The Troubles of Johnny Cannon (3 page)

“Oh, I'm so sorry.”

“It wasn't your fault. It wasn't nobody's fault, really. That's what I had to come to grips with while I was in the hospital.” I reached up and scratched at the scar next to my nose that circled around under my eye to my ear. “I was in the car when she had the accident, after all.”

“You poor boy,” she said, then she put a five-dollar bill and a shiny silver dollar in my hand. “You keep the change, son.”

“Thank you, ma'am,” I said. I always wondered if folks thought I had a piggy bank with all that change they let me keep, and when it was full I could bust it open and buy my ma back from the store. Or maybe a bicycle. But I already had a bicycle.

That was pretty much how it went with the whole delivery. We came out with thirty dollars more than we'd planned. It was real funny how something that I barely remembered happening to somebody I never really knew could wind up so beneficial that many years later. We saved money on Mother's Day too.

Once we got all the meat sold, me and Tommy got ready to fly back out of there. He kept hesitating on getting in the plane, though, and I wasn't too sure why. But then a black car with tinted windows drove out to the airstrip we was on. I looked at the license plate; it was from Florida. They pulled up close to us and a woman got out of the passenger seat. She looked like she was from someplace in South America. She came over to Tommy and he told me to get into the plane.

I hurried into my seat and watched as they talked. She gave him an envelope and he looked inside of it, and then he nodded to her. They got closer to each other and she was whispering something to him. He had a reputation with the ladies, but she was too old for him to brag about. It was the darnedest thing.

After a while, the other door on the car opened and a short white fella with sunglasses and a suit got out and walked to where they was talking. He interrupted them talking and pointed at his watch. She shooed him away, but he only took a couple of steps off and he stood there listening to what they was saying.

I could tell Tommy was getting frustrated with him listening, cause he kept glancing at him and showing off his fighting stance. He finally went to push the short guy away. Then the short guy opened up his jacket and showed a gun.

Tommy took a step back with his hands up.

The lady said something to the short guy, and then she kissed Tommy on the cheek and headed to the car.

After they drove off, he got into the airplane. He was so interested in whatever was in the envelope that he let me go through the routines of getting the engines started. He even let me get us going down the runway, though he didn't let me do the actual takeoff. I reckoned he was still spooked over Fluffy.

“Is that some woman you've been seeing?” I said.

“Her? No. She's a friend of a friend,” he said, and he stuffed the envelope into his pocket. He didn't talk about her or the envelope again.

After we was up in the air real good, I looked at his watch to see what time it was.

“It didn't even take us three hours to get this all done. Why couldn't we have done it next Saturday? Was it cause you had to meet that lady?”

He glanced down at the trees and such that was passing underneath us.

“I wanted to make sure everything was taken care of and that the money from the meat was ready to go to the bank on Monday. You know how to make a deposit at the bank? Fill out the slip and all that?”

I hadn't never been inside the bank before except to get the candy that the tellers kept out on their counters. Even then, it was only when I was really hard up. You'd think, with all that money, they could afford something besides peppermints.

“Why?” I said. “You can drop it off, or Pa can if you're too busy. Ain't no reason to let me screw up the deposit.”

“No, you need to learn how to do it.” He pulled out the wad of money we'd just made and stuck it in my shirt pocket. “And how to pay bills, too, writing out the checks and all that. Pa ain't no good with figures.”

“What you talking about? He's an egghead.”

“Sure, when it comes to wiring stuff or making the TV work. But his head ain't been good for handling money since the war. He gets his numbers mixed up. You're going to have to handle things while I'm gone, or else you two will be in a mess of trouble.”

We was most always in a mess of trouble when it came to money. And with me at the steering wheel, we'd crash and burn faster than Fluffy had nose-dived into that tractor. May she rest in peace.

He saw my face getting worried, so he let me take over with the flying.

“You got money saved, right? From all them jobs you do and stuff?”

I nodded.

“Good. You keep it hidden, don't let yourself give in to using your money for the bills.”

“But what if Pa needs it?” I said. “What if he gets hard up?”

“He's going to get hard up, and you're going to have to help him. Just not with your own money. Help him fight off the lions.”

I right off got a picture of me and my hunting rifle staked out on our porch, shooting lions that was escaped from the zoo. That made me feel a bit better, cause I could hold my own better with wild animals than with wild bankers. Still, I was pretty sure I didn't have the right ammo.

“What you mean?”

He thought for a bit, staring out the window.

“Pa's in a lion's den in Cullman. Surrounded by folks, by creatures, that are aiming to eat him up. That's why we're always poor, cause it makes sense to him to feed all his money to the mouths of the lions. It's the only way he can think of to keep them from tearing him apart. And they'll tear you apart too, if you let them. So don't let them.”

“There ain't no lions in Cullman. Maybe at the zoo in Gadsden, but I ain't heard of no escapes.”

“It's a metaphor, Johnny.”

“What's a ‘meta'? And why's it for me?”

He shook his head.

“Just listen. You got to keep yourself and Pa surviving until you can get out of there, out of Cullman. That's the only way you'll be safe, when you can leave. Like I did.”

“But you came back.”

“Yeah,” he said. “For you. But when you get the chance, you got to leave and never look back. It's the only hope you got.”

Now he was scaring me.

“Why you talking like this?”

“Cause I'm leaving again soon,” he said.

“Yeah, but you're coming back again.”

He didn't say nothing.

“You're coming back, Tommy. Right? Ain't you?”

He took a deep breath.

“You never know, little brother. Nobody can tell the future, not even them gypsies that come in the fair. But I can tell you this, you can only come and go from the lion's den so many times before you get bit. And I've ridden my luck about as far as it'll go.”

I had a lump the size of a baseball in my throat.

“Is this cause the Captain came in to town? I reckon he's either gone or going soon.”

“It ain't,” he said, then he paused. “And it is, I reckon. He did help me remember that we got a history in our family of bad luck. And bad luck ain't exactly something you shake, not the kind we got.”

“Is he one of the lions you're talking about?” I was starting to get the meaning of what he was saying. “What in tarnation happened between you and that Captain? If it's so horrible that it's making you talk like this, I need to know.”

He sighed.

“No, you don't. It's in the past, it's history.”

“Mrs. Buttke at school always says if you don't know your history, you're doomed to repeat it,” I said. It was one of the few lessons I really remembered, and it was why I only paid attention to history class. Math, English, and all them others just claimed to be beneficial for you. History was the only one that came with a warning label.

“Sometimes it don't matter if you know it or not. You're still doomed.” He stretched his arms out, then plucked the silver dollar out of my pocket.

“Hey, that's mine,” I said.

“Then you might ought to learn how to protect your things.” He grinned his usual possum grin at me. “But, that's enough of all that talk. Have you picked up your comic books this month from the grocery store? What's happening in the world of Superman?”

Normally, talking about superheroes and monster stories was top of my list of favorite conversations we had. We was both the biggest Superman fans in Alabama. We was convinced that Krypton was blown up by the Commies. It would explain why red Kryptonite was so powerful.

But I didn't feel like talking about superheroes. And it wasn't cause I was sore about the silver dollar. But he didn't want to talk about nothing else. So we went the rest of our trip not talking about nothing. He landed us, gave what he owed to Bob Gorman, and we drove back to the house. I hoped the Captain was gone, for no other reason than that Tommy'd cheer up and spend his last couple of weeks having fun.

We got to the house and the Captain's truck was parked in the driveway. Tommy didn't even get out, he let me out and said he was going back into town. I said I'd go with him, but he said he was going drinking and I couldn't come. I almost wondered if the Captain owned stock in the beer business, for how much drinking he inspired in my brother. Tommy drove away and I felt that lump in my throat getting heavier and heavier. I went inside the front door.

Pa and the Captain was sitting at the dinner table with a whole mess of RadioShack catalogs and ham-radio books laid out in front of them. They was looking at radio equipment and checking the specs off of stuff in the catalogs against numbers that was in the books. I got myself a glass of water and went to sit down next to them.

When I did, I caught a whiff of the Captain's aftershave and it made me have a memory. I remembered being wrapped up in a blanket, sleeping in the back of a car while my folks drove around late at night. I tried to focus on the memory, tried to key in and see my ma's face, but I couldn't. My brain was too broken. It was funny, it was a different aftershave than what Pa used, which was why I hadn't never remembered it before. He must have changed brands after the accident.

I peeked over Pa's shoulder at the page he was looking at.

“What's that?” I said about the big box-looking thing that had the dials and knobs on top.

“It's a Collins 30S-1 linear amplifier,” Pa said. “It can cover the whole frequency spectrum, which is good if you're going to be operating at different times of the day.”

I took a look at the price tag.

“Dadgum, Pa! It's fifteen hundred dollars.”

His cheeks got red.

“Why don't you head upstairs and work on your homework?” he said.

“Or he could stay,” the Captain said. Pa shot him a look. “Sorry, didn't mean to overstep.”

“I ain't got no homework,” I said. Which wasn't exactly a lie. I did have homework, I just didn't have none I was going to do that day. Homework was like cheese, it had to sit for a while. Then you could throw it away.

“Well then go read your comic books or something. We can't have you down here.”

I didn't see no good that could come from arguing with him about it, even though I had a bad feeling he was fixing to start shoveling our money into the lion's mouth, just like Tommy'd said. I took my water upstairs and listened to my radio for a while to catch the baseball scores. I wondered if there was any equipment in them magazines they had that could make my radio pick up better stations. Like ones that had the Reds actually winning.

After I was served a good dose of lousy news, I reread a few of my Justice League comics. I wouldn't read none of Tommy's if my life depended on it. Pa'd gone through and drawn long pants on all the pictures of Wonder Woman. He said he was protecting our minds, but Tommy said all it was doing was feeding his imagination. None of that made no sense to me, but I learned to hide my comic books in a box after that. Tommy kept his girlie magazines in there too. But they didn't have no good stories, so I never read one.

I went downstairs a couple of times to make myself a sandwich or to refill my cup of water. I offered to fetch the both of them some of Tommy's booze from the fridge, but they said they didn't drink. Which I knew was true of Pa, for the most part, but the Captain struck me as a guzzler for some reason. I reckoned I was wrong.

After a while they left together. I headed back down so I could look at their catalogs, but they'd taken the whole lot with them. So I got myself a bowl of cereal and sat on the couch to watch some TV. Of course there wasn't nothing good on except for an afternoon movie about a fella that was frozen in an iceberg for fifty years, so I watched that. I watched shows and movies for the rest of the day all by myself in the house. I must have fallen asleep on the couch, and Pa must have left me there, cause when I got woken up the house was quiet and it was pitch-dark outside. Tommy was leaving a piece of paper on the table.

“What you doing?” I said. He jumped.

“I thought you was in bed,” he said. His breath stank of beer and whiskey, I could smell it from the couch. That didn't trigger no memories for me, at least none but dragging Tommy out of the bathroom after he passed out on the toilet. And I sure didn't want to dwell on that one.

“I ain't in bed, am I? What are you doing?”

He looked at the paper he had put on the table and crumpled it up and put it in his pocket.

“I'm leaving,” he said.

I realized that he was in his uniform, and I saw his duffel bag by the door.

“Where you going?” I said, even though I already knew the answer.

“Montgomery. I'm reporting for duty on Monday, and then I'm shipping out.”

Dadgum, that lump in my throat wasn't going nowhere.

“But, I thought we had a few more weeks before you went to Korea. You sure you ain't been drinking too much?”