Boys Life

whole lot of air. Dad and I clung together in the choppy murk, breathing.
    At last we swam to where we could pull ourselves out, through mud and reeds to solid earth. Dad sat down on the ground next to the pickup truck, his hands scraped raw with glass cuts, and I huddled on the red rock cliff and looked out over Saxon’s Lake.
    “Hey, partner!” Dad said. “You okay?”
    “Yes sir.” My teeth were chattering, but being cold was a passing thing.
    “Better get in the truck,” he said.
    “I will,” I answered, but I wasn’t ready yet. My shoulder, which would become one swollen lump of bruise in the next couple of days, was mercifully numb.
    Dad pulled his knees up to his chest. The sleet was falling, but we were already cold and wet, so what of it? “I’ve got a story to tell you about Dr. Lezander,” he said.
    “I want to tell you one, too,” I answered. I listened; the wind swept over the lake’s surface and made it whisper.
    He was down in the dark now. He had come from darkness and to darkness he had returned.
    “He called me Bronco,” I said.
    “Yeah. How about that?”
    We couldn’t stay here very much longer. The wind was really getting cold. It was the kind of weather that made you catch your death.
    Dad looked up at the low gray clouds and the January gloom. He smiled, with the face of a boy unburdened.
    “Gosh,” he said, “it’s a beautiful day.”
    Hell might have been for heroes, but life was for the living.
    These things happened, in the aftermath.
    When Mom got up off the floor from her faint, she was all right. She hugged both Dad and me, but she didn’t cling on to us. We had come back to her a little worse for wear, but we were back. Dad in particular; his dreams of the man at the bottom of Saxon’s Lake were ended, good and truly.
    Mr. Steiner and Mr. Hannaford, though dismayed that they had never even gotten a finger on Dr. Gunther Dahninaderke, were at least satisfied with the outcome of rough justice. They had Mrs. Kara Dahninaderke and her birds of human bone in their custody, however, and that was a great consolation. The last I heard of her, she was going to a prison where even the light lay chained.
    Ben and Johnny were beside themselves. Ben jumped up and down in a fit and Johnny scowled and stomped when they realized they had been sitting in front of a movie while I’d been battling for my life against a Nazi war criminal. To say this made me a celebrity at school was like saying the moon is the size of a river pebble. Even the teachers wanted to hear my tale. Pretty Miss Fontaine was enthralled by it, and Mr. Cardinale asked to hear it twice. “You ought to be a writer, Cory!” Miss Fontaine said. “You surely do know your words!” Mr. Cardinale said, “You’d make a fine author, in my opinion.”
    Writer? Author?
    Storyteller, that’s what I decided to be.
    On a cold but sunny Saturday morning toward the end of January, I left Rocket on the front porch and got into the pickup truck with Mom and Dad. He drove us across the gargoyle bridge and along Route Ten-slowly, all the time watching for the beast from the lost world. Though the beast remained loose in the woods, I never saw him again. I believe he was a gift to me from Davy Ray.
    We reached Saxon’s Lake. The water was smooth. There was no trace of what lay at its bottom, but we all knew.
    I stood on the red rock cliff, and I reached into my pocket and pulled out the green feather. Dad had tied twine around it, with a little lead-ball weight on its end. I threw it into the lake, and it went down faster than you can say Dahninaderke. Much faster, I’m sure.
    I wanted no souvenirs of tragedy.
    Dad stood on one side of me, and Mom on the other. We were a mighty good team.
    “I’m ready now,” I told them.
    And I went home, where my monsters and my magic box were waiting.

PART FIVE – Zephyr as It Is
    IT HAS BEEN A LONG, COLD WINTER, AND I AM GOING HOME.
    South from Birmingham on Interstate 65, that busy highway leading to the state capital. A left turn at Exit 205, and then following the road as it narrows and winds past drowsing towns named Coopers, Rockford, Hissop, and Cottage Grove. No sign spells out the name Zephyr anymore, but I know where it is and I am going home.
    I am not going alone, on this beautiful Saturday afternoon at the beginning of spring. My wife, Sandy, is beside me, and our own “young’un” in the back, curled up wearing a Birmingham Barons baseball cap on backward and