Boys Life

from the bony temples.
    A great burst of bubbles blew out of the car as more water rushed in. The lake would not be denied; it was going to claim its toy and tuck it away in a secret drawer. As the car began to slide down into the murk, the suction grabbed my father’s legs and pulled him under, and standing on the red rock cliff I saw his head disappear and I shouted “Dad!” as panic seized my guts.
    Underwater, he fought the lake’s muscles. The car fell away beneath him, and as his legs thrashed for a hold in the liquid tomb, more bubbles rushed up and broke him loose and he climbed up their silver staircase toward the attic of air.
    I saw his head break the surface. “Dad!” I shouted again. “Come on back, Dad!”
    “I’m all right!” he answered, but his voice was shaky. “I’m comin’ in!” He began dog-paddling toward shore, his body suddenly as weak as a squeezed-out rag. The lake continued to erupt where the car disturbed its innards, like something bad being digested. Dad couldn’t get up the red rock cliff, so he swam to a place where he could clamber up on kudzu vines and stones. “I’m all right!” he said again as he came out of the lake and his legs sank to the knees in mud. A turtle the size of a dinner plate skittered past him and submerged with a perplexed snort. I glanced back toward the milk truck; I don’t know why, but I did.
    And I saw a figure standing in the woods across the road.
    Just standing there, wearing a long dark coat. Its folds moved with the wind. Maybe I’d felt the eyes of whoever was watching me as I’d watched my father swim to the sinking car. I shivered a little, bone cold, and then I blinked a couple of times and where the figure had been was just windswept woods again.
    “Cory?” my dad called. “Gimme a hand up, son!”
    I went down to the muddy shore and gave him as much help as a cold, scared child could. Then his feet found solid earth and he pushed the wet hair back from his forehead. “Gotta get to a phone,” he said urgently. “There was a man in that car. Went straight down to the bottom!”
    “I saw… I saw…” I pointed toward the woods on the other side of Route Ten. “Somebody was-”
    “Come on, let’s go!” My father was already crossing the road with his sturdy, soggy legs, his shoes in his hand. I jump-started my own legs and followed him as close as a shadow, and my gaze returned to where I’d seen that figure but nobody was there, nobody, nobody at all.
    Dad started the milk truck’s engine and switched on the heater. His teeth were chattering, and in the gray twilight his face looked as pale as candle wax. “Damnedest thing,” he said, and this shocked me because he never cursed in front of me. “Handcuffed to the wheel, he was. Handcuffed. My God, that fella’s face was all beat up!”
    “Who was it?”
    “I don’t know.” He turned the heater up, and then he started driving south toward the nearest house. “Somebody did a job on him, that’s for sure! Lord, I’m cold!”
    A dirt road turned to the right, and my father followed it. Fifty yards off Route Ten stood a small white house with a screened-in front porch. A rose garden stood off to one side. Parked under a green plastic awning were two cars, one a red Mustang and the other an old Cadillac splotched with rust. My dad pulled up in front of the house and said, “Wait here,” and he walked to the door in his wet socks and rang the bell. He had to ring it two more times before the door opened with a tinkle of chimes, and a red-haired woman who made three of my mom stood there wearing a blue robe with black flowers on it.
    Dad said, “Miss Grace, I need to use your telephone real quick.”
    “You’re all wet!” Miss Grace’s voice sounded like the rasp of a rusty saw blade. She gripped a cigarette in one hand, and rings sparkled on her fingers.
    “Somethin’ bad’s happened,” Dad told her, and she sighed like a redheaded raincloud and said, “All right, come on in, then. Watch the carpet.” Dad entered the house, the chimey door closed, and I sat in the milk truck as the first orange rays of sunlight started breaking over the eastern hills. I could smell the lake in the truck with me, a puddle of water on the floorboard beneath my father’s seat. I had seen somebody standing in the woods. I knew I had. Hadn’t I? Why hadn’t he come over to see about the man in the car? And who had the man in the car been?
    I was puzzling over these