The Troubles of Johnny Cannon

by Isaiah Campbell

  “I sure hope the spirits don’t get too tore up over us being here,” I said.

  “You talking about ghosts?” he said. “There ain’t no such thing.”

  I was surprised by that.

  “You don’t believe in ghosts? I thought all—” I stopped myself.

  “You thought all black kids was scared of ghosts? Heck no. Science, Johnny. I believe in science.”

  I didn’t say no more about it, but I wasn’t as sold on science as he was, so I kept getting the creepy crawlies.

  The first of the boxers to come around was some of Willie’s friends, including Russ. He didn’t say too much to me, but they all went over and started joking around with Willie.

  “When we going to get the fight started?” Russ asked. “I’ve been practicing on a car tire for three days.” A car tire. That was a good idea.

  Willie told him we was waiting on a few more people to come. Didn’t tell them they was white people. I hoped he was right that it wouldn’t be a big deal.

  The clouds was getting even darker, and I started smelling the rain coming. I was beginning to think none of the fellas from my school was going to show up. The air went from hot to cold, just like it does when you are about to get haunted real good. I looked around for any graves getting busted or any headless white ghosts coming walking through the yard. Instead, all them white boys from my school showed up in a group.

  And I wished they hadn’t.

  As soon as they all got there and they saw Willie’s friends, and as soon as Willie’s friends saw them, it was plain as day that I’d been right to be concerned. They all got real quiet and just stared at each other for a few seconds. Eddie was leading the fellas from my school. He came over and spoke to me extra loud to make sure all Willie’s friends could hear it.

  “It ain’t often you see spooks in a cemetery. Are the Tiggers leaving or staying?”

  Before I could tell him to keep quiet and not say that word, especially when they was right there, Russ came over and stood up real tall over Eddie.

  “I’m going to give you a chance to rethink that question,” he said.

  “Back off, Sambo,” Eddie said. “We were invited here for a boxing match. So y’all need to find another place to loiter at.”

  “We’re here for a match too,” Russ said, then he gave me a look. “The same match? You invited them to our match?”

  “Well, it’s really all of our boxing match,” I said, and I could tell that didn’t sit too well.

  Willie came over to try to clear the air. Which was good, ’cause I had a feeling it was going to be filled with raindrops pretty soon.

  “We invited all of y’all to fight each other.” When he put it like that, it didn’t sound as fun. “There ain’t no reason it should turn into something about color, is there?”

  Eddie looked at Willie, then back at his friends.

  “Well, this one’s a cripple. You know what they would have done with a crippled Tigger back in the good old days?” he said.

  Russ didn’t give him no time to finish his joke. He shoved him into his friends.

  “Shut your mouth and go home,” he said.

  Eddie brushed himself off all over his porky little body.

  “Did you just put your hands on me, boy?” he said.

  “I’ll put more than that on you if you don’t get out of here,” Russ said. “Don’t much matter to me which white boy I wallop today.”

  The fella that was mad about his cousin losing a job five years before stepped in between them.

  “You’re all the same, ain’t you?” he said to Russ.

  “If you mean that we can all whip your—”

  Thunder clapped real loud and drowned out the end of Russ’s sentence, but I think we got the idea. I hurried and tried to push them away from each other. I probably shoved them both harder than I should have. Russ lost his balance and crashed into a real big tombstone and cracked it a little. The other fella tripped over a root and went rolling down the hill into a fence.

  And that was all the spark them two groups needed to start fighting. And not in a civilized manner that would win me some money, either. Nope, this was more like Gettysburg all over again.

  They was swinging and shoving and swearing at each other, kicking and scratching and acting like they meant to do some real damage. Some of the white fellas saw Willie’s tape recorder and grabbed it, talking like they was going to smash it. I ran over and punched one of them in the ear, then took the tape recorder and put it under a broken gravestone.

  One of the fellas had knocked Willie down and was kicking him. Russ ran over and swung a stick at him to get him off. The fella grabbed Willie’s crutch and swung it back at Russ.

  More thunder clapped and I felt a raindrop.

  The fella I’d knocked into the fence ran back up the hill, and he was winded. Which meant he couldn’t do much damage with his fists. He picked up a rock and tried to throw it at one of Willie’s friends. He ducked and the rock busted the wing off an angel statue.

  The rain started pouring down, and the wind started to pick up. I looked for Eddie, but he’d already run off. I had to hand it to him, at least he knew he wasn’t no good for a fight.

  I got in there and threw a few solid punches to try and make a good point that civilized folk shouldn’t be fighting, and I took a couple myself, though I wasn’t completely sure what point those ones was supposed to make. Willie got his crutch back and went looking for his tape recorder. I didn’t have no time to tell him where I’d stuck it, ’cause my mouth was getting battered at the moment.

  One of the fellas from my school was on Russ’s back, choking him. I went and pulled him off and we went rolling halfway down the hill. A big stream of mud had already started flowing, and we both got covered in it. I bit his shoulder to get him off of me, and he went running. He didn’t stop at the top of the hill but kept going from there.

  I’d gotten a big glob of mud in my ears and couldn’t hear nothing, though I wasn’t really paying no attention. I was too busy dodging a tree branch one of the other fellas from my class was swinging at me. Knocked my legs out from under me and then was going to bash my head in, I reckon. But then Russ clobbered him and helped me up. He said something to me, and that’s when I realized I wasn’t hearing. I cleaned out my ears and finally heard the sheriff’s car coming up on us real fast.

  I was sure he was there to run us all in or something, and I think any other day he would have been, but instead he was yelling at us all to get on home. He said the storm that was coming our way was a real bad one, and if we got caught in it we might get hurt from debris. I didn’t bother to point out that we was already hurt from debris we’d made ourselves. Didn’t seem like the time for jokes.

  All the other boys had already taken off to go back up to Cullman and Colony, and it just left me and Willie. One look at Willie’s face told me that he was hurting real bad, so I didn’t tell him that I’d seen this whole problem coming but hadn’t said nothing ’cause he was so smart. Which really made it all his fault, ’cause I would have said something if he hadn’t been so smart.

  The sheriff gave us both rides up the mountain to our houses, and Willie didn’t say nothing the whole way. I reckoned he was trying to figure out how he was going to explain the bruises and bleeding he had going on his face and, I was pretty sure, around his ribs. Or maybe he was worried what would happen when his pa found out we’d caused the biggest race fight in Cullman County history. There’d been a bigger fight once, but that was called the Civil War. Which was about states’ rights. And maybe a little about race.

  After a bit in the car, I leaned over and asked Willie what was wrong.

  “I left my tape recorder at the cemetery,” he said, looking out at the rain that was starting to come down real hard.

  “Maybe it’ll be all right,” I said. “I c
overed it up with a gravestone.”

  “If it gets wet, it’s ruined,” he said. “Ain’t no gravestone going to change that.”

  There wasn’t no consoling him on it, and when the sheriff dropped him off at his house, Willie got out and went in as fast as a kid with a crutch can go. I felt real bad for him, but there really wasn’t nothing I could do.

  The sheriff drove over the mountain and let me out at my house. I peeked around back before I went in and saw that Pa was in the shed. I went inside the house.

  It took me a few seconds to realize that the phone was ringing. I almost went for the one in the living room, then I remembered that it was outside, so I ran into the kitchen and picked up the set in there. Willie whispered at me.

  “I’m going back to get my tape recorder.”

  “How you going to do that?” I said. “Somebody going to take you?”

  “I was hoping you would,” he said.

  I couldn’t help but laugh at him.

  “You want me to carry you or something? In the rain? I ain’t up to that.”

  “You told me that you drive your pa’s truck when you go fishing, didn’t you? Drive me back to the cemetery.”

  “I don’t care if you don’t believe in them or not, I ain’t going back to see them ghosts trying to clean up their resting places after we done busted them up. They ain’t going to be happy about that for nothing. Plus I don’t never drive in the rain,” I said.

  “Johnny, please,” he said, and it sounded like he was about an ant’s tail away from crying. “I can’t lose my tape recorder. There ain’t no way I could buy another one. I’m begging you.”

  Now, there’s a lot of things I’ve been okay with in my life, but making a cripple beg wasn’t one of them. I agreed and hung up. I went to the washroom where Pa kept the truck keys hanging on a hook and took them, then I went out and started the engine.

  It was raining so hard I almost had to turn the wiper speed all the way up just to see in front of me. I put it in reverse and looked over my shoulder. Why didn’t they put wipers on the rear windows? Plus there wasn’t no headlights back there. Still, thanks to the fact that I knew our driveway about like I knew my own room, I was able to inch out onto the road and go down to Willie’s house.

  He came out of the back and got in.

  “My ma thinks I’m in the bathroom,” he said. “Let’s make this fast.”

  “She’s going to think you’re unloading a week’s worth of meals, even if we go as fast as a delivery truck. And I ain’t going that fast,” I said.

  “I can always apologize to her later,” he said. “I need to get my tape recorder.”

  There wasn’t no arguing with him, and I was already in too deep to get out, so I put the truck into gear and started on down the road. The rain was falling even thicker than before, and I wasn’t as used to driving on the road to the cemetery as I was going out to the lake, so I had to move slower than I’d planned.

  There was a good number of times that I had to stop as we was going, ’cause I was afraid the sheriff was coming up behind us. But it was usually just somebody trying to get home in the rain, and after a while we got to the gate that said MOUNT VERNON CEMETERY. By the time we got there, it was coming down like a cow peeing on a flat rock, and there wasn’t no way Willie could get out and run to get his tape recorder, if it wasn’t washed away or something, so I jumped out and ran back to where I’d stuck it under the gravestone.

  It took me a bit to find it ’cause it had slid down the hill in the mud, but the stone had slid with it and wedged onto some rocks so it was somewhat protected from the water. I was trying real hard to not look around, ’cause the last thing you want to do is make eye contact with a ghost. I wrapped the tape recorder in my shirt, though I don’t really know what good it did, and I slopped through the mud back to the truck. I could have sworn I stepped on a few arm bones and such on my way, but I said a prayer every time, so I don’t reckon they’ll be able to come into my dreams or nothing.

  As soon as I got into the truck, Willie grabbed the tape recorder and started wiping all the gunk off of it. I got us turned around and headed back home.

  “It don’t look like the inside got too mucked up,” he said. “It might still work.”

  I didn’t say nothing back. I couldn’t, I was too busy focusing on the road in front of us through the window that was starting to get all fogged up, I reckoned ’cause the ghosts was breathing on it. I was trying to figure out how to drive without getting the both of us killed. All the wipers was doing was tossing the water into the air off the sides of the windshield, but they wasn’t clearing enough for me to see nothing. And the wind was starting to blow too, so hard that I thought we was going to get knocked off the road.

  We got away from the cemetery and was on the road that would take us up to our houses, and just when we was a little bit out, I heard something that made me want to go faster. It was the sound of a thousand spirits, howling in torment over the condition of their souls.

  Then I realized it wasn’t. It was the tornado sirens going off.

  They was wailing away out there, letting us know that we was the two biggest idiots in all of Cullman County. Them, combined with the pounding rain and the rumbling thunder, filled my ears so bad that I couldn’t hear too much of anything.

  I was trying to get us to our mountain as fast as we could go, and I thought I was doing a pretty good job considering I couldn’t see or hear anything. But then, just when we was coming around the bend of the road that had the biggest overhanging branches, Willie started screaming bloody murder. The reason he did that was ’cause there was a pair of headlights that was coming straight at our windshield.

  I slammed on the brakes and tried to swerve, and when I did that we slid and skidded all the way to the other side of the road. I jerked the steering wheel in the other direction, and that was all the truck needed to spin on out of control and take us over the edge of the road and down into a great big ditch that was lined with trees. We hit one of them trees real hard.

  I was about to tell Willie he could stop screaming, but then I realized that I was screaming just as much as him. Once we both calmed down, I told him to open his door. He couldn’t. It was wedged against the tree we’d slammed into. I tried to open mine, but then the lightning cracked and the wind blew so hard it shook the truck. A big limb from the tree got knocked off and it crashed down right onto the truck, then down against my door. I couldn’t get mine open either.

  “Oh my gosh, we’re stuck. We can’t get out,” I said. “What if we can’t never get out? What if we die out here?”

  “Open the window,” Willie said. “You could probably climb out and go get help.”

  “Oh, right.” I rolled down the window and water poured in over us like we had jumped into the shower. I rolled it back up. “Maybe we could wait till the rain calms down.”

  He nodded, and then the lightning cracked and the thunder made the truck shake a bit. Another bad gust of wind came through and the tree right in front of us blew over. Some of its branches landed on the hood.

  “Of course, I guess we could die out here,” he said.

  That got us both to being quiet, and we listened to the raindrops like they was bullets knocking on the lid of the truck, trying to get in at us. Then we both realized that it wasn’t rain we was hearing, it was hail. The tornado sirens blaring off in town made the both of us realize this was probably the worst storm either one of us had ever been in.

  “I took five dollars out of the collection plate at church,” he said all of a sudden. “Never gave it back, neither.”

  “Why’d you just tell me that?” I said.

  “ ’Cause, if we’re going to die, I don’t want there to be no secrets I’m holding on to when I get to Heaven.”

  The thunder rumbled again and them tornado sirens almost seemed like they was gett
ing louder.

  “My only good math grade last school year was ’cause I copied Martha Macker’s test paper,” I said. I wasn’t sure how much I believed what Willie was saying about Heaven, but I didn’t want to risk getting kicked out over a math grade.

  “I ripped the arms off my sister’s doll last year and told her the white kid that lived over the mountain did it,” he said.

  “Wait, that’s me.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, grinning. “That might be why she don’t like you.”

  That about did it for his secrets, I guess, ’cause he acted like he was ready to meet his maker. But I still had one thing that was weighing on my conscience.

  “I lied to a CIA agent today,” I said.

  “A what?”

  “A CIA agent. He was looking for a fella that’s doing radio stuff, and I said I’d never seen nobody like that. But really, I have,” I said, and then I went ahead and told him about what Pa was doing. I got so caught up in spilling the beans, I spilled about Tommy not being in Korea, too.

  “Wow,” he said. “That’s a lot more than you probably needed to share.”

  That made me feel really stupid. I tried to change the subject.

  “Do them sirens sound like they’re getting louder to you?”

  He listened for a bit.

  “Yeah, they do,” he said. “That’s weird.”

  Then we heard brakes and an engine. I rolled my window down again and we both took to hollering in spite of the gush of water that was falling in on us. We saw a flashlight and heard feet working their way into the ditch we was in. After a few seconds, the sheriff came over to us, covered in a rain poncho, and he shined his light in at us.

  “Johnny Cannon? Didn’t I already take you home once tonight?” he said.

  “Yes sir,” I said. “But that time it was from the cemetery. So it’s sort of different this time.”