Bad Boy Boogie

by Thomas Pluck

  “Where’s Mam?” I asked, noticing her absence. You could always tell when she was missing. The house grew still and lifeless, as if she took the soul of the place with her when she went.

  Dad dipped the paper and peered over the rim of his glasses. They looked so delicate perched there on the tip of his bulbous nose—the thin-rimmed bifocals. He never wore them in public. “Just eat your food. She’ll be in when she’s in.”

  Ten minutes passed, and all I’d managed was to stare at the fry-up whilst newscasters spouted static from the radio, wondering if the sip of tea I’d sent down would send my insides into a spasm until they chucked it back up. Then a shadow ghosted past the window, and in through the back door stepped Mam wearing a smile nearly splitting her cheeks.

  “There you are. My child, now a man. And how’s the head? Do you need a painkiller?” Over to the medicine cabinet she went with her trademark shush of slippers and perfume trailing in her wake. “I’ve some Paracetamols here somewhere, if you need them.”

  “Aren’t they months out of date?” I asked.

  “Sure everyone knows that’s only a cod to make you buy more.”

  Despite my misery, I laughed at her logic. “You’re probably right. But I’m fine. Taken a few tablets already. I should be flying in an hour or so.”

  She nodded, turned the heat down on the cooker and folded her arms. “What’s with the flag?”

  Dad snorted derisorily. “Don’t ask, Peggy. For the love of God.”

  It must have been the spotlight above, but I really only copped on to the state of her then. In all my life, I’d never seen Mam fully made-up so early, like she was stepping out for a night in Cork city. Yet there she stood dressed in her finery, with her face gleaming from all the rouge and lippy and her hair set immaculately in a bob. I studied her face a while longer. Her lips wore the smile well, but it was her eyes that made me swallow. They were red and moist and sat in puddles of black. Even with all the makeup on, I knew she’d been crying half the night.

  “You’re looking well, Mam. Is there a mass or something?”

  “No, no mass.”

  “A day out with the ones from the choir, then?”

  “If only I were so lucky.” She fussed with her bracelet for a moment. “Too much to do around here to go gallivanting around town. How’s the fry-up?”

  I stuck a fork in a rasher and wiggled it. “Just the ticket. Thanks.”

  “You meeting JJ again later? Going for day two of a three-day bender no doubt?”

  “Maybe for a swift few. Got the minor match tomorrow, so we’ve to take it easy tonight.”

  She smiled again, but it came faker than those prissy grins you’d see sprawled over the cover of glossy magazines. “We were young once ourselves. Enjoy it while you can.”

  I crinkled my brow. “You all right, Mam? Anything wrong?”

  “Oh, we’re grand. Aren’t we, Pat?”

  “We are,” Dad said without looking up. “All hunky-dory here.”

  “You see? Now, do you want a fresh top-up of tea?”

  “No, thanks. Stomach’s a bit queasy, so you won’t mind if I only manage a bit of this?”

  “Well, eat what you can. I’ve a beer in the fridge, if you fancy a cure. What is it you and your pals call it? The hairy dog?”

  I laid the cup down and stared straight up at her. “What’s going on, Mam? I mean…you’re never this nice to me the morning after a session.”

  The smile slipped from her face, and her shoulders tensed up slightly. She sloped over, sat next to Dad and twisted her wedding band around and around on her finger, before jabbing him in the side. “Go on then, Pat.”

  “Go on with what?” He shook the paper once and raised it ever so slightly.

  “You know damn well with what.”

  “Do I?”

  She grabbed the newspaper from his hands, sat on it, and the two of them locked eyes. It was a worrying sight, to be honest. With the weighty stares on them, it looked like they were either going to score the face off each other or fight.

  Dad broke away first and clasped his hands on the table. “You fancy your chances with those Glenbridge boys tomorrow? Word has it they’re strutting about the town like cocks of the walk, thinking they’ll wipe you off the pitch.”

  “Stop stalling,” Mam said, clipping her ring off the edge of the table.

  “I’m not…I’m easing into it. I can’t just—”

  “You can too.”

  “All right, calm down.” He sipped his mug, winced and reached for the teapot. “That’s stone cold. I need a hot drop first before I—”

  Mam yanked it out of his hands and slammed it on the table, sending some of the tea lipping out of its spout. “You’re adopted,” she said, quick as you like, and slapped her hands over her mouth.

  The words had barely reached my ears when everything went north of normal. Mam erupted into a shaking mess of tears. Dad recoiled with a feverish look to him; his ruddy face deepening to purple and his eyes enlarging to the size of cue balls. Even the washing machine beeped and shuddered to a stop from the shock of the moment.

  I held up my palms defensively. “Rewind for a second there, Mam. Could you repeat what you just said?”

  “Benjamin…”

  “Yes.”

  “You are…a-dop-ted.”

  Jesus Christ.

  Mam tilted her head and cupped my chin in her hand. “I’m sorry, Benjamin. I didn’t want to blurt it out like that. But it’s done now. I love you. You hear me? That’s all you need to know. And now…” She glanced about briefly and nodded. “Now I’ve got to hang up the washing.” And with that, she gathered up the linen basket, hemmed it against her hip and barged out the backdoor into the yard.

  “Peggy,” Dad said, leaping up and running after her. “You can’t let the lad hanging like that.”

  A sour wind full of rot swept in just then. It scooted about briefly and buffeted the blinds, before sucking the door shut with savage force. For the next little while, I sat motionless in slack-jawed silence, staring at the tea-stained tablecloth until Dad crept back inside and slipped in opposite me once more.

  “Right so, Benjamin,” he said. “I can tell you’re confused. So while Mam’s busy with her hissy fit, let’s try this again.”

  Back to TOC

  Here is a preview of Lono Waiwaiole’s prequel to his Wiley series, Leon’s Legacy…

  Prologue

  St. Louis, Missouri

  Leon came off the floor of the Boys and Girls Club on North Grand with sweat pouring off his body like he had just stepped out of the shower instead of off the court. He grabbed a towel from his bag and mopped his face for a moment, even though he knew his walk home through the steamy evening would be every bit as sweaty as the game had been.

  “Damn, Leon,” Oscar said from behind his own towel. “Don’ you never take no prisoners?”

  “What would I do with ’em after I took ’em?”

  “I heard that,” Oscar said through a grin. “Lotsa armies had the same problem back in the day.”

  Back in what day was that, Oz? Leon thought, but he knew better than to say it out loud because Oscar could talk from one end of the military history of the world to the other. “Thanks for the run, man,” he said instead.

  “You’re welcome,” Oscar said, shaking his head in Leon’s direction while he said it. “I have no idea why I do it, though. You ain’ no fun to play against, man.”

  “Maybe we’ll let you be on my team someday.”

  “Fat chance of that.”

  “All you gotta do is get someone down here better than you.”

  “I’m tryin’, man, but it’s so damn hard to do!”

  They both followed that with a laugh until Fat Eddie stuck his big head in the door and drained all the laughter out of the room. “A couple of those Bailey boys wanna see you outside, Leon,” he said.

  “Which ones?”

  “I don’ know, man, but they’re big ones.�
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  “This about Maryanne?” Oscar said.

  “Probably.”

  “This is bullshit, man. Everybody knows that.”

  “With the possible exception of her family,” Leon said. He swabbed his face one more time and dropped the towel into his bag.

  “You don’t have to go out there just because they said they wanna see you,” Oscar said, “and you sure don’t have to go out there by yourself.”

  “Stay out of it, Oscar, I mean it.”

  “They both have bats, man,” Fat Eddie chipped in from the doorway.

  “I can’t let you do this alone,” Oscar said.

  “You don’ see what comes down, you won’t have to lie about it if the cops come around later.”

  “And if what comes down is you get your head beat in with a bat?”

  “Puh-leeze,” Leon said, drawing it out like he thought the sky would fall on him before the Baileys ever put a dent in his head. “You really wanna help, do something to keep the staff in here as long as you can. And that goes for you, too, Eddie.” He glared in Fat Eddie’s direction for a moment and then draped his six feet plus three inches on a folding chair next to his gear.

  “Nothin’ wrong with avoidin’ trouble when you can,” Oscar said. “Why don’t you just go out the other door?”

  “I got trouble comin’, why would I want it to catch me from behind somewhere? Right now I know exactly where it is.”

  Both Oscar and Fat Eddie continued to protest, but Leon tuned them out and focused instead on how his thing with Maryanne Bailey had turned so totally from sweet to sour.

  There was no doubt about the sweetness—Maryanne was hot as hell and loved to do a few things for which Leon had developed a definite fondness. But when he began to lose interest before she did, she went absolutely nuts—and Leon’s life suddenly got stickier than a St. Louis summer.

  “Don’ mess with me on this,” he said to Oscar as he rose from the chair. When Oscar seemed willing to concede, Leon brushed past Fat Eddie and walked out the door with a basketball in one hand and his gym bag in the other. The brothers waiting for him turned out to be Jimmy and Joey and pretty much as advertised—both close to his height but twice as wide.

  “What do you fools want?” he said.

  “You’re gonna pay for what you did to Maryanne, muthafuckah!” Jimmy said.

  “I didn’t do shit to Maryanne,” Leon said. He dropped the gym bag and threw the ball as hard as he could into Jimmy’s face. It broke his nose, and he let his bat fall while he raised both hands in a fruitless effort to stop the blood from flowing down his face.

  By that time Joey had his bat coming at Leon’s head, which proved probably for the millionth time that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Joey knew a baseball bat could crush a human skull, but he overlooked the fact that a head is not very easy to hit. Leon ducked under the bat and laid Joey out with a blow to the solar plexus that might have been lethal if he hadn’t pulled it back a little at the last moment.

  When he turned toward Jimmy again, Leon was the only one holding a bat. Jimmy was still standing there in shock, the hands holding his broken nose still leaking blood.

  “You broke it,” he said, his voice thicker than it had been a moment earlier.

  “Are we done?”

  “No fuckin’ way,” Jimmy said, so Leon put the bat to work. He left four broken legs and a chorus of screams behind him when he walked out of the parking lot a few minutes later, and he didn’t really slow down until he was at his uncle’s doorstep in Portland, Oregon.

  Portland, Oregon

  Vincent Kohl sat in his chair in front of Whiteside without squirming, but it took every bit of self-control he could muster. Kohl normally dealt with people a lot farther down the editorial chain at the paper, but he normally didn’t have his hands on a story this big.

  Goes with the territory, I guess, he thought while he waited.

  “Okay,” Whiteside said. “Let me hear it again, in twenty-five words or less.”

  Kohl began to squirm a little while he counted words in his head. “It’s a retrospective on the year the boys team at Jefferson won the state basketball championship during the birth of the crack gangs in their neighborhood.”

  “That’s twenty-six words, kid.”

  “I could have cut the first word, but then it wouldn’t have been a complete sentence.”

  “It’s a good idea,” Whiteside said with a grin that flashed across his face and disappeared almost immediately. “I like it.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I’m not sold on you for it, though.”

  I knew that was coming, Kohl thought. “May I ask why not, sir?”

  “Would you agree that we’re looking at several installments if we do this right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I don’t think you have the chops to handle something that big.”

  “I think I can prove that I do if you give me a chance to try.”

  “That’s not how things work around here. You prove it first, then you get the assignment.”

  “This was my idea, sir. I feel like I’m the right person to follow through with it.”

  “I’d like to reward you for coming up with this,” Whiteside said after a moment of reflection. “But I want to see what you’ve got as you go along, understand?”

  “Not really.”

  “Write up everything you get and send it to me. I like what I see, I’ll let you keep doing it.”

  “I’m not sure I can work that way, sir.”

  “Sure you can.”

  “I’m not sure I want to, then.”

  “Fair enough. I’ll put someone I’m more comfortable with on this.”

  “I want it, sir,” Kohl said as he rose from his chair. “I’ll get the next flight to St. Louis.”

  “St. Louis?”

  “The story starts in St. Louis, sir.”

  “Sources in St. Louis are why telephones were invented, Kohl. The paper can’t afford to fly you to fucking St. Louis.”

  It was worth a shot, Kohl thought with a shrug as he started for the door, but Whiteside caught him before he got there. “Every day, Kohl,” he said.

  “Sir?”

  “I want something from you every day, understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” Kohl said before he busted out the door in search of the people who could tell him the story he wanted to write.

  Ronetta

  Kohl parked across the street from the house with the address he was looking for in Forest Grove and climbed out of his car. There was a driveway to the left of the house that led to a small garage, the garage had a basketball backboard and hoop fastened to it and the hoop had a wiry kid maybe twelve years old or so firing basketballs in its direction.

  Kohl walked across the street and stopped at the foot of the four steps leading from the driveway to the front porch of the house. The kid continued to shoot and retrieve the ball, which seemed to hit nothing but net every time he shot it.

  “Do you ever miss?” Kohl said.

  “Of course,” the kid said. “My dad says the only people who never miss never shoot in the first place.”

  Very true, Kohl thought. “Want a rebounder?” he said. “You can get up a lot more shots in the same amount of time.”

  “My sister used to do that, but she quit on me.”

  Kohl walked past the kid and took up a position under the rim with his back to the garage door, and when the next shot nestled through the net he caught the ball and whipped it back to the kid. The two of them repeated that process several times before a beautiful brown woman came off the front porch.

  “I see you’ve met JJ already,” she said.

  “Not exactly,” Kohl said. “I did kinda meet this young shooting machine here, though. I’m Vincent.”

  “I’m JJ,” the kid said with a grin. “Thanks for the passes.”

  “No problem. Looks to me like you might take after your dad a little.”

 
“You know my dad?”

  “Not really, but we’ve met. I’m doing a story on the year he won the state basketball championship.”

  “Don’t let him hear you say that,” JJ said with an even wider grin. “He’ll tell you it took a team to win it.”

  “Point taken, JJ,” Kohl said, and he walked past him until he was close enough to the woman to shake hands. “Vincent Kohl,” he said.

  “Ronetta,” she said with a grip on his hand that had some gristle behind it.

  “Thanks for agreeing to talk to me.”

  “I’m not sure how much I can help you, Mr. Kohl. I wasn’t a baller or a banger, you know.”

  “Still, your name comes up all the time.”

  “Let’s go inside,” she said as she turned toward the front door with a quiet smile on her face. “I’ll do what I can.”

  They walked into a living room furnished with a couple of comfortable-looking armchairs flanking a long, leather-covered couch. A girl, who might have been JJ’s flip-side if he were a coin, was sitting in one of the armchairs reading a book.

  “This is Scooter,” Ronetta said. “Scooter, this is Mr. Kohl. He’s a reporter from The Oregonian.”

  “Hi, Mr. Kohl,” the girl said with a grin that matched JJ’s almost tooth for tooth. “Are you working on a story?”

  “Call me Vincent, Scooter. And yes, I am. Your mom and dad are part of it.”

  “That’s cool,” Scooter said before she turned her focus back to the book in her hand.

  “What are you reading, Scooter?” Kohl said. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

  “I don’t mind at all. It’s a poem by Maya Angelou.”

  “Really? Which one?”

  “It’s called ‘Phenomenal Woman.’”

  “Wow! I didn’t know kids your age read poems like that.”

  “Poems like what?”

  Kohl paused a moment to check out Ronetta’s reaction to this turn in the conversation, but she offered nothing except a silent grin and a shrug.

  “You know, poems about grown-up stuff,” he said.