Sonny's Comeback: Jim Green

by James Green

  On the run and getting over taking a bullet led him to be a part of…

  Sonny’s Comeback.

  by

  Jim Green

  With acknowledgements and apologies to the original author of…

  The Prodigal Son

  Chapter 1

  Welcome to Smallville.

  It’s funny how things go. You think, you plan, you work, and then life steps in with a bunch of roses or a blackjack and suddenly nothing’s the same any more, nor ever going to be. Of course it doesn’t happen to everyone, for the lucky ones life just passes them by and lets them get on with it, but I wasn’t one of the lucky ones. With me it had been the blackjack, life had sapped me down out of a clear blue sky, a New York, cornflower blue, Spring sky, and you know what I remember most about it? How she had looked. How young and innocent and fresh, and how sweetly she smiled when she pulled the trigger. But I’m not complaining, it was a woman’s piece, a handbag gun, small calibre, and the bullet hadn’t gone anywhere that did any real harm. She wasn’t used to gun-play so I floored her before she could get another round off. I got to Old Isaiah early enough so he was still sober which meant he patched me up well enough to travel. I had a spare suit and enough dough for a ticket to…well, somewhere in the Mid-West, so I skipped, happy to be ahead of the cops and still upright. OK, I left behind a stash worth two hundred large and a cash deal, but I also left behind a thirty year stretch of which I’d have been lucky to serve three. You see, the stuff hadn’t exactly been mine to sell in the first place, and my friends had friends. She does that, you know, Life, she comes on to you and you think it’s going to be roses all the way. Something just falls at your feet and when you bend down to pick it up – zap, and it’s you that’s on the floor and they’re queuing up to kick your ribs in.

  So, there I was in the great Mid-West, tending bar on Main Street, Smallville, serving drinks to cowboys in Stetsons, high-heeled boots and check shirts. You’ve seen that street in that town a hundred times on old TV movies, hot, dry and nothing ever happening and let me tell you it’s just like that, no make-believe needed. Of course in the movies something does happen or there’d be no movie but that summer there wasn’t any make-believe and the only thing that happened was Saturday nights when maybe someone would get a bit of a load on and maybe a few fists would get thrown but it never amounted to anything. See, those people were neighbours, although when I say neighbours I don’t mean like in a New York neighbourhood, there was miles between one ranch and the next so they didn’t exactly fall over each other when they stepped out of their front doors.

  The women saw each other when they came into town with the kids or to shop or get their hair done and the men came in on Saturday night to drink and relax and on Sunday morning everyone came into town and went to church and that, my friend, was that. I didn’t mind it too much, for me it was a change and a rest and I would be on my way when I was ready but I think the place was hard on the young people. Young people need an occasional surprise and a bit of mystery, something unknown in the future for them to discover and make their own, a person, a situation, something that you don’t see coming. There was about as much mystery in Smallville as there is in a dead fish left in the sunshine, if you lived in that town you knew what was coming. Yes, it was hard on some of the young people and Sonny Ravenaar was a young man who didn’t try to hide it that he hated Smallville and just about everything and everyone in it.

  When I first met Sonny he was just turned eighteen, a good-looking guy who wanted to be full of life but was mostly full of himself, and that’s a bad thing to be in a small community. In a big city like New York your sharp edges get blunted or pointed and you get to know early where it is you’re going fit in. In Smallville Sonny’s sharp edges just cut anyone he rubbed up against. In the big city he would always have had some girl on his arm, a good-looking guy like him, but in Smallville he had used up the pool because his looks didn’t cut it enough to make up for the fact that, for Sonny, it was only Sonny who mattered.

  So Sonny just had Sonny and maybe a couple of cronies who would sit with him in the bar on Saturday nights and listen to him gripe for as long as he bought them drinks. If there was no-one else, he’d gripe to me. I listened because barmen are supposed to listen, it’s allowed for in the pay-check, but I didn’t like the guy. Sonny’s trouble was that he was weak. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean he was weak physically, physically he was a big guy. What I mean is that maybe his mom had spoiled him as a kid, always told him he was something special, made him think everyone ought to look up to him and that life would put something good in his lap one day because… well, for whatever reason mom’s tell favourite sons they deserve better. Maybe that’s how it was, I couldn’t tell because Sonny’s mom had been dead for a few years before I hit the town, it was his dad I knew better.

  Sonny’s dad was a rancher like the rest but in a bigger way than most. Each week he’d drive into town with Sonny’s older brother, Jesse. They come in a battered old pick up and Jesse would go to sort out any business and Sonny’s dad would go do the shopping. That was how the old guy was, he didn’t try to impress people with what a big man he was and seeing as how shopping was women’s work he did it, he never asked Jesse or Sonny to do it. Not that Sonny ever got asked to do much of any real kind of work that I ever found out about. Jesse worked hard like his pop and I only saw him on Saturday nights, but Sonny seemed to have plenty of spare time to hang around in town or head off to… well, a city not too far away where he could get a bit of action if he’d managed to get some dough off his pop. Maybe if his mom had lived she would have straightened him out, I’ve known it done, as it was his dad did the best he could but he gave him too long a leash. Whatever he gave Sonny was never enough, Sonny always felt he should have had more, more free time, more dough, more respect. You get my meaning? Sonny was weak because he wanted things, but he wouldn’t work for them and he wouldn’t take them, he wanted them put right into his lap and he didn’t want to have to say, thank you. Now Jesse, Sonny’s brother and about three years older, he was strong, but he was quiet too, not nice, gentle, quiet but kind of waiting quiet. It was something in his eyes mostly, the way he looked as if he was always watching in case anybody tired anything on him. He was one dark dude.

  I reckon he resented the way he worked hard and Sonny just longed around, whatever it was there was no love lost between them. They never drank together when they were in town, not even Saturday nights. I’ll give him this, though, Jesse worked hard and had a good head for business. The old man had built up the ranch, bought land, improved the stock, drilled wells, hell, whatever ranchers do to get to be bigger ranchers, but Jesse had taken over the running of the ranch and was doing a good job at it. I knew about it all because if Jesse’s business kept the old man waiting he’d come into the bar for a beer and we’d talk. I liked the old man, he was a straight guy and I owed him a favour.

  A black stranger in a sharp city suit doesn’t always get made welcome in these small Mid-Western towns. I don’t mean it was like Mississippi or Alabama in the old days, they don’t make you sit somewhere special to eat or expect you to say, ‘Yes sah, no sah’. It’s just that they’re naturally suspicious, they’re good, kind, friendly people, but naturally suspicious, and a black man, with no reason to be there, turning up out of nowhere saying he’s looking for work in a small town with no jobs brings it out, why wouldn’t it? and, if you come right down to it, they were right to be suspicious, I sure wasn’t what anybody would call good news.

  Sonny’s old man was the first person I had spoken to when I got off that bus, I’d asked him where I could get a drink. I didn’t really want a drink, you understand, I just wanted
to make contact, speak to someone, test the water, and asking about the nearest bar was the best way I could think of. You know what happened? Sonny’s pop looked at me for a second then said,

  ‘Come on, friend, I’ll show you. You look like you could use some refreshment.’

  And he took me to a bar, sat me down and bought me a beer. My friend, that was the best break I ever got, sitting in that bar drinking with Sonny’s pop made me welcome in that town. Guy’s passed us and said, ‘Hi,’ or nodded. If I was with Sonny’s pop I was welcome. Before we left that bar I had a job and the recommendation for a room.

  Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to tell you I was there looking to reform and the old guy’s kindness got me started. I’d done plenty of bad things and I fully intended to get on out there and do plenty more as soon as I felt safe, I wasn’t about to change the kind of guy I was. You see, the way I’d always figured it the good Lord made us sheep and goats, like it says in the Bible. Now some folks are natural born sheep and I guess some folks get to choose, but some folks have to be the goats and I was surely born one of them. I never was cut out to be a good guy and I had no use for trying. I was bad at home, bad at school and bad when I got sent to juvenile, and I just kept running on those rails.

  What I’m saying is that when I hit that town I didn’t want trouble, I was trying to stay out of trouble, but I was trouble, always had been, and I think Sonny’s pop saw that and that was why he took me to the bar, bought me a drink, sat with me and talked. He saw the way it was and so he got me a job and a room. He was a good man, a true Christian doing a good deed, although at the time I had him down as a sucker, to me he was the country rube while I was the city wise guy, so I took his drink, his job moved into the room and set out to wait out the time.

  It was about six weeks after I had hit town on a Saturday night that the bust-up started, Sonny had been drinking in the bar with a couple of guys and, as usual, had been griping on about how he deserved better than some small no account town, about how he needed…Oh, shit, you’ve know, you’ve heard it all before a hundred times, I want, I want. It was nothing new, like I say, Sonny wanted. That weak dude wanted it all, he wanted dough and plenty of it, he wanted girls, he wanted action, he wanted people to sit up and take notice and tell him what a great guy he was. The way Sonny told it he could cut it all the way from Venice to Queens and back again if only his pop would bank roll him the way he deserved. Then Jesse came in.

  He was on his own for some reason and he came to the bar and stood next to Sonny and bought a beer, they didn’t even look at each other, never mind speak, and when I brought Jesse his beer he took it to a table and sat down, quiet-like, but not nice quiet if you know what I mean.

  Sonny had turned and watched him all the way to the table and kept on looking at him, like he was waiting, like he knew something was going to happen. Man, you could tell right off that night was the night for action. Those brothers had decided to settle something, it was then that I realised just how much that they hated each other. I guess I was the only one in that bar who felt surprised that night when things busted open between them, everyone else was expecting it sooner or later, but I was a city guy, a wiseguy, and I was used to city hate, up front and violent. I wasn’t used to country ways, hate slowly building over years, hate eating you up inside while outside you’re just like always. Well, as I said, that night even I saw it coming. Jesse sat with his beer looking down at it and Sonny sat on his stool at the bar looking at him, and that’s how it stayed for a few minutes.

  Then Jesse looked up from his beer and looked at Sonny,

  ‘Make that drink your last, kid, tomorrow early I need a couple of guys to go and round up strays in the back hills and you’re going to be one of the guys. You’ll be away a week, or maybe it’ll be two seeing as how you ain’t exactly the hot shot in the saddle that you are on a bar stool, but don’t worry, I’ll send Old Joe with you, he’ll nurse-maid you through it.’

  Sonny got off his stool all cool and collected, I guess that, even though we hadn’t seen it much in town, those brothers had passed words plenty of times before. He went over to Jesse’s table and just looked at him

  ‘You know what you can do, cow hand? You can go and screw yourself, and if you don’t want to do that then you can screw Old Joe or your horse or maybe one of the cows you find in the hills when you go looking.’

  Now I won’t waste your time with their dialogue, they were both small town Joes who got their tough talk off the TV or the movies and their cursing words wouldn’t get the notice of a Bronx Sunday School teacher, so you’ll pretty much know what they had to say to each other. What made it different on this Saturday night was that it didn’t stop at bad-mouthing each other, it moved on. It took about two minutes before Jesse threw his beer glass at Sonny’s head and they were at each other and you could see straight off this time they both meant it.

  Now, like I said, I’m a city guy and I was used to city ways, if this fist-fight had been in a New York bar, at least in the one’s I drank in, I’d have watched for a

  minute and then laid money on who would come out on top. What I expected in that small town bar was for guys to wade in and pull those brothers apart, I mean, they were rally hurting each other. Sonny was bigger but Jesse was meaner and blood was soon flowing and I reckoned one of them might well wind up in the mortuary if no-one stopped things, but I was wrong. No-one did a damn thing. I guess they knew their own neighbours and figured it would have to come out this way one day, so why not now?

  Well, it was no contest really, Sonny should have taken Jesse being the bigger man, but Sonny couldn’t take the pain, that is, while he was really mad he could take it but he couldn’t stay mad and like I said, when he wasn’t mad he was just weak. Once Jesse outlasted Sonny’s first charge the kid just about gave up. But Jesse didn’t, he worked on Sonny almost like a professional and when Sonny had the sense to go down and stay down Jesse stepped up and kicked him hard with those pointy-toed cowboy boots they wore. He would have gone on kicking him, I guess, if their old man hadn’t shot him in the leg.

  Now a fist-fight in a Main Street bar on Saturday night didn’t warrant the sheriff’s office turning out, but gun-play on Main Street anytime sure did. When the show was over Sonny and Jesse were in hospital, their old man was in the jail and after I had closed up like the deputy told me to I sat having a drink and thinking.

  I was running away from a tight squeeze. I’d finked on my friends and stolen their goods, I’d moved in on my best friend’s girl, or at least I thought I had, and what I had got from it all was a bullet in my hide and the cops getting stuck on my tail, and that was just what I knew about. In the drugs racket there’s never a shortage of corpses so I guess since I blew town a couple of inconvenient stiffs could have been charged up to me. Why not? It’s what I would have done. But the way I figured it, compared to that old guy in jail I was on easy street.

  You see in my line of work you don’t really have friends so all that crap you see on TV or the movies about not ratting to the cops is just that, crap. You rat, you squeal, whatever you’ve got, goods, people, information, you sell for what you can get and you take the money and run. Unless of course you’re big enough to take the money and stay, which I never was nor likely to be. But at least I could run and

  because me and my friends were small-time, once I’d cleared town I was free as a bird. The cops would have been glad if I’d fallen in their lap, sure, but they don’t have the time or interest to go looking for the likes of me and my friends don’t have connections outside of the penitentiary system. So here I was, safe and sound in Smallville with a job and a decent room and people treating me like I was just another Joe. Like I say, I was on easy street, wait maybe a few more months then head back East, not New York, but some big city and make new friends and get back to work. Now the old guy in jail couldn’t just up and run away from his trouble, his trouble was his family and his family, with his ranch, was his whole lif
e and you can’t run away from your life. I knew what he was doing in that cell of his, he was working out how not to lose both sons, because sure as God made little apples when they came out of hospital they were going to start in on hating each other all over again and next time one might just kill the other and spend the rest of his life in jail for doing it. That’s what I sat there thinking the old man was busy working on in his cell, and as it turned out, I was right on the button.

  They let the old man out in the morning and he came round and knocked on the bar door. He knew I cleaned the place up in the mornings so I let him in and made him a coffee. I guessed he didn’t want to sit down where people would come up all the time and tell him how tough it was and how sorry they were, but he didn’t want to go back to his ranch either. He wanted to finish working things out and he figured the bar was the best place to do that so he sat there drinking his coffee and I left him to it.

  After a while he said to me, ‘They’ll both be OK. They told me in jail. Jesse’s leg will be OK and Sonny’s going to mend up fine.’

  I told him that was good news.

  ‘I had to shoot Jesse, you know, I knew it was the only way to stop him that’s why I came after him.’

  I told him that, as there was no real harm done to the leg, it was a good thing he had come in when he did and done what he had to do. I told him that everyone understood, that anybody could see it was the only thing to do. He seemed to appreciate what I said. I didn’t include Jesse of course, I didn’t think Jesse would understand, not by a long shot, but I didn’t think there was no need to say that out loud.