Grand Dragon, and: Locker Room

Grand Dragon

In the first photo Scoggin wearsa formal shiny crimson robe,no iconic hood, black Gregory Peckhair swept back, his chin sharpenough to gig mill pond frogs.He tosses an album towarda smoky burning cross.The summer of '66 John Lennonsoaked the South in kerosene,saying the Beatles were more popularthan Jesus.

Militant djs struck the matchto start the spreading fire, burningpiles of records flared everywhere,the touring Fab Four's vinylmelted to black sapin the radio station parking lots.

I was twelve that summerof the Beatle fires. I rememberScoggin's face from our church,Saxon Methodist, as in Anglo-Saxon,on the outskirts of the mill village,home of this man in the scarlet robe.

We were all clannish back then,pews around us held uncles, aunts, and cousins. My mother, sister,and I shared a Sunday service oncewith Scoggin, visiting our churchfrom Grace Baptist with his son Bobby,my youth group buddy. Fifty years laterI can't get enough of the Grand Dragon,maybe the closest I've ever satto evil, only one pew removed.

I Google a second photo, South Carolina'sshadow realm, this time Scogginsits at a hearing of the Un-AmericanActivities Committee investigatingthe Klan's resurgence—he pleadsthe Fifth and walks away. Handsomeand stark in his heavy black glassesand his Sunday meeting clothes,Scoggin looked more like AtticusFinch than Adolph Hitler, but the sharpchin was a dead giveaway.

In the third photo the albums burningbecome another bonfire in a mowed fieldoutside an upstate town where boys myand Bobby's age stand in short pantsand watch from the klavern's edge.Scoggin's hand gestures toward a new flame,and the fiery cross burns in black and white.

Saxon Methodist was staid brick,like other '60s churches—built to servethe will, dispensing gospel to keepwarm-blooded boys like us on a narrow way.The summer of '66 Bobby and I had a crushon the preacher's daughter, pressedbetween us on hay rides. I flirtedin her family's brick parsonage

living room, watching It's About Timeor Lost in Space on the rabbit earsSunday nights, after the churchhad emptied. That fall, beforethe Beatles furor broke, we listenedto Revolver, "I'm only Sleeping"spinning in back bedrooms to sit usup before we woke to fires. What didI know then of hate's scarletmelody and living flame?

Now a cardinal in royal redpilfers the feeder. Its feathered maskmissing, a pink beak on a raw,naked skull. One Sunday the preacherstoked a puny fire in the church'sgravel parking lot and everyone,I think, pitched in. That is, everyonemaybe but me. My only clues to truthare that in a family photoI stand playing a tennis racketlike George Harrison in my raggedBeatles wig, so it must not have burned.I still have Revolver, so maybe I said"No" when the preacher asked us to spurnthe devil's rock and roll. I need to thinkof this as my first defiant acta way of living with the dragons who flewamong us then, their scales mirrors blindingthose who looked to see them beating past.

Locker Room

after Elizabeth Bishop

Home from schoolin the afternoon to restbefore basketball practice.It's still hot. The leaveson the water oak have notbegun to turn. It's quietI feel very alone.I pick up the mail fromthe box and there it is:Sports Illustrated's collegebasketball issue with PeteMaravich on the cover.I sit down in the front room(a place no one ever sits)and flip through the pages,past "The short takes" and"They said it," the ads forChevys, starched Arrow shirts.From my mother's bedroomthe cry, my name. At firstI'm not sure, but then again.Not alone, but...