Boys Life

Johnny and Rachel are perfectly happy. We all went deep-sea fishing off Destin one weekend, and Johnny caught a marlin, I got my line tangled up under the boat, and Ben got the sunburn of his life. But we sure did do a lot of laughing and catching up.
    It is there before I realize it. My stomach tightens.
    “Saxon’s Lake,” I tell them. They both crane their necks to look.
    It hasn’t changed at all. The same size, the same dark water, the same mud and reeds, the same red rock cliff. It wouldn’t take much effort to imagine Dad’s milk truck parked there, and him leaping into the water after a sinking car. It likewise wouldn’t take much effort to remember a Buick wallowing there, water flooding through the broken rear windshield, and my father straining to reach me with a glass-slashed hand. Not much effort at all.
    Dad, I love you, I think as we leave Saxon’s Lake behind.
    I remember his face, washed by firelight, as he sat there in the house and explained to me about Dr. Gunther Dahninaderke. It took us both-and Mom, too, and just about everybody in town-a long time to accept the fact that he and his wife had done such evil things. Though he wasn’t evil through and through, or else why would he have saved my life? I don’t think anyone is evil beyond saving. Maybe I’m like Dad that way: naive. But better naive, I think, than calloused to the core.
    It dawned on me sometime later about Dr. Dahninaderke and his nightly vigils at the shortwave radio. I firmly believe he was listening to the foreign countries for news on who else in the Nazi regime had been captured and brought to justice. I believe that under his cool exterior he lived in perpetual terror, waiting for that knock on the door. He had delivered agonies, and he had suffered them, too. Would he have killed me once he had that green feather in his fist, as he and Kara had tortured and killed Jeff Hannaford over blackmail money? I honestly don’t know. Do you?
    Oh, yes! The Demon!
    Ben told me this. The Demon, who had demonstrated later in high school that she was indeed a genius, went to college at Vanderbilt and became a chemist for DuPont. She did very well at that, but her strange nature would not let her alone. The last Ben understood, the Demon has become a performance artist in New York City and is locking horns with Jesse Helms over an art piece she does in which she screams and rants about corporate America while sitting in a baby pool full of… you can guess what.
    All I can say is, Jesse Helms better not get on her bad side. If he does, I pity him. He might find himself glued to his desk one fine day.
    I follow the same curves that scared the yell out of me when Donny Blaylock flew around them. And then the hills move aside and the road becomes as cleanly straight as a part made by Mr. Dollar and there is the gargoyle bridge.
    Missing its gargoyles. The heads of the Confederate generals have been hacked away. Maybe it was vandalism, maybe it was somebody who would get a thousand dollars apiece for them on the art market as examples of Southern primitivism. I don’t know, but they are gone. There is the railroad trestle, which is about the same, and there is the shine of the Tecumseh River. I imagine that Old Moses is happier, now that the paper mill has closed. He doesn’t get pollution in his teeth when he bites a mouthful of turtle. Of course, he doesn’t get his Good Friday feast anymore, either. That ended, Ben told me, when the Lady passed over her own river in 1967 at the grand old age of one hundred and nine. The Moon Man, Ben said, left town soon afterward, heading for New Orleans, and after that the community of Bruton began to dwindle, getting smaller at even a faster rate than Zephyr. The Tecumseh River may be cleaner now, but I wonder if on some nights Old Moses doesn’t lift his scaly head to the surface and spout steam and water from the twin furnaces of his nostrils. I wonder if he doesn’t listen to the silence beyond the sounds of water sloshing over rocks and think in his own reptilian language “Why doesn’t anybody ever come to play with me anymore?”
    Maybe he’s still here. Maybe he’s gone, following the river to the sea.
    We cross the gargoyle-less bridge. And there on the other side is my hometown.
    “Here we are,” I hear myself say as I slow the car down, but instantly I know I am incorrect. We may be in a particular place in time, but this place is no longer Zephyr.
    At least not the Zephyr