Ask the Dice (14 page)

I conjured up the mental snapshots of my earliest youth in rural
Texas
. A peach orchard grew just down the lane from where my parents Bradford and Nella rented a snuff-colored, two-story stucco house. Peach trees lured in the dreamy kids, and this one had climbed high into the branches, perched in a crux, and basked under the sun.

As an only child, I had no friends living near me, so my imagination fleshed out the characters to my make-believe gang of kids to keep me amused. My best friend was a fiery minx whom I called
Shiloh
. She was a blonde, or towhead as they like to say in
Texas
. Buoyed by the vivid memories, I was on the cusp of spawning a new poem. My ink scribbles on the legal pad devoted a batch of free verse lyrics to the high jinks between
Shiloh
and me in the peach orchard.

   
Towhead

One August, already ages ago, his cling-stones annealing

to their derelict rot, Old Man Williams split us into pairs:

a towhead, radio to her ear, played in our teenage shadows.

I ran a walk-behind sickle-bar mower chewing joe-pye weed,

the hot noon sun inextinguishable. Doing dog labor for two,

my sidelong glance tripped down the front of her dizzy top.

Her name was
Shiloh
as on the battlefield; her lucky number,

seven; her power sport, baton twirling. Feigning a kiss, she

snatched those aviator goggles from my crown, her red Keds

skittering up sly bamboo ladders, rappelling with a tarantula's

skill, lowering her pails to me, our harvest skunking the lesser

pickers to fill the refrigerated sea-tainers daubed Marine green.

Shiloh was mine, I resolved, unless her boyfriend could deck

Mr. Universe—in which case, I'd clam up. "Ok, how's a guy

to win your heart?" "Only through wooing me," she blinked.

Inside the Old Man's garaged Mercury, she tuned to jazz, nudging

me down to her, clasping us tight, splayed flat out nose-to-nose.

Then—don't ask me why—nothing until her mother drove up.

My second and third scan, no changes made, rated my poem competent enough to be a keeper. So I detached the yellow sheet from the legal pad and folded up the sheet. Some day I'd publish my poems as a slim volume and shelve it at a library branch like this one. A young lady named
Shiloh
with an inquiring mind, a tender soul, and a toned body wandering among the stacks might check out my slim volume and take it home with her.

Later, with the kids tucked in bed, as she lay in her own bed, reading my poems, a lump formed in her throat just as listening to the soulful riffs blown on an alto sax did to me. I chuckled—sometimes I got swept up in my reveries—as I cut out of the public library. Buckled up again in the coupé, I included my latest poem with its cohorts clasped to the sun visor.

As I wheeled away, I thought of Arky's sawed-off stowed beside the front seat.
Bradford
, I decided, wasn't so clever, after all. A hacksaw and a little elbow grease would've cropped his 12-gauge like this one, and he'd've kept on his boots. No man deserved the chump's indignity to die barefoot.

Nobody in the next-of-kin chain had stepped up after my parents’ suicides, and I went on the orphans' auction block, or that was how traumatic it felt to me. Weeks and months crawled by, and no bidders placed any bids. Prospective ones treated a black kid with parents of violent impulses like a can of rat poison.

When the Zanes applied, I retreated into my inner shell of wary rage while on the exterior I said and did all the right things as I'd been taught. The Zanes hailed from the northern
Virginia
suburb of Old Yvor City, a ten-minute shot south of
Washington
,
D.C.
Cosmopolitan Old Yvor City was a long haul from boondocks
Texas
, both in its distance and culture. Sweet. My talks with the Zanes went congenial enough, the ink dried on the adoption papers, and I emigrated to
Virginia
where I vowed I'd never set foot again in
Texas
.

Well, never say never.

"G
lad to see you, Tommy Mack. I've got a little job for you."

"M'm-h'm. Go ahead then."

"There might be a slight hiccup."

I sucked in my cheeks, then asked, "How slight is slight?"

Mr. Ogg tilted his face goggled by the green aviator shades. He resembled a predatory mantis, but I wasn't to be his delectable morsel. "
Texas
."

My curt headshake was automatic. "Showstopper."

"
Tsk-tsk
. Look, Tommy Mack—"

"I had three rules the day I signed on with you, Mr. Ogg. Let's review them again. One: I never pull any jobs in
Texas
, two: I never do a brother or sister, and three: I never work on Wednesdays. You agreed to all three stipulations, so that's that."

"Relax, will you? I know the Klan boys are all gone from
Texas
."

I laughed. "Klan? Those assholes never bothered me."

"Then what's your bellyache with
Texas
?"

"It's personal."

"Even so, this job can't slide. I owe the associate there in a big way."

"Is that a fact? Then you best go do what needs doing in
Texas
."

"How can I? I'm the boss. No, you're the man, Tommy Mack."

"Is this a direct order?"

"Never more so. Your flight leaves Dulles tonight. Be on it."

I deferred on my principles, like always, and flew south, my target lying doggo in a hamlet called Alamo Rex. I landed in
Texas
and picked out a rental car that didn't smell of rotten mushrooms and wasn’t littered inside with sunflower seed hulls. The red line Mr. Ogg had blazed on the road map took me west. The two-lane blacktop highway stretched out flat as a stove lid and grew just as hot.

With the windows down, I didn't run the A/C but let the arid heat blast in, scorching my skull face. I'd withheld a little information from Mr. Ogg. The highway to Alamo Rex just happened to bisect a town I knew all too well since I was a native son of
Champagne
's Folly. I didn't need his road map to get there.

Shotgun pellets mangled the town limits sign.
Champagne
's Folly still lay in its dust-choked coma. Nothing alive moved on the main stem before I left the town. Driving slower, I looked keen, or I'd overshoot the washboard lane. My toeing the brakes put the rental car into the dogleg turn. Joe-pye weed, bull thistle, and spiky chicory hemmed me in as I bounced down the rutty lane, churning up the rooster-tail of dense, yellow dust.

The peach orchard splurged with the frothy, pink blossoms just as I recalled it. Honeybees, delirious over the pollen, sent up a buzzing murmur. After parking the rental car, I hopped out, retucked my shirt, and gazed ahead. The snuff-colored, two-story stucco house a hardball’s toss down the lane that I'd thrilled to leave now beckoned me, but I resisted. The same bottle tree glinted cobalt, aquamarine, red, and green from all the hung glass in the sunlight. Closer to the house, the ancient chinaberry tree offered me its inviting shade.

New seedy details jumped out, starting with the "NO TRESPASSING!" and "KEEP OUT!" and "PRIVATE PROPERTY!" signs. No curtains or venetian blinds dressing the naked windows left the stucco house looking desolate and forbidding. The overgrown yard—Mom's quince hedge was an unruly jungle—wasn't from a lazy or disabled tenant. Rather, the stucco house in its state of ill-repair was uninhabitable. Did the agitated ghosts of Bradford and Nella rattle their chains and slam doors under its roof? Did the doom that draped over it like a cloud of mustard gas unnerve the vagrants from squatting there?

Underneath the peach trees, I paced off the four trunks from the one nearest to the stucco house. No broom sedge grew on this patch of dirt. My crouching down, sweeping away the pink petals, and clawing at the loose yellow dirt proved I could still touch my poignant
Texas
roots. My hands shoveled in deeper and spaded out the dirt clumps. At a half-dozen inches down, my fingertips scraped the treasure.

It remained where I'd buried it the night before I'd left
Texas
. The Band-Aid box had rusted in spots, but its hinge still functioned, and I flipped up its lid. The object shaken out was a jet onyx totem swaddled by excelsior shavings. I'd traded my Fleer baseball cards of Clemente, Carew, and Aaron for the jet onyx totem at the black pawnshop in town.

As a kid, I'd had no idea if the jet onyx totem I now held in my palm had any good mojo, but what could it hurt? You had to place your faith in some outside force. Tossing up the jet onyx totem up to catch it, I liked how I was still alive. Something had been working right. So, I reburied the jet onyx totem in the yellow dirt, reversed the rental car, and rocketed off back down the lane.

T
he
Texas
job—the target was a police snitch the outfit wanted to terminate—proceeded with no glitches, and I returned to
Virginia
less than forty-eight hours later. My boss, the fake hermit cloistered in his shabby bungalow, heard my debriefing.

"It was a sunny stroll on the boardwalk, eh?" Mr. Ogg stroked his pointy chin. "What did I tell you? All of your pissing and moaning amounted to a row of rat turds in a windstorm."

"Sure, it was a sunny stroll on the boardwalk," I said but I thought otherwise.
You've always got all the answers, don't you, Mr. Ogg? Ever since Day One that's how it's been. But the day will come—I feel in my bones it will be sooner rather than later—when you won't have the right answers for me, and I'll have to go by my own answers that I’ve worked out.

"W
hat I can't dope out is why an intelligent homeboy like yourself is up to your nose in this dirt bag's crimes." He sucked between his canine teeth and spoke in a sonorous voice like Johnny Cash. "Can you explain that puzzler to me?"

"I want to consult my attorney." I'd no lawyer, but I wanted to disrupt his grilling me. Hauled in for questioning by the police wasn't a good thing for me.

"You can't lawyer up. That happens only after I've charged you with a crime. Right now you're fulfilling your civic duty by fielding my questions on Gwen Ogg's homicide."

"Who? Gwen Ogg. Sorry, but I don't know the lady."

"Uh-huh. Except we both know that's bullshit."

"Are we being videotaped? I have the legal right to know if we are."

"Just smile a lot. An anonymous tip came to us. Did you phone it in?"

"Look, I gotta take a piss, and I ain't kidding you."

"Tie it in a knot and throw it over your shoulder. Because if we match your voice print to the tip-line's recording, well, that's all she wrote."

"My lawyer can take it from here."

Homicide Detective Sergeant Troy Bang, shaking his head, served with the Old Yvor City PD. The ceiling light's fluorescence waxed his bald dome. His frayed shirtsleeves rolled up past his elbows revealed his wiry hair. His unknotted necktie's ends dangled loose. That was a good way to get choked to death. Maybe he was daring me to try it. We jousted in the bare interrogation stall with its dead centipedes, cinderblock walls, and hard luck tales the other brothers sweated before me had given up.

"Can I get that soda?" I asked.

"I'm working on that, but our soda machine is on the fritz," said Bang. “Our maintenance guy is troubleshooting it, and we'll be up and running again. But first I want some straight answers."

"Shoot then."

"What's your deal with Mr. Watson Ogg?"