The Troubles of Johnny Cannon

by Isaiah Campbell

  “Johnny,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here.” He started down the steps with the trash bags.

  “I just wanted to drop by and—”

  “I’ve closed shop, didn’t you see the sign?”

  “Yeah, I saw it.” I grabbed one of the bags from his hand and helped him heave them into the dumpster. “I just wanted to invite you to my ball game.”

  His breathing got real fast. He grabbed me and pulled me into the shadow of the dumpster, out of view from his back door.

  “I can’t tonight. And neither should you,” he whispered to me. “The agent is here, been staying in my shop. He said he knows for certain that radio man is in Cullman.”

  “Why don’t you call the cops?” I said. I remembered something from my history books. “After all, the Redcoats tried that kind of stuff, but George Washington kicked their butts over it. He can’t make you let him stay.”

  “Who could I call?” he said, and I could tell he wasn’t expecting an answer. “He’s the CIA. They do what they want.”

  It was just starting to sink in how big of a mess I was in, and now Mr. Thomassen was in it with me. If I just told him that WX5RJ was Pa, maybe he could go back to operating his shop and making his money. But that would make me the worst son ever. Didn’t even matter that Tommy’d told me to take care of Pa. It wasn’t never right to turn in your kin to the government.

  As much as it killed me, I had to keep the secrets.

  “Why you?” I said. “There’s about a thousand other places he could stay, why’s he so stuck on you?”

  He sighed. “Because I had a hand in the invasion.”

  He couldn’t have shocked me more if he’d tried.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “The invasion was done by Cuban exiles, as you know. One of their leaders was Dr. Raúl Vega, a frequent visitor at my club in Havana. He and my bartender, Carlos Martí, were cousins. When I was driven out of the country, Carlos came with me. And,” he said, and looked over at the door, and then he whispered twice as quiet as before, “Carlos joined Dr. Vega in the Bay of Pigs invasion.”

  I didn’t much care about his buddy Carlos, but Dr. Vega was in the invasion? Dadgum, this plot was getting thick enough to make a pie out of it.

  “But you said you had a hand in it. That means more than just that you knew one of the fellas.”

  He looked like he didn’t want to say no more, but that he knew he had to.

  “I told you Bob Gorman owed me big, right?”

  I nodded.

  “I came here to Cullman to kill him,” he said, and he let that sink in. “At least, that’s what I told him. He begged me for anything else, so I told him I’d cut his debt in half if he connected me to the best pilot in his air show. I wanted to make sure the invasion had the best chance it could, and that meant they needed the best pilots giving air support.”

  “Tommy,” I said, and my head started hurting again. “He gave you Tommy, didn’t he?”

  “I contacted Carlos, and he convinced Dr. Vega to have the CIA recruit some pilots from the Alabama Air National Guard. They asked for your brother by name.”

  “So he flew for the invasion? But they said we didn’t give no air support or nothing. We wasn’t even involved, according to the government.”

  “Tommy contacted me the day before the invasion from a payphone in Nicaragua and told me that everything had gone to hell. Vega had defected to Cuba and President Kennedy had called off the full air support,” Mr. Thomassen said. “I suspected both those things might happen. Vega was always crooked, and Kennedy doesn’t have the stones for the job, not yet at least. Which was why I was glad I had my own man down there. My own pilot.”

  “Tommy flew anyway,” I said, and I knew it was true. That was Tommy’s style.

  He nodded.

  “He flew anyway. I didn’t even have to ask, he told me that was what he was doing. He said the exiles couldn’t handle another betrayal.”

  “And he got shot down?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  My head was swimming. I couldn’t look Mr. Thomassen in the eyes no more. It was his fault, this whole dadgum thing with my brother. I couldn’t say nothing to him, couldn’t breathe the same air he was breathing no more. I ran off before he could say nothing else. I got on my bike and headed to the only place that seemed like normal. The ball field where the Colony team was playing the Cullman team.

  I tried to shake off what I’d just learned so we could start pitching around, but my brain wasn’t really in it. I missed three catches and Reverend Parkins kept asking me if I was okay. I didn’t let on nothing, just told him I had the jitters, and we got ready to start the game.

  We was pitching at the top of the first inning, and when I took the mound I looked over to the bleachers to find Pa. He wasn’t there. My first pitch was a strike, but it wasn’t a pretty one. It only got worse. I walked that kid and the next two to load up the bases. Reverend Parkins came out to the mound to talk.

  “What’s going on, son?”

  I shook my head. “It’s taking me a little to put my head in it. I’ll get this one.”

  He patted my shoulder. “I hope you’re right.”

  He left me out there, and I closed my eyes to focus. I decided to listen to the crowd for Pa’s voice. Maybe he wasn’t in the bleachers yet.

  I strained to listen, but I couldn’t find it. Instead, I heard a whole bunch of Cullman folks talking about the white pitcher for the used-to-be-colored team.

  “Who knew that Cannon boy was a Tigger-lover?”

  “Gorman said this would happen, didn’t he?”

  “He ain’t going to pitch nothing worth hitting. That’s the problem with integration.”

  “Somebody ought to teach them colored folk to keep their hands off good white kids.”

  “Why hasn’t the Klan done something about this yet?”

  I opened my eyes and shook my head to get all them voices out of my ears.

  The batter was ready for me, but my brain wasn’t ready for him. I tried to focus on the top corner of the catcher’s mitt, tried to plot the perfect fastball. I had to block out all them folks and their chattering, all the problems I was having with Pa, everything that had been going on lately.

  I threw the pitch and it was a line drive straight to the batter’s kneecap. Dadgummit.

  Reverend Parkins came running out after the batter hobbled to first and the fella on third walked in for a score. I was scared he was going to cuss at me, or at least say whatever preachers said whenever they was cussing at folks. Probably quote the names of the twelve disciples or something.

  Instead, all he did was ask if I was okay. I shook my head, there wasn’t no sense in trying no more. I wasn’t good for nothing, especially not baseball. He went ahead and sent me back to the dugout and called up Russ, whose pitching hand had healed up good enough to play a minuet, according to his grandma. Russ smacked my butt and told me I’d do better next time. I didn’t say nothing back.

  Everybody in the stands was staring at me so hard, I reckoned I should find a place to hide. I ran around behind the bathrooms and right into Willie, who was looking like he’d just seen a whole mess of ghosts line dancing to a Hank Williams song.

  “You need to listen to something,” he said. He was carrying his tape recorder.

  My head was splitting and I didn’t feel like playing along.

  “I can’t listen to nothing right now,” I said. “I just want to find a hole I can bury myself in.”

  “You can do that anytime,” he said. “But, you need to listen to this right now. It’s the tape from your interview.”

  “I was there. Why should I listen?”

  “Not the second tape, the first one. I left it recording when we went for a new tape, and it recorded your pa’s phone call that was coming over that
telephone in your living room.”

  “So?” I spied something, or somebody, hiding out under the bleachers. I couldn’t really see what it was. But it looked like it was waving at me.

  “He spills everything, him and the person he was talking to. And it proves that he ain’t as guilty as you thought he was.”

  “Wait, what?” Now he had my attention. “You’re saying he didn’t help the Cubans?”

  “No, he did. But he got tricked into doing it. He didn’t know he was selling to the bad guys and he didn’t know the folks he was ratting out had ties with America. He just thought he was solving y’all’s money trouble. Here, just listen to it,” he said as he pulled out his headphones. “It explains everything.”

  I nodded, and just almost put on them headphones, but then I heard a whistle. Whoever was under the bleachers was whistling at me.

  “Tell you what, let me go shut up whoever’s making that noise and then I’ll listen,” I said.

  “But this is important!”

  “And I want to give it all I got. So let me go wring the neck of the whistler.”

  I didn’t give him no time to protest. I took off running to the bleachers. Right up to the shadow.

  Right up to Captain Morris.

  He was leaning on a trash can and, judging by the half-drank bottle of whiskey in his hand, he was running on a full tank.

  I ducked into the dark right next to him

  “Captain? What are you doing here?”

  “I’m a big baseball fan,” he said, then he giggled. “Plus I needed to talk to you. Alone. To warn you.”

  “Warn me? Of what? That I’m going to throw the worst pitches of my life tonight?”

  He had a sad look in his eyes, and he quieted down a bit.

  “They’re coming for your dad. Tonight. Now. They’re going to arrest him.”

  My chest got super tight.

  “Who?”

  “The Feds. He did something he shouldn’t have. I can’t tell you any more than that.” He took another swig from his bottle. “I’m sorry, son.”

  I felt like somebody punched me in the chest.

  “They’re wrong,” I said. “He didn’t mean to rat out Operation Pluto.”

  He straightened up and got sober, like he’d just swallowed five gallons of coffee.

  “Where’d you hear about that?” he said.

  “I heard Pa telling some Spanish folks about it. But he wasn’t doing it to hurt nobody.”

  He didn’t say nothing for a bit.

  “How much about that did you hear?”

  “I don’t know. Most of it, I guess.”

  He pulled out his tobacco and shoved a glob into his cheek.

  “You probably ought to get down to your house. They might not let you see him once they take him away.”

  He didn’t have to say another word. I left a cloud of dust in the shape of Johnny Cannon and ran off to get on home. I probably should have gone back to Willie and listened to the tape, but I didn’t think of that. All I could think of was my pa getting dragged out of our house in chains, with about a million guns pointed at him. Maybe there’d be a helicopter involved.

  I rode my bike faster than I’d ever ridden it up the mountain. I was so all-fired focused on making it home, I wasn’t put off at all that it was as dark as a boar’s underbelly. I was just going on instinct. I reckoned that would help me manage all the bumps and twists in the road.

  But it didn’t make up for the stick that got shoved in my spokes about halfway up the hill. I got thrown off my bike and went rolling for a good six feet, then I jumped up and got ready for a tussle with whoever or whatever thought it was a good time for a prank.

  It was Mr. Thomassen. He stepped out of the bushes and turned on a flashlight.

  “Gosh danged it!” I yelled, though I actually yelled something else. Then I realized who I was yelling at. “I’m sorry. I’m just—”

  “What? What are you doing?” he said. He got more stern than I’d ever heard him.

  “I’m trying to hurry home. I need to talk to Pa before they take him off.”

  “And do what?” he said. “That agent is hell-bent on finding WX5RJ. And he knows your father is WX5RJ. He finally told me that right before he headed to your house.”

  “But my pa wasn’t—”

  “Your pa dropped off a check at the bank yesterday for thirty-­five thousand dollars. The bank flagged it and contacted the agent,” Mr. Thomassen said. “That’s pretty damning evidence.”

  “But, he was tricked into it.” I picked up my bike and started to get back on. Mr. Thomassen stopped me. “I can prove it,” I said.

  “Do you have the evidence? With you? Because that’s the only thing that will stop him.”

  I looked up the mountain. I could just barely make out the lights of Short-Guy’s car that was parked up there.

  “No, I don’t,” I said. “But, maybe he’d wait and let me get it. Let me put things together so he can let my pa go free.”

  Mr. Thomassen bent over and picked up something I could just barely make out in the dark. It was my jacket that Short-Guy had taken from my room.

  “How’d you get that?” I said.

  “I stole it out of his suitcase at my shop,” he said. He pulled my survival guide out of the jacket pocket. “And I read this. December 6, 1884. Remember what that one is?”

  I had to think real hard.

  “Ain’t that the day the Washington Monument was completed?”

  “Exactly. Do you remember the story?”

  The lights from the car started to move.

  “Dadgummit, they’re leaving,” I said.

  “The story. What is the story of the Washington Monument?”

  I sighed.

  “They started it in 1848 and they got up about a third of the way. But then a whole mess of stuff happened, arguing and corruption among the folks doing the building. They stopped ­building ten years later and the monument was the laughingstock of ­Washington. It wasn’t until 1879 that they started building it again, and then they finished it five years later.”

  The car drove down the mountain on past us and I don’t reckon they saw us in the dark. Then they disappeared around a bend.

  Pa was gone.

  I was officially all alone. I picked up a walnut off the ground and threw it as hard as I could at a tree.

  “And what’s the lesson you wrote down for this day?” Mr. Thomassen asked me again.

  “No disrespect, sir, but this ain’t school,” I said. “Don’t you got any idea of what just happened? I just lost my pa. Lost it all. Probably lost my house, too. My whole dadgum life is ruined.”

  “No worries. He’s taking your father to Birmingham for processing. I cashed in a favor and he’ll hold your father for up to a week. There’s plenty of time. Now, the lesson. What is it?”

  I tried to visualize the page.

  “That Eddie’s got a million jokes about tall pointy things.”

  He chuckled.

  “The other lesson,” he said.

  “That it don’t much matter how your story starts, it just matters how it finishes.”

  “Exactly. And the agent’s story is ending the way he wants it to, by catching the bad guy. If you can’t offer him an ending as good as that, then he’s not going to be interested.”

  The sound of the crickets filled my ears as I processed what he said.

  “How do we do that?”

  “By finding the real bad guy,” he said.

  That made sense. And I knew how we’d do that too.

  “Willie’s got a tape,” I said. “Pa was talking to somebody about the whole thing. I’d bet you a silver dollar that whoever he was talking to knows who the bad guy was, if he wasn’t the bad guy himself.”

  “Now you’r
e thinking. Let’s go get that tape from Willie,” he said. He handed me my jacket. “Here, you might need this.”

  I put the jacket on. It was getting a little chilly, either that or I was shivering from loneliness. I’d probably tell folks it was chilly.

  “Why are you so fired up about helping us?” I said.

  “When your brother left, he made me promise I’d take care of your family.”

  Tommy was good at that.

  “Yeah,” I said, “he said something similar to—”

  I heard a truck coming up the road that stopped me in the middle of my sentence. We saw headlights coming around the bend. Me and Mr. Thomassen both stepped off the road to make way.

  Mr. Thomassen noticed who was driving. He stepped forward and shielded his eyes to see better.

  “Is that—” he started.

  Then the car swerved and slammed right into him.

  He went flying off the road, rolled down the ditch, and smacked right into a tree. He was out cold.

  I was screaming.

  Then the door to the truck opened. Captain Morris got out.

  “Oh my God!” I screamed. “You done killed Mr. Thomassen!”

  He came over and put his arm around me. He looked down into the ditch.

  “No. He’s not dead. I don’t think.” He squinted his eyes. “Nope, not dead. Not yet, anyway. He’s still breathing.”

  I was still hollering. Couldn’t stop. Not even if I wanted to.

  “Johnny. Johnny.” The Captain started shaking me. “Stop. You need to listen to me. You’re going to get in the truck and we’re going to go away. Okay? Everything’s going to be okay.”

  I shook my head.

  “No. No it ain’t. It ain’t at all.”

  “Come with me,” he said.

  I jerked out of his hand.

  “I can’t. I can’t.”

  He grabbed me and flung me around. I felt something sharp go into my neck.

  “That wasn’t a request,” he whispered in my ear. “You’re coming with me.”

  Everything went dark.

  CHAPTER TEN

  IT’S COLD INSIDE

  I probably won’t never understand how you can smell something and it brings back a whole mess of memories, like smelling biscuits and remembering your grandma cooking breakfast, or smelling fried catfish and thinking of your brother’s graduation. But, if I’d ever doubted how powerful of a memory-­producer a smell could be, I stopped when I smelled the air as I was waking from the long nap I’d just taken.