Boys Life

Branlin refused to pay for it on account of my throwing the baseball at Gordo. My mother pitched a fury, but my father let it go. Davy Ray went to bed with an ice pack, his violet-bruised face looking like two miles of bad road. As I learned from my dad, Johnny’s concussion was severe enough to put him on his back until Dr. Parrish gave him the green light, which might be a couple of weeks or more. Even when Johnny was back on his feet, he was not to do any running or roughhousing and he couldn’t even ride his bike, which his father had rescued intact from beneath the bleachers. So the Branlins had done something even worse than beating us up: they’d stolen part of Johnny Wilson’s summer away from him, and he would never again be twelve years old in June.
    It was about this time that, sitting on my bed with my eyes puffed up and the curtains drawn against the stinging light, I put my stack of Famous Monsters magazines in my lap and began to cut out some of the pictures with scissors. Then I got a roll of Scotch tape and started taping the pictures up on my walls, on my desk, on my closet door, and just about anywhere that would hold adhesive. When I finished, my room was a monster museum. Staring down at me were Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein and Mummy. My bed was surrounded by moody black and white scenes from Metropolis, London after Midnight, Freaks, The Black Cat, and The House on Haunted Hill. My closet door was a collage of beasts: Ray Harryhausen’s Ymir battling an elephant, the monster spider stalking the Incredible Shrinking Man, Gorgo wading across the Thames, the scar-faced Colossal Man, the leathery Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Rodan in full flight. I had a special place above my desk-a place of honor, if you will-for Vincent Price’s suave, white-haired Roderick Usher and Christopher Lee’s lean and thirsty Dracula. My mother came in, saw what I had done, and had to hold on to the door’s edge to keep from falling down. “Cory!” she said. “Take these awful pictures off the walls!”
    “Why?” I asked her, my lower lip straining against its stitches. “It’s my room, isn’t it?”
    “Yes, but you’ll have nightmares with these things starin’ at you all the time!”
    “No I won’t,” I said. “Honest.”
    She retreated graciously, and the pictures stayed up.
    I had nightmares about the Branlins, but not about the creatures who adorned my walls. I took comfort in the belief that they were my watchdogs. They would not allow the Branlins to crawl through my window after me, and they spoke to me in the quiet hours of strength and endurance against a world that fears what it does not understand.
    I was never afraid of my monsters. I controlled them. I slept with them in the dark, and they never stepped beyond their boundaries. My monsters had never asked to be bora with bolts in their necks, scaly wings, blood hunger in their veins, or deformed faces from which beautiful girls shrank back in horror. My monsters were not evil; they were simply trying to survive in a tough old world. They reminded me of myself and my friends: ungainly, unlovely, beaten but not conquered. They were the outsiders searching for a place to belong in a cataclysm of villagers’ torches, amulets, crucifixes, silver bullets, radiation bombs, air force jets, and flamethrowers. They were imperfect, and heroic in their suffering.
    I’ll tell you what scared me.
    One afternoon I picked up an old copy of Life from a stack of magazines Mom was about to throw out, and I sat on the porch and looked through it with Rebel sprawled beside me, the cicadas droning from the trees and the sky as still as a painting. In this magazine were photographs of what had happened in Dallas, Texas, in November of 1963. There were sunny pictures of the president and his wife in a long black convertible, and he was smiling and waving to the crowd. Then, in a blur, it all changed. Of course I had seen that guy Oswald get killed on television, and what I remembered about that was how small the shot had sounded, just a pop and not at all like the cannon booms of Matt Dillon’s six-shooter on “Gunsmoke.” I remembered how Oswald had cried out as he fell. I made a louder noise than that stubbing my toe on a rock.
    As I looked at the photographs of President Kennedy’s funeral-the riderless horse, the dead man’s little boy saluting, rows of people standing to