Boys Life

disappeared amid the trees.
    “Did you guys see that?” Davy Ray whispered.
    “’Course we saw it!” Ben whispered back. “We’re right here, aren’t we?”
    “Wonder who was in that car, and why they’re way out here?” Davy Ray looked at me. “You want to find out, Cory?”
    “Probably moonshiners,” I answered. My voice trembled. “I think we’d better leave ’em alone.”
    Davy Ray picked up his flashlight. His face was still pallid, but his eyes shone with excitement. “I’m gonna find out what’s goin’ on! You guys can stay here if you want to!” He stood up, flicked on the flashlight, and began to stealthily follow the car. He stopped when he realized we weren’t with him. “It’s okay,” he said. “I won’t think you guys are scared or anythin’.”
    “Good,” Ben answered, “’cause I’m stickin’ right here.”
    I stood up. If Davy Ray had enough courage to go, then so did I. Besides, I wanted to know who was driving a car way out here in the woods myself. “Come on!” he said. “But watch where you step!”
    “I’m not stayin’ here alone!” Ben hoisted himself to his feet. “You two are damn crazy, you know that?”
    “Yeah.” Davy Ray sounded proud about it. “Everybody stay low and no talkin’!”
    We crept from tree to tree, following the trail that we hadn’t even seen when we’d set up camp at nightfall. Davy Ray kept the flashlight’s beam aimed at the ground, so it couldn’t be spotted by anyone up ahead. The trail wound back and forth between the trees. The owl was hooting again, and lightning bugs blinked around us. We’d gone a couple of hundred yards more along the trail when Davy Ray suddenly stopped and whispered, “There it is!”
    We could see the car ahead of us. It was sitting still, but its lights were on and the engine was rumbling. We crouched down in the pine straw, and I don’t know about the others, but my heart was going a mile a minute. The car didn’t move. Whoever was sitting behind the wheel didn’t get out. “I’ve gotta pee!” Ben whispered urgently. Davy Ray told him to squeeze it.
    After five or six minutes, we saw more lights coming through the woods from the opposite direction. It was another car, this one a black Cadillac, and it stopped, facing the first car. Davy Ray looked at me, his expression saying we’d really stumbled into something this time. I didn’t particularly care what was going on; I just wanted to get away from what I figured was a meeting of moonshiners. Then the doors of the first car opened, and two people got out.
    “Oh, man!” Davy Ray breathed.
    Standing in the crossing of headlights were two men wearing ordinary clothes except until you got to their heads, which were covered by white masks. One of the men was medium-sized, the other was big and fat, with a belly that flopped over the waist of his jeans. The medium-sized man was smoking either a cigarette or cigar, it was hard to tell which, and he angled his masked head and blew smoke from the corner of his mouth. Then the Cadillac’s doors opened, and I almost swallowed my heart when Bodean Blaylock slid out from behind the wheel. It was him, all right; I remembered his face from when he’d looked across the poker table at me, same to say he had my granddaddy and wasn’t about to let him go. A slim man with slicked-back dark hair and a jutting slab of a chin got out of the passenger side; he was wearing tight black pants and a red shirt with cowboy spangles on the shoulders, and at first I thought it was Donny Blaylock but Donny didn’t have a chin like that. This man opened the Cadillac’s right rear door, and the whole car trembled as whoever was still inside started to climb out.
    It was a mountain on two legs.
    His gut was tremendous, straining the front of the red-checked shirt and overalls he wore. When he rose up to his full height, he was maybe six and a half feet tall. He was baldheaded except for a wisp of gray hair circling his acorn-shaped skull, and he had a trimmed gray beard that angled to a point below his chin. He breathed like a bellows, his face a ruddy mass of wrinkled flesh. “You boys goin’ to a masquerade party?” he growled in a voice like a cement mixer, and he laughed hut-hut-hut like a big old engine starting to fire its plugs. Bodean laughed, and the other man laughed, too. The men wearing the masks shifted uneasily. “You fellas look like sacks of shit,” the mountainous bulk said as he