“What’s a caleche, Nat?”
“It’s a little one-horse tourist buggy. If you ever go up there, you’ll see ’em all over the place, especially down in Old Montreal, pulled around by these terribly broken-down old horses about ready for the glue factory. Once in the wintertime I even came on a bunch of people cooking one of those horses whole right in the street over a big fire, like an ox. Anyway, I liked it down there. It was a lively place, just like St. Catherine Street. Until I had the trouble.”
“So what was the trouble?”
“I’m coming to that. One fall evening when I’d stayed on after school for soccer practice, I was coming back through that market about dusk. The street was full of cornhusks and cabbage leaves and broken pieces of wooden crates, and I was just ambling along when I felt this squishy thing hit the back of my neck and slide down between my shoulders. When I turned around, here was this gang of boys on the corner in front of a candy store, smoking cigarettes and laughing. One boy, who was a good deal bigger and older than the rest, stepped out and yelled something to me. I’d seen him around before, that one. He was their ringleader, a big hulking boy with a clubfoot. Instead of a shoe he wore this horrible black boxlike affair on his bad foot. I don’t know what his real name was but I’d heard him called Ti Chevaux. In French that means Little Horse, and he was about as big as a horse, too. I think he was slow-witted, to tell you the truth. Anyway, he shouted something and threw another tomato, and this one hit me square on the front of my school uniform jacket, right above the crest. That really made me mad.
“I was scared, too. There were half a dozen or so boys in that gang, and I was alone. But as scared as I was of Ti Chevaux, I was more scared of being thought a coward, or thinking myself one. So I did a stupid thing. I went back and challenged him to fight. Right there in front of his gang.”
“Oh, boy, Nat. That was stupid, if I do say so. And he cleaned your clock, right? This Ti got you down and put that big black box to you and that’s why you don’t want to fight Frenchy.”
Nat shook his head impatiently. “Stop interrupting, Kinneson. Of course he didn’t clean my clock. Didn’t I tell you Dad had taught me to box? He was a heavyweight Olympic boxer, in case you didn’t know, and he saw to it I could use my hands, too. He said the time would probably come when I’d need to. And I figured this was the time so I mopped up the street with that boy. The problem was, he just wouldn’t quit. Every time I knocked him down he got back up and came at me again, kicking and punching and roaring, with that gang of his yelling ‘Ti! Ti! Ti!’ to spur him on, don’t you know. Finally a policeman came along and stopped it, but that was after I’d broken the boy’s nose and shut one eye and done who knows what other damage to the poor devil.”
“So why don’t you just clean Frenchy’s clock too, then? I don’t understand, Nat.”
“I haven’t told you the worst part.”
“What, did the cop take you home to your grandmother?”
“No, he didn’t seem to mind seeing Ti get his comeuppance. The worst part was that I enjoyed beating that boy. I wanted him to keep getting up so I could keep hitting him. I wanted to put him in hospital, or worse. It didn’t matter to me that he was crippled or slow-witted or what. I was like . . . like an animal. It was as though I was taking out all my frustrations on that poor chap—all the times I’d been called a name and my mother’s death and Dad’s being away and everything. Afterwards I told Gram and she made me promise I’d never fight again. I was very willing to promise, too, because after I’d had a chance to think about it, the one I was really most scared of was myself. Now do you see why I won’t fight Frenchy?”
I nodded. But at the time, all I understood for certain was that Nat Andrews was my friend and his life had been infinitely more complicated and difficult than mine, and I had been too quick, far too quick, to assume that because I would react a certain way in a certain situation, he should react the same way.
“I’m tired, Kinneson. I’d like for you to go home now. No more explanations. No more stories from the dark past. Just go home and keep your mouth shut, if that’s remotely possible.”
Running hard, I swerved into the lane between the hotel and the commission sales barn, past Bumper Stevens’ Cadillac and dark cattle truck, into forbidden precincts, where men traded cattle, as they had done for a hundred years, told obscene jokes, and gambled late at night, where, it was darkly rumored, whole farms had sometimes changed hands over the turn of a card; where, when the place was otherwise empty, town boys sometimes took “wild” girls; where (I would learn later) certain poor women outcasts had actually been auctioned off for the night, like cattle, to the highest bidder after the regular sale ended; and where Frenchy LaMott had grown up brawling with anyone who would fight him in the ring while the after-hours crowd bet on winners, exactly as they did on Resolvèd’s cockfights.
To the right and left, penned calves bleated continually. From somewhere in the barn’s recesses, a bull roared. Fleeting thoughts of Ordney Gilson and that fateful New Year’s Eve murder crossed my mind.
A single lighted bulb hung at the end of the aisle that sloped toward the auction ring. It was slick as ice from cattle urine and manure and I skidded and nearly fell. I kept running, knowing that if I paused for so much as a second I would lose my nerve.
Murmuring voices. Dark bulky forms crowded around a wooden ring. The smells of whiskey and tobacco. Older town boys, some I didn’t know by name, sprawled in the rickety bleachers. And lounging shirtless in his filthy jeans and battered engineer boots on a hay bale in the ring, his dark shaggy hair hanging over his eyes, was Frenchy LaMott.
As I vaulted over the wooden sideboards he stood up. “So where you monkey pal, Kin—”
I never stopped. It was absolutely essential that I get in the first one or two punches if I was to punch at all. But instead of hitting Frenchy LaMott I surprised both him and myself by lowering my head like a ram and butting him right in the pit of the stomach. To my astonishment, I knocked him over the hay bale and up against the slats at the rear of the ring. I must have knocked his breath out, too, although he was still half-standing, he was bent over gasping and grabbing his stomach. Here was my golden opportunity.
I hit him just once, squarely on the nose. I swung again, a wild haymaker, but he had already covered his head with his forearms. The second punch glanced off his bony elbows and stung my hand. Then he was swarming all over me, punching, kicking, kneeing, fighting the way he had fought far bigger and stronger boys from the time he was eight or nine years old and Bumper first put him in the ring.
Blood was everywhere; some was Frenchy’s, most was mine. I fell backward over the bale and tried to roll away. There was no place to go. Frenchy was driving his steel-toed engineer boots into my arms and legs. I rolled into a corner, and he had me at his mercy. I actually thought he might kill me.
“GET OFF HIM.”
Through the blood on my face I caught a glimpse of a yellow shirt and black baseball pants. The fearful kicking stopped.
“What the hell’s going on here?” Charlie roared.
He was holding Frenchy with one hand by the back of the neck, and as big a boy as Frenchy was, he looked like a puppet thrashing in my brother’s grip.
Bumper Stevens said, “Just a couple of young bucks duking it out, Charlie. Nothing serious.”
“Bullshit!” Charlie said.
“Go wash up,” he told Frenchy, and half threw him toward the gate in the ring. He pulled me to my feet and turned to face the crowd of older boys and men in the grandstand.
“If this is your idea of a good time, you’re all bent. Pitting two kids against each other gives you your thrills? I can’t believe it!”
He paused, spat into the straw and manure at our feet, then turned back and roared, “All right, assholes. You want to see a fight? I’ll take on any three of you. Come on,” my brother said coaxingly, ominously, beckoning with his finger. “How about you, Stevens? You haven’t had your
jaw broken yet this month. Pick any two of these rummies to bring in with you. Pick three or four.”
“We don’t want no trouble with you, Charlie K,” Bumper said. “Settle down, now. No call to get all het up with your own good friends and gentle neighbors.”
“No,” Charlie said, “let’s get along with our own good friends and gentle neighbors and just persecute strangers, especially if they aren’t the same color we are, right, Bumper?”
Charlie whirled back to point at the retreating figures in the grandstand, now clearing out like Athena Allen’s eighth graders on Friday afternoon.
My brother spat again in disgust and called after them, “If I ever hear of any of you bothering my brother or any of his friends, including the Andrews, in any way at all, or putting young LaMott or anyone else up to bothering them, you won’t travel so far that I won’t find you. Then you know who I’ll be defending over in that courthouse? Myself, that’s who, for aggravated assault with two deadly weapons. These two.”
Charlie held up his fists, but by now the grandstand was empty.
He looked at me and grinned. “Come on, Sugar Ray,” he said. “Let’s go get you cleaned up.”
“Hi, sweetie,” Charlie said into the phone. “Jimmy got in a little fracas with another kid tonight. He needs some motherly medical attention.”
Charlie looked over at me, sitting at his cluttered kitchen table with an ice pack over my left eye, and winked as he listened to Athena’s reply. “It won’t take three minutes, hon. Just to check and make sure he doesn’t have any broken bones or loose teeth.”
Again Charlie listened. With my good eye, I read his statistics from the Outlaws’ first fifteen games of the season, which he’d posted up on his old-fashioned refrigerator, the kind with a round motor on top. He was currently batting .434.
“All right!” Charlie said and hung up. “She’s coming, buddy! This should work out well for both of us.”
It would work out well for me, at least. I would a hundred times rather be examined by Athena than by Painless Doc Harrison, who had not come by his sobriquet because of any inclination toward or expertise in humane medical methods. I was scared to death of him and enormously grateful to my brother for calling Athena, whatever ulterior motives he might have.
She arrived in the judge’s black Lincoln within two or three minutes and began by carefully checking inside my mouth to see if I still had all my teeth. She didn’t say “Open wide” or condescend to me in any other way, just very gently tried to wobble my teeth.
She bent back my head to look at my swollen lips and nose. Her dark hair brushed my face and I caught a scent of some faint deansmelling perfume. A thrill shot through me as she carefully pressed the bridge of my nose, checking for broken bones. My face got red and Charlie laughed.
“Relax and enjoy it, buddy. It isn’t every young blade that’s lucky enough to have the fair and frolicsome Athena Allen hold him in her arms for five minutes.”
“Quit picking on him, Charlie,” Athena said. Then she gave a little jump and scream. “Damn you! Cut that out.”
I suspected that Charlie had given her a pinch on the fanny. He was always doing that when he thought no one was watching, that or putting his hand up her leg or inside her sweater, which to my bafflement seemed to embarrass her and please her at the same time.
“That eye looks pretty bad to me,” Charlie said. “You get any licks in before Frenchy went to town on you?”
I nodded. “One. I made his nose bleed all over.”
“Good. But what in the world possessed you to go in there in the first place?”
“Well, he wanted to fight Nat, but Nat wouldn’t go, so I thought—I don’t know what I thought, that I ought to stand up for my friend, I guess.”
I desperately wanted to explain to Charlie and Athena why Nat wouldn’t fight Frenchy. But I’d given my word to Nat not to breathe a word of what he’d told me.
Charlie reached into his refrigerator and got out two bottles of beer, opened them, and handed one to Athena. She took a long drink. I liked the way that, instead of sipping, she drank like Charlie, taking two or three swallows at a time.
Charlie shook his head. “I appreciate what you were trying to do for your friend, Jimmy, but I can tell you right now that it won’t work. What Al Quinn and Justin and those guys were saying on the common Saturday is the truth. Nat’s got to fight his own battles.”
“Probably Nat thinks it wouldn’t do much good to fight Frenchy,” Athena said as she checked my sore ribs. “It might even make things worse. I imagine he’s heard these slurs off and on all his life. It must bother him, but he may actually have come to expect it.”
“His old man almost seems to enjoy a good row,” Charlie said. “But I’m sure you’re right about why Nat won’t fight. He didn’t act afraid when Frenchy braced him over on the common. In fact, I think you’ll see that when and if the time comes when Nat’s back is to the wall, Frenchy’ll rue the day he ever laid eyes on him. In the meantime, Jim, just try to be his friend. Don’t fight any more of his battles for him. Old Painless Doc doesn’t need business that badly. Right, sweetie?”
Athena took another long swallow of beer. “Charlie’s right, Jim. And don’t blame Frenchy too much. No doubt Bumper Stevens is putting him up to all of this. My uncle Armand told me that the day Doctor H unwired Bumper’s jaw, he came in the hotel and made some pretty nasty threats about getting the Andrews out of town before the summer’s over. Uncle Armand said he knows Bumper’s a big blowhard, but the more he thought about what Bumper said, the more it bothered him. He actually went over to see Zack Barrows about it, but Zack just laughed and said that Bumper was all talk and wouldn’t do anything.”
“I hope not, for Bumper’s sake,” Charlie said, laughing. “Reverend Andrews can take care of himself. My only reservation about the fella is that he says he’s too busy this summer to play on my town team. Who ever heard of somebody being too busy to play baseball?
“Now that we know you aren’t dead, kiddo, go curl up on the couch in the other room and go to sleep,” Charlie told me. “I’ll call old finely tuned Ruthie and explain that you’re okay and going to spend the night. This girl”—draping his arm around Athena’s shoulder as though she were one of his baseball buddies—“and I have to have a long, serious talk.”
I lay down on the couch in Charlie’s tiny living room, and Athena put a blanket over me and tucked it in around my shoulders. Then she and Charlie drank some more beer in the kitchen while I tried to sleep. But my eye throbbed like crazy and my side ached where Frenchy had kicked me.
I looked up at the wall. In the dim light from the kitchen I could just make out the pinups that Charlie had literally papered the inside of his living room with. Even the ceiling was covered with magazine cut-outs of tough-looking gun molls from True Detective and sultry-eyed young lovelies from Argosy and Esquire and calendars advertising automobile parts and farm machinery. Despite my discomfort, I felt a vague but powerful longing for . . . I wasn’t sure what.
I must have fallen asleep. The next thing I knew, I heard a thump, like someone tripping, and people laughing softly like laughter in a dream.
“Stop it, Charlie!”
The trailer was totally dark now, but there was enough moonlight coming through the window for me to make out two forms in the doorway to Charlie’s tiny bedroom.
“Stop it!” Athena said again in a breathless half-whisper. “Not with Jimmy here. What if he wakes up?”
“He isn’t going to wake up. He’s dead beat, so to speak. Come on, hon. I need an experienced teacher. One with your impeccable credentials.”
Athena giggled. “You need a bath, preferably a cold one, and a few cups of black coffee. We aren’t even officially engaged anymore, remember?”
“We’ll be engaged in five minutes, I promise,” Charlie said. “Come on. What is it with you recently?”
“I said, not with Jimmy here. Don’t you have any common sense at all?”
“You sound like my father. ‘Grow up.’ ‘Run for county attorney.’ ‘Use some common sense.’ It’ll be more fun with Jim there. We’ll have to be extra quiet, like the old days.”
“The old days are gone,” Athena said, and I saw the smaller form twist away and out the door, followed closely by my brother, still talking, almost pleading with her now.
Outside a car door slammed, then a second or two later an engine came to life and Athena’s car sped off down the county road toward the village—leaving me with more to think about than my fight with Frenchy or the buxom Miss February, smiling coyly down from the wall above me.
6
Charlie must have forewarned my parents about my battered condition and its causes, because the next morning when I limped home after he fed me a loggers’ breakfast of eggs and pancakes and pork chops cooked extra crisp, just the way he loved them, Mom told me to stay away from Frenchy LaMott and the commission sales barn in the future. My father, I think, was secretly proud of my loyalty to Nat, misguided though it was. But all he said was that I ought to use a hay hook on Frenchy the next time I tackled him, because he was probably impervious to anything less lethal.
Dad had a church trustees’ meeting at the parsonage that morning, at which Reverend Andrews intended to announce his plans for the big church fundraiser. “What are you going to do today, Ezzard Charles?” he asked me.
Although it hurt, I had to laugh through my swollen lips. I told him I’d planned to take Nat crawfishing this morning but in view of the way I looked I’d rather wait a couple of days before going overstreet.
“Get your crawfish trap,” Dad said. “We’ll walk over to the parsonage together.”
A Stranger in the Kingdom Page 15