Boys Life

at all. It was obviously fashioned by someone who was proud of his labors. A chief, most likely.
    “Can I keep it, Dad?” my daughter asks.
    Her name is Skye. She turned twelve in January, and she’s going through what Sandy calls the “tomboy stage.” Skye would rather put on a baseball cap backward and run grinning through the dust than play with dolls and dream about the New Kids on the Block. These things will come later, I’m sure. For right now, Skye is fine.
    “I believe you ought to,” I tell her, and she eagerly pushes that arrowhead down into the pocket of her jeans like a secret treasure.
    You see, it’s a girl’s life, too.
    And now we drive along Merchants Street, into the center of the stilled heart.
    Everything is closed. Mr. Dollar’s barbershop, the Piggly-Wiggly, the Bright Star Cafe, the hardware store, the Lyric, everything. The windows of the Woolworth’s are soaped over. The growth of retail outlets, apartments, and a shopping mall with four theaters in Union Town consumed the spirit of Zephyr, as Big Paul’s Pantry finished off the milkman’s route. This is a going-forward, but is it progress?
    We drive past the courthouse. Silence. Past the public swimming pool and the shell of the Spinnin’ Wheel. Silence, silence. We drive past the house of Miss Blue Glass, and the silence where there used to be music is heavy indeed.
    Miss Blue Glass. I wish I can say I know what happened to her, but I don’t. She would be in her eighties now, if she is still alive. I just don’t know. The same is true with so many others, who drifted away from Zephyr in the waning years: Mr. Dollar, Sheriff Marchette, Jazzman Jackson, Mr. and Mrs. Damaronde, Nila Castile and Gavin, Mrs. Velvadine, Mayor Swope. I think they are all alive, in other towns. I think they have kept part of Zephyr with them, and wherever they go they leave Zephyr’s seeds in the earth. As I do.
    I worked for a newspaper in Birmingham for two years after I finished college. I wrote headlines and edited other people’s stories. When I went to my apartment in that big city after work, I sat down at my magic box-not that same one, but a new magic box-and I wrote. And I wrote. The stories went out into the mail and the stories came back. Then, out of desperation, I tried to write a novel. Lo and behold, it found a publisher.
    I am a library now. A small one, but I’m growing.
    I slow the car as we move past a house set back off the street next to a barn. “He lived right there,” I tell Sandy.
    “Wow!” Skye says. “It’s creepy! It looks like a haunted house!”
    “No,” I tell her, “I think it’s just a house now.”
    Like Bo knows football, my daughter knows haunted houses. She knows Vincent Price and Peter Cushing, the films of Hammer, the works of Poe, the chronicles of Mars and the town called ’Salem’s Lot. But she knows Alice through the looking glass, too, and the Faithful Tin Soldier, the Ugly Duckling, and the journeys of Stuart Little. She knows Oz and the jungles of Tarzan, and though she is too young to fully appreciate anything but the colors, she knows the hands of Van Gogh, Winslow Homer, and Miro. She will listen to Duke Ellington and Count Basie, as well as to the Beach Boys. Just last week she asked me if she could put a picture in a frame on her dresser. She said she thought this particular dude was cool.
    His name is Freddy.
    “Skye,” I said, “I really think havin’ that in here is gonna give you night-”
    And then I stopped. Oh-oh, I thought. Oh-oh.
    Freddy, meet Skye. Talk to her about the power of make-believe, will you?
    I turn the car onto Hilltop Street, and we rise toward my house.
    I’m doing all right with my writing. It’s a hard job, but I enjoy it. Sandy and I aren’t the kind of people who need to own half the world to be happy. I have to say, though, that once I did splurge. I bought an old red convertible that called to me from a used car lot when Sandy and I were taking a vacation in New England. I think they used to refer to such cars as roadsters. I’ve restored it back to how it must’ve looked when Zephyr was new. Sometimes, when I’m alone out in that car, speeding along with the wind in my hair and the sun on my face, I forget myself and speak to it. I call it by a certain name.
    You know what I call it.
    That bicycle went with me when we left Zephyr. We had more adventures, and that golden eye saw a lot of trouble coming and kept me from getting into it on more