Summer of the Guns
© 2017 by Justin Daniel Herman
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Herman, Justin Daniel, 1928- author.
Title: Summer of the guns : a novel / by Justin Daniel Herman.
Description: Santa Fe : Published by Sunstone Press, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017003681 (print) | LCCN 2017021404 (ebook) | ISBN
9781611395068 | ISBN 9781632931757 (softcover : alk. paper)
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.H4938 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.1.H4938 Su 2017 (print) |
DDC [Fic]--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017003681
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This is a work of fiction. All events and people herein are products
of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual
people or events is purely coincidental.
Foreword
I am an old man. I grew up during the Great Depression and the Second World War. During that time, I met many wonderful people, the finest of whom was a girl named Billie Jane Moran. Over the years, we drifted apart, but recently her grown daughter came to me and told me she had passed. She also wanted to give me a handwritten manuscript that her mother had written. It turned out to be a memoir of Billie Jane’s girlhood. Billie Jane wanted me to have it because I was the only writer she knew. After reading it, I realized that the memoir deserved publication. I have set it forth here just as Billie Jane wrote it, with only a few changes to punctuation and grammar. One of the people Billie Jane wrote about, after all, was me, in another life lived long ago.
1
My name’s Billie Jane Moran, and if that sounds girlish don’t be misled. I was named after my grandma Billie Jane but no one ever used the “Jane” part, not unless they didn’t know her. She went by “Billie” all her life and so have I.
Grandma Billie died in 1938, a month before my mother passed. Since Papa was in prison, Sara—my six-year-old sister—and I went to live with my mother’s white sisters. They weren’t mean to us, but they really didn’t want us. When Papa came for us, Sara and I were so happy we started screaming. We never thought we’d see him again. He’d been given “life,” our aunties told us, but they released him for “hardship reasons.” Of course that wasn’t exactly true, but they didn’t know it.
Our aunties were so glad to get rid of us that they gave us their old Model T Ford truck and 30 dollars. After Papa got the truck running, we crowded into the bench seat. We were a family again. Papa in overalls, quiet as usual. Sara with her long red-brown curls and the Raggedy Ann doll that Mama had dyed with coffee. And me, dressed like a boy in hand-me-down pants, my curly hair tucked under an oversized baseball cap. Like I said, we were a family again, even if we didn’t look like it. Papa’s skin was like black walnut, he always said, but we children had lighter skin.
We headed out from the Ozarks and down to Dallas. From there, we passed across the hot, flat plains of Texas and the deserts of New Mexico. We seldom saw another car, not even police. Papa let me drive a little. I was tall for my age of twelve, and I listened carefully as Papa showed me how to shift and apply the brakes. When Papa saw how good I drove, he started calling me his “man-child.” I pretended not to like it, but secretly I did. I could do anything a boy could do, I figured, and most things a lot better.
When we got out of New Mexico, the hills became steep and soon turned into mountains. Papa took over the driving then and told us we were low on gas. The old truck was straining to make the grades as the gas needle pointed towards empty. We were greatly relieved when a town came into view. It was a mining town on the side of a mountain, each house higher than the one below. When we pulled into a one-pump gas station, an old man in a straw hat came walking out slowly to meet us. Just then another car came rolling up from the opposite direction.
Sara seemed frightened and hugged her doll close to her body. Papa put his arm around her and stroked her red-brown curls with his huge hand, his eyes fixated on the approaching car. He spoke softly as usual. “That’s a policeman,” he said, directing his words toward me. “If he says anything to you, just smile. Let me do the talking.”
My sister being deaf, she couldn’t hear him, but I could hear him fine. Only his words left me puzzled. For the first time ever, I sensed fear in his voice. I noticed his hand tremble a little as he pulled it away from Sara’s head.
When the old man reached us, he leaned his arm on Papa’s open window and spoke through a wad of tobacco. “You wanna fill up?” he asked. “You’ll have a long climb over that mountain there.”
He pointed toward a huge mass of rock that jutted up on the west side of town. “That road’s steep as hell,” he went on in a lisp. “Next town’s only forty miles or so but it’ll seem like a hundred.” I saw Papa take two dollars from the pocket of his blue work overalls and hand it to the old man.
“Give us what this’ll buy,” he said. “We’re headin’ to California.”
“That won’t get ya there,” said the attendant as he placed the nozzle of the gas pump into the tank behind the cab of the truck. I looked out the back window and watched the bubbles form in the glass top of the pump as he squeezed the handle. The rising fumes from the gas were strong, but almost pleasant in my nostrils
About then the police car pulled up on the other side of the pump. A fat man wearing a billed cap and a wrinkled brown uniform climbed out and looked us over. “Nice day, ain’t it, Elmer,” he said to the attendant, but his eyes stayed fixed on Papa.
“The days is all the same to me,” answered the man called Elmer. “I’d leave this job if I could make a living at somethin’ else. Jobs is hard to come by, though.”
“Too bad,” said Papa, “I was hoping for handy work hereabouts. I just need a few dollars to finish our trip. I can do most anything—carpenterin’, brick layin’, or even sweepin’ out.” There was strain in his voice like he was talking without hope. Sweat teared from his forehead and dripped down his brown cheeks.
“You’d better keep movin’,” said the policeman. “Ain’t nothin’ around here for ya. See that sign over there?” He pointed a fat finger toward a cardboard poster nailed to a tree trunk. It read “NEGROES NOT WELCOME AFTER DARK.”
My father sat stiffly, a defeated look on his face. His big shoulders slumped. The attendant replaced the nozzle in the pump and spat tobacco juice, splattering the policeman’s shoe. The cop’s face reddened. “I could run ya in for that, Elmer, but I won’t. I got bigger fish to fry.”
Then he looked at Papa. “You, mister, where’d you get them white children?” He came over to my side of the truck and stuck his face so close I could see the veins in his nose and smell the beer on his breath. His hard eyes raked over my sister and me until he seemed satisfied. “Why hell, they ain’t white at all,” he said. “Just a couple pretty mulattoes. That’s a fine-lookin’ blue dress you got, young lady.” He reached through the window of the truck and patt
ed my sister’s head. She frowned and pulled away, clutching her doll tighter against her body.
“Her mama made the dress,” said Papa. “Wasn’t but a month before she died. We’re just tryin’ to find a new home.” The policeman walked around the truck sizing up the worn tires and the rusted metal of the radiator.
“This thing ain’t safe on the road,” he said. “You’re dangerous to other folks. I’ll bet your brakes is bad, too. You better get out, mister, and show me your driver’s license.”
Just when Papa started to move we heard a screech of brakes. When I looked closer, I saw two cars narrowly avoid an accident. One of them, an old Buick sedan, was driven by a gray-haired woman who sat pale and shaken behind the steering wheel. The other car was a blue Model A Ford roadster. It hastily backed up, then headed away in a cloud of dust. One of the boys inside looked back at us briefly.
“Not in my town, you punks!” the fat cop shouted, hurriedly climbing into his patrol car and sending it hurtling after the escaping Model A.
“That was a close one,” said Elmer, squeezing the two dollars Papa had given him. “He might a given you real trouble if them boys hadn’t come along. Now get outta here while you can.”
Papa stammered his thanks. Then he climbed out to crank the old truck to life while I put the gearshift in neutral. After resuming his place behind the wheel, he guided the truck onto the pavement, heading in the same direction as the cop. No one said a word.
The road narrowed as we drove westward, winding its way through piney mountains. We could see thin clouds drifting across the road. “Sulfur,” said Papa, “comin’ from the smelters back there.” I caught a strong whiff of rotten eggs just then, but we were soon clear of it. The sky became turquoise blue as the old truck struggled up the winding hills. About an hour later we pulled into a town called Prescott. Its town square was guarded by a statue of a cowboy on a scared-looking horse. On the east side of the square, I saw a row of saloons where people milled back and forth. Some kind of celebration seemed to be going on, but we didn’t stop to find out what it was. We continued to head west until the grade became steep again. As we began to climb another hill, Papa turned to me and spoke loudly.
“There’s somethin’ I need to tell ya. Somethin’ bad. I told you a lie and I got to make it right.” Just then the truck’s engine coughed a little and cut out, but quickly resumed its steady roar. Papa gripped the wheel tighter as if that would make a difference. “Damn it! We’re running out of gas again.” Then he glanced over at me. “I don’t think you noticed but that old man at the gas station gave me about twice what my two dollars was worth. You don’t see many like him. Not white ones anyway.”
I didn’t like Papa talking that way but I understood what he meant.
“I have to tell you something,” he said, “something hard. I lied to you about my release.” I could hardly hear him over the engine noise. Then he started shouting, almost like he was mad. “They didn’t let me out of that damn prison like I told you. I broke out of it, Billie. And I nearly killed a guard doin’ it. I’m sure they’ve got wanted posters out on me by now.”
I looked at him with my brows furrowed, then stared ahead at the road. I guess I should have been frightened, but somehow I wasn’t. “You shouldn’t have been in jail at all!” I yelled back at him. “Everybody knew that guy robbed us. You had to go after him, Papa. You didn’t have a choice.”
“If he hadn’t hit his head after I took a swing at him, we wouldn’t be on the run. I surely didn’t mean to do it. But ain’t no jury gonna listen to a colored man.” Then he lapsed back into silence. “I had to break out, Billie,” he started again. “When the news came about you goin’ to live with your aunties, I had to do somethin’. Those two didn’t like me. Wasn’t no way in heck I was gonna leave you two with ‘em.” Then he forced his voice to sound cheerful. “That’s all history. I don’t wanna think about it. We’re goin’ to California, by God, and it’s all gonna be different. Lots of buildin’ goin’ on out there. Plenty of jobs for a man who knows carpentering. I read about it in a magazine. And they don’t push the race laws.”
“What’s ‘race laws’?” I asked.
“Somethin’ you shouldn’t worry about,” Papa replied. “When we moved from New York to Arkansas two years ago, we found out about race laws. I curse the day your mama inherited that damn farm. We’d have been better off in Harlem.”
The old truck slowed to a crawl as we started to climb another hill. Sara and I leaned toward the window to peer down the side of the mountain. We could see thin clouds again, drifting over the valley. We stared down a long time as the truck slowly climbed higher. When we finally passed over the highest point of the grade, Papa reached across Sara to shift down, but the engine sputtered and died. Papa wrenched the shifter back and forth but he couldn’t find a gear. He kept trying to force it but it only caused a grinding sound. The truck rolled forward in neutral, gathering speed as we descended. Papa’s knuckles turned white as he gripped the steering wheel and braked. We heard another grinding noise, then we could smell the heat from the metal. “Goddamn mechanical brakes,” Papa cursed. “They won’t stop nothin’. You hang on to Sara now. Protect her with your body if you have to.”
He was silent after that as he guided the careening truck around curves that hugged the mountainside. We barely missed an oncoming car. We passed a rest stop where people were enjoying the view. They turned to look at us as our brakes screeched again, but the old car didn’t slow.
I held on to Sara, who was screaming now. I could see my father’s lips moving, but he wasn’t cursing. I figured he was praying. The road was endless before us, no longer winding around the mountain but stretching straight into the valley. The old truck shook and rattled so loudly I thought it would fly apart. Then we saw a highway patrolman heading the other way. We went by him in a flash as he gaped at us out his open window.
Ahead of us an old car loomed, moving slowly, its driver unaware as we rapidly gained on him. The grade was still downward; our truck wasn’t slowing. I heard Papa screaming out, “oh my God, help us!” Then he yelled for me to help him turn the steering wheel. I let Sara go and pulled on the wheel as hard as I could.
Just as we seemed sure to collide with the other car, Papa and I twisted the wheel enough so we barely missed it. We went completely off the road, crashing through brush and over rocks until we finally slowed to a stop. “Praise the Lord!” Papa blurted. Sara and me sat there shaking. The hot fumes from the brakes were so strong that the truck seemed about to catch fire. After a while, we heard a siren and a squeal of brakes from the road as the patrol car we’d just passed pulled up in a cloud of dust. An officer came running over to our truck, now mired in the brush that had saved our lives.
“You okay, mister?” he yelled as he approached Papa’s side of the truck. Then he looked inside and saw Sara and me. “Good God, you’ve got children in here! Are you crazy? Are you completely out of your head?”
“No,” Papa answered as he stepped from the truck, still shaking a little. “I’m just out of gas. I couldn’t have turned that steering wheel without my girl helping. She saved our lives. She’s my man-child.”
The tall policeman walked around the truck, then looked at me and smiled. “You’re safe now,” he said in a kindly voice. Then he walked over a few yards from the truck and stood looking downward. “You may be out of gas, mister,” he yelled back at Papa, “but you’re damn sure not out of luck. Come take a look at this.”
My father walked over to him with me right behind. The view was frightening. Our truck had come to a stop no more than thirty feet or so from the edge of a canyon. Papa just stood absolutely stock still. Then he looked up and spoke softly. “Thank you, Lord, you heard me.”
The patrolman introduced himself as Captain Sykes of the highway patrol. “I supervise this stretch of highway,” he said as he surveyed the damage to our old truck. “Damn but you really are lucky,” he exclaimed as he stooped to peer under
the truck. “You don’t even have a flat tire, and your springs don’t seem to be broken. I guess we can tow you back to the highway.” Then he hesitated, turning back and sizing up Papa with a stern expression. “You still got some answering to do, though. Why were you free-wheeling?” He took off his hat while he was waiting for Papa to answer, revealing a receding line of sweaty brown hair.
When Papa finally spoke, he was hesitant, as if he didn’t expect to be believed. “We’d just passed the crest of the hill and I was in neutral, shifting down. Then the motor quit. I couldn’t get the damn thing back in gear. That’s all there was to it. I’d never free-wheel on purpose, not with my girls in the car and not any other time, neither.”
Captain Sykes kept his sober expression, then smiled suddenly. “Well, as I said, you still got luck on your side. I believe you. Now let’s get this thing out of here.” It took half an hour to attach the chain and pull the old truck back up to the road where Captain Sykes and Papa spent more time looking for damage.
“The way I see it,” the patrolman said, “this truck was in such bad shape it took a miracle to even get you this far.” He studied the Arkansas license plate on the rusted tailgate and paused, scratching his head. “There’s a wanted poster out on an escaped convict from Arkansas. They want him pretty bad back there.” Then he looked over at Papa. “But he sure as hell wouldn’t be traveling with children, now would he?” I could see Papa’s fist double like he was getting ready for a fight.
Sara took Captain Sykes’ hand as he retrieved her doll from the truck. She accepted the doll in her other arm, clutching it to her face and kissing it. Captain Sykes knelt down and put his hand on her shoulder, almost like she was his own child. “I can see you love your doll,” he said. Then he paused and looked at me. “You’re too pretty to be called ‘man-child,’ he said quietly. Then he cleared his throat and looked back at Papa. “I guess we better get you people on your way.” The tension passed and Papa’s fists relaxed into open hands.
Summer of the Guns Page 1