One-Eyed Jacks

by Brad Smith

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  Contents

  Newsletter

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  If you would like to use material from the eBook (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at info@280steps.com

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  Newsletter

  Copyright

  For Bob and Jean,

  those Canfield kids

  ONE

  That night the old DeSoto finally gave up the ghost, cashing her chips noisily on a nameless gravel road in the dark starless night. She coughed a little, began to hammer and clang, spit some blue smoke and then packed it in, rolling to a halt alongside a deep ditch where bulrushes grew and frogs burped in contentment. The two men deserted her there, just gathered their gear from the back and left her to the ages. They set out on foot and never looked back.

  They walked maybe five miles in the dark, setting a good pace, not saying much. After six months on the road, there wasn’t a lot that hadn’t been discussed. Usually that fact didn’t discourage T-Bone Pike from conversation, but tonight he was quiet. This was new territory to him and he was taking it in, not so much the sight of it — not in the pitch dark — but the sounds and the smells of this place, this backwoods Ontario. And his Missouri nose told him this country wasn’t so different from his home. There was fresh-cut hay nearby, he knew, and there was ragweed in the hay and there was something else on the air, maybe leeks or wild onions. When they passed a barn T-Bone could smell fresh manure and hear the morning coming in the cackle of the hens and the low moaning of the cattle.

  Beside Pike, Tommy Cochrane was thinking of none of this, noticing nothing as he walked. This was just home and you didn’t notice home when you were there, you just remembered it when you weren’t. Tommy Cochrane had been gone a long while this time, but that didn’t change things. Home was home and it had nothing to do with time.

  Near daybreak they hitched a ride into Kitchener with a grey old farmer in a rusty pickup truck, the pickup loaded down with ducks and geese in crates and hampers of vegetables going to market. There was early corn and tomatoes and string beans and lettuce. The two men squeezed onto the narrow front seat with the farmer, who crunched the gears getting the old Ford into low and then humped the truck back onto the highway without a word. T-Bone Pike mooched a field tomato from a basket at his feet and sat happily eating in the outer seat, juice on his lips and cheeks, teeth flashing in his smooth ebony face.

  They hit Kitchener with the light of day, with the sun breaking red behind them and the sounds of doomed fowl in their ears. They left the farmer at the corner of Maple and Main, two blocks from the famous old market. Tommy Cochrane had spent a few early mornings there himself, as a kid with his grandfather, arriving sleepy-eyed and tangle-haired in a truck like the one he’d just stepped down from. But that was going back some.

  T-Bone stayed behind to talk the farmer out of a couple more tomatoes and then he hurried to catch up with Tommy, who was striding away without a word, heading for the railyards in the center of town.

  “Breakfast, Thomas,” T-Bone said, drawing even. He tossed over the largest tomato. “Where we goin’ now?”

  In the truck, T-Bone had talked the farmer’s ear off, asking all about the geese and the ducks and the worth of each, about the difference between sweet potatoes and yams, and about the price of hens’ eggs compared to ducks’.

  Now he asked again after their destination, but Tommy Cochrane wasn’t saying much today. They skirted the red brick railway station and made their way along the fence at the north end of the yard. Tommy was moving faster now, his eyes on an idling freight a hundred yards away. After a moment he stopped to slide his canvas bag through the fence, then pulled the strands of wire apart to allow T-Bone to crawl through. T-Bone’s belongings, wrapped in an oilcloth and slung with a cord over his shoulder, caught in the wire and Tommy freed the bundle and then followed man and bag through the fence.

  “Thank you, Thomas,” T-Bone said in all seriousness.

  But Tommy was walking already, watching the train in the yard. It was a short train, a half-dozen flatbeds and a couple of Wabash boxcars in front of a caboose. It began to move as they approached, and Tommy broke into a trot to catch up, crouching low to avoid detection as he ran. T-Bone, behind him, high-stepped in the faint morning light, taking the rails and switches like a hurdler, grinning widely as he ran.

  “Jumpin’ a freight,” he sang out loud.

  The cars were clicking along as Tommy caught up and pulled himself onto the rearmost flatbed. He hadn’t run a step since the Catskills six months ago, and he was out of breath and blowing like a fat man as he moved to the front of the car to lean against the railing there. He took a moment to catch his breath. Running was one thing he wouldn’t miss. Ten, fifteen years ago he hadn’t minded the roadwork, even looked forward to it as a way to get away from the bullshit that sometimes followed him around. Now he was thirty-five though and that was behind him. This morning he’d run fifty yards only to save himself a ten-mile walk.

  In a moment T-Bone Pike joined him on the flatbed, smiling yet, his breath as easy as a baby’s sleeping. Five years older than Tommy, he had the natural conditioning of a thoroughbred, could run like a goddamn Peruvian Indian, all day and all night.

  “Jumpin a freight,” he laughed. “The rail cops see us, they bust our heads for sure.”

  Tommy took the tomato from his pocket, picked some lint from the skin and began to eat. There were no railroad cops to worry about anymore. It was 1959 and the only people riding the rails these days were a few hobos who figured the Depression never ended. Them and maybe a finished-up boxer and his coloured friend just trying to make it home after six years away.

  “Last time I ride a train like this was back in the ‘30’s, I reckon,” T-Bone was saying. “I was ‘bout fifteen maybe, and my daddy and me took the rails all the way from Missouri to Deetroit, Michigan, fixing to work in the automobile factory there. Problem was, there’s no jobs when we get there. So we stole a couple red hens outside of town and headed back for old Mo. Cooked them birds over a fire two nights running, figured the country owed us something for travellin’ all that way for no job. My daddy took it badly and he never voted for Mr. Roosevelt after that.”

  The sun was clear of the horizon now, showing a blood red sky to the east. There would be rain before the day was out, Tommy knew. That cut no ice with them, though, they’d be home and dry before it broke. Bouncing on the rough deck, he finished the juicy tomato and tossed the stem over the side, then took his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his hands. T-Bone unslung his bundle and slid it beneath his head for a pillow. The wheels below clacked over the joints faster and faster.

  “Thomas,” T-Bone asked presently, “how many times you fight Carmen Mazzili?”

  Tommy rubbed the backs of his fingers across his jaw; he was in need of a bath and a shave.

  “You fought him once, Thomas,” T-Bone answered his own ques
tion. “I was there — you remember? He throw the towel after eight. But I fought that ‘talian twice. The first time he get a technical knockout in the tenth, the second fight I go all the way with him. One more fight and I believe I’d of maybe had him, Thomas.”

  T-Bone nodded happily at the notion and eased back on his bundle. Tommy sat with his knees up, watching the farmland beyond the fences.

  “‘Course, he was a tough wop,” T-Bone admitted beside him.

  Tommy nodded slightly. Carmen Mazzili was a real tough wop and he — Tommy Cochrane — had put him on his stool for keeps in eight. But that was going back a ways. It didn’t mean a thing now, you couldn’t get a cup of coffee with it. Things were different then, legs weren’t that important. Funny, legs didn’t matter when you had them, and nothing else mattered when you didn’t.

  Thirty minutes later they were pulling into the village of Marlow. Tommy got to his feet and knelt by the flatbed’s railing as they arrived, watching the single main street anxiously. Because it was his main street. And it was his school he could see above the houses at the far end of town. His church there by the cemetery. His gas station and his old broken wooden backstop at the ball diamond.

  The train moved on without stopping, and he sat down again. Maybe he was wrong. It had been six long years this time, and he couldn’t know if any of it was his anymore.

  The freight had to slow to take a switch outside the village and it was still chugging, making maybe twenty miles an hour when they reached the sideroad. Tommy tapped T-Bone Pike on the shoulder and then stood up as they approached. Tommy jumped first, making for a patch of plush grass along the ditch beside the gravel road at the crossing. He landed and rolled, then felt T-Bone roll over him, arms and legs flying. T-Bone was laughing as he got up and adjusted the bundle around his neck.

  “Where we goin’ now?” he wanted to know.

  Tommy got to his feet and indicated a farmhouse a quarter mile to the east. Then he began to walk.

  “How your head today, Thomas?” T-Bone asked as he fell in step. “It been hurtin’ any?”

  “My head’s okay, Bones,” Tommy said. “I don’t want you to ask me about that anymore.”

  “Only natural for a body to be concerned.”

  “I know,” Tommy said. “But let’s just leave it alone, okay?”

  TWO

  The farmhouse was white stucco, with green shutters and a sloping front porch and a split-shingled roof of cedar. The barn behind the house was in good repair, painted the green of the shutters of the house, a little bit of Ireland here and there. The henhouse alongside and the shed for the tractor and machinery were covered with the same paint, cracked and faded a little but still looking good enough, for outbuildings anyway.

  The place was too damned quiet though, as Tommy Cochrane and T-Bone Pike approached along the gravel road on foot. The henhouse cooped no hens and a small yet sustained silence called from the barn, announcing its emptiness too. The house was dark and the windows dirty, and the grass in the yard was long and tangled and laid flat in places by the summer rains. And there was something else. A pane was broken from a kitchen window, the window above the sink, the window that had been for years to Tommy Cochrane a picture frame for his grandmother’s head as she washed dishes or made supper or simply watched her husband at work somewhere in the yard. There was a pane of glass broken from that window, and by that single incident of disrepair Tommy knew that James Andrew Cochrane was dead.

  “Whose house is this?” T-Bone asked. He was stepping cautiously through the gate, eyes sharp, like a man expecting to be chased off.

  “My grandfather’s,” Tommy told him.

  The house was locked and they went in through the broken window, into the stale interior. The electricity was off so Tommy walked around opening doors and windows, flooding the rooms in morning light and fresh summer air. The house was sour and musty, but somehow it held the smell of James Cochrane, tobacco and honest sweat, maybe some Bushmills — maybe it was nothing more than memory. Tommy climbed the back stairs and went into his old room, the one with the dormer over the side porch, the room where he’d slept a few thousand nights. But the years had dwarfed the place; the old feather bed that had once hugged him like a bear was some kid’s toy now, barely five feet long.

  The gas was still on in the house — the farm had its own well — and when Tommy climbed down he found T-Bone in the kitchen, putting water on for coffee. Tommy went into the cupboards and came up with canned beans and stew, and they heated these and had a proper morning meal. Tommy took a rag and wiped the dust from the kitchen table and chairs and they ate there, the two of them, looking out over the orchard where the Macs were beginning to show. After breakfast they carried water from the outside pump into the square washtub in the bathroom and they each had a bath and a shave in turn. Then they washed their dirty clothes in the kitchen sink and hung them on the line out back, where Tommy figured they would dry quick enough, if the wind stayed in front of the rain.

  They sat in their underwear in the front room while they waited for their clothes, T-Bone Pike on the overstuffed red chesterfield and Tommy in his grandfather’s armchair — the old man’s favourite resting place — a green velvet chair with oak trim and down-filled cushions, a chair bought with money won on Emerald Lady, a bay mare, sixteen hands, out of Lucky Jim from over the pond. The arms of the chair were worn bare now, and enough down had escaped over the years to leave the cushions a little lean.

  “Maybe he just move away,” T-Bone was suggesting. “Go live with somebody else, like old folks do.”

  “Maybe,” Tommy said. But he knew.

  “This the house where you live with your momma and daddy, Thomas?”

  “They died when I was seven,” Tommy said. “My sister Margaret and I lived here with my grandparents. Grandma died — I don’t know — maybe fifteen years ago.”

  T-Bone nodded and took time to digest the bit of history. He committed every word from Tommy Cochrane to memory; he could recall conversations from years past almost to the word — meaningless bits of talk that nobody but T-Bone Pike would ever give two hoots about.

  “Maybe he on vacation,” T-Bone suggested then. “Gone off to Florida or some such place.”

  Tommy got to his feet and walked into his grandfather’s bedroom. He found a pair of overalls there and put them on. Then he walked out onto the front porch. The grass was too long for the mower — have to run the hay-cutter over it, rake it up and start again. It wasn’t right to let the place go like this; somebody should be looking after things, cut the damn grass at least.

  What was Peg doing, her and that tight-fisted husband of hers? All he ever cared about was a dollar. No money in cutting a dead man’s grass, Tommy knew.

  He heard a familiar (even after all these years) chug and he turned to see a faded Case tractor clearing the railroad tracks. The tractor was pulling a full wagonload of hay bales. Driving the Case was Clarence Morris, these days as faded as the machine he was steering.

  Tommy stepped out into the road. Clarence hit the clutch, then the brake, took maybe ten seconds before he chuckled in recognition.

  “Well,” he said.

  “How are you today, Clarence?”

  “Not bad at all. Ain’t you the stranger.”

  “I guess I am.” Tommy looked at the bales stacked on the wagon. “How’s the hay looking?”

  “Not worth a tinkers damn,” Clarence said. “We had a dry April and nothing but rain in May. Second cutting might be better.”

  Tommy glanced back at his grandfather’s house. “Awful quiet around here.”

  Clarence was making a cigarette. He looked quickly over the paper at Tommy.

  “I guess Peg never got hold of you.”

  Tommy was still looking at the house. “No, I been out of touch.”

  Clarence took a wooden match from the bib of his overalls.

  “When did he die?” Tommy asked him.

  “Just after the new year,
I guess.” Clarence lit the roll’em and blew smoke in the air. “Took a heart attack shovelling snow. Man delivering co-op flyers found him.”

  Clarence sat looking evenly at Tommy Cochrane. There was a bit of tobacco on the old man’s lower lip.

  “Never suffered any, so the Doc said. That’s something anyway.”

  “Well, yeah.” Tommy looked at the man on the tractor. He figured Clarence to be pushing seventy, but to Tommy he hadn’t really changed in thirty years. Funny how that could be.

  “How was he, Clarence? These past few years, how was he?”

  “Well, his health was real good right up to the end.” Clarence spit the tobacco strand from his lip finally. It landed on the steering wheel and clung there, a new refuge. “I don’t suppose that’s what you’re asking.”

  “No.”

  Clarence removed his hat and ran his hand over his bald head. The skin there was lily white against the weathered brown hand.

  “The last couple years it seemed to me he was —” Clarence shook his head and put his hat back on. “It seemed to me he was just pissed off about being old.”

  After a moment Tommy nodded his head. “I could see him being that way.”

  That was all he said. He didn’t want to ask if Clarence felt the same way. He didn’t want to know the answer to that one. He would wait.

  “Well, I’d better get this hay in the mow,” Clarence said. “Rain on its way.”

  “I’ll give you a hand,” Tommy said. “And I got a pal inside.”

  “No, I got the grandsons working,” Clarence said. “We’ll get it done. Thanks just the same.” He put the Case in gear.

  “I’ll be seeing you, Clarence.”

  Tommy watched as the tractor and wagon pulled away. A minute later a blue station wagon came down the concession from the east. Tommy turned and walked back to the porch where T-Bone Pike had emerged from the house. The wagon slowed to a crawl: inside a women in a flowered hat stared out at the pair of them before hitting the gas and driving away.