If Jack's in Love (22 page)

“Wow Jack, I'm really sorry. How come everyone is so prejudiced against your brother?”

“He's caused a lot of trouble in this neighborhood. You don't know him the way other people do.”

“Oh come on, he wouldn't hurt a flea.”

Reedy's engine started outside and Stan came in the house. He winked and put his finger to his lips.

No sooner was he in the door than Mom and Pop appeared.

Pop's eyebrows were lifted; he nodded towards the door. “So what'd he say?”

“Says he admires how ‘streetwise' I am. Says he wants me to help him come up with ideas about how we might find Gaylord.”

Pop burst out laughing, and after a dumbstruck silence Stan joined in. They both started guffawing at the top of their lungs.

“Deputy Dawg! How dumb does he think you are?”

Mom listened unhappily and walked out. Anya watched this male play uncertainly.

I headed for the door.

“Where you off to, sport?” Pop called.

I didn't answer. I left the house and went stalking through El Dorado Hills. People in their yards stopped what they were doing when I passed. No one taunted me. No one hollered. They even seemed to regard me with a sort of grisly respect. Maybe they interpreted Gaylord's disappearance as payback for years of abuse. Maybe they were now realizing they had pushed the Witchers over the edge and we were behaving the way the downtrodden always behave. Maybe they had come to fear and respect us the way they feared Castro's Cuba.

I crossed the alleyway behind the shopping center and headed up the terraced slopes towards Gladstein's. But then I saw Snead's truck and realized it was a Saturday. I debated whether to go ahead or turn back, and finally I turned back. The truck had reminded me of Pop's plot to rob the store and I wasn't sure I could deal with Snead's being in the same room with Gladstein.

I passed the shops the way I had come, getting more and more depressed. My brother a murderer, my pop a jewel thief. What did that make me?

It was when I was crossing the alleyway that the trouble happened. Through the shrubs bordering Myra Street I saw sandals and tennis shoes and moving fabric, blue, white and green; and when I reached the steps Johnny Pendleton and two other boys appeared at the break in the fence. The boys were Chip Blevin and Barry Campbell, who lived across Cherokee Road where the houses were bigger. I didn't really know them, I just knew they were on the wrestling team with Pendleton.

All three of them blocked my way.

“Look who it is,” Pendleton said.

I stopped. Chip and Barry stood like sentries on either side of him. They were keeping their eyes on him, not me. Barry was popping his knuckles.

“Where's your brother?” Pendleton said.

“At home.”

“That's not very lucky for you, is it?”

They grinned. Chip rubbed a hand over his lips, as if to smooth a moustache. He darted a look behind to make sure no one was coming.

“Let me go by,” I said.

“What are you gonna do if we don't?”

I looked over my shoulder and wondered if I could make it back to where the stragglers were still browsing before the shop windows. But the boys must have read my mind. Their feet raced down the steps and circled around behind me, and now Pendleton was blocking the pathway that led to the shops. “Sorry, are we in your way?”

Chip and Barry were flanking him. Chip had his eyes cut to the side, watching Pendleton. He seemed uneasy about what they were doing.

I turned and hurried up the steps and heard the drumming of their shoes as they rushed after me. “What did your brother do with Gaylord, asshole?”

I reached Myra Street, hoping I could get away without actually running.

Pendleton came up beside me.

“I asked you something.”

“You tell me.”

“I'm not playing games, Witcher, what did your brother do with Gaylord?”

“Same thing he'll do to you if you don't leave me alone.”

Pendleton stopped in his tracks.

“What did you say?”

I kept moving.

“Did you hear? Are you guys witnesses? He just admitted it!”

I was nervous already about what I'd said. My motive had been to scare off Pendleton, but I realized if this got out it wouldn't do my brother's brief one bit of good. And what if it got back to Myra as well?

I turned around. The boys were babbling excitedly in the middle of the street, too preoccupied to notice I was heading back. When they saw me they broke off. They almost seemed scared.

“I take back what I said.”

Pendleton scornfully drew up his pectorals.

“You can't take it back, we heard you.”

“I don't know what happened to Gaylord that night. My brother was with his girlfriend, he didn't have a thing to do with it.”

“You mean that hippie slut?”

“Don't call her that.”

“If she's not a slut what would she be doing with a Witcher?”

Chip kept pushing at his nose, as though he wore glasses.

“My brother didn't do a thing that can be proved. Until you know what happened you shouldn't be making accusations.”

“Oh yeah? Well, you can suck my dick. You and your brother and that hippie slut, you all can suck my dick.”

I headed on down the street, uneasy about putting my back to them. I heard whispering, and then I heard Pendleton holler, “Where the fuck is Gaylord, you prick?”

A rock sailed past my ear.

I swung and looked. The boys were in the middle of the road. Pendleton's arms were at his side. His shoulders were sagging.

He brought his hands to his face and Chip threw a consoling arm across his shoulders.

I came to the corner, turned left and then right, which put me behind Dickie Pudding's house.

When I had walked a ways I snuck a quick look back.

The road behind me was empty. But what a cheerless acquittal it was.

POP HOOKED MY SHIRT TAIL as I was trying to slip past.

“Come on, let's take a ride.”

“Where to?”

“We have to get your mother's headache prescription filled, she's having another migraine.”

I peeked into the bedroom. One of her palms was next to her head, curled at the fingertips like a dead person's. A small fan next to the bed was making her hair tremble.

By now it was almost dark.

Pop assumed a curious position whenever he drove, twisted slightly to the left. He would fold his right arm over the wheel and bring his head so close to it you almost expected him to rest his chin. Garbage was piled up in the passenger-side footwell, and paper bags and paper cups and balled-up napkins brushed against my flip-flops. Whenever Pop took a turn cans rattled in the back of the car.

“This guy Reedy figures he's got your brother cornered. He's this patrol cop playing detective and he thinks if he breaks this case he'll get a promotion. Man's gonna do everything in his power to pin this thing on Stan.”

“He doesn't seem so bad.”

Pop gave me a look. “You're getting awfully smart. What makes you think you been around long enough to know more than I do?”

I shrugged.

“Why don't you take the cotton out of your ears and put it in your mouth. I want you to listen to me for a change.”

We rode along for a while without speaking, and then I said, “Okay, I'm listening.”

“I don't want you talking to Reedy. Don't say a word to the man. He shouldn't be asking so many questions anyway. If he asks you anything you tell him you ain't saying a word without an attorney present. That'll shut him up, he knows the law.”

“Pop, if Stan didn't do anything—”

“He didn't, but that's not enough for these cats. Stan is exactly the type of guy they like to pin stuff on. He ain't one of your refined Kellners or Joyners. Plus he run his mouth about killing Gaylord, which was his own damn fault.”

“He's got a violent streak a mile wide.”

“The kid ain't nothing but trouble, but we're sticking by him, hear?”

“Yes sir. But what if we found out he did do something?”

“We ain't gonna find that out.”

“I'm asking, that's all. What if he did something and you found out. What would you do?”

Pop thought about it.

“All I know is I wouldn't turn him in. Wouldn't be my place to do so. Probably I would talk to him, convince him to turn his own self in.”

“Witchers ain't snitchers.”

“There you go.”

“I don't guess we have to worry, Anya says he was with her the whole night.”

“That's right, Stan couldn't have done anything. But we still have to say he left Anya at ten 'cause that's what we told Deputy Dawg.”

To get the prescription refilled we had to go to the all-night People's on Main, because that's the only place that was open.

Pop ran in while I sat in the car and stared at the people passing in and out of the store. A black man in a porkpie hat strolled past and gave me a curt nod through the windshield.

When Pop came out he was beside a fat man, laughing hilariously over some ribald pleasantry. They parted with loud hollers and wholehearted waves. I'd yet to see Pop leave a store without making at least one new friend.

During the ride home he started up on Gladstein. “How come you visit that man so often?”

“I don't know, he was telling me how to make Myra my girlfriend. He sold me a ring real cheap, for fifty cents, and then he said I should try and kiss her.”

“He said that, he told you to kiss her? That's a little weird.”

“What's so weird, I did kiss her.”

“You kissed that girl?”

Pop reached over and backhanded me. I gave him a grin and we rode along together, feeling warm. “A Witcher seducing a Joyner, I like that. You're gonna be a heartbreaker, kid.”

I kept grinning.

“And now they think your brother offed her brother, that's too bad.”

Which pretty effectively ended our warm moment.

“Listen, I want you to cool it with Gladstein, something ain't right about the cat.”

I didn't say a word. I'd been expecting this ever since I heard him and Snead talking outside my window.

“He just came to this town to make trouble. Moving to Jefferson Ward, that's the craziest thing I ever heard. Black people don't want him, they don't want white people no more than white people want them.”

He went on in this vein, and I let him talk. I stared out the window until the lights of the town began to dwindle and we were winding along the curves of Cherokee Road.

Pop was on a different tack by then. “You ever been in that back room of his?”

“Who, Gladstein's? No, I hang around out front, he never takes me in the back.”

“Snead says he keeps his dogs in the back room.”

“They're always whimpering behind the door. He's got three of 'em.”

“Which is another weird thing, those fluffy dogs. You know who he reminds me of? Your mother had a cousin, Johnny Lee, I don't know if you met him, he only come to the house once or twice. Probably you were too small. He used to own a fluffy little Maltese and he'd put ribbons and bows on the thing and take it out for a walk. A man walking a dog that had ribbons and bows! I used to think, Man, this cat is cruising for a bruising. He was queer as a three-dollar bill, but he was all right, he wasn't too bad. He died of cancer two or three years ago. Your mother thought the world of him. Women always like queers.”

Pop fell to musing and then he said, “I wonder what happened to the dog.”

“I don't think Mr. Gladstein's a queer, he was married for twenty-five years.”

“That don't say a thing. Man next door might be a queer for all we know.”

“We don't have a man next door.”

We were coming up on Lewis Street. As soon as we made the turn we'd be going past the Joyners', and my stomach got all fluttery, anticipating it.

“Does Gladstein have a burglar alarm?”

“He does, but it isn't hooked up. He told me he never got around to fixing it.”

“He told you that?”

Pop searched my face, and I realized what I had said. I'd just sold Mr. Gladstein down the river.

“Well I don't know, it could be I'm wrong.”

“You said that's what he told you.”

“Well—yeah.”

I couldn't think of a convincing way to take it back, so I went on the offensive. “Why, you planning on robbing his store?”

“Of course not,” Pop said, laughing.

He made the turn on Lewis and sailed down the road as fast as he could. I guess he didn't want anyone to notice us.

The cars were thick in front of the Joyners' house, probably people attending a vigil for Gaylord. All the lights were on and a few folks were standing in the yard smoking cigarettes. I could see the silhouettes of their heads as they turned to watch our battered car go past.

Pop's jaw tensed and he kept his eyes straight ahead. I craned my head to search for Myra, but I don't think she was in the yard.

When we got home I ran the headache pills to Mom.

I didn't switch on the light, because she couldn't bear it when one of her headaches was on. I brought her a glass of water and two pills and held her head while she drank. I knew from long experience that she wouldn't remember this the next day. When she woke up from her headaches she always had amnesia about the night before. My great-aunt Norma who lived in Lakeside used to tell me that Mom's not being able to remember was God's mercy at work. One time I challenged her and said, “Mom doesn't believe in God,” and Aunt Norma said, “Do you really think that would stop God from being merciful?”