The Troubles of Johnny Cannon

by Isaiah Campbell

  Russ touched his face where I’d hit him and realized I’d drawn blood.

  Then he cracked me in the mouth.

  So I kicked him in the crotch.

  He doubled over and I reckoned the fight was done. I was starting to feel like I was back in charge of the boat again, so I offered him my hand. Like a gentleman.

  He reached out and grabbed my belt, yanked me around, and threw me into the wall of the church. The whole building shook and a loose shingle fell off the top.

  I jumped onto him and we went rolling around on the ground. I was boxing his ears and slapping his face, he was punching my throat and I think trying to rip my arm out of its socket. Not a one of us heard the footsteps of all the grown folk coming around the corner of the church.

  Two of the deacons pulled us apart and then Mrs. Parkins ran over and almost had a cat when she saw how messed up my clothes and my body was. She hurried me and her kids to the car, talking about how she didn’t know how she’d explain it to my pa, and how she shouldn’t have let me out of her sight. I tried my best to let her know I would have probably gotten just as beat up if she was watching me, but she didn’t pay me no mind.

  She drove us all on out of the Colony and back up to my house, even though I told her I could walk on my own from theirs. While we was going, Willie was trying to ask me all sorts of questions. I wasn’t giving him too many answers, not ’cause I was trying to be rude or nothing, but because my head was hurting way too darned bad.

  “Russ is a good guy with an ego too big for his britches. He needed to be brought down a few pegs,” he whispered to me. “And you did it. That’s really something. He don’t usually lose no fights.”

  I nodded.

  “I mean, you was winning, wasn’t you? Gosh, how did it feel? I mean, getting in those punches? Did you feel strong? Powerful?” he said. He rubbed his bum leg while he was talking, and I got a better idea of why he was asking. I nodded again.

  Mrs. Parkins was watching in her rearview mirror as he was grilling me with them questions.

  “Leave him alone, Willie. Can’t you see he don’t feel good right now?”

  I was thankful for that. My head hadn’t stopped hurting, and after getting in that fight, I was realizing the prayer to become an angel was just another one that wouldn’t get no answer. Just like the one asking for the Cardinals to get to the NFL Championship.

  “Okay, I’ll stop asking. Today.” He got a grin on his face. “But, can I do an interview with you some other time? And record it, and everything, like what they did for Gene Fullmer?”

  “An interview?” I said.

  “Yeah. It’s a hobby.”

  I nodded to get him to leave me alone and then I acted like I was trying to say something to his sister, who was sitting next to me again. She was asleep ’cause it was probably her naptime. I accidentally woke her up and she stuck her tongue out at me again. Dadgummit, I might have to get a ledger book to keep track.

  We got to my house and Mrs. Parkins got out to go tell my pa what had happened. I got out too, and I was embarrassed by our front yard. In between the time I’d left for church and then, Pa and the Captain had filled our front yard with a whole mess of empty boxes and papers and such. It looked like a homeless paradise. If homeless people used RadioShack boxes.

  Mrs. Parkins knocked on our door and there wasn’t no answer. Then we both heard a loud ruckus of banging coming from the backyard, so she headed that way and I followed her. And if I was embarrassed by the state of our front yard, our backyard made me want to change my name and move to Canada. And you know that’s bad, ’cause there ain’t no good reason to go to Canada.

  Pa and the Captain had dug everything out of our shed, the lawn mower, the deep freezer, my bicycle, everything, and they had it thrown all kinds of ways out in the grass. They was inside the shed hammering and sawing and drilling, and they was laughing and carrying on while they did it like two fellas that didn’t have a care in the world.

  Mrs. Parkins went and knocked on the shed door that was halfway open.

  “Mr. Cannon?” she said.

  Pa bolted out of the shed, along with the Captain, and they pushed the door closed.

  “Hello, Coretta,” Pa said. “How are you doing today?” He had the kind of grin you got when you was trying to hide something from somebody and you thought it was the funniest thing ever to be doing it, but you knew if you told it to them they wouldn’t think it was funny at all and they’d whip you for it. I tried to get the image of Mrs. Parkins having my pa over her knee, swatting him with a paddle, out of my head, but things like that, once it’s in there, it’s in there.

  “I’m doing fine, but your boy here ain’t doing as good.”

  Pa spied me and my torn, dirty, bloody shirt, pants, and face and he got as stern as a gnarled piece of wood.

  “Boy, what did you get into?”

  “Just a boxing match, Pa,” I said.

  His mouth almost crackled at the edges with the beginnings of a smile.

  “Did you win?” he said.

  “I reckon,” I said.

  He started to say something else, but the Captain cleared his throat and shot Pa a look. Pa went back to being stern.

  “You know the rule about fighting.” We didn’t have no rule that I’d ever known, except to make sure and tell the story over dinner. “Get in there and go to your room,” he said. “You done embarrassed me enough today.”

  I looked at the big mess he’d made of stuff. There was more boxes back there, including one that was marked with that linear amplifier he’d been looking at.

  “I know how you feel,” I said. “Looks like you two went shopping. How’d you pay for everything?”

  His eyes got steely at me.

  “That ain’t your place to ask, is it?”

  “Do you still have the money from yesterday in your pocket?” I said.

  He looked at Mrs. Parkins and then back at me.

  “I’m your pa. If I see fit to spend our money on something, I’ll do it without your questions. You hear me?”

  “No worries,” the Captain said. “I floated him a loan. You all can pay me back whenever you can.”

  A loan. That wasn’t much better. Whether we was devoured by a lion all at once or one bite a day over the next few months, we was still doomed to be dinner. Dadgummit.

  I didn’t say nothing else to Pa, I just went inside. I watched out the window as Mrs. Parkins got in her car and drove off to her house. I thought about making myself some lunch or something, but my head was hurting too bad to even think about nothing like that. It was throbbing again and all I wanted to do was lay down and rest.

  I went up to my room and sat on my bed. I couldn’t stop thinking about that money that Pa had thrown away on some stupid equipment. And taking a loan from the Captain, what in tarnation was Pa thinking? Most likely Pa was trying to impress him. Tommy told me that folks was the stupidest when they was aiming to impress, and they was downright brain dead when they was impressing a woman. It was a good thing the Captain wasn’t a woman.

  Now I had the picture of the Captain wearing a dress in my head. I wished there was a pill for that. To get images out of my head, I mean. Not to get the Captain in a dress.

  The more and more I ran all them thoughts in and out of my head, the madder and madder I got. I stood up and tried to walk around my room a bit to get my anger out, but it just kept coming. It felt like a fountain that was springing up in my gut, and I couldn’t explain it. I left being angry at anything, and I was beginning to just be angry in general.

  It got to the point where I couldn’t take no more, and I just had to either hit something or yell. And with my head hurting so bad, there wouldn’t be no yelling or I might have a brain attack, so I turned to punch my wall. The worst that could happen was I’d get bloody knuckles, and that would be fine. It�
�d make me look tough at school the next day. Might even impress Martha Macker, the prettiest darn girl in Cullman County.

  I punched and then my fist went straight into the wall. It made a hole in the Sheetrock, a big one that I couldn’t hide or deny.

  Apparently I was a lot madder than I even realized.

  Madder than I’d ever been before.

  But I just didn’t know why.

  CHAPTER THREE

  CATCHING PUBERTY

  Monday morning I got up with my headache half gone but the rest of my body feeling a whole lot worse. I almost thought about taking the day off from school and saying I was sick, but then I saw out my window the backyard still all messed up from Pa and the Captain’s project, and I decided I’d rather leave.

  I went downstairs to get something to eat first and Pa was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee, reading out of the ham radio book.

  “Feeling better?” he said. “I came up to check on you last night. You was tossing like a man on a boat.”

  I’d had some crazy nightmares, that was for sure. I shook my head to get out the picture of the Captain in a green dress with Pa over his knee, paddling him something fierce. I grabbed some bread and put it in the toaster.

  “I think I’m better today,” I said. I sat down across from him and tried to think of what I wanted to talk about. I’d done decided there wasn’t no point in talking to him about money, the cash that had been on my dresser or any other money issues we was having. I’d pick up a rock on my way home to talk to about that. It’d be more advantageous and less risky than filling Pa’s ears with our figures.

  I was still real nervous about the way I’d felt the day before, and how angry I’d been, and about punching through the wall, and that was on my tongue to talk about. But I wasn’t sure how much Pa would know to tell me, or how much I wanted to tell him. He could talk transistors and circuits all day long, but it was like there was a wall when it came to flesh-and-bone conversations. He’d get so awkward you felt sorry for him, and guilty that you’d made him look so foolish.

  Still, he was my pa. He had to be good for something.

  “Something funny’s happening to me,” I said. “Like, I’m getting all kinds of weird feelings and such.”

  He looked up from the book, real uncomfortable. He coughed a couple of times.

  “You got hair growing in your pants?” he said. “It’s normal, part of growing up. You want to talk about it?”

  I absolutely did not want to talk about nothing going on in my pants. I had to find the exit sign in this talk. Too late, he kept going.

  “See, son, there’s this thing that’s called ‘puberty.’ You start having weird things happening to your body. You start getting hair in places you didn’t before and you start to smell bad.” He was twisting the book in his hands like he was wringing all them words out of his brain. “Girls have it too, but their changes are a lot prettier than boy changes. And you’ll notice the girls as they’re changing too. That’s another side effect of puberty.”

  I had to make him stop. I couldn’t listen to my own pa talking about these things.

  “And you might start getting the rage, too,” he said. “That’s what my mama called it. When you start feeling like you could tackle a bear and it about drives you crazy that you can’t find one nowhere.”

  That got my attention. Maybe he was onto something.

  “So, you start feeling like you’re a live wire?” I said. “And you get angry faster?”

  He nodded and coughed again.

  “Yeah, and your voice starts dropping.”

  Captain Morris picked right then to come into the kitchen.

  “What are you two talking about? Puberty?” he said.

  Pa said we was, and since the Captain said it too, I reckoned that settled it.

  “You experiencing changes?” the Captain asked me. I didn’t feel like getting into it any more in front of Pa, so I just nodded and got my toast. Still, he was a doctor.

  “How’s your throat feeling today?” he asked. Took me a second to remember that I’d had a sore throat the morning before. He came over and pulled my mouth open and looked inside. “Looks fine. Still, if you get any more sore throats, there might be something we can do.”

  “Like what? Take out my tonsils?”

  He poured himself some coffee.

  “Something,” he said. He squeezed my shoulder and for a second I forgot what Tommy’d said about not trusting him. He looked like he really cared about me, like he was almost worried or something. I tried to shake it off.

  Pa got up to get himself some more coffee.

  “Hey, Captain, all these call signs they’re using now, I can’t make sense of them in my head. Can you look at them for me?” He glanced at me. “When Johnny goes, of course.”

  Well, that was practically a permission slip, as far as I was concerned.

  “I’m leaving right now,” I said, and I left the house. I had to go to the bottom of the mountain to catch the school bus, and normally I’d have run down there. But I had a lot on my mind, so I decided to walk it instead.

  I barely made it in time to catch it before it went off. I got settled into my seat and then I tried to forget how crazy of a weekend I’d had and have a normal day. I was pretty thankful that the colored kids had their own school in the Colony, even though most days I thought it was unfair. Why should they get to learn things I didn’t? But, today I didn’t want no reminders of how weird things had been over the past couple of days.

  Things went pretty normal, too. I walked into John Cullman Middle School and everybody left me alone, as usual. Heading through the yellow halls to our classes, folks hurried past me, laughing and carrying on, hoping to get all their jokes out before the bell rang. Thing was, most of them only knew about five good ones, and they retold them every morning. And almost all of them fellas that was telling them jokes yet again was doing it to impress one girl.

  Martha Macker.

  I’d had a crush on Martha Macker for as long as I could remember, probably since the second grade. She’d been the first person to smile at me when I came to school as the new kid. She was also the only one to smile at me for two months after. My scars had been real dark back then, and everybody else looked away from me when I came by. She did too, but she’d try to smile first.

  Problem was, every other fella our age in Cullman had a crush on her too. She had the prettiest red hair, the brightest blue eyes, and five freckles on her nose that danced when she laughed. And she wasn’t like one of them girls that puts on being nice or sweet to try to get her way. Her smiles was like dog farts, they wasn’t trying to hide nothing.

  Once I got into our class, I found my spot two rows from the back, the seat right behind Martha, and I settled into my desk. Mrs. Buttke got us started with the prayer and then the Pledge of Allegiance. After that she had us all pull out our reading for the day, and then she started writing on the board the same thing she wrote every single day.

  This Day in History:

  I was maybe the only kid in the class who paid attention to that every time she wrote it. It was all ’cause I’d told her on the first day of school that I thought history was stupid, ’cause it had all happened so long ago it didn’t matter. She told me that everything that’s ever happened in history was as close to us as yesterday, and the reason we study it is so we can keep today from being as bad as yesterday was. That made sense to me a whole lot, ’cause there was a lot of bad stuff in my yesterday that I needed to stay out of today. From then on I wrote down everything she told us about history, especially them facts of the day, hunting for clues. I even kept track of each day’s fact in a notebook. I had made a fancy cover for it too.

  Johnny Cannon’s Guide to Surviving Yesterday

  She finished writing on the board and I copied the day’s event.

  M
arch 13, 1781—Sir William Herschel discovers Uranus in Bath.

  The kids behind me started snickering. Mrs. Buttke turned around and glared at them. Eddie Gorman raised his hand.

  “Yes, Eddie?”

  “Whose did he discover?” he said, and half the class started giggling.

  She looked at the board again and blushed.

  “Eddie Gorman, you despicable little child. Go immediately to the principal’s office.” She made him come up there and get a note, and then he went out the door. The class was still giggling. It took me a second to get the joke, but when I did, I snickered to myself.

  “Johnny, do you have something to say?”

  I hated when she called me out. I always wanted to get sucked into a hole in the floor and go to school with the mole people.

  “No’m,” I said, then I thought for a second. “Well, I guess I do. Why is it so important to know how Ur—” I stopped, ’cause I was afraid of saying the name and making everybody laugh again.

  “Your-in-us,” she said. “It’s pronounced Your-in-us. Not what you foul-minded children are thinking. And Bath was the city in England where Sir William lived.”

  There was a couple more snickers, but mostly the class calmed down.

  “And it’s important,” she said, “because it illustrates how long it can take for what we observe to become what we understand. Sir William initially thought the planet was a comet or a star, and even after other astronomers were convinced it was a planet, he had difficulty accepting it. It wasn’t until two years later that he formally confirmed it to be the seventh planet from our sun.”

  I made a note next to the event in my book.

  It can take a while to go from seeing to believing.

  I thought for a second and wrote right underneath it.

  Naming a planet for a butt is a sure-fire way to get Eddie sent to the principal’s office.

  Both of them was real good things to remember.

  The rest of the day was filled with boring school stuff, like math, which I didn’t figure I’d ever understand so there wasn’t no point in trying, and English, which I’d been talking since I was a baby, so I didn’t know why we had to keep learning it every year. Science was about the ins and outs of plants, which didn’t matter much to me since I didn’t figure I’d be a plant anytime soon. Of course we studied history and the Civil War and stuff, which was real interesting, even though Mrs. Buttke had a knack for making it as boring as Sunday School.