by Paul Levine
I had forgotten about that scheme. Just then, somebody behind me said, “Gregory Peck would have taken vegetables, instead of worthless pieces of paper.”
I turned around. Kip was barefoot and wore torn jeans and a faded T-shirt.
“Vegetables?” I asked him.
“In To Kill a Mockingbird, he takes collard greens as his attorney’s fee when a client can’t pay. At least you can eat them.”
“Thanks for the advice, kid. Why don’t you see if Judgment at Nuremberg is on? It’ll keep you busy for three and a half hours.”
The kid pouted and backed out of the kitchen. In a moment, I heard him clicking through the channels in the other room. Now Granny was scowling at me. “Jake, I want you to be nice to Kippers.”
“Okay, okay.”
“And I want you to represent him.”
“He needs a lawyer? What happened, did they fail to deliver his TV Guide?”
“It’s a little problem in Juvenile Court. I’d rather let Kippers tell you about it.”
“Let him hire Gregory Peck. He works cheap.”
“Jake!”
I stuck an index finger into the sizzling lime-tomato concoction and burned myself. “Holy blazes,” I said, repeating a phrase I’d learned from Granny in my youth. I sucked on my finger and turned the heat down on the burner. After a moment, I said, “Okay, I’ll get the little brat off, even if he poisoned the nasal spray of the entire PTA.”
Granny gave me a smile. She still had all her own teeth, despite fifty years of opening beer bottles without an opener. Then she took a wooden spoon that was older than me and started stirring the sauce. “Good. You’ve got to promise me you’ll treat him like family.”
“Like family? Why?”
“Because he’s your nephew,” Granny Lassiter said, never looking up from the simmering sauce.
Chapter 5
One of Us Was Dead
I thought I heard a faint knock in the engine of my canary yellow Olds 442. Like its owner, the convertible is beginning to show its age, which is only natural, since it is vintage 1968. The Olds doesn’t have a tape deck, a CD player, a cellular phone, or a fax machine. It does have a radio, but no FM band. Three hundred fifty cubic inches under the hood, a four-barrel carburetor, a black canvas top, and a five-speed stick, it is—again, like its owner—a throwback.
On this warm, humid Monday morning, my ancient but amiable chariot, its top down, was growling north on Useless 1, the old highway that runs from Maine to Key West. The radio was tuned to a sports talk show at the low end of the dial, but every time a cloud passed over, the speaker crackled with static, and Fidel Castro or one of his cousins came on the air yelling about the imperialistas. It made me miss the latest report on which Dolphin free agents signed multiyear, mega-bucks contracts, and which University of Miami players had failed their drug tests.
In the black leather bucket seat next to me was this lemon-haired, string bean of a kid who Granny had informed me was my kin, to use her word. I studied him. He had blue eyes with long, pale lashes, fair skin with a faint blue vein showing just over the left temple. His straight, lank hair fell into his eyes. He would be considered cute, and when he filled out and reached his mid-teens, the girls would probably consider him a stud or a fox, or whatever the word of the day might be.
Granny said he was my half sister’s son.
Which was double news to me. I didn’t know I had a sister, whole or fractioned, and obviously, I didn’t know about a son. It all had to do with my no-account mother—Granny’s phrase again—who ran off to Oklahoma with a man she didn’t marry, a man who left after fathering a daughter, Janet by name.
My mother had spent her last half-dozen years in an alcoholic fog, living alone in a third-floor walk-up apartment in Tulsa. Although the roughneck was long since gone, dear old Mom never came back to Florida, which is a euphemistic way of saying, she never saw me after dropping me off at Granny’s on her way out of state and out of mind. Still, she always sent a card at Christmas and on my birthday, sometimes with a few dollars or a shirt that was hopelessly small.
I know a psychologist would say I’m into heavy denial, but I don’t remember missing her, and when she died in my junior year in high school, it didn’t mean that much. I still had Granny, and now apparently, so did Kip, son of unknown, unmarried, half sister Janet, who was in drug rehab in Houston or Phoenix or Albuquerque, those cities tending to merge in Granny’s mind.
“How come you’re not in school?” I asked Kip, as we roared north, passing a Winnebago with mushy tires on the two-lane road lined with conch shell stands and ticky-tack motels.
“It’s summer vacation,” he answered, giving me a pitying look.
“Right. I knew that.”
We both studied the double white line a moment, and he said, “You ever see Fast Times at Ridgemont High?”
“Must have missed it.”
“It was so cool. Sean Penn is this dweeb named Spicoli, who orders pizza delivered to his homeroom.”
“Cool,” I agreed.
I stayed quiet a while, sneaking peeks at the kid’s profile as the wind blasted his hair back off his face. Okay, maybe there was some resemblance. He would be more finely chiseled than his roughly hewn uncle, and just now he seemed so fragile that something within me, something buried in the genetic material we shared, made me want to protect him. Trouble was, I had precious little experience with children, and I didn’t know where to begin.
“I did see Blackboard Jungle,” I said, “but that was before your time.”
“Yeah, it’s been on the classics channel. Sidney Poitier and Vic Morrow were totally awesome, and the music over the credits was way cool.”
“Way cool,” I agreed again.
I gunned the convertible around a rental Ford Taurus whose occupants had slowed to stare at an osprey nest lodged on top of a telephone pole. “The song you liked was ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and His Comets.”
Granny had asked me to teach the kid some things. I wasn’t sure what I could do, unless he wanted to know some of the history of rock and roll, or maybe how to get by an offensive tackle with the swim move. In the meantime, there was work to do.
“Kip, I have to ask you some questions to get ready for the hearing tomorrow.”
“Yeah.”
“Why’d you do it?”
“Who said I did? There’s a presumption of innocence, and if the state can’t prove its case, the judge has to dismiss it, just like Paul Winfield did when Harrison Ford was charged with murder in Presumed Innocent.”
Most clients who try to teach me the law are jailhouse lawyers. Now I had a kid with a J.D. from HBO. “Listen up, Kip. I’m your lawyer, so you tell me the truth without being a smartass. Got it?”
“Are you a good lawyer or a goofball like Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinnie?”
To our left, the sun was setting over a swampy field of saw grass. Three web-footed terns dipped and cawed, scanning the shallow water for dinner. I gunned the Olds to pass a Jeep hauling a Boston Whaler on a shimmying trailer and said, “Granny gave me the A-form, so I know what the cops say you did. I’m assuming you spray-painted the wall since you were caught with blue paint on your pants, and there’s a witness who saw you chuck the can through a display window. If that’s not enough, you admitted everything to the cop who came to the scene.”
“He didn’t read me my rights. Not even like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon 3, when he knocks the bad guy unconscious, then says, ‘You have the right to remain silent.’
“But they’ll testify they did. They always do. Besides, the physical evidence and the eyewitness are enough to convict, even without the confession. So, bottom line, little guy, tell me what was going through that mind of yours.”
“What’s the big deal? Timothy Hutton did the same thing in Turk 182 as a protest. That’s where I got the idea.”
I hit the brakes and the old car groaned and whinnied as we stopped on the edge of a ditch fille
d with water, weeds, and probably alligators. We were just south of the Card Sound Bridge, and the traffic was slowing down to watch a flock, or is it a gaggle, of herons heading for the water.
Turning to the kid who allegedly shared my blood, I said, “I don’t care about movies, okay, and I want you to stop showing off. I know you’re bright. I know you wrap yourself in the movies because you don’t have a real family, and you’ve been bounced around so much, you don’t have any real friends, either. But I’m here for you. Do you understand what I’m saying?
“You’re my lawyer.”
“I’m your friend and . . .” I took a deep breath as an eighteen-wheeler roared by, kicking up dust. “I’m family, too.’’
He looked at me skeptically.
“Look, Kip, neither one of us knows exactly what to do. You don’t know how to be a nephew, and I don’t know how to be an uncle. So, we’ll learn together. When the hearing’s over, I’ll take you back to Granny’s if they don’t send you off to Raiford.”
He gave me a funny look, like I’d hurt his feelings, but he wasn’t going to let it show.
“I’ll come down and visit you,” I added quickly, “and you can come to Miami and visit me. I’ll try to do the uncle things like buying you ice cream, taking you fishing—”
“Or to the movies.”
“Right. And you’ll do the nephew things like ...” What the hell were nephew things? “Like cutting the grass, changing the oil in the Olds, and waxing down the sailboards.”
“You’ll have to show me how,” he said happily, seeming to welcome the opportunity to work up a sweat.
“It’s a deal,” I responded, and we exchanged high fives.
“Can we go to the movies tonight?” he asked.
“No. I have to meet a client.”
“A murderer, like Jeff Bridges in Jagged Edge?”
“Nobody ever mistook Blinky Baroso for Jeff Bridges,” I said. “Danny DeVito, maybe.”
I pushed the clutch to the floor, grabbed the chrome ball on the stick shift, eased out the clutch while giving it some gas— leaded, high-octane—and tore up gravel, then burned rubber getting back onto the road. I figured the first lesson in nephew training was safe driving, which I sum up as follows: If you’ve got three hundred fifty cubic inches, use them all.
***
I live in a coral rock house between Poinciana and Kumquat in Coconut Grove. The house is a two-story pillbox that has withstood sixty years of hurricanes, a number of Super Bowl parties, and many years of benign neglect. Just after nine p.m., I pulled the Olds under a chinaberry tree that serves as a carport and showed Kip how to put up the canvas top. He seemed to like helping. Then I grabbed the duffel bag with all his worldly belongings and led him to the front door, which I opened by banging my good shoulder into the humidity-swollen wood. The door yielded with a groan, or was that me?
Inside was dark and stuffy. I turned on the ceiling fan to stir the soggy air and opened the blinds to let in the green phosphorescent glare of the neighborhood’s sodium vapor anti-crime lights. I cleared some beer bottles from the sailboard that is propped between two concrete blocks and serves as a cocktail table. Then I sat down, put my feet up, and tried to figure out what to do next.
My house is furnished in Early Locker Room. There’s a tasteful lamp made of a Dolphins helmet with an orange and aqua shade. There’s a rusted scuba tank leaning against a planter filled with parched dirt and the fossilized remains of a rubber plant. There are newspapers and magazines and assorted volumes of Florida Statutes Annotated and a few paperbacks by John D. MacDonald.
Kip looked around, surveying my palace. “What a dump!” he proclaimed, and before he could tell me, I said it was a pretty fair Bette Davis. The kid looked sleepy. It hadn’t occurred to me earlier, but now I was getting some vague idea about children’s bedtimes. I had been planning to haul him with me to meet Blinky Baroso on South Beach. Now, I saw the kid couldn’t make it.
I told Kip the bathroom was on the second floor to the left and he scampered up the stairs. I followed him up and put some fresh sheets on the bed in the spare room, a place former teammates crash when they hit town to check into Mount Sinai for a knee replacement or drug rehab.
I tried calling Blinky Baroso to tell him to come over to the house, instead of meeting me at our usual spot on South Beach, but all I got was a recording. Damn, he must have left already. I didn’t even know why he wanted to meet. He hadn’t said much on the phone when he set up the meeting. People were watching him, or me, or both, and we needed to talk. He probably wanted to tell me about his latest scheme to turn horseshit into gold, and I was growing irritated that he was dragging me out of the house and away from my kid.
Whoa, my kid?
Is this what fatherhood—or uncledom—does to a man? Was I finally getting domesticated?
I changed into my client conference attire, a clean tank top to match my cutoffs, deck shoes without socks, then came back downstairs. Maybe I could tuck Kip in bed and ask one of the neighbors to stop by. But it was Sunday night, and Phoebe, a thrice-divorced redhead across the street, was hosting one of her swingers’ parties, complete with bobbing for apples (and what not) in the Jacuzzi. I could do without a herd of her sopping wet friends traipsing through my house, corrupting my nephew.
My neighbors are a fine lot, though not necessarily baby-sitter material in a Newt Gingrich world of family values. Besides Phoebe, there’s Geoffrey, who works nights cruising the expressways looking for fiery car crashes to videotape, and Mako, who lives in a wooden treehouse on the other side of the limeberry shrubs. To visit, you have to climb a rope ladder, something that discourages process servers. Mako trades his custom-made hammocks for crawfish with Homer Thigpen, a lobster pot poacher who lives in the first house on Poinciana. I helped Homer beat a federal charge that could have cost him his boat under the forfeiture laws, and ever since, and I’ve been knee-deep in Florida lobster, some of them even corralled in season. I haven’t felt so warm and fuzzy about the majesty of the legal system since I walked a parking meter thief who paid my fee in quarters and dimes.
I heard the water running upstairs and yelled at Kip to make sure he brushed his teeth. “Up and down strokes,” I ordered.
I was feeling uneasy about leaving him alone in a strange house. He was a good kid. Okay, so he smashed a window and spray-painted the South Miami Cineplex with a pretty fair drawing of Arnold Schwarzenegger holding a shotgun. “Hasta la vista, baby,” Arnold was saying in a cartoon bubble of iridescent blue paint.
It was an understandable protest by a kid who had ridden the bus from Islamorada to see Casablanca on the big screen only to discover that the theater had, without notice, substituted Revenge of the Nerds III. I thought the theater manager overreacted in reporting the incident as a terrorist act, and when Kip asked, I assured him he wouldn’t get the chair like Jimmy Cagney in Angels with Dirty Faces.
I was thinking about the juvenile court hearing when Kip came back down the stairs. He had changed into his pajamas, I thought at first, but then I saw he was wearing an old Dolphins jersey than hung down past his knees. “I found this in the closet,” he said. “Okay if I wear it to sleep?”
He turned around, modeling it. Across his back, the lettering said LASSITER. Below was the number, fifty-eight. “Looks great on you,” I said. “It’s yours.”
He smiled, stifled a yawn with a dainty fist, and came up to me. I didn’t know what he wanted, but I figured it out after a second. I gave him a good-night hug, then on impulse, scooped him into my arms. We went up the stairs that way, his legs curled around me, and I dropped him into bed and pulled up the sheet to his chin.
“Good night, Kip.”
“Good night, Uncle Jake,” he said, his eyes half closed, his face a tranquil reflection of childlike innocence.
***
I took Douglas Road up to Grand Avenue, hung a right and headed into downtown Coconut Grove. To avoid the teeny boppers cruising Cocowalk on a Sun
day night, I swung onto Oak and then by Tigertail going north. I turned left on Seventeenth Avenue, picked up I-95 to hook up with the MacArthur Causeway and drove east across the bay to Miami Beach. I found a parking spot next to a Dumpster behind a sushi bar and walked to the coral rock wall that runs along the east side of Ocean Drive.
A three-quarter moon was hanging above the ocean, spreading a creamy glow across the black water. A warm breeze from the southeast swirled sand across the sidewalk and into the street. Lovers of every persuasion strolled by the sidewalk cafes across the street, and the usual collection of models, photographers, would-be actors, wannabe trendies, and assorted semi-hipsters crowded the sidewalk, pausing long enough to be ogled by patrons sipping decaf cappuccino under Campari umbrellas. This season’s color seemed to be black. Billowing black silk pants, square-cut black jackets with shoulder pads over white T-shirts. And those were the men. The women wore black minis and black fishnet stockings.
As is my custom, I was on time. It is a harmless obsession. I don’t like to be kept waiting, and it’s only fair to return the favor. So I sat on the low wall, watching the parade of characters go by on foot, in limos, on choppers, and occasionally on Rollerblades. I thought about Jo Jo and Blinky, the beauty and the bullshit artist. In my life, there had been women before Jo Jo, and women after her, but she was unique. Always pushing me. Reach high, be the best. She reminded me of a recruiting pitch for the Army.
I had cared for her, but I went on without looking back. I’m not proud of that, but it’s the way I am. Introspection is not my strong suit. I am an ox, head down, plowing ahead to newer, if not greener, pastures. So when I am forced to revisit my past, I am confused. I do not see the present clearly because the past is still misty. I have not resolved old issues. Hell, I didn’t even know they were issues at the time.
Now I waited for Blinky. If I smoked, which I don’t, I would have struck a match. If I drank, which I do, I would have strolled across the street and sat at the News Cafe, watching for Blinky at the wall. So I did, at an outdoor table, ordering a Grolsch, the fine Dutch beer, in the sixteen-ounce bottle with the porcelain top.