Boys Life

wet, but a feather with a definite glint of green.
    Like the green feather I’d found on the bottom of my sneaker that morning.
    My mind raced. Might there have been two green feathers in that hatband, before the wind had plucked one out?
    One of the beams, defeated, drew back. The other pranced away. The man walked in darkness.
    “Mom?” I said. “Mom?”
    The figure was wading away from us, and had passed no more than eight feet from me. He reached up with a white hand to hold the hat on his head. “Mom?” I said again, and she finally heard me over the noise and answered, “What is it?”
    “I think… I think…” But I didn’t know what I thought. I couldn’t tell if that was the person I’d seen across the road, or not.
    The figure was moving off through the brown water, step after step.
    I pulled my hand free from my mother’s, and I went after him.
    “Cory!” she said. “Cory, take my hand!”
    I heard, but I didn’t listen. The water swirled around me. I kept going.
    “Cory!” Mom shouted.
    I had to see his face.
    “Mister!” I called. It was too noisy, what with the rain and the river and the working; he couldn’t hear. Even if he did, he wouldn’t turn around. I felt the Tecumseh’s currents pulling at my shoes. I was sunken waist-deep in cold murk. The man was heading toward the riverbank, where my dad was. Flashlights bobbed and weaved, and a shimmering reflection danced up and struck the man’s right hand as he pulled it from his pocket.
    Something metallic glinted in it.
    Something with a sharp edge.
    My heart stuttered.
    The man in the green-feathered hat was on his way to the riverbank for an appointment with my father. It was an appointment, perhaps, that he’d been planning ever since Dad dove in after the sinking car. With all this commotion, all this noise, and in all this watery dark, might not the man in the green-feathered hat find a chance to drive that blade into my father’s back? I couldn’t see my dad; I couldn’t make out anyone for sure, just glistening figures straining against the inevitable.
    He was stronger against the current than I. He was pulling away from me. I lunged forward, fighting the river, and that was when my feet slipped out from under me and I went down, the muddy water closing over my head. I reached up, trying to grab something to hold on to. There was nothing solid, and I couldn’t get my feet planted. My mind screamed that I’d never be able to draw a breath again. I splashed and wallowed, and then somebody had gripped me and was lifting me up as the muddy water oozed from my face and hair.
    “I’ve got you,” a man said. “You’re all right.”
    “Cory! What’s wrong with you, boy?” That was my mother’s voice, rising to new heights of terror. “Are you crazy?”
    “I believe he stepped in a hole, Rebecca.” The man set me down. I was still standing in waist-deep water but at least my feet were touching earth. I wiped clots of mud from my eyes and looked up at Dr. Curtis Parrish, who wore a gray raincoat and a rainhat. The hat had no band, therefore it had no silver disc and no green feather. I turned around, looking for the figure I’d been trying to reach, but he had merged with the other people nearer the river’s edge. He and the knife he’d drawn from his pocket.
    “Where’s Dad?” I said, working up to another fever pitch. “I’ve gotta find Dad!”
    “Whoa, whoa, settle down.” Dr. Parrish took hold of my shoulders. In one hand he held a flashlight. “Tom’s right over there.” He pointed the flashlight’s beam toward a group of muddied men. The direction he indicated was not the direction in which the man with the green-feathered hat had gone. But I saw my father over there, working between a black man and Mr. Yarbrough. “See him?”
    “Yes sir.” Again I searched for the mysterious figure. Vanished.
    “Cory, don’t you run away from me like that!” Mom scolded. “You scared me almost to death!” She took my hand again in a grip of iron.
    Dr. Parrish was a heavyset man, about forty-eight or forty-nine years old, with a firm, square jaw and a flattened nose that reminded everyone he’d been a champion boxer when he was a sergeant in the army. With the same hands that had scooped me from the hole at my feet, Dr. Parrish had delivered me from my mother’s womb. He had thick dark eyebrows over eyes the color of steel, and beneath his rainhat his dark brown hair was gray on the sides. Dr.