Boys Life

“Maybe he went after that log thinkin’ it was a big turtle. Maybe he was just mean that day, and he snapped at everythin’ his snout bumped up against.” His finger tapped the fang’s broken rim. “Hate to think what this thing could do to a human bein’. Wouldn’t be pretty, would it?”
    “Can I see that?” Dad asked, and Mr. Sculley let him hold it. Mr. Sculley went to the window and peered out as Dad examined what he held, and after another moment Dad said, “I swear, I believe you’re right! It is a tooth!”
    “Said it was,” Mr. Sculley reminded him. “I don’t lie.”
    “You need to show this to somebody! Sheriff Amory or Mayor Swope! Heck, the governor needs to see it!”
    “Swope’s already seen it,” Mr. Sculley said. “He’s the one advised me to put it in my closet and keep the door shut.”
    “Why? Somethin’ like this is front-page news!”
    “Not accordin’ to Mayor Swope.” He turned away from the window, and I saw that his eyes had darkened. “At first Swope thought it was a fake. He had Doc Parrish look at it, and Doc Parrish called Doc Lezander. Both of them agreed it’s a fang from some kind of reptile. Then we all had a sit-down talk in the mayor’s office, with the doors closed. Swope said he’d decided to put a lid on the whole thing. Said it might be a fang or it might be a fraud, but it wasn’t worth gettin’ folks upset over.” He took the pierced wood chunk back from my father’s hands. “I said, ‘Luther Swope, don’t you think people would want to see real evidence that there’s a monster in the Tecumseh River?’ And he looked at me with that damn pipe in his mouth and he says, ‘People already know it. Evidence would just scare ’em. Anyway,’ Swope says, ‘if there’s a monster in the river, it’s our monster, and we don’t want to share it with nobody.’ And that’s how it ended up.” Mr. Sculley offered it to me. “Want to touch it, Cory? Just so you can say you did?”
    I did, with a tentative index finger. The fang was cool, as I imagined the muddy bottom of the river must be.
    Mr. Sculley put the piece of wood and the fang back up on the closet shelf, and he closed the door. The rain was coming down hard again outside, banging on the metal roof. “All this water pourin’ down,” Mr. Sculley said, “must make Old Moses mighty happy.”
    “I still think you ought to show somebody else,” Dad told him. “Like somebody from the newspaper in Birmingham.”
    “I would, Tom, but maybe Swope’s got a point. Maybe Old Moses is our monster. Maybe if we let everybody else know about him, they’d come try to take him away from us. Catch him up in a net, put him in a big glass tank somewhere like an overgrown mudcat.” Mr. Sculley frowned and shook his head. “Nah, I wouldn’t want that to happen. Neither would the Lady, I reckon. She’s been feedin’ him on Good Friday for as long as I can remember. This was the first year he didn’t like his food.”
    “Didn’t like his food?” Dad asked. “Meanin’ what?”
    “Didn’t you see the parade this year?” Mr. Sculley waited for Dad to say no, and then he went on. “This was the first year Old Moses didn’t give the bridge a smack with his tail, same to say Thanks for the grub.’ It’s a quick thing, it passes fast, but you get to know the sound of it when you’ve heard it so many years. This year it didn’t happen.”
    I recalled how troubled the Lady looked when she left the gargoyle bridge that day, and how the whole procession had been so somber on the march back to Bruton. That must have been because the Lady hadn’t heard Old Moses smack the bridge with his tail. But what did such a lack of table manners mean?
    “Hard to say what it means,” Mr. Sculley said as if reading my mind. “The Lady didn’t like it, that’s for sure.”
    It was starting to get dark outside. Dad said we’d better be getting home, and he thanked Mr. Sculley for taking the time to show us where the bike had gone. “Wasn’t your fault,” Dad said as Mr. Sculley limped in front of us to show us the way out. “You were just doin’ your job.”
    “Yep. Waitin’ for one more bike, I was. Like I said, that bike couldn’t have been fixed anyhow.”
    I could’ve told my dad that. In fact, I did tell him, but one sorry thing about being a kid is that grown-ups listen to you with half an ear.
    “Heard about the car in the lake,” Mr. Sculley said as we neared the doorway. His