Boys Life

from his arms, his cheek, his ear, and almost gnawed off a finger before Gordo, screaming to high heaven and stinking like hell, was able to scramble out of the ditch and take off running. Lucifer raced after him, chattering, spitting, and shitting, and the last I saw of them Lucifer had leaped onto Gordo’s head and had handfuls of peroxided blond hair, riding Gordo like an emperor on an elephant.
    I pulled Rocket up and got on. Rocket was docile now, all the willful fight drained away. Before I pedaled off to find a path around the ditch, I thought of how Gordo would be feeling in a few days, his face and arms swollen with bites, when he’d realized all those green three-leafed vines down in Lucifer’s domain were poison ivy pregnant with silent evil. He would be a walking fester. If he could walk, that is.
    “You’ve got a mean streak,” I said to Rocket.
    The defeated black bike lay down at the bottom of the ditch. Whoever went in after it had better be stocked up on calamine lotion.
    I rode back to school. The fight was over, but three guys were searching the playground. One of them had a tackle box under his arm.
    We found most of the arrowheads. Not all. A dozen or so had been swallowed up by the earth. An offering, as it were. Among the lost was the smooth black arrowhead of Chief Five Thunders.
    Johnny didn’t seem to mind that much. He said he’d look again for it. He said if he didn’t find it, somebody else might, in ten years, or twenty years, or who knew how long. It hadn’t been his to own anyway, he said. He’d just been keeping it for a while, until the chief needed it on the Happy Hunting Grounds.
    I had always wondered what Reverend Lovoy meant when he talked about “grace.” I understood it now. It was being able to give up something that it broke your heart to lose, and be happy about it.
    By that definition, Johnny’s grace was awesome.
    I didn’t know it yet, but I stood on the verge of my own test of grace.

XXI – Case #3432
    AFTER THAT DAY ON THE PLAYGROUND, THE BRANLINS DIDN’T bother us anymore. Gotha returned to school with a false front tooth and a dose of humility, and when Gordo was released from the hospital he skulked away whenever I was near. The capper came when Gotha actually approached Johnny and asked to be shown-in slow motion, of course-the haymaker punch that he hadn’t even seen coming. That’s not to say Gotha and Gordo became saints overnight. But Gotha’s beating and Gordo’s itchy agony had been good for them. They’d been given a drink from the cup of respect, and it was a start.
    As October moved along, the hillsides lit up with gold and orange. The smell of burning autumn hazed the air. Alabama and Auburn were both winning, Leatherlungs had eased off her tirades, the Demon was in love with somebody other than me, and everything would have been right with the world.
    Except.
    I often found myself thinking about Dad, scribbling questions he could not answer, in the small hours of the morning. He was getting downright skinny now, his appetite gone. When he forced a smile, his teeth looked too big and his eyes shone with a false glint. Mom started biting her fingernails, and she was really nagging Dad now but he refused to go to either Dr. Parrish or the Lady. They had a couple of arguments that made Dad stalk out of the house, get in the pickup, and drive away. Afterward, Mom cried in their room. I heard her on the phone more than once, begging Grandmomma Sarah to talk some sense into him. “… Eatin’ him up inside,” I heard Mom say, and then I went out to play with Rebel because it hurt me to hear how much pain my mother was suffering. Dad, as I well knew, was already locked in his own cell of torment.
    And the dream. Always the dream: two nights straight, skip a night, there it is again, skip three nights, then seven nights in a row.
    Cory? Cory Mackenson? they whispered, standing in their white dresses beneath the scorched and leafless tree. Their voices were as soft as the sound of doves in flight, but there was an urgency about them that struck a spark of fear in me. And as the dream went on, little details began to be revealed as if through misted glass: behind the four black girls was a wall of dark stones, and in that wall the splintered window frame held only a few ragged teeth of glass. Cory Mackenson? There was a distant ticking noise. Cory? It was getting louder, and the unknown fear welled up in me. Cor-
    On this seventh night,