Mrs. Parkins came and told us that she’d gotten the table ready for us, and the bobcat casserole was hot out of the oven. We went inside to eat, and Pa asked her to stick around just in case we needed something else. Her face showed that she was antsy to get back to her family, but she stuck it out anyway. The fact that Willie was probably getting inconvenienced by us made me smile to myself, just a little bit. That was what he got for being so rude.
We tore into the bobcat casserole, and it was real good. A little like possum pie, only with more onions. I just knew that Tommy would have thought it was the best, but he never did show up to eat with us. When he said he’d lost his appetite, he must have meant it was gone for the night. I reckoned he’d made his way to the bar in town, cause losing your appetite inevitably makes you thirsty. I wouldn’t know, I had appetites to spare.
“Excuse me, Captain,” I said with my mouth half full of a biscuit, “but what are you hunting for Tommy for?”
He stopped mid-chew. “What makes you think I’m hunting for him?”
“Well, you said out in the woods that you was looking for him.”
He swallowed his bite. “I was hoping to see him first because I needed to clear the air between me and him. A grudge that needs to be done with, though I don’t recall how it started.”
Pa apologized to the Captain for Tommy running off.
“No worries,” the Captain said. “That’s what they train you for in the National Guard. To be an independent thinker. They think it makes their men more effective.”
“Effective,” Pa grunted as he chewed on some more casserole. “That’s a word we couldn’t use too often back in the war.”
“They still can’t, trust me,” the Captain said. He wiped his mouth and glanced at me. “That’s actually the main reason why I came here. There’s a group of vets doing something I think you’d be perfect for. With radios.”
Pa leaned in like a cat watching a goldfish.
“You mean there’s work?” I said. “You’ve got a job lined up?” I was getting a bit excited.
“Well, not exactly,” the Captain said. He cleared his throat and wiped his mouth. “I think we ought to speak more in private, Pete.”
Mrs. Parkins shot out of there like she’d been waiting for the chance to leave, and Pa told me to head on up to bed. It was a good ways before my bedtime, and I wasn’t too keen on getting treated like a little kid, but Pa had his strap handy so I went on up. I could have asked to go out and see my friends, but he would have known I was lying. That was another side effect of them scars on my face. People couldn’t stop looking at them long enough to make friends. And Cullman wasn’t big enough to have blind kids, so I was sunk.
While I was going up the stairs to my room, I heard the Captain say something about Pa communicating with folks all over the world. I wanted to stop and listen some more, but Pa said he was going to come check on me in a few minutes, so I had to hurry and get in my sleeping clothes.
When I got to my room, I spied Tommy sitting out in the truck with a bottle of beer and five more on the dash, watching the Captain’s truck like it was a sleeping snake. I got ready for bed and kept checking to see if he was still there. He stayed out there, best as I could tell, until the Captain left. I wasn’t so sure when that was, ’cause I fell asleep looking at my homework and thinking about how much work it would be to actually do it.
I knew Tommy didn’t stay out there all night, cause early the next morning he was shaking me to wake up.
“Come on, lazybones,” he said as he was rattling my teeth inside my head. “We got work to do. Time’s a-wasting.”
I rubbed my eyes and looked at my alarm clock. It said it was six in the morning. On a Saturday. Dadgummit, he was still drunk. Either that or there was a missile coming at Cullman.
“We ain’t got no work to do today. At least, none that’s got to be done this early.”
He yanked my pillow from under my head and ripped the blanket off of me.
“We got to run the delivery. Unless you don’t want to go with me,” he said.
I shot up. If he was lying, I was going to punch him in the mouth.
“That’s today? I thought we was doing it next Saturday. I was going to get a few more turkeys before we went.”
He threw my shoes at me and I slipped them on over my bare feet. I picked a shirt that didn’t smell too bad off my floor and put it on. He curled up his nose at me, which was a good sign. When folks puked at my odor, then I knew it was laundry day.
“It was going to be next Saturday,” he said, “but Bob told me yesterday he’d only let us have the bird for three hours next weekend. He can give it to us for five today. Now, come on.”
We went downstairs and out to the wooden shed in the backyard, where we had our deep freezer filled with all the game I’d killed over the last month. He started pulling out the brown-paper-wrapped portions and handing them to me. I filled up some cardboard boxes with them and carried them to the truck. We had to be real discreet about it, cause I had gotten a lot more than what was proper according to the hunting laws. But, when your family needs money, sometimes you got to close your eyes to the rules.
I found a marker and wrote on all them boxes NOT MEAT. That’d fool them.
We got the truck all loaded up with the frozen turkeys, rabbits, quails, deers, and squirrels and we left the house. We drove down the mountain and into Cullman, the only hometown I’d ever known. It wasn’t a small town, really, cause there was about ten thousand folk that lived there. And we had a good group of different types of people. People that had their roots in Germany, Ireland, England, and a lot of other countries.
Driving through town that early was one of the few good things about prying my eyes open, cause it was quiet and you could really appreciate the town for what it was. Right at the edge of town we passed the sign that they’d put up to ward off colored folk, which told them: COLOREDS—DON’T LET THE SUN GO DOWN ON YOU IN THIS TOWN.
Pa said that was the rudest sign he’d ever seen, and he was glad we didn’t live in the city for it. Tommy said Pa didn’t know how things was, and he thought it was a good idea. It kept the colored folk off in their own little place, a village on the other side of our mountain called Colony. Folks in Cullman called it the Colony, which I thought made it sound more official.
As we drove into Cullman, we passed the grocery store, where the owner was out sweeping the sidewalk and setting up his signs for the Saturday business. We passed the college, Saint Bernard, with all its trees and pretty sidewalks, where Tommy’d gotten his degree off the GI Bill and where I planned on going if I ever graduated from high school. Didn’t know what I’d study. Maybe they had a degree in hunting.
We drove real quick past the Methodist church me and Pa went to on Sundays, probably cause Tommy never could stomach going in there. Not since the pastor’d told him drinking was a sin and Tommy told him being fat was too. Even the pretty white walls and tall steeple couldn’t take his mind off that, so he stopped going. The only person who asked about him was Mr. Thomassen, the piano player. But they started catching up at the bar on Fridays, so they was fine.
Finally we went out the other side to where the airstrip was and we met Bob Gorman, the fella who owned the little airplane we was going to take to fly down to Birmingham.
“You’re going to pay me when you get back, right?” Bob said.
“Don’t I always?” Tommy said as I got to loading all that frozen meat into the plane.
“Usually,” he said. “This was a lot easier back when I just took it out of your paycheck.”
Bob Gorman owned the air show that Tommy’d flown for ever since he graduated from his basic training for the Alabama Air National Guard. That’d been almost three years of flying and showing off all over the South, and Tommy’d loved the fame, attention, and women he got from it. But, for the past three months, h
e hadn’t done none of it. Just stayed at home with us to help get things in order before Korea.
“It was easier for you,” Tommy said. “But you know I’m good for it. Give me the keys.”
Bob fished them out of his pocket and handed them to Tommy. We got into the airplane and I took my spot next to him at the copilot’s steering wheel. Tommy started flipping the switches and pulling the knobs.
“You don’t let that kid fly, do you?” Bob yelled.
“Do I look crazy to you?” Tommy said, and then he started the engines on the plane. Bob yelled something back, but there wasn’t no hearing it over the noise. Tommy drove the plane out onto the strip, we picked up speed, and then he eased us up into the air. I felt my stomach getting sucked up into my throat as we left the ground behind, and almost wanted to close my eyes so I didn’t get nervous. But I didn’t, cause I would have hated myself if I didn’t watch Tommy taking off an airplane. He was an artist, like da Vinci. And when Hank da Vinci painted your house brown, it was the prettiest brown in the South.
The trip from Cullman to Birmingham wasn’t a long one to fly, but it was just long enough for him to let me grab ahold of the steering wheel and fly for a bit. He gave me some tips while we was up there, but I didn’t ever need them. I’d been practicing flying in my head since the first time I saw a hawk fly in the woods. I strapped a kite on our dog one time to test my ideas. Sometimes I missed Fluffy.
Tommy watched me fly in silence for a few minutes.
“So, what’s your beef with Captain Morris?” I said, keeping my eyes straight ahead at the clouds in front of us like he always told me to. Fluffy hadn’t done that. Pretty sure that’s what went wrong with her inaugural flight.
He pulled out a bag of sunflower seeds from his pocket and chewed on a couple.
“It don’t really concern you,” he said. “We got a history that’s been bumpy, but there ain’t no reason for you to get tore up over it.”
“He don’t seem so horrible to me,” I said.
“No, he never does.” He threw another few seeds in his mouth and took hold of the wheel again. “It’s time to start landing.”
“Will you let me do it?”
He laughed. “Little brother, I was taught by the legendary—”
“Major Harrison. I know,” I said. I had dreams of someday taking a lesson or two from that fella.
“Trust me, landing is the hardest part of it all. Someday you’ll learn it, but until then I’m the man for the job.”
He brought us down to the ground just as smooth as he took us up. There was a whole group of people waiting for us with their ice chests. As soon as the plane was stopped and parked real good, they came and lined up to give us their money and take some of the meat we’d brought. I went to the head of the line and started collecting money, cause that was what I was really good at. Not so much doing the adding or giving out change, but I was real good at convincing them to give us more than what they’d planned.
“You was wanting a turkey and two rabbits? That’s three dollars,” I said.
“I thought it was two dollars,” the old lady I was talking to said.
“It was. But we had to raise the price on account of us having to pay the colored woman to come cook for us.”
“Why should I pay more cause your ma can’t find time to do her job?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” I said. “It really is a shame she died when I was six.”
She got a shocked look on her face.
“Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t nobody’s fault, really. That’s what I had to come to grips with while I was in the hospital.” I reached up and scratched at the scar next to my nose that circled around under my eye to my ear. “I was in the car when she had the accident, after all.”
“You poor boy,” she said, then she put a five-dollar bill and a shiny silver dollar in my hand. “You keep the change, son.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” I said. I always wondered if folks thought I had a piggy bank with all that change they let me keep, and when it was full I could bust it open and buy my ma back from the store. Or maybe a bicycle. But I already had a bicycle.
That was pretty much how it went with the whole delivery. We came out with thirty dollars more than we’d planned. It was real funny how something that I barely remembered happening to somebody I never really knew could wind up so beneficial that many years later. We saved money on Mother’s Day too.
Once we got all the meat sold, me and Tommy got ready to fly back out of there. He kept hesitating on getting in the plane, though, and I wasn’t too sure why. But then a black car with tinted windows drove out to the airstrip we was on. I looked at the license plate; it was from Florida. They pulled up close to us and a woman got out of the passenger seat. She looked like she was from someplace in South America. She came over to Tommy and he told me to get into the plane.
I hurried into my seat and watched as they talked. She gave him an envelope and he looked inside of it, and then he nodded to her. They got closer to each other and she was whispering something to him. He had a reputation with the ladies, but she was too old for him to brag about. It was the darnedest thing.
After a while, the other door on the car opened and a short white fella with sunglasses and a suit got out and walked to where they was talking. He interrupted them talking and pointed at his watch. She shooed him away, but he only took a couple of steps off and he stood there listening to what they was saying.
I could tell Tommy was getting frustrated with him listening, cause he kept glancing at him and showing off his fighting stance. He finally went to push the short guy away. Then the short guy opened up his jacket and showed a gun.
Tommy took a step back with his hands up.
The lady said something to the short guy, and then she kissed Tommy on the cheek and headed to the car.
After they drove off, he got into the airplane. He was so interested in whatever was in the envelope that he let me go through the routines of getting the engines started. He even let me get us going down the runway, though he didn’t let me do the actual takeoff. I reckoned he was still spooked over Fluffy.
“Is that some woman you’ve been seeing?” I said.
“Her? No. She’s a friend of a friend,” he said, and he stuffed the envelope into his pocket. He didn’t talk about her or the envelope again.
After we was up in the air real good, I looked at his watch to see what time it was.
“It didn’t even take us three hours to get this all done. Why couldn’t we have done it next Saturday? Was it cause you had to meet that lady?”
He glanced down at the trees and such that was passing underneath us.
“I wanted to make sure everything was taken care of and that the money from the meat was ready to go to the bank on Monday. You know how to make a deposit at the bank? Fill out the slip and all that?”
I hadn’t never been inside the bank before except to get the candy that the tellers kept out on their counters. Even then, it was only when I was really hard up. You’d think, with all that money, they could afford something besides peppermints.
“Why?” I said. “You can drop it off, or Pa can if you’re too busy. Ain’t no reason to let me screw up the deposit.”
“No, you need to learn how to do it.” He pulled out the wad of money we’d just made and stuck it in my shirt pocket. “And how to pay bills, too, writing out the checks and all that. Pa ain’t no good with figures.”
“What you talking about? He’s an egghead.”
“Sure, when it comes to wiring stuff or making the TV work. But his head ain’t been good for handling money since the war. He gets his numbers mixed up. You’re going to have to handle things while I’m gone, or else you two will be in a mess of trouble.”
We was most always in a mess of trouble when it
came to money. And with me at the steering wheel, we’d crash and burn faster than Fluffy had nose-dived into that tractor. May she rest in peace.
He saw my face getting worried, so he let me take over with the flying.
“You got money saved, right? From all them jobs you do and stuff?”
I nodded.
“Good. You keep it hidden, don’t let yourself give in to using your money for the bills.”
“But what if Pa needs it?” I said. “What if he gets hard up?”
“He’s going to get hard up, and you’re going to have to help him. Just not with your own money. Help him fight off the lions.”
I right off got a picture of me and my hunting rifle staked out on our porch, shooting lions that was escaped from the zoo. That made me feel a bit better, cause I could hold my own better with wild animals than with wild bankers. Still, I was pretty sure I didn’t have the right ammo.
“What you mean?”
He thought for a bit, staring out the window.
“Pa’s in a lion’s den in Cullman. Surrounded by folks, by creatures, that are aiming to eat him up. That’s why we’re always poor, cause it makes sense to him to feed all his money to the mouths of the lions. It’s the only way he can think of to keep them from tearing him apart. And they’ll tear you apart too, if you let them. So don’t let them.”
“There ain’t no lions in Cullman. Maybe at the zoo in Gadsden, but I ain’t heard of no escapes.”
The Troubles of Johnny Cannon Page 2