Boys Life

this time he wasn’t mocking anybody. Glass crashed and something kabonged in the car’s belly, and with a loud ripping noise of bushes and low tree limbs the Chevy came to a halt with its nose buried in a bank of red dirt.
    “Yi yi yi yi!” Donny was yelping like a dog with a hurt leg. I tasted blood, and my nose felt as if it had been pushed right through my face. I saw Donny looking wildly about; at his hairline along the sides of his head, the hair had gone gray. “I killed him!” he squalled in a high and giddy voice. “Killed that bastard! Midnight Mona burned up! Saw it burn up!”
    Lainie stared at him, her eyes unfocused, an egg-sized knot bulging on her reddened forehead. She whispered thickly, “You… killed…”
    “Killed him! Killed him dead! Went flyin’ off the road! Boom, he went! Boom!” Donny started laughing, and he scrambled out through the driver’s-side window without opening the door. His face looked swollen and wet, his eyes cocked and crazy. He began to stagger in a circle, the front of his jeans soggy with urine. “Daddy?” he cried out. “Help me, Daddy!” Then he started gibbering and sobbing and he climbed up the bank of red dirt for the woods beyond.
    I heard a click.
    Lainie had reached down to the floorboard and retrieved the pistol. She had pulled its hammer back, and now she took aim at the struggling, insane wretch who sobbed for his daddy.
    Her hand trembled. I saw her finger tighten on the trigger.
    “Better not,” I said.
    Her finger didn’t listen.
    But her hand did. It moved an inch. The pistol went off, and the bullet threw up a chunk of red dirt. She kept firing, four more times. Four more red dirt chunks, flying in the air.
    Donny Blaylock ran for the yellow woods. He got caught up in branches for a moment, and as he thrashed to get loose the branches ripped the shirt right off his back. He hightailed it, but we could hear him laughing and crying until the awful sound faded and was gone.
    Lainie lowered her head and pressed her hand to her eyes. Her back began to tremble. She gave a low, moaning sob. My nose was starting to feel like it was on fire.
    But through it I could still smell a hint of English Leather.
    Lainie looked up, startled. She touched her tear-stained cheek. “Stevie?” she said, her voice alive with hope.
    As I’ve said, it was the season of ghosts. They had gathered themselves, building up their strength to wander the fields-and roads-of October and speak to those who would listen.
    Maybe Lainie never saw him. Maybe she wouldn’t have believed her own mind if she had, and she would’ve gone running for a rubber room the same as Donny.
    But I believe she heard him, loud and clear. Maybe just in the scent of his skin, or the memory of a touch.
    I believe it was enough.

XXIII – High Noon in Zephyr
    MY NOSE WASN’T BROKEN, THOUGH IT SWELLED UP LIKE A MELON and turned a ghastly purplish-green and my eyes puffed up into black-and-blue slits. To say Mom was horrified about the whole experience is like saying the Gulf of Mexico has some water in it. But I survived, and I was all right after my nose shrank to its regular size.
    Sheriff Amory, who’d been called by Miss Grace, found Lainie and me walking back to Zephyr on Route Sixteen. I didn’t have much to say to him, because I remembered Donny yelling that the Blaylocks owned him. I told Dad about this when he and Mom came to pick me up at Dr. Parrish’s office. Dad didn’t say anything, but I could see the thundercloud settling over his head and I knew he wouldn’t let it lie.
    Miss Grace was okay. She had to be taken to the hospital in Union Town, but the bullet hadn’t hit anything that couldn’t be fixed. I had the feeling that it would take an awful lot to put Miss Grace down for the count.
    This was the story about Lainie and Little Stevie Cauley, as I learned later from Dad, who found it out from the sheriff: Lainie, who’d run away from home when she was seventeen, had met Donny Blaylock while she was a stripper at the Port Said in Birmingham. He had convinced her to come work for his family’s “business,” promising her all sorts of big money and stuff, saying the Air Force boys really knew how to part with a paycheck. She came, but soon after she arrived at Miss Grace’s, she’d met Little Stevie when she’d gone to the Woolworth’s in Zephyr to buy her summer wardrobe. Maybe it hadn’t been love at first sight, but something close to it. Anyhow, Little