The Struggles of Johnny Cannon (14 page)

“Well, I've got a lot of work to do, so I reckon I'm going to head back out to my shack. Thanks for lunch.”

He went out the back door and left me and Sora staring at each other. I had two more hot dogs to go or else I would have left too.

As soon as he was out of earshot, Sora leaned as good as she could across the table and whispered to me.

“Can you keep a secret?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said.

She looked over her shoulder out the window to make sure Pa was in his shack.

“Tommy never went to Korea.”

No kidding.

“Really?” I asked. “How do you figure?”

“He told me right before he left. Korea was a lie, a cover story. He actually went to Nicaragua, but he made me swear to not tell anyone, especially your pa. We made up the story about the Korean classes so I wouldn't blow his cover.”

Dang, she knew more than she let on.

“What did he do down there?”

She took a deep breath. “Have you heard about the Bay of Pigs invasion?”

“A little.”

“That's what he did down there. He trained the Cubans to prepare them for the invasion.” Her voice got all sad. “That's probably how he really died.”

How'd she know all that?

My face must have shown how confused I was 'cause she reached across the table and grabbed my hand.

“I know, it's a real shock. But I'm sure he would have wanted you to know,” she said. Then she smiled. “He always said you weren't just his brother, you were his closest friend.”

And that did it for me. Got me right in the throat. I couldn't listen no more or else I'd make a danged fool of myself. I got up and left a perfectly good hot dog waiting to get eaten.

“I got to run my pants to Mrs. Parkins,” I said, then I went upstairs, changed into my jeans, and carried my folded-up pants out the front door as fast as I could.

I got down to the Parkinses' house in time to catch the tail end of dinner, which was good 'cause I was still powerful hungry. There was only one problem. They had company. Specifically, they had the Mackers over. Well, Mrs. Macker and Martha. Mr. Macker was still in Montgomery.

Sitting next to Martha was a little like President Kennedy sitting next to Nikita Khrushchev. It was cold and quiet between us, even though the whole table was talking to each other and laughing as hard as ever. We was in the middle of a Cold War.

After everybody got done eating, I asked Mrs. Parkins if she'd mind getting my pants good and clean. Mrs. Macker looked sort of funny when I asked that and said it was time for her and Martha to head on home, which was fine by me, 'cause I was getting tired of straining my ears to hear if Martha might eventually apologize or something. Which she didn't, by the way.

Mrs. Parkins took my pants to go wash them, and me and Willie went to work on some SuperNegro stories in his room. He wanted to talk about the letter, or about the Gormans, or about Martha or something. But I wasn't up to it. I needed to get away into the world of Mercury and them aliens he was hunting.

After a little while, Mrs. Parkins knocked on the door right at the best part of the story just like she always did and Willie had to turn off his tape recorder.

“Doggone it, Ma,” he said. “What do you need?”

She opened the door.

“Johnny, this was in your pants pocket. I don't reckon you want me to wash it, do you?”

She handed me that letter. There was a great big purple stain on it from the grape juice.

“Oh, thank you, ma'am,” I said. I took the letter and tossed it over by the tape recorder. She left us alone 'cause that's what a good ma knows to do when your boys is working on something important like a SuperNegro story.

Willie picked up the letter.

“What's this?” he asked, and pointed to the purple stain that was at the bottom.

“Oh, some grape juice spilled on me. Ain't nothing.”

“No, not the stain,” he said, and he held the letter out closer to me. “This.” He was pointing at the edge of the stain where there was some letters that hadn't been there before. They was bright white against the purple of the grape juice. They said:

solitary fort is

“What in tarnation—” I said. He looked at the letter again.

“Oh, of course,” he said, and he slapped his forehead. “Invisible ink.”

“Huh?” I asked. “That's a real thing?”

“Sure, you just mix up baking soda and water, then you write your message with like a toothpick or something, and it don't show up unless you heat it up. Or paint it with grape juice.”

He hopped up and went to his kitchen, then he came back with a bottle of Welch's. He poured it on a rag and wiped it all over the letter. And, sure enough, a whole nother message came shining through.

If a solitary fort is a Scottish lake,

Then what is its resident?

JVSJN IND KQUZT

Me and Willie stared at that message for a bit, both of us trying to make heads or tails of it.

“You think it's the first letter thing again?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“No, it don't work out. Plus that last line is obviously a cipher.”

“A what?” I asked.

“A cipher. A code where you substitute out the letters in your word for other letters.”

A lightbulb turned on in my head.

“Like the decoder rings?” I asked. “Tommy was always into that kind of stuff. He had the Captain Midnight decoder ring, the Little Orphan Annie decoder ring, even the Ovaltine decoder ring. He loved them things, collected them since he was four.”

The way them decoder rings would work was that there was a little disk with the alphabet on it, set to turn inside of a rim that had the alphabet on it again. You'd turn the ring around and then make your message by substituting the letters on the inside for what you had on the rim.

“Then it makes sense that's what he'd do, don't it?” he said.

“It shouldn't be too hard to figure it out,” I said.

Boy was I wrong.

We spent the rest of the day working on that line, substituting letters this way and that to make it work. But it just wouldn't do it. We literally used all twenty-six letters as the substitute for
A
, but no matter which way we did it, it didn't make no sense. Finally, Willie snapped his pencil in half.

“We're doing this all wrong,” he said. I looked over at the paper he was working on. He'd only been doing the middle section of letters, the
IND
.

“What do you mean?”

“There's only so many three-letter words,” he said. “So I've tried every single one I can think of to get a hint of what the substitute would be. But it don't work out. If I say the
IND
is ‘and,' so
I
equals
A
, it don't let it stay as ‘and.' Same as if I do ‘but' or ‘the' or any other three-letter word.”

It was getting dark outside and we was both tired, so I didn't feel up to pointing out how silly he was sounding.

“So, what does that mean?”

“I don't know,” he said. “Short-Guy gave me a book about cryptography. Maybe I'll look and see what it says.” He let out a great big yawn. “Tomorrow.”

I looked at his watch. It was well after eleven. I didn't have to get up early 'cause of the holiday, of course, but Willie told me his ma decided to make him get caught up on some of his English assignments. Willie always said that doing your school at home was the worst thing that could happen to a kid. And he'd had polio, so that's saying something.

I went home and thought about reading a comic or two, but my brain wasn't too keen on letting that letter sit by itself. Instead, even after I got washed up for bed, while I was snug as a bug in a rug under my covers, I couldn't fall asleep. Them letters from that coded message was swimming in my brain and begging for me to work on it. And I tried to not do it, but after a couple of hours of staying awake staring at my ceiling, I couldn't take it no more. So I got up and started trying to break the code again.

It wasn't no use, of course. I didn't have the brainpower I needed, especially that long after midnight. But I couldn't fall asleep, either. Finally, I had one of them ideas that you really only get after midnight when you're still awake but you shouldn't be. I decided to go ask Tommy.

The whole house was asleep when I went down and got the keys from the back room and took off in the truck to the cemetery. All the way down there, I was praying that the ghosts would have maybe taken the night off since it was a Sunday and all. I really just needed to talk to Tommy alone. Even though he wasn't there. So maybe it was just about being alone myself.

When I got to the cemetery, I realized that wasn't going to happen.

T
here was two trucks and a car parked outside the cemetery when I got there. And when I say they was parked, I mean that whoever'd driven them there had enough sense to keep from hitting each other and to put their trucks in park before they got out.

When I got out of my truck, I could hear some voices coming from inside the gates, singing at the top of their lungs. And not the pretty kind of singing like you'd get at church or on the radio. They was singing the kind of songs that only came bubbling from the bottom of a bottle of Jack Daniels. I knew, 'cause that was the only kind of singing Tommy used to ever do.

Now, it probably would have been a good idea for me to turn around and head on back home. Try to get some sleep or something and let them fellas mess themselves up alone. But of course that ain't what I did. Instead I snuck into the cemetery, hoping to find whatever fools was raising the ruckus and keeping them poor dead souls from resting in peace.

As I made my way around some of the bigger tombstones, I finally figured out that them crazy fellas was having a party in the graveyard and they was having it over in the Cannon corner. I wondered if they knew they was drinking over my grandma. She'd probably appreciate them pouring some out onto the ground for her.

I made my way over to where I could see them fellas and where they was at, and when I did, both of those facts stopped me dead in my tracks. 'Cause them fellas was having their little party over at Tommy's grave. And them fellas was Mr. Braswell, Ethan Pinckney, and—

It took me a second to figure out where I knew the last guy from, and then I realized. It was the fella that had driven Sora to the graveyard. I looked back at the car. Sure enough, it was a gold Buick LeSabre.

I stepped out into the moonlight 'cause I couldn't quite see if there was anybody else up there with them. Then Ethan spotted me.

“Hey!” he hollered. “Hey, there's the—the—uh—” Then he took to giggling.

Mr. Braswell turned and saw me. He cussed.

“Johnny Cannon, what in the”—he cussed again—“are you doing here? You've got school in the morning.”

“No I don't, tomorrow's Labor Day,” I said. That set Ethan to giggling real hard.

Sora's driver looked at me.

“Hey,” he said, and he swung the bottle of Jack in the air. “You're the kid that gave my girl”—he hiccuped—“my friend a ride out of this place, aren't you? Come on over here. I never got the chance to really show you my appreciatitude.”

I wasn't scared of drunk fellas, thanks to all them times with Tommy. I'd learned that they was real easy to push over if you needed to. Or if you just needed a good laugh. I walked up to Tommy's grave.

“What are y'all doing here?” I asked.

“Having a reunion of the All-Winners Squad,” Mr. Braswell said.

Ethan hiccuped and nodded.

“The what?” I asked.

“Ah, not so good at history as you thought, huh?” Mr. Braswell said with a sneer. “Well then, let me educate you. After all, that's my job, right?”

“And my job is to administer the sacraments,” Ethan said, then he started crying again. Sora's driver went over, patted him on the back, put the bottle of Jack in his mouth, and tilted his head back to help him drink. After a long gulp, Ethan coughed up half of it, then nodded and said, “Thanks.”

Mr. Braswell went and put his hand on Tommy's tombstone.

“When me, Tommy, and Ethan were kids, we found a box of my dad's comics in my attic. And in there, we found the greatest two comics that have ever been created.”

“Action Comics number one, the first appearance of Superman?” I asked, getting real excited. “Or Detective Comics number twenty-seven, the first appearance of Batman. Or both, oh my gosh, you guys found both, didn't you?”

“No, idiot,” Mr. Braswell said. I wondered how many times he'd felt like saying that when he was teaching and sober. If he
was
sober when he was teaching. “We found All Winners Comics numbers nineteen and twenty-one.” He grinned like he expected me to wet myself or something.

“Never heard of them,” I said.

He groaned.

“See, this generation has no clue about the important things in life,” he said. “Those were the comics that had the greatest superhero team ever created, the All-Winners Squad. Captain America, the Human Torch, Sub-Mariner, Whizzer, and Miss America.”

“Human Torch was my favorite,” Ethan said. “He was a robot.”

“How could he be the
Human
Torch if he was a robot?” I asked. “Shouldn't he be more like the Robo-Torch or something?”

“Anyway,” Mr. Braswell said. “We read those comic books over and over and over again together. And we decided we were going to be the new All-Winners Squad.” He patted Tommy's gravestone. “Tommy was Captain America. I was the Human Torch.”

“I was Whizzer,” Ethan said. I looked at his soiled pants. Yeah, that nickname made sense.