Boys Life

cigar box in my room, along with my collection of old keys and dried-up insects. I closed the box lid, placed the box in one of the seven mystic drawers, and slid the drawer shut.
    And that was how I forgot about it.
    The more I thought about seeing that figure at the edge of the woods, the more I thought I’d been wrong, that my eyes had been scared from seeing Dad sink underwater as the car went down. Several times I started to tell Dad about it, but something else got in the way. Mom threw a gut-busting fit when she found out he’d jumped into the lake. She was so mad at him she sobbed as she yelled, and Dad had to sit her down at the kitchen table and explain to her calmly why he had done it. “There was a man at the wheel,” Dad said. “I didn’t know he was already dead, I thought he was knocked cold. If I’d stood there without doing anything, what would I have thought of myself after it was over?”
    “You could’ve drowned!” she fired at him, tears on her cheeks. “You could’ve hit your head on a rock and drowned!”
    “I didn’t drown. I didn’t hit my head on a rock. I did what I had to do.” He gave her a paper napkin, and she used it to blot her eyes. A last salvo came out of her: “That lake’s full of cottonmouths! You could’ve swum right into a nest of ’em!”
    “I didn’t,” he said, and she sighed and shook her head as if she lived with the craziest fool ever born.
    “You’d better get out of those damp clothes,” she told him at last, and her voice was under control again. “I just thank God it’s not your body down at the bottom of the lake, too.” She stood up and helped him unbutton his soggy shirt. “Do you know who it was?”
    “Never saw him before.”
    “Who would do such a thing to another human being?”
    “That’s for J.T. to find out.” He peeled his shirt off, and Mom took it from him with two fingers as if the lake’s water carried leprosy. “I’ve got to go over to his office to help him write it up. I’ll tell you, Rebecca, when I looked into that dead man’s face my heart almost stopped. I’ve never seen anything like that before, and I hope to God I never see such a thing again, either.”
    “Lord,” Mom said. “What if you’d had a heart attack? Who would’ve saved you?”
    Worrying was my mother’s way. She fretted about the weather, the cost of groceries, the washing machine breaking down, the Tecumseh River being dirtied by the paper mill in Adams Valley, the price of new clothes, and everything under the sun. To my mother, the world was a vast quilt whose stitches were always coming undone. Her worrying somehow worked like a needle, tightening those dangerous seams. If she could imagine events through to their worst tragedy, then she seemed to have some kind of control over them. As I said, it was her way. My father could throw up a fistful of dice to make a decision, but my mother had an agony for every hour. I guess they balanced, as two people who love each other should.
    My mother’s parents, Grand Austin and Nana Alice, lived about twelve miles south in a town called Waxahatchee, on the edge of Robbins Air Force Base. Nana Alice was even worse a worrier than Mom; something in her soul craved tragic manna, whereas Grand Austin-who had been a logger and had a wooden leg to show for the slip of a band saw-warned her he would unscrew his leg and whop her upside the head with it if she didn’t pipe down and give him peace. He called his wooden leg his “peace pipe,” but as far as I know he never used it for any purpose except that for which it was carved. My mother had an older brother and sister, but my father was an only child.
    Anyway, I went to school that day and at the first opportunity told Davy Ray Callan, Johnny Wilson, and Ben Sears what had happened. By the time the school bell rang and I walked home, the news was moving across Zephyr like a crackling wildfire. Murder was the word of the hour. My parents were fighting off the phone calls. Everybody wanted to know the grisly details. I went outside to ride my rusted old bike and lead Rebel for a chase in the woods, and it came to me that maybe one of those people who called already knew the details. Maybe one of them was just trying to find out if he’d been seen, or what Sheriff Amory knew.
    I realized then, as I pedaled my bike through the forest and Rebel ran at my heels, that somebody in my hometown might be a killer.
    The days passed, warming into the