Boys Life

home, to wait for a casting call. But Davy Ray was dead forever, and I could not stand the thought of him in darkness.
    It got to where I couldn’t sleep. My room was too dark. It got to where I wasn’t sure what I’d seen, the night a blurred figure spoke to Rebel. Because if Davy Ray was in darkness, so, too, was Carl Bellwood. Rebel was. And all the sleepers on Poulter Hill and all the generations whose bones lay beneath the twisted roots of Zephyr’s trees: they, too, had returned to darkness.
    I remembered Davy Ray’s funeral. How thick the red earth was, on the edges of the grave. How thick, how heavy. There was no door down there when the minister was finished and the people gone and the dirt shoveled in by Bruton men. There was only dark, and its weight made something crack inside me.
    I didn’t know where heaven was anymore. I wasn’t sure if God had any sense, or plan or reason, or if maybe He, too, was in the dark. I wasn’t sure of anything anymore: not life, not afterlife, not God, not goodness. And I anguished over these things as the Christmas decorations went up on Merchants Street.
    Christmas was still two weeks away, but Zephyr struggled for a festive air. The death of Davy Ray had drowned everybody’s joy. It was talked about at Mr. Dollar’s, at the Bright Star Cafe, at the courthouse, and everywhere in between. He was so young, they said. Such a tragic accident, they said. But that’s life, they said; whether we like it or not, that’s life.
    Hearing these things didn’t help me. Of course my folks tried to talk to me about it, saying that Davy Ray’s suffering was over and that he’d gone to a better place.
    But I just couldn’t believe them. What place would ever be better than Zephyr?
    “Heaven,” Mom told me as we sat together before the crackling fire. “Davy Ray’s gone to heaven, and you have to believe that.”
    “Because why?” I asked her, and she looked as if I’d just slapped her face.
    I waited for an answer. I hoped for one, but it came in a word that left me unsatisfied, and that word was “faith.”
    They took me to see Reverend Lovoy. We sat in his office at church, and he gave me a lemon candy from a bowl on his desk. “Cory,” he said, “you believe in Jesus, don’t you?”
    “Yes sir.”
    “And you believe that Jesus was sent from God to die for the sins of man?”
    “Yes sir.”
    “Then you also believe Jesus was crucified, dead and buried, and on the third day He arose from the grave?”
    “Yes sir.” Here I frowned. “But Jesus was Jesus. Davy Ray was just a regular boy.”
    “I know that, Cory, but Jesus came to earth to show us that there’s more to this existence than we understand. He showed us that if we believe in Him, and follow His will and way, we, too, have a place with God in heaven. You see?”
    I thought about this for a minute as Reverend Lovoy sat back in his chair and watched me. “Is heaven better than Zephyr?” I asked him.
    “A million times better,” he said.
    “Do they have comic books there?”
    “Well…” He smiled. “We don’t really know what heaven will be. We just know it’ll be wonderful.”
    “Because why?” I asked.
    “Because,” he answered, “we must have faith.” He offered the bowl to me. “Would you like another candy?”
    I couldn’t picture heaven. How could a place be any good at all if it didn’t have the things there you enjoyed doing? If there were no comic books, no monster movies, no bikes, and no country roads to ride them on? No swimming pools, no ice cream, no summer, or barbecue on the Fourth of July? No thunderstorms, and front porches on which to sit and watch them coming? Heaven sounded to me like a library that only held books about one certain subject, yet you had to spend eternity and eternity and eternity reading them. What was heaven without typewriter paper and a magic box?
    Heaven would be hell, that’s what.
    These days were not all bleak. The Christmas lights, red and green, glowed on Merchants Street. Lamps shaped like the head of Santa Claus burned on the street corners, and silver tinsel hung from the stoplights. Dad got a new job. He began working three days a week as a stock clerk at Big Paul’s Pantry.
    One day Leatherlungs called me a blockhead six times. She told me to come up to the blackboard and show the class what I knew about prime numbers.
    I told her I wasn’t coming.
    “Cory Mackenson, you get up here right now!” she roared.
    “No,