Boys of Blur (6 page)

Charlie looked at his stepfather. Mack never talked about Charlie’s dad. None of them did.

“Not sure how to say this.” Mack pulled off his sunglasses. He massaged the bridge of his nose, and then he met Charlie’s eyes with his own. “Your mom wasn’t crazy. To marry him. He wasn’t always what he turned into.”

“He doesn’t matter,” Charlie said. He looked away. Thinking about his dad made his chest feel brittle. Even the flashes of happy memory. Especially the happy memories. They made the bad memories worse. If he didn’t change the subject in his mind, his throat would try to close and breathing would make his eyes water. And after last night, everything inside him was already too loose.

“Fathers always matter,” Mack said. “In high school, I respected what he could do, and he respected me. He wasn’t like Spitz. Then, in college, we were the only two Florida boys on our team. We were roommates. We were friends.”

Charlie knew this already. He wanted to change the subject.

“Charlie Boy,” Mack said. “Look at me.”

Charlie hesitated. But he did. Mack’s eyes were solemn.

“Your father made mistakes. We all do. But instead of working to set things right, he chose to protect those mistakes—he let them be. He even fed them, which made them so much worse. Mistakes don’t just hang on the wall like ugly pictures. Mistakes are seeds.” He thumped his chest. “In here. They grow. They take over. You make a mistake, you gotta make it right. Dig that seed out. Old
Wiz used to say, ‘Fruit rots, wood rots, but lazy-ass boys rot the fastest.’ ”

Charlie exhaled. Then he nodded.

“Now, here’s the thing,” Mack said. “Your father hurt you and your mother in every kind of way. His mistakes are yours to overcome, but they don’t need to grow in you. You’ll make plenty of your own.” Mack smiled and his eyes warmed. “But your daddy’s cane-fire speed? His wildcat toughness? His laugh? That stuff is in your genes, kid. Yours to keep and yours to grow with sweat and effort. Bobby Reynolds squandered it all, but you don’t have to. If those things rot, it will be on you and me. Not him. Not anymore.” Mack thumped Charlie on the shoulder. “Got it?”

“I’m not that fast,” Charlie said. “Or tough.”

Mack grinned. “You think I haven’t seen you run? Kid, you’re a long way from slow, and you were already tougher at six than most at eighteen, though I wish you hadn’t needed to be.”

Toughness. Speed. More thoughts Charlie didn’t want to think. He pushed his mind back to Cotton. His cousin was somewhere in the quiet morning heat. So long as he hadn’t been caught by that … 
stink
. Or a panther. But maybe the cops were right and he was just hiding from his mom.

“Is Cotton’s name really René?” Charlie asked.

Mack laughed. “It is. French, and not a girl’s name over
there. His mama always wanted her boy to be all brain. Said muscles were only good for slaves, so she named him after someone famous for thinking.”

“But why does she call him Cotton?” Charlie asked.

Mack smiled. “That kid was three years old when some punk told him he had a girl’s name. From that moment on, he wouldn’t answer to it. Named himself Cottonmouth and that was that and no discussion.
Cotton
must have been time’s compromise.” Mack stretched his arms above his head, talking through a yawn. “Okay, Charlie Boy, I need breakfast and about ten gallons of coffee. Then we buy ourselves a car, I meet with the superintendent, and you can find your mom and Molly the house of their dreams.”

“What kinda dreams?” Charlie asked. “Nightmares?”

Mack laughed, ruffled Charlie’s hair with a heavy hand, and then shoved him away. Charlie slipped out of his shoes and hopped in socked feet on gravel. Mack was already walking away.

Charlie grabbed his shoes, unflattened the heels, and tugged them all the way on.

A long, sharp whistle sliced back to Charlie as Mack disappeared behind a low brick building. He was acting more like a coach already.

With shoelaces loose and their whip-tips clicking, Charlie raced after his stepfather.

Pastor Steve Beaux Revis was running late. It happened sometimes on weekdays, but it was never pleasant arriving at the church when the elderly early risers who made up the congregational steering committee and ladies auxiliary union were already gathered around the locked door of the sanctuary, watching him fumble with his keys with their eyebrows raised, winking wrinkled lids at each other as they all loudly agreed that young growing boys needed their sleep.

He was forty-eight years old, for goodness’ sake. He had two boys in college and his wife had been in the little graveyard for three years. But to his ancient congregation, a heavyset middle-aged widower was just another kid from the cane.

Pastor Beaux pulled his battered sedan to a stop at the bottom of the hill. So far, so lucky. The cars were all parked, but no white-haired shapes lurked by the church door, leaning on canes. He must have left the building open after the funeral. He hopped out and climbed the mound.

The front door was locked. No doubt his esteemed elders found that hilarious. His key required less jiggling in the church door than normal, and the iron hinges complained as loudly as ever when the door swung open.

Two steps into the sanctuary Pastor Beaux stopped, his heavy feet on the rough board patching the hole where the old church bell was buried. The place was empty. And
something was wrong with the light. It was slanting into the room through a row of white windows as it always did, warming dust motes and pews. But there were shadows. He walked slowly down the aisle, looking at the windows. Dark stripes had been painted across every pane of glass.

Pastor Beaux ran out of the church, and puffed around the building and into the graveyard. His feet and his breath stopped at the same time.

Old men and women were standing among the tombstones, staring and whispering. Beaux hardly noticed. A huge symbol—crescents and circles and swooping lines—had been painted on the side of the white church, crossing windows and stretching from near the ground all the way up to the roof. The paint was dark red, almost black, the color of dried blood.

Pastor Beaux turned slowly, moving his eyes from the wall down into the graveyard, to the grave where he had been standing yesterday, to the grave that should have been holding the body of the old man who had taught him just about everything he thought he knew.

Dirt mounds lined the sides of the open grave. The fresh headstone had been knocked back onto its granite heel.

Reaching up out of the grave, sinewy and knotted like a serpentine muscle, a black ironwood tree was growing.

It couldn’t be. But it was.

Pastor Beaux walked toward the grave like a dreamer.
He looked down into the hole at the splinters of the very empty coffin. The tree had somehow grown up through the coffin’s bottom. Threads from torn white satin cushions were tangled around the trunk and snagged on the rough bark. Ironwood leaves fluttered level with the pastor’s head.

Coach had been replaced with a tree.

A live tree. Pastor Beaux leaned out over the grave and grabbed the trunk. The wood was rock hard and cool against his palm. He tugged. It was rooted. And iron solid.

Charlie sat on the grass with his legs spread out, his back pressed against the red cinder block wall of the locker room. Most of his body managed to be in the shade. He was tired. He was hungry. And his mind wouldn’t turn off.

On the field in front of him, high school boys yelled. Whistles chirped. Pads crunched. And Mack’s voice bellowed above all the rest. A few people were scattered through the bleachers, sitting in the full sun, there to watch the great Prester Mack run his first practice. Small groups of men huddled along the edges of the field for the same reason. At first, Charlie had cared what they were saying. But it had all been the same.

Boy’s been struggling. He turn it around?

Dunno
.

He just might turn things around
.

Sure enough. If he don’t, who could?

Dunno
.

Think he’ll turn it around?

Charlie’s eyes shut slowly. The sun had simmered down his energy. And all the walking. No, not so much the walking. It was all the stopping and talking. They’d walked from the motel to a grimy little diner with just a few customers and a flock of flies so slow and heavy that Charlie figured Molly could have rounded them all up in five minutes. Charlie had wanted to tell his stepfather about Cotton, about the grave, about what he had seen. But it wasn’t an easy story to start, and once Mack was in the diner, customers had packed in after him and all of them had been loaded with questions. Charlie had eaten his pancakes and watched Mack prod his waffle for more than an hour without five minutes to chew sprinkled through it. When they had walked to the little gravel lot to look at the used cars the town of Taper had to offer, at least half the crowd had followed them.

There had been only five cars for sale, all of them battered, all with huge bright yellow price stickers followed by exclamation marks. The two saddest were minivans bedecked with sagging balloons on each side mirror.

Despite the excitement of the large woman in turquoise pants who owned both the hair salon next door and the car dealership, the crowd groaned at every vehicle. None of them were deemed worthy of the great Prester Mack no matter how often the woman pointed out excellent
features—like having four tires and a working radio—with the hair scissors that were still in her hand.

Charlie had watched his stepfather, curious. He knew Mack well enough to know that he would be fine just fitting in. But no one wanted him to fit in. He was the great hometown success story returned—they wanted to see his success, to feel it more closely than when he had just been Prester Mack running around on the TV, playing ball thousands of miles away.

Every man in the crowd had tried to sell Mack some relative’s car. They had argued with the hairdresser, but carefully while those scissors were open.

Finally, Mack had just called a luxury dealership all the way in Palm Beach. The crowd had cheered. The car was being delivered. The hairdresser had offered Charlie a trim. Charlie had ducked away.

Next was a visit to the realtor’s, and the realtor had been in high school with Mack, and he had wanted to show them three perfect houses right away, but he had wanted to be Mack’s long-lost best friend even more.

All three houses had been empty, yellow, overgrown, with yards that backed right up to a wall of cane. Charlie hadn’t even looked at the broken barbecues or torn trampolines. He had stared at three different backyards that all edged another world. He had seen what could come from that cane. He had smelled what could come from that cane. And even in the sun, as those cane sticks shook
their heads in the breeze, he had tried not to turn his back on them.

The realtor had ended by pitching houses in neighboring cities. Mack wasn’t interested. The realtor said he had a friend with rental listings all the way in Fort Myers—beach houses, right on the sand. He’d make a call. Mack had laughed, but he hadn’t argued. A rental might be good. Something comfortable. For a little while, until Charlie’s mom adjusted.

They’d skipped lunch.

Mack’s meetings at the school had been eternal. Charlie had been offered a brief secretarial tour, but he’d shrugged it off and gone wandering around on his own, staring through the glass in classroom doors. He’d been in the hall during one rush of bodies, and his out-of-placeness and the schoolness of it all had been too much for him. He’d finally fallen asleep in the library.

And now, football practice. Sun. Heat. Shouting. Drills. Boys much bigger and much faster than he was, making his stepfather yell and bellow and laugh in a way that Charlie never had.

He had found shade against the side of the small cinder block building that held two locker rooms along with the public restrooms. Hunger moaned inside him, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that. Shutting his eyes helped. But only slightly. Open or shut, all he could see was Cotton standing at the motel room door, pumping his
bike, running through the cane, crawling up the church hill in the moonlight, disappearing down that alley.