July passed like a midsummer’s dream. I spent these days doing, in the vernacular of my hometown, “much of nothin’.” Johnny Wilson was getting better, his dizzy spells abating, and he was allowed to join Ben, Davy Ray, and me on our jaunts around town. Still and all, he had to take things easy, because Dr. Parrish had told Johnny’s folks that a head injury had to be watched for a long time. Johnny himself was just as quiet and reserved as ever, but I noticed that he’d slowed down some. He was always lagging behind us on his bike, slower even than tubby Ben. He seemed to have aged since that day the Branlins had beaten him senseless; he seemed to be apart from us now, in a way that was hard to explain. I think it was because he had tasted the bitter fruit of pain, and some of the magic carefree view that separates children from adults had fallen away from him, gone forever no matter how hard he tried to pedal his bike in pursuit of it again. Johnny had, at that early age, looked into the dark hole of extinction and seen—much more than any of us ever could—that someday the summer sun would not throw his shadow.
We talked about death as we sat in the cooling breezes from the ice house and listened to the laboring lungs of the frosty machines within. Our conversation began with Davy Ray telling us that his dad had hit a cat the day before, and when they got home part of the cat’s insides were smeared all over the right front tire. Dogs and cats, we agreed, had their own kinds of heaven. Was there a hell for them, too? we wondered. No, Ben said, because they don’t sin. But what happens if a dog goes mad and kills somebody and has to be put to sleep? Davy Ray asked. Wouldn’t that be a hell-bound sin? For these questions, of course, we only had more questions.
“Sometimes,” Johnny said, his back against a tree, “I get out my arrowheads and look at ’em and I wonder who made ’em. I wonder if their ghosts are still around, tryin’ to find where the arrow fell.”
“Naw!” Ben scoffed. “There’s no such thing as ghosts! Is there, Cory?”
I shrugged. I had never told the guys about Midnight Mona. If they hadn’t believed I’d shoved a broomstick down Old Moses’s gullet, how would they believe a ghost car and driver?
“Dad says Snowdown’s a ghost,” Davy offered. “Says that’s why nobody can shoot him, because he’s already dead.”
“No such thing as ghosts,” Ben said. “No such thing as Snowdown, either.”
“Yes there is!” Davy was ready to defend his father’s beliefs. “My dad said Grandpap saw him one time, when he was a little kid! And just last year Dad said a guy at the paper mill knew a guy who saw him! Said he was standin’ right there in the woods as big as you please! Said this guy took a shot at him, but Snowdown was runnin’ before the bullet got there and then he was gone!”
“No. Such. Thing,” Ben said.
“Is too!”
“Is not!”
“Is too!”
“Is not!”
This line of discussion could go on all afternoon. I picked up a pine cone and popped Ben in the belly with it, and after Ben howled in indignation, everybody laughed. Snowdown was a hope and mystery for the community of hunters in Zephyr. In the deep forest between Zephyr and Union Town, the story went, lived a massive white stag with antlers so big and twisted you could swing on them as on the branches of an oak. Snowdown was usually seen at least once every deer season, by a hunter who swore the stag had leaped into the air and disappeared in the gnarly foliage of its kingdom. Men went out with rifles to track Snowdown, and they invariably returned talking about finding the prints of huge hooves and scars on trees where Snowdown had scraped his antlers, but the white stag was impossible to catch. I think that if a massive white stag really did roam the gloomy woods, no hunter really wanted to shoot him, because Snowdown was for them the symbol of everything mysterious and unattainable about life itself. Snowdown was what lay beyond the thickness of the woods, in the next autumn-dappled clearing. Snowdown was eternal youth, a link between grandfather and father and son, the great expectations of future hunts, a wildness that could never be confined. My dad wasn’t a hunter, so I wasn’t as involved in the legend of Snowdown as Davy Ray, whose father was ready with his Remington on the first chilly dawning of the season.
“My dad’s gonna take me with him this year,” Davy Ray said. “He promised. So you’ll be laughin’ through your teeth when we bring Snowdown back from the woods.”
I doubted that if Davy Ray and his father saw Snowdown, either one of them would pull a trigger. Davy had a boy-sized rifle that he sometimes fired at squirrels, but he never could hit anything with it.
Ben chewed on a weed and offered his throat to an ice house breeze. “One thing I sure would like to know,” he said. “Who’s that dead guy down at the bottom of Saxon’s Lake?”
I pulled my knees into my chest and watched two ravens circling overhead.
“Ain’t it
weird?
” Ben asked me. “That your dad saw the guy go under, and now the guy’s down there in his car gettin’ all mossy and eat up by turtles?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You think about it, don’t you? I mean, you were
there
.”
“Yeah. I think about it some.” I didn’t tell him that hardly a day went by when I didn’t think of the car speeding in front of the milk truck, or my dad jumping into the water, or the figure I’d seen standing in the woods, or the man with the green-feathered hat and a knife in his hand.
“It’s spooky, for sure,” Davy Ray said. “How come nobody knew the guy? How come nobody ever missed him?”
“Because he must not have been from here,” Johnny commented.
“Sheriff thought of that,” I said. “He called around other places.”
“Yeah,” Ben went on, “but he didn’t call everywhere, did he? He didn’t call California or Alaska, did he?”
“What would a guy from California or Alaska be doin’ in
Zephyr
, dope?” Davy Ray challenged him.
“He could’ve been! You don’t know everythin’, Mr. Smart!”
“I know a big dope when I see one!”
Ben was about to fire a reply back, but Johnny said, “Maybe he was a spy,” and that halted Ben’s tongue.
“A spy?” I asked. “There’s nothin’ around here to spy on!”
“Yes there is. Robbins Air Force Base.” Johnny systematically began to crack his knuckles. “Maybe he was a Russian spy. Maybe he was watchin’ the planes drop bombs, or maybe there’s somethin’ goin’ on over there that nobody’s supposed to know about.”
We were silent. A Russian spy killed in Zephyr. The thought gave all of us delicious creeps.
“So who killed him, then?” Davy Ray asked. “Another spy?”
“Maybe.” Johnny contemplated this for a moment, his head slightly cocked to one side. The lid of his left eye had begun to tic a bit, another result of his injury. “Or maybe,” he said, “the guy at the bottom of the lake is an American spy, and the Russian spy killed him because the dead guy found out about him.”
“Oh, yeah!” Ben laughed. “So somebody around here might be a Russian spy?”
“Maybe,” Johnny said, and Ben stopped laughing. Johnny looked at me. “Your dad said the guy was stripped naked, right?” I nodded. “Know why that might be?” I shook my head. “Because,” Johnny said, “whoever killed him was smart enough to take the dead guy’s clothes off so nothin’ would float up to the top. And whoever killed him had to be from around here, because he knew how deep the lake is. And the dead guy knew a secret, too.”
“A secret?” Davy Ray was all ears now. “Like what?”
“I don’t know what,” Johnny answered. “Just a secret.” His dark Indian eyes returned to me. “Didn’t your dad say the guy was all beat up, like somebody had really worked him over? How come whoever killed him beat him up so bad first?”
“How come?” I asked.
“’Cause the killer was tryin’ to make him talk, that’s why. Like in the movies when the bad guy’s got the good guy tied to a chair and he wants to know the secret code.”
“What secret code?” Davy Ray asked.
“That’s just for instance,” Johnny explained. “But it seems to me like if a guy was gonna kill somebody, he wouldn’t beat him up for no reason.”
“Yeah, but maybe the dead guy was just plain beat to death,” Ben said.
“No,” I told him. “There was a wire around the guy’s neck, chokin’ him. If he’d been beat to death, why would he get choked, too?”
“Man!” Ben plucked up a weed and chewed on it. Overhead, the two ravens cawed and flapped. “A killer right here in Zephyr! Maybe even a Russian spy!” He stopped chewing all of a sudden. “Hey,” he said, and he blinked as a new thought jabbed his mind like a lightning bolt. “What’s to keep him from killin’ again?”
I decided it was time. I cleared my throat, and I began to tell my friends about the figure I’d seen, the green feather, and the man in the green-feathered hat. “I didn’t see his face,” I said. “But I saw that hat and the feather, and I saw him pull a knife out of his coat. I thought he was gonna sneak up behind my dad and stab him. Maybe he tried to, but he figured he couldn’t get away with it. Maybe he’s steamed ’cause my dad saw the car go down and told Sheriff Amory about it. Maybe he saw
me
lookin’ at him, too. But I didn’t see his face. Not a bit of it.”
When I’d finished, they didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then Ben spoke up: “How come you didn’t tell us this before? Didn’t you want us to know?”
“I was gonna tell you, but after what happened with Old Moses—”
“Don’t start that bull again!” Davy Ray warned.
“I don’t know who the man in the green-feathered hat is,” I said. “He could be anybody. Even… somebody we all know real well, somebody you wouldn’t think could do such a thing. Dad says you never know people through and through, and that everybody’s got a part they don’t show. So it could be anybody at all.”
My friends, excited by this new information, flung themselves eagerly into the roles of detectives. They would agree to be on the lookout for a man in a green-feathered hat, but we also agreed to keep this knowledge to ourselves and not spread it to our parents, in case one of them happened to tell the killer without knowing it. I felt better for having relieved myself of this burden, yet I was still troubled. Who was the man Mr. Dollar said Donny Blaylock had killed? And what was the meaning of the piano music in the dream the Lady had told my mom about? Dad still refused to visit the Lady, and I still sometimes heard him cry out in his sleep. So I knew that even though that ugly dawn was long behind us, the memory of the event—and of what he’d seen handcuffed to the wheel—haunted him. If Dad went out walking at Saxon’s Lake, he didn’t tell me, but I suspected this might be true because of the crusty red dirt he left scraped on the porch steps on more than one afternoon.
August came upon us, riding a wave of sultry heat. One morning I awakened to the realization that in a few days I would be spending a week with Granddaddy Jaybird, and I immediately pulled the sheet over my head.
But there was no turning back the clock. The monsters on my walls could not help me. Every summer, I spent a week with Granddaddy Jaybird and Grandmomma Sarah whether I wanted to or not. Granddaddy Jaybird demanded it, and whereas I spent several weekends throughout the year with Grand Austin and Nana Alice, the visit with Grand-daddy Jaybird was one lump sum of frenetic bizarrity.
This year, though, I was determined to strike a bargain with my folks. If I had to go to that farmhouse where Granddaddy Jaybird jerked the covers off me at five in the morning and had me mowing grass at six, could I at least go on an overnight camping trip with Davy Ray, Ben, and Johnny? Dad said he’d think about it, and that was about the best I could hope for. So it happened that I said good-bye to Rebel for a week, Dad and Mom drove me out from Zephyr into the country, my suitcase in the back of the truck, and Dad turned off onto the bumpy dirt road that led across a corn field to my grandparents’ house.
Grandmomma Sarah was a sweet woman, of that there was no doubt. I imagine the Jaybird had been a rounder in his youth, full of vim and vigor and earthy charm. Every year, however, his bolts had gotten a little looser. Dad would say it right out: Jaybird was out of his mind. Mom said he was “eccentric.” I say he was a dumb, mean man who thought the world revolved around him, but I have to say this as well: if it wasn’t for the Jaybird, I would never have written my first story.
I never saw Granddaddy Jaybird perform an act of kindness. I never heard him praise his wife or his son. I never felt, when I was around him, that I was anything but a—thankfully temporary—possession. His moods were as fleeting as the faces of the moon. But he was a born storyteller, and when he focused his mind on tales of haunted houses, demon-possessed scarecrows, Indian burial grounds, and phantom dogs, you had no choice but to willingly follow wherever he led.
The macabre, it may be said, was his territory. He was grave smart and life stupid, as he’d never gotten past the fourth grade. Sometimes I wondered how my dad had turned out as he had, having lived seventeen years in the Jaybird’s strange shadow. As I’ve said, though, my grandfather didn’t really start going crazy until after I was born, and I guess there were sensible genes on my grandmother’s side of the family. I never knew what might happen during that week of suffering, but I knew it would be an experience.