“It’s a metaphor, Johnny.”
“What’s a ‘meta’? And why’s it for me?”
He shook his head.
“Just listen. You got to keep yourself and Pa surviving until you can get out of there, out of Cullman. That’s the only way you’ll be safe, when you can leave. Like I did.”
“But you came back.”
“Yeah,” he said. “For you. But when you get the chance, you got to leave and never look back. It’s the only hope you got.”
Now he was scaring me.
“Why you talking like this?”
“Cause I’m leaving again soon,” he said.
“Yeah, but you’re coming back again.”
He didn’t say nothing.
“You’re coming back, Tommy. Right? Ain’t you?”
He took a deep breath.
“You never know, little brother. Nobody can tell the future, not even them gypsies that come in the fair. But I can tell you this, you can only come and go from the lion’s den so many times before you get bit. And I’ve ridden my luck about as far as it’ll go.”
I had a lump the size of a baseball in my throat.
“Is this cause the Captain came in to town? I reckon he’s either gone or going soon.”
“It ain’t,” he said, then he paused. “And it is, I reckon. He did help me remember that we got a history in our family of bad luck. And bad luck ain’t exactly something you shake, not the kind we got.”
“Is he one of the lions you’re talking about?” I was starting to get the meaning of what he was saying. “What in tarnation happened between you and that Captain? If it’s so horrible that it’s making you talk like this, I need to know.”
He sighed.
“No, you don’t. It’s in the past, it’s history.”
“Mrs. Buttke at school always says if you don’t know your history, you’re doomed to repeat it,” I said. It was one of the few lessons I really remembered, and it was why I only paid attention to history class. Math, English, and all them others just claimed to be beneficial for you. History was the only one that came with a warning label.
“Sometimes it don’t matter if you know it or not. You’re still doomed.” He stretched his arms out, then plucked the silver dollar out of my pocket.
“Hey, that’s mine,” I said.
“Then you might ought to learn how to protect your things.” He grinned his usual possum grin at me. “But, that’s enough of all that talk. Have you picked up your comic books this month from the grocery store? What’s happening in the world of Superman?”
Normally, talking about superheroes and monster stories was top of my list of favorite conversations we had. We was both the biggest Superman fans in Alabama. We was convinced that Krypton was blown up by the Commies. It would explain why red Kryptonite was so powerful.
But I didn’t feel like talking about superheroes. And it wasn’t cause I was sore about the silver dollar. But he didn’t want to talk about nothing else. So we went the rest of our trip not talking about nothing. He landed us, gave what he owed to Bob Gorman, and we drove back to the house. I hoped the Captain was gone, for no other reason than that Tommy’d cheer up and spend his last couple of weeks having fun.
We got to the house and the Captain’s truck was parked in the driveway. Tommy didn’t even get out, he let me out and said he was going back into town. I said I’d go with him, but he said he was going drinking and I couldn’t come. I almost wondered if the Captain owned stock in the beer business, for how much drinking he inspired in my brother. Tommy drove away and I felt that lump in my throat getting heavier and heavier. I went inside the front door.
Pa and the Captain was sitting at the dinner table with a whole mess of RadioShack catalogs and ham-radio books laid out in front of them. They was looking at radio equipment and checking the specs off of stuff in the catalogs against numbers that was in the books. I got myself a glass of water and went to sit down next to them.
When I did, I caught a whiff of the Captain’s aftershave and it made me have a memory. I remembered being wrapped up in a blanket, sleeping in the back of a car while my folks drove around late at night. I tried to focus on the memory, tried to key in and see my ma’s face, but I couldn’t. My brain was too broken. It was funny, it was a different aftershave than what Pa used, which was why I hadn’t never remembered it before. He must have changed brands after the accident.
I peeked over Pa’s shoulder at the page he was looking at.
“What’s that?” I said about the big box-looking thing that had the dials and knobs on top.
“It’s a Collins 30S-1 linear amplifier,” Pa said. “It can cover the whole frequency spectrum, which is good if you’re going to be operating at different times of the day.”
I took a look at the price tag.
“Dadgum, Pa! It’s fifteen hundred dollars.”
His cheeks got red.
“Why don’t you head upstairs and work on your homework?” he said.
“Or he could stay,” the Captain said. Pa shot him a look. “Sorry, didn’t mean to overstep.”
“I ain’t got no homework,” I said. Which wasn’t exactly a lie. I did have homework, I just didn’t have none I was going to do that day. Homework was like cheese, it had to sit for a while. Then you could throw it away.
“Well then go read your comic books or something. We can’t have you down here.”
I didn’t see no good that could come from arguing with him about it, even though I had a bad feeling he was fixing to start shoveling our money into the lion’s mouth, just like Tommy’d said. I took my water upstairs and listened to my radio for a while to catch the baseball scores. I wondered if there was any equipment in them magazines they had that could make my radio pick up better stations. Like ones that had the Reds actually winning.
After I was served a good dose of lousy news, I reread a few of my Justice League comics. I wouldn’t read none of Tommy’s if my life depended on it. Pa’d gone through and drawn long pants on all the pictures of Wonder Woman. He said he was protecting our minds, but Tommy said all it was doing was feeding his imagination. None of that made no sense to me, but I learned to hide my comic books in a box after that. Tommy kept his girlie magazines in there too. But they didn’t have no good stories, so I never read one.
I went downstairs a couple of times to make myself a sandwich or to refill my cup of water. I offered to fetch the both of them some of Tommy’s booze from the fridge, but they said they didn’t drink. Which I knew was true of Pa, for the most part, but the Captain struck me as a guzzler for some reason. I reckoned I was wrong.
After a while they left together. I headed back down so I could look at their catalogs, but they’d taken the whole lot with them. So I got myself a bowl of cereal and sat on the couch to watch some TV. Of course there wasn’t nothing good on except for an afternoon movie about a fella that was frozen in an iceberg for fifty years, so I watched that. I watched shows and movies for the rest of the day all by myself in the house. I must have fallen asleep on the couch, and Pa must have left me there, cause when I got woken up the house was quiet and it was pitch-dark outside. Tommy was leaving a piece of paper on the table.
“What you doing?” I said. He jumped.
“I thought you was in bed,” he said. His breath stank of beer and whiskey, I could smell it from the couch. That didn’t trigger no memories for me, at least none but dragging Tommy out of the bathroom after he passed out on the toilet. And I sure didn’t want to dwell on that one.
“I ain’t in bed, am I? What are you doing?”
He looked at the paper he had put on the table and crumpled it up and put it in his pocket.
“I’m leaving,” he said.
I realized that he was in his uniform, and I saw his duffel bag by the door.
“Where you going?” I sa
id, even though I already knew the answer.
“Montgomery. I’m reporting for duty on Monday, and then I’m shipping out.”
Dadgum, that lump in my throat wasn’t going nowhere.
“But, I thought we had a few more weeks before you went to Korea. You sure you ain’t been drinking too much?”
He turned and looked away from me. His voice wasn’t as level as it usually was.
“I ain’t going to Korea. I’m going somewhere else, but it’s top secret.” Yeah, he was drunk as a skunk. I’d seen his papers myself.
“Where you going, then?” I reckoned his answer would be something like Mars or Wonderland or something.
“I told you,” he said, “it’s secret.”
Narnia. That had to be it. When he’d had a pint of whiskey, he was always going to Narnia. He started toward the door. He was walking pretty straight, considering how drunk I reckoned he was. Still, if he was headed to Narnia, he probably thought our door was a wardrobe. Poor cuss.
I jumped up and grabbed his arm. He almost fell over. Yup, he was pretty drunk.
“You can trust me, Tommy. I swear I won’t tell nobody.”
He stared at the door. He swallowed and I wondered if he had a lump in his throat too.
“I can’t. I got orders. It ain’t just my secret, it’s the government’s.” The government of Aslan, I reckoned. He looked in my eyes. “If you ever told anybody, I don’t know rightly what would happen to me. Or you and Pa, for that matter.”
“I swear. On Ma’s grave, I swear.”
He searched my eyes like he did when he thought I was lying about something.
“That ain’t enough. You got to swear on mine.”
I took a tiny step back. That was new. Maybe he wasn’t talking about Narnia.
“You ain’t got no grave,” I said.
“But I will if you tell.”
I spit in my hand and held it out. “Swear on your grave, then.”
He spit in his hand and shook mine. “I’m going to Nicaragua.”
I racked my brain to figure that one out.
“Is that in Oz?” I said.
“That’s in South America.”
Dadgum. Nicaragua. That almost sounded like a real country.
“Was that where that lady was from?”
“No, she was Cuban.”
“Oh, well South America’s still closer than Korea.” I started to feel better. “So it ain’t so bad.”
“No, it’s worse. I got a mission to do that ain’t the safest doing. A whole mess of people are counting on me to help them out. But it’s worth it, I promise you it is.” His face was sweaty, like it was when he was lying. Also when he was drunk. Which he usually was when he was lying. “I just hope my luck holds up.”
As soon as he said that, I got an idea. Just in case he was telling the truth. I hurried up to my room and dug under my bed until I found what I was looking for. I went back downstairs and put my Superman action figure in his hand.
“He’ll keep you safe,” I said. “That’s what he does.”
“But he’s yours,” he said. “I gave him to you. You can’t give him back.”
“Nope. I ain’t giving him to you. Just loaning him.” I almost got choked on something, must have been allergies. “You make sure you bring him home, okay?”
He nodded and I could tell them allergies was getting to him, too. He didn’t say nothing else, just grabbed his duffel bag and started out the door. He stopped.
“You take good care of Pa, you hear me?” he said, his voice crackling a bit. He went out and closed the door behind him.
I ran out after him and he was walking out of our driveway, I reckoned down to the bus stop at the bottom of the mountain. Which meant he was really going. Or else he was in for one heck of a hangover.
“Who’s going to take care of me?” I yelled after him.
He turned around and showed me a big grin on his face. He threw something at me and I caught it.
“You’re Johnny Cannon,” he said. “You’ll take care of yourself. That’s what you do best.”
I looked at what he’d thrown. It was that dadgum silver dollar the lady had given me. I looked up to watch him disappear into the darkness. The lump in my throat was threatening to jump up into my mouth and blow my head apart. I had to blink a few times to keep myself from blubbering, and I finally remembered where my feet was and how to use them to go back inside.
In spite of all his flaws, Tommy was more than just my brother. He was my best friend. For the first time I could remember, I was alone. Even though Pa was there, the house was empty. Like a den just waiting for the lions to arrive.
CHAPTER TWO
NEVER FIGHT ON SUNDAY
I woke up the next morning to a smell that made me feel all warm and bubbly inside, so good I almost forgot about what had happened the night before. But then I saw the silver dollar on my dresser and my heart started breaking all over again. The smell even smelled sad after that.
I went down to see what it was I was sniffing, and the Captain was in the kitchen cooking at our stove. He was wearing an apron and everything. I didn’t even know we owned an apron, but he’d found it. He was smoking a cigar, too, which I reckoned counteracted the frills.
Meanwhile, Pa sat at the table, looking through them catalogs again. I was dadgum curious at what they was aiming at doing. Maybe they was building a robot. If they did, I hoped they’d train it to keep the house clean. And to not kill nobody. But, if we could only pick one, I’d choose a clean house. After all, I owned a gun and it wouldn’t be nothing to shoot a robot.
“What you cooking?” I said.
“Jalapeño cheese biscuits with gravy and scrambled eggs with spicy sausage, or as we call it in Texas, chorizo con huevos. It’s my mother’s recipe,” the Captain said. Since it sounded like a Mexican dish, I didn’t reckon she’d come up with it on her own. Unless she was Mexican. But he’d said his name was Richard, not Ricardo, so there wasn’t no way.
He scraped at the red-colored eggs with a spatula and turned them over. I took a seat next to Pa. He closed the catalog and put it away.
“It smells awful familiar to me,” I said.
“Your ma made it every Sunday morning when you was little,” Pa said. “I imagine Tommy’s going to be real excited when he gets up. It used to be his favorite. When I told Captain Morris that while we was at the grocery store yesterday, he decided to cook it for us this morning.”
“To smooth things over with your brother,” the Captain said. “The other reason I came here.”
I wasn’t sure how to tell them about Tommy, so I got myself some orange juice from the fridge and occupied my mouth drinking it. I must have not worn a blanket the night before, cause as soon as that juice hit my throat it burned like the dickens.
“What’s the matter?” the Captain said.
“Throat hurts. It ain’t nothing.”
He pulled out the pan of steaming biscuits from the oven and plopped one on a plate, covered it in gravy, then scooped some of them eggs on the other side. He set it in front of my seat.
“You want me to look at it?” he said.
Couldn’t he see it from where he was standing?
“Maybe later. I reckon I’m fine.”
He grabbed the knife out of the butter and wiped it off on his pants.
“Here, open up. Let me have a look-see.”
I clenched my teeth together. I didn’t much care for folks poking around on me. That’s why I never went to the doctor. Sometimes I’d go with Pa, but that was mainly to see what Goofus and Gallant was up to in Highlights. Them two fellas was a hoot and a half.
“Johnny,” Pa said, “let the Captain look. He’s a darn good doctor.”
I didn’t feel like fighting the both of them, so I opened my mouth. The Captain
pushed my tongue down with the knife and peered into my throat.
“I can’t really see.” He pulled a match out of his pocket and lit it with his thumbnail. “Don’t breathe,” he said, and then he held the lit match inside my mouth. It was getting pretty hot, and I held my breath for fear of third-degree burns.
“You don’t look so bad in there,” he said after he looked for a spell. “How do you feel? Achy? Run down?”
I shook my head while I put my orange juice back in the fridge and poured myself some milk. It didn’t hurt as bad as the juice.
“I’m fine, just the throat’s sore,” I said.
He started pushing on the sides of my neck, feeling it all up and down. He ran his finger along the three-inch scar I had just under my Adam’s apple. He looked like he was hurt over it.
“That’s from the accident,” I said. That one on my neck was the longest, the one on my face was the most obvious, and the one on my forehead was the ugliest. I also had a few where people couldn’t see them, like on my chest and in my pants, but I hadn’t never had to explain those. I had a habit of keeping my pants on. Pa said Tommy should learn that habit too. “I’ve had my scars since I was six.”
“I know where you got the scars,” he said.
I was about to ask him how he knew where I got the scars since he hadn’t seen my pa for fifteen years, but Pa distracted me from the question.
“I’m surprised your brother hasn’t come down yet,” Pa said. “I’d have thought the smell of this breakfast would drag him out of bed.”
“He ain’t here,” I said, and then I took a bite of the eggs. Dadgum, it was good.
“Where’d he go? Into town for something? On a Sunday?”
I sipped my milk. I knew the answer to his question was Narnia. No, wait, it was Nicaragua, wasn’t it? Good thing I’d sworn to keep Tommy’s secret, cause I probably couldn’t tell it if I tried.
“Korea,” I said. That one I’d had practice telling. “He went ahead and shipped out.”
Captain Morris set a plate in front of Pa and sat down with his own.
“Was it because I’m here?” he said.
The Troubles of Johnny Cannon Page 3
