Boys Life

the night. From far away I heard a car’s engine growl. I thought of my dream about Mrs. Neville, and what she’d said: Don’t think of it as writing. Think of it as telling your friends a story.
    What if? I asked myself. What if I was to write about something that had really happened?
    Like… Mr. Sculley and the tooth of Old Moses. No, no. Mr. Sculley wouldn’t want people coming around to his place to see it. All right then, what about… the Lady and the Moon Man? No, I didn’t know enough about them. What about…
    …the dead man in the car at the bottom of Saxon’s Lake?
    What if I was to write a story about what had happened that morning? Write about the car going into the water, and Dad jumping in after it? Write about everything I’d felt and seen on that March morning before the sun? And what if… what if… I wrote about seeing the man in the green-feathered hat, standing there at the edge of the woods?
    Now, this I could get fired-up about. I began with my father saying, “Cory? Wake up, son. It’s time.” Soon I was back in the milk truck with him, on our way through the silent early morning streets of Zephyr. We were talking about what I wanted to grow up to be, and then suddenly the car came out of the woods right in front of us, my dad twisted the milk truck’s wheel, and the car went over the edge of the red rock cliff into Saxon’s Lake. I remembered my father running toward the lake, and how my heart had clutched up as he’d leaped into the water and started swimming. I remembered watching the car starting to go down, bubbles bursting around its trunk. I remembered looking around at the woods across the road and seeing the figure standing there wearing a long overcoat that flapped in the wind and a hat with a green-
    Wait.
    No, that’s not how it had been. I had stepped on the green feather, and found it on the bottom of my muddy shoe. But where else could a green feather come from but the band of a hat? Still and all, I was writing this as it had really been. I hadn’t actually seen the green-feathered hat until the night of the flood. So I stuck to the facts, and wrote about the green feather as I’d found it. I left out the part about Miss Grace, Lainie, and the house of bad girls, figuring Mom wouldn’t care to read about it. I read the story over and decided it wasn’t as good as I could do, so I rewrote it. It was hard making talking sound like talking. Finally, though, after three times through my Royal, the story was ready. It was two pages long, double-spaced. My masterpiece.
    When Dad, clad in his red-striped pajamas and his hair still damp from his shower, came in to say good night, I showed him the two sheets of paper.
    “What’s this?” He held the title up under my desk lamp. “‘Before the Sun,’” he read, and he looked at me with a question in his eyes.
    “It’s a story for the writin’ contest,” I said. “I just wrote it.”
    “Oh. Can I read it?”
    “Yes sir.”
    He began. I watched him. When he got to the part about the car coming out of the woods, a little muscle tensed in his jaw. He put out a hand to brace himself against the wall, and I knew he was reading about swimming out to the car. I saw his fingers slowly grip and relax, grip and relax. “Cory?” Mom called. “Go lock Rebel in for the night!” I started to go, but Dad said, “Wait just a minute,” and then he returned to the last few paragraphs.
    “Cory?” Mom called again, the TV on in the front room.
    “We’re talkin’, Rebecca!” Dad told her, and he lowered the pages to his side. He stared at me, his face half in shadow.
    “Is it okay?” I asked.
    “This isn’t what you usually write,” he said quietly. “You usually write about ghosts, or cowboys, or spacemen. How come you to write somethin’ like this?”
    I shrugged. “I don’t know. I just thought… I’d write somethin’ true.”
    “So this is true? This part about you seein’ somebody standin’ in the woods?”
    “Yes sir.”
    “Then how come you didn’t tell me about it? How come you didn’t tell Sheriff Amory?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe… I wasn’t sure if I really saw somebody or not.”
    “But you’re sure now? Almost six months after it happened, you’re sure now? And you could’ve told the sheriff this, and you didn’t?”
    “I… guess that’s right. I mean… I thought I saw somebody standin’ there. He was wearin’ a long overcoat, and he-”
    “You’re sure it was a