“I found these over in a pile of vomit,” Short-Guy said. He was holding a set of keys with a pair of pliers.
Mr. Thomassen shook his head.
“So what do you think that means?”
Short-Guy shrugged.
“If I had to put the pieces together as I see them now, with Eddie missing, this car that’s been abandoned and is missing plates, and now a set of keys in vomit, I’d say we’re looking at a gang crime.”
Oh, dang. That was a whole heck of a lot more interesting than the truth.
“Ain’t that a bit of a stretch?” Pa said.
“Not at all. It’s fairly common in the underworld to transport small items by swallowing them. A nice car with no plates is obviously stolen, probably towed here on the back of a truck, set to be sold on the black market. Perhaps the driver and the buyer were meeting here to make a deal, then Eddie stumbled on them right when the driver brought up the keys.”
“And now Eddie is either kidnapped or dead,” Mr. Thomassen said.
Short-Guy nodded.
“But Johnny said he was with him,” Pa said.
“Probably left just in time,” Short-Guy said.
“But why go through the trouble of getting the keys up if you aren’t going to take them?”
“That’s the question,” Short-Guy said. “There’s what looks like a safety deposit key and maybe a key to a commercial lock on here. I’ll need to analyze them and see if we can find out what they all go to.” He looked at Pa. “Did you install that piece of equipment I gave you?”
“The one that transmits pictures over the radio waves? I’m working on it.”
“So, which one of us is going to break it to Bob that Eddie probably isn’t going to be found anytime soon?” Mr. Thomassen said.
“I will,” Short-Guy said. “That’s what my badge is for.”
He turned to head over to Bob, who was finishing securing the LeSabre to the tow truck. I headed down to our truck so I could get out of there before anybody saw me.
I got back to Rudy’s camp just as they was eating their snake stew. I went and sat down next to Eddie.
“Don’t know how you expected me to get your car anyway,” I said. “I’d have had to leave my truck up there.”
“You didn’t get it?” Rudy said between chews.
I told them about what had happened and Rudy stood up and tossed his bowl of stew out into the woods.
“Well, I guess we’re stuck here, then, aren’t we?” he said.
Eddie had a piece of snakeskin that he must have not peeled off very good sticking out of his mouth. He slurped it down.
“Wait, why are we stuck here?” he asked. “I know how to get cars out of my dad’s shop. And he showed me how to hot-wire, too, so we don’t need your keys.”
“No, we need my keys,” he said. He looked at Sora. “My keys are the most important thing.”
She stood up and touched her belly. “No, not the most important thing,” she said, then she grabbed me by the wrist. “Let’s get back before Pa does. Or else losing some keys will be the least important problem Rudy has.”
He didn’t seem too happy with that, but I couldn’t argue with her logic, so we got back into our truck and headed up to the house. And the whole way there, I was praying that Pa and them others hadn’t quite made it home yet. ’Cause there’s only one punishment left after being grounded, and that’s getting your butt beat so bad the eggs in the fridge feel sorry for you.
We pulled in and nearly ran over a bush on my way to getting the truck right back into its own tire ruts. I just about had a heart attack when I saw that somebody was on the porch, but it turned out it was Willie, so we didn’t need to call no ambulance or nothing. He was sitting on a green chair Sora had Pa get from the store. As soon as we walked up onto the porch, he got up and offered it to her. She walked on past and into the house.
“What you doing here?” I asked.
“Got done with my homework, so I came up here to talk at you,” he said. “And to see if Short-Guy was going to be around anytime soon. Thought I might pick his brain about that letter. How was the Labor Day thing?”
I started to tell him, and I even got started filling him in a bit on Rudy and how he was the mysterious stranger, but then the caravan of the Three Caballeros showed up on the road coming up to our house and I had to stop before I was done.
“Look, I can’t finish the story right now, but if they know I wasn’t here, I’ll be picking out my harp and wings, so you got to act like I was here when you got here.”
“You was,” he said with a grin. “We’ve been throwing rocks at squirrels for the last two hours.”
That’s why we was blood brothers.
The whole gang of them fellas came up to the porch, which I reckon meant they needed to change their name to Banda de los Caballeros, but then again, what do I know? When they got over to us, Willie did his part to make sure nobody got suspicious.
“He was here when I got here,” he said.
Short-Guy shot me a look and I reckoned I was sunk. Thank the Good Lord that Pa was in egghead mode.
“Hey, Willie, glad you’re here,” he said. “Have you heard anything about SSTV?”
Willie’s eyes lit up like they only did when he was fixing to get into an egghead discussion with someone.
“You mean slow-scan TV, like what Copthorne Macdonald wrote about?”
Pa nodded, and he and Willie got sucked into a weird tunnel of science that left all the rest of us feeling stupid and staying quiet.
“They’ve been using it on the Sputniks to send pictures down to Earth,” Willie said.
“Yup,” Pa said. “Though I didn’t know there was dogs in space.”
They both giggled at that and the rest of us smiled like we thought it was funny, even though it really wasn’t.
“Well, anyway, I got one in my shed,” Pa said.
“You got one?” Willie’s eyes got as excited as I do when I find a good deer that’s just sitting and staring away from where I’m hiding with my rifle.
“Yeah, but I’m having trouble connecting it.”
“What’s wrong?”
“The photomultiplier tube is disconnected and I can’t figure out where it goes.”
“Copthorne put it in his article, I think it’s on the first page.”
“I don’t got that article. Do you have it?”
Willie tapped his forehead.
“Sure do. Right here.”
“You want to come help me?”
“Like sodium wants to share ions with chlorine.”
“Are you positive?” Pa said, and then they both started laughing all over again. The rest of us didn’t even try to laugh at that one. When jokes are that brainy, it only makes you look stupid to act like you understood it.
They went off together, Pa using his cane and Willie using his crutch, and my first thought in my brain was how much Willie took after Pa. But then I remembered that Willie wasn’t even related to Pa, so that didn’t make no sense. Then I remembered that I wasn’t related to Pa either, so maybe it did.
Short-Guy tapped me.
“Do you have anything to eat in this house?”
We went inside and I started to make them all ham sandwiches, but Carlos saw that I had some leftover pork roast in the fridge and got super-inspired, so he made them into Cuban sandwiches instead. Which really only meant that he added the roast on with the ham, buttered the bread, slapped on mustard, Swiss cheese, and pickles, and then he grilled it like a grilled cheese sandwich, only he smashed it as flat as it’d get with a spatula. Short-Guy and Mr. Thomassen acted like it was the best thing they’d ever had in their entire lives, but I’d had french-fried coon with gravy before, and that was a pretty heavy contender. Still, it was a danged good sandwich, regardless.
Sora was lying down, so we saved her a sandwich and then we all went out to the shed to see how they was coming along with the egghead project. Pa and Willie had gotten it all ready to go and was playi
ng with it, joking about how they was sending their own faces into outer space so the Martians would know there was intelligent life on Earth.
Short-Guy handed Willie the keys to get set up for taking pictures and then he called his folks back at the CIA place to tell them he was about to send them some images that needed to be analyzed. He told them he’d dug them out of vomit, which was when Willie yelped and tossed them across the shack, and then I finally started laughing. I was the only one.
I looked outside and spied Sora, standing at the back side of the house, smoking a cigarette. I hadn’t never seen her smoke before, so I reckoned this was a special occasion, and not a happy one. I left them fellas and went to see what was going on with her.
“So when you smoke,” I said as I walked up behind her, “does the baby smoke too? ’Cause I can just imagine some smoke rings getting puffed in your belly.”
She looked at the cigarette and dropped it on the ground. “What do you want, Johnny?”
“What’s going on with you and Rudy?”
She ground the cigarette with her heel. “What makes you think there’s anything going on?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I ain’t exactly used to the whole boy and girl thing, so I’m probably as far off base as Willie Mays before he steals second. But it sure seemed weird the way you two was hugging and such. I mean, Tommy’s only barely been dead for a couple months and you’re already hugging on other fellas?”
She let out a big sigh. “How old are you?” she asked.
“I’m thirteen,” I said. “What’s it to you?”
“I have a rule in my life,” she said. “I don’t take relationship criticism or advice from anyone under the age of nineteen.”
“That’s a Tommy quote, ain’t it?”
She smiled. “Yes it is,” she said. Then she looked at my face real close. “It’s strange, I actually thought at first that you were the one Rudy is looking for.”
I coughed. “What you mean?”
“Well, ever since Tommy told me about the accident—”
“He told you about that?”
“Yes,” she said. “He told me how you were with your mom and your aunt in the car and it killed both of them.”
Well, that was a lie.
“Okay, so what about that made you think I was who Rudy was aiming for?”
“He said your mom was there to meet someone. And then I met you and could tell you weren’t related to Pa. But you’re definitely related to Tommy, so the traits you two share must be from your mom. And the traits you don’t must be from somebody else.”
I felt a lump in my throat starting up.
“So you thought I was—”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said, then she closed her eyes and sighed. She held her hand on her belly like she was waiting to feel something, so I reckoned it was a kick. She must have gotten it, ’cause she smiled and moved her hand away. “Rudy found him, so that’s that.”
The way she said what she said made me feel like there was a whole lot more trouble yet to come from whatever “that” was.
“What’s he going to do with him?” I asked.
She shot me a look. “Are you friends with him?”
“Depends on the day of the week.”
“Then please trust me that his plans are for the good of everyone concerned,” she said. “But I’m hungry. I’m going to go feed my baby that sandwich Carlos made.”
She turned and went back inside the house and left me standing there, trying my best to decide what exactly the line was I was staring at and which side of it I wanted to be on.
Then Pa called me back over to the shed and, like she said, I reckoned that was that.
CHAPTER NINE
CLOSE SHAVE
School was the worst on Tuesday. Everybody was talking about what had happened the day before. Most of the kids was talking about how mad they was about not getting no fireworks, and I couldn’t blame them for that. Others was talking about how big of a drunk I was turning out to be, which I could have blamed them for, except if I’d have been them, I’d probably be saying the same thing. Funny thing was, not very many of them was talking about Eddie being missing. Not even Mr. Braswell. Of course, he was as mad as a hornet at me, so he didn’t say nothing to me at all the whole day. Not even when I did the This Day in History thing. Which was a shame, ’cause it was all about how, back in 1863, the US threatened the British that they’d declare war on them if they helped out the Confederates in the Civil War. And it showed the lesson that you got to be real careful whose side you pick in things.
I probably needed to learn that lesson.
Anyway, I even had trouble keeping my mind on history or school or anything else, ’cause all I could think about was the job Rudy had given me when I’d snuck back out to talk to him the night before. He said I had to steal his keys away from Short-Guy. And, even though I protested like crazy, I couldn’t argue with his logic. Out of all of us, I was probably the one that could get the closest so I could get them out of his pocket. If he was keeping them in his pocket. Which he probably wasn’t, but still. It couldn’t hurt to try. Or, actually, it probably could. But I was committed, so I was trying to come up with a good plan.
Around noon, the paper showed up at the school, and then there was a whole other thing for folks to get riled up about. And it was probably the worst timing for an article in newspaper history.
The article was announcing to the community that Sheriff Tatum had decided he’d be retiring and that Bob Gorman was going to be running for the position. And right next to that article was a letter to the editor from none other than Reverend Parkins himself. In it he talked about how nice Sheriff Tatum had been to the folks in the black community and how he’d helped them restore the steeple on the church and even laid the cornerstone for a new recreation center in Colony. And he ended the letter by encouraging folks to elect another sheriff of the same caliber. Which wouldn’t have been that big of a head turner if not for his last sentence, which was the doozy. It said:
Elect another man of fine morals, not a man of means. We have enough Gormans in this county, but Tatums are hard to find.
Now, I happened to know for a fact that he’d written and submitted that letter on Saturday, before anyone knew that Bob was going to freak out and Eddie was going to run off or anything like that. But the paper didn’t decide to run the letter until today, and it served to get folks more fired up against Reverend Parkins than to get fired up about Bob. It was like they blamed Reverend Parkins for all the things that went wrong on Labor Day. And that was a real bad thing, ’cause folks in Cullman was already against the black folk. But this got them set to fetch their guns.
Which probably meant that Mrs. Parkins would be even more set on moving away from town.
When school was all over, I rushed out the door ’cause I figured, if you’re going to get shot in the face by a CIA agent, you might as well get it over with. Martha stopped me just at the sidewalk.
“Hey,” she said, “I think we need to put aside our differences for a little bit. This whole newspaper thing is going to push the Parkinses out of Cullman forever.”
Put our differences behind us? I wasn’t sure women knew how to do that, but I reckoned I could give it the benefit of the doubt.
“Well, it’s really just the timing that’s all wrong, really. That letter would have been better if it’d hit before Eddie ran off.”
“Exactly,” she said. “So what we need to do is remind people that Bob is still just as bad a guy whether his son is gone or not.”
Wow, that was low, even for a girl. I shook my head and tried to sidestep her.
“Don’t you walk away from me again, Johnny Cannon,” she said.
“Look, it ain’t right. We should just let it alone. The poor son of a gun just lost his kid. He’s having enough trouble without us trying to make him look bad to people.”
“It’s not like Eddie died or anything,” she said. “He
ran away. Because Bob is a bad person. I don’t see what the issue is.”
That made my stomach feel like it was doing a cartwheel.
“But, ain’t that dirty politics?” I asked. “I mean, dragging a fella through the mud when he’s already been knocked down for the count?”
“Didn’t you listen to Mr. Braswell?”
Nope.
“Sure, but I’ve forgotten what he said.”
“He told us that Machiavelli quote, ‘The end justifies the means.’ So it’s okay.”
Well, now I really wished I’d been listening, ’cause I would have loved to have let Mr. Braswell know how wrong he was. That was something me and Mrs. Buttke used to have fun talking about in detention, about all the things folks claimed people said but they didn’t really say. And that Machiavelli quote was one of her favorites.
“Machiavelli didn’t say that,” I said.
“Mr. Braswell said he did.”
“Well, he’s wrong. Mr. Braswell also said that Vice President Johnson would maybe make a pretty good president, and we all know that wouldn’t be true.”
She didn’t say nothing to that, so I reckoned that meant I could keep on going.
“But Machiavelli did say something else, he said, ‘Men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand, because it belongs to everybody to see you, to few to come in touch with you. Every one sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are, and those few dare not oppose themselves to the opinion of the many.’ ”
That had been Mrs. Buttke’s favorite quote for me. She said it to me every time I’d start to whining about folks that was staring at my scars.
“Okay, so?” she said.
“So that means if you ain’t going to put in the time to really get deep with somebody, it ain’t right to claim you know all about them. Even if everybody else claims they do. This stuff between Eddie and Bob, it’s a lot more complicated than making headlines and getting folks to change their votes.”
She shrugged.
“So?” she said. “The important thing here is that the Parkinses are in trouble and this is the way to help them. By making Bob look bad to everybody.”
The Struggles of Johnny Cannon Page 14
