Boys Life

I saw dank gray light streaming through the cupola over the staircase and I started running down the stairs without even holding on to the railing, which was enough right there to cause my mother to go white-haired. Mayor Swope was puffing behind me, and his voice was losing its steam: “No, Cory! No!” I reached the bottom of the staircase, and I ran across the entrance lobby and out the front door into the chilly rain. The worst of the storm had already swept over Zephyr, and now squatted above the hills like a massive grayish-blue toad-frog. I got Rocket unlocked, but I left the chain hanging. I pedaled away from the courthouse just as Mayor Swope came through the door hollering at me to stop.
    The last thing he hollered-and I thought this was strange, coming from a crazed killer-was “For God’s sake, be careful!”
    Rocket flew over the rain-pocked puddles, its golden eye picking out a path. The clouds were parting, shards of yellow sunlight breaking through. Dad had always told me that when it rained while the sun showed, the devil was beating his wife. Rocket dodged the splashing cars on Merchants Street and I hung on for the ride.
    At home, Rocket skidded to a stop at the front porch steps and I ran inside, my hair plastered down with rain and my hand gripping the soggy green feather.
    “Cory!” Mom called as the screen door slammed. “Cory Mackenson, come here!”
    “Just a minute!” I ran into my room, and I searched the seven mystic drawers until I found the White Owl cigar box. I opened it, and there was the green feather I’d found on the bottom of my shoe.
    “Come here this instant!” Mom shouted.
    “Wait!” I placed the first green feather down on my desk, and the green feather I’d plucked from the mayor’s hatband beside it.
    “Cory! Come in here! I’m on the phone with Mayor Swope!”
    Oh-oh.
    My feeling of triumph cracked, collapsed, cascaded around my wet sneakers.
    The first feather, the one that had come from the woods, was a deep emerald green. The one from the mayor’s hatband was about three shades lighter. Not only that, but the hatband feather was at least twice as large as the Saxon’s Lake feather.
    They didn’t match one iota.
    “Cory! Come talk to the mayor before I get a switch after you!”
    When I dared to walk into the kitchen, I saw that my mother’s face was as red as a strangled beet. She said into the telephone, “No sir, I promise you Cory doesn’t have a mental condition. No sir, he doesn’t have panic attacks, either. Here he is right now, I’ll put him on.” She held the receiver out to me, and fixed me with a baleful glare. “Have you lost your mind? Take this phone and talk to the mayor!”
    I took it. It was all I could do to utter one pitiable word: “Hello?”
    “Cory!” Mayor Swope said. “I had to call to make sure you’d gotten home all right! I was scared to death you were gonna fall down those stairs in the dark and break your neck! When you ran out, I thought you were… like… havin’ a fit or somethin’.”
    “No sir,” I answered meekly. “I wasn’t havin’ a fit.”
    “Well, when the lights went out I figured you might be afraid of the dark. I didn’t want you to hurt yourself, so I was tryin’ to get you settled down. And I figured your mom and dad wouldn’t want me to let you try gettin’ home in that storm, either! If you’d gotten sideswiped by a car… well, thank the Lord it didn’t happen.”
    “I… thought…” My throat choked up. I could feel my mother’s burning eyes. “I thought… you were tryin’ to… kill me,” I said.
    The mayor was silent for a few seconds, and I could imagine what he must be thinking. I was a pure number-one nut case. “Kill you? Whatever for?”
    “Cory!” Mom said. “Are you crazy?”
    “I’m sorry,” I told the mayor. “My… imagination got away from me, I guess. But you said I knew somethin’ about you, and you wondered how I’d found out, and-”
    “No, not somethin’ about me,” Mayor Swope said. “Somethin’ about your award.”
    “My award?”
    “Your plaque. For winnin’ third place in the short story contest. That’s why I asked you to come see me. I was afraid somebody else on the awards panel had told you before I could.”
    “Told me what?”
    “Well, I wanted to show it to you. I was bringin’ your plaque in to show you when the lights went out and you went wild. See, the fella who engraves the plaques misspelled your name. He