Boys Life

sun.
    July passed like a midsummer’s dream. I spent these days doing, in the vernacular of my hometown, “much of nothin’.” Johnny Wilson was getting better, his dizzy spells abating, and he was allowed to join Ben, Davy Ray, and me on our jaunts around town. Still and all, he had to take things easy, because Dr. Parrish had told Johnny’s folks that a head injury had to be watched for a long time. Johnny himself was just as quiet and reserved as ever, but I noticed that he’d slowed down some. He was always lagging behind us on his bike, slower even than tubby Ben. He seemed to have aged since that day the Branlins had beaten him senseless; he seemed to be apart from us now, in a way that was hard to explain. I think it was because he had tasted the bitter fruit of pain, and some of the magic carefree view that separates children from adults had fallen away from him, gone forever no matter how hard he tried to pedal his bike in pursuit of it again. Johnny had, at that early age, looked into the dark hole of extinction and seen-much more than any of us ever could-that someday the summer sun would not throw his shadow.
    We talked about death as we sat in the cooling breezes from the ice house and listened to the laboring lungs of the frosty machines within. Our conversation began with Davy Ray telling us that his dad had hit a cat the day before, and when they got home part of the cat’s insides were smeared all over the right front tire. Dogs and cats, we agreed, had their own kinds of heaven. Was there a hell for them, too? we wondered. No, Ben said, because they don’t sin. But what happens if a dog goes mad and kills somebody and has to be put to sleep? Davy Ray asked. Wouldn’t that be a hell-bound sin? For these questions, of course, we only had more questions.
    “Sometimes,” Johnny said, his back against a tree, “I get out my arrowheads and look at ’em and I wonder who made ’em. I wonder if their ghosts are still around, tryin’ to find where the arrow fell.”
    “Naw!” Ben scoffed. “There’s no such thing as ghosts! Is there, Cory?”
    I shrugged. I had never told the guys about Midnight Mona. If they hadn’t believed I’d shoved a broomstick down Old Moses’s gullet, how would they believe a ghost car and driver?
    “Dad says Snowdown’s a ghost,” Davy offered. “Says that’s why nobody can shoot him, because he’s already dead.”
    “No such thing as ghosts,” Ben said. “No such thing as Snowdown, either.”
    “Yes there is!” Davy was ready to defend his father’s beliefs. “My dad said Grandpap saw him one time, when he was a little kid! And just last year Dad said a guy at the paper mill knew a guy who saw him! Said he was standin’ right there in the woods as big as you please! Said this guy took a shot at him, but Snowdown was runnin’ before the bullet got there and then he was gone!”
    “No. Such. Thing,” Ben said.
    “Is too!”
    “Is not!”
    “Is too!”
    “Is not!”
    This line of discussion could go on all afternoon. I picked up a pine cone and popped Ben in the belly with it, and after Ben howled in indignation, everybody laughed. Snowdown was a hope and mystery for the community of hunters in Zephyr. In the deep forest between Zephyr and Union Town, the story went, lived a massive white stag with antlers so big and twisted you could swing on them as on the branches of an oak. Snowdown was usually seen at least once every deer season, by a hunter who swore the stag had leaped into the air and disappeared in the gnarly foliage of its kingdom. Men went out with rifles to track Snowdown, and they invariably returned talking about finding the prints of huge hooves and scars on trees where Snowdown had scraped his antlers, but the white stag was impossible to catch. I think that if a massive white stag really did roam the gloomy woods, no hunter really wanted to shoot him, because Snowdown was for them the symbol of everything mysterious and unattainable about life itself. Snowdown was what lay beyond the thickness of the woods, in the next autumn-dappled clearing. Snowdown was eternal youth, a link between grandfather and father and son, the great expectations of future hunts, a wildness that could never be confined. My dad wasn’t a hunter, so I wasn’t as involved in the legend of Snowdown as Davy Ray, whose father was ready with his Remington on the first chilly dawning of the season.
    “My dad’s gonna take me with him this year,” Davy