I caught up with him just as he was coming to the edge of the trees.
“Okay, you ain’t gonna believe what I’m about to show you,” he said. He led me out of the trees and into the clearing that was right at the edge of the water.
And there it was. And he was right, it was a Tom and Huck sort of thing.
It was a tent. A white pup tent, set up by somebody who either didn’t know there was snakes everywhere or didn’t care. There was a few other things scattered around too, like some food cans and the remains of a campfire. Also there was a mirror and a razor next to the tent.
Eddie grinned like a possum.
“Cool, huh?” he said.
“Whose is it?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I only found it last night and nobody was up here. Maybe the fella that built it is laying off in the woods, dead by a water moccasin or something. Come on, let’s look at it.”
We went and looked around the tent, watching our step so we didn’t accidentally wake up no snakes or nothing. I looked inside, where there was a sleeping bag and a whole mess of supplies. Like a carton of cigarettes, a mess of baked beans, and six cans of tuna.
“Holy cow,” I said out loud. “I think this is the fella that’s been stealing groceries.”
Eddie didn’t pay me no never mind and felt the campfire remains.
“It’s still warm,” he said, just as excited as a kid at his birthday party. “That means whoever this is was here recent.”
“And might be coming back soon,” I said. His grin got even bigger.
“Yeah, wouldn’t that be something?” He went into the tent. “Oh, cool!” He came out and was waving his newest discovery around in the air.
It was a gun.
“Tarnation, Eddie!” I said. “Put that back and let’s get the heck out of here.”
“What? If I got it, then he don’t.” He went back in and kept rummaging through the things. I went back to feeling nervous and watching my feet for snakes.
I went over to the mirror with the razor next to it. There was also a little can of shaving soap and a bottle of aftershave. Almost without thinking, I sniffed of the aftershave.
Wintergreen. Real familiar wintergreen.
Then I spied the mirror and what was down there in the corner of it.
It was a picture of Sora.
I grabbed that picture and looked at it real close, just to make sure. She looked less skinny in the face. Maybe less pregnant, too. I looked on the back, it was dated 1960.
I started to feel sick to my stomach.
“I think we ought to leave,” I said.
He popped his head out of the tent.
“What? No way, this is our big Tom and Huck adventure,” he said.
“No it ain’t. We ain’t Tom and Huck no more,” I said. “We’re Johnny and Eddie, and we ain’t got no business being out here.”
His face soured and he got real mad at me.
“Fine, get on and run. I don’t care,” he said as he went back into the tent. “But leave me the keys so I can get home.”
I nodded even though he couldn’t see me and I dropped the keys next to the mirror on the ground. I put Sora’s picture in my pocket and ran off through the trees to the road. I had to get as far away from there as possible.
I walked about a mile or two down the road to our hill. I was trying my best to stop feeling like I needed to sleep for the next few months until everything blew over when I heard a honking coming from behind me. Carlos’s truck passed me and stopped on the side of the road. He hollered out the window.
“¿Qué pasa, amigo?”
“Hey, you headed up to my house?” I asked. He nodded. “Could you give me a ride?”
“Any day of the week, my friend,” he said. I got in and we headed up the road. He whistled a song that I’d heard him play before on his trumpet, in another one of them mental photographs I had in my head, back when he would wear a white suit and a red flower and he had a whole band behind him in Mr. Thomassen’s club. And Ma would dance.
“How was school?” he asked.
“I don’t know, it was school, I guess.” I eyed his face real good. “How’s the Cosa Nostra?”
He grinned like he always did when I started talking about stuff I wasn’t supposed to know about.
“They’re nervous, I believe.”
“What is ‘Cosa Nostra’ anyway, Spanish? It sounds Spanish.” He’d been giving me some Spanish lessons off and on, which was real nice. I still couldn’t figure out why there was so many llamas in Spain, but other than that I was catching on.
“It’s Italian,” he said. “It means ‘Our Thing.’ But it sounds similar to the Spanish. What would ‘Our Thing’ be en español ?”
I thought for a second.
“¿Nuestra Cosa?” I asked.
“¡Bravo!”
“But what is it?” I asked.
“Las cinco familias. Los italianos de Nueva York y Chicago,” he said real fast. Sometimes he forgot that I wasn’t like Mr. Thomassen. When they’d get to talking, they’d mix up Spanish and English together all the time.
“What?”
He snapped his fingers in the air for a second while he tried to translate himself in his head.
“The Sicilian Mafia,” he said. “From New York and Chicago. And other places as well.”
“You mean like Capone?”
“Cuh-pown,” he said. “Is that Italian?”
“Yeah, I think he was. He was a gangster from Chicago.”
“Then, yes, like Capone,” he said.
“So you Three Caballeros are fighting against the Mafia?” I asked, and my heart started racing. “Are y’all crazy?”
He laughed and I reckoned maybe he was.
“Nosotros no le caemos bien,” he said. “We’re pains in their butts. We’re simply making it as difficult as possible for them to be successful in this country.”
We pulled into our driveway.
“No worries, amigo,” he said. “No se puede hacer tortilla sin romper los huevos.”
I didn’t take the time to try and figure that out, ’cause I was too busy being worried. I got out and went inside to maybe lie on the couch and watch some TV or something to get my mind off of things.
But the couch was occupied. Sora and Martha was sitting on it with Willie’s tape recorder set up in between them and Martha was holding the microphone.
I’d caught Martha midsentence. She hurried and shut off the tape recorder.
“Hey, Johnny,” she said. “About time you came home.”
“What are you doing?” I asked. She winced when I said it, either ’cause I’d said it really rude or ’cause girls just don’t like getting asked to explain themselves.
“I have to interview people for your biography,” she said.
That stupid biography. It was going to be the death of me. Literally.
“So, why you interviewing her?” I asked. “She don’t know me.”
This time Sora winced. I was batting a thousand with the ladies. Must have been that Cannon charm.
“You’d be surprised, actually,” Martha said. “Tommy told her a heck of a lot.”
I looked over at the mantel where stupid Robin was perched, like a goblin just laughing at me. Tommy hadn’t told her enough.
“Where’s my pa?” I spit out.
“In his shed in the backyard,” Sora said. I turned and hurried through the house toward the back door, tripped over a fancy rug that didn’t have no business being there, and knocked over a vase I didn’t recognize, full of flowers that belonged outside and water that would have been better fit for drinking. Sora must have been decorating. Martha tried to hide a giggle but didn’t do a very good job with it.
I hurried out the door and went to Pa’s radio shack. I stopped short of knocking ’cause I could hear him and Carlos talking to somebody over the radio.
“—the trucks leave for Chicago tomorrow night,” whoever they was talking to said.
“Yeah, though I don’t know how—”
“Just tell me,” Carlos said. “Rats or beetles?”
“The big guy is scared of rats,” the fella said. “But I don’t get what that does for you.”
“Simple,” Carlos said. “When the truck arrives in Chicago and they open it up, they will be greeted by hundreds of rats that have chewed holes in all their bags.”
“And pooped in all their drugs,” Pa said with a chuckle.
“You know they’re going to kill you someday, right?” the fella said. “When they find out who the Three Caballeros are, they’ll put your kidneys in their trophy racks.”
“Which is why they aren’t going to find out,” Carlos said. “Or they might learn some other facts about you that will make them much, much angrier.”
I was listening real hard, my heart just about ready to blow up in my chest, and that’s why I jumped when the screen door slammed behind me.
Martha marched out of my house and came over to me. I moved away from the shack so she wouldn’t hear none of what was being said.
“What is wrong with you?” she asked. She seemed mad enough to cuss.
“Why are you up here talking to Sora?” I asked. “And why are you so all-fired interested in finding out my story?”
“You won’t tell me anything,” she said. “We’re supposed to be friends, but you won’t even give me a straight answer about the things that happened when you were a kid.”
“Because I don’t want folks knowing all that stuff.”
“But it’s all part of your story,” she said. “It’s not like you can deny it.”
“But, see, that’s the problem,” I said. “To you, that’s what it all is. Stories. But for me, they ain’t stories, they’re memories. And they’re memories I ain’t figured out how to deal with yet.”
She looked at my eyes like she wasn’t sure if I was being sincere or not.
“And anyway,” I said, “Sora ain’t got no business telling them at all. She wasn’t a part of any of it, so she don’t know.”
“But she does know,” she said. “Tommy told her a lot. A lot that I didn’t even know. Like how you were still getting surgeries after you moved here to Cullman, and how you wore a catheter until second grade.”
“And you think I want you to know that stuff?” I asked, and I could feel my cheeks turning red.
“She told me other stuff, too,” she said. “Not embarrassing stuff. Stuff from before your accident.”
I started panicking.
“You didn’t ask her about Captain Morris, did you?”
For some reason, that made her even more mad.
“You asked me not to, didn’t you?” she said. “Do you really think I would do that? Why don’t you trust me?”
I didn’t know what to say to that, or to anything else, so I did something that probably ain’t smart to do, especially to the girl you’re hoping to woo.
“I’m going hunting,” I said, and I turned to walk away.
She grabbed my arm.
“Are you for real right now?” she asked.
“Why don’t you go interview Willie, too?” I asked. “Get as much information from him as you can before his ma makes them move off to Michigan or something.”
She let go of my arm and her eyes got big.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, you don’t know?” I was sounding real nasty, but I didn’t much care. “See, I guess while you was so busy trying to dig up all my secrets, you missed the fact that Mrs. Parkins is trying to get them to get out of here on account of all the segregation and Bob Gorman running for sheriff and such.”
“Willie might be moving?” she asked. She suddenly looked ready to cry.
“Yeah, but don’t you worry. We’ll always have the memories for you to poke at and write papers about.”
With that still hanging in the air, I turned again and ran off, leaving her standing there looking as lonesome as a lost kitten. I got my gun and went on out into the woods. Alone.
I had a feeling I might need to get used to that.
CHAPTER FIVE
SACRAMENTS
That Sunday morning, I was all ready to head on down to Colony and see how them folks was handling things, but Mr. Thomassen called us early and insisted we come to church in Cullman. Which didn’t matter one way or the other to Pa, but going to that church for me was always the worst part of my week. It was dull and boring and it smelled like old folks and hymnals. I decided to wear my school pants instead of my church pants out of protest. It made me feel a little better.
Bob Gorman was one of the head deacons, which meant I had to see him every time we walked through them doors, ’cause he was always greeting folks at the front. That was going to make it real uncomfortable when we got there, but I reckoned I could slip by him and go get a head start on my nap in the back.
But he had a different idea.
We got to church that morning nice and early, so Pa could hit the altars for a good while ’cause he wanted to have a little talk with Jesus and pass on messages to Ma. And maybe Tommy, if him and Jesus was finally on speaking terms. Which was a long shot, but Pa reckoned a slim chance is still a chance, so he did it anyway.
Bob grabbed me by the arm before I even got all the way through the front doors.
“Boy, why don’t you come help me set up the sacraments?” he asked, and before I could answer, he dragged me through the church to the kitchen. I wasn’t exactly sure what the sacraments was, but I reckoned it was a fancy word for a whipping. Maybe with a sack of mints or something. I really hoped it didn’t hurt as bad as it sounded. And that they wasn’t peppermint. I hated peppermint.
He cornered me against the yellow wall next to the refrigerator. I got myself ready for the impending beating. I tried to figure which hand he was going to use to sacrament me first and which pocket he was going to pull the sack from.
“What was you doing up at them Tiggers’ house?” he growled in my face. He didn’t look to be ready to start sacramenting, so I relaxed a bit.
“They’re my friends. What was you doing up there?” I asked.
“Pretty sure I made my intentions crystal clear.”
“Yup, I’d say you did.”
Right then, Pastor Pinckney came in.
“What’s going on in here, Bob?” he asked.
“Just getting the grape juice to set up the sacraments,” Bob said. I tried to figure how juice was going to play into it. Maybe he was going to pour it in the wounds or something. Sacraments sounded brutal. “This young fella volunteered to help me.”
I was waiting for Pastor Pinckney to jump in and tell him we didn’t do that sort of thing at church, or at least that Bob ought not to waste the grape juice from communion on sacramenting me, but he didn’t say nothing about it.
“Well, the trays and cups are in my office. Ethan is in from seminary, so I thought I’d let him officiate.”
Bob got the bottle of grape juice from the fridge and started toward the pastor’s office. I reckoned we wasn’t going to be doing no sacramenting now, so I started back to the sanctuary to find my sleeping spot. Bob stopped me.
“We ain’t done talking. Come with me.”
We went into the pastor’s office, which had a great big oak desk with all sorts of items from around the world placed on it that Pastor Pinckney’d gotten from visiting missionaries. No shrunken heads, though. Which made all them boring missionary sermons seem like a real waste. There was also about four or five bookshelves with all them books he needed to write his sermons, including a joke book, which I didn’t reckon he’d ever read in his life.
And, in the corner, there sat Ethan Pinckney, still just as skinny and nervous as he had been when he used to run around in high school with Tommy. It was funny, I hadn’t thought about them days in a long time. Ethan, Tommy, and Mark, or as we called him now, Mr. Braswell, used to go
around raising hell all over the county, usually as sauced as a rack of ribs, and almost always with five or six girls in tow. But you wouldn’t know it to look at Ethan now. He was wearing his pa’s preacher robe and trying to memorize his lines from the Bible. His hair was slicked back and his face was clean except for a caterpillar mustache under his nose. And he was talking real pretty-like.
“FOR I HAVE RECEIVED FROM THE LORD THAT WHICH ALSO I DELIVERED UNTO YOU . . . ,” he said, then he double-checked his Bible for the next part.
“Pipe down, Ethan,” Bob said. “We’ve got to get the sacraments ready.”
Ethan nodded and didn’t look worried about me getting pummeled one bit. Which meant he’d make a great preacher someday. He lowered his voice and took to whispering.
“FOR I HAVE RECEIVED FROM THE LORD THAT WHICH ALSO I DELIVERED UNTO YOU . . . ”
Bob pulled the brass communion trays out from under Pastor Pinckney’s desk and started pouring grape juice in the little cups. Oh, so that was the sacraments? Jeepers, the Bible needed to have a glossary or something. Not that I’d read it, but still.
“Did they say anything after I left?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. “Folks don’t usually stay quiet for too long.”
“Well, what did they say?”
“What’s it to you?” I asked.
“THAT THE LORD JESUS,” Ethan said, “THE SAME NIGHT IN WHICH HE WAS BETRAYED . . .” He checked his Bible again.
“Did they say who they’re going to vote for?” he asked.
“Last I heard there wasn’t no candidates yet,” I said. “Unless you’re saying you’re running.”
“TOOK BREAD: AND WHEN HE GAVE THANKS, HE BRAKE IT . . .”
“I ain’t said nothing official yet,” he said. “But did they mention that? Do they think I’d be a good sheriff?”
“AND SAID, TAKE, EAT: THIS IS MY BODY, WHICH IS BROKEN FOR YOU . . .”
“I don’t know,” I said. “The sheriff is supposed to do a whole lot less lawbreaking than I reckon you’re used to.”
“THIS DO IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME.” Ethan had his eyes closed, trying his best to say it all from memory.
The Struggles of Johnny Cannon Page 9