Boys Life

car engines started and revved up and young laughter flew like sparks.
    I stopped. Just couldn’t walk anymore. That music was unlike anything I’d ever heard: guys’ voices, intertwining, breaking apart, merging again in fantastic, otherworldly harmony. The voices soared up and up like happy birds, and underneath the harmony was a driving drumbeat and a twanging, gritty guitar that made cold chills skitter up and down my sunburned back.
    “What’s that, Davy?” I said. “What’s that song?”
    …Round… round… get around… wha wha wha-oooooo…
    “What’s that song?” I asked him, close to panic that I might never know.
    “Haven’t you heard that yet? All the high-school guys are singin’ it.”
    …Gettin’ bugged drivin’ up and down the same ol’ strip… I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip…
    “What’s the name of it?” I demanded, standing at the center of ecstasy.
    “It’s on the radio all the time. It’s called-”
    Right then the high-school kids in the lot started singing along with the music, some of them rocking their cars back and forth, and I stood with a peanut butter milk shake in my hand and the sun on my face and the clean chlorine smell of the swimming pool coming to me from across the street.
    “-by the Beach Boys,” Davy Ray finished.
    “What?”
    “The Beach Boys. That’s who’s singin’ it.”
    “Man!” I said. “That sounds… that sounds…”
    What would describe it? What word in the English language would speak of youth and hope and freedom and desire, of sweet wanderlust and burning blood? What word describes the brotherhood of buddies, and the feeling that as long as the music plays, you are part of that tough, rambling breed who will inherit the earth?
    “Cool,” Davy Ray supplied.
    It would have to do.
    …Yeah the bad guys know us and they leave us alone… I get arounnnnddddd…
    I was amazed. I was transported. Those soaring voices lifted me off the hot pavement, and I flew with them to a land unknown. I had never been to the beach before. I’d never seen the ocean, except for pictures in magazines and on TV and movies. The Beach Boys. Those harmonies thrilled my soul, and for a moment I wore a letter jacket and owned a red hotrod and had beautiful blondes begging for my attention and I got around.
    The song faded. The voices went back into the speakers. Then I was just Cory Mackenson again, a son of Zephyr, but I had felt the warmth of a different sun.
    “I think I’m gonna ask my folks if I can take guitar lessons,” Davy Ray said as we crossed the street. Git-tar, he pronounced it.
    I thought that when I got home I would sit down at my desk and try to scratch out a story in Ticonderoga #2 about where music went when it got into the air. Some of it had gotten into Davy Ray, and he was humming that song as we returned to the pool and our parents.
    The Fourth of July sizzled in. There was a big barbecue picnic in the park, and the men’s team-the Quails-lost to the Union Town Fireballs by seven to three. I saw Nemo Curliss watching the game as he sat crushed between a brunette woman in a red-flowered dress and a gangly man who wore thick glasses and was sweating through his once-crisp white shirt. Nemo’s father didn’t spend much time with his son and wife. He got up after the second inning and walked off, and I later saw him prowling through the picnic crowd with a book full of shirt swatches and a desperate look on his face.
    I had not forgotten about the man in the green-feathered hat. As I sat with my folks at a picnic table in the shade, munching barbecued ribs as the elderly men threw horseshoes and the teenaged guys heaved footballs, I scanned the crowd for that elusive feather. It dawned on me, as I searched, that the hats of winter had been put away, and every hat in evidence was made of straw. Mayor Swope wore a straw fedora as he moved through the throngs, puffing his pipe and glad-handing barbecue-sauced palms. Straw hats adorned the heads of Fire Chief Marchette and Mr. Dollar. A straw boater with a bright red band was perched on the bald skull of Dr. Lezander, who came over to our table to examine the scar’s pale line on my lower lip. He had cool fingers, and his eyes peered into mine with steely intensity. “Those fellows ever cause you any more trouble,” he said in his Dutch dialect, “you just let me know. I’ll introduce them to my gelding clippers. Eh?” He nudged me with an elbow and grinned,