Right before we left, the best part of the day happened. It was when Mrs. Buttke would pass out all our homework and Martha would hand the stack back to me. I always managed to touch her hand when I took it.
“So much to do,” she said every single day.
“I reckon,” I said every single day.
I lived for that part of the day.
Finally the bell rang and I was super glad for it. I went real fast to the barbershop to do my daily job of sweeping up all the loose hair and stuff that was all over the floor. It was perfect for me, ’cause none of the men who came there talked to me, and I got to listen to all their stories. They liked to brag about their big hunts they’d gone on recently, and I liked to compare their stories to my own. Mine were usually better.
I got to the front of the barbershop and my day went from being normal to weird all over again. Willie was sitting outside with his tape recorder, and as soon as he saw me, he called me over to him.
“Hey, are you ready to give me that interview?”
“What are you doing in Cullman?”
“My pa came to meet with the preacher from the church here. Now, about that interview.”
“Why are you so all-fired determined to interview me?” I said.
He looked at me like I’d asked the dumbest question in the history of the world. Which I hadn’t. The dumbest question in the history of the world is, “Will you marry me?” It narrowly beats out, “Do you think you could shoot this off my head?” and “Can I pet that rattlesnake?”
Tommy told me that joke. It’s one of my favorites.
“I want to interview you ’cause you fought like a wild man yesterday,” Willie said, “and you beat Russ. Got that straight from his mouth this morning. That don’t happen that often. That’s a news story if I ever saw one.”
“So? You ain’t a reporter. You’re only ten,” I said.
“Eleven,” he said. Dang, he was small. “And I aim to be a reporter. A sports reporter, actually. Though I guess if I had to announce the big stories too, that’d be fine.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that they wasn’t going to hire a colored person from the Colony to be a reporter on the radio, except maybe on the colored stations. Plus, what with him having a bum leg and all, he wouldn’t probably get no jobs nowhere when he got older. If my pa couldn’t get a job, there wasn’t no way a crippled colored kid would. Except maybe as a professional beggar. I heard there was a union for that.
I sat down in front of him. At least talking to a tape recorder would be easier than talking to a real person. Sure, I was going to be talking to Willie, but he wasn’t really like a stranger. Not anymore, at least.
“All right, ask your questions.”
He got his recorder going and held the microphone in front of himself.
“Hello again, sports fans, this is Willie Parkins, your on-the-spot reporter. I’m here with the toughest kid in Cullman County, Johnny Cannon. Tell me, Johnny, have you ever fought like how you did yesterday before?”
I had to think for a spell.
“Nope,” I said.
“And, what do you reckon was different about yesterday’s fight? The level of competition? The setting?”
I thought for a second.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t feeling too well beforehand, actually. I reckon I got puberty.”
He stopped the tape.
“You can’t say ‘puberty’ on the radio.”
“We ain’t on the radio,” I said.
“Don’t matter. You can’t say it,” he said.
“I don’t see why not. It’s what I got.”
“Do you even know what puberty is?”
“A headache. Right?” I said.
He snorted, and then he went and explained what in tarnation puberty was, and it was a horrifying image. It was all about body parts sprouting hair and other parts growing, and smelling bad when you sweated, and feeling funny around girls. And, what was the most disturbing, it wasn’t nothing about headaches or punching through walls. And, even though I actually had been noticing some of those things happening for a couple of months before that, like the hair and stuff, and I’d felt funny around girls ever since I figured out I was a boy, it hadn’t scared me none. Not like the events of Sunday had.
“So, I don’t reckon you was fighting hard because of puberty,” he said.
I was real embarrassed by this point, so I got up.
“Hey, ain’t you going to finish the interview?” he said.
“Some other time. I got to head in there for work.” I started to go, and then I stopped. “How come you know so much about puberty?”
“I got this hobby called ‘reading.’ You should try it.”
“I read a lot. I’ve read every novel at the library, and I got a big history book that I read every night.”
He sneered.
“Novels are made up and history’s stupid.”
“No it ain’t,” I said. “With science all you do is figure out how things is. With history, you figure out how they ought to be.”
He wasn’t buying that.
“How? By repeating the same stupid thing they was doing a hundred years ago?”
“Nope,” I said. “By not.”
I didn’t feel like putting up with him no more, so I opened the door to the barbershop.
“Just let me know when we can finish the interview,” he said. He wasn’t going to let up about that. “Or if you need me to explain the birds and the bees.”
I wasn’t that stupid.
“I already know about them. Birds fly and bees make honey.”
“That explanation will probably work till you’re through with puberty,” he said, and I could tell he was trying to hide his grin.
I felt like I should say something real smart back, but I was starting to believe I didn’t have it in me. Worse yet, I was getting more and more convinced that my pa’s horse sense was slower than mine, which meant he really wasn’t qualified to be running the business of our house. I tried not to let that worry me and I went inside.
Mr. Thomassen, the barber who also played piano at church, said hello. He was shaving Bob Gorman. Shaving his face. Bob’s head was already bald enough.
“Where were you yesterday?” Mr. Thomassen said. “I looked for you at church.”
I really didn’t want to answer no more questions. I fished out the broom and the dustpan from behind the waiting chairs.
“I went with the Parkinses to their church,” I said, hoping that would end it.
Bob sputtered and some shaving cream went flying through the air.
“In the Colony? You went to the Tigger church?” he said. Except he didn’t actually say “Tigger,” he used a different word that I ain’t obliged to say no more on account that I’ve been cutting back on my cussing. But Bob wasn’t trying to cut back on nothing. “Tigger” was his favorite word, or rather, the other word was. I don’t know how he felt about anything A. A. Milne wrote.
Mr. Thomassen stopped shaving him.
“Bob, I’ve told you I won’t stand for that kind of talk in my shop.” Mr. Thomassen was from up north, New York or some such place like that. I didn’t know why he’d moved to Cullman. Maybe it was for the traffic. We got a new light over on Fourth Street about the same time he came.
“Yeah,” I said, and I was surprised that I did. Maybe it was ’cause of my puberty or whatever. “You’re supposed to call them ‘colored.’ ” I expected Mr. Thomassen would be happy I’d taken his side. He sighed.
“That’s not much better,” he said, and I felt stupid again. “If you call a man ‘colored,’ you’re implying that he’s different from normal, ‘uncolored’ people. And I don’t think any of us are normal. Or uncolored, for that matter.”
Bob yanked the towel off of Mr. Thomassen�
��s arm and wiped off the shaving cream from his face.
“I can shave myself,” he said, and then he stormed out. I felt pretty bad that I’d just made Mr. Thomassen lose a customer. Especially a Gorman. Everybody salivated over their money like dogs staring at a pile of raw meat.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think I was doing nothing wrong. I hope he don’t stay away for good,” I said, hoping Mr. Thomassen wouldn’t fire me right there on the spot.
Mr. Thomassen had an upright piano off to the side of his shop, and he went over and started playing it. He played better than anybody I’d ever heard before, and he played the kind of music I never got to listen to when Tommy was around. Jazz. That was the other reason I swept his shop for a nickel.
“Don’t worry about Bob Gorman,” he said. “He can’t afford to be too high and mighty with me. We have a history together.”
“Really?” That was downright interesting to me. “What kind?”
He ignored my question.
“But I do want you to make me a promise,” he said. “Get rid of that ‘colored’ talk, the proper term is ‘Negro.’ Saying ‘colored’ makes you sound ignorant. You’re better than that, better than all the hillbilly boobs you’re surrounded with. And, comparing you to Bob . . .”
He didn’t finish that sentence, but went straight into a real fast piece of piano music. I swept to the rhythm he was making and tried to not let nothing get into my head about Bob, or about my weekend, or nothing else. I got just about all that mess out of my head except for the picture of Martha handing me my schoolwork. I figured that was fine.
I got done sweeping and he paid me my nickel. He also gave me his order for meat, three squirrels so the lady that worked for him could make him a stew. I told him I’d go hunting for them squirrels that night and then I left. I had my nickel from Friday still in my pocket, so I went to the drugstore and paid ten cents for a new comic book. The only one they had that I hadn’t read yet was Star Spangled War Stories, which had a dinosaur eating an army plane out of the sky, and the soldiers shooting at it from their parachutes. I took it and read it on my walk home.
When I got back to the house, I at first thought maybe things was getting back to normal, ’cause all the boxes was cleaned up out of the front yard. But then I saw a great big antenna sticking up over the top of the house, and I realized life was just getting weirder and weirder.
I looked in the backyard and saw all the stuff from the shed still strewn about, and the antenna was coming off the top of the shed. Pa and the Captain was connecting wires and such around the building, and when they saw me standing there, they shooed me away. I got my rifle and went out to get Mr. Thomassen’s squirrels. Didn’t take me too long, and after I packed them up and put them in the freezer in our kitchen, I went up to my room and read my comic book again. It was important to read things like comic books twice, once for the story and the second time for the pictures. Tommy taught me that.
And that was pretty much how the days went for the next few of them. I went to school and Mr. Thomassen’s barbershop, avoided giving Willie an interview that he hounded me for every day, and then came home to see Pa and the Captain working on their newfangled project. They stopped constructing whatever it was they was building and started going out and just staying in the shed every day. Since Pa’d pulled our freezer out, I couldn’t fetch nearly as much meat as I liked when I went out hunting, so I had to stick to what would fit in our fridge. Which meant I had to hunt more often, which didn’t bother me none.
Friday was Saint Patrick’s Day, so we all wore green to school to avoid getting pinched. Eddie was pretending that he was color-blind that day, though, and he went around pinching whoever he could, mostly the girls. He came and pinched me at lunchtime, and I socked him in the stomach. I didn’t know if it was what Saint Patrick would have done, but I wasn’t Catholic, so I didn’t reckon it mattered. Got sent to the principal’s office for it, though, and the principal called my home so I could get picked up. Since it was the fourth time in two months that I’d punched Eddie, I was getting sent home for the rest of the day.
I waited in the office, dreading Pa getting me. He was pretty quick on the draw with his paddle when it was regarding my school. He said if your seat didn’t hurt you four or five times a week, then you wasn’t learning nothing. I must have been learning more than anybody else at school.
They told me my ride was there and I started covering my butt right away. But it wasn’t my pa that had come. It was the Captain. I said a quick glory-be and got into his truck with him.
“You’re quite the fighter, aren’t you?” he said as I closed the door. I shrugged. That fight I’d been in at the Parkinses’ church was about the only real fight I could recall. I mean, sure, I’d occasionally beat the living tar out of Eddie, but that wasn’t much of a fight. He was the closest thing I had to a friend at school, and our friendship was that he’d mess around a lot and I’d sock him in the gut a few times for it. I didn’t expect the Captain to understand newfangled friendships.
“Just like your mom,” he said.
“You knew my ma?” I said.
“Sure. She was there in New Orleans when your pa and I were there.”
That made sense, I guessed. It was weird that he knew her and I didn’t, but then again there was a whole mess of folks that knew her before the accident killed her and all my memories. She was buried in a grave there in Cullman, they’d brought her up from Havana. Wherever my memories was buried, I didn’t have no idea. They didn’t make the trip.
“She did a lot of fighting with folks around the hospital?” I said.
He chuckled.
“She did a lot of fighting with folks everywhere she went. But she loved her family, especially her sons.” He looked down the road for a bit while he drove us to my house. “I think that’s why it hurt her so bad when your brother moved in with your grandma.”
“Yeah, he told me about that,” I said. He’d moved away when he was twelve to live with Grandma there in Cullman. I was four then. He was still living there when Pa and I moved up from Guantánamo three years later, after I got out of the hospital. “But that was long after we left New Orleans. How’d you know about that?”
He kind of stuttered for a second.
“I visited y’all a couple of times while you lived down there. Don’t you remember?”
I tried, but there wasn’t no use.
“I don’t really remember nothing from before the accident. Don’t rightly know why,” I said. Then I had another brain flash. “But, Pa said he hadn’t seen you in fifteen years. Didn’t he remember you visiting?”
He pulled us into a gas station. There was a bus filling up at one of the pumps, he pulled up to the other one.
“Well, look at that. I need to top off my tank before I hit the road,” he said. “I’m going up north. Have to meet another old friend up in Washington. We can talk all about this when I see you again,” he said and handed me a quarter. “Why don’t you go in there and get you a drink?”
“You got more friends up north?” I said.
“Oh, I have friends everywhere. Now, go get you something.”
I hopped out of the truck. It sure seemed like he was avoiding my questions, but I couldn’t make no reason why. I had Tommy’s voice in my head saying not to trust him, but everything about the Captain was telling me I should. I didn’t know what to do about that. I did know what to do with the quarter, though. I went into the station to get a MoonPie and an RC.
I said hello to Skippy, the fella that was working in the station. I was pretty sure he was the owner’s sixteen-year-old son. He barely ever said hi back at me when I came by. He was always too busy. No matter where I saw him, he was busy working, whether it was at football, or at studying, or whatever. He acted like he had to take care of the entire world before dinner. We had a lot in common.
I got me an
RC and my MoonPie and went up to the counter. Skippy was wiping down the window.
“How’s your pa?” I asked.
He stopped his wiping and shot me a glare.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I didn’t reckon I was speaking in a different language. Maybe he was listening in one.
“Your pa, Mr. Dexter.”
His shoulders relaxed.
“Oh, right. Folks always think that. He ain’t my pa, he’s just an old friend. But he’s more like my pa than my pa.”
He took my money and fiddled with the change.
“Who’s your pa?” I said.
He double-counted the coins he’d just put on the counter. After I took them, he finally told me.
“Archie Dean,” he said.
Archie was the town drunk. He was in and out of the jail cell so often he and the sheriff had started a checkers match with each other, one move a night. Archie claimed the sheriff was cheating. The sheriff claimed Archie was drunk. That story was easier to believe.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sure it ain’t easy having him as a pa.”
“It ain’t. But Mr. Dexter really took me under his wing. He’s taught me how to be a man and how to take care of myself. He’s helping me fill out college applications.”
I looked out the window at the Captain. He saw me looking and waved. I waved back.
“So does that make Clem your brother?” I said to Skippy.
He groaned. That confirmed it.
Clem was worse known in town for drinking than Archie. He wasn’t smart enough to get in a checkers match, either. So he had no redeeming qualities.
“Why didn’t Mr. Dexter help him out?” I said.
“Clem doesn’t trust Mr. Dexter. He says he’s trying to turn us into city folk. I think he started drinking more after Mr. Dexter took me in than he did before.”
The Troubles of Johnny Cannon Page 6
