Boys Life

He started to howl.
    Dad muttered, “Damn it,” and stood up, being careful not to scrape his chair on the floor. I shrank back into a shadow; I’m not sure why I did this, but Dad looked like he didn’t want to be disturbed. He walked to the back door, and I heard him go out to hush Rebel.
    Rebel’s howling ceased. Dad would be back in a minute or two.
    I couldn’t help it. I had to know what was so important for him to be up at two-thirty doing.
    I walked into the den, and I looked at the sheet of paper.
    On it, my father-who was by no means an artist-had drawn a half-dozen crude skulls with wings growing from their temples. There was a column of question marks, and the words Saxon’s Lake repeated five times. The Lady was written there, followed by another series of question marks. Down in the dark was there, the pen’s point almost tearing through the paper. It was followed in capital letters by two desperate questions: WHO? WHY?
    And then a progression that made me feel sick to my stomach:
    I am.
    I am afraid.
    I am about to have a breakd
    The back door opened.
    I retreated to my shadow, and watched as Dad entered the den. He sat down again, and he stared at what he’d drawn and written.
    I had never seen his face before. Not the face he wore now, at this quiet hour before the sun. It was the face of a frightened little boy, tortured beyond his understanding.
    He opened a drawer and took out a coffee cup with Green Meadows Dairy stenciled on the side. He brought out a pack of matches. Then he folded the sheet of paper up, and began to tear it into small pieces. The fragments of it went into the coffee cup. When the paper was all torn up, Dad struck a match and dropped it into the cup, too.
    There was a little smoke. He opened a window, and then there was none.
    I slipped back to my room and lay down to think.
    While I was dreaming of the four black girls in their Sunday dresses, what was my father being visited by? A mud-covered figure rising from the lake’s murky depths, borne up by a fleet of moss-backed snapping turtles? A beaten and misshapen face, whispering Come with me, come with me, down in the dark? A handcuff on the wrist of a tattooed arm? Or the knowledge that it could be any man and every man who ends his life alone, forgotten, drifting down into oblivion?
    I didn’t know, and I was afraid to guess. But I knew this for sure: whoever had murdered that unknown man was killing my father, too.
    At last sleep overtook me, and gentled me away from these tribulations. I rested, while around me my monsters kept their watch.

XVIII – The Magic Box
    THE SATURDAY NIGHT OF THE ZEPHYR ARTS COUNCIL AWARDS ceremony arrived. We all put on our Sunday clothes, jammed into the pickup truck, and headed for the library. My fright level, which had been hovering around eight on a scale of ten, now moved past nine. During the week, my so-called buddies had been telling me what might happen when I got up to read my story. If their predictions came true, I would break out in hives, pee in my pants, and lose my dinner from both ends in one simultaneous rush of shame and agony. Davy Ray had told me that to be safe I ought to put a cork in my butt. Ben had said I’d better be careful walking up to the podium in front of all those people, because that’s when likely I’d have my accident. Johnny said he’d known a boy who got up to read something in front of people and he forgot how to read right then and there, had started babbling in what sounded like Greek or Zulu.
    Well, I’d decided against the cork. But when I saw the lights on in the library and all the cars parked out front, I started regretting my decision. Mom put her arm around my shoulder. “You’re gonna do just fine,” she said.
    “Yep,” Dad said. He was wearing his father’s face again, but he had dark hollows under his eyes and I’d heard Mom telling him he might need to start taking some Geritol. She knew something was wrong, of course, but she didn’t know how deep the troubled current ran. “Just fine,” he told me.
    The library’s meeting room was full of chairs, and at the front there was a table and the dreaded podium. Worse yet, there was a microphone at that podium! About forty people occupied the chairs, and Mayor Swope, Mrs. Prathmore, Mr. Grover Dean, and some of the other contest judges were moving around hobnobbing. I wanted to shrivel up and squeeze into a corner when Mayor Swope saw us and started walking over, but