Boy's Life.

By Robert McCammon.

Prologue.

I WANT TO TELL YOU SOME IMPORTANT THINGS BEFORE WE START our journey.

I lived through it all. That's one problem about relating events in first person. The reader knows the narrator didn't get killed. So whatever might happen to me-whatever did happen to me-you can be sure I lived through it all, though I might be a little better or worse for the experience, and you can make up your own mind which.

There might be some places where you'll say, "Hey, how come he knows this event right here happened or this person said or did this or that if he wasn't even there?" The answer to that question is that I found out enough later on to fill in the blanks, or in some cases I made up what happened, or in other cases I figured it ought to have happened that way even if it didn't.

I was born in July of 1952. I am approaching my fortieth birthday. Gosh, that's some number, isn't it? I am no longer, as my reviews used to say, a "promising young talent." I am what I am. I have been writing since I was in grammar school, and thinking up stories long before I understood exactly what it was I was doing. I have been a published writer since 1978. Or is it "author"? Paperback writer, as the Beatles said. Hardback author? One thing's for sure: I certainly have developed a hard back. I have suffered kicks and smiled at kindnesses just like any other brother or sister on our spinning home. I have been blessed, to be able to create characters and worlds out of whole cloth. Writer? Author?

How about storyteller?

I wanted to set my memories down on paper, where I can hold them. You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn't realize we lived in that web of magic, connected by the silver filaments of chance and circ.u.mstance. But I knew it all along. When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present, and into the future. You probably did too; you just don't recall it. See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for G.o.d's sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they'd allowed to wither in themselves.

After you go so far away from it, though, you can't really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it's because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they're left feeling a little heartsad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train pa.s.sing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm.

That's what I believe.

The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It's not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don't know it's happening until one day you feel you've lost something but you're not sure what it is. It's like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you "sir." It just happens.

These memories of who I was and where I lived are important to me. They make up a large part of who I'm going to be when my journey winds down. I need the memory of magic if I am ever going to conjure magic again. I need to know and remember, and I want to tell you.

My name is Cory Jay Mackenson. My hometown was a place called Zephyr, in south Alabama. It never got too cold there, or too hot. Its streets were shaded with water oaks, and its houses had front porches and screens on the windows. There was a park with two baseball fields, one for the kids and one for the grown-ups. There was a public swimming pool where the water was blue and clear and children plumbed the deep end for pennies. On the Fourth of July there was a barbecue, and at the end of summer a writing contest. When I was twelve years old, in 1964, Zephyr held about fifteen hundred people. There was the Bright Star Cafe, a Woolworth's, and a little Piggly-Wiggly grocery store. There was a house where bad girls lived out on Route Ten. Not every family had a television set. The county was dry, which meant that bootleggers thrived. The roads went south, north, east, and west, and at night a freight train pa.s.sed through on its way to Birmingham and left the smell of scorched iron in its wake. Zephyr had four churches and an elementary school, and a cemetery stood on Poulter Hill. There was a lake nearby so deep it might as well have been bottomless. My hometown was full of heroes and villains, honest people who knew the beauty of truth and others whose beauty was a lie. My hometown was probably a lot like yours.

But Zephyr was a magic place. Spirits walked in the moonlight. They came out of the gra.s.sy graveyard and stood on the hill and talked about old times when Coca-Cola really had a bite and you could tell a Democrat from a Republican. I know. I've heard them. The breeze in Zephyr blew through the screens, bringing the incense of honeysuckle and awakening love, and jagged blue lightning crashed down upon the earth and awakened hate. We had windstorms and droughts and the river that lay alongside my town had the bad habit of flooding. In the spring of my fifth year, a flood brought snakes to the streets. Then hawks came down by the hundreds in a dark tornado and lifted up the snakes in their killing beaks, and the river slinked back to its banks like a whipped dog. Then the sun came out like a trumpet call, and steam swirled up from the blood-specked roofs of my hometown.

We had a dark queen who was one hundred and six years old. We had a gunfighter who saved the life of Wyatt Earp at the O.K. Corral. We had a monster in the river, and a secret in the lake. We had a ghost that haunted the road behind the wheel of a black dragster with flames on the hood. We had a Gabriel and a Lucifer, and a rebel that rose from the dead. We had an alien invader, a boy with a perfect arm, and we had a dinosaur loose on Merchants Street.

It was a magic place.

In me are the memories of a boy's life, spent in that realm of enchantments.

I remember.

These are the things I want to tell you.

PART ONE

The Shades of Spring Before the Sun Down in the Dark The Invader Wasps at Easter The Death of a Bike Old Moses Comes to Call A Summons from the Lady

I Before the

"CORY? WAKE UP, SON. IT'S TIME."

I let him pull me up from the dark cavern of sleep, and I opened my eyes and looked up at him. He was already dressed, in his dark brown uniform with his name-Tom-written in white letters across his breast pocket. I smelled bacon and eggs, and the radio was playing softly in the kitchen. A pan rattled and gla.s.ses clinked; Mom was at work in her element as surely as a trout rides a current. "It's time," my father said, and he switched on the lamp beside my bed and left me squinting with the last images of a dream fading in my brain.

The sun wasn't up yet. It was mid-March, and a chill wind blew through the trees beyond my window. I could feel the wind by putting my hand against the gla.s.s. Mom, realizing that I was awake when my dad went in for his cup of coffee, turned the radio up a little louder to catch the weather report. Spring had sprung a couple of days before, but this year winter had sharp teeth and nails and he clung to the South like a white cat. We hadn't had snow, we never had snow, but the wind was chill and it blew hard from the lungs of the Pole.

"Heavy sweater!" Mom called. "Hear?"

"I hear!" I answered back, and I got my green heavy sweater from my dresser. Here is my room, in the yellow lamplight and the s.p.a.ce heater rumbling: Indian rug red as Cochise's blood, a desk with seven mystic drawers, a chair covered in material as velvety blue-black as Batman's cape, an aquarium holding tiny fish so pale you could see their hearts beat, the aforementioned dresser covered with decals from Revell model airplane kits, a bed with a quilt sewn by a relative of Jefferson Davis's, a closet, and the shelves. Oh, yes, the shelves. The troves of treasure. On those shelves are stacks of me: hundreds of comic books-Justice League, Flash, Green Lantern, Batman, the Spirit, Blackhawk, Sgt. Rock and Easy Company, Aquaman, and the Fantastic Four. There are Boy's Life magazines, dozens of issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland, Screen Thrills, and Popular Mechanics. There is a yellow wall of National Geographics, and I have to blush and say I know where all the African pictures are.

The shelves go on for miles and miles. My collection of marbles gleams in a mason jar. My dried cicada waits to sing again in summer. My Duncan yo-yo that whistles except the string is broken and Dad's got to fix it. My little book of suit cloth samples that I got from Mr. Parlowe at the Stagg Shop for Men. I use those pieces of cloth as carpet inside my airplane models, along with seats cut from cardboard. My silver bullet, forged by the Lone Ranger for a werewolf hunter. My Civil War b.u.t.ton that fell from a b.u.t.ternut uniform when the storm swept Shiloh. My rubber knife for stalking killer crocodiles in the bathtub. My Canadian coins, smooth as the northern plains. I am rich beyond measure.

"Breakfast's on!" Mom called. I zipped up my sweater, which was the same hue as Sgt. Rock's ripped shirt. My blue jeans had patches on the knees, like badges of courage marking encounters with barbed wire and gravel. My flannel shirt was red enough to stagger a bull. My socks were white as dove wings and my Keds midnight black. My mom was color-blind, and my dad thought checks went with plaid. I was all right.

It's funny, sometimes, when you look at the people who brought you into this world and you see yourself so clearly in them. You realize that every person in the world is a compromise of nature. I had my mother's small-boned frame and her wavy, dark brown hair, but my father had given me his blue eyes and his sharp-bridged nose. I had my mother's long-fingered hands-an "artist's hands," she used to tell me when I fretted that my fingers were so skinny-and my dad's thick eyebrows and the small cleft in his chin. I wished that some nights I would go to sleep and awaken resembling a man's man like Stuart Whitman in Cimarron Strip or Clint Walker in Cheyenne, but the truth of it was that I was a skinny, gawky kid of average height and looks, and I could blend into wallpaper by closing my eyes and holding my breath. In my fantasies, though, I tracked lawbreakers along with the cowboys and detectives who paraded past us nightly on our television set, and out in the woods that came up behind our house I helped Tarzan call the lions and shot n.a.z.is down in a solitary war. I had a small group of friends, guys like Johnny Wilson, Davy Ray Callan, and Ben Sears, but I wasn't what you might call popular. Sometimes I got nervous talking to people and my tongue got tangled, so I stayed quiet. My friends and I were about the same in size, age, and temperament; we avoided what we could not fight, and we were all pitiful fighters.

This is where I think the writing started. The "righting," if you will. The righting of circ.u.mstances, the shaping of the world the way it should have been, had G.o.d not had crossed eyes and buck teeth. In the real world I had no power; in my world I was Hercules unchained.

One thing I do know I got from my granddaddy Jaybird, my dad's father: his curiosity about the world. He was seventy-six years old and as tough as beef jerky, and he had a foul mouth and an even fouler disposition, but he was always prowling the woods around his farm. He brought home things that made Grandmomma Sarah swoon: snake-skins, empty hornets' nests, even animals he'd found dead. He liked to cut things open with a penknife and look at their insides, arranging all their b.l.o.o.d.y guts out on newspapers.

One time he hung up a dead toad from a tree and invited me to watch the flies eat it with him. He brought home a burlap sack full of leaves, dumped them in the front room, and examined each of them with a magnifying gla.s.s, writing down their differences in one of his hundreds of Nifty notebooks. He collected cigar b.u.t.ts and dried spits of chewing tobacco, which he kept in gla.s.s vials. He could sit for hours in the dark and look at the moon.

Maybe he was crazy. Maybe crazy is what they call anybody who's got magic in them after they're no longer a child. But Granddaddy Jaybird read the Sunday comics to me, and he told me stories about the haunted house in the small hamlet of his birth. Granddaddy Jaybird could be mean and stupid and petty, but he lit a candle of wonder in me and by that light I could see a long way beyond Zephyr.

On that morning before the sun, as I sat eating my breakfast with my dad and mom in our house on Hilltop Street, the year was 1964. There were great changes in the winds of earth, things of which I was unaware. All I knew at that moment was that I needed another gla.s.s of orange juice, and that I was going to help my dad on his route before he took me to school. So when breakfast was over and the dishes were cleared, after I had gone out into the cold to say good morning to Rebel and feed him his Gravy Train, Mom kissed both Dad and me, I put on my fleece-lined jacket and got my schoolbooks and off we went in the coughy old pickup truck. Freed from his backyard pen, Rebel followed us a distance, but at the corner of Hilltop and Shawson streets he crossed into the territory of Bodog, the Doberman pinscher that belonged to the Ramseys, and he beat a diplomatic retreat to a drumroll of barks.

And there was Zephyr before us, the town quiet in its dreaming, the moon a white sickle in the sky.

A few lights were on. Not many. It wasn't five o'clock yet. The sickle moon glittered in the slow curve of the Tec.u.mseh River, and if Old Moses swam there he swam with his leathery belly kissing mud. The trees along Zephyr's streets were still without leaves, and their branches moved with the wind. The traffic lights-all four of them at what might be called major intersections-blinked yellow in a steady accord. To the east, a stone bridge with brooding gargoyles crossed the wide hollow where the river ran. Some said the faces of the gargoyles, carved in the early twenties, were representations of various Confederate generals, fallen angels, as it were. To the west, the highway wound into the wooded hills and on toward other towns. A railroad track cut across Zephyr to the north, right through the Bruton area, where all the black people lived. In the south was the public park where a bandsh.e.l.l stood and a couple of baseball diamonds had been cut into the earth. The park was named for Clifford Gray Haines, who founded Zephyr, and there was a statue of him sitting on a rock with his chin resting on his hand. My dad said it looked as if Clifford was perpetually constipated and could neither do his business nor get off the pot. Farther south, Route Ten left Zephyr's limits and wound like a black cottonmouth past swampy woods, a trailer park, and Saxon's Lake, which shelved into unknown depths.

Dad turned us onto Merchants Street, and we drove through the center of Zephyr, where the stores were. There was Dollar's Barbershop, the Stagg Shop for Men, the Zephyr Feeds and Hardware Store, the Piggly-Wiggly grocery, the Woolworth's store, the Lyric theater, and other attractions along the sidewalked thoroughfare. It wasn't much, though; if you blinked a few times, you were past it. Then Dad crossed the railroad track, drove another two miles, and turned into a gate that had a sign above it: GREEN MEADOWS DAIRY. The milk trucks were at the loading dock, getting filled up. Here there was a lot of activity, because Green Meadows Dairy opened early and the milkmen had their appointed rounds.

Sometimes when my father had an especially busy schedule, he asked me to help him with his deliveries. I liked the silence and stillness of the mornings. I liked the world before the sun. I liked finding out what different people ordered from the dairy. I don't know why; maybe that was my granddaddy Jaybird's curiosity in me.

My dad went over a checklist with the foreman, a big crew-cut man named Mr. Bowers, and then Dad and I started loading our truck. Here came the bottles of milk, the cartons of fresh eggs, buckets of cottage cheese and Green Meadows' special potato and bean salads. Everything was still cold from the ice room, and the milk bottles sparkled with frost under the loading dock's lights. Their paper caps bore the face of a smiling milkman and the words "Good for You!" As we were working, Mr. Bowers came up and watched with his clipboard at his side and his pen behind his ear. "You think you'd like to be a milkman, Cory?" he asked me, and I said I might. "The world'll always need milkmen," Mr. Bowers went on. "Isn't that right, Tom?"

"Right as rain," my dad said; this was an all-purpose phrase he used when he was only half listening.

"You come apply when you turn eighteen," Mr. Bowers told me. "We'll fix you up." He gave me a clap on the shoulder that almost rattled my teeth and did rattle the bottles in the tray I was carrying.

Then Dad climbed behind the big-spoked wheel, I got into the seat next to him, he turned the key, and the engine started and we backed away from the loading dock with our creamy cargo. Ahead of us, the moon was sinking down and the last of the stars hung on the lip of night. "What about that?" Dad asked. "Being a milkman, I mean. That appeal to you?"

"It'd be fun," I said.

"Not really. Oh, it's okay, but no job's fun every day. I guess we've never talked about what you want to do, have we?"

"No sir."

"Well, I don't think you ought to be a milkman just because that's what I do. See, I didn't start out to be a milkman. Granddaddy Jaybird wanted me to be a farmer like him. Grandmomma Sarah wanted me to be a doctor. Can you imagine that?" He glanced at me and grinned. "Me, a doctor! Doctor Tom! No sir, that wasn't for me."

"What'd you start out to be?" I asked.

My dad was quiet for a while. He seemed to be thinking this question over, in a deep place. It occurred to me that maybe no one had ever asked him this before. He gripped the spoked wheel with his grown-up hands and negotiated the road that unwound before us in the headlights, and then he said, "First man on Venus. Or a rodeo rider. Or a man who can look at an empty s.p.a.ce and see in his mind the house he wants to build there right down to the last nail and shingle. Or a detective." My dad made a little laughing noise in his throat. "But the dairy needed another milkman, so here I am."

"I wouldn't mind bein' a race car driver," I said. My dad sometimes took me to the stock car races at the track near Barnesboro, and we sat there eating hot dogs and watching sparks fly in the collision of banged-up metal. "Bein' a detective would be okay, too. I'd get to solve mysteries and stuff, like the Hardy Boys."

"Yeah, that'd be good," my dad agreed. "You never know how things are gonna turn out, though, and that's the truth. You aim for one place, sure as an arrow, but before you hit the mark, the wind gets you. I don't believe I ever met one person who became what they wanted to be when they were your age."

"I'd like to be everybody in the world," I said. "I'd like to live a million times."

"Well"-and here my father gave one of his sagely nods-"that would be a fine piece of magic, wouldn't it?" He pointed. "Here's our first stop."

That first house must've had children in it, because they got two quarts of chocolate milk to go along with their two quarts of plain milk. Then we were off again, driving through the streets where the only sounds were the wind and the barking of early dogs, and we stopped on Shantuck Street to deliver b.u.t.termilk and cottage cheese to somebody who must've liked things sour. We left bottles glistening on the steps of most of the houses on Bevard Lane, and my dad worked fast as I checked off the list and got the next items ready from the chilly back of the truck; we were a good team.

Dad said he had some customers down south near Saxon's Lake and then he'd swing back up so we could finish the rest of the street deliveries before my school bell rang. He drove us past the park and out of Zephyr, and the forest closed in on either side of the road.

It was getting on toward six o'clock. To the east, over the hills of pine and kudzu, the sky was beginning to lighten. The wind shoved its way through the trees like the fist of a bully. We pa.s.sed a car going north, and its driver blinked the lights and Dad waved. "Marty Barklee deliverin' the newspapers," Dad told me. I thought about the fact that there was a whole world going about its business before the sun, and people who were just waking up weren't part of it. We turned off Route Ten and drove up a dirt drive to deliver milk, b.u.t.termilk, and potato salad to a small house nestled in the woods, and then we went south toward the lake again. "College," my dad said. "You ought to go to college, it seems to me."

"I guess so," I answered, but that sounded like an awful long distance from where I was now. All I knew about college was Auburn and Alabama football, and the fact that some people praised Bear Bryant and others worshipped Shug Jordan. It seemed to me that you chose which college to go to according to which coach you liked best.

"Gotta have good grades to get into college," Dad said. "Gotta study your lessons."

"Do detectives have to go to college?"

"I reckon they do if they want to be professional about it. If I'd gone to college, I might've turned out to be that man who builds a house in empty s.p.a.ce. You never know what's ahead for you, and that's the-"

Truth, he was about to say, but he never finished it because we came around a wooded bend and a brown car jumped out of the forest right in front of us and Dad yelped like he was hornet-stung as his foot punched the brake.

The brown car went past us as Dad whipped the wheel to the left, and I saw that car go off Route Ten and down the embankment on my right. Its lights weren't on but there was somebody sitting behind the wheel. The car's tires tore through the underbrush and then it went over a little cliff of red rock and down into the dark. Water splashed up, and I realized the car had just plunged into Saxon's Lake.

"He went in the water!" I shouted, and Dad stopped the milk truck, pulled up the hand brake, and jumped out into the roadside weeds. As I climbed out, Dad was already running toward the lake. The wind whipped and whirled around us, and Dad stood there on the red rock cliff. By the faint pinkish light we could see the car wallowing in the water, huge bubbles bursting around its trunk. "Hey!" Dad shouted with his hands cupped around his mouth. "Get out of there!" Everybody knew Saxon's Lake was as deep as sin, and when that car went down into the inky depths it was gone for good and ever. "Hey, get out!" Dad shouted again, but whoever was behind the wheel didn't answer. "I think he's been knocked cold!" Dad told me as he took off his shoes. The car was starting to turn onto its pa.s.senger side, and there was an awful howling sound coming from it that must've been the rush of water pouring into the car. Dad said, "Stand back." I did, and he leaped into the lake.

He was a strong swimmer. He reached the car in a few powerful strokes, and he saw that the driver's window was open. He could feel the suction of water moving around his legs, drawing the car down into the unfathomed deep. "Get out!" he hollered, but the driver just sat there. Dad clung to the door, reached in, and grabbed the driver's shoulder. It was a man, and he wore no shirt. The flesh was white and cold, and my dad felt his own skin crawl. The man's head lolled back, his mouth open. He had short-cropped blond hair, his eyes sealed shut with black bruises, his face swollen and malformed from the pressures of a savage beating. Around his throat was knotted a copper piano wire, the thin metal pulled so tightly that the flesh had split open.

"Oh Jesus," my dad whispered, treading water.

The car lurched and hissed. The head lolled forward over the chest again, as if in an att.i.tude of prayer. Water was rising up over the driver's bare knees. My dad realized the driver was naked, not a st.i.tch on him. Something glinted on the steering wheel, and he saw handcuffs that secured the man's right wrist to the inner spoke.

My dad had lived thirty-four years. He'd seen dead men before. Hodge Klemson, one of his best friends, had drowned in the Tec.u.mseh River when they were both fifteen years old, and the body had been found after three days bloated and covered with yellow bottom mud like a crusty ancient mummy. He'd seen what remained of Walter and Jeanine Traynor after the head-on collision six years ago between Walter's Buick and a logging truck driven by a kid eating pep pills. He'd seen the dark shiny ma.s.s of Little Stevie Cauley after firemen doused the flames of the crumpled black dragster named Midnight Mona. He had looked upon the grinning rictus of death several times, had taken that sight like a man, but this one was different.

This one wore the face of murder.

The car was going down. As its hood sank, its tail fins started rising. The body behind the wheel shifted again, and my father saw something on the man's shoulder. A blue patch, there against the white. Not a bruise, no; a tattoo. It was a skull with wings swept back from the bony temples.

A great burst of bubbles blew out of the car as more water rushed in. The lake would not be denied; it was going to claim its toy and tuck it away in a secret drawer. As the car began to slide down into the murk, the suction grabbed my father's legs and pulled him under, and standing on the red rock cliff I saw his head disappear and I shouted "Dad!" as panic seized my guts.

Underwater, he fought the lake's muscles. The car fell away beneath him, and as his legs thrashed for a hold in the liquid tomb, more bubbles rushed up and broke him loose and he climbed up their silver staircase toward the attic of air.

I saw his head break the surface. "Dad!" I shouted again. "Come on back, Dad!"

"I'm all right!" he answered, but his voice was shaky. "I'm comin' in!" He began dog-paddling toward sh.o.r.e, his body suddenly as weak as a squeezed-out rag. The lake continued to erupt where the car disturbed its innards, like something bad being digested. Dad couldn't get up the red rock cliff, so he swam to a place where he could clamber up on kudzu vines and stones. "I'm all right!" he said again as he came out of the lake and his legs sank to the knees in mud. A turtle the size of a dinner plate skittered past him and submerged with a perplexed snort. I glanced back toward the milk truck; I don't know why, but I did.

And I saw a figure standing in the woods across the road.

Just standing there, wearing a long dark coat. Its folds moved with the wind. Maybe I'd felt the eyes of whoever was watching me as I'd watched my father swim to the sinking car. I shivered a little, bone cold, and then I blinked a couple of times and where the figure had been was just windswept woods again.

"Cory?" my dad called. "Gimme a hand up, son!"

I went down to the muddy sh.o.r.e and gave him as much help as a cold, scared child could. Then his feet found solid earth and he pushed the wet hair back from his forehead. "Gotta get to a phone," he said urgently. "There was a man in that car. Went straight down to the bottom!"

"I saw... I saw..." I pointed toward the woods on the other side of Route Ten. "Somebody was-"

"Come on, let's go!" My father was already crossing the road with his st.u.r.dy, soggy legs, his shoes in his hand. I jump-started my own legs and followed him as close as a shadow, and my gaze returned to where I'd seen that figure but n.o.body was there, n.o.body, n.o.body at all.

Dad started the milk truck's engine and switched on the heater. His teeth were chattering, and in the gray twilight his face looked as pale as candle wax. "d.a.m.nedest thing," he said, and this shocked me because he never cursed in front of me. "Handcuffed to the wheel, he was. Handcuffed. My G.o.d, that fella's face was all beat up!"

"Who was it?"

"I don't know." He turned the heater up, and then he started driving south toward the nearest house. "Somebody did a job on him, that's for sure! Lord, I'm cold!"

A dirt road turned to the right, and my father followed it. Fifty yards off Route Ten stood a small white house with a screened-in front porch. A rose garden stood off to one side. Parked under a green plastic awning were two cars, one a red Mustang and the other an old Cadillac splotched with rust. My dad pulled up in front of the house and said, "Wait here," and he walked to the door in his wet socks and rang the bell. He had to ring it two more times before the door opened with a tinkle of chimes, and a red-haired woman who made three of my mom stood there wearing a blue robe with black flowers on it.

Dad said, "Miss Grace, I need to use your telephone real quick."

"You're all wet!" Miss Grace's voice sounded like the rasp of a rusty saw blade. She gripped a cigarette in one hand, and rings sparkled on her fingers.

"Somethin' bad's happened," Dad told her, and she sighed like a redheaded raincloud and said, "All right, come on in, then. Watch the carpet." Dad entered the house, the chimey door closed, and I sat in the milk truck as the first orange rays of sunlight started breaking over the eastern hills. I could smell the lake in the truck with me, a puddle of water on the floorboard beneath my father's seat. I had seen somebody standing in the woods. I knew I had. Hadn't I? Why hadn't he come over to see about the man in the car? And who had the man in the car been?

I was puzzling over these questions when the door opened again and Miss Grace came out, this time wearing a floppy white sweater over her blue gown. She had on sneakers, her ankles and calves thick as young trees. She had a box of Lorna Doone cookies in one hand and the burning cigarette in the other, and she walked to the milk truck and smiled at me. "Hey there," she said. "You're Cory."

"Yes'm," I answered.

Miss Grace didn't have much of a smile. Her lips were thin and her nose was broad and flat and her brows were black-penciled streaks above deep-set blue eyes. She thrust the Lorna Doones at me. "Want a cookie?"

I wasn't hungry, but my folks had always taught me never to refuse a gift. I took one.

"Have two," Miss Grace offered, and I took a second cookie. She ate a cookie herself and then sucked on the cigarette and blew smoke through her nostrils. "Your daddy's our milkman," she said. "I believe you've got us on your list. Six quarts of milk, two b.u.t.termilks, two chocolates, and three pints of cream."