Ask the Dice (10 page)

T
he entrance I turned into voided to a corral of steel rails crisscrossing in the bright cones to my streaming headlights. Beyond their immediate range loomed the rectangular hulk to what I took as a boxcar. So, I nosed my way into the corral until the coupé's front tires bumped up against the first span of tracks, blocking my further progress.

My headlights died with the engine, and I stretched out, doing my best to relax. The window down let in the April night hush since the raucous insects hadn't yet hatched out. Once I thought I heard the soulful call of the hoot owl. The ghoulish specter of Gwen Ogg, nude and inert, behind my eyes mashed shut refused to disappear. A bitter irony gnawed at me. Her corpse out of the scores I'd left strewn in my wake was the one that buried me. How did you like that?

My rooting around behind my seat found Mr. Ogg's manila envelope. I lifted the flap, drew out the materials inside, and aimed the map light to beam down on them. What I found on the sheets of paper bore out my worst suspicion. The copy read like the rap sheet to a small-time hood named "John Doe" who happened to reside at Gwen's townhouse address. My barked out laugh was a hollow one.

I was a fool. Mr. Ogg had suckered me into going to her townhouse where I supposedly shot her dead. Who else was handier to play his fall guy? His betrayal stung me harder, and I trembled, still wanting not to believe it. But my denying the obvious here would land me tucked in a coffin like Gwen's. My palsied hands quivered as my palms sweated at the creases. I chucked the manila envelope over my shoulder and switched off the map light. By the next minute, a lit
Blue
Castle
glowered between my jittery fingers. I puffed with renewed vigor. The nicotine sedated my anxiety to stay here and not streak off in a wild ass panic. Music also placated me, so I gave the ignition key a twist, powered on the coupé's AM radio, and relaxed.

As a kid I'd carried a sky blue Panasonic AM transistor radio, compact enough to fit in my shirt pocket. My transistor radio went everywhere with me. I listened to it through the plastic plug I fitted into my ear. The transistor radio's clear as a bell tone was heads above the tinny bleats I heard from the
Hong Kong
knockoffs discounted at the corner five-and-dime. Mid-winter nights I tunneled my way under the crazy quilt in bed, mesmerized by my AM's vast broadcast range.

I vicariously experienced those glorious nights when my birth father,
Bradford
, had tuned in the tacky X-radio stations beaming their megacycles up from wide-open México. He caught the broadcasts in his boyhood
Texas
, and I wished I'd asked him about the X-radio stations. But I had many questions he'd never get to take. Reconnecting with him was essential. I flipped down the sun visor, put on the map light again, and rifled through the sheaf of poems. The right one waxed lyrical on what his adventurous radio nights must've been like in
Texas
.

X-Radio Stations

Texas, 1940s

The renegade megacycles bumped off

Mercury, then boomed back miracles

to Chapman's Folly. Over the muddy
Rio

DJs played to plowboys enraptured

by the wireless radios. Blinky stars

above spoke: "So gents, you've

lost your crust? The good goat

doctor will restuff the starch!"

Midnight a thin-lipped sky pilot

for a fist of Borax box tops sent

"a signed pix of Jesus H. Christ,

deal done at dawn." Clabber Girl

mewed, her mesquite tongue trailed

down ears: "The cash in your bibs

for my Tango Pink." Slim Rhinehart

yodeled "I'll Fly Away"—ended

his sacred broadcast plugging tree

stump water as a grace for grippe.

Those X-radio airwaves fell hushed

on the sage as Pancho Villa had died.

The golden era of the X-radio stations he knew and loved was lost to the forgotten past. I pondered if the coupé's AM radio possessed the right powerful magic to suck in the old jazz stations. Doubts besieged me, but I had to try searching for them. I turned the radio dial, my ears piqued for any riffs to a die-hard jazz tune still afloat in space. The dial swept past the radio spots of the rabid talking heads, the easy-listening snoozers, the hollow-voiced rappers, the hackneyed rockers, and the cowboy hat acts.

My search in vain to detect and lock on any jazz program crushed out the glow to my dying embers of hope. But I had to cling to my hope that somewhere beyond the murky switchyard, an ace trumpeter was heating up the mike. I had to believe he did it for all I was worth, or my spirits faded away like the jazz riffs had done. I kept going until reaching the radio dial's most extreme left position where a different, but well-remembered voice yammered over the coupé's speakers.

Shine, the prodigious trickster in black folklore, was spinning one of his tall yarns, and I listened in on him. The only defender left alive at the Alamo mêlée was ole Shine who then stole General Santa Ana's prized pinto and hauled ass across the
Texas
plains to hunt up Sam Houston and Company. Shine led the fighting mad Texans back to their final victory fought at
San Jacinto
, and I knew the rest of the story. Well, the cocky Shine tickled me to laugh so hard in joy that I related my own stirring saga.

“You see, the big crime boss Mr. Ogg set up ole Tommy Mack to take the hard fall for the murder of the niece Gwen. Only it backfired. Ole Tommy Mack was too cunning and knew how to dodge a frame job fitted on him. He'd scoped out a fat armored truck to heist, and he lifted a cool million bucks.”

Shine, cackling in risible laughter, slapped me on the shoulder. Good one, he said. Go on, Tommy Mack. I'm digging it, man.

“Well, ole Tommy Mack paid in cash for this spanky new Learjet, and he flew off into the indigo skies while chain-smoking his Blue Castles. Hours later, he touched down on this tropical island in some forgotten but exotic dot of the
Pacific Ocean
. He had it made. Hell, he might pitch and star in his own Realty TV series if he conjured such a fanciful notion, you know what I mean?”

Now only silence filtered from the radio speakers. Shine had vanished, and my laughter trailed off like the fading echo in a canyon. Sad to say it, but my feel-good fantasy had no shot at coming true, so I extinguished the radio and hauled out.

Stretching my cramped legs, I left the coupé and sallied forth, pacing between the steel rails and over the crossties still strong with creosote smells. This switchyard was the place where the trains steaming into
Old
Yvor
City
had stopped. A labyrinth of switches and tracks enabled the cars—flatcars, hopper cars, tank cars, and cabooses—to shuffle in and out like playing cards as the railroad engineers built the new trains.

Tonight the trains didn't run. The old railroad's blue stone bed knifing through the city had become a bike path. Turning more curious, I picked my way toward the boxcar, a lone sentinel guarding this moonlit wasteland of rusty tracks, loose blue stone, and weedy clumps. Boxcars had grown more obsolete, in part, because of those long autoracks you see towed by the eighteen wheelers terrorizing the interstates. The automakers had once shipped out their shiny, new models inside the boxcars until the cheaper trucks hauling the autoracks cornered the market.

The boxcar I crept up on from the rear belonged in an open-air museum before the vandals demolished it, or the gangbangers spray-painted their gaudy tags on it. As I cleared the boxcar's corner, I observed the pale glow emanating from where the side door gaped wide. The musty fruit odor indicated I wasn't alone.

"Freeze, dildo."

The man's syrupy drawl revealed he was a brother.

"Go easy there," I said. "I'm alone and carrying no heat on me."

"Then I got you trumped. My Glock can dust off your balls. Keep on talking, and just maybe I won't do it."

"There's not a lot to say. I'm checking around is all."

"Why? Are you a Sam Spade?"

"Me? Shit, I couldn't locate my ass with both hands and GPS."

"You pick a funny hour to get nosy."

"Uh-huh. Do you mind dropping your aim?"

"Not so fast. Who are you?"

"Tommy Mack Zane. I was born in
Champagne
's Folly,
Texas
, but I've lived in
Old
Yvor
City
for most of my life."

"What brings you here at 1:33 a.m., Tommy Mack Zane of
Champagne
's Folly,
Texas
?"

I didn't see any merit to bullshit him, so I played it straight. "I'm hiding from a bad white dude who's out to kill me."

"Are you shitting me?"

"I’m not a looney. Can I mosey in closer? Shouting like we're doing could draw us unwanted attention."

"Uh-huh. Come on then, but do it slow. Hands propped in high sight, too."

I hoisted my hands above my shoulders and maneuvered over the loose blue stone without wrenching a knee.

"That be close enough, Tommy Mack."

Several paces in front of him, I pulled up. He stood framed by the boxcar's side door where I lowered my hands without asking for his damn permission. From the backlight silhouetting him, I saw my host was a fricking dwarf, topping out possibly at my mid-chest. The Glock was a cannon clutched in his hands. No wonder he acted so defensive. "How do I address you, brother?"

"Big Jamal works fine."

Big, yeah right, dream on
. "Yo, Big Jamal. What's with the Glock?"

He shrugged a shoulder. "I fished it out of a dumpster in the dog park. A dope runner ditched the Glock there is my guess. But it's loaded, and it shoots straight, and it's a comfort right now to me."

By using his name again, I gave him reassurances to relax his white-knuckled finger on the Glock's trigger. "Big Jamal, I ain't here to crimp your style." I nodded toward the boxcar. "Say, is that bud I smell?"

"It
was
bud. I burned a jay and caught a buzz, but I ain't got any more for you."

"I can't get high anyway. How long have you been on the street?"

"Centuries, it seems. I used to drive a hoopty to jungle up in until the loan company repo'ed it."

"This boxcar beats sleeping under an overpass or on a heat grate with the sewer rats."

"Passably so, I reckon. The door pulled to keeps out the stiff wind and riffraff."

"What did you do in your previous life?"

"Oh…this and that." Big Jamal spat from the boxcar. "My last nine-to-five was a half-baked database administrator. Some fast talking landed me that sweet gig. Then the afternoon three days before Christmas my prick of a manager saunters up, juts his fat jaw, and says he's forced to lay me off. So I told the dildo to go fry his balls, and I split. But that's enough pedigree on me. What's your line, Tommy Mack?"

"That ties back to why I'm holed up in the switchyard."

"Uh-huh. Well, this spot is claimed."

"I hear you fine. I'm also curious. You got a hootchie mama waiting back yon?" I asked, trying to draw a tableau of just how the pint-sized guy was able to climb a leggy mountain.

"Just me and the shadows are here."

"Do you sling your dope back here?"

"No dope, sir. Why?"

"Using an orphaned boxcar is a slick setup. Who explores the switchyard? The final locomotives steamed up ages ago. There's acres of flat, open terrain to monitor who's coming and going, and your clients know where to find you."

"Uh-huh. What makes you so street savvy, Tommy Mack?"

"Like you, I've been around some. I wish I had something to pay or trade you for that Glock. It'd come in awful useful."