“Nigger lover,” said the loudmouth.
“It’s alright,” said the man in the suit. “You boys are alright. But go on now.”
“They ain’t alright,” said the other man in khakis. “Nigger lovers. Not a damn thing worse. I hate them more than the niggers. Nigger is what he is, but you boys are what you are by choice. One’s scum by birth, but you two are the way you want to be.”
The young man with the bat dropped it on the floor and he and his companion went out together. There was a window at my booth. I looked out of it. I watched them drive away in a shiny brown Buick.
Louise went to the phone on the wall and dialed someone and spoke soft and I didn’t hear it. I could tell she was mad though.
“Tell them they probably took the main road,” said Charles. “I doubt that coon is smart enough to keep out of sight, and them other two, they don’t figure how bad they’ve stepped in it. Goddamn niggers. Goddamn nigger lovers.”
“Don’t call anyone, Louise,” the older man in the suit said. “Don’t do that. It’s not worth it for some chips and Co-colas. That fellow paid you.”
“You’re sounding like a nigger lover yourself,” Charles said. “Don’t come around here no more.”
“You don’t own this café,” the man in the suit said.
“But I do,” Louise said. “Don’t come around anymore. Eat somewhere else. I can’t abide a nigger lover.”
The older man in the suit got up and opened his wallet and put bills on the table. He was trembling. He put on his hat and went out.
I put money on the table for what I would have eaten, and went on out behind him. I watched the man in the suit walk toward his car. I walked over to him.
“Who would they call?” I said.
“It’s best not to know,” he said. “It’s even best not to think about it.”
He got in his car and slammed the door and drove off.
I got in mine and did the same. I tooled on toward Tyler, but after about twenty minutes I turned around and headed home. The air had gone out of my adventure.
I stopped for gas when I came back through No Enterprise, and when I got on down the road, I passed the car the two young men had been in. Their brown Buick was partially off the road and both the front doors were open, but I didn’t see them anywhere.
10.
Apollo Red
“Alright, let me ask this?” Leonard said. “Would your father have stood up for that black man in the café?
“Probably not,” I said. “He may have been too much of his time. I hate to say that, but that might be the truth.”
“I don’t know,” Leonard said. “He seems to me to have been a pretty straight shooter.”
“In most ways I think he was, but when it came to race, I can’t say completely. I mean, yeah, he had his moments. He used to do a lot of things to help black people. I think when it was just him and them, he could be kind and generous. I think the whole thing with whites looking on, well, maybe he could go the other way.”
“He was brave, though, and that often says something about a man.”
“Bad people can be brave, Leonard. Not that I think he was bad. But, hey, he was brave.”
“I know the stories,” Leonard said.
“Tell me one, Daddy,” Chance said.
I looked at Brett. She was holding her face up with a hand under her chin and an elbow on the table. She had heard all these stories.
“Okay,” I said. “There’s the one about a guy I call Apollo Red.”
“Oh, I love this one,” Leonard said.
“Even I feel a bit more alert,” Brett said. “I like this one too. And just for the record, I know more stories than I’m going to let you tell about your dad tonight, but I want to put my two cents in and say he has always sounded like a hell of a man to me.”
“I guess he was,” I said. “He was my hero, flaws and all.”
“Tell the story, Daddy.”
Summer this happened, I must have been about seventeen, give or take a few months. I was down at the garage with my dad. He was washing tools in gasoline, cleaning them up, getting ready for me and him to drive to the café and get some lunch, though in that day and time we called the noon meal dinner, and the later meal supper. Yankees had lunch. We had dinner.
Dad was always greasy because he always worked. He cleaned up when he was home, but he was the kind of guy that could put on freshly cleaned and ironed khakis, and within an hour at the garage, look as if he had been living inside an oil drum. He worked hard and was good at it. He could fix any kind of car and make it hum. Odd thing was, we always drove junk. I guess it’s like the barber who needs a haircut, the dentist who needs his teeth cleaned, the carpenter whose porch is sagging. Dad spent his time working on other people’s cars, trying to put food on the table and a roof over our heads.
When he was eight his mother died, and his fondest memory of her was that once for Christmas she had given him an orange and a peppermint stick. He talked about it like it had happened yesterday, like the gift was as important as a new car. For him it was.
His father was a mean-spirited jackass that made Dad work in the cotton fields when he was eight. At that time and place this was acceptable behavior. Once, on the way to the fields, Dad fell off the pinto pony he rode and busted his ear drum. He rode the horse back home, hanging on its back, limp as a blanket.
His father took a horse whip to him, sent him back to work with blood running out of his ear. You’d think with an upbringing like that Dad would have passed it down the line, but he didn’t. I never got one whipping, spanking, whatever you want to call it. And I’ll tell you, I’m not altogether opposed to a slap on the ass over doing something that is going to get you killed, but that’s a far cry from a beating. I never got either from him, though my mother once took a flyswatter to me for something I well deserved. It embarrassed me more than it hurt me.
For a poor kid I was what they called spoiled in those days, and what my mother called loved. Spoiled was going to work at fifteen instead of eight. At the time this happened I was working a night shift at Imperial Aluminum and going to school during the day, but this was the summer, so I was free until three thirty. I got off at midnight. If there were child labor laws against that, neither the boys I worked with or the aluminum chair company we worked for was aware of it.
So there I was, waiting on Dad to clean up a bit, and this guy comes driving up in this shiny gold Cadillac with a golden swan ornament on the hood, kind that was made mostly of plastic. When you turned on the lights the swan lit up. Coming down the road at night you saw the headlights, and dead center of the hood, a golden swan floating across the night, seemingly pulling the car along with stiff-winged elegance. During the day it was just a gold-plastic bird with a wire and a bulb inside of it.
The Caddy drove up as we were about to leave, and this raw-boned, redheaded guy with his short shirt sleeves rolled up to display his sizable biceps, got out. His hair was well oiled and slicked back on the sides and he had a bit of a duck tail in the back. He looked as if he were wearing a copper helmet.
He got out and stuck a cigarette in his mouth, walked about halfway up to the wide open garage doors, paused, lit his smoke carefully with a gold lighter, doing it for dramatic effect, like he was posing for a photo, and then he snapped the lighter closed with a metallic clap, stuffed it in his tight pants pocket, and strutted into the garage, his black boots with red explosions on the toe flashing before him. The toes on those things were so long and pointed he could have kicked a cockroach to death in a corner.
The man kind of glowed. It was as if a white trash Apollo had descended from heaven in his golden chariot, down from the sun to get his oil checked, have a chicken-fried steak with white gravy, and screw a mortal before ascending back to the heavens. In my mind I nicknamed him Apollo Red.
There was a lemon-colored Buick parked inside the garage, and it was the car my father had been working on that morning. Dad was drying his
hands on a shop rag when this guy swaggered in, leaned a large hand on the Buick, said, “This car fixed yet?”
Dad studied Apollo Red the way a snake studies a frog.
“Yep,” Dad said.
“My girlfriend’s got to have it.”
“Alright,” Dad said. And he told the guy what the charge was.
“She’ll have to owe you,” said Apollo Red.
“Owes me for the last time I fixed it.”
“You didn’t fix it good enough.”
“That was the transmission, this here was a leak in the carburetor. I rebuilt it so she don’t have to buy a new one. I saved her about thirty dollars.”
“Did, did you?”
Dad just looked at him.
The fellow strayed an eyeball my way. “That your boy?”
“Yeah,” Dad said.
“Needs a haircut.”
“Yeah, he does.”
“I’d hold him down and trim it with a pocket knife.”
I had heard this shit a million times, and sometimes it seemed a million times a day. Lot of the kids then had long hair. The girls liked it and so did I. I thought this hair remark was an odd statement coming from a man that wore his hair the way he did. Probably as long as mine, but tamed with hair oil and spray and a lot of mirror examination and a fine-toothed comb. I started to say something smart, but somehow I didn’t want to get into Dad’s bubble. And something about that guy made me cautious, like knowing to avoid a dark alley at night in a strange city.
“He might need it, but it won’t be you cutting it, or two more just like you,” Daddy said.
That caused Apollo Red to purse his lips and knit his brows. His gray eyes became slits. Apollo Red thought a moment, almost loud enough to hear his thoughts running about in his head like mice on gravel, and then he turned his attention back to Dad.
“Girlfriend needs the car. She sent me to get it. She can’t pay you nothing right now, but she’s good for it, and I’m going to take it.”
“Naw, she ain’t taking it, and neither are you,” Dad said. “Shouldn’t have worked on it, knowing she don’t pay her bills.”
“Is that right?”
“Know she works at the beauty parlor and has a long walk to work without a car. Wanted to help her out, but I need at least half what she owes me for the last job. You got that, you can take it, though how you’re going to drive two cars is a puzzle.”
“I’ll pull it out, park it in the lot, bring her to get it when she gets off work. She needs it tonight.”
“Tell her to get the money,” Dad said, and he was through talking. He walked by Red toward the garage doors. The doors were two wide metal sections you pulled closed and linked with a chain that ran through a hole in the doors, then you padlocked them together. Dad was about to pull the doors when Red said, “Wait a minute, old man.”
Now at this time, Dad was pushing sixty, and that was back when sixty was old. He had gained a lot of weight and was tired looking, but back in his younger days he had been a boxer and a carnival wrestler. He had a kind of strength, especially when he was younger, that was almost startling. It wasn’t built-up gym stuff, it was working-man muscle, compacted and stretched and flexed by hard work from the time he was a child. He didn’t look like much, but neither does a stick of dynamite.
That said, this guy was young and well formed, and he moved like a cat. Just looking at him I knew he had done bad things and wanted to do more. I could feel a crackle in the air when he talked. It’s that strange feeling you get when things aren’t right, a sensation of something mean and nasty on the other side of some kind of dimensional barrier, waiting to get through a slit in time and space, enter into one of us humans and ignite our most evil traits, send us flailing with fist, snapping with teeth, slashing with knives, slinging clubs and tossing rocks.
Apollo Red, obviously annoyed, came outside and put his butt to the fender of his car, said, “You ain’t going nowhere till you give me that car.”
“Going to get something to eat,” Dad said.
Apollo Red reached down and took hold of his belt with both hands and hitched it up, like maybe he was making room for a set of testicles the size of bowling balls, and said, “You ain’t going nowhere, Greasy, less’n you give me that car.”
“Soon as I lock these doors you can watch me and my boy and my greasy clothes drive away, ’cause I’m done talking to you.”
This was like tossing gasoline on a fire for Apollo Red. “Tell you what, old man, I’ll sort your shit out right now, that’s what I’ll do.”
Dad looked at him. I had seen that gaze before, and let me tell you, you had to be a fucking idiot not to know there was something feral behind those near-black eyes, and that this was a man who had seen the devil and kicked his ass. But the devil had taken his beating twenty years earlier, not of recent from an overweight, old man pushing sixty.
Apollo Red bounced himself off of the car fender, cocked his hand back as he came forward, and I thought, well, I’m stepping in. Dad’s getting old, and I better help. But even though I was no slouch when it came to fighting, I was afraid. Apollo Red wasn’t merely a smart-ass kid that wanted to tussle a bit. He was a bad man and you could sense it.
All of these thoughts came quickly, of course, and as I prepared to jump into the fray, Dad lunged forward. He was standing still one moment, and in the next he was covering ground like a bullet.
And then it came. It was an impossibly fast and short uppercut, but it was still a punch from hell. Before Apollo Red’s punch could reach him, the upper cut rose, almost touching Red’s chest as it tracked toward his chin. To this day I imagine flames coming off of it, Dad was moving so fast. His shot hit while Apollo Red was still bringing his punch around. Dad’s flat fat fist caught Apollo Red solid under the chin, and it’s the only time in my life I have actually seen someone lifted that high off the ground from a punch. That loudmouth was launched like a space rocket, and the only thing missing was a monkey on board and radio contact with NASA.
The blow made a sickening sound, and that upper cut lifted him onto the fender of his car. He rolled then, caught his shirt in the flying bird hood ornament; tore it half off, and rolled onto the concrete drive. One leg started kicking, like maybe he was trying to stomp a bug in a ditch, and then Apollo Red’s head cocked back and he let out with a wheeze similar to steam hissing from a teapot. His eyes rolled up in his head like cherries in a slot machine. I almost expected him to spit coins.
And then he was still.
Corpse still.
I wouldn’t have been surprised if vultures were already passing the word.
I went over, leaned down, and looked. Apollo Red’s lips were blue. He may have been the sun god where he came from, but the god of lightning and thunder had just knocked the sunlight out of his ass.
I said, “Dad, I think you killed him.”
Dad always carried a stub of a cigar in his shirt pocket, and as he walked over he pinched it from his pocket and poked it in his mouth. He scratched around in his pants pockets for a box of matches. When he found them, he took a match out slowly, struck it on the strike-strip on the side of the box, held the flame to that foul-smelling cigar. He shook the match and threw it down. He looked down at Red, turned his head from side to side like a curious dog, said, “Nah. He’ll come around.”
I wasn’t so sure.
“You hit him hard, Daddy.”
“Man’s punch is the last thing to go.”
I guess Dad might actually have been a little concerned, because we didn’t go to dinner. He stood near the guy’s car for a bit, then went inside and picked up a comic book. He couldn’t actually read, but he was learning a bit with Western comics. He liked Billy The Kid . I helped him with the words.
“Go get us some hamburgers, Baby Man,” he said.
I had anything but dinner on my mind, but in a kind of daze I drove to the café and got hamburgers, fries, couple of Cokes, and drove back.
This took
about thirty minutes or so. Dad was still attempting to read his comic, moving his lips over the words he was learning. Apollo Red still hadn’t moved. It had grown really hot.
Dad ate his hamburger and fries, then went back to work on a car at the rear of the garage, his head under the hood, whistling like one of the dwarves from Snow White. Apollo Red, lying on the summer-hot concrete, still had not wiggled a muscle.
I tried to eat, but couldn’t. I stood and looked at Red. About an hour after he had taken a ride on the rocket from hell, he twitched.
Like the Frankenstein monster testing his nerves and muscles, starting to recognize shapes and shadows, he writhed against the concrete. His jaw on one side had swollen to about the size of an eggplant and his chin had blackened like a two-day beard. The flesh around the eye on the side of the swelling had gone black as well. There was blood at the corners of his mouth.
Apollo Red stirred a little more. He rolled to one side with no more trouble than a beached whale. He lay there for a while pulling in ultra-violet rays. Birds flew over and dropped their shadows on him. Apollo Red finally got a knee under him, but his head hung low, as if heavy. The position he was in, it looked as if he were about to attempt an impromptu head stand. A tooth fell out of his mouth. He laid back down for a while.
I looked at Dad. He was still doping out the comic book.
Another fifteen or twenty minutes passed, and then Apollo Red moved again. He went through all the formations he had managed before, but this time, when it came to the knee position, he pushed up to his feet, wobbled a bit, and then forgetting he had come by car, started slowly zig-zagging away, as if practicing evasive maneuvers against a slow-moving, heat-seeking missile.
He staggered across the street, over the dead grass next to the oil well bit shop, fell down, got up with excruciating slowness, continued to zig-zag until he stumbled out of sight behind a high stack of tires at the rear of a filling station.
I finally ate my hamburger. Dad went back to work. I sat around for another hour. I had planned to eat dinner with Dad, go home and go to work, but I decided the hell with it. I was too shook up. I walked across to the bit shop, borrowed their phone, called my boss, said I would be in late, if at all.