The Troubles of Johnny Cannon (4 page)

He turned and looked away from me. His voice wasn't as level as it usually was.

“I ain't going to Korea. I'm going somewhere else, but it's top secret.” Yeah, he was drunk as a skunk. I'd seen his papers myself.

“Where you going, then?” I reckoned his answer would be something like Mars or Wonderland or something.

“I told you,” he said, “it's secret.”

Narnia. That had to be it. When he'd had a pint of whiskey, he was always going to Narnia. He started toward the door. He was walking pretty straight, considering how drunk I reckoned he was. Still, if he was headed to Narnia, he probably thought our door was a wardrobe. Poor cuss.

I jumped up and grabbed his arm. He almost fell over. Yup, he was pretty drunk.

“You can trust me, Tommy. I swear I won't tell nobody.”

He stared at the door. He swallowed and I wondered if he had a lump in his throat too.

“I can't. I got orders. It ain't just my secret, it's the government's.” The government of Aslan, I reckoned. He looked in my eyes. “If you ever told anybody, I don't know rightly what would happen to me. Or you and Pa, for that matter.”

“I swear. On Ma's grave, I swear.”

He searched my eyes like he did when he thought I was lying about something.

“That ain't enough. You got to swear on mine.”

I took a tiny step back. That was new. Maybe he wasn't talking about Narnia.

“You ain't got no grave,” I said.

“But I will if you tell.”

I spit in my hand and held it out. “Swear on
your
grave, then.”

He spit in his hand and shook mine. “I'm going to Nicaragua.”

I racked my brain to figure that one out.

“Is that in Oz?” I said.

“That's in South America.”

Dadgum. Nicaragua. That almost sounded like a real country.

“Was that where that lady was from?”

“No, she was Cuban.”

“Oh, well South America's still closer than Korea.” I started to feel better. “So it ain't so bad.”

“No, it's worse. I got a mission to do that ain't the safest doing. A whole mess of people are counting on me to help them out. But it's worth it, I promise you it is.” His face was sweaty, like it was when he was lying. Also when he was drunk. Which he usually was when he was lying. “I just hope my luck holds up.”

As soon as he said that, I got an idea. Just in case he was telling the truth. I hurried up to my room and dug under my bed until I found what I was looking for. I went back downstairs and put my Superman action figure in his hand.

“He'll keep you safe,” I said. “That's what he does.”

“But he's yours,” he said. “I gave him to you. You can't give him back.”

“Nope. I ain't giving him to you. Just loaning him.” I almost got choked on something, must have been allergies. “You make sure you bring him home, okay?”

He nodded and I could tell them allergies was getting to him, too. He didn't say nothing else, just grabbed his duffel bag and started out the door. He stopped.

“You take good care of Pa, you hear me?” he said, his voice crackling a bit. He went out and closed the door behind him.

I ran out after him and he was walking out of our driveway, I reckoned down to the bus stop at the bottom of the mountain. Which meant he was really going. Or else he was in for one heck of a hangover.

“Who's going to take care of me?” I yelled after him.

He turned around and showed me a big grin on his face. He threw something at me and I caught it.

“You're Johnny Cannon,” he said. “You'll take care of yourself. That's what you do best.”

I looked at what he'd thrown. It was that dadgum silver dollar the lady had given me. I looked up to watch him disappear into the darkness. The lump in my throat was threatening to jump up into my mouth and blow my head apart. I had to blink a few times to keep myself from blubbering, and I finally remembered where my feet was and how to use them to go back inside.

In spite of all his flaws, Tommy was more than just my brother. He was my best friend. For the first time I could remember, I was alone. Even though Pa was there, the house was empty. Like a den just waiting for the lions to arrive.

CHAPTER TWO

NEVER FIGHT ON SUNDAY

I
woke up the next morning to a smell that made me feel all warm and bubbly inside, so good I almost forgot about what had happened the night before. But then I saw the silver dollar on my dresser and my heart started breaking all over again. The smell even smelled sad after that.

I went down to see what it was I was sniffing, and the Captain was in the kitchen cooking at our stove. He was wearing an apron and everything. I didn't even know we owned an apron, but he'd found it. He was smoking a cigar, too, which I reckoned counteracted the frills.

Meanwhile, Pa sat at the table, looking through them catalogs again. I was dadgum curious at what they was aiming at doing. Maybe they was building a robot. If they did, I hoped they'd train it to keep the house clean. And to not kill nobody. But, if we could only pick one, I'd choose a clean house. After all, I owned a gun and it wouldn't be nothing to shoot a robot.

“What you cooking?” I said.

“Jalapeño cheese biscuits with gravy and scrambled eggs with spicy sausage, or as we call it in Texas,
chorizo con huevos
. It's my mother's recipe,” the Captain said. Since it sounded like a Mexican dish, I didn't reckon she'd come up with it on her own. Unless she was Mexican. But he'd said his name was Richard, not Ricardo, so there wasn't no way.

He scraped at the red-colored eggs with a spatula and turned them over. I took a seat next to Pa. He closed the catalog and put it away.

“It smells awful familiar to me,” I said.

“Your ma made it every Sunday morning when you was little,” Pa said. “I imagine Tommy's going to be real excited when he gets up. It used to be his favorite. When I told Captain Morris that while we was at the grocery store yesterday, he decided to cook it for us this morning.”

“To smooth things over with your brother,” the Captain said. “The
other
reason I came here.”

I wasn't sure how to tell them about Tommy, so I got myself some orange juice from the fridge and occupied my mouth drinking it. I must have not worn a blanket the night before, cause as soon as that juice hit my throat it burned like the dickens.

“What's the matter?” the Captain said.

“Throat hurts. It ain't nothing.”

He pulled out the pan of steaming biscuits from the oven and plopped one on a plate, covered it in gravy, then scooped some of them eggs on the other side. He set it in front of my seat.

“You want me to look at it?” he said.

Couldn't he see it from where he was standing?

“Maybe later. I reckon I'm fine.”

He grabbed the knife out of the butter and wiped it off on his pants.

“Here, open up. Let me have a look-see.”

I clenched my teeth together. I didn't much care for folks poking around on me. That's why I never went to the doctor. Sometimes I'd go with Pa, but that was mainly to see what Goofus and Gallant was up to in
Highlights
. Them two fellas was a hoot and a half.

“Johnny,” Pa said, “let the Captain look. He's a darn good doctor.”

I didn't feel like fighting the both of them, so I opened my mouth. The Captain pushed my tongue down with the knife and peered into my throat.

“I can't really see.” He pulled a match out of his pocket and lit it with his thumbnail. “Don't breathe,” he said, and then he held the lit match inside my mouth. It was getting pretty hot, and I held my breath for fear of third-degree burns.

“You don't look so bad in there,” he said after he looked for a spell. “How do you feel? Achy? Run down?”

I shook my head while I put my orange juice back in the fridge and poured myself some milk. It didn't hurt as bad as the juice.

“I'm fine, just the throat's sore,” I said.

He started pushing on the sides of my neck, feeling it all up and down. He ran his finger along the three-inch scar I had just under my Adam's apple. He looked like he was hurt over it.

“That's from the accident,” I said. That one on my neck was the longest, the one on my face was the most obvious, and the one on my forehead was the ugliest. I also had a few where people couldn't see them, like on my chest and in my pants, but I hadn't never had to explain those. I had a habit of keeping my pants on. Pa said Tommy should learn that habit too. “I've had my scars since I was six.”

“I know where you got the scars,” he said.

I was about to ask him how he knew where I got the scars since he hadn't seen my pa for fifteen years, but Pa distracted me from the question.

“I'm surprised your brother hasn't come down yet,” Pa said. “I'd have thought the smell of this breakfast would drag him out of bed.”

“He ain't here,” I said, and then I took a bite of the eggs. Dadgum, it was good.

“Where'd he go? Into town for something? On a Sunday?”

I sipped my milk. I knew the answer to his question was Narnia. No, wait, it was Nicaragua, wasn't it? Good thing I'd sworn to keep Tommy's secret, cause I probably couldn't tell it if I tried.

“Korea,” I said. That one I'd had practice telling. “He went ahead and shipped out.”

Captain Morris set a plate in front of Pa and sat down with his own.

“Was it because I'm here?” he said.

It sure was.

“No sir, I don't think so. I reckon he got called to go early.”

Pa sighed and started picking at his food.

“Ain't that just like the military? No concern for family whatsoever.”

The Captain was eating his food fast. Faster than me, and that was something to brag about. We sometimes had eating races during lunchtime at school, and I won almost every time, as long as Eddie, Bob Gorman's pudgy son, didn't get involved. That kid was a vacuum cleaner disguised as a twelve-year-old. Maybe
he
was a robot.

“We running late for church or something?” I said.

“Church?” he said with his mouth full of
chorizo
. “You two go to church on Sundays?”

“Yeah, don't everybody?”

Pa caught eye of the Captain's bewilderment.

“Me and the Captain ain't going today. We got a lot of work to do. But you ought to go. Why don't you hitch a ride and go with the Parkinses today?”

I laughed cause I reckoned he was joking. Then I realized he wasn't, he was dadgum serious. Which meant the person playing the joke was the Almighty Himself. He was one devil of a prankster.

“To the colored church? In the Colony?” I said. “Are you kidding?” I was pretty sure there was laws against white folk going to the Colony for anything, and especially for going to the colored church. It was for our own safety, of course. Kind of like all them hunting laws I never listened to. They was intended to keep us all civil.

“Church is church, ain't it? And I can't take you, so you should go with them.”

“Maybe I could stay home. After all, with Tommy leaving and me having an inflamed throat and stuff, I'm sure it's all right for me to miss.”

He stabbed his biscuit and took a big bite.

“No sir, you got to get going. To the Parkinses' church today. You'll be fine.”

I ate my food as slow as I could given how good it was and how hungry the Captain looked, and then I took my time getting ready. I figured if I missed the chance to ride with the Parkinses, I couldn't be blamed for not going to church. It would have been a lot easier if I was a girl and had makeup to do and stuff. All I had to do was comb my hair and spray cologne on my armpits.

I wasn't able to go as slow with that as I wanted to, cause Pa came up to my room and was watching me with his leather strap just itching to meet up with my backside. So I got into my clean white shirt and my black pants and started working on getting my dress shoes on, when Pa saw the wad of money me and Tommy'd made the day before sitting on my dresser.

“Is this your earnings from yesterday?” he said.

I reached to grab it, but he took it first and shoved it in his pocket.

“I don't want you putting this in the offering or nothing. I'll hold on to it.”

I wanted to tell him that it wasn't his place, cause Tommy'd put me in charge of the money, but I didn't have the guts to do that. That strap of his was practically humming in anticipation of getting swung at my hindquarters. I hurried out of the house and ran to the other side of the mountain. I caught Mrs. Parkins just as she was loading her kids into their big white station wagon.

“I told your pa I wouldn't never be available on Sundays,” she said to me while she was helping her little daughter get into the backseat. She was a cute little girl in a white dress, probably only three years old. She stuck her tongue out at me, and I almost returned the gesture but Mrs. Parkins was eyeing me, so I decided I'd save it till later. I made a mental note so I wouldn't forget.

“I ain't fetching you to come up. He sent me to go to church with y'all.”

She got as funny a look on her face as I had inside my head.

“Is this a joke?” she said.

“I reckon so, though it ain't one being played by my pa.”

She understood that, I guess.

“The Lord does have an interesting sense of humor,” she said. “Well, get on in and make room for Willie.”

I wasn't enjoying the seating arrangements one bit, but I slid in next to the little girl and braced myself for Willie to squeeze in after me. He came out of the front door and I noticed, for the first time ever, that he walked using a crutch like the kids that had had polio did at school. He was carrying a suitcase under his arm and he hurried to get into the car. If we was ever putting on a show of
A Christmas Carol
with an all-colored cast, he could probably play Tiny Tim. Finding a Scrooge would be hard, though. Maybe Bob Gorman could put on blackface.

“What's in the suitcase?” I said to him.

“None of your business,” he said. “What are you doing riding in our car?”

“None of your business,” I said, and I reckoned that about covered all the questions.

We drove down the mountain on the opposite side of Cullman and went the ten miles into the Colony. It was small, even compared to Cullman, and it was as run down and poor looking as folks might expect of a colored town. We drove over to where the Parkinses' church was at. It wasn't all that different from the church in Cullman, except that it was older and smaller and the outside wasn't kept up as good. I didn't reckon that was the fault of any of the folk that lived over there, after all churches was kept up by the money of the people. And everybody knew that the Colony wasn't where no money was at.

We pulled up and Mrs. Parkins walked in and the kids all followed her, so I did too. The kids ran off to different classrooms for Sunday School except for Willie. He headed through two big doors into the sanctuary, carrying his suitcase with him. I was plumb curious as to what he was up to, so I followed him. Actually, he walked so slow, I just went in ahead of him and waited.

He hurried as much as he could with his bum leg all the way up to the front of the sanctuary and set the suitcase up at the foot of the pulpit. He opened it and pulled out some metal stick thing with a wire coming off of it and set it up on the wooden podium. He plugged the wire into a little hole on the suitcase and then he pulled out a couple of round things, one that had a black ribbon come off of it. I went up to see closer. I didn't think a preacher's kid would bomb his own church, but there was a first time for everything. I ate an egg roll once.

“What you doing?” I said.

He stopped and tried to hide his stuff from me.

“What I'm supposed to. Why don't you go to your classroom?”

Meeting strangers was right up there with getting eaten by a bear on my list of favorite things to do. I didn't even bother answering him.

“What is that thing?” I said.

He let out a sigh.

“It's a reel-to-reel tape recorder. I record my pa's sermons every Sunday.”

I looked at the suitcase more closer. Pa would have loved it. It had a switch on it that said Stop/Play/Record, and there was a speaker set into the top of it. He had the two reels all ready to go, the one on the left was a thick roll of the black ribbon, the one on the right was empty. I really hoped his pa wasn't going to fill that whole tape with his preaching.

“Is that your pa's tape recorder?”

“It's mine. The church folk got it for my birthday last year so I could record the sermons.” He ran the end of the ribbon from the reel on the left to the one on the right and fastened it. “Anyway, I got to get this ready. So go find somebody else to bother.”

I thought about shooting back a comment at him, but since we was in a church and he was the preacher's kid, God would probably hit me with a lightning bolt the size of Kentucky, so I decided against it. I walked around the building, finding things to look at and kick around until about time for the service to start. I went in and sat as close to the back as I could, figuring I was in for another boring Sunday morning.

Boy was I ever wrong.

The first thing I noticed was different was the singing and the music that went with it. It wasn't necessarily that everyone in there was a better singer than the folks back at my usual church, but I'll be darned if they didn't sing them songs better than we did. They sang every word like it was a dadgum message from Heaven itself, and the organ that was played was like a singer all its own.

They went through a few songs, some of the women crying and darn near swooning, the menfolk clenching their eyes shut tight like they needed to block tears from popping out. I didn't sing along with them. Not so much 'cause I was embarrassed by how bad of a singer I was, but because I didn't know how to get myself worked up like that. Crying wasn't one of my skills. It was like dancing. I usually just plastered myself to the wall and ate the food.