Boys Life

“It’s all right now! Everything’s all right!”
    I wondered about a man who could say that when his ear was half chewed off and his white suit covered with monkey mess.
    The sinful song we had all gathered to hear was forgotten. That seemed a minor thing now, in perspective. People started to get over their shock, and what took its place was indignation. Somebody hollered at Reverend Blessett that he shouldn’t have let that monkey get loose, and somebody else said that he was sending his cleaning bill over first thing in the morning. The woman with the bitten nose squawked that she was going to sue. The voices rose and clamored, and I saw Reverend Blessett shrink back from them, all the power sucked out of him. He looked confused and miserable, just like everybody else.
    The men who’d chased out after Lucifer returned, sweating and breathless. The monkey had scrambled up a tree and gone, they said. Maybe he’d turn up somewhere when it got light, they said. Then maybe they could snare him in a net.
    People trying to snare Lucifer instead of Lucifer snaring people. That struck me as peculiar and funny at the same time, but Dad put a voice to the thought. “Dream on,” he said.
    Reverend Blessett sat down on the podium. He stayed there, in his fouled white suit, and he looked at his hands as his congregation left him. On the record player, the needle ticked… ticked… ticked.
    We went home, through the humid summer night. The streets were quiet, but the symphony of insects droned and keened from the treetops. I couldn’t help but think that from one of those trees Lucifer was watching. Now that he had gotten free, who could put him back in his box again?
    I imagined I smelled the burning cross again, wafting its taint over my hometown. I decided it must be somebody cooking hot dogs over an open fire.

XIII – Nemo’s Mother a Week
    with the Jaybird
    THE SUMMER MOVED ON, AS SUMMERS WILL.
    Reverend Blessett tried to keep the furor going, but except for a few people who wrote to the Journal demanding that the song be banned from sale, the steam was gone from the reverend’s engine. Maybe it had something to do with the long, lazy days of July; maybe it concerned the mystery of who had set that cross afire in the Lady’s yard; maybe people had listened to that song for themselves and made up their own minds. Whatever the reason, folks in Zephyr seemed to have decided that Reverend Blessett’s campaign was nothing but hot air. It ended with a slam when Mayor Swope visited his house and told him to stop scaring people into seeing demons that weren’t anywhere but in the reverend’s mind.
    As for Lucifer, he was seen traveling in the trees by a half-dozen people. A banana cream pie cooling on a shady windowsill at the house of Sonia and Katharina Glass was utterly destroyed, and at any other time I’d have said the Branlins did it but the Branlins were lying low. Lucifer, on the other hand, was swinging high. An attempt was made by Chief Marchette and some of the volunteer firemen to snag Lucifer in a net, but what they got for their trouble was monkey business all over their clothes. Lucifer evidently had a sure aim and a steady spout, both front and rear. Dad said that was a pretty good defense mechanism, and he laughed about it, but Mom said the thought of that monkey loose in our town made her sick.
    Lucifer stayed pretty much to himself during the day, but sometimes when night fell he shrieked and screamed loud enough to wake up the sleepers on Poulter Hill. On more than one occasion I heard the crack of gunshots as someone, roused from sleep by Lucifer’s racket, tried to put a hole through him, but Lucifer was never there to catch a bullet. But the gunfire would wake up all the dogs and their barking would awaken the entire town and therefore the Zephyr council passed an emergency ordinance forbidding gunshots in the town limits after eight o’clock at night. Soon afterward, Lucifer learned how to clang sticks against trash cans, which he liked to do between three and six A.M. He avoided a bunch of poisoned bananas Mayor Swope laid out for him, and he shunned a trip-wire trap. He started leaving his brown mark on newly washed cars, and he swung down from a tree one afternoon and bit a plug out of Mr. Gerald Hargison’s ear when the mailman was walking his route. Mr. Hargison told my dad about it as he sat for a moment on the porch and puffed a plastic-tipped cheroot, a bandage on his