Boys Life

voice echoed in the cavernous room, and I sensed my father tightening up. “Bad way for a man to die, without a Christian burial,” Mr. Sculley continued. “Sheriff Amory got any clues?”
    “None that I know of.” My father’s voice was a little shaky. I was sure that he saw that sinking car and the body handcuffed to the wheel every time he lay down in bed and closed his eyes.
    “Got my own ideas about who it was, and who killed him,” Mr. Sculley offered. We reached the way out, but the rain was still falling hard onto the mountains of old dead things and the last of the sunlight had turned green. Mr. Sculley looked at my father and leaned against the door frame. “It was somebody who’d crossed the Blaylock clan. Must’ve been a fella who wasn’t from around here, ’cause everybody else in their right mind knows Wade, Bodean, and Donny Blaylock are meaner’n horny rattlers. They got stills hidden all up in the woods around here. And that daddy of theirs, Biggun, could teach the devil some tricks. Yessir, the Blaylocks are the cause of that fella bein’ down at the bottom of the lake, and you can count on it.”
    “I figure the sheriff thought of that already.”
    “Probably did. Only trouble is, nobody knows where the Blaylocks hide out. They show up now and again, on some errand of meanness, but trackin’ ’em to their snakehole is another thing entirely.” Mr. Sculley looked out the door. “Rain’s easin’ up some. Reckon you don’t mind gettin’ wet.”
    We trudged through the mud toward my dad’s truck. I looked again at the mound of bikes as we passed, and I saw something I hadn’t noticed before: honeysuckle vines were growing in the midst of the tangled metal, and the little sweet white cups were sprouting amid the rust.
    My father’s attention was snagged by something else that lay over beyond the bikes, something we had not seen on the way in. He stopped, staring at it, and I stopped, too, and Mr. Sculley, limping ahead, sensed our stopping and turned around.
    “I wondered where they brought it,” Dad said.
    “Yeah, gonna haul it off one of these days. Gotta make room for more stuff, y’know.”
    You couldn’t tell much about it, really. It was just a rusted mass of crumpled metal, but some of the metal still held the original black paint. The windshield was gone, the roof smashed flat. Part of the hood remained, though, and on it was a ripple of painted flames.
    This one had suffered.
    Dad turned away from it, and I followed him to the pickup. Real close, I might add.
    “Come back anytime!” Mr. Sculley told us. The hound dogs bayed and Mrs. Sculley came out on the porch, this time without her rifle, and Dad and I drove home along the haunted road.

VI – Old Moses Comes to Call
    MOM HAD PICKED UP THE PHONE WHEN IT RANG, PAST TEN o’clock at night about a week after our visit to Mr. Sculley’s place.
    “Tom!” she said, and her voice carried a frantic edge. “J.T. says the dam’s burst at Lake Holman! They’re callin’ everybody together at the courthouse!”
    “Oh, Lord!” Dad sprang up from the sofa, where he’d been watching the news on television, and he slid his feet into his shoes. “It’ll be a flood for sure! Cory!” he called. “Get your clothes on!”
    I knew from his tone that I’d better move quick. I put aside the story I was trying to write about a black dragster with a ghost at the wheel and I fairly jumped into my jeans. When your parents get scared, your heart starts pounding ninety miles a minute. I had heard Dad use the word flood. The last one had been when I was five, and it hadn’t done a whole lot of damage except stir up the swamp snakes. I knew, though, from my reading about Zephyr that in 1938 the river had flooded the streets to the depth of four feet, and in 1930 the spring flood had risen almost to the rooftops of some of the houses in Bruton. So my town had a history of being waterlogged, and with all the rain we and the rest of the South had been getting since the beginning of April, there was no telling what might happen this year.
    The Tecumseh River fed out of Lake Holman, which lay about forty miles north of us. So, being as it is that all rivers flow to the sea, we were in for it.
    I made sure Rebel would be all right in his dog run behind the house, and then my mom, dad, and I jammed into the pickup truck and headed for the courthouse, an old gothic structure that stood at the terminus of Merchants Street. Most