The Struggles of Johnny Cannon (17 page)

“What's going on?” he asked. “Do we need to get up a search party?”

“That's a good idea,” Bull said.

“Johnny said Eddie was at the cemetery,” Pa said.

Bob shot me a look.

“Okay. Round up every available man,” Bob hollered. “We're going to find my son, and we ain't going to stop until he's back home.”

“But what about the fireworks?” Mr. Braswell said.

“Boy, I reckon fireworks is the least of our concerns,” Bull said. “We need to start looking over every inch of this county. He couldn't have gotten very far.”

Bob grabbed Pa by the arm.

“Pete?” he said. “Can I count on you?”

Pa nodded.

“Sure, sure. Yes, I'll help you. Of course. Let me just take Johnny home first.”

“But he was with Eddie. He might know better where to find him.”

Pa glared at me.

“No, I reckon he's been as much help as he'll be. I'll take him home and set him in his room and then I'll meet you and whoever else at the cemetery.”

“So there's not going to be any fireworks?” one of the girls with Mr. Braswell said.

Mr. Braswell took a look at Bob's eyes, which was practically shooting flames out of them.

“Nope,” he said. “None that we want to see. Let's move this party back to my house.”

Edith Braswell, Mr. Braswell's mom, stepped in and grabbed him by the ear.

“You told me you didn't do no drinking last night,” she said. “There ain't going to be no more party for you at my house. Let's go.”

I almost laughed, watching a grown man get dragged by a little old lady out to her car, but then I spied Bob again. He was frothing at the mouth.

“So, what you going to do when you find Eddie?” I asked.

He cracked his knuckles and ground his teeth for a second.

“I will make sure he never gets the darn fool idea to run off like this in his head again. Even if I have to beat the spit out of him.”

I could almost feel them hellfires tickling at my toes.

“Look, I'll bet I could lead the manhunt,” I said. “Show y'all all the places I reckon he went. Like, he said he was going to head over to the library. We could all go over there. And maybe pick up a book or two while we're at it. They say all the answers can be found in books.”

Pa grabbed hold of my arm real tight.

“Nope, you're going home. Sora can watch you.”

He dragged me back out of the park, with everybody watching us twice as hard, and made me get back into the truck. And I should have been mad about getting grounded and everybody thinking I was a stinking drunk and the fact that I wasn't ever going to be able to show my face around town again. Any other normal kid would have been mad at that. But I wasn't. I was worried instead.

I had a bad feeling if Bob had his way, Eddie's blood was going to be on my hands.

D
id you know that when folks ain't quite sure what they ought to say, they'll usually clear their throat or cough? It's like they're trying to make folks believe the reason their brain ain't working is 'cause they caught tuberculosis or something. And then maybe folks'll run off 'cause there ain't nobody that wants to catch tuberculosis, no matter how nosy they are. Which is also why folks cough so much in church. They're hoping the preacher will quarantine himself.

I was sitting at the dining room table and Sora was watching me, clearing her throat like she'd just come in from a dust storm. Meanwhile, I was stewing away, trying to figure out how to sneak out and get to Rudy and Eddie before the town posse caught up with them.

Which was stupid, 'cause there wasn't neither one of them that was a decent enough fella to risk getting grounded for the rest of my life over. But there also wasn't neither one of them that was bad enough to deserve what Bob was primed to give them. It was one of them moral dilemmas, like when you're powerful hungry but you just saw
Bambi
in the theaters, so you can't bring yourself to shoot the deer in front of you. But then you remember that Bambi's ma was probably feeding that hunter's family real good, so you shoot the deer anyway. It was like that.

“You don't got to watch me,” I said. “I ain't going nowhere.”

“I don't mind,” she said. “Pa asked me to, so I'm going to do it.”

So she was going to play the game. Me and Tommy used to play it all the time. We'd know the other one had a secret, and so we'd keep playing dumb to all the lies they'd tell until they was so frustrated they'd finally spill it. But I didn't have time for that game, so I reckoned I'd just go ahead and put my cards on the table.

“Rudy's with him, you know,” I said.

She took a quick breath. She wasn't expecting to hear his name from my lips. That was for darn sure.

“Rudy?” she asked. “Who's that?”

“Don't even try,” I said. “You can't out-lie a liar. I don't know what he is to you, but I sure know what you are to him. And if Bob finds Eddie with him, he'll have Rudy's hide as a rug in his shop. Won't even think twice.”

She stared at me for a couple of seconds and then she stood up. “Take me to them.”

“Wait, what?”

“Take me to them. We need to warn them.”

She didn't get no arguments from me, so we got up and headed out. Pa had hitched a ride with Bob, so we took the truck and drove on down to Snake Pond.

When we got to the tent, the campfire was working to get a pot of water boiling. Eddie was tending to it.

“Hey,” I said as I went over to him, “we got—” Then I noticed what was sitting next to him in the dirt. “Wait, what are you cooking?”

“Snake stew,” he said. “My grandma got the recipe in Sweetwater, Texas.”

“With water moccasin?” I asked. “That'll kill you.”

“No,” he said, and he picked up a bag of snake heads. “You just cut it low enough so you don't get no venom. Plus it all cooks out anyhow.”

Sora finally caught up with me, 'cause pregnant women is slow.

“Where is he?” she asked.

No sooner had she said that when Rudy popped out of the tent.

“Sora?” he said, then he ran to her and hugged on her, and she hugged him back, though she didn't seem as enthused as he was about it. The whole thing would have been weird any day of the week to be honest, but considering the baby that was in between them was Tommy's, it seemed downright sinful.

I cleared my throat and Rudy let go of her.

“You're supposed to be gone,” she said. “I thought you said you'd leave on Friday.”

“I was going to,” he said, then he glanced over at Eddie. “But then I found him.”

She looked over at Eddie and then back at him.

“Him?” she asked. “
He
is him?”

He nodded and grinned.

“But, I thought—” she said. He stopped her.

“Let's go talk in private,” he said. They went off and headed to a place in the trees that looked like a good spot to die of snake poison.

“They're talking about me,” Eddie said. I looked over at him and he stirred the pot. “They're excited about me being Morris's son.”

“Your pa is looking for you,” I said. “And, knowing him, he's going to find you. Both of you.”

He stopped stirring and started staring at me with real scared eyes.

“He wouldn't look for me out here, though. Right?”

I looked back over at the spot that Sora and Rudy had snuck off to.

“I don't know,” I said. “I hope not. But he's got a posse out hunting you.”

He cussed. Then he cussed again.

Before he could get out a third one, I decided that I needed to know what they was talking about.

“Hey, I'm going to go pee,” I said.

I headed over and tried to get as close to those two as I could without getting heard or nothing, and then, 'cause I actually did have to pee, I went ahead and started watering some of them weeds.

“Are you absolutely sure?” she asked. “I mean, he doesn't even look like—”

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “But he knows things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Like about Havana. And about the club. And—”

“Okay, so it's him,” she said. “So, what now?”

I got done peeing and zipped up. It was funny, when I was a kid with Tommy and we came down to Snake Pond, he'd always told me not to pee near the water. I couldn't remember right then why, though.

“Now we try to get word back to my father,” he said. “And maybe—”

He kept on talking, but I stopped listening, 'cause I remembered why Tommy'd told me never to pee down there.

Snakes like it when folks pee near them. 'Cause pee attracts rats, and snakes like rats more than ice cream.

And right then, a big, fat water moccasin came slithering to check out the mess I'd just made and see if any nice juicy rats had showed up for a drink or two.

I've faced down some pretty dadgum scary things in my life, even stood toe-to-toe with Che Guevara after he broke my nose, but there ain't nothing that sends me into a frantic worse than snakes. Especially poisonous ones. And doubly especially when it's sniffing my toes and figuring out that I am the source of that sweet-smelling liquid it knows is going to fetch it a nice meal.

I went from zero to screaming in two seconds. Which only made the snake even more curious. I reckon there ain't much screaming down in the snake pits.

That snake started darting around me, hoping, I guess, that it'd get me to stop doing the screaming it wasn't liking so much, which shows just how small snake brains are, 'cause all it did was make me scream worse than I did during
Psycho
.

Rudy came busting through the woods to see what all the commotion was about. I pointed at that snake that was getting ready to bite me. Without another word, Rudy reached around to his back and pulled out that gun Eddie'd found before, and he shot the snake right in the head. It flopped up into the air and around in the dirt a few times, but then it gave up the ghost.

“You can stop screaming now,” Rudy said.

I closed my mouth.

Sora came over to us.

“What just happened?” she asked, then she saw the snake.

“Nothing a little firepower can't fix,” Rudy said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Too bad you probably got Bob's posse heading this way now.”

“Bob's posse?” he said, and then he looked at Sora. She went ahead and told him what all'd happened and such, and he got real serious real fast.

“Okay, I guess that's our cue to hit the road.”

“ ‘Our' meaning you and Eddie?” I asked. “Or ‘our' meaning you and Sora?”

Sora shot me a look.

“Him and Eddie, of course,” she said. “I'm here for the long haul. That's what Tommy would want.”

That seemed to fire a dart at Rudy, though he recovered pretty fast. He went back to their campsite and started packing up.

“But, the stew is almost ready,” Eddie said. “Why are we leaving so soon?”

“We'll have time to eat,” Rudy said. “Let's just get all this loaded up in my car and then—”

He smacked himself in the forehead.

“My car is still at the cemetery.”

Well, that wasn't good.

“That's where the posse is starting their search,” I said. “Which means they found your car.”

“I locked it, though,” he said. He dug into his pockets for his keys.

“They're still in a puddle of Ethan's throw-up,” I said. He groaned.

“Do you think you could go get it?”

Sora and Eddie both looked at me and I laughed.

“Are you out of your mind?” I asked. “If the posse is still at the graveyard and I show up, I'll be grounded till two years after college or something. Why don't you go get your own danged car?”

“You're the only one out of all of us that could get it without raising suspicion,” he said. “I show up and they're there, they're going to want to ask me questions, maybe even throw me in the jailhouse so they can be sure I'm being honest. Eddie shows up, well, you know what would happen with that.”

“What about Sora?” I asked.

She looked a little shocked.

“I guess I could.”

“No,” Rudy said, pretty stern-like. “No, she's not getting dragged into this. You have to do it.”

“I don't got to do nothing but—” I started to say, but then I saw Eddie's eyes. It was one of Bob's favorite sayings, that you didn't have to do nothing but stay white and die. But it was wrong. Bob was wrong. And he hadn't never done nothing good for Eddie.

“Fine,” I said. “I'll do it.”

With a whole batch of fresh-baked cusswords rattling around in my mouth, I drove on over to the cemetery so I could fetch his dadgum LeSabre. As I got closer, I could see a mess of cars, including Mr. Thomassen's Cadillac and Carlos's truck. Plus there was the sheriff's car, and a bunch of other ones that had been out at the lake all parked slipshod all over the place. So I circled around and parked on the other side of the hill, then I hiked up to see if I could sneak in and get them keys from in front of Tommy's grave.

When I finally found my spot, I spied Rudy's car, but there was a problem. It was hooked up to the back of Bob Gorman's tow truck.

Mr. Thomassen, Pa, and Carlos was all standing close enough that I could hear what they was saying, and they was joined pretty quick by their favoritest CIA agent, who must not have had nothing better to do than to stick around Cullman and make it harder for me to be comfortable breathing.

“I found these over in a pile of vomit,” Short-Guy said. He was holding a set of keys with a pair of pliers.

Mr. Thomassen shook his head.

“So what do you think that means?”