Boys Life

pressed to his face. “I don’t know,” he said.
    “Let me rub your back.”
    The bedsprings squeaked again, as the weight of their bodies shifted. “You’re awful tight,” Mom said. “All up in your neck, too.”
    “That hurts like hell. Right there, where your thumb is.”
    “It’s a crick. You must’ve pulled a muscle.”
    Silence. My neck and shoulders, too, had been comforted by my mother’s supple hands. Every so often the springs spoke, announcing a movement. Then my father’s voice came back. “I had another nightmare about that man in the car.”
    “I figured so.”
    “I was lookin’ at him in that car, with his face beat all to pulp and his throat strangled with a wire. I saw the handcuff on his wrist, and the tattoo on his shoulder. The car was goin’ down, and then… then his eyes opened.”
    I shivered. I could see it myself, and my father’s voice was almost a gasp.
    “He looked at me. Right at me. Water poured out of his eyeholes. He opened his mouth, and his tongue was as black as a snake’s head. And then he said, ‘Come with me.’”
    “Don’t think about it,” Mom interrupted. “Just close your eyes and rest.”
    “I can’t rest. I can’t.” I pictured my father’s body, lying like a question mark on the bed as Mom kneaded the iron-tight muscles of his back. “My nightmare,” he went on. “The man in the car reached out and grabbed my wrist. His fingernails were blue. His fingers bit hard into my skin, and he said, ‘Come with me, down in the dark.’ The car… the car started sinkin’, faster and faster, and I tried to break loose but he wouldn’t let me go, and he said, ‘Come with me, come with me, down in the dark.’ And then the lake closed over my head and I couldn’t get away from it and I opened my mouth to scream but the water filled it up. Oh Jesus, Rebecca. Oh, Jesus.”
    “It wasn’t real. Listen to me! It was only a bad dream, and everythin’s all right now.”
    “No,” Dad answered. “It’s not. This thing is eatin’ at me, and it’s only gettin’ worse. I thought I could put it behind me. I mean, my God, I’ve seen a dead person before. Up close. But this… this is different. That wire around his throat, the handcuff, the face that somebody had pounded into putty… it’s different. And not knowin’ who he was, or anythin’ about him… it’s eatin’ at me, day and night.”
    “It’ll pass,” Mom said. “That’s what you tell me whenever I want to worry the warts off a frog. Hang on, you tell me. It’ll pass.”
    “Maybe it will. I hope to God it will. But for right now, it’s in my head and I can’t shake it loose for the life of me. And this is the worst thing, Rebecca; this is what’s grindin’ inside of me. Whoever did it had to be a local. Had to be. Whoever did it knew how deep the lake is. He knew when that car went in there, the body was gone. Rebecca… whoever did this thing might be somebody I deliver milk to. It might be somebody who sits on our pew at church. Somebody we buy groceries or clothes from. Somebody we’ve known all our lives… or thought we knew. That scares me like I’ve never been scared before. You know why?” He was silent for a moment, and I could imagine the way the pulse throbbed at his temple. “Because if it’s not safe here, it’s not safe anywhere in this world.” His voice cracked a little on the last word. I was glad I wasn’t in that room, and that I couldn’t see his face.
    Two or three minutes passed. I think my father was just lying there, letting Mom rub his back. “Do you think you can sleep now?” she finally asked him, and he said, “I’ll try.”
    The springs spoke a few times. I heard my mother murmur something close to his ear. He said, “I hope so,” and then they were silent. Sometimes my dad snored; tonight he did not. I wondered if he lay awake after Mom had drifted off, and if he saw the corpse in the car reaching for him to drag him under. What he’d said haunted me: if it’s not safe here, it’s not safe anywhere in this world. This thing had hurt my father, in a place deeper than the bottom of Saxon’s Lake. Maybe it was the suddenness of what had happened, or the violence, or the cold-bloodedness of it. Maybe it was the knowledge that there were terrible secrets behind closed doors, even in the kindest of towns.
    I think my father had always believed all people were good, even in their secret souls. This thing had cracked his