Boys Life

forget you were there, and what you saw and heard. Can you do that?”
    “Why?” I had to ask.
    “Because Miss Grace might be a lot different than you, me, or your mother, and she might be tough and mean and her line of work might not be a preacher’s dream, but she’s a good lady. I just don’t want talk gettin’ stirred up. The less said about Miss Grace and that house, the better. Do you see?”
    “I guess I do.”
    “Good.” He flexed his fingers on the steering wheel. The subject was closed.
    I was true to my word. My celebrityhood took flight, and that was that.
    I was about to open my mouth to tell him about the figure I’d seen in the woods when a black and white Ford with a bubble light on top and the town seal of Zephyr on the driver’s door rounded the corner and slowed to a stop near the milk truck. Sheriff Amory, whose first name was J.T., standing for Junior Talmadge, got out and Dad walked over to meet him.
    Sheriff Amory was a thin, tall man whose long-jawed face made me think of a picture I’d seen: Ichabod Crane trying to outrace the Headless Horseman. He had big hands and feet and a pair of ears that might’ve shamed Dumbo. If his nose had been any larger, he would’ve made a dandy weather-vane. He wore his sheriff’s star pinned to the front of his hat, and underneath it his dome was almost bald except for a wreath of dark brown hair. He pushed his hat back up on his shiny forehead as he and my dad talked at the lake’s edge and I watched my father’s hand motions as he showed Sheriff Amory where the car had come from and where it had gone. Then they both looked out toward the lake’s still surface, and I knew what they were thinking.
    That car might’ve sunken to the center of the earth. Even the snapping turtles that lived along the lakeshore couldn’t get far enough down to ever see that car again. Whoever the driver had been, he was sitting in the dark right now with mud in his teeth.
    “Handcuffed,” Sheriff Amory said, in his quiet voice. He had thick dark eyebrows over deep-set eyes the color of coal, and the pallor of his flesh suggested he had an affinity to the night. “You’re sure about that, Tom? And about the wire, too?”
    “I’m sure. Whoever strangled that fella did a hell of a job. Near about took his head off.”
    “Handcuffed,” the sheriff said again. “That was so he wouldn’t float out, I reckon.” He tapped his lower lip with a forefinger. “Well,” he said at last, “I believe we’ve got a murder on our hands, don’t you?”
    “If it wasn’t, I don’t know what murder is.”
    As they talked, I got out of the milk truck and wandered over to where I thought I’d seen that person watching me. There was nothing but weeds, rocks, and dirt where he’d been standing. If it had been a man, I thought. Could it have been a woman? I hadn’t seen long hair, but then again I hadn’t seen much of anything but a coat swirling in the wind. I walked back and forth along the line of trees. Beyond it, the woods deepened and swampy ground took over. I found nothing.
    “Better come on to the office and let me write it up,” the sheriff told my father. “If you want to go home and get some dry clothes on, that’d be fine.”
    My dad nodded. “I’ve got to finish my deliveries and get Cory to school, too.”
    “Okay. Seems to me we can’t do much for that fella at the bottom, anyhow.” He grunted, his hands in his pockets. “A murder. Last murder we had in Zephyr was in 1961. You remember when Bo Kallagan beat his wife to death with a bowlin’ trophy?”
    I returned to the milk truck and waited for my dad. The sun was up good and proper now, lighting the world. Or, at least, the world I knew. But things weighed heavy on my mind. It seemed to me that there were two worlds: one before the sun, and one after. And if that were true, then maybe there were people who were citizens of those different worlds as well. Some moved easily through the landscape of night, and others clung to the bright hours. Maybe I had seen one of those darktime citizens, in the world before the sun. And-a chilling thought-maybe he had seen me seeing him, too.
    I realized I had brought mud back into the milk truck. It was smeared all over my Keds.
    I looked at the soles, and the earth I had collected.
    On the bottom of my left Ked was a small green feather.

II – Down in the Dark
    THE GREEN FEATHER WENT INTO MY POCKET. FROM THERE IT found its way into a White Owl