Boys Life

Ray said. “He promised. So you’ll be laughin’ through your teeth when we bring Snowdown back from the woods.”
    I doubted that if Davy Ray and his father saw Snowdown, either one of them would pull a trigger. Davy had a boy-sized rifle that he sometimes fired at squirrels, but he never could hit anything with it.
    Ben chewed on a weed and offered his throat to an ice house breeze. “One thing I sure would like to know,” he said. “Who’s that dead guy down at the bottom of Saxon’s Lake?”
    I pulled my knees into my chest and watched two ravens circling overhead.
    “Ain’t it weird?” Ben asked me. “That your dad saw the guy go under, and now the guy’s down there in his car gettin’ all mossy and eat up by turtles?”
    “I don’t know,” I said.
    “You think about it, don’t you? I mean, you were there.”
    “Yeah. I think about it some.” I didn’t tell him that hardly a day went by when I didn’t think of the car speeding in front of the milk truck, or my dad jumping into the water, or the figure I’d seen standing in the woods, or the man with the green-feathered hat and a knife in his hand.
    “It’s spooky, for sure,” Davy Ray said. “How come nobody knew the guy? How come nobody ever missed him?”
    “Because he must not have been from here,” Johnny commented.
    “Sheriff thought of that,” I said. “He called around other places.”
    “Yeah,” Ben went on, “but he didn’t call everywhere, did he? He didn’t call California or Alaska, did he?”
    “What would a guy from California or Alaska be doin’ in Zephyr, dope?” Davy Ray challenged him.
    “He could’ve been! You don’t know everythin’, Mr. Smart!”
    “I know a big dope when I see one!”
    Ben was about to fire a reply back, but Johnny said, “Maybe he was a spy,” and that halted Ben’s tongue.
    “A spy?” I asked. “There’s nothin’ around here to spy on!”
    “Yes there is. Robbins Air Force Base.” Johnny systematically began to crack his knuckles. “Maybe he was a Russian spy. Maybe he was watchin’ the planes drop bombs, or maybe there’s somethin’ goin’ on over there that nobody’s supposed to know about.”
    We were silent. A Russian spy killed in Zephyr. The thought gave all of us delicious creeps.
    “So who killed him, then?” Davy Ray asked. “Another spy?”
    “Maybe.” Johnny contemplated this for a moment, his head slightly cocked to one side. The lid of his left eye had begun to tic a bit, another result of his injury. “Or maybe,” he said, “the guy at the bottom of the lake is an American spy, and the Russian spy killed him because the dead guy found out about him.”
    “Oh, yeah!” Ben laughed. “So somebody around here might be a Russian spy?”
    “Maybe,” Johnny said, and Ben stopped laughing. Johnny looked at me. “Your dad said the guy was stripped naked, right?” I nodded. “Know why that might be?” I shook my head. “Because,” Johnny said, “whoever killed him was smart enough to take the dead guy’s clothes off so nothin’ would float up to the top. And whoever killed him had to be from around here, because he knew how deep the lake is. And the dead guy knew a secret, too.”
    “A secret?” Davy Ray was all ears now. “Like what?”
    “I don’t know what,” Johnny answered. “Just a secret.” His dark Indian eyes returned to me. “Didn’t your dad say the guy was all beat up, like somebody had really worked him over? How come whoever killed him beat him up so bad first?”
    “How come?” I asked.
    “’Cause the killer was tryin’ to make him talk, that’s why. Like in the movies when the bad guy’s got the good guy tied to a chair and he wants to know the secret code.”
    “What secret code?” Davy Ray asked.
    “That’s just for instance,” Johnny explained. “But it seems to me like if a guy was gonna kill somebody, he wouldn’t beat him up for no reason.”
    “Yeah, but maybe the dead guy was just plain beat to death,” Ben said.
    “No,” I told him. “There was a wire around the guy’s neck, chokin’ him. If he’d been beat to death, why would he get choked, too?”
    “Man!” Ben plucked up a weed and chewed on it. Overhead, the two ravens cawed and flapped. “A killer right here in Zephyr! Maybe even a Russian spy!” He stopped chewing all of a sudden. “Hey,” he said, and he blinked as a new thought jabbed his mind like a lightning bolt. “What’s to keep him from killin’