Boy's Life by Robert McCammon Read Free Book Online

me were sitting watching Tarzan on a Saturday afternoon. I forget why Davy Ray wasn’t there; I think he was grounded for hitting Molly Lujack in the head with a pine cone. But satellites could go up and spit sparks in outer space. A man with a beard and a cigar could jabber in Spanish on an island off the coast of Florida while blood reddened a bay for pigs. That bald-headed Russian could bang his shoe. Soldiers could be packing their gear for a trip to a jungle called Vietnam. Atom bombs could go off in the desert and blow dummies out of tract-house living rooms. We didn’t care about any of that. It wasn’t magic. Magic was inside the Lyric on Saturday afternoons, at the double feature, and we took full advantage of getting ourselves lost in the spell.
     
         I recall watching a TV show—“77 Sunset Strip”—where the hero walked into a theater named the Lyric, and I got to thinking about that word. I looked it up in my massive two-thousand-four-hundred-and-eighty-three-page dictionary Granddaddy Jaybird had given me for my tenth birthday. “Lyric,” it said: “Melodic. Suitable for singing. A lyric poem. Of the lyre.” That didn’t seem to make much sense in regards to a movie theater, until I continued following lyre in my dictionary. Lyre took me into the story-poems sung by traveling minstrels back when there were castles and kings. Which took me back to that wonderful word: story . It seemed to me at an early age that all human communication—whether it’s TV, movies, or books—begins with somebody wanting to tell a story. That need to tell, to plug into a universal socket, is probably one of our grandest desires. And the need to hear stories, to live lives other than our own for even the briefest moment, is the key to the magic that was born in our bones.
     
         The Lyric.
     
         “Stab it, Tarzan! Stab it!” Ben yelled, and that elbow was working overtime. Ben Sears was a plump boy with brown hair cropped close to his skull, and he had a high, girlish voice and wore horn-rimmed glasses. The shirt wasn’t made that could stay tucked into his jeans. He was so clumsy his shoelaces could strangle him. He had a broad chin and fat cheeks and he would never grow up to resemble Tarzan in any girl’s dream, but he was my friend. By contrast to Ben’s chubby exuberance, Johnny Wilson was slim, quiet, and bookish. He had some Indian blood in him that showed in his black, luminous eyes. Under the summer sun his skin turned brown as a pine nut. His hair was almost black, too, and slicked back with Vitalis except for a cowlick that shot up like a wild onion at the crease of his part. His father, who was a foreman at the sheet rock plant between Zephyr and Union Town, wore his hair exactly the same way. Johnny’s mother was the library teacher at Zephyr Elementary, so I suppose that’s how he got his affinity for reading. Johnny ate encyclopedias like any other kid might eat Red Hots or Lemonheads. He had a nose like a Cherokee hatchet and a small scar warped his right eyebrow where his cousin Philbo had hit him with a stick when we were all playing soldiers back in 1960. Johnny Wilson endured schoolyard taunts about being a “squawboy,” or having “nigger blood,” and he’d been born with a clubfoot to boot, which only doubled the abuse directed at him. He was a stoic before I knew the meaning of the word.
     
         The movie meandered to its conclusion like a jungle river to the sea. Tarzan defeated the evil elephant poachers, returned the Star of Solomon to its tribe, and swung into the sunset. The Three Stooges short subject came on, in which Moe wrenched out Larry’s hair by the handfuls and Curly sat in a bathtub full of lobsters. We all had a grand old time.
     
         And then, without fanfare, the second feature began.
     
         It was in black and white, which caused immediate groans from the audience. Everybody knew that color was real life. The title came up