He went to hand the flask back to Rudy, but Rudy told him he could keep it. Then Mr. Braswell and Ethan staggered off down the hill to the truck. Ethan fumbled with his keys a bit and turned on the engine. Mr. Braswell rolled down his window.
“See you at the lake tomorrow, Johnny!” he said. Then he raised up, pulled down his pants, and showed off his bare backside. He kept it hanging out the window while Ethan made a cloud of dust as he drove off down the hill.
I suddenly remembered the motto the teachers at school had decided on that year, Training the Leaders of Tomorrow.
Rudy chuckled.
“Well, I think I’ll be going too.” He pulled his keys out of his pocket, couldn’t quite keep hold of them, and they went flying through the air. They landed in Ethan’s vomit. He cringed.
“So, I’m walking.” He started to stumble down the hill.
I closed my eyes. I needed to learn to keep my big mouth shut, I knew that. I knew I shouldn’t do things or offer things or be there for folks the way I had been lately. But I wouldn’t be a Cannon if I did what I knew I should do all the time.
“Would you like a ride?” I asked.
“No, I’ll be fine,” he said. “I’m in a tent just five miles from here. Of course, you already know that, don’t you? Anyway, I can walk it.”
“Or I could drive you,” I said. “Ain’t no skin off my teeth.”
It only took a little more convincing until he gave in and got into my truck. We started down the road. And, just like Tommy used to be, he was awful chatty with all that whiskey in his system.
“So, what do you remember about Cuba?” he asked. Tommy must have told him.
“Not much,” I said. “Just the bad stuff, mainly.”
He sighed.
“That’s too bad,” he said. “But there’s got to be something you remember that’s good. What about Batidos?”
Batidos was like a milk shake in Cuba. And he was right, that was a good memory.
“Heck yeah,” I said. “Batido de Trigo was my favorite thing in the whole world. I’d drink them by the dozen when I could.”
“Mmm, mine was Batido de Guanábana.” He sighed. “What about the dancing? And the music? And friends? Surely you had friends.”
I shook my head.
“I remember dancing, but if I had any friends they done got erased from my brain.” I thought for a second. “But, wait, you was in Cuba?”
He nodded.
“Lived there all the way up until Castro’s chumps drove my family out,” he said. “Cut my teeth on the banana trees.”
“And now you’re here,” I said. “And you still ain’t told me why you’re tracking Sora like a dog.”
“I made a promise,” he said. “And I’m working to keep that promise.”
“A promise to who? To Tommy?”
He nodded.
“And Sora,” he said. “A promise to keep her safe.”
I stared up at the road that was getting shined on by the headlights and mulled that in my brain for a bit.
“It’s pretty plain and clear from your outfit and your car that you got money. Why are you stealing groceries, then? Why not just go in and buy them?”
He groaned. “My father has eyes everywhere. And I need to make sure he doesn’t find me. Because once he’s found me, he won’t let me get away again so easily.”
“Well, if you’ve been taking care of her so blamed good, why is she so skinny?”
“Feeding a pregnant girl is hard,” he said. Brother, he could say that again.
“Well, I got to say that your promise to Tommy and Sora must have been a powerful strong one,” I said. “To get you staying in a tent out in the middle of nowhere. Stealing groceries and risking getting arrested or dragged back to your pa and all that. Don’t reckon I’d do it.”
He stared out the window at the darkness.
“I’m trying to avoid paying for the sins of my father. To find penance for the scars on my soul. So, yes, it is a powerful strong promise.”
I shivered. That didn’t sound good.
“Which sins you talking about?”
“Take your pick,” he said. Then he pointed up ahead of us. “You can park up here.”
I pulled over and he went to get out. He had one leg out of the truck and then he looked back at me.
“You want to come see my tent? Or, see it again, I guess?” His eyes was halfway closed. He pulled a mint out of his pocket and put it in his mouth, then he offered me one.
In case you’re wondering, there’s only one right answer to give to somebody if they ask you if you want to see their tent. You tell them no. Just like that. If you want to add a kick to the knee or a sock in the jaw, that’s up to you. But no matter what, you ought to always say no. Saying anything else is dadgum stupid.
“Sure, I guess,” I said. Never said I was smart. Plus, like he said, I’d already seen his tent, so it was different. “But then I got to get on home.”
I got out and followed him. He almost toppled flat over into a pile of weeds that probably was hosting a family of snakes. I went and let him lean on me and we walked through the woods. He still smelled like wintergreen, but with whiskey thrown in. Wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever sniffed, but it wasn’t apple pie either.
We made our way through the trees to the clearing and headed toward his tent. There was a lantern on inside of it and what looked like another person, sleeping.
“You brought somebody with you?”
“No,” he said, “I picked up a straggler.”
He opened the flap to the tent and kicked the sleeping bag as he went and collapsed on the other side. The person sleeping jumped up. He wasn’t wearing nothing but his skivvies.
“Eddie?” I said.
“Johnny?” he said.
“Oh good, you two know each other,” Rudy said as he pulled his blanket over top of himself. He started to say something else, but the whiskey finally set in, and instead he went to snoring.
“What are you doing out here?” I asked Eddie. “Where’s your clothes?”
“I told you, I’m running away,” he said.
“From your pants?”
“No,” he said, blushing.
“Why are you with him?”
“ ’Cause we’re”—he looked over at Rudy and his voice got softer—“kindred spirits. We’re both running from the sins—”
“Of your fathers, got it,” I said. “But I got a feeling you’d be better off running on your own than camping out with him. Your pa isn’t going to take too kindly to you running off in the first place, let alone hanging with a vagrant. And when Rudy finds out your pa is up for sheriff, well, I reckon he’ll want to be as far away from you as possible.”
As soon as I said that, he pushed me out of the tent and shushed me.
“Listen, about that, I need you to keep a secret for me. Just from Rudy, if you ever talk to him again.”
I didn’t figure I’d be talking to Rudy much more after that night, so I said I would.
“Okay, see, I might have lied to him when he asked me who my father was,” he said.
“Probably smart,” I said. “Though I don’t reckon you can keep that lie up if you stick around here any longer.”
“I know, I know, but listen,” he said. “Here’s the deal, at first he wasn’t aiming to let me stay with him, so I needed to come up with some reason he might want me to stick around.”
“And?”
“And after you left me here on Friday, I went through his journal and stuff and I came across some entries that he was looking for a fella.”
“Okay, so?”
“So, if you’re ever talking to him again, my name ain’t Eddie Gorman. It’s Eddie Morris. And my father is Captain—”
“Richard Morris,” I said, and my gut clenched up something fierce.
“Yeah, how did you know?” he asked.
I peeked back into the tent and could see Rudy breathing real hard in his sleep and I wonder
ed if he was dreaming about the reward money Mr. Trafficante had put on the Morris blood. On my blood.
“Word spreads fast,” I said.
“Well, anyway, as soon as he heard me say that, he said I needed to stay with him and to not go nowhere or nothing. Said it was for my own good.” He grinned a big fat grin. “So, from now on, I’m Captain Morris’s son.”
That’d make my life quite a bit easier. But it might not be the best turn of events for Eddie. And, since I’d already done stopped hating him and started caring about whether or not his life went off okay, I couldn’t let him walk into a bear trap like that.
“Listen, you can’t ask me how I heard about this, but I think it ain’t exactly safe to be Richard Morris’s son at the moment.”
“On account of the price tag on his head?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, and I eyed him as suspiciously as I ever had. “How’d you know that?”
“Rudy told me,” he said. “Said that’s exactly why I needed to be right by his side, ’cause that was the only way I could guarantee that I’d be safe from anybody that might be hunting for me.”
I peeked back in the tent again at Rudy, grinning while he snored like he was dreaming about finding Shangri-La or something.
“But wasn’t he hunting you?”
“Sure, but he was after me to keep me safe from them folks that’s aiming for me,” he said. “Well, for the Morrises, but whatever.”
I really hoped he was right. I sort of thought it might just be easier to spill the truth, but I wasn’t sure. It was one of those situations where you feel like the kid who saw the magician practicing before the birthday party and you knew all about the trapdoor in the box and such, but you wasn’t sure if you wanted to say nothing ’cause you didn’t want to be that guy that messed up the magic show. Especially when you was the one that might get sawed in half. I decided to keep my big mouth shut.
We talked a little more about his lies and about what he and Rudy was going to do and whether they was going to stick around for a bit or not. He didn’t know nothing, to tell the truth, so it was a waste of spit and wind. Finally, I decided it was time to go home. I was heading out the camp when he stopped me.
“You got to swear you won’t tell nobody.”
“Sure, whatever,” I said.
“Johnny,” he said, “I’m serious. You saw what my pa did to me before, and that was him trying to restrain himself. Trust me, if he finds me now, well, I ain’t so sure he’d know how to hold back.” His eyes almost started tearing up. “From here on out, I’m a Morris, not a Gorman. And you didn’t see me out here at all.”
He was scared. There was something about it, something about him being as scared as a little kid, without one ounce of meanness or even a shred of a prank or nothing. I hadn’t never seen it on him before. So I swore I’d keep it secret, and not just any old oath you’d take on the schoolyard. I took an Alabama blood oath, the sort that only gets paid back once you’ve burned in hell for a few years. That was serious business.
I wondered how long you had to burn for lying about who your father was. Hopefully not as long. I probably already had a few centuries’ worth of sins saved up that I’d have to simmer in brimstone over, I sure didn’t need no more.
I went back to the truck and headed on home.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SPARKS FLY
It was right before five in the morning, and I was powerful grateful that I could sleep all day. Before I laid back down, I wrote a note and pinned it to my door asking Pa to let me sleep until at least after lunch, and then we could head over to the picnic.
He must have gotten my note, ’cause he didn’t come into my room until late. But, when he did finally come to wake me up, he did it by turning my mattress over and dropping me on the ground like a flapjack with a fly cooked into it.
I jumped up, hopping mad.
But he was even madder. He was furious.
“What is this?” he asked, and held out the shirt I was wearing before I went to bed, which I’d thrown on the floor right next to the door.
“It’s my shirt,” I said. I still wasn’t ready to stop scowling at him.
“I know it’s your shirt,” he said. Then he pointed at some stains going down the front. “I mean this. What is this? And don’t try to lie your way out of this, I know whiskey when I smell it.”
Ah, dang. I stopped my scowling and started stuttering.
“It’s . . . It’s . . . it ain’t like what you think,” I said.
“Oh, sure.” He threw my shirt at me. “It ain’t never like what I think, is it? Ain’t that just what Tommy used to always say? And then we’d find out he’d beaten some poor soul to a pulp, or he’d wrecked somebody’s car, or he’d been out with some girl and couldn’t remember her name.”
I peeked out at the hallway. Sora stood, dazed, with her mouth open. She saw me looking, so she ducked away.
“Yeah, that’s how it used to be with him, but it ain’t with me. I ain’t aiming to be like that.”
“Of course you ain’t,” he said. “But that don’t mean you ain’t going to hit it if you keep on going.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Okay, fine.” He sat on my desk. “Tell me, did you or did you not go out after bedtime last night?”
I took a deep breath.
“Yes sir, I did.”
“What time did you come home?”
I closed my eyes. This wasn’t going to be good, but lying would be worse.
“About five.”
He looked like I’d stepped on a kitten or something. He took a couple seconds before he said another word.
“Were you alone or with people?”
“I was with people, but it—”
He held up his hand and stopped me.
“Was there drinking involved?”
I took another deep breath.
“Yeah, there was, but—”
“Don’t you ‘but’ me,” he said, then he put his finger in my face. “Now, you answer this question honest or so help me. Did you drink anything yourself?”
I looked at that finger and remembered a time that Tommy’d smacked Pa’s hand away for doing it. I didn’t understand how he could do that then. I did now.
“Well, it really depends on what you mean by drinking.”
Pa got real mad at that and smacked my desk, loud as a pistol.
“Damnation! Don’t you go splitting hairs with me! Did a drop, a single, solitary drop of whiskey make its way over your lips? Did you taste alcohol? How else can I say it?”
Unfortunately, there was only one honest answer to those questions.
“Yes,” I said, “but that ain’t a fair line of questions.”
He stood up, his face fallen down like an old barn.
“You’re grounded,” he said. “No more hanging around with Willie or Martha, no more hunting or fishing, none of it. No TV. You ain’t going to do nothing but go to school and then sit in your room. And you’ll only be doing homework in here too. No comic books.”
He started to head out of the room.
“Mr. Braswell made me do it,” I said. He stopped in his tracks.
“Mark?” he asked. “Used to hang around with Tommy and Ethan?”
“Yeah. Mark did it. He forced me to drink.”
Pa grabbed me by the arm.
“Either you’re lying or Mark is going to be out of a job.”
I wasn’t lying, so I hoped Mark had his résumé ready to go.
Pa dragged me downstairs and put me in the truck. Didn’t let me brush my teeth or fix my hair or nothing. I was still in my sleeping shirt, though he did let me throw on pants and my shoes, which I was thankful for. Then he drove us real fast into town and over to Mr. Braswell’s mom’s house. But she wasn’t there. She and everybody else was out at the one place I sure didn’t want to be right then.
They was all out at Smith Lake Park for the Labor Day picnic. And, ’cause he was fixing to embarr
ass me in front of every single person that lived in or around Cullman, Pa drove us out there so he could give Mr. Braswell a piece of his mind.
The whole way there, I was begging and pleading with him to turn around and head back home. I tried bargaining with him, offering to spend the rest of my days working in our house, even tried threatening to tell folks his most embarrassing story, when he sleepwalked and thought the trash can was the toilet and we all woke up to the worst smell there’d ever been, but it didn’t do nothing. He was bound and determined to ruin my life, and there just flat wasn’t no stopping him.
The park was so full that people was parking on the road, and we pulled up behind about twenty-five cars. Which meant we was going to be walking from the far end of the park over to where everybody was congregating. Me still in my pajama shirt and my hair still matted from my own drool. I ain’t never wanted to die so bad in my life.
We marched along the grass, Pa stabbing the ground with his cane like he figured he was knocking the devil in the head or something. The park was a sea of noisy people, but as soon as we stepped foot in it, the sea parted and we walked along on the dry ground of silence. Every single pair of eyes snapped on us and followed us as we moved deeper and deeper to find Pa’s target.
We passed Martha and Kristen, sitting on a blanket, watching some fellas from our class playing Frisbee. Or they was until we passed by. Then they was watching us. Which is why I’ve always hated Frisbees, ’cause they can’t keep folks’ attention for nothing.
There was folks over barbecuing, and I was afraid they was going to burn their weenies ’cause they stopped tending to them. Some folks was playing volleyball and one fella got an easy point ’cause the other team noticed us first.
Finally, we got deep in the heart of the crowd and found Mr. Braswell. He was standing with a whole mess of girls, just gabbing away like he knew they all wanted to be his girlfriend. He was in swim trunks and didn’t have no shirt, which made all them girls keep glancing at his chest. He had on big sunglasses and was holding a beer in one hand and his cigarette in the other. He didn’t see us coming.
The Struggles of Johnny Cannon Page 12
