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."

          

        I was tired from the lack of sleep the night before, but I had to go to work. I had worked at three different jobs since coming from Oklahoma. I pumped gas at a service station, worked in the produce department at a grocery store, and I even twisted a few wrenches working on cars. All my bosses were wonderful people, I couldn't have been luckier in that regard, and I learned something important from every one of them, but something inside of me never felt right while I was working there. I felt restless like I knew I wasn't at home.

        I quit the mechanics job because I didn't feel like was giving Doc Arnold equal value for what he was paying me. He tried to talk me out of leaving because he liked me and didn't  want to see me jobless. One of the guys I met playing cards at Ernie's was a cracker-jack mechanic named Leo Jones who had just gotten laid off because the shop where he was working couldn't afford to keep him on. Leo also had two kids and a wife. So, I took him to meet Doc, and it was love at first sight. They took off to jabbering about engines and gear-ratios and I managed to slip out of the garage without them noticing. Even though I was now jobless myself, I felt pretty good because I had hooked up Leo and hadn't left Doc in the lurch.

        I didn't have a car then and still don't, but I had picked up a used Schwinn bicycle to get to work and back and when was riding it home, Doc's shop was only about four miles from where I lived, and started getting close to where I lived, I saw this old guy wearing a battered straw hat who had pulled this battered looking old truck over to side of the road to pick up an shabby looking sofa somebody had tossed out. He was, grunting, sweating and wrestling with the thing trying to get it up into the back of his truck, so I stopped and asked him if he needed a hand. He held out his hand for me to shake, told me his name was Garret Fitzgerald and that he did, in fact, need a hand.

         "Are ya blind or daft, Son? Do you not see me here wrassling with this forlorn piece of crap? Why would ask such a useless question?"

       When I started to explain that I was just looking to help, he stopped me before I could even get a  word out.

        "No need to explain or apologize, Laddie. It's you that is a helping. I was just making a very poor attempt at humor. If you would help get this sofa unto the back of my truck, I would, for a fact, be very appreciative."

         That's how I met Old Man Fitz, soon to be my next boss. I was barely five minutes away from leaving Doc's employ and the universe seemed to have reached out and spoke to me by saying,"Errol, I just can't have you out there just bouncing around out there at random."

          Outside my own Pa, Fitz quickly became the most influential man in my life. He had actually been born in Ireland and him and his dad had migrated first to Boston then came out to the West Coast because of the condition of his father's lungs. When I asked him about a mother and siblings, he told that his mam and his sister Kelley had died right before he and his dad had sailed across the ocean. He was a stout but rather portly gentleman with a great white shock of hair and long white beard to match with piercing blue eyes and big red cheeks. Fitz could  be taciturn at times and come off as grumpy, especially when you first met him, but once he warmed to your presence, it would often be like talking to your dad, a priest,  a college professor, a newspaper reporter, and a door-to-door salesman rolled into one. The reason that he was out picking up trashed furniture from the side of the road was that it was how he made his living. I helped him wrestle that old sofa onto to his truck, and he made me an offer.

       "Sonny, I'll pay you if you would come with me to my warehouse and help me to take her inside my workshop. Normally, I have a helper but I just fired the lad for being lazy, and my wife, who's at home, has a bum ankle." He pointed in the direction of a hill to the west of where we were, "It's just over that hill right there, and I'll bring you right back. I'l even throw in a sandwich and a pop."

        So, I threw my bike on to the back of the truck being careful not to scratch it and went with him. True to his word, in a couple of minutes, he turned his truck into the driveway of this large brick warehouse situated in a fairly substantial grove of Eucalyptus trees. Over an open double-wide garage door was a large sign saying Fitz's Resurrection Warehouse in large green letters outlined in gold.

        While we were lugging the sofa into the open doors, I questioned him, "Is this some kind of ministry or something?"

        He was huffing and grunting some but answered, "Don't be daft, Son. Gather your facts before you question things, else they won't be obligated to give you a correct answer. Also, your question mark should have been placed after the word ministry. Or something is a redundancy."

         After we placed the sofa down where he wanted it, I felt the need to explain that I felt my question was relevant considering there was a large red cross painted on the sign, but once again he checked me before I started talking. He simply held up the back of his hand as he began walking toward work bench where he picked up a lunch pail and started walking back toward me. He gestured toward a table and chairs and motioned for me to sit.

         "In that cooler there, they're a couple of pops on ice. My wife has this wonderful machine that makes ice. Amazing, huh? Could you be so kind as fetch me one? You can have the other." I did as I was told, and he opened up the lunch box and took out two rather large Roast Beef sandwiches and handed me one. He sat down in one of the chairs and let out a big sigh, and after we got situated, he began again. "Hortensia's sandwiches aren''t as good as my last wife's, but they're not bad. Go ahead and dig in."

         He ate a couple bites out of his sandwich and took a big swig off his pop. The sandwich was not just great, it was one of the best sandwiches I'd ever eaten. I wanted to tell him so, but I was afraid he'd cut me off again. Instead, I just said, "This is pretty good." 

         He nodded and gestured at all the stuff that was around us. "There's your resurrection, Son. I fix old things, bringing them back to life you might say. I haven't sat between the walls of a church since we buried me mam and my sis. That's not to say I don't respect and believe in the message of Jesus. I just don't like the fat priests who tell it. As you can see, I've spent a great deal of my own life bringing things back to life, not to believe in a resurrection, and you might one of those fools, who'll say,'They're just things Fitz, they are not living beings. But, the way I see it is, a thing is a thing, it occupies both time and material space as well as a space in our mind, and I consider what I do, much like what Christ did in his own time."

        I looked around and was totally amazed. The entire space, and it was a big warehouse,  was full of things like repaired vacuum cleaners and old radios he had rescued from the trash. There were chairs, tables, floor lamps, sofas, and bedposts. Oddly, the whole western wall was covered in flattened tin cans and looked like a piece of art. The East wall was almost entirely made up of glass windows that he had colored so that the sun coming in the morning filled the space with multi-colored light like a rainbow, or one of them great cathedrals in France. The thing that most caught my attention was the front of what had once must have been a rusted out truck that had been painted and converted into a beautiful sofa. The whole thing, all of the objects, the colored lighting, the tin-can wall, along with the portly, red-cheeked Irishman with his flashing blue eyes seemed so magical, and so full of life, I didn't to leave. Something inside of me shifted, and there was suddenly nothing more in life that I wanted to than to get a job and work for this crazy old Irish man. I so desperately wanted to ask him for a job, but was afraid of the possibility of a rejection.

         Instead, I told him the story of how I come to be on that road where he had found that sofa. When I came to the telling of why I left Doc's employ, I noticed some moisture welling up in his eyes. I finished and felt embarrassed about being so open with someone I had barely met, so I swallowed the last of my pop, placed the bottle on the table and looked down at my hands.

       "Well Errol, it seems like we've been placed on a path of convergence. I just fired my helper, a Mexican boy named Arturo, last evening. He was too lazy and didn't want to work. It was a hard thing for me to do because I truly liked the lad, and I really liked his mam, and I know his family needed the money. I thought that he needed the lesson of getting fired more than he needed the job. Then Mathilda, his blessed mother, came this morning before I opened, and told me it was he best thing I could have done. She said they had long talk and he had decided to get a part time job and return to school. At this point, Fitz  broke out his pipe, stuffed some tobacco in it, and lit it, took a huge puffs and blew out two huge smoke rings. "When you said that you walked away from the job because you didn't feel that you were giving that man Doc a good return, I knew right away that I wanted you to work for me. I meet so many hungry men in these desperate times looking for work who'll tell you they can drive a nail straight into piece of granite and then you find they don't even know how to hold a hammer, or read an alarm clock."

      I found myself a real home at the Resurrection Warehouse. It didn't pay as much as the mechanic job, but Fitz told me that after hours, I was free to work on projects of my own if I wanted to make some money on the side. He was also teaching me the skills I need to repair and refurbish things. On top of that, it came with lunch and a pop.

         "There'll be a doughnut or two from time to time and some coffee in the morning. Of course, Hortensia would be expecting you to have dinner with us from time. She don't get out as much because her knees gives her problems and she likes to know what's going on at the shop. Now, if gets a little nosey about something I don't want to know about yet, I'll clear my throat or cough. She knows the game, and won't be getting mad at you if it happens."

         The last thing he told me that morning has stuck with me ever since he said the words, and it will be there when I die, and maybe, if I'm lucky enough someday, be able to pass down. It came after I asked him why he was so brusque with me at first.

       "It was for your own edification, Lad. You saw me wrestling with that sofa and asked me if I needed help, and I know you were just being polite, but a good man wouldn't ask. There's such a thing as being too polite."

       When I got to work that morning, Fitz was just finishing a piece that we had found put out on a sidewalk outside of apartment complex. It was an old roll-up desk in such horrible condition I questioned  even if he could work his magic on it. He just chuckled and said, "How would you like it, if people just gave on you?" It was drying from the last coat of varnish, and it was stunning! I had no doubt that someone would buy that desk for hundreds of dollars. He was feeling good about the results and wanted to have some coffee before we went out on our junk run. I decided to tell him about my dream and my problems with Giancarlo.

        "I've been married three times before this one, and every one of them ladies paid me a visit after they passed on. My first, Mary came back just to say hello. Marta, the second, was angry because we had never gotten around to having kids, and she felt cheated. Hilda, the last one, a fine German lady, was just trying to scare me a little."

          I asked him which of the wive's was his favorite; he just chuckled and said the one that's in the kitchen cooking us lunch. Hortensia, his current bride, was a widow of a truck driver, and she was a little on the portly side herself. His first wife had been thin, so when I asked him which body type he preferred, he said, "You like 'em boney when you're a younger man because you're boney too and there's a lot more room in the bed. When you get older though, you like 'em with a bit more heft because they're softer when you're trying to sleep. There's nothing worse than getting an elbow to the liver when you're counting the sheep."

       Our conversation became much darker when we discussed about what I should do about Giancarlo. Fitz rose from the table and slowly wandered over to a large, gun-metal gray metal closet standing in a corner. He rummaged around in it a bit, and unlocked a footlocker and withdrew something wrapped in a red cloth and brought it back to the table where he placed it and unwrapped it. It was a shiny chrome, pearl handled .38 pistol.

          He grimaced as he spoke, "I'm going to lend you this pistol till your problem is solved to your satisfaction, Errol." I started to protest but he just held up his hand, "My Uncle gave me this in Boston and Boston back then, was a dangerous jungle for a young Irish man fresh off the boat. Now, I'm agin killin a man as much as anybody, but a far worse thing is ending up on the other side of that equation. This man wants to do you harm and travels around with two gorillas. It's one thing if you knew for certain the full extent of his intentions toward you, but you don't, and they involve a woman who might need protection too. And as my uncle said when he gave me this gun, 'It would better to have a gun and not need it, then need one and not have one because you were so enamored with the false illusion that human beings are all naturally good.'"

         I had to admit that argument made a lot of sense, so I reluctantly accepted the gift. He told me that the six chambers were fully loaded and then reached into his pocket and handed me six more bullets along with a bit of advice that he had apparently culled from a dime-store novel about Wyatt Earp which was to make sure you took your time and aimed carefully before you pulled the trigger.

         As, it turned out, I almost had to heed his advice that very day. At quitting time, I had to figure out a way to get that pistol home. So, I unloaded it and put six bullets in either pocket on both sides of my jacket. Then I carefully wrapped the gun back up in the red cloth and tied it down inside the basket behind the seat using an old shoe string.

    I got about a mile from my house and turned the corner on a road leading up a hill, when a car full of evil intentions, two ape-like creatures, and oily, wannabe gangster was barreling down that same road.  They saw me as they whizzed past me and then slammed on their brakes at the bottom of the hill where there was the only place wide enough to turn around after putting the car into reverse a few times. There was copse of trees at the top of the hill, and I tore out toward it as fast as I could peddle. I almost made it too, but right before I reached it, Giancarlo's car came brushing by, knocking me off the road and into the rocky field that adjoined it. I fell, ripped the knee out of the right leg of  my jeans and tore the right elbow out of my blue flannel work shirt. I also hit my head on a rock and was bleeding from a wound on over my right eye.

     I was somewhat dazed, but I could see Giancarlo and the twins dismount the car and start sauntering my way. The two thug-like brothers flanked Giancarlo. They each had a large wooden baton and were slapping them into their palms to make a loud noise. Giancarlo was dressed from head-to-toe in white linen and was stepping gingerly so he wouldn't step on something that would foul his clothing and his shiny, two-tone brown and white shoes.

       Boot, the bigger of the twins was yelling, "Hey Mister Look at the Naked Woman,' your little tricks ain't going to work no more. We ain't as dumb as you think we are, are we Butch?" Then he looked over at his brother who was having a time figuring out what his brother had said, then you could see the understanding finally unveil in his head, and he yelled, "Oh yeah, time for you to suffer 'Mr. Look at the Naked Woman!'" Then he tried to slap his baton a little extra hard, but he stumbled, and almost tripped and fell which caused Boot to roll his eyes and slap his hand against his head and clearly forgot he had baton in it and almost knocked himself out.

     Giancarlo shook his head, but wasted no time getting to the point."Well, what do we have here, Boys? Looks like a little rabbit don't it? Look at the little rabbit, how vulnerable it looks. Tiny little rabbit so pitiful and afraid. Is it a girl rabbit or a boy rabbit?" Giancarlo stopped abruptly, and the two dummies ran into his back and almost caused him to fall forward. He turned and glared at both of them before he resumed the abuse. "Damn, look at all that blood on its head; that must hurt a lot, huh?"

        Boot was impatient, "Come on, Boss, let us work him over. We'll mess him up good and proper. He'll look like a mud puddle when we're done! What d'ya say?"

      I don't know why Giancarlo didn't, but he didn't. He was apparently satisfied for the moment with drawing my blood; he gave me a very strict warning to stay away from Rosie DeLeon, and emphatically stated that she was his girl, and if I knew what was good for me, I would stay away from her. Rosie was a pretty girl and mother of one who lived across the courtyard from me at Cohen's Court and often moonlighted waiting on the poker tables. He had mentioned something about an unnamed female in his initial threats, but I wasn't seeing anyone at the time, so I didn't know who or what he meant.

   So, when he named Rosie, the motive for his anger suddenly came clear. She was standing behind me when I had caught him bluffing with a pair of fours and raked in a huge pot at his expense. He got up and left the table in a huff, but didn't say anything at time, so I didn't put two and two and together. A couple of weeks later though, he walked in the bar where I was sitting, sat down beside me and acted like he spilled his beer on me by accident.

   I stood up to protest, but then the two mountains rose up behind him, and I hesitated for a second. Thankfully, it was Ernie who broke it up by ordering them outside. Giancarlo was still mouthing off as he went by me and was going on about how he was going to get back at me. He said something about a girl, but I didn't hear him clearly. Then when he mentioned her by name, I remembered that I had taken a shiny silver dollar from the pot and flipped to Rosie for bringing me luck.

       I was so relieved to watch them fools walk away and crawl back into Giancarlo's car and drive away. Not because of the beating that never happened, but because it meant that I could finally release my grip on the pistol I had reloaded as I watched them approaching.


                



     

        

         

           

     You know what's weird. Gravity? Just think about how little the average person knows about that kind of stuff. Most people don't even notice when they drop a glass or something that hits the ground. Them scientists say that Isaac Newton was born in the middle of the 17th century or there abouts, and if that apple tree story really took place, it had to have happened pretty close to the beginning of the 18th century. So, that means that us humans have been sitting under apple trees getting hit in the head by falling apples for tens of thousands of years at least with out ever noticing that anything funny was going on before Newton came along and laid claim to the notion. There were probably a few Greeks and Egyptians who had a clue, but they didn't have radio back then, so I guess it didn't matter, at least up until that German feller invented the printing press, I guess most people simply assumed that stuff just falls down whenever you let it go.

      One day, my family and my Uncle Wilbur's family went up into the snow to find a Christmas tree. My dad just couldn't accept paying a dollar for a tree when we could get one for free. I guess that some kind of sense. While we were there, we saw these people paying this guy money to let them climb up his hill and slide down on an inner tube or on a sled.

       My Uncle Wilbur blurted out, "Damn, look at all them folks paying for that guy to let them climb up that hill."

     My dad answered with sarcastic grin, "Nobody pays to climb a hill, Brother. They paying for that down hill slide." I remember that day because that saying became one of his favorites, that term 'the down hill slide'. He used it to explain just about ever thing and in a lot of different ways. For example, he used it to describe laziness and cutting corners and often would say, "Beware of that downhill slide, son. Anything worth doing involves a climb." When my cousin Wilcox, Wilbur's boy, lost everything he owned because of his hardheaded nature, Pa said, "Stubbornness often precedes that downhill slide."

      When I went through all his things years after he died, I found an old, battered looking brown leather-bound notebook. Pa had been keeping track of all those things he had ever said like that. He had gotten the notebook on his tenth birthday and written hundreds of sayings over the years. The very first one was "Don't count your chickens before you eat them, makes more sense to count them after they're gone."

      They did get better over the years.  When I opened the book and looked to see what it said on the last page, I was surprised to discover that Pete had written something it in. It was something my dad had said right before he died. It simply stated, "My whole life's been a downhill slide, how could it have been otherwise, my mom was standing when she had me."  I remembered that there was the story that Pa's mama was standing up with her back against the wall when he came out the chute.. I don't know the particulars, or even if someone or the other had just made that up to explain my father's strange character traits. I guess it made some sense in an oddball sort of way, and Grandma Maggie was sure stubborn enough to do something like that just to prove she could.

    I kept the notebook on a table in my bedroom, and whenever I started missing Pa, I'd open it up and read a couple of his sayings. My favorite was. "Why did the chicken cross the road? It ran out of other options." When I told Pete I kept it there to remind me of Pa, he asked me how come I didn't have any pictures or things of Ma's. I thought it about for a couple of seconds before answering. "Don't need nothing to remind me of Ma, she's with me every day." He started to raise his finger and say something smart back, but then it hit him what it meant, and he stopped mid-word and nodded.

    This the kind of stuff you think about when you wake up in the middle of the night because your dead wife came to you in a dream and wouldn't talk to you. It's also the same thinking that you would use to distract yourself from thinking about your real problem which was what were you going to do about a cheap little hoodlum named Giancarlo Robbia who, for some reason or another, hated the very fact that I was even alive.

        I couldn't sleep, so I put on a jacket and went and poured myself a small glass of orange juice and went and sat outside on the small porch in the front of my two bed-room bungalow. I don't why I rented a two bedroom apartment, I guess maybe because I knew that Pete was so wild and unsettled he'd would probably need a place to stay at some point. I set the other bedroom up as an office with an old desk I'd found in a thrift store along with a reading chair and a couple of book cases. My little library was small, but it was loaded up with some powerful thinking. I had read a lot of Mark Twain's stuff and a lot of Dickens. It had some Thoreau and Emerson too, Dad's volume of Leaves of Grass that Grandma had given him for his 16th birthday, Nay favorite was this book by a Canadian name Maurice Bucke, and I even kept Mama's two volumes of Browning's poems that she kept on the fireplace mantle.

       Even though my mind was restless, I couldn't help but notice what a lovely night it was. A large full moon seemed to float on a pillow of clouds surrounded by a halo. For a moment, I started up in thinking how foolish we humans are, as we could witness this natural beauty nightly and speculate on how the moon follows the earth and reflects the light from the hidden sun, and how the angles change and shadows encroach only to be driven back. There's a whole lot of stuff to sort through in thinking about what it all means. The greatest thing about it though, is that we have the eyes to witness this display and thoughts to process it, the heart to appreciate it all the way down to our bones and words to describe it to generations yet unborn. But most of us, one way or the other, have to turn our focus on to the stupidity of people like Giancarlo Robbia. I would much rather sit there and lull myself into sleep looking at the moon, but I knew it wasn't going to happen on this night.

      Giancarlo was two-bit hood who liked to pretend he was real hot stuff. He reeked of cheapness and small minded thinking; he seemed proud of his ignorance and exuded stupidity and greed. He wore these shiny double-breasted suits which he thought made him look like Bugsy Siegle, but were actually cheap knock-offs produced in a run-down factory building in Chinatown by an old, Chinese tailor named Wong Lee. Old man Lee liked to play cards and told us that Giancarlo had once threatened that unless Lee gave him the suits at half price he would burn down the factory building. He didn't understand that Old Man Lee was already hand-making top quality suits for some real deal people. Lee pretended to go along with the deal, but one night Giancarlo got dragged out of a casino, thrown in back of Packard and woke up, naked, and trussed like a pig ready for slaughter in an orange grove out in Topanga valley.

     All those cheap suits he wore did was make everybody aware that he was not the tough guy he pretended to be. He was strictly small-time and was contented to be twisting the arms of old ladies who ran boarding houses, and working men who were just trying to make a living pumping gas, fixing motors cars, or selling groceries. A nickel and dimer's what my daddy would have called him. Rumor had it that he wasn't even Italian and that his real name was Juan Carlos Roberts, and mom was Mexican seamstress, and his daddy was an Arkansas sneak thief named Squeaky Roberts.

      That didn't mean that he wasn't dangerous. Wannabe gangsters were generally stupid and would do rash things that a real hood would never do. He always strutted around with these two big apes who seem to share a single eye-brow, mouth breathing Neanderthals who carried walnuts in their pockets so that they could crush two of them at a time with their barehands in an effort to look tough. I had avoided their wrath a few times by merely pointing and saying, "Hey, look at that woman over there. She ain't wearing any clothes!" They would turn and look and it was at least a minute before they turned back around, and by that time, I was long, gone. One time I did it, and there weren't even any people in the direction that they turned, just a big, concrete wall. Still, took them a minute or two before they realized there wasn't any naked lady there.

     I knew that made them doubly dangerous because they would do what Giancarlos paid them to do, but, when it came to hurting me, they would come at me, screaming, "There never were no naked lady, Errol! You lied to us." The way I figured it though, was I could always do it again, and Giancarlos would actually have to be there to tell them not to look, and in that case, dealing with him would cancel out any threat they posed.

    I went back to thinking about my Pop. My main goal in life was simple. I just wanted to do it better than my pa. It wasn't going to be all that simple either. My dad had a lot of faults. He'd these spells of depression and would do impulsive things like drink and gamble all of our money away. He'd come home drunk, and when my Mom would meet him at the door full of anger, he'd invariably break down sobbing, begging for forgiveness, and she would always forgive him. Ma's greatness weakness was her unending love for my  daddy.

     But judging Pa was a lot more complicated than that. At heart, he was a really good person and a highly intelligent one at that. He just wasn't cutout to be a farmer. He was crucified by the one truth he could never understand. Pa could build a house from scratch though, wire it up, pour the concrete, frame the windows, paint it inside and out, roof it, all of it. He could take a car apart and put it back together in better shape than it was before he started messing with it. I'll never understand why he just didn't do those things, and why he felt so strongly about making that farm work. When I asked Mama, she'd tell it was because the farm had been in our family for over a hundred years and his daddy, my grandpa Thomas, considered it his legacy and therefore it was Pa's duty to pass it down to his son's, and his son's duty to pass it down to theirs. It was tragic, how it all played out, but damn, I was glad Pa didn't put that weight on his boy's, and Ma never shared in that view at all' she tolerated because it Pa's burden, and she was wife.


     He came home one night and burst in the door looking all crazy. Mama had gone over to Grandpa's house to help to deliver her sister's baby. Petey jumped up from the table where we were playing cards, and cried, "What's the matter, Papa? What's wrong?"

     Daddy didn't answer, he just walked slowly over to where Peter was standing, put his hands on Pete's shoulders and looked at him all weird and then looked all around the room before uttering, "Where's Mama, Pete?"

        Pete told him, then Papa came over to where my little sister Sissie and I were sitting, put his hand softly on top of her blonde head, picked up one of her braids and lifted it up slowly before letting it go, he grimly smiled at me for a second then started walking back toward the door. Sissie was scared and started crying, and Pete ran to him tried to grab hold of him, but Papa just gently shoved him away. Pete was off balanced and fell. Papa went out and closed the door behind him. I helped Pete up, and we all ran outside, calling for Papa to wait. Me and Sissie stood on the porch, she clinging to my arm as she cried.

           Pa  went to the shed attached to the barn and went inside, he lit the lantern and I could see the small window light up. He was looking for something and noisily rummaging around, I could see Pete creep up and try look into the window, but the light abruptly vanished, in the darkness, and I could hear Pa come out and start walking towards the woods behind the field where we pastured our cows. Pete was running toward him and calling, "Daddy! Don't go, Daddy! Wait! Mama be home shortly!"

         I could barely hear Papa's reply, "Go home, Pete. Take care of Errol and Sissy. Tell Mama, I be home shortly. Tell her I'm sorry."

       Daddy disappeared and Pete came walking back out of the darkness. He was twelve years old, but  in the dim light, he looked like an old man.

      

        

            

       

     It was a quarter till two, and Ernie the bartender was already showing signs that he was ready to close. Ernie, the owner and barkeep of a seedy little establishment in the San Fernando Valley, was a stocky little Armenian dude with a weird beard that was braided on both sides of his chin. His dark hair was curly and awkwardly lay on his head like a misplaced rug. Whenever he was ready to go home, he'd always turn off the radio and shut down some of the neon behind the bar then stand there and dry a glass that never seemed to get dry.

      "What's the matter, Ern, you in a hurry to get home?"

      "Naw, that ain't it, Errol. Ma's not feeling too good. She called about an hour ago and said her stomach was bothering her."

        "Hell, you shoulda said something. I'll swallow this one down then. Hey, you couldn't mix me one up for the walk home could ya?"

         "Well asides the fact that I legally can't do that, it goes against my better sense to pour scotch in a paper cup. What's the matter, you dry at home?"

        I nodded, "Payday's tomorrow."

        "Tell ya what I'll do then. I pour ya shot of Lamberts."

        "No scotch?"

       "Scotch is not for shots or paper cups. Scotch is a thinking man's drink. What you need for walking is whisky."

        I didn't argue and finished my drink and put the glass down on the bar, "I guess beggars can't be choosers."

        We both laughed and Ernie turned and went and got the Lamberts.

      I guess it would be wrong to call Ernie's Place an Armenian bar because even though there a boat load of Armenians living in the LA area, Ernie and his brother Leo were the only ones who seemed to ever come into the place. He explained it by saying it was because of a feud he had with some of his cousins. The regular clientele were middle class white dudes from the offices and car lots in the vicinity, a mess of blue collar Okies and Mexicans, a few Black  guys from the airport, and some bored housewives. Some of the neighboring bars didn't let the ethnics in, but Ernie's wasn't like that.  The whole theme of the place centered around the poker tables in the back room where how they judged character was solely based on how well you played cards. It was Sunday evening though, and Ernie shut the tables down on Sunday.

         It was a place where people either went to play poker or to drink away problems. Some, like myself, went there to talk to somebody other than the pictures on the walls. I'd come out to LA two years before from Tulsa, Oklahoma after my wife Elsie died from being hit by a hit and run driver. She was on her way to tell me that she was pregnant. She didn't die right away but lingered in a coma for over a week. My brother Pete callously picked that trying time to come tell me that he had decided to go out to California to seek his fame and fortune and wanted me to go with him. Mind you, my wife was lying comatose in the bed not six feet away from where we were talking.

       "Elsie's not going to want to go to California."

      He didn't say nothing, at least not out loud, the look he gave me though was pregnant with meaning and hung there in the air between us for several minutes.

     I broke the silence first, "What about Sissie? We the only family she's got out here now that Aunt Susie died and Walter and his family went west."

      Pete rubbed the stubble on his chin, "She's a big girl now, Errol. She don't want to keep living with her older brothers. Besides I think she's going to marry Oliver Jones if  he ever works up the nerve to ask her."

         "Don't you think we at least ought to ask her?"

      "Well sure, but......., " he never finished his sentence because a nurse came in to check on Elsie.

           It turns out that we didn't have to ask our sister what she wanted because she died two days later. She had attended a barn dance in Pryor and on the way home, a drunken farmer had pushed the car she was in onto the path of an oncoming train mistakenly thinking his wife was in the car with another man. They brought her body into the morgue in the basement of the hospital while Peter and I were upstairs sitting with Elsie. Then my wife passed away not 10 minutes before Johnny Bowron, our neighbor's son, burst into the room to tell us about Sissy.

        I never did tell Peter one way or the other about going west. It was just assumed. I think that I was numb right up till the moment our truck, loaded with everything we owned, pulled out of the muddy, rutted, lane that ran up to our farmhouse. Pete had handled the whole shebang. Elsie was buried by the side of her Daddy up in Tulsa, but Pete and me buried Sissy on the hillside overlooking our farm, right by our mom and dad. I remember thinking that for the thirty-two years my family owned the place, there wasn't a single grave up on that hill. When we left, there were three.

       Ernie brought me a paper cup containing a double shot of Lamberts. I was reaching in my pockets to pay him when just waved me off and said it was on the house.

       "You looked like you needed that drink, Errol, and far be it for me to turn away a man who needs a drink."

       "Appreciate it, Ern, and you're right, I sure needed a drink tonight."

      "You ain't worried about that Giancarlo guy are you? If you want, I'll give you a ride home."

      "Naw, shit no. I ain't worried about that fool, him and his little gang of thugs. No, you go home check on your mom. I like walking at night. It clears my head."

     He finished locking up the door and walked over to where his car sat underneath the streetlight. He had to fight off a cloud of bugs to unlock it. He waved as he pulled out of the parking lot onto the blacktop road.

       I waved back and then turned and started walking the three quarters of a mile up hill climb to the one bedroom bungalow I shared with a parakeet named Edgar.

      That night Elsie came to visit me. I know it's probably wrong to phrase it that way, her being dead and all. But, the fact was, she still visited fairly regular. This time, she woke me out of a dead sleep. I was dreaming about a night at the county fair when we were on our first real date. We got in fight because she thought she caught me looking at another girl, got mad and took off through the crowd.

     It wasn't true. There was no way any fool could look at another girl when Elsie was around. I mean she was small town, church-going girl, and back then that meant she was clothed from her neck to her knees. My brother Pete used to use the word swaddled to describe the look when he was complaining about how the girls in our home town always dressed. He had picked up the word in Sunday school class, when our teacher, the aptly name Ms. Hogg said the infant Jesus was wrapped in swaddling clothes.

     Pete had spent a year traveling with some carnies and had no end of stories about how the girls dressed in the towns and cities more sophisticated than our own, which in his view, was pretty much every other town. He also used a lot of terms like hot to trot and out looking for it when he launched into one of his rants.

     I didn't care if Elsie wore a flour sack, which I'm sure most of our mothers had done at one point. Any guy in our neck of the woods would have snapped their damned head off trying to catch a glimpse of her walking by. Looking at her made me think about what life must have been like being a peasant boy in the Middle Ages, living in a hut with your animals, and then seeing the Lord's beautiful daughter come riding by. You couldn't help but think that the mere vision of. her wasn't heaven sent.

      I swear I was just looking away so I wouldn't give away what was going on inside my head by just staring at her all the time. Maybe, some other girl happened to randomly intersect the path of my vision when Elsie turned to tell me something, or maybe she just made the whole thing up to play games with my heart, I don't know. I was her first beau, and that was her first real time away from her mom and dad's protective vision. My dad had warned me about such things one night as he sat outside on the porch sipping on his nightly glass of squeezins as he called it.

      "You keep a young girl locked town tight as she begins her turning, she's going rebel one way or the other. The tighter the chain, the crazier the dog."

      I looked at him stupidly, not comprehending the analogy. Hell, I didn't even know what an analogy was then, "Elsie not a dog, Pa. She's the prettiest girl I ever seen. Maybe the prettiest girl in whole damn world."

     He just looked at me for a bit, took a sip and said, "Don't be stupid, Errol. I don't want to talk to stupid. I use up all my stupid talk when I'm trying to tell them pigs what to do. Most women have a great deal of crazy locked up inside them. Not judging, mind you. It comes with that monthly cycle thing they been given. They have to learn to live with things, we men, don't even know about. It's the child bearing and raising of youngins that uses most of the craziness up, and keeps'em from going full blowed crazy."

     "Mama?"

     "Your mama is one of the rare'uns, boy. Jeanne always so calm. There's two reasons she was so sane. Number one, she really believes in that Bible. Most of the people in that church say they do, but she really does. Secondly, her daddy was a lot crazier 'n her mama. Your mama had to learn how to be sane a lot earlier than most girls just to survive her raising and take care of her siblings."

      I guess, he just was trying me to tell to keep my guard up when it came to dealing with females. He tried to explain that Elsie was bound to play games with me regardless whether she wanted to or not. He said that she wouldn't even understand why she was doing things, and that I needed to stay smart and not get caught up in the craziness, and that my main job was to keep guiding her back  to her true self."

       I was just talking to talk, and smugly answered that that sounded easy enough, and Pa suddenly spit out his drink, doubled over, and damned near choked himself to death laughing. When he finished, he had to take a big drink to stop the choking, and the strength of liquor caused him to choke even more. I damned near choked my pa to death out of mere stupidity that night. I think I learned more about human frailty that evening than anything that's happen to me since.

       After regaining some composure, he finally said in a voice made gravelly by all the choking, "Easy nuff? Son, when that little pecker of yours starts to gettin hard enough to scratch your name in that oak tree over yonder, you're going to learn a thing or two about crazy all right, and you're going to learn it, and still have to learn to act normal, build a house, dress a hog, and keep your own fool seff from being cheated by all the damn, two legged varmints round here. Easy has nuthin to do with it. Listen, you avoid easy like the plague, easy's got nuthin to do with real life."

       I never did learn if Elsie was playing with me or not. By the time I caught up with her and grabbed her by the shoulder, she turned around with the biggest smile, and I forgot the question.

      The night in the dream though, I was one shot away from winning her one of them big dolls, but I quickly put the rifle down and started chasing her through the crowd. Yet, every time I'd get close enough to start to reach out, someone or something would interfere, and she'd get even further away while I dealt with the problem. She made her way all the way out by the parking lot, where there was a beer stand where Pete and some of his friends were standing around talking. She finally stopped and let me catch up to her, and, this time, when she started to turn, she disappeared, completely vanished into the night and I realized I was with dreaming and woke with a cry that hurt me to the bone.

       After that, I couldn't go back to sleep. So, I got up and made myself a cup of coffee, went outside, and sat down on the single wooden chair I kept by the front door. And while I was pondering over what I needed to do about a sleazy, little two-bit hood name Giancarlo Robbia, the morning sun peeked over a mountain top far away.