Boys Life

fever. Of that, at least, I was certain. My father, satisfied that I was not building up heat, pulled his hand away and refastened it to the steering wheel. “Just sit still,” he said, and I obeyed him. He fixed his attention on the tricky road again, but his jaw muscle clenched every few seconds and I figured he was trying to decide whether I needed to go see Dr. Parrish or get my butt busted.
    I didn’t say anything more about the black car, because I knew Dad wouldn’t believe me. But I had seen that car before, on the streets of Zephyr. It had announced itself with a rumble and growl as it roamed the streets, and when it had passed you could smell the heat and see the pavement shimmer. “Fastest car in town,” Davy Ray had told me as he and I and the other guys had lounged around in front of the ice house on Merchants Street, catching cool breezes from the ice blocks on a sultry August day. “My dad,” Davy Ray had confided, “says nobody can outrace Midnight Mona.”
    Midnight Mona. That was the car’s name. The guy who owned it was named Stevie Cauley. “Little Stevie,” he was called, because he stood only a few inches over five feet tall though he was twenty years old. He chain-smoked Chesterfield cigarettes, and maybe those had stunted his growth.
    But the reason I didn’t tell my dad about Midnight Mona streaking up behind us on that rain-slick road was that I remembered what had happened on a night last October. My dad, who used to be a volunteer fireman, got a telephone call. It was Chief Marchette, he’d told Mom. A car had wrecked on Route Sixteen, and it was on fire in the woods. My dad had hurried out to help, and he’d come home a couple of hours later with ashes in his hair and his clothes smelling of burnt timber. After that night, and what he’d seen, he hadn’t wanted to be a fireman anymore.
    We were on Route Sixteen right now. And the car that had wrecked and burned was Midnight Mona, with Little Stevie Cauley behind the wheel.
    Little Stevie Cauley’s body-what was left of it, I mean-lay in a coffin in the cemetery on Poulter Hill. Midnight Mona was gone, too, to wherever burned-up cars go.
    But I had seen it, racing up behind us out of the mist. I had seen someone sitting behind the wheel.
    I kept my mouth shut. I was in enough trouble already.
    Dad turned off Route Sixteen and eased the truck onto a muddy side road that wound through the woods. We reached a place where rusted old metal signs of all descriptions had been nailed to the trees; there were at least a hundred of them, advertisements for everything from Green Spot Orange Soda to B.C. Headache Powders to the Grand Ole Opry. Beyond the signpost forest the road led to a house of gray wood with a sagging front porch and in the front yard-and here I mean “sea of weeds” instead of yard as ordinary people might know it-a motley collection of rust-eaten clothes wringers, kitchen stoves, lamps, bed-frames, electric fans, iceboxes, and other smaller appliances was lying about in untidy piles. There were coils of wire as tall as my father and bushel baskets full of bottles, and amid the junk stood the metal sign of a smiling policeman with the red letters STOP DON’T STEAL painted across his chest. In his head there were three bullet holes.
    I don’t think stealing was a problem for Mr. Sculley, because as soon as my dad stopped the truck and opened his door two red hound dogs jumped up from their bellies on the porch and began baying to beat the band. A few seconds later, the screen door banged open and a frail-looking little woman with a white braid and a rifle came out of the house.
    “Who is it?” she hollered in a voice like a lumberjack’s. “Whadda ye want?”
    My father lifted his hands. “It’s Tom Mackenson, Mrs. Sculley. From Zephyr.”
    “Tom who?”
    “Mackenson!” He had to shout over the hound dogs. “From Zephyr!”
    Mrs. Sculley roared, “Shaddup!” and she plucked a fly swatter from a hook on the porch and swung a few times at the dogs’ rumps, which quieted them down considerably.
    I got out of the truck and stood close to my dad, our shoes mired in the boggy weeds. “I need to see your husband, Mrs. Sculley,” Dad told her. “He picked up my boy’s bike by mistake.”
    “Uh-uh,” she replied. “Emmett don’t make no mistakes.”
    “Is he around, please?”
    “Back of the house,” she said, and she motioned with the rifle. “One of them sheds back there.”
    “Thank you.”