Boys Life

their sons. Dead fish floated in a slimy brown sludge on the surface, but Mom’s attention was on me. “I’m gonna tan your hide, Cory Mackenson!” she shouted as she waded in with Nila Castile behind her.
    Then they walked right into the floating monster disgorgement, and from the sound she made I don’t believe my mother was thinking about whipping me anymore.
    Lucky me.

VII – A Summons from the Lady
    NONE OF MY FRIENDS BELIEVED ME, OF COURSE.
    Davy Ray Callan just laughed and shook his head, and he said he couldn’t have made up a better story if he’d tried. Ben Sears looked at me like I had seen one too many monster movies at the Lyric. Johnny Wilson thought about it awhile, in that slow, deliberating way of his, and then he gave his opinion: “Nope. Didn’t happen.”
    “It did!” I told them as we sat on the porch of my house in the shade under a clear blue sky. “It really did, I swear it!”
    “Oh yeah?” Davy Ray, the feisty one of our group and the one who was most likely to make up astounding tales, cocked his brown-haired head and stared at me through pale blue eyes that always held a hint of wild laughter. “Then how come Old Moses didn’t just eat you up? How come a monster ran from a kid with a broom?”
    “Because,” I answered, flustered and angry, “I didn’t have my monster-killin’ ray gun with me, that’s why! I don’t know! But it happened, and you can ask-”
    “Cory,” my mother said quietly from the doorway, “I think you’d better stop talkin’ about this now.”
    So I did. And I understood what she meant. There was no use trying to make anybody believe it. My mom herself couldn’t quite grasp it, though Gavin Castile had sputtered the whole story to his mother. Mr. Thornberry, incidentally, was all right. He was alive and getting stronger day by day, and I understand he wanted to get well so he could take Gavin to see more Looney Tunes.
    My friends would have believed it, though, if they could’ve smelled my clothes before Mom threw them in the garbage. She threw her own tainted clothes away, too. Dad listened to the tale, and he nodded and sat there with his hands folded before him, bandages on his palms and fingers covering huge blisters that had been raised by the shoveling.
    “Well,” Dad said, “all I can say is, there’re stranger things on this earth than we can ever figure out if we had a hundred lifetimes. I thank God the both of you are all right, and that nobody drowned in the flood. Now: what’s for dinner?”
    Two weeks passed. We left April and moved through the sunny days of May. The Tecumseh River, having reminded us who was boss, returned to its banks. A quarter of the houses in Bruton weren’t worth living in anymore, including Nila Castile ’s, so the sound of sawing and hammering in Bruton was almost around the clock. There was one benefit of the rain and the flood, though; under the sunshine, the earth exploded in flowers and Zephyr blazed with color. Lawns were deep emerald, honeysuckle grew like mad passion, and kudzu blanketed the hills. Summer was almost upon us.
    I turned my attention to studying for final exams. Math was never my strongest subject, and I was going to have to make a high grade so I wouldn’t have to go to-and the mere thought of this made me choke-summer school.
    In my quiet hours, I did wonder how I’d managed to beat Old Moses away with a bristle-brush broom. I had been lucky in jamming it down the monster’s throat, that was for sure. But I figured it might have been something else, too. Old Moses, for all his size and fury, was like Granddaddy Jaybird; he could holler a good game, but at the first sting he took off running. Or swimming, as the case might be. Old Moses was a coward. Maybe Old Moses had gotten used to eating things that didn’t fight back, like catfish and turtles and scared dogs paddling for their lives. With that broomstick in his throat, Old Moses might have figured there was easier prey where he came from, down at the bottom of the river in that cool, muddy banquet hall where nothing bites back.
    At least, that’s my theory. I don’t ever want to have to test it again, though.
    I had a dream about the man in the long coat and the green-feathered hat. I dreamed I was wading toward him, and when I grasped his arm he turned his face toward me and it was a man with not human skin but diamond-shaped scales the color of autumn leaves. He had fangs like daggers and blood dripping down