Sixth grade year was a very stressful period in the life of young Danny Wilson. In the same year, President Kennedy was assassinated, and at the end of school year, in fact the day after school had ended, his best buddy, Billy Christian drowned in a irrigation canal south of town. It was probable too, that his upcoming matriculation from the sixth grade, made Danny anxiously aware that in the following year, he would be leaving behind the safe confines of Mark Twain Elementary located in the Southside neighborhood where he grown up and traveling all the way across town to a junior high in more affluent north side of town.

     The Beatles also came in that year and washed over the North American continent, which included the small, dusty farming community of Concord, California,  like a tidal wave pregnant with meaning. For some unexplained reason, the admixture of the young, handsome president getting his head blowed off in Dallas, followed closely afterwards by the often televised insanity of hundreds of thousands of young females screaming for the mop top quartet, produced a fertile surge of creativity in America, but more importantly, for this particular story, at Mark Twain Elementary School.

        It might have just been the arrival of Miss. Elenor Franklin, the new fourth grade teacher and drama coach. It was Miss Franklin who introduced the lunchtime Chubby Checker Twist-off where  a hundred students or so gathered at the basketball courts at lunch time and would "twist again like we did last summer" knowing full well that none of us had actually twisted last summer. Then sometime in February, after the Ed Sullivan show introduced the Beatles to America, Miss Franklin unceremoniously threw out all her Chubby Checker records onto the dustheap of history and replaced them with the Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand", and suddenly us lunchtime kids went from swinging our arms and hips back and forth in a relatively controlled fashion,  and started gyrating like a bunch monkeys having a seizure, while totally oblivious to the fact that nobody was actually holding anybody's hand.

       Miss Franklin in her effort to introduce a little bit of culture into the life's of the children of farmworkers who inhabited the Southside neighborhood that surrounded the school, decided to put on a play based on Hans Christian Anderson's classic fairytale The Emperor's New Clothes. If you are familiar with the story, you know that it was about a very vain Emperor obsessed with his clothing and who was swindled by a couple of conmen who pretended to weave him a suit made out of a fabric that was invisible to foolish people or persons who were unqualified for the jobs they were hired to do, naturally there was no such fabric, and gullibility of everyone around the emperor, including his subjects, help to sustain the hoax.

      Nobody knows if Miss Franklin chose that play in order to take a snide jab at the McCarthy era shenanigans, like so many of her erstwhile peers liked to do back in the day, but if she did, she would have had to write it out and rent  billboard space because the people on the Southside of Concord back in the day were too busy working for a living to put much stock in the use of ordinary allegorical interpretations much less ones used to make political points. Nobody had ever thought to ask her if those were her intentions before she packed up her classroom and moved along to another school in a bigger city where presumably she could stage a production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible without all the 'splaining.

      Danny badly wanted the role of the Emperor because it would have allowed him to walk around in the parade scene in his long john underwear, but Miss Franklin's pet Ronnie Rexroth got that role. Then he tried out for one of the two swindlers and failed again because Miss Franklin, in his opinion, had it in for him. He had to settle for the small role of the child who points out that the emperor was out there walking around in public in his underwear. During the pre-production meeting, Danny suggested that the play might actually be more successful if the emperor played the role au natural. All Danny got for his effort was a very stern look from Miss Franklin, who sat at the head of the table silently mouthing, "I'll tell your mother," some giggles from the girls, and the pleasure of seeing butt kisser Ronnie blushing. Oh yeah, and Billy falling out of his chair laughing.

      Danny had some problems with his lines which was a little strange considering he only had to say five words in the whole dang play, "He's not wearing any clothes!" It probably had more to do with stage fright and maybe a little to do with the timing, considering those words came at the climactic moment. Him and Billy also giggled a lot during rehearsals, particularly when Ronnie would walk around in his long john underwear with a slightly embarrassing protuberance; Ronnie was only eleven at the time, so it wasn't nearly as embarrassing as it might have been say he was in high school, but more like something that most people, being completely honest, would find amusing even today, sixty years later in these infinitely more sophisticated times. But Miss Franklin wasn't having any of it, and often made poor Danny wish he hadn't got involved with these dang theater people at all. 

       One day, after rehearsals, Danny and Billy went outside for a smoke and were met, at this large enamel sink where ten kids could wash their hands at once, by these two fifth grade sisters named Charlotte and Darla Mathews. Billy knew both girls very well and a conversation quickly arose about the use of the F word, yeah, that one. Danny was totally amazed and way over his head because at the point in his life the extent of his knowledge of cursing was limited to the phrase "Damn it all to hell!" that his dad would occasionally mutter when he hit his finger with the hammer, and for which his mom would quickly admonish him.

     Danny was also spending a lot of time in Church activities back then. Admittedly, he was having some problems adjusting to their views about how a person should behave in public. Sometimes, for instance, when Bertha Bohanan, his Sunday School teacher, would be droning on  and on about the fishes and the loaves for the hundredth time, he would go to the restroom, lock the door, climb out the window, run across the alley to the Food Mart and steal a couple pockets full of penny candy. Then he would surreptitiously pass the candy around to his classmates mistakenly thinking that he was kind of allegorically reenacting what Jesus was doing with the fishes. Mrs. Bohanan not only did not see things the same way, she took it upon herself to tell the whole class that Danny was more than likely going to be spending eternity in a vat of boiling oil. Danny often used the incident, and the unfairness of the penalty involved, to explain why he was so put off by organized religion and church goers in general, saying, "I don't need to be associating with people who believe in boiling kids in oil for sucking on a jawbreaker."

      Charlotte and Darla were pretty cute girls, and them explaining the many different ways that the F word could be used, made them look a little bit sexy which was another concept Danny hadn't previously given much thought. Thinking it over, he didn't feel like any of the girls in his class had much potential for sex appeal, then he stopped in mid thought and said to himself, "Well, maybe they do, but I just don't know it yet."

    Billy, on the other hand, seemed very knowledgeable about the word and comfortable in its use, reeling off whole sentences marvelous in their use of alliteration, and illustrating how to use the word as a noun, an adjective, a verb, an exclamation and even as a preposition. Danny's head was whirling, and he was soaking it all in like a sponge, nervously glancing over his shoulder, instinctively understanding that by merely listening to the exchange,  he was participating in something equally, dark, forbidden and mysterious.

    Later that same night, Danny's mother let him watch the famous scene from The Streetcar Named Desire where Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski started screaming "Stella! Stella!" in the middle of the street. It was probably not one of her better decisions, but she was only  trying to encourage his fledging interest in theater, telling him, "See that, Danny? That's how real actor's do it."

      The last run through for the play took place during school hours, and Danny had a lot of stuff on his mind, and Danny missed his cue making Miss Franklin blow her top.

          "You can't do that tonight, Danny! You only have five words, but they are the most important words of the whole play. They contain the whole meaning of life in a nutshell, people just cannot go along with the crowd just because they are afraid of looking different! It's like Prometheus bringing fire down from the mountains, stolen from the very  Gods themselves to hand down to the people below." At this point, she threw her hands up in frustration and finished her comments, "I don't know what I was thinking putting you in that role!"

      Danny, by that time,  had finally heard enough and brazenly replied, "You put me in the role because you thought I was so stupid I would screw things up if you didn't keep things simple." Then he pointed his right index finger at her face, "Well, I got news for you.You don't have to worry bout me, Miss Franklin. I ain't stupid. Remember, I'm the only one in this play who notices that Ronnie over there ain't got no stinking clothes on.  I got this." And just like that, he stormed out of the final rehearsal leaving Miss Franklin to explain herself to the other cast members and the angry glare of Billy Christian who was seriously thinking of following Danny's lead with an outburst of his own.  Danny, who lived around the corner, went home and asked his mother who was Prometheus was. She told him, but she left out the punishment part.

    Of course, that night Miss Franklin gave Danny a perfunctory apology but turned it into a teaching moment where she reminded the whole cast, but particularly Danny, about the need to project their voices and to put some fire and emotion into their performances. There was a small hallway just off to the north side of the stage in cafeteria where the play was being performed. The hall way was being used as a staging area that night, and just before Billy went out, he noticed Danny's nervousness and came and put his arm around his friend and said, "The whole school thinks that me and you are a couple of screw-ups, Danny, but tonight!" he assumed a Shakespearean pose, "Tonight we are kings!" Then after a moment, he added, "And our pee pees aren't poking out our underwear like Ronnie's. Don't worry, Danny. You got this." Danny looked at Ronnie and giggled pointed it out to Juan Ortega who giggled and started a chain reaction of giggling in the hallway.

        At the beginning of the final scene, with the lights down, Danny and the other members of the crowd took their seats in the actual audience; Danny sat in the first row closet to the aisle. Other cast members were seeded throughout the audience, to rise as the procession led by the Emperor in his state of undress passed them, and shout out their praise for his wonderful new garments, hopefully encouraging the members of the audience to join in. The parade began at the entrance to the cafeteria and proceeded down the center aisle. Danny was to wait until the last of the procession passed him by and mounted the stairs to the stage. While he waited, he looked down to the end of the row where he was seated and waved at his mom and dad at the other end.

       Finally, the parade passed him and the Emperor was just getting ready to sit down on his throne strategically located right smack dab in the center of the stage. Just before he sat, Danny rose up from his seat stepped out into the front of the the stage where a dedicated spot light found him, and yelled in his best Stanley Kowalski voice," "Wait a f#@king minute, motherf@#ker! You ain't wearing any f@#king clothes!"

      It wouldn't do any good to describe the total chaos that ensued. Someone, (me actually) had the good sense to cut the stage lights. Miss Franklin's planned remarks with which she obviously thought she was going to use to explain allegory to the assemblage, were scratched. And if you were standing near the front exit of that cafeteria that fateful night, you would probably have heard the phrase, "Well, I never, " a record number of times, along with the related question, "What the hell was that all about?" But there were some of us among that crowd that got it. Bill Christian, for example, became a doting acolyte of all things Danny Wilson until his own untimely death a few months later.

        Danny told me that he and Billy had sat out in the swing sets at Kindergarten Corner and talked for hours about what lay ahead for them that last day of sixth grade. He said Billy had asked him to go swimming at this bridge that spanned an irrigation canal a mile south of town. Danny told him he knew his mom would throw a fit and that he was trying his best to get back on her good side, so he couldn't. When Billy left, he ran and jumped, grabbed the top part of the fence and flipped over and landed on his feet like a circus acrobat. Then dropped down in a pose in the middle of the street and yelled, "Wait a f#$kin minute!" Then he laughed, and ran out of Danny's life forever.

        
          One night we were drinking beer, and I asked Danny how his mom and dad felt about what he had done, he laughed and said, "It was the strangest thing, Doug. My mom scolded me and whipped my butt that night, but I could tell that deep down inside, she was secretly proud, like she couldn't believe that I came out of her womb, and Dad? After my mom went to sleep, my dad, the Deacon of Seventh Street Baptist Church,  snuck into my room, bent down and whispered, "Danny, that was the funniest f#@king thing I ever saw." And on his way out, dressed in his wife beater and tidy-whities, he did the Stanley Kowalski, "Wait as f@#kin minute!"

        I can't speak for all the grown-up townspeople. It was a different time back time, but as far as the kids were concerned, Danny became as big as the Beatles. He was the pride of the Concord High class of 1970, and 1969 tried to claim him too, said that he was held back a year. He dropped out his senior year though and volunteered to go to Vietnam, where he served as a helicopter gunner, winning a bronze star for his actions in saving a downed copter's crew. He came back on leave once, landed in San Francisco, and was spit on and cursed at by a crowd of protesters. He immediately re-upped and was killed in action during his second tour. It's a local legend that Danny's headstone contains the only profanity permitted in the Concord Cemetery.

    There were enough people who remembered Danny fondly to encourage the city council to put up a bronze plaque above the water fountain in the cafeteria where a comprise solution resulted in the words Wait a minute being engraved under the mention of his medal for bravery. 
 
     At their 15th reunion of the class of 1970 and every reunion after, the class would stage a contest in the Mark Twain Cafeteria to see who could best act out those lines. It became a tradition until the reunion of 2020. It was the Covid year and only fifteen signed up. At the meetings, someone noted that the use of the particular word in question had lost most of the impact it once enjoyed with kids telling their parent much worse and students cussing out their teachers with much more elaborate phrases. It was agreed, that that truth would have made Danny very sad. Right before they voted to put an end to the tradition, someone suggested that instead they continue it with the original words of the play restored.

    "He's not wearing any clothes!"

​     The resolution passed unanimously.


        

​          

    I was up well before dawn the next morning and headed toward Fitz's for some coffee and advice. Hortensia made the best mocha coffee I've ever tasted, so I was looking forward to that as much as I was the advice I needed from Fitz. He had shut down our work at the warehouse for the time being, feeling it would be too hard to keep our eyes open to all the threats and still do good work at the same time.

   He was still keeping me on payroll though, and told me it was justified as we were still working for the long-term success of the business.  The lights were off when I got there; they were keeping them off in an effort to project the idea that any interlopers would sense that there was some kind of a trap awaiting them if they rushed in half-cocked. He told me that they'd been awakened one night by a loud scream, and when he went to investigate the source , he found a piece of boot and a large  puddle of blood next to one of the bear-traps he had placed by an entrance at the rear of his property. Another night there was other screaming and when he went to check it out, he discovered some torn blood-stained clothing on a strand of barb-wired fence he had strung two-feet from the ground across the trees behind his shop.

      "I've put up enough No Trespassing signs to make all the people in this area aware, and every one of those traps are well within my property, so no should be out there without permission." Then he gave me a signal I should use to announce myself when approaching the house and showed me where the booby traps were in case I needed to get something out of the shop. Then I explained what had happened at Lennie's school the day before.

      "The wolves are starting to circle. I need to figure out how I'm going to handle things. No more lolly-gagging, Fitz, I need to get things done."

      "I don't know how much more busier you could be, Lad; you've been putting in full days already, as I see it."

    "Maybe it's a matter of degree then. I might just need bigger explosions.

         The tone of my voice caught him by surprise and made him laugh, "That last explosion took down a whole house, what are you shooting, for a mountain?"

       I grinned despite myself, "More like a Devil in a red car."

      "Why didn't you say so? Follow me into the shop, be careful where you step though."

       About an hour later, I was hiding inside of a old, broken down house that was located about seventy-five yards uphill from where Hector's mom lived. There were some trees behind it which would cover-up  my coming and going from the place. All the windows were broken out and almost all of the roof was gone. Nobody had lived there for several years, and it was where Rosa had hidden out when Johnny was looking for her the night she had fled. Broken glass was scattered all across the floor, and several large spider webs were strung across all the rafters and window frames. One of the windows faced Guadalupe's house and looked out across a large expanse of weeds and dirt. The window had been boarded up but one of the smaller boards had been pushed in giving me a perfect view of what was happening at the house across the field.

        I had been in waiting for about fifteen minutes when a suddenly red, Ford sedan pulled up into the yard in front of the house, and a tall, very thin man got out and stretched. I could see why Rosa had called Johnny 'the one-legged man'. He was so thin that when he stood with his both his legs together, he looked like a single stem emerging from the ground. Using the binoculars I had gotten from Fitz, I could easily see that it had to be him. His face was very bit as sinister looking as she and the school guard had described.
 
       Five minutes after he pulled in, two Los Angeles County Sheriff Department cars pulled into the yard beside him and a total of six uniformed officers emerged from the cars. Two of the officers went immediately to the rear of the first car, opened the trunk, and pulled out two shovels. Johnny went to the front door and knocked and his mother Guadalupe came outside dressed in some blue pajamas and a purple robe. He asked her something, and she got very agitated and was saying something to the effect of, 'I don't know nothing, I don't know," and gesticulating wildly which was exactly what I had told Rosa to tell her to do. I could tell that Johnny wasn't very happy with the performance, so he pushed her away from him, and he and the officers started briskly walking toward the shed at the back of the property.

     The two officers with the shovels went into the shed followed by another officer who appeared to be their leader. The other three officers stood outside with Johnny and his mother. Guadalupe appeared to be crying, and even as far away as I was, I could faintly hear her saying, "Why? Why are you doing this to me?" One of the officers took out a pack of cigarettes offered them to the others and soon every one but the mother was smoking.

      About twenty minutes after they had gone into the shed, the leader came out, and it was obvious, he wasn't very happy. He went straight up to Johnny and grabbed him by the shirt and started screaming in his face. Johnny got angry and started shoving back and had to be restrained by the others, then the two men with shovels came outside and carrying what looked like the decaying remains of a dog, maybe a Border Collie.

      There was a heated discussion. Johnny's mom quit crying and started laughing uncontrollably. The two guys with the shovels carried the corpse of the dog back in the shed and reburied it. The heated discussion between Johnny and the leader continued, but I had no interest in sticking around and watching the fireworks. I had a pretty good idea where Johnny was going to head next, and I needed a head start. 

       The red-headed stranger's name turned out to be Aubrey O'Toole and he owned a up-scale barber shop in Glendale. It was situated on the  outskirts of the city in a building that was a little isolated from the city proper. It was located next to another larger building. The two buildings shared, a large paved parking lot between them. The signs on the other building told that it had once been a furniture store, but was now vacated and boarded up. Red's Barber Shop took up the larger portion of the building it was in; but shared frontage on the main road with Dottie's Sunshine Cafe. In the rear of the old furniture store there was a cinderblock enclosure where they had once stored all the broken down cardboard they used in the business. I had parked Fitz's truck in the parking lot of  another abandoned building a block away from the barber shop and rode my bike from there to where I was hiding and awaiting the arrival of one very angry Robert, who I was betting, would be headed back toward where he had gotten the information that his brother was buried in his mother's shed.

     And I didn't have to wait long. The red Ford sedan slid into the parking lot at a high rate of speed and came to a screeching halt. Robert slammed the door open and leapt out. I watched him reach back inside the car and pull out a chrome pistol and stuff it into the back of his waistband. He had shut the motor off but was in such a hurry, he left the door wide open which made my job a whole lot easier.  I had told Red that I needed at least fifteen minutes; I felt that ten would probably do but wanted to give myself a little extra for nerves. He was naturally nervous and upset and protested he could only guarantee thirty seconds if Robert took the notion to shoot him before asking any questions.

      I assured him that wouldn't happen because if Robert did that, he wouldn't be able to find out what had happened to his brother. I told Red that after he after he convinced Robert to spare his life, to go call a number I had provided and ask whoever answered the phone what the heck had happened. I knew that the voice on the other end would just start laughing and answer, "Tell them fat, lazy bastids to dig the hole a little deeper, the dog was a distraction!"

      By the time Hector got that news, I was already putting my bike in the back of Fitz's truck. I couldn't resist the urge to drive by the front of the barber shop and see how the plan was working. I turned the corner onto the street just as Robert was forcing Red into the passenger side of his car. I hadn't foreseen that occurrence. I was hundred yards down the road when I heard the explosion, looked in the mirror and saw car parts flying through the air.

       I didn't have time to feel too much guilt, if any, about what had happened to Red because right when I heard the explosion, I suddenly remembered what it was about the voice of the masked man on the night we blew up the house; it was my brother Pete's voice I heard.

      When I got out of the truck at Fritz's house, I immediately called out the signal.

          "That you, Errol?"

        "Yep, and I have to tell you, I feel pretty stupid having to yell out, "Polly wattle doodle all day."

           Fitz stepped outside chuckling, "That's why I picked it. Come on in Errol, we have some guests waiting inside."

          The whole back side of Fitz's house was a large closed-in patio which even had a fireplace and barbecue pit. In the middle of room there were several expensive outdoor chairs surrounding a large low  circular oak table. There were several men sitting around the table, Old Man Lee was there, next to him sat Johnny Luna a life-long friend of his, Ernie was there to Johnny's right, Big Mike Garcia was next to him, then there were three empty chairs, so I took a seat next to Big Mike, and Fitz sat down beside me. I was nodding to acknowledge all of the guys when the back door to Fitz's house opened and out came Hortensia with a tray of glasses followed by my brother Pete carrying the large green bottle of very expensive Scotch that normally sat as the center piece of the top shelf of Fitz's well stocked bar. He was holding on to the bottle with both hands, but nodded toward me.

       "Errol."

       "Pete." I didn't have time to ask him what the heck he was doing there because Fitz stood up and cleared his throat as Pete uncorked the bottle and poured it into the glasses. When he was done, he took the first one over to where Hortensia was standing and handed to her in spite of her protestations.

        Once every one had a glass, Fitz started talking, "As spiritually minded folk, we would have to acknowledge that it would wrong on many levels to drink a toast to celebrate the taking of a life. However, it would equally egregious to fail to acknowledge a major step in a man's progress in becoming a truly serious man. And where it is undeniabley wrong in the wanton taking of a life, there are times when truly serious men must sacrifice their conscience in order to prevent the pervasive spread of unchecked evil. Today, our good friend, Errol has made such sacrifice." It was the first time in my life that anyone had ever toasted me. When everyone had set their glasses down, Fitz added, "We have some things to tell you, Errol, which I think might help you deal with the mixed emotions that you might be feeling. Pete, I'll let you start it off."

      Fitz sat down and Pete stood and started talking, "Errol, there were a lot of times recently when I wanted to spare you the responsibility of today, but I couldn't. When Pa died, Grandpa had wanted to get Cousin Joe and go take deal with the sheriff that allowed Eddie Tudder to cheat Pa that night. He told me that our sweat Mama had ordered them to wait until I got a little older, and include me in on whatever took place. So, on the night of my sixteenth birthday, Grandpa came told me what I had to do.  He also informed me that Tudder and the sheriff were involved in kidnapping a lot of poor girls in Oklahoma and Arkansas, holding them out on Tudder's farm and then when the got enough, transporting them down to Tupelo Mississippi where they sold them to the bordellos around that area. So, on night I waited outside a brothel for three hours in a driving rain until Tudder came outside for a smoke. I shot him right between the eyes with Daddy's rifle. Then, I waited until the sheriff came outside to see what the noise was all about. He was still buttoning up his pants, when I shot him too. Granda and Joe was waiting in the trees, and on the way home, Joe pulled out a pint of Grandpa's white lightning from his overalls and even let me ride in the window seat for the ride home."

        As soon as he finished, Old Man Lee stood up, "I was twelve years old. My mother took in washing and ironing to save up money to open up her own restaurant. She gave it to a man in Sacramento who offered to sale her his restaurant. He not only didn't give her the restaurant, he raped her in his office, cut her throat and dumped her body in the river. He was getting a shave in my barber shop and laughing after telling  unfunny joke when I cut throat."

       Luna just said, "My mother was murdered by her brother over a twenty dollar gold piece." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a gold coin and flipped it on the table, "This gold piece."

        Big Mike kept his story short too, he just said, "The priest in our village had a thing for young boys. The people complained of course, but nothing ever changed. Went on for years until one day, my little brother Tomas came home crying from school."

        Ernie was so emotional about his part in this bizarre tell-all that he couldn't even talk. He looked liked he was somewhere a millions miles away. It was Fitz who broke the silence and told Ernie's story, "Ernie's whole family were murdered in Turkey. He was only one of his immediate family who survived a massacre by hiding beneath a bed that contained the bodies of his three brothers. Someday, you should ask him to show you his collection of Turkish knifes that he keeps in the room behind the bar."

     It was Fitz's turn to share his story, but he was silent. It was like he wanted me to ask first, but instead, I asked, "How do you know my brother, Fitz?"

      "Pete did me a big favor. That's how I met him."

      I was more than a little confused, "Yeah, but Pete just recently came out here same as me, and I'd just randomly met you just few weeks ago, and he ain't been nowhere around."

     Fitz chuckled, "I warned you about the dangers of assuming things when I first met you, Errol. I never said he did me a favor in Los Angeles."

      That confused me even more, "Not Los Angeles, then the only other place I've ever been is ..."

      "Tulsa, Oklahoma, he answered before I even finished the thought. "I had a daughter, a beautiful young lady named Sienna. He mother was half Shawnee, the daughter of a chief. I met her when she visited Boston. She never told me about being pregnant, she was afraid Sienna he might want to go live with me in Boston. I didn't even know about her until she was twenty-one years old. She grew living with her mother in the northeast corner of Arkansas. When her mother died, I got a letter telling me the story and that Sienna had moved to Tulsa to live with her uncle. Me and Hortensia went back east to meet her and were arranging things to have her come visit us to see how she liked it out here. Unfortunately, she went out to a bar in Tulsa and met a man named Eddie Tudder. She died in a bordello in Tupelo Mississippi from the drugs that they kept her on to keep her under their control.

      At that point, he reached inside his jacket and took out a folded document and placed it on the table in front of me. I picked it up and unfolded it. It was insurance policy taken out on me naming Elsie as the benefactor. Fitz started up again, "Your wife Elsie and her lover were waiting for the right moment to take you out. Pete didn't think he could get close enough to the man without he being recognized as your brother. He mentioned the problem one night when I was back in Oklahoma visiting Sienna's grave. I was more than happy to be able to return a favor. It was me, not your brother, who put that monster on that lamppost in case you were wondering. And it was me that advised Pete to come out west, and as long as we are sharing secrets, even our meeting on the side of the road where I was wrestling with that sofa wasn't random."

      I was confused but also a little angry that there didn't seem to any kind of randomness in my life, and that others were planning everything without my knowledge."Well, what if I hadn't stopped to help you that day?"

     "Pete told me how you were going to give up your job because you didn't feel that you were giving fair value to your employer. I told him that I very much wanted to meet someone who would do such a thing. It was test that I had contrived; I had set that old, sofa on that road myself, and one I was pretty certain you would pass. And in answer to your question, if you had sailed on past and not offered to help, you probably wouldn't be sitting here, and your sweet Rosa would already be suffering for your lack of foresight."

      Pete got involved at this point, "I think you need to know that Hector, Giancarlo, and Jimmy DeLeo are or were not as mesmerized and desirous  of Rosa's beauty as you believe. She's uncommonly pretty, but they were all more concerned with how money she could make them, even Hector was planning on selling her to DeLeo so DeLeo could send her out to his off shore casino where he also runs a bevy of the best looking ladies that Giancarlo and his goons can kidnap and deliver. Of course, DeLeo would more than likely have sampled her wares before shipping her out." 

      Then not satisfied that I fully understood the gravity of the situation, Fitz took out a second document from inside his jacket and tossed it on the table. "Just case you were feeling that the punishment meted out to the man who talked your wife into taking out an insurance policy on you was a bit extreme, here's the one that I took out of his briefcase before I hung him up on that lamp post." I opened it up. It was an insurance policy taken out on Elsie listing her lover as the beneficiary.

     Pete drove me home a little later. It was quiet in the car for a few minutes before he opened up, "I'm sorry about not telling you about all this earlier. The truth is, I was hoping I would never have to tell you most of it. Mama left it to me, but she did say that there would most likely come a time when I have to do to you what she and grandpa did to me."

    I thought about it for a minute before answering. "That's kind of a cynical outlook on life, wouldn't you say, Pete?  I never got a sense of Mama ever being that cynical to."

     He was looking out of the window as he answering, "Naw, she was never that cynical. She looked on everything as being practical, doing things that needed to be done. I guess it come from dealing with all of Dad's inconsistencies. But, she weren't ever cynical. Mom could be standing knee deep in a swamp and see nothing but potential. She was always an optimist, Errol. She would look at all this craziness we are going through, and consider them as speed bumps on the highway to heaven." He flashed me a grim smile.

     "Tell me, how was it, Pete, standing out there waiting to shoot Tudder and that fat sheriff?"

        "Well, the way I figured, there was never anything going to be anything worse in my life than seeing Pa hanging from that tree limb. Once I done it, I felt kind of relieved. You'd figure I'd feel kind of guilty about taking a man's life, but I never really did. When grandpa told me about everything Tudder and sheriff was up to, I didn't consider them as men. I looked at them like they were monsters who needed stopped. Grandpa didn't say a whole lot to me that night, but he started treating me like a a full grown man from that point on. How did you feel when you heard that explosion?"

       "I felt like I'd crossed a line of some sorts, and, tell the truth, after listening to those men, I kind of feel like I ain't never had any say in my own life, like it was movie script, with no random lines. It felt like something I was destined to do. Feels strange like maybe life ain't got meaning or real purpose."

       "Mama always saw beauty in the mystery of life. I remember waking up in the middle of the night and seeing her standing out front of the house looking up at the stars. I remember watching her reading that damn poetry book and seeing tears welling up in her eyes. You want some random? That gal of yours and that boy, what part of the script was that?"

        "I don't know, even her. The first time I looked in her eyes, I felt electricity run all through me. I was in middle of a card game, and I went speechless. It was like I'd known her a thousand years, and had lost her somewhere along the way. You ever have that feeling about a woman?"

        He laughed, "Funny you should ask. I just got married."

        



          

     I was dead tired by the time I finally got home. I noticed that Rosa's kitchen light was still on, so I knew she had been waiting up. It was getting close to sun up, so I didn't want to bother her in case she had fallen asleep which I believed was more than likely since she had to get Lennie off to school.  Tired as I was, I was glad I had the good sense to take a shower before I crawled into bed. I got a few hours of deep sleep before I was awakened by the sound of somebody using a key to unlock my front door, and then, several seconds later, Rosa slipped into bed beside me. I raised my arm so that she could snuggle in close, then we both fell asleep for a couple more hours.

      She woke me up my nibbling on my ear, "Good morning, Love, how is your appetite?'

     I sat up grinning, "My appetite is as good as any man's."

     She giggled and gently slapped at my face, "Are you hungry? I was thinking that I could cook you up a good breakfast."

    "I could eat a horse. I don't remember eating anything at all yesterday. I'm truly starving. Oh, I forgot, I don't have anything on hand but some yoghurt, some walnuts, some berries, and a couple of bananas."

    "I've got some eggs and bacon at home, I'll just run over to my house and get some."

     I started to get up, "Do you need help?"

     She was already up and pulling on her housecoat, "No, you stay, I'll be back in a jiffy." She was true to her word, and by the time I had gotten out of bed and dressed, she was back and setting the victuals on the kitchen counter.

      Before she started cooking though, I pulled her into the living room and down upon my lap as I sat in the one good easy chair that I owned."  missed you so much yesterday. Let's talk a bit first. There's a lot that you need to know."

      "Did you do the thing that you had to do?"

      "Yep and a few other things too." I didn't mention about blowing up the house, but I told her about the red-headed stranger and the things that he'd said at the card room. I mentioned some of the lies and half truths I had told him with the purpose for him passing them on.

      She listened intently occasionally frowning or nodding. Then she asked,"Do you think it was wise to let him go like that?" I knew that she would most likely ask me that question, but I was still woefully unprepared to answer it. I think because, it was the same question that I was having the hardest time answering for myself.

       "I'm not sure it was the wisest thing. Fitz kind of advised against it. Heck, all the other guys at the card room were against letting him go. The only way I can explain it is that I'm going to anything and everything to protect you and Lenny, but I'm going to try to keep the blood on my hands to a bare minimum."

      The answer wasn't entirely satisfactory for either of us, and it created an awkward silence as we thought about the possible ramifications of the decision. Finally, she broke the silence by asking about all of my books as she looked around the room, "All of these books are yours?" When I nodded, she walked another question," Have you read them all?"

        "Pretty much! I didn't do much socializing as a kid, mostly I read. It was a way to escape from reality. My mom used to take all of us kids to the library every Saturday morning. Walking into a room full of books is still on my favorite things."

        "You too? My Tio Juan, my mom's brother, used to bring us books to read and take us to the library. He was a teacher. My brother used to read us that one," she said pointing to my mom's favorite book.

           "Walt Whitman? That's my mom's book. Your brother read it? I didn't even know you had a brother."

           "I had two brothers and two sisters. My older brother Robert was angry all of the time, just like my dad. My younger brother Ezekiel, or Zeke as we called him, was a poet. He loved that book especially."

                "I contain multitudes."

             She laughed, "Yes, that one. He loved that one saying the most. When he would get depressed by something awful my father did or said, he would until my dad left and then smile and say, 'I contain multitudes'. I never did understand it, but it still made me smile."

               "It means that we humans are much, much bigger than we appear. We are the sum total of every thought, every action, every word we've ever heard, every thing we've ever seen, every sound, and every feeling. Every human being is actually a universe to him or her self. My mom used to read that poem to us after my dad died. Where's Zeke at? How come he hasn't come to see you and Lenny?" 

            I wished immediately that I could have taken the question back before I finished asking, the look in her eyes was so sad and painful, her face frozen in a slight grimace. "My brother was the one great thing in my life, the most colorful bird, always laughing, always gentle. My father couldn't stand having a son so gentle, so he always said things to hurt Zeke,  always compared him to my brother Robert who was more a like a snake. One night, after a real brutal experience with my dad, Zeke climbed to the top of a telephone pole in front of our house and hung himself. My dad was so angry and embarrassed that he left him there, and it was only because my mom and my sisters kept crying that he finally made Robert cut him down."

           "Dang! There's an awful lot of people hanging themselves in our lives. And you, Rosa? You didn't cry."

          "I was way past crying by then. I don't think I ever talked to my dad after that day. And I do feel bad for that. The night, after Zeke died, they laid out in a home made coffin in the back yard, there wasn't any yard, it was all dirt. They strung lights from the trees so it was all lit up. My mom's church on the corner loaned us some wooden benches, and my mom put out some Kool-aid and wine for the grown-ups along with some cold cuts and cheese. Me, I couldn't sleep so I went outside and I climbed up in the fork of this big china berry tree in the shadows. It was very late, after every one was gone, I heard the back door open and my father came out and kneeled down by Zekie's coffin and started sobbing. It was the only time I had ever seen him cry. I think he knew deep down inside that he had, gone too far, and that he needed Zekie's gentleness and soft ways, but he couldn't find a way to ever tell him, otherwise to let anybody else know."

     "What did your dad do for a living?"

     "He took care of horses in Mexico, he was well known in his village for how he handled horses. When he came to LA there wasn't much work for him in that field, so he became a mechanic and worked on cars. He hated working on other people's car. His family gave us the money to take him back to bury him in his village. They still called him 'the boy who knew horses'."

         "Dang."

         "That's not all. I stayed up in the tree all night. After about an hour after my dad went in, my brother Robert snuck outside. My grandpa had given each us of kids a big Mexican coin to pay to cross the river."

        "Cross the river?"

      "You know, like in the Greek stories, to pay the boat man, to take you across the river, to go to heaven. We all kept our coin and carried it everywhere we went for good luck. I saw my mom place Zeke's coin into his pocket before they laid him in the casket, and I saw my brother Robert take it out of his pocket that night."

          'What? Did you call him out?"

         "No, he was too big, and it would have shamed my family even more than the nature of Zeke's death. After he left, I climbed down, and replaced the coin with my own."

          "So, you don't have a coin to pay the crossing?" She looked down and shook her head no. I stood up and set Rosa down in the chair, and  went to the shelf and pulled out the book of poems, "Here, I want you to have this. It was my mother's favorite book."

           "I can't take that, Errol. It's your mother's."

          "Mom would understand. I know that she would want you to have it. Open it up and see." She took it from my hand and gently opened the book. Lying in the middle was an old gold coin. Rosa gasped when she saw it."

          "What is this, Errol?"

       "It's how I know that the book was meant for you. When mom died, we gave all of her possessions away. My sister got her diary, my brother Pete took her Bible, and I got this book of poems. When I unpacked it to set it on that shelf, the book opened to that coin. I never even knew it was in there. Look what she underlined."

          Rosa read the passage, "He sees eternity in men and women; he does not see men or women as dreams or dots." She closed the book and clutched it to her chest.

           "Someday very soon, Rosa, I hope and pray that you can return it to the same spot on that shelf and yet still keep it at the same time."

      When she realized what I was saying, she stood and wrapped her arms around me tightly. We stayed in the embrace for a long time, until I laughed and told her, "You can still cook me breakfast though.

       I was just wolfing down the last of the bacon, when Mrs. Cohen came knocking on the front door. I answered it and she looked worried and asked if Rosa was there, so I invited her in.

        "Rosa! Stay calm, stay calm! Lennie is all right, he's OK, but I just got a call from the school and they said some guy tried to take him out of school, but they wouldn't let him. Lennie is ok, but they said they need to talk to you."

      On the way to the school, I tried my best to keep her calm, but she was frantic and kept ordering me to go faster. I could tell that she was on the very edge of losing it. I tried to calm her down by talking, "Rosa, it don't make sense that it would be Giancarlo or those two idiots. It had to be Johnny. I don't know how he found out, but we'll do whatever we have to do, even if it means we move Lennie to a different school, or even us moving away from to somewhere else."

    She only half heard what I was saying, but when the import of the message got through to her it was if she came out of a trance, "I don't want to move. Mrs. Cohen and Miss Mildred are so good for him. Mr. Gomez hires him to wash his car and do chores. This is a great place, I don't want to leave there. It's not fair for Lenny to have to run and hide for something that I did."

     "I don't want to go either. I was just trying to say that I'm willing to do whatever it takes."

     She let that one thought hang in the air for a moment before looking me in the eye and answering, "Anything?"

     I didn't get a chance to reply because we were pulling into the parking lot of the school. When we got into the office, Lennie jumped up and ran across the room into his mothers arms crying, "It was Uncle Louie, Mom, he tried to make me go with him, but I didn't go. I yelled just like you told me, and Mr. Johnson helped me." He pointed to an elderly, gray-haired black man wearing overalls standing silently in the corner the room. You could tell the man was not used to being the center of attention as he kept his hands in his pockets and looked away when Lennie pointed at him. Rosa immediately released Lennie and took two large steps to cross the room to embrace Mr. Jackson.

       The principal of the school, a portly, red-faced, white man with named Dr. Jones sputtered, "Mr. Johnson, our janitor, saw what was happening and ran and grabbed hold of Lennie and wouldn't let him go. The assailant, a tall thin, devilish looking man kept cursing and striking Mr. Johnson, but we all started screaming and running toward him, he  let go and ran and got into a red Ford sedan and took off. We called the police and they are on their way. If, you don't mind, Miss DeLeon, could I get you step in my office so we can get started on the report?"

        Rosa and Lennie went off with him and I stayed behind with Mr. Johnson and the secretary. I wanted to ask him some questions, so I started out by shaking his hand. "I can't tell you how thankful we are for what you done."

         He relaxed a little when it was just the two of us, "No bother, I just did any man should have done in my place."

         "Yeah, but still, you acted, many people would have hesitated out of fear."

         "I could see  why they would too, he was a mean looking sucker. I never seen anyone who looked that mean. If I said I wasn't scared, I'd be lying."

          "If it's who I think it is, his nickname is El Diablo."

          "I can believe that. Is he the father of the boy?"

        "No, he's the uncle. The boy's father has disappeared under suspicious circumstances, his brother is trying to get the boy's mother. He thinks she had something to do with his brother's disappearance. That's all I can say. The mother is just trying to go on with her life."

           "She seems like a real nice lady. I hope things work out for her and the boy. Are you helping her?"

           I shook my head yes, "Trying to keep her and the boy safe, Mr. Johnson."

          "Well, that man was pure evil. You best get your mind right, young man because you'll be fighting with the Devil. I have no doubt that there ain't nothing that man wouldn't do to get his way." He gave me a knowing look with the statement.

          When we got back to Rosa's place, she sent Lennie inside and lingered to talk to me. She told me that people at the school were all great and they love Lennie wanted him to stay at their school. Lennie loves that place too, and he loves it here too. Then, she suddenly grabbed me and kissed me with very fiber of her being. Pulling away, she whispered, "I'm tired of running and looking over my shoulder all of the time.You said you'd do anything to protect us." then she walked back toward her house, turning to tell me one last things before she headed inside, "Go, do anything."

           I stood there for a second, confused by a whole multitude of feelings and emotions. Then I turned and started toward my house when I heard footsteps and turned back around as Rosa leaped back into my arms.

     I whispered as we embraced, "I'm just trying to be worthy of you, Rosa. You deserve someone worthy."

       She whispered back, "I just want to be alive, Errol. I want you and me and Lennie to still be alive and happy and somewhere safe."

      Later that night, alone in bed, I prayed for the first time since my mother died. I had never consciously rejected the idea that there was someone or something (I leaned toward something because it was hard for me to reconcile God being someone like the people I knew) directing this whole earthly drama, but I had gotten so caught up in the fictions and frictions of daily existence that I could hardly think straight about anything but survival. So, I prayed.

        "I'm not trying to be rude or smart." Then after some thought, "I'm just trying to protect Rosa and Lennie, Lord." Then after some more thought, "Please, help guide me, grant me some wisdom," and after more thought, "Please accept my thanks and please forgive my sin." I drifted off another reverie before I even got to the final words, the words that sealed the deal. 

         And in between the words of the prayer which were as sincere as I could muster, I was thinking of the words, "Inch tall." Inch tall was how Elsie always made me feel in those final days of our marriage. Like that night she first showed me the dress she was wearing the day she died, and me knowing that the dress wasn't meant for me, and it wasn't my approval she was seeking even as she asked me what I thought. I had never told anyone else that I knew she wasn't rouging her cheeks or applying that bright red lipstick for me. She knew I didn't like it and did it anyway. Then there was the way she started always compared me to her boss, telling me that I needed to work harder, to have more gumption and develop some vision. And there I was the standing by her grave as her family's preacher told the assembly about what a virtuous, fine young Christian she was turning out to be, and all the people who came and patted me on my shoulder and told me how it didn't seem like it, but time would surely heal all wounds. And I never told anyone, how, when I looked out the window and seen her sprawled out in the middle of the intersection, I felt a little sense of relief as if God himself had stepped in taken the problem out of my hands, knowing that I wasn't up to the challenge. Even when Pete and I were traveling across the country in an effort to put as many miles as we could between us and the source of all our nightmares, I never told him about the doubts, that sense of relief, not even in a whisper, or about the source of my bad dreams.

      Some times we would camp out at night, sometimes we would stay in cheap roadside motels, soon as we stopped for the evening, he would always start drinking himself into a stupor causing us to argue a lot. It would usually get to the point where he would end up  pointing his finger at me and slurring, "You didn't see him hanging there, Errol. You didn't have to climb out on that limb and cut him down. 

      But I would always silence him and end the argument by answering, "Yeah, but I helped you and Grandpa get him off the back of the wagon and carried him inside and undressed him and washed his body. You, though Pete, never looked out of the window and saw your wife sprawled out in the street like a broken doll." Pete knew all about Elsie's infidelities, but he always stopped just short of throwing them back in my face. And it was his silence, as much as anything, that kept me from the wholehearted belief that that it wasn't him who had hung her lover from that lamppost on the hill outside of  Tulsa. I never told him though about those mixed emotions I felt from viewing that scene from on high. And it was that unspoken knowledge that kept the distance between us once we got out to the promised land, the so-called 'Land of Milk and Honey', a place which should have been more truthfully labeled as, 'More of the Same'. 

         And it was then, that I awoke from the reverie and finished the prayer, by stating "In Jesus's name, Amen."

         

 

      Sometime back,  Fitz had somehow gotten his hands on an old timey tape recorder. They weren't a real common item, but some telephone companies and law offices often used some form of them back in the twenties. He told me he had come by it when he bought out the estate of lawyer who had lived in Northern California, close enough to town to have electricity, but far enough outside city limits to be often visited by bears looking for food. The guy was a lawyer who liked keeping abreast of technology, and he had once recorded about ten minutes of some rampaging bears trying to break into his house.

       I placed the old recorder on a shelf outside the boarded up window of where I was holding the chained up stranger from Ernie's place. I played the whole tape as loud as possible, thinking I could to soften up the red-headed fool before I even began to question him. Afterwards, putting the recording device away took about ten minutes which I figured was more than enough time to let him stew in his own juices.  I unlocked the door making as much ruckus as I could,  then walked then an unfastened the lock and chain that held him in the corner, got him up to his feet, walked him over to a chair in the middle of the room, made sit down in it, and then took the gag off of his mouth. He was still blindfolded with his hands tied behind his back.

       "What the hell was that?" he demanded as soon as his mouth was freed.

        "What, the bear? Don't mind that. He's caged up and can't get at you. You need to focus your attention to me, not that bear."

        "You do know that this is a kidnapping, don't you? You just brought the Feds into this whether you know it or not. You're in big trouble, Young Man!"

         Instead of answering, I just walked over to where he sat and knocked him out of the chair. "You do know that walked into Ernie's looking for a lady named Rosa. You brought me into this whether you know it or not. Let's just say if I was thought I was going to be arrested for kidnapping, what would stop me from putting a couple of bullets in your head right this moment. I'd rather take my chances with a jury, I don't think they'd convict me if I told them you were looking for her to  take her back to Jimmy DeLeo so he could ravish her at gun-point."

        "Ravish her at gun-point? That ain't Jimmy's style. That girl would have made out like a bandit. Jimmy would've set her up real good."

        That's when I couldn't resist the urge to kick him. "That's the way you want to play things, then that's the way we'll play."

           "Wait, wait, wait, WAIT A MINUTE! I didn't mean that girl no harm. I just wanted to find Hector! That's who DeLeo wants to get this hands on. He owes DeLeo $5000, and he's a man who killed his own uncle for $50 gambling debt."

           I didn't believe he was telling me the truth about Rosa, so I kicked him again, this time even harder than before. I had sense that he was holding back, that he'd gone into Ernie's thinking he was dealing with a bunch of Rubes who he felt he could easily bamboozle.

            "You lie to me about the girl again, I'l kick you to death and feed you to that bear."

             "All right, all right, all right! DeLeo's been obsessed with finding the girl ever since Giancarlo told him about her.'

               "Giancarlo told him?"

              "It wasn't like that. It was obvious Giancarlo thinks she's his girl. There was a bunch of us sitting around playing poker and bragging about women and stuff, and Giancarlo just starts describing how beautiful his girl was, and just like that, DeLeo gets all snake-eyed and orders Giancarlo to bring her to him. Giancarlo is then forced to tell him that the girl is living with Hector, so DeLeo just grins and says that was great because Hector is $5000 short on his delivery and he was fixing to fixing to push his button anyway. Make a long story short, Giancarlo is forced to make the arrangement; you could tell it didn't like it, but there was nothing he could do about it."

              I kicked him again, "You trying to tell me you didn't know that Giancarlo is trying to set him up to knock him off?" I figured there was a good chance he really didn't know, but that he would immediately be thinking of ways to sell the knowledge to one of the main actors.

           "Quit kicking me! How the hell am I supposed to know that? I could by the look Giancarlo gave me when he walked away from the table that he angry enough to shoot the Old Man, but I never thought he'd have the nerve to try.

            Later, I walked him out to Fitz's truck and helped him step upon into the passenger seat. I was starting to think that he'd more useful alive and spreading misinformation than dead. It gave me kind of like a way to see behind the enemy lines because the information would, more than likely, produce certain reaction that'd only I would be in position to decipher.

          I was driving around using random streets  in order to confuse him and slowly making my way back up the hills towards Topanga Canyon. I decided to muddy up the waters a bit more.

           "The girl's gone for your information." I didn't think he'd believe it, but felt that he'd be suspicious if I didn't make the effort."She's waiting for me in Mexico. Soon as I get my money, I'll be leaving this snake-pit."

           "What is Hector going to think about that?"

           "Ask Louie." 

           "Yeah, Louie. They got in a fight over the money they stole from DeLeo. Louis killed him with a machete, buried him in the shed behind their mother's house. He half-way has the mother convinced that she did it in her sleep."

           "Excuse me if I'm a little skeptical. Did you hear that from the girl? I know that Louie would have brought that girl back if she was there."

       "She slipped out the back door while Hector was waiting for her to get dressed and hid in the alley behind the old woman's place. Hector was looking for her when Louie came up in the dark and killed him. He buried the body and went back in the house and drugged his mom. Check her out, she still has a needle mark where he shot her up. Then Louie left to go break the news to DeLeo, and Rosa came back, got her boy and took off."

            "Why you telling me all this?"

            "Way I see it, I'm putting you on the spot. I figure you're sleazy enough to know that what I'm telling you is worth some money to someone; the problem is if you tell the wrong person, you could end up in worst shape than you are now. Either way, one of them fools is going to have take care of the other ones, so I'll only have to deal with the winner. Then, I could go meet Rosa with a lot less blood on my hands."

           Even in the dark, I could see him smile when he realized that he was going to make out of the night alive and in one piece. Then, even though it was dark and he was blindfolded, I could see his mind kick into overdrive.

         Five, minutes later, I pulled up into a dark grove of trees and shut the lights off. I went around to the passenger side and helped him down out of the truck. I made him lean up against the side door, took out my knife that Fitz had especially sharpened for me. I used it to cut all the way up the side of each leg and jerked his pants off of him. I grabbed his underwear and pulled them down and cut them off, then did the same to his shirt."

        "Is this really necessary? Come on, man, give me a break. You want me to spread this dissension, at least untie me."

           "I'm going to unchain your feet. The rest, you can figure out on your own. It'll give me some time to do what I need to get done. and just so you know, if anything happens to Rosa or her son, I'll will find you, and I skin you alive." I knocked him down for good measure.

          I was so exhausted when I left, but when I got to the intersection where I should have turned to go home, I turned right. I had one more task to perform before I could sleep that night.

     When I pulled into Fitz's driveway, it was completely dark. The porch light that they usually on at night was off along with the two floodlights that lit up the sign over the warehouse. It wasn't more than a second though before Fitz was tapping on the driver's side window with a flashlight. He was dressed head to toe in black and even wore one of those black sock hats that covered every part of your face but the eyes.

        I couldn't help but it made me laugh which was a mistake. Fitz was on edge, "What's with the mask?"

        "Don't be a laughing at me. We are all serious men tonight doing serious business." He pointed the flashlight in the direction of the warehouse and that's when I made out the shadows of two other figures also clad completely in black and wearing the same type of sock hats.

        That's when he noticed that the Stranger bound, gagged,, and blindfolded sitting beside me in the truck. He nodded in question.

      "That's somebody who showed up at Ernies and made a fool of himself asking a lot of questions about Rosa. Haven't made my mind up what to do with him. Figure it could wait until after we take care of our business. Do you think it would be okay to lock him up in the building out back till we get back?"

         "No problem, but I'm going put a few chains on him, just in case. I don't trust the ropes. You can truss a pig up and they'll just give up and lay there. Most men will never quit trying to get loose. That building's the perfect place to lock somebody up though, it used to be an ice-house, the one window's boarded up, and doors about good six inches thick."

        We took care of that first, then we met up with the other two guys. They were waiting for us in the back parking lot of Mama Jo's Cafe about five miles from Fitz's warehouse I could easily tell who one of them was despite the face coverings, but we weren't using any names. Fitz told me later that although they were both stand-up people, their one big flaw, if you could call it that, was that they weren't used to lying, and it thought that it would be easier for them to say that they couldn't identify anyone else if everyone was masked. Fitz handed me a sock hat and made me put it on before we approached them.

       We stood around the picnic table outside the front of the shop where Fitz had lit up a small kerosene lantern. Then he went inside the warehouse office and came back with two devices that I could make out as some kind of home made bombs after he laid them on the table. Fitz went through the plan and told us what we each needed to do. Fitz and I were going to take care of Boot's house, and the other two were going to take a car to his brother's place which was about a half mile away. He handed me one of the bombs and a small pry bar to pry open the back door.

       I was more than a little nervous about handling the device, and even more worried about what we were about to do, this was some real stuff, and I had never so much as lit a firecracker before, "I don't know this, Guys, I've never done anything quite like this."

      It was Fitz who answered, "It will be a piece of cake. We scouted everything out. Boot lives with his mom, but she plays Bingo with her sister tonight and will be staying in town. The rest of us have already been put to the test, every one but you. Do your job and this is where you'll earn the trust of the ones who count. Besides, it will let you use that fancy lighter of yours for doing something besides lighting some lady's cigarette."

       "You've guys have done this before?" I asked surprised.

       The taller of the two guys answered in a familiar voice, "More than once, why you think DeLeo generally stays on the other side of the valley and lets Giancarlo try to tame this place?" The voice puzzled me. It didn't belong to the person I thought it was, but I knew I had heard before, and it bugged me that I couldn't place it. 

     We split up and got in our vehicles. Fitz told me to drive. The other car, an older, black Buick sedan followed behind. At first, Fitz was silent, but once we worked up a head of steam, he rolled his mask up and started talking, "You said this red-headed guy came in flapping his lip?"

      I took the sock hat off and threw it on the seat between us, "You couldn't get him to shut-up if you held a gun to his head. His lips were still moving when I knocked him out."

       "You know any of those guys you play with who'd talk like that?"

      I thought about it for a minuted, "You know, I don't. Those guys will talk to get you off your game, but as far as revealing anything about themselves or what they're thinking, it wouldn't happen. Hell, Old Man Lee could be holding a straight flush or a pair of twos and his face would look the same."

       "My old Da would always said, a good man listens more than he talks. It's usually more beneficial to take in information than to give it out."

        "I take it, you're not going to tell me who that taller guy is?" 

        "No, not yet, at least."

         We didn't talk for the next five minutes before Fitz volunteered some news that I didn't know, "About three years ago, Jimmy DeLeo a couple of his goons came and tried to convince Ernie to sell him his card room. Ernie told him no of course and that night they tossed a bomb through the front window of the bar. One of Ernie's nephews lost an eye in the explosion."

           I kept waiting for him to tell me the rest of the story, but he didn't. So, I had to tell him, "What happened?"

          He smiled and I could tell he was considering if he could string me along a little further, but when I gave him a threatening look all he said was, "DeLeo wears an eye-patch and Ernie still has his bar."

         "Sheesh, Fitz, I know we were just talking about not volunteering any more than you need to, but you brought it up in the first place."

          He laughed again and I realized that he was just trying to keep from becoming overly anxious, "You wouldn't know it to look at them, but those guys who play cards there are some serious men. You should consider it a sign of respect that they let you play in their games."

           I thought about what he said and then he added, "From what I heard, a bunch of masked men caught him at a stop sign and shot out all four of his tires, his headlights and tail lights, then broke out all of his windows, and he was blinded in his right eye because someone punched him in the face while he was wearing his glasses. Since then, he's been kind of afraid to come back that way, but I've heard that his boss is looking to turn Ernie's into some kind of a casino."

          The car behind us peeled off and went in another direction after Fitz and I turned on Holland Drive. We passed Boot's house on the right side of the road; it was the last house on the street, and road continued upward and curved around a small copse of trees where Fitz pointed out a hidden trail that led into the darkness created by the trees. He had me back into the trail until the care was hidden from view. We got out and he handed me the bomb and the pry bar. The trail led us out the other side of the trees and suddenly we were looking down on Boot's house. There was a little grassy field that went up to the wire fence that surrounded the place.

        "Go in through the back door. The lock if pretty flimsy and the pry bar should handle it pretty easily. Put the bomb on the table and light the fuse. You'll have about five minutes before it goes off. Don't hurry and don't rush, you'll have plenty of time." He threw me the sock hat and I put it on.

         I made my way across the field creeping like Pete and I used to do when we stole watermelons from our neighbor Mr. Jenkins' fields back in Oklahoma. The fence only had three strands of wire so, I put the bomb and pry bar down on the other side and climbed over using a fence post to clear it. The back door lock was as flimsy as Fitz said it would be, so, in a matter of seconds I was inside the kitchen. It was an old woman's kitchen, kind of like's mom's and made me a little sad to think of the probability that Boot's mom was going to feel sad because of what I was about to do. I quickly put that thought out of mind by thinking of the pain that Giancarlo would put Rosa through if he had a chance.

        On the way out, I tripped over a mop bucket on the back porch, but I got up and tried to remain calm, but then I snagged my pants on the barbwire fence and took more than a few seconds before I managed to extricate myself. I finally got back to where Fitz was waiting and turned around and saw a bright yellow Plymouth turn the corner on Holland. It had to be Boots coming home as there wasn't any other house on the street. The pulled into the driveway, the driver's door opened and Boot got one leg out before the whole house blew-up in flames. About 10 seconds later, we heard another loud explosion coming from the other side of the hills to the northwest.

         At the start of the drive back to the warehouse, Fitz was pretty quiet. It was as if he sensed my own inner unrest and was trying to give me room to work it out. When we got out of the area, in the what would be considered the neighborhood of the bombings, he got out his pipe, packed the bowl from the pouched he always carried, and started smoking.

         "I know you're probably worrying, lad, but you've a right. You've had a pretty stressful day, would've flagged any man."

         "That's what I was thinking. I've kidnapped a stranger and blew-up a house belonging another man. The worst thing I've ever done before is steal some of my neighbor's watermelons. When I went to church the Sunday after we took those melons, our Sunday School teacher told me and Pete, we were going to hell where we would be burned in cauldron of oil forever and ever. And though I realized, that the punishment far outweighed the crime, I've felt like a criminal ever since and someone who desperately in need of salvation."

         "As well, you should. I wonder who's done more for creating that feeling, that Dante fellow, or Sunday School teachers. My own moment came in Church when Sister Mary O'Neil caught me ogling Peggy Lewis as was swinging from a tree-limb. The good sister was renown through out the County, for her agility in wielding a ruler. I'd come home from church and my Da would see the bruises and tell me,'Ah, you been ogling that Lewis girl again have ya?"

         The image made me chuckle, but I replied, "All my life, I've been trying to be a better man than my own dad. He had major flaws, but he was basically a good man who tried to be honest and not hurt anyone. That example he sat for us though, just shows how easy it is to do bad things."

         "You're right, Errol, for trying to hang on to every ounce of innocence, and to fight those inner battles every time you think it's necessary to cross the line. If you don't it gets easier and begins to snowball to a point where a man justify pretty near any thing he does."

         "Tell me Fitz, if what we did is so right, why does it make me feel so bad? Shouldn't I be happy."

           "There's your mistake. Most people ne'er realize that happiness is not what we really are searching for, at least that kind of happiness. That's why these millionaires like Jimmy DeLeo are never happy with what they got. There's a different kind of happiness that comes from doing the right thing. Sometimes, most times, that is, it involves giving up things, things like hedonic pleasure, or even your own safety, or even your own life. Let's say, for example, you had to chance to save Rosa's life and you didn't because it conflicted with your morals. Would you ever be happy again?"

         I answered without thinking, "Not in a million years, not if I had all the money in the world," and then after a little thought, I asked, "what's the point then, if you can't be happy?"

         "No one said that you can't be happy, Son. The thing that deprives us of that happiness is a lack of meaning. Our brief time on this planet needs to mean something. You'd be surprised though of just how many of our neighbors simply desire to skate through world without attaching meaning to anything they do."

         We drove along quite a bit further while I chewed on Fitz's words and he smoked on his pipe. At lone point, are partners passed us after blinking their lights and honking. One lone arm came out on the passenger side to wave. It reminded me of something.

          "I wish I knew who that guy was. I recognized the shorter guy as Billy Haynes almost right away. I know that voice though, I'm sure of it."

       I looked at Fitz, thinking he might tell me, but he just took another long pull on his pipe, blew the smoke out slowly, and then laughed.

    After a bit, he said, "What you should be thinking on, is what you're going to do with the stranger you got locked up at my place."

      


        

      
   

     I never had much taste for eating bananas while I was growing up in Oklahoma. Don't know why, but they just didn't seem to be around me that much. When I got out to California, suddenly bananas were everywhere. I used to go buy dogfood for Fitz from this old Greek guy name Theo. Theo sold feed for animals, but he had a part of this store partitioned off where he sold healthy stuff for humans to eat. Theo was the one who got me to eating oatmeal and stuff for breakfast instead of my usual gravy, biscuits, bacon and eggs, and he always sold lots of local honey, bananas, melons, seasonal fruit, and stuff like that.

      I took to them bananas pretty hard, loved them, would slice them up over my oatmeal and stuff, eat them for a snack. So, I went out  and bought me a couple dozen right off the bat, and quickly found out that you can't put them things in the icebox, and that they start going bad pretty quickly after a couple days. You could only buy what you needed for the moment. And I learned you had pick out the ones that were still a little green, almost ripe, to make them last a little longer. Then you had to go get more. It was almost the same with the yoghurt that Theo also got me hooked on.

       For some reason, thinking about them bananas reminded me a lot of something that Mama used to quote Jesus on, about storing up your treasures in the material world where things rust, decay, and stuff, so that what you need to do was figure out what was good for the here and now and worth stockpiling. Way I understood it, was that he was talking about money too. That money was only good when you were putting it to good use to make life less complicated, and stockpiling a bunch of it would only make people jealous so that they would try to steal it.

        At first, I thought it was a major inconvenience to have go to the market so often. I thought of it back then as if I was using up a lot of valuable time that I could spend playing cards or being with Rosa, but later I began  to like because it got me outside and mingling with people, and I started forming relationships and even developed some friendships with a lot of the people who I was meeting. Sometimes, I would even get up early and have coffee with the other Greek merchants that hung out and helped Theo unload the produce trucks in the morning. Every last one of them had interesting stories to tell.

     When I left Fitz's that afternoon, I didn't go straight home. I went to a thrift shop in Glendale and bought an old army blanket, a pillow and a used canvas and wooden cot. I had been wanting to set up a cot in case Pete needed something to sleep on if and when, he ever visited. That was what the pillow was for too. I already had an army blanket for that purpose, but I needed something to wrap up Lewellyn's body in. After that, I went back to Fitz's and got his body and wrapped him up. Then, I went home, took a shower and napped for a couple of hours. I had dinner plans because Rosa and Lennie had asked me to come eat with them, and afterwards I was going to play cards in an effort to clear my head. Poker was always good for helping me focus my thoughts.

     Dinner at Rosa's was wonderful. The meal was simple, just some meatloaf and some mashed potatoes, but I couldn't ever remember eating a meal that made me feel as good as I did eating with her and Lennie. Back home, at my Mama's table, no matter how hard she tried, it seemed like there was always a dark cloud hanging over us like it was fixing to rain inside our house, even before Daddy did what he did. We knew that good times, when he was drinking, were rare and would always be followed by something embarrassing and shameful, and it always made us kids act ashamed to be alive even though we knew we didn't deserve to feel that way.

       Lennie surprised us by volunteering to clean up the dishes, so Rosa and I stepped outside for our farewells. The moment we were outside, she put both hands on the sides of my face, and kissed me long and passionately. Then when I rubbed the back of my right hand against her cheek, she took it and kissed it and held it to her lips.

     Then she asked, "Why do you look so worried, my love? You act happy, but there's just a little bit of something behind your eyes."

       "I wasn't acting. Tonight was the happiest I've been in quite a while. I was thinking about how many nights we could have like this if things were a little less complicated. I'm just tired. Cleaning up that mess today was a lot of unnecessary work."

         "Be honest.That's not it. I've seen you come home tired. Tonight you look worried, so what's worrying you? Remember, no secrets."

         "I never want to worry you about anything unless I have to, and tonight I have to, Rosa." So, I went ahead and told her what Hortensia had shared about how Guadalupe was behaving at church and at confession.  I hated to stand there and watch the doubt creep across her beautiful face,  but I figured she would be safer knowing. "You have to talk her, at least to try get her to hold out a while longer until we can work something out."

            "I can do that. Do you think she's going to break down and spill the beans?"

          I shook my head yes, "Yeah, I think the guilt of killing her own son is too much for her. We should never had thought otherwise. We have to assume the worst, which means that she's probably already said too much and somebody's overheard it, someone who'll take it to someone who'll use it to cause us pain."

          Rosa instantly went from worried to angry. Her eyes flashed,"I know I owe her my life, but she's being a silly woman. It's the just the guilt, the Hector she loved, the boy who collected model airplanes died a long time before that night. Besides, she has a grandson who deserves a chance to be happy?"

        "She killed her son. Think about it. It's understandable; it's too late to argue about her motives. We have to do something though."

        That calmed her anger a bit,"What, what'll we need to do?"

        "I don't know yet, but we have to try and delay  things until we can work something out, even if it means we have to leave here. I have to go somewhere tonight to take care of something. Soon as that's done, we'll start working on a plan."

          She kissed me again, "What are you going to do, Errol. Promise me, you won't do anything that'll put you in danger tonight."

          "I wish I could. I think it's better if I keep this one to myself. I can't promise you that I won't ever put myself in danger though. You remember that first night, when I told you I'd step in front of a bullet for you? It still goes, Rosa. I don't think it's going to be tonight, but there's a possibility that it is coming; I will never let anyone hurt you, or Lennie, as long as I'm alive."

         She got quiet for a while, then started crying. I cradled her face In my hands, then she whispered,"Things would have so much easier for you, if you had never met me."

         I laughed wrapped both arms around her, "My dad used to say that easy was overrated, that anything good comes out of struggle."

            "Then we are going to be very rich someday."

          "We already are,  never let 'em take  away from you.

           The front bar at Ernie's was almost empty. Armin his cousin was washing up some glassware when I came in.

           "Hey, Errol. Where you been, haven't seen you in a while?"

           "Been working. Your family OK?

            "Aw, you know my old lady. Spends more money than I make.
You still drinking Scotch and water?

            "That's my drink?"

            "I'll bring it in."

           When I walked in the card room, I had to adjust my eyes a little because as dark as the bar was, the card room was significantly darker, there was a separate light source for each table with a green circular shade made of tin and directed the light down toward the tables so that it looked like there were little of circles of light spotting the area. Ernie generally ran eight tables, but tonight there was only two going. I got lucky because Russian Mike went all in on a pair of queens and got ambushed by Old Man Lee's three tens.

             "Hey, Errol. I was just keeping this seat warm for you, but I'll warn you, it's full of bad luck tonight."

               I went to shake his hand, "You sure it's the seat, Mike and not all that Vodka?" Then I went around the table and shook hands with everyone, first approaching Ernie who sat in the  high seat overlooking the games like he was tennis judge. I knew pretty much every-one in the room. There was Old Man Lee who would be on my immediate left and Iron Belly, his best friend, a Swedish long haul truck-driver  who pretty much lived at Ernies when he was in town.

    To my right was Mexican guy whose real name was Henry Gonzalez but everybody knew as Balboa because he was always claiming that the explorer was on of his forebears. Everybody would tease him so much that he would pretend to get mad and jump up ready to fight, but then start laughing and pointing his finger like a pistol saying, "I got chu, got chu, and got chu." His other nickname was Got Chu; he answered to both. Across from me was the only lady in the room, and when I say lady, I mean lady. Jenny Sinclair was known as the Duchess in that room. She was a tall, slender gray-haired lady of about sixty, who always wore a black dress and string of fake pearls with matching ear-rings. She was the head of cleaning services at the Belvedere Hotel, a tough lady with a heart of gold who knew so much about the rules of poker that everybody deferred to her instead of Ernie when questions arose, and no-one ever disputed her rulings because to do so would have a shown a lack of respect. I knew everyone else in the room except the one guy who would be sitting directly behind me. He was new, so that threw up a red flag right away. He was a stocky, red-haired Irish looking dude with thick lips, large blue eyes, and a bulging forehead. His arms were covered with fine blond hair and freckles. That was odd too because he was the only man in the room wearing a short sleeved shirt. His demeanor was also suspect . He talked way too much for a newbie. The first thing I noticed was when the server brought his drink to his table, he didn't tip her. That was a major faux pas and said more about his character than anything else he could have said or done. It said that he was not only a hustler, but a cheap hustler, someone who would sale out his grandma for a buck.

      And he didn't do anything to dispel the notion when he started talking either. Right away he gave himself away when he asked Ernie, "Hey, Ernie, whatever happened that other girl who used to work here. You know the pretty one with the those big dark eyes."  The statement reenforced the idea that he was kind of dumb as I could tell Ernie knew he hadn't ever been there before much less long enough to know that Rosa worked there. Ernie started to close him down when he saw me give the signal to draw him out, to let him talk.

         "She left, she got a better job in the city and took off. Good kid. We miss her." Every person in the room nodded which should have been a warning for him to watch his tongue, a warning that apparently went unheeded.

         "Too bad, she sure was easy on the eyes."

        "That she was. As beautiful on the inside as the outside too, a real sweet-heart."

       The red-headed stranger let a second or two go by before he continued, "I heard a rumor that her boyfriend wasn't such a sweet-heart though. I heard he worked for the Big Guy, you know Jimmy DeLeo."

         Ernie was unsure about how much he should let the guy keep running hi mouth, as everybody knew who DeLeo was and were anxious about being part of any conversation that was throwing his name around so loosely."I'd be careful how I talked about Mr. DeLeo in these parts. It's an easy way to end up somewhere you don't want to be."

           If the guy was worried about that, he didn't show it,, he took no heed of the warning and instead looked around the room and waved his arm,  "We're among friends here. And from what I've always heard, Mr. DeLeo lets this part of the valley run itself, you kind of like the Wild West. That is unless you want to count that little pint-sized hoodlum Giancarlo and his two big dummies as something to worry about."

          Ernie had enough of the man's audacity, "What is it that you're trying to say here Mister. I've never seen you in here before, so what is it you want to know about Rosa?"

            The stranger just smiled, "Fair enough let's be direct. I'm a busy man and don't really have time to beat around the bush anyway. Hector, Rosa's boyfriend worked for Mr. DeLeo and ended up owing him a whole lot of money. Giancarlo told Mr. DeLeo about this Rosa dame, about how pretty she was. So, they set up a deal where Hector was to bring his girlfriend to a party at the Belvedere and in exchange Mr. DeLeo would wipe that debt clean. Problem was, Hector never showed up and neither did the girl. And the funny thing was that Hector's brother Johnny, that devil looking one everyone calls El Loco, was waiting there at the hotel, so they sent him to find his brother. He comes back a hour later, no brother, no girl, but says his mother was acting very strange. Bottom there's a very generous reward out for any information about where Hector disappeared to, and or information about the girl, this Rosa broad."

             I knew that Ernie was thinking at this point, it might be better to let him reveal as much information as possible, so he asked,"So, tell us, Stranger, what's in it for you? And what's to stop any one of us from going to DeLeo ourself?"

           If a snake could laugh, it would probably sound like the hissing sound that came out of Stranger's mouth, "None youse guys could get within a mile of Jimmy DeLeo. But me, I'm his barber, I cut his hair once a week, and I'm not a greedy man, I'll do sixty-forty split with anyone who knows anything." He stood up and looked to see if anyone was willing to take him up on his offer. When he turned my way, I hit him with the beer mug that Old Man Lee handed me, and he dropped like a ton of bricks.

         There was no place else to put him but in the passenger side of the truck. Nearly everyone in the card room helped with the trussing and the carrying him out to the truck. Old Man Lee even put a Chinese curse on him, and Iron Belly provided the rope we tied him up with. Balboa, who absolutely adored Rosa, wanted to urinate once we got him outside, but I told him I was going have to carry him inside Fitz's truck and didn't get it all smelly.

      "Can I spit on him, Errol. Kick him."

      "Help yourself." I was surprised that all of the ones who didn't know all that well, joined in the festivities and added a few kicks of their own. It was like of bonding experience of sorts, ordinary men who didn't a lot of chances be hero, in a mythological sense, getting a few kicks in on the personification of evil. We didn't kill him, but I'm not going lie and say the subject didn't come up, or that we didn't have to debate the issue.

     The Duchess, stepped outside to watch the action, When everybody was going back in the card room, she walked out to where I was holding up a cigarette in a long black cigarette holder for me to light. She knew I didn't smoke but she also carried around my grand daddy's Zippo just so I could play the gentleman and light other people's cigarette.

      She took a long drag and exhaled slowly looking a lot like one of them rich dames in the movies, which I knew was what she was looking for, "Thanks, Handsome,"

       "Always my pleasure, Duchess. You do know that I carry this lighter with me just so I have the honor."

           She laughed and said, "That ain't all I know, Errol. I was there that night that idiot was talking about. DeLeo takes up the whole top floor at Belvedere. One half is for his business affairs, and other half is where he entertains. I remember that evening because he was all anxious and even had us being up extra flowers, and put roses on the bedspread with some fancy chocolate." She leaned in a little closer, "I also caught one of my girls hiding a gun in the towel closet in the bathroom. Turns out she did it for Giancarlo. He was going to use that girl, I didn't know it was Rosa till this guy started talking, to get DeLeo to lower his guard so he could take him out."

          "The girl?"

         "You don't need to worry about the girl. She's where all the people like her end up."

         "Where's that?"

         "Let's just say, north of Fresno and leave it at that."

         I gave her big hug and kiss on the cheek after she informed me that the gun was still hidden and that she'd worked at the Belvedere since she was a kid and through the boot-leg years, and she knew every inch of the that hotel and corridors and tunnels that no-one else there even knew about.

         Ernie told me that Armin was already working on getting rid of the Stranger's car, "He's not my brother's smartest son, but he knows how to dispose of a car, so you won't have to worry about it topping up at the worse time." He patted the side of the truck, "You sure you got this one under control?" He was referring the Stranger who was tied up hand and foot and blind-folded on the passenger side of Fitz's truck. One of guys, I didn't know his name had taped his mouth shut with some packing tape and a handkerchief.

           "I can handle him. I don't rightly know what I'm going to do with him yet."

          "If it was me and he was.....,well you know. I'd feed him to the fishes. Not too late!"

           "Ernie, I forgot to ask. How's your mom?"

           "Mom? She's doing good, wait a minute, I see what you're doing that's not fair, Errol, bringing my mom into this discussion."

            I laughed and drove off, waving out the door.

           

 




         



          
 
            



 

​

       When Mama was lying on her deathbed, growing weaker by the day, I would ask her a lot of questions about Daddy, how they'd met and things like that. She liked telling me those things. It took both of our minds off of the gravity of the situation we were in. She told me that in all their years together, she'd only seen him lose his temper once when she'd had embarrassed him in front of his dad. She'd knocked a glass of whisky out of his hand, and he'd pushed her in retaliation. Grandpa had lived in Salina back then, and it was a long ride back home. Petey and I both remembered it well. They'd fought back and forth almost the whole trip. We sat in the back cowering as we watched the storm rage. Mama even slapped him a couple of times. She told me that that night she had given him an ultimatum that if he ever laid a hand on her again, she would leave him. He never did. Never even raised his voice against her. I asked her if he had demanded the same from her. She just smiled and laughed at the thought then added, "He didn't need to."
 
       Then I asked, "Mom, why did you stay with him all those years?"
She looked at me with a little bit of fire in her eyes when I asked this one question.

     Normally, she her voice was just a little more than a whisper, but this time she sat up a little to answer. It was like she wanted to make sure I remembered what she told me, "You don't run out on the ones you love, Errol." She even looked at me like she was a little angry because I had asked such a stupid thing, as if the mere asking had called her character in question.

        "But he made things so hard for you, Mama."

       She lay back against her pillow, "Like I'm making things hard for you?"

       "It's not the same thing, Ma. You're my mother. You sacrificed your whole life for me, Pete, and Sissy. You've never a done a thing to hurt us, or to put our future in jeopardy. We couldn't pay you back in a hundred years. You gave us life."

        She didn't answer right away, but then pointed instead to the single drawer of the blue and gold nightstand that stood next to the her bed, then gestured with her right hand for me to open the drawer, so I did, and the only thing in it was a faded and folded piece of paper that looked something like a letter. She motioned me to hand the letter to her and I did. Then she lay back, carefully unfolded the paper and started reading in a shaky voice so quiet I had to lean forward to make out what she was saying.

       "My dearest Sophie, I'm so sorry. I made a horrible mistake tonight. One I couldn't get back once I made it. He made me feel so small, like I cheated you out of your future. I started thinking about how much I love you and the kids, and how much easier your lives would be if you weren't always having to get me out of a hole. I'm sorry for this, but I hurt so bad. Love your Billy"

       She handed the opened letter over to me and I read it myself. I could tell he had written it in haste because the letters and lines were all over the page; the saddest thing about the letter though were the still visible faint outlines of two tear drops near where he had signed his name and the crooked little heart he had drawn on the bottom of the page. I choked up and pointed to the teardrops, and Mama tilted her head nodded. She closed her eyes, and the biggest teardrop I've ever seen rolled out of the corner of her left eye and slid down her cheek.

      "He lost his head and he needed me and I wasn't there. You don't leave the people who need you most."

      It turns out that those were the last words my mama ever said to me. I carefully folded the letter back up and put it back in the drawer. I sat back down picked up a hymnal and started singing her favorite hymn to her so she could sleep.

"On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,
the emblem of suffering and shame;
and I love that old cross where the dearest and best
for a world of lost sinners was slain."

       By the time I reached the third verse, she was softly snoring. So, I left the room to go sleep in the easy chair in the parlor and was awakened early in the morning by a car horn honking. It was Sissy signaling me to come help her carry groceries in from her car. I wrestled  a big box out of her trunk and carried it in as she head the screen door open and sat it on the blue tiled counter top in her tidy little kitchen, then hustled back to ask mama what she wanted for breakfast. I was in my socks, so I silently slid around the corner on the slippery wooden floor of the hallway. The soft morning light was seeping through her window shade. Her eyes were open, but she wasn't looking at anything in this world. Her right arm was frozen in the air as if she was reaching for something that wasn't there. I stumbled back into the kitchen and gave my sister a look that told her everything without a word.

      We held a wake and placed her open casket in the middle of her living room. That night, my Grandpa Long filled me in on the rest of the story. He told me that my dad was out playing cards at this road house a county over from ours, and his life-ling nemesis, a rich farmer named Long Eddie Tudder, who was reputed to have longest legs in the Oklahoma, sat down and started playing in the vacant seat right next to my dad. Tudder had been Mama's most ardent suitor when she was young, and he could never bring himself to understand why she had chosen my dad over him, so he let my dad have it pretty good the whole night.

       Daddy was usually pretty good about not losing more than he could afford, but that night he was drinking more than usual because of the ribbing from Tudor. Towards the end of the night, right before the card room closed, Daddy caught an ace of hearts, two red kings, and two black queens, and he threw away the ace and caught another king, so he  he went in more than usual. Tudor kept raising on every round doubling the pot, and on his last bet threw down a hundred dollars. Dad, didn't have the money, but was goaded on by Tudor, and he bet the gold bracelet, his prized possession, a gift that Mama had bought for his birthday back when things were still going well. Dad, in his anxiety quickly threw his hand down on the table with an almost magical laugh accompanied by a sigh of relief. Then Tudor rose up from his seat and put his crds face up, and one by one, threw down a J of hearts, an ace of hearts, an ace of diamonds, an ace of clubs, and finally the ace of spades.  

        According to everybody, Daddy immediately protested and told the others about his discarding of that last ace. Clarence Ludlow, who was standing behind Daddy vouched for the fact.The sheriff of the county was there, but he was Eddie Tudder's first cousin and quickly and loudly sided with his kin. The owner of the card room was the cousin of the sheriff. Daddy grew agitated and told them that he wasn't about to be cheated and made a lunge at the standing Tudder. The others grabbed them, and the sheriff looked at Ludlow and asked him in menacing voice, "Clarence, You sure you saw an Ace?"

     Ludlow wilted and shook his head no. Then they basically grabbed hold of dragged my daddy out of the room and shoved him out the door laughing as they closed the door.  Apparently, daddy got hold of a tire iron and waited in the shadows for Tudder to come out. When he did, Daddy lunged toward him out of the shadows. They all said that daddy caught him while he was getting into his car, bashed him over the head a couple of times, reached into Tudor's pocket and got his bracelet back before escaping in the darkness of the woods behind the card room.
Grandpa Long made sure that the bracelet was visible on daddy's wrist when they buried him. Daddy was right about Mama though, when she didn't have to bail him out all of the time, she prospered and became quite a formidable woman. Mr. Tudder eventually recovered, but was known as a card cheat and in those parts and those times, and turns out he was pimp and procurer too and did a lot  of wicked work with that sheriff and his deputies.


      When I got to work the day after the night Rosa and I had sat in the truck overlooking the ocean sharing all of our secrets, I knew something was wrong even before I got there. Coming down the hill, I could see Fitz walking around in circles and waving his arms like a wild man. I could see Hortensia half behind their screen door looking worried. I parked the truck and got out, and Fitz just gestured for me to follow him into the warehouse. It was a mess, there was paint splashed all over the tin-can wall, pieces of broken lamps and chairs everywhere, some of the colored window panes were broken out, and that beautiful desk that he had spend so many hours bring back to life had been chopped to pieces. He kept walking and pointed to the wreckage as he made his way to the open back door of the warehouse. Nothing could have prepared me for what was out there.

         My jaw dropped almost to the ground, and I actually had to rub my disbelieving eyes. Lewellyn, Fitz's beloved border collie was hanging upside down from one of the elm trees, right from the limb where Fitz had put a swing, and worse than that, the dogs throat had been cut and large pool of blood had formed in the depression in the ground that been created by the year after year of people swinging back and forth. The look on Fitz's face was made even more horrible by the fact that his was a face made for projecting hard won wisdom and empathy, not abject sorrow. I walked over and put my hand on his back and guided him over to a small concrete patio where there were three green deck chairs surrounding a fire pit. I saw Hortensia looking out the back door and gestured for her to bring us something to drink and she quickly returned with a pitcher of cold water and couple of glasses. I poured Fitz a glass and handed it to him and he took it a kind of robotic reaction and took a drink.

       I thought it would probably be best to get him talking and somehow away from the thoughts that were freezing his thinking.


      "Tell me, what happened here. Do you know."

      It took a second, but he responded, " That guy by here after you left with those two big goons."

      "Giancarlo came here! Oh man, I'm sorry if I brought this..."

      He interrupted me before I could finish. "No, he didn't even know you worked with me. They came to shake me down like they've been doing to everybody else around here, like Cleo's garage, Mrs. Gonzales's cafe, Hero at the produce market, and old man Jackson's drug store. I heard they recently acquired permission from Jimmy DiLeo to create their own little thing around here, so they've been trying to muscle in on everybody's livelihood."

      "I take it you didn't pay them."

      "You're damn right I didn't. It'll be a cold day in hell before I get bamboozled by the likes of those clowns. I pretended as if I was going to give them the money and went and got my gun and ran them off. For a second, I was going to have to shoot the bigger of the two galoots. They got in their car and left, but that little bugger swore that I'd be sorry. I didn't think it would be so soon."

      "Well, I'm sorry Fitz, but I think the best thing for us to do right now, is to start cleaning this mess up, give us time to think."

       He thought about what I said, and then shook his head in agreement, so we started to work. While he went inside, I cut the dog down, grabbed a shovel and threw some dirt to cover up the pool of blood, then went back inside and started helping him and Hortensia to restore some order to the place. We worked for over six hours straight without a break, using some turpentine to get most of the paint off of things. Fitz had some extra panes of colored glass, so I held the ladder as he replaced the broken ones. Hortensia kept busy sweeping up broken glass and shattered wood. I piled most of the broken furniture outside to take away to the dump. About thirty minutes before we finished, Hortensia went inside an whipped us up a simple feast featuring slabs of roasted beef, goat cheese, fresh-baked bread, home made butter, boiled spinach and water melon. We washed it down with some ice cold pitcher lemonade.

           I could tell that Fitz  was feeling a lot better though occasionally he would tear-up when he remembered Lewellyn. He asked me if I could take care of the dog because he didn't think he could handle it. I told him I would need to borrow his truck again, and he said that it was ok as long as I brought it back by midnight. I was  going to ask him about why the curfew when he called Hortensia, who was taking the left-overs back inside, to come over.

          "Hortensia has something she needs to tell you, Errol."

          "I hope it ain't bad. My plate is kind of full in that regard."

          He didn't answer, but held out his hands, palms upright, as if to say it is what it is. She came over to where we were, and I could tell right away that it was something bad by the look on her face and the way she was wringing her hands. She started speaking in Spanish and after a while, Fitz turned and told me what she said.

        "She attends Mass with Lennie's grandmother."

        I was stunned. When Rosa had told me her story,  I had just assumed that she meant by hiding was that she had put a whole city the size of Los Angeles between her and her past, and here I was finding out that Hortensia and Guadalupe went to the same church.

        Fitz went on and occasionally Hortensia would add something to the narrative and he would translate that too, "Lupe is loud in her grief for the loss of her son. Even in the confessional booth, she is loud and crying. The other mothers can hear what she tells the priest."

         This was bad. It meant that at some point, hidden things were going to be exposed. Now, I not only had to worry about Hector's brother Johnny showing up unexpectedly with burning need for revenge, there could also be an unwanted visit from the police.

         "Errol, she says the mother is saying that Rosa killed Hector because he was trying to force his way on her and that she helped Rosa hide the body."

            "Tell her it wasn't Rosa. It was the other way around," I felt revealing even that much of Rosa's secret, but I thought I needed to explain Rosa's participation. "Hector had pimped her out to somebody and she wasn't going along with the deal."

            He let Hortensia go back to what she was doing before, "I thought that you needed to hear that, just in case, you guys are getting serious."

           "I'm falling in love with her, Fitz. She needs my help. apparently even more than I knew. Tell me something did you know Hector, or his brother?"​ 

            "Hector was a good kid for a while. He would come in and watch me work sometimes. He would come and borrow glue for his model airplanes. The he got into selling drugs trying to help his mom and got in way over his head. He got a lot meaner. The people him and Johnny worked for are bad people. They got the police and some judges on the payroll. Even that guy that Giancarlos works for Jimmy DiLeo is tied up with them. Now, Johnny is the devil incarnate, he's never been anything but evil since he stepped out of the cradle."

             We talked some more and then I remembered to ask him why he needed the truck back at midnight.

             "Well, actually I need you and the truck. I have some business to attend to."

               "Business?"

              "Surely, Errol, you didn't think I was going to let this," and he directed my gaze toward the shop floor, "slide until I saw what they were going to do next." 

      

 

      Rosa and I mutually agreed to take things pretty slow. We weren't a couple of star-struck teenagers who would let our physical desires get out of control and burn down a promising start, we were more like a couple of small mountain streams flowing gently around large boulders and diving beneath fallen logs and emerging on the other side, hoping that at some point a little further down the mountain we'd find a place to merge into something bigger and stronger.

     One day, I borrowed Fitz's truck and took her and Lennie to see an open air production of Romeo and Juliette in a small, oak lined park up the coast. The production began right after sundown. The clearing was abuzz with families and friends chatting while sitting on myriad of  multi-colored quilts. Then when the last magical light of the day extinguished as if by stage direction and the wired lights, strung from tree to tree,  came on, all talk stopped and the play began. We sat on one of Mrs. Cohen's quilts and nibbled on sandwiches she'd packed for us while we watched and listened as some very precocious and talented amateur actor filled the air above our heads with the music of Shakespeare's words. Lennie soon fell fast asleep in his mother's lap, but Rosa was entranced by the story and listened in rapt attention. I couldn't take my eyes off of her face, even had I wanted. 

     She couldn't stop talking about the play all the way home. "I can't get over her foolishness, or their foolishness. He deserves most of the blame. Don't you think so?" She looked at me with such earnestness, that even in the dark I could tell that she was looking for an answer, or at least something that would validate her assumptions.

     "Yeah, I actually do. Men get the blame for a lot of things. They always feel like people are looking for them to make the right decisions. Places a lot of pressure on men with weak shoulders."

       She didn't say anything for a long time, just stared out the window at as much of the road ahead as the headlights and the coastal fog would let her see. Then out of nowhere she asked, "When were you going to tell me about Giancarlo?"

       It was my turn to be silent for a bit, "I didn't want to worry you. I figured you had enough on your plate worrying about Hector hunting you down."

       She was looking at me when I answered, then quickly turned again to face the road. "It's not Hector. It's his brother Johnny. Hector's dead, buried beneath his mother's tool shed." I didn't say anything. I was having a real hard time reconciling my need to keep the truck on the right side of the road with what she'd just told me me. Then, almost in whispered she continued, "His own mother killed him while he was trying to force me to let one of his gangster friends rape me. He had stripped me down and put me in the bath tub trying to freshen me up for his friend. I was fighting back with all my might, and he was trying to hold me down and got mad and started choking me. While it was happening, he wasn't paying attention on anything else, and his mom came in with a machete and brought it down hard across his neck."

       I saw a chance to pull the truck over in a clearing overlooking the ocean, so I did. Outside the truck, the scene was magical with a huge golden moon hung in the sky, illuminating the inside of the truck. I could see Rosa's shoulders trembling and the shiny wet path of the tears flowing down her face.

        It got real strange for a moment, and I mean other worldly strange. When I was in sixth grade, my teacher Mr. Oswald had shown me a picture of Michelangelo's statue of Mary cradling her son Jesus, down from the cross, in her arms. It affected me so much that that night I had the strangest dream of looking out over a moonlight sea while staring at Mary crying while holdingg Jesus in her arms. I woke up in the middle of the night crying myself. And here I was looking at the same scene in real time. I went somewhere inside my head for a moment, and when I snapped out of it, Rosa was staring at me worried.

        "I'm so sorry, Errol. I shouldn't have told you."

        "No. That's not it. I know it sounds strange, but I've been here, I mean, I've seen this in a dream when I was twelve, the same moon, the ocean, a mother weeping while holding her child. I don't know what it all means, but I've seen it."" She was still confused because it wasn't the reaction that she expected, so I switched gears figuring I could think about the weirdness later, and I needed to connect with her. So, I said, "It's understandable, what happened was Hector's fault, tell me what happened afterwards."

     She calmed down enough to tell me that Guadalupe, Hector's mother,  was going to turn herself in and take the consequences, but Rosa reminded her that Hector was moving drugs and the people he worked for were politically connect with judges and police on their payroll. She said she finally convinced Guadalupe that she'd done the only thing she could have done. "I told her that had she not acted, I would be the dead one, and she'd would have been forced to help him cover up the crime. She told me that she wished she had used the machete on her own husband before her sons were born. For some reason, that made me laugh. Then she started laughing and went sat there in that bloody bathroom laughing like a couple maniacs, covered with blood, and me naked as a baby. It was the laughter that cleared our heads enough to come up with a plan."

    "And I thought my dream was weird?"

    That made her smile, "Maybe we're just a couple of escapees from a lunatic asylum."

     "Lunatic asylum is probably right, I don't know if I could vouch for the escapee part. Might be, we have a ways to go."

      "Well, that's all I got. Besides the fact that Giancarlo attacked you thinking that I belong to him, what are you holding back from me Errol?"

      "I told you that I didn't want you to worry. That is one of the good things about men, Rosa. They want to protect the ones who they love. I do have one more thing to share. I don't anymore secrets."

       "All ears."

      "You remember when I told you that Pete didn't kill Floyd. Well, he told me he didn't and convinced me that there were enough people who hated Floyd and could have done it. There was still this one thing that created some doubt. The night my dad walked off into the dark and never came back, my mom came home from her sister's after delivering a baby, and we told her Daddy hadn't come home. So, she sent Grandpa Long out to look for him and a little while later he came back and hitched the mules to our wagon and told Pete to jump up in the seat beside him. A couple hours later, they came back with Daddy's lifeless body lying in the back. Pete wouldn't talk about it for years, but one night he was out drinking with some of his buddies and came home drunk. So, I got on him about making things harder for Mama. He got mad and told me about what happened that morning. Him and Grandpa had found Daddy hanging from an old oak tree. The tree was famous in those parts because it hung out over a ledge that looked out over the whole valley below. It was like Daddy was proclaiming his failures for the whole world to see. Pete had a to take a rope, crawl out on the limb a few feet away from where Daddy was hanging and rope one of Daddy's leg. It was a damn near impossible thing to do, but he did it. He tossed the other end of that rope to Grandpa who tied it to the back of the wagon. Then Pete had to crawl on the limb that Daddy hung from and cut that rope. That's how they dragged Pa back up over the ledge."

      "That's horrible. Poor Pete. But I don't see how that explains Floyd's death."

      Outside of Tulsa, there was this small hill and road that ran up it that curved around this one corner where the good people of Tulsa had inexplicably placed a lone streetlight with one arm hanging out over the ledge. That's where they found Floyd hanging, out over valley for all the honest world could witness his failures as a man. Just like Daddy."

      That was it. All of our secrets were out on the table. Lennie had never woken up once in the entire time almost from the time that the play had begun. We didn't leave right away either. The beauty of the place was just too mesmerizing. We sat there and talked a while about the future that lay before us and almost without addressing the problems we faced, reached an understanding that the vision was worth pursuing and that whatever happened, we would share in both the pain, the effort, and hopefully a common dream. 

     She told me how Hector's brother Johnny had come home looking for  Hector. He had been at a hotel with the two men who had paid Hector for Rosa's services. Rosa and the mom hadn't had time enough to get rid the body yet and had just finished hiding it in the toolshed behind the house. Johnny was anxious, angry and in a hurry, so he attempted to grab Rosa by her arm and take her back to the hotel. He hadn't anticipated the fury of Rosa's resistance and then Guadalupe picked up the machete and told him that Rosa wasn't going anywhere. His mother's stance was totally unexpected and unnerved him. He left the house swearing that he would come back and get to the bottom of things.

     They went back to the shed and Rosa dug a big hole in the floor, and placed Hector in it. Turns out that Hector's dad had a side job cleaning cast iron and there was a nearly full bag of lye in the shed. They poured the lye over Hectors body and filled the hole in. His mother came up with the idea of skimming up the dry sand from the alley and using it to help cover up the new dirt from the hole. Rosa said that the mother had even made a grim joke saying that a toolshed would be the last place that Johnny would ever look for his brother. They decided to smash all of Hector's model planes to make it looked he had done it himself a fit of rage because of Rosa's refusal to give herself over to his plans. The mother said, that Johnny suspected that Rosa was behind Hector's disappearance and had even put up a reward for news of her whereabouts. I swore to her, that despite my suspicions, I still believed that Pete did not kill Floyd. He had fallen into some shakey company but I still believed that was good down deep and incapable of murder.

    The next day, I came home from work and dug a couple old ball gloves that Pete and I had brought with us when we came west. They had been carelessly tossed into a box of things we couldn't bring ourself to leave behind, Dad's work boots, one of Mama's Easter bonnets, Sissie's stuffed bear, a scuffy old baseball and the mitts that we used to play for our school baseball team.  Lennie was sitting on his porch so,  I called him over and we went to the grass covered area between the houses and started tossing the ball around. We were both kind of clumsy at first but quickly got into a nice routine. I caught Rosa looking out the door, and,I couldn't tell for sure, but it looked like she was crying. There is something primal about a man playing catch with his boy, and I think that image may have caught her by surprise. Lennie wasn't my son, but I didn't have a son, and his dad sure as hell wasn't ever going to ever play catch with him, so I questioned if it was very wrong for us to serve as a fill-in for one another.

     All night long, I had wrestled with the story that Rosa told me, and I couldn't wrap my head around Rosa doing the things that she had had to do that night in order to survive and protect her son. She had made me promise that I wouldn't lie to her about anything. The other thing that kept me awake was the deja vu moment where I remembered the dream where I was standing there before a full moon that took up half of the sky and looking at the Madonna holding Jesus's body and crying over his fatal wounds. I finally fell asleep and dreamed about Pete having to climb out on the limb of the oak tree and cutting down Papa's body. I remembered that Mama was inconsolable and cried for days. 

     It started to get dark, and Rosa stuck her head out of the door and called out to Lennie, "Lennie, Vente de la casa; vente comel." She waved to me and smiled. I waved back.  

      Lennie tossed me the glove with a, "Thank's, Errol," then he ran right into his mother's laughing arms.

     

       

      Rosa and I sat outside and talked for hours that night. I completely forgot about the incident where Giancarlo had warned me about staying away from her. We quickly drank the last of the three beers. I offered to go inside and get some red wine that I had left over from cooking pasta the week before, but she declined because she didn't want to get tipsy in case Lennie needed something.

       "That's the price you pay when you have a kid, Errol. You always have to be on your toes and on the look-out for potential dangers."

       "But wouldn't you say that the blessings far outweigh the threats?"

    "I wouldn't have it any other way. Lennie gives me balance; he gives me purpose. I wouldn't have made it this far without him. He was so little when his dad would put hands on me, but he never hesitated and would run in the room and start grabbing on to Hector and screaming at for Hector to leave his mama alone. Then afterwards, after we went into hiding, he'd always try to cheer me up by saying, 'We'll make it, Mama. We'll make it.' He was only seven years old at the time."

        "He's such a polite boy. Mrs. Cohen loves that kid."

        "That's so true. She's giving him violin lessons, and Miss Mildred is teaching him how to bake pies.  How about you, you and your wife have any kids?"

        "No, my wife was on the way to tell me she was pregnant when she got hit by a car. It was on the street right beneath my office window. I heard a loud crash and a lot of commotion outside, so I looked out to see what it was all about and saw Elsie lying there in the street. I knew it was her right away because she had just bought that new, red dress the night before. I told her I didn't like the color, but she bought it anyway."

            "Was Elsie pretty?"

      "When we first met, I thought she was the prettiest girl in Oklahoma. After we were married a while though, she started changing, things like wearing a lot of lipstick and stuff. I couldn't understand it because it didn't make her look any better, made her look cheap in a way. She got a job working in this real estate office and she turned into a completely different person.

           "How did you know she was going to have a baby?"

           "She had just come from the doctor. She was clutching the note in her hand. When I got down to the street, this lady handed me the doctor's report."

           "I'm sorry. That must have been horrible."

           "It was horrible all right. And it got a lot worse."

           "What do you mean worse?"

        I went blank for a moment and forgot that Rosa was even there. My eyes were wide open but they were seeing an event that took place a thousand miles away, an event from the past, one that happened in a bedroom in Tulsa. I snapped out of it quickly enough and saw Rosa staring at me waiting for an answer. So, I took a deep breath to clear my head and told gave her one.

       "The day of the funeral, I was home getting dressed. Pete was going to pick me up and take me to the cemetery. I was looking for a tie, and looked in the drawer where I kept my handkerchiefs, ties, and stuff, and there, sitting on my ties, wide open, was Elsie's diary. She was only person who could have placed it there so I would find it. The last entry was dated on the day she died. She obviously meant for me to read it. It told me that she had been having an affair with her boss, and she was going to the doctor to confirm the fact that she pregnant," I waited a moment before adding and still choked a little on the words, "with her bosses baby. It made sense 'cos we hadn't relations for a while. She said she was working late and would come home tired, or she would pick a fight with me the moment she came in the door. Anyways, she was going to tell him, and he was going to divorce his wife, and she was going to divorce me.  I believed at that moment that she was on her way to tell me when she got hit by the car."

        "Wow. That's crazy. I'm so sorry, Errol."

        "It  gets crazier, I was stunned. I went and poured myself a glass of whiskey. Remember, I'm getting ready to go to the funeral. So, I so sit on the sofa, and while I'm sitting there befuddled, an envelope dropped through the mail slot on the door. I picked it up and there's no address or stamp, so I look out the window, and there is no-one there. I open it up, and inside there's a note that says that I should go to this building, one that's about a block north and across the street from the office where my wife worked, and look inside. So, I go to the funeral, and you can imagine my mindset. Her boss shows up with his wife and his kids. He doesn't approach me, just nods and goes back to his car afterwards. His wife, a very sweet lady, comes and hugs me and offers her condolences, and it's obvious she has no idea that her husband has been cheating on her."
         
​         "Did you go check out that place?"

         "Yeah. I went that night with a flashlight."

         "And?'

         "I had to jimmy the window open to get in, but what I saw there was a beat-up, old 1928 Plymouth Roadster, It was pretty rusty and battered, but looked like it could still run, tires were good and upholstery was intact."

         "I'm not looking to buy the car, Errol. Get to the point."

      "I could tell it was two-toned, White on top, red body with white-walls. That was important because the police report said it was a two-toned, red and white Plymouth that ran Elsie over. I went and checked the right front bumper, and snagged on the chrome was a tiny piece of red cloth."

        "Wha..."

         "Yeah. Anyway, I had Pete find out who the building belong to and it turned out it was her boss, and it was her bosses car."

        "You mean, he did it!"

         "Yeah. I confronted him, but it was before Pete told me who owned that building. He didn't deny the affair, but said it was her that initiated it. He denied ever telling her that he was going to divorce his wife, said Elsie felt that his wife was an impediment, and concocted the whole thing in her head. They had an argument that morning, he said that her last words were that she was glad that she hadn't told me about the affair yet, so she could go back to the way that things were."

           "You didn't ask him about the car?"

        "No, I wanted to be sure. It's a poker thing, you never let your opponent know all the cards that you're holding.  It took a lot to not to tell him, but I kept it to myself. It probably did mean that Elsie was most likely coming to tell me that it was my baby she was carrying, and that she had plans to hoof it home and get that diary out of my drawer."

            "Why would he kill her though, he would be home free?"

       "Gets even worse. Pete found out that Floyd, her boss, was involved up to his eyeballs in a lot of scams involving this big time hoodlum named Baxter Long. They were stealing property out from under people who couldn't meet their loan payments, conning old ladies out of their bank accounts, and even putting insurance policies out on people and then making sure those people had tragic accidents."

            "Elsie?"

           "Pete discovered that Floyd had taken out an insurance policy on my wife, and the beneficiary of the policy was none other than Baxter Long's live in girl friend, a stripper named JoJo Adler." 

           "What did you do then?"

          I looked Rosa in the eye and then hung my head a bit, "I don't know why I'm telling you all this. We barely know each other."

         "Forget that, you pushed yourself way past that when you said you'd said you'd take a bullet for me. I want to know what you did for my own selfish reasons, Errol. I need to know."

           "Turns out,I didn't have to do anything. I was going to go tell the police, but Pete said the police were taking bribes from Long. Then Floyd was found hanging from a street lamp over this intersection in Tulsa where  a road on the side of a hill makes a hairpin turn up to the top of the hill, you know kind of like that road that leads up to this place.  Everyone who lived down below in the canyon could see him hanging there. There wasn't any note in the car, there was however a packed suitcase and a brief case with $15,000 in it. Looking like he was trying to leave town, but the police didn't care, they ruled it a suicide, and the whole thing went away."

             "Look me in the eye, Errol, and tell me if was it you?"

           "No, it wasn't me. The cops came around, but that night, I was in bar getting plastered. The bartender knew that I never get plastered like that, so he was certain of the time. In fact, he was him that took me home and put me in bed."

             "Pete?"

            I had to shrug my shoulders, "I don't know for sure. He says no. He told me that Baxter Long probably did it to cover-up his role in the insurance scam. All I know is we were on our way to California before they buried Floyd. Pete just assumed that I was ready to leave Oklahoma. There is one thing, that worries me about it, but I have to keep it to myself for the time being."

         "Like the card thing?"

         "Yeah, but different. Sometimes thinking you know what the other guy has in his hand, freezes you, so you can't act decisively when you need to, sometimes not knowing something is the better course."

        Rosa seemed satisfied with my answer, "You want to know my story?"

         "As much of it as you feel comfortable with telling."

         "I have no secrets, Errol. Well, that's not true. I have one, and I'll let you know when the time's right."

         "Fair enough."

         "Living with my dad sure wasn't any picnic. He was a vicious dictator. He never put hands on my mom because he didn't have to, he never gave her room enough to take a breath of her own. I have an older brother named Javier. He was my dad's favorite. My dad never put a hand that boy. I got whipped weekly. It made me into a tough kid. I got in a lot of fights. I was young, pretty and very desperate. I was like a wild animal back then. My dad was starting to get pretty handsy with me when he came home drunk.  I was looking for some kind of an escape and then one day Hector rolls up in his shiny car, those pretty brown eyes, and enough of an attitude to worry my dad. My dad kicked me out when I got pregnant and I haven't talked to him or my mom since. I have a tia name Hilda, my mom's younger sister who keeps me informed about them.

        I didn't know how bad Hector was, and didn't much care, if I am being honest, all I knew was that he could keep my dad in check. Then I quickly found out that I had married a younger, crazier version of my dad, someone who wasn't afraid to use his fists.  His mom's a good lady though, and one night he got locked up for stealing a car, and she hands me all the money she had saved taking in laundry and tells me to go find a place to hide and not tell her where.  A week before he almost killed me in the bathtub because he was drunk and trying to get in the tub with me. When I fought back, he went crazy.  I call a neighbor lady to see if Hector's around and his mom and I set up a time and place where she can see Lenny."

          "You mean that he's out there looking for you?"

          "I have no doubt, if he ain't locked up that is, and I also know that he will kill me if he finds me. He collected airplane models. That's why we named Lenny Lindbergh after that dude with the airplane. I smashed every one of them before I left. That's why I asked you what you did when you found out about Elsie. I needed to know if you would have my back and wouldn't just turn and run when he finds me,"

           "You don't have to worry. I'm not a violent guy, I don't try to hurt people as a rule, but I don't run away either."

         We sat there talking for a while longer before she got up and came and sat across my legs and placed her head against my shoulder whispering, "Sharing secrets is sure tiring."

        "Yep, but I'll bet, it'll make things lighter in the long run."

         She fell asleep there, and after a while I woke her and told her I'd walk her home. She tried to tell me that I didn't have to do that, but I pushed her protests aside and held her hand as we traversed the courtyard. When we got to her porch, she turned to face me.

          "Can I kiss you tonight?

      She shook her head, "Errol, no woman I know wants to be with a man who......"

    I pulled her forward and kissed her before she finished the admonition. It was good.

     Rosa DeLeon was a working-class goddess. Believe me, I spent a lot of time thinking about what word to put in front of that term goddess. I didn't want anyone to compare her to those bottle-blonde, store-bought females that lived up in the hills around Hollywood, you know, someone like Jean Harlow for example. When I first told Rosa, I thought of her being like a goddess, she scoffed and held up her right elbow and pointed to a scabbed over wound, and almost screamed, "Damn it all, Errol, do all the goddesses in your world have scars like this?"

    I silenced her anger by nodding and saying, "Yeah, they do. Mrs. Cohen, for example, she's a goddess too, and Miss Mildred, another one. Fitz's wife Hortensia, big time goddess. Rosa, in my eyes, you're the most beautiful creature on this planet, but goddesses are never just pretty on the outside." So, instead of staying angry, she looked at me, mouth open in wonder, and struggled to fight back tears, and when she couldn't hold them back any longer, she turned and ran into the house, so I wouldn't see her sobbing.

     The night after I had the run-in with Giancarlo and his goons, I was still a little unnerved by the intensity of the incident, so after getting home, I walked up to the store and bought myself a six-pack of beer. I went home and took a nap, and when I awoke, I cooked myself a late breakfast of bacon, toast, and eggs, and afterwards took the beer and went and sat outside. I was thinking about things and watching the evening sky turn into a darkness lit up by the moon. I was three beers in, when Rosa's mom's car pulled up into the courtyard and dropped Rosa and her son Lennie off, probably bring Rosa home from work. Rosa took Lennie inside and after a few minutes, she came back outside and sat in one of the matching wooden chairs that flanked her door. She saw me sitting there, waved and called out, "How you doing tonight, Errol?"

     Instead of yelling across the courtyard, I got up and slowly walked toward where she was. Slowly, because I didn't want to trip over my own feet and look like an idiot. When I was almost there, I started talking, "Rosa, I want to. . . .  . I want to tell you something." 

       "It's not something bad is it? I'm not in the mood for bad."

        I got up to her to where I was in front of the small porch where she was sitting, so we were almost eye-to -eye. "I was thinking, on how you could tell a serious suitor from someone who is just playing around." 

       There was a little bit of an awkward pause before she answered, "Alright.You got my attention, Errol, but where are you going with this? And be careful because I'm dangerously close to asking you what business is it of yours, who I go out with."

      "No, no, don't get me wrong, Rosa. It's just that I watch you coming and going, and you always move with such grace no matter what you're doing, I find it amazing. I mean from, over there,...

        I got tongue-tied for a moment and Rosa got a little impatient and gestured for me to finish my thought.

       "I was thinking that if someone came and asked you out, you should take a pistol and aim it right between their eyes and ask them if they were willing to take a bullet for you."

        "Let's say, for the sake of argument, they tell me no. What would I do then."

        "Shoot 'em, of course." The answer made her smile briefly, but she reined it in immediately."

        "Seriously, I should shoot them? For asking me out?"  I nodded. she smiled again. "That's it? That's the best you got? How long did it take you to come up with that?"

          I shrugged, "I don't know. I don't wear a wristwatch, I'll just have to say three beers worth. But there was a lot of added pressure on me, you have to take into consideration."

         "What pressure?"

         "Like the three beers gave me a little more courage than usual, so I went for it. Don't get me wrong, I wanted to talk to you a lot of times, but didn't, because I was afraid of the rejection, so I knew that if I didn't go for it tonight, I'd probably wouldn't ever get another chance. So, it didn't leave me much time to think of something smarter to say."

         She held up her fingers like a gun and pointed,"And that gun thing, right between the eyes, Bam! That's what you came up with?"

         I gave her a sheepish grin, "Yeah, but only because, from where I'm sitting over there, I could see that you are not only pretty on the outside, you're just as pretty on the inside. I see how you help Mrs. Cohen, how you treat your son, and how you brought flowers to Miss Mildred on Mother's Day knowing that her daughter died last year. You always ask how I'm doing like you really want to know. I started thinking about things, like how anyone who was worthy of your affection should be willing to die for the privilege."

          "How 'bout you. Would you take a bullet for me, Errol?"

          I didn't hesitate, "You know, I think I would."

          "You have to admit, it's a little strange for you to say that because you barely know me, I mean, we've barely talked."

         "I know you better than you think." It got so very quiet, I couldn't handle it anymore, so I turned and started walking back to my beer. After a few agonizing steps, I hear a voice behind me.

           "Isn't this where you're supposed to say, I'd like a chance to get to know you better."

           I turned around and faced her, "Where I come from, saying you'd take a bullet for someone, pretty much kind of implied that you'd want to know more about the person."

             She smiled but this time a little sadly, "Where I come from, you become skeptical of people's intentions, especially men. Just so you know, I've watched you too, Errol, you know the way you're always there to help Miss Mildred take her groceries in like you know when she's going shopping and plan your day so that you're there, the way you manage to take time to have coffee with Mrs. Cohen every Tuesday before you go to work." She choked up a little, "And how you always ask my Lenny about his day like you really want to know." She paused again, " I was actually working up the nerve to ask you over for dinner even before you ever offered to take a bullet for me."

            "Is it too late to take that part back then?"

        "Hell, yeah! That's the deal breaker, What could be handier than having someone around willing to take a bullet for you?"

            "In that case, the offer still stands." Rosa laughed for the very first time that night, and it was like music to my ears.

           "You got any more beer?" I nodded and held up three fingers. "Let me check on Lennie and I'll have a beer with you."

           I swear on my mother, Rosa looked like an angel as she walked back toward her bungalow, and me being as totally confused as I have ever been in my life, I whispered softly to myself, "Damn, Errol, what have you gone and done."