Littlejohn

by Howard Owen

  It was just about dark when we got there, and for a minute, I had this crazy feeling that Lafe was going to pop out from behind a tree and scare us half to death, and we’d all laugh about what a joke he’d played on us all.

  But there he was, or his body was, lying right by that pine tree, not moved since I run off, his head kind of twisted to one side. Daddy walked up to him, felt his body and said, “I wish you had of shot me instead.”

  Then he grabbed his legs and said, “Help me load him into the wagon. He’s gone.”

  He didn’t say another thing all the way back to the house, which was where Dr. Horne was waiting, since neither me nor Daddy had told anybody where Lafe’s body was.

  There wasn’t anything to do except have him hauled to the undertaker’s, which one of the Williams boys did. I had to tell that story about ten times before they buried him, to every blessed relative that come by, and every time I told it, I could feel Momma’s and Daddy’s eyes on me, and I knew right then and there that it would take more than one lifetime before they got over it. They might forgive me or at least stop blaming me, but they never would get over it.

  We ain’t much on sensitive around here, or at least we weren’t back then. Times was tough, and nobody thought about sending a boy to see a psychiatrist because he shot his brother by accident. I doubt if there was any psychiatrists around here back then. You was supposed to mind your manners and say yes sir, no sir; be polite and tell the folks how come it was that you shot your brother dead.

  “Littlejohn,” my aunt Ida, who we saw about four times a year, said, “how in the world did you mistake your own brother for a deer?” And I was supposed to sit there, patient and calm, and tell her how it happened, or how I said it happened.

  The worst thing about the shooting, or maybe the second worst, was that, to this day, I can’t look you or God in the eye and say, for sure and certain, that I didn’t have a little spite or meanness in my heart when I pointed that Iver-Johnson at Lafe. Oh, to be sure I never meant to kill my brother. But maybe I tried to cut it a little too close. If I’d of aimed three feet over his head instead of two, I’d of still missed him a foot when he jumped up. It just shows what comes from going too close to the edge. You can fall off.

  I’m only sure that I saw Angora Bosolet two times in my life after that. Both times was within a month of Lafe’s death.

  There wasn’t any sign of her at the millpond, although I reckon somebody looking for a third person could of found them little footprints of hers in the sand, and they might of found the wrapper around the smoked fish and wondered where that come from. But the sheriff was more gentle about it all than my family was, figured that nobody would be stupid enough to lie about shooting his own brother to death because he was a deer, I reckon.

  Thing is, I felt like I would be betraying Lafe if I told everybody he was seeing this Hittite girl on the sly, that it would make his whole life seem cheap, like people might snigger and laugh when they mentioned his name. I couldn’t of stood that. It seems right crazy now, thinking back on it: I was so concerned that nobody would think any less of Lafe, when he himself was fixing to marry Angora, no matter what anybody thought. I expect that it might hurt somebody a little more to put a bullet in his brain than it would to tell everybody who his secret girlfriend was. But that was the way I felt at the time. Besides, I promised.

  It was two weeks after the funeral, walking back from the swamp on a Tuesday, that I seen Angora for the second time. She must of waited until the Lockamys was already headed toward their house, so she could see me alone. We was back cutting the bank by Lock’s Branch, and all of a sudden she just appeared from behind the Rock of Ages. I started to back up. It was near-bout dark, there was a cemetery to my left with Lafe’s body fresh in it, and a full moon was already up just over the Blue Sandhills, turning brighter by the second.

  She looked just as pretty as she did the first time, but she was dressed all in black, and her eyes looked all puffy.

  “You’ve got to help me,” she said. “It’s your fault. You’ve got to help me. He was going to marry me.”

  I turned and run. She chased after me, and for a while, I could hear her feet, near-bout feel her breath as she tried to talk to me while I was running away.

  Later, I remember she said something about two months, but it didn’t hit me what she meant. I just kind of shut it out of my mind. Maybe if she hadn’t jumped out from behind the rock like a ghost, I would of stopped and let her have her say. But I was sure she meant me harm, that maybe she would tell Momma and Daddy everything that happened and make it even worse than it was. Whatever, by the time I come out of the woods next to the Lockamy place, she had give up and gone back.

  The last time I’m sure I seen Angora, it was a Friday the week after that. I had to work on the tobacco barn roof farthest from the house, because it had leaked in the fall and ruined some tobacco.

  It was a hateful job, because those tobacco barn roofs was steep, and it was a one-man show. I was already starting to talk to Lafe’s ghost, and it seemed like any minute I might come over the crown of the roof and see him on the other side, grinning like he did. It made me a little spooked.

  I had just climbed down the ladder to take my dinner break when she stepped out of the woods right in front of me. Thinking back, she must of spent a awful lot of time tracking me to catch me with nobody else around twice like she did.

  “Please don’t run off, Littlejohn,” she said, and she tried to smile, but it just scared me worse somehow. “I need help, Littlejohn. Please.”

  I turned and run. She chased me a quarter mile or so, cussing me and begging me not to run away. But I never wanted to see Angora Bosolet again, couldn’t look at her without thinking about Lafe and the millpond.

  It was a long time before I found out what Angora wanted. At the time, I thought she was either crazy over Lafe dying, or she was a ghost, or she wanted to make trouble.

  The longer I’ve lived, the more I have become convinced that nothing ever comes to nothing, that everything we do comes back to haunt us, just like Angora did.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  August 1

  Daddy never offers a large opinion, or makes a large decision, unless he feels it’s absolutely necessary, that things just aren’t going to work out right unless he intercedes. Which is why I am inclined to abide by the wishes of a slightly senile eighty-two-year-old man in overalls who is giving away most of what some would falsely call my inheritance.

  Seeing him now, with his short-term memory going along with his eyes and his heart, fills me with such shame for all the days we could have had together out here on the porch while the sun slipped across one more white-hot summer sky. Even now, though, I can’t make myself move back, give up all hope of being a Famous Writer, or even a Famous Scholar, in order to make my own father a little happier for a while.

  It was in a little town on the southern shore of Lac Leman that things finally turned to crap for Mark and me.

  We had planned our great European tour for months, and Mark had some definite ideas about what we ought to do. He’s a newspaper editor, and they can get so neurotic that they make English professors seem like Rotarians. All those deadlines, probably. Mark would try to dole out days in preordained parcels. Get up. Have breakfast (fifteen minutes). See British Museum (three hours). Have lunch (forty-five minutes). Take tube to Hampstead Heath and back (three hours). Stop in pub (thirty minutes). The way I’d always done European vacations, Stop in Pub was pretty much open-ended. I’ll give Jeff that; he didn’t mind changing schedules if the mood struck him. As it turned out, unfortunately, he didn’t mind doing anything if the mood struck him.

  We did it Mark’s way all through Ireland and Great Britain, from Shannon Airport to the hovercraft at Dover, twelve days of it. I didn’t mind terribly much, because I’d already seen most of the British Isles at one time or another, and was getting pretty damn tired of them, to tell you the truth.

  Mark wou
ld rave on about the English hospitality and sense of order, and those were the things I once admired in the British. But just as good friends come and go but a worthwhile enemy is forever, so it is that the negative things are what stick in my mind: the cabbies calling black people who don’t move out of their way quickly enough “Sambo”; the smugness; the black pudding. Anyhow, I like England but do not love her, so there was nothing much that Mark could drag me away from with an anxious look at his watch that I really minded being dragged away from, other than a couple of pubs that needed a pint or two more scrutiny.

  But then we were in France, which is what I go to Europe for. We had a small argument before we left about how many days we’d spend there. Mark doesn’t like the “Froggies,” although he’d been there exactly once, for three days, as part of a seven-cities-in-eleven-days tour. All three days were spent in Paris, and he never got over the fact that the Parisians didn’t roll out the red carpet, were actually rude to him. Hell, I told him, the Parisians are rude to each other. Why should they make an exception for Americans?

  We agreed, finally, to spend ten days in France, but only if we extended our time in Germany to ten days as well. Mark loves Germany. All that efficiency and cleanliness. The Germans give me the shakes. I can’t help but think that the same old guy who’s playing in the oompah band was once a young SS officer herding Jews into ovens. But to Mark, the French are more reprehensible for letting the Germans invade their country than the Germans are for invading. The French might be a bit snooty, but they’re spontaneous. They will surprise you.

  I persuaded Mark to count the day in Zurich as part of Germany, since it’s practically the same thing, I argued, and I would count our day in Geneva as part of France. Montreux and Zermatt we would take from Italy.

  So we rented a car and knocked around Normandy for two days, drinking Calvados and eating our first good breakfasts in quite some time. Then we drove to Paris, turned in the car at Charles de Gaulle and took a taxi to our small hotel between the Opéra and Place Vendôme, within walking distance of the Louvre and the Left Bank, to say nothing of several of my favorite restaurants.

  Mark doesn’t speak French. I speak enough to get by in restaurants and shops and to ask directions on the street—and sometimes understand the answer. The French appreciate it if you try, though. A strange thing: Even though Mark is a demon for punctuality and formality, he never understood about the French and reservations. We would wake up to the breakfast in bed the cheery little maid brought in every morning, we’d eat our croissants and drink our tea, then Mark would leap out of bed and say, “Time’s a-wasting,” and reel off the nineteen things we were supposed to do before dinner. But what about dinner? I’d ask. We need to make reservations. But he’d hustle me out of our little hotel before we decided where we wanted to go, and then, when we’d stop for a minute to rest our feet on the Champs-Elysees or at the Luxembourg Gardens, he’d be too busy mapping out the next stop to talk about dinner. The English eat to live, he’d say smugly, and the French live to eat. If you cooked like the English, I’d reply, you’d only eat to live, too.

  So, we’d wind up about eight o’clock, dog-tired because we hadn’t had the afternoon nap any fool knows you need to make the most of a day in Paris, and we’d have to go to a restaurant without reservations. In Paris, you might as well go without shoes. The maître d’ of some half-empty eighth arrondissement place would look way down that long Gallic nose at us and either tell us there was no room or make us wait, or put us at the table by the kitchen door. The French are not committed to being churlish. It’s just that, given the opportunity and the justification, they’re so damn good at it.

  It took me until the third day to convince Mark that reservations equated to good manners in Paris, but he sulked the rest of our time there, and I knew he’d spend the next year ripping the French waiters, and the French train stations, and even the fact that they took away the pissoirs, which he’d have bitched about if they hadn’t gotten rid of them.

  The other bone of contention in Paris was cafés. I was only slightly bothered when we didn’t have time to sit and ponder life and darts in British pubs, but cafés are different. I’ve never understood it, but the waiters in Parisian cafés, especially the outdoor places along those beautiful, tree-lined avenues full of the most interesting people in the world, cannot be persuaded to rush. If you were of a mind to get drunk at the Café de la Paix, you would have to order wine by the bottle. You can sit at the center of the civilized universe for forty-five minutes nursing one Kronenbourg beer and enjoying Paris’s best attraction—the people—without anybody asking you if you’d like anything else—like the check—even once. And on the Left Bank, it’s even better. They throw in fire swallowers and magicians and the odd street person who’ll stop long enough to drink half your beer if you’re not watchful. It’s slightly more charming than New York, where the chief attractions are muggings and watching someone go to the bathroom on the sidewalk.

  The only time I was able to persuade Mark to stop was at a quiet place near the Boulevard St.-Germain. We’d been there about five minutes when this little gnome who must have been sixty-five at least started talking to us from the next table. He was about five two, very weathered and brown, and he somehow reminded me of Uncle Lex, only much shorter. We could converse well enough for him to find out that we were from Virginia and for us to find out he fought in World War II. Mark didn’t know much of what we were saying, only what I had time to translate.

  Then the little old man asked if we would take his picture. So I did. Then he wanted to have his picture taken with me; so, with much sign language and flashing eyes, Mark took a picture of me with Henri, which was his name. Then he wanted one of himself and Mark. I had the pictures developed before I came down to the farm, and in that one, Mark looks as if he doesn’t want his clothes to touch Henri’s.

  Finally, he wanted to take a picture of Mark and me, which I thought was sweet. I showed Henri how to focus and where the button was, and he took the camera. He took a step back, then another, on the sidewalk. In the picture he took, Mark seems to have Bell’s palsy, because he’s in the middle of saying, “The goddamn Frog is going to steal our camera.” Henri shyly handed the Nikon back to us. I don’t think he heard what Mark said.

  We took the bullet train to Geneva for our eighth French day. The last two would be spent on the Riviera, with a friend who has a villa near Vence, in transit from Italy to Spain. Geneva might as well be in France, geographically, but it really has no nationality or night life.

  The big thing we had planned in Geneva was a boat trip on Lac Leman, to Yvoire. It takes about three hours to get from the harbor to Yvoire, and there’s another boat to take you back every hour or so. I prefer lakes to oceans, and I’ve always loved the mountains, or at least ever since Daddy first took us the long way back from Atlanta. So, Lac Leman, with these neurotically perfect Swiss towns along the coast and the Alps in the background, met my specifications for perfection. It had been about five years since I’d been near the Alps, and I’d never taken the boat from Geneva.

  We sat at a table inside and looked out through the glass at the water and the mountains. Mark had worn only a flannel shirt, no sweater, so that when I wanted to go up on deck, I went alone. We drank Cardinal beer and watched the passengers, mostly Swiss, mostly using the boat as a bus, come and go at Nyon. I wanted to take pictures of some of the children, maybe because they reminded me of Justin, not as he is now, but as he was at five and eight and twelve.

  As we got nearer to Yvoire, where we planned to get off and catch the next boat back, it looked as if we were entering the Middle Ages. Everything seemed to have been not built out of stone but chiseled from a solid stone foundation, so that everything—the streets, the dock, the walls and roofs—was seamless. It is one of dozens of such towns I’ve seen across Europe, planned communities of the Dark Ages, built for common defense and accidentally beautiful, all the more striking because they never meant to
be. And Yvoire may be the best of the lot. There were winding streets barely wide enough for one car; and everywhere there were flowers—planters in every conceivable spot bursting with a red that was perfect counterpoint to the austere stone. The town center’s fountain was inundated with them.

  “No fair,” said Mark, nudging me as we got off the boat. “We’re back in France.” He pointed to the DOUANE sign and perfunctory customs office, and I realized that we were indeed in that tip of France below Lac Leman. Mark seemed to be only partly kidding. He was really getting an attitude—an “attytude” as his mother always said it—about the place.

  We walked by a terrace loaded with tables shaded by those ubiquitous umbrellas that seem to be the premier product of Europe. I looked at the handwritten menu and suggested that we take a later boat back and have lunch in Yvoire, with the lake and the mountains in front of us, the towers and spires of this perfect combination of French grace and Swiss efficiency behind us. Mark said we didn’t have time. It was approximately the fiftieth time we hadn’t had time since we left Dulles International. It wasn’t noon yet, and we already had a place reserved in Montreux for the evening. I pointed out that we could probably drive from Geneva to Montreux in an hour and a half when we got back. I pointed out that we were almost to summer solstice, that it wouldn’t get dark until after nine.

  Mark said we’d get a sandwich on the boat that was picking us up in thirty minutes. He didn’t say we could get a sandwich; he said we would get a sandwich. Amazing how one little word, one little letter, really, can ruin a relationship.

  I basically just cleared out a spot there, right on the terrace of this hotel, and threw a shit-fit. I told him I had passed up about fifty hours of much-needed pub time, that I had lost a good two days of people-watching in Paris, all because of his neo-Nazi infatuation with making sure the train ran on time. I told him that the train had derailed and it was time to seek alternative means of transportation. It is not pleasant to have a roaring argument in front of foreigners in a strange land. On the plus side, they aren’t likely to tell everyone you know about it, but on the minus side, there is this feeling, especially in a tucked-away town such as Yvoire, that you are the sole representative of the United States of America, and that you are making a Bad Impression.