North Dallas Forty (13 page)

I threw down the paper and stared blankly at the wall.

“It’s pretty freaky all right.” Joanne was sitting on the commode, sipping from a glass of iced root beer, her favorite morning drink. She was bent forward, reading the paper I had tossed to the floor. “Pretty freaky. Did you read about this Mexican family the police shot up accidentally?”

I nodded.

“It says here they didn’t even speak English.”

“Who?”

“The Mexicans. Musta really scared ’em. The police bustin’ in their door and shooting ’em with shotguns like that.”

“I’ll bet it stung some, too,” I said, leaning back and sliding under the water until just my nose and eyes peeked out. The hot water on my head eased the throbbing ache, but it still felt like my skull was being crushed. A sharp pang behind my left eye brought me upright quickly. Water sloshed out of the tub.

“Hey!” Joanne jumped.

“Sorry.” I pulled my wet hair off my forehead and out of my eyes.

“Why don’t you cut your hair?”

“My head hurts too much. You didn’t hit me with anything last night, did you?” I rubbed a spot on my forehead. The bone underneath felt cancerous.

“The paper said they booked the whole family as dope pushers. Three of the kids are under ten.”

“Can’t trust them greasers,” I said, standing up and dripping more water onto the floor.

“Poor baby.” Joanne leaned over and kissed the head of my red, wrinkly, dripping little penis. “What do you want for breakfast?” She straightened up into an elaborate yawn then handed me a towel.

“He’ll have a live mouse and I’ll have what you’re having.” I rubbed myself vigorously, trying to convince myself I was healthy.

“I’m having chocolate pudding.”

“How about bacon and eggs?”

“No bacon.”

“How about eggs?”

“Nope.”

“Toast?”

“No butter.”

“Okay,” I said, giving up. “I’ll have some of that pudding.”

“Only one serving, but I’ll share it with you.”

“No ... no ... I’ll just drink the coffee. Why’d you ask?”

“I couldn’t send you out on a day like this on an empty stomach.” Her voice made a three-octave jump and she began to laugh her delightful little laugh. She turned and walked out and clomped back down the stairs.

“Fuck.” I laughed at Joanne in spite of my blood oath never to smile before noon and not at all on a rainy day.

It was 9:15. I had time to go by my house to pick up a heavier coat. Another cup of coffee and a joint would revive me enough to get out the door.

The morning was gray, cold, and rainy. The wind was blowing in bone-penetrating gusts. It was the kind of day to ride fence in a plaid mackinaw, astride a buckskin Appaloosa, hat pulled over squinted eyes and tied tightly with a wool scarf, face scrunched into the collar of the red plaid coat.

Traveling west on Loop 12 to the North Dallas Tollway, I flicked on the radio.

“I told Con,” Uncle Billy crackled, “let me talk to them boys ... they’ll win for Ol’ Billy. I’ll take ’em to the Superbowl ...” I turned the radio off and shoved a tape into the deck.

The car topped a rise and I could see the western horizon; billowing gray clouds rolled overhead. Behind them, probably over Fort Worth, a black mass followed. A hell of a storm was coming.

I pushed the car up to seventy-five as soon as I pulled onto the toll road. It was a risk because of the radar and late morning traffic. I was more scared of the traffic than the radar. Dallas drivers are a peculiar sort. Spoiled by wide flat highways and convinced the ability to drive an automobile comes automatically with the money to buy one, they smash into each other at a phenomenal rate. Despite all my fears the sound of the tape deck and wet tires on wet pavement hypnotized me and I almost ran through the tollgate. The marijuana had relaxed me, had increased my headache, and had made me tired all at the same time.

When I reached home my front door was open. I assumed it was the maid—or the wind. It was neither. The house was a shambles. Furniture was overturned and drawers had been emptied onto the floor. I dug through the mess, trying to assess the loss. But it was a difficult accounting, as I didn’t know what I had had in the first place. The bedroom was worse. All the big things, television, stereo, cameras, and shotguns, were still intact. Twenty dollars was missing from the top of the dresser. I had been burgled for twenty bucks. It would cost me more than that to get the place cleaned up. I decided against calling the police, lest a carelessly discarded marijuana cigarette turn this into the crime of the century. I could see the headlines:

DOPE FIEND GRIDDER GETS CHAIR
!!

I left the mess and clawed my way to the back of the walk-in closet for my sheepskin coat. I pulled on the coat, stepped back into the bedroom, and scared the shit out of Johnny, my maid.

“EEEEEEEEEEE!!!” She had just walked into the room and my sudden materialization from the closet reduced her to stark terror. She looked a caricature, fear-gorged white eyes against a purple-black face, fingertips pressed to a brilliant magenta grimace.

“Goddammit, Johnny, don’t ever scream like that,” I said.

“Oh, Mistah Phil, you scared poor Johnny into da middle a next week.” She dropped her hand to her heart and patted her breast. “I seen this here mess an’ didn’t know what to think.”

“I was burgled.”

“You was what?”

“Burgled. Burgled. You know, robbed.”

She nodded her head slowly, still disoriented with fright.

“I was afraid this had sumthin’ to do with Mr. John David.”

“What about John David?”

“He’s dead.”

John David was my crow. He had been given to me by Don Willie Dimmitt of the legendary University of Texas Dimmitts. Johnny, in some bizarre interpretation of social propriety, always referred to him as “Mr. John David.”

“Dead!” I had always considered John David indestructible. One night, after a disastrous day and a bout at the Royal Knight with five bottles of cheap sauterne, I had come home in a fit of depressed rage and had emptied a thirty-shot, banana-clipped, M-l carbine into my darkened back yard, accidentally blowing John David’s wooden cage to shreds. He had somehow miraculously escaped and sat cawing fatly at me from the garage roof while I reloaded. I emptied the gun again, indiscriminately into the neighborhood. I fired at shadows and passing airplanes. It was a nonspecific, multidirectional rage.

I figured I had seen the last of John David that night, but early the next morning he avenged himself with loud waking calls against my blinding hangover. I quit feeding him that day for his own good, in hopes that he would return to the wild. But, like all crows, he was an amazing scrounge and, most nights, when I opened the back door he would just walk in, holding in his beak a whole chicken leg or a sourdough biscuit or several french fries. It was beyond me where he got them.

“How’d it happen?” I asked Johnny.

“I swears, Mistah Phil, I don’t know.” She talked rapidly, her eyes wide. “I was in here straightenin’ your bed when I hears this awful squawk. I runs outside an’ Mr. John David is laying dead in the driveway.” She stopped momentarily and pursed her lips. “I thinks he fell off the garage and bust his neck. The rev’ren’ thinks he committed suicide. Animals do that, ya know.”

“It was probably suicide,” I agreed. It probably was.

“Anyways, we buried him in the flower bed.”

I walked to my window and peered into the back yard. Stuck in the freshly spaded earth, next to the unpainted stockade fence, was a small cross made from a coat hanger. I was ashamed of my past transgressions against John David.

Turning back to Johnny, I noticed for the first time that she was lugging a huge Wollensak tape recorder.

“What’s that, Johnny?”

“Oh—I did some recodin’. Me an’ mah sistah an’ the rev’ren’ made a record. She plays the piano.”

The reverend was idling in the driveway in a 1963 Cadillac just as he did every day Johnny cleaned my house. I always suspected Johnny wasn’t as meticulous as some domestics I had known.

Johnny was active in a south Dallas evangelical church and often extorted money and time off from me for alleged church functions and family tragedies. She had worked for me a little over a year and had already gone through most of her immediate family and had created some religious holidays I had never heard of. She had also convinced me to supply her with photos of myself and my teammates. Forging the autographs, she sold the pictures for a dollar apiece in the ladies room of a local nightclub. I got none of the receipts.

“Come on. Sit down an’ listen, Mistah Phil.” She waved me back into the living room.

“Well now, Johnny, I’ve got to ...” I obediently followed into the front of the house, trying to protest.

“It’ll only take a second.” Her eyes at once became sad and insistent.

“Okay, but only a few minutes. I’ve got to get this place cleaned up and get to practice.”

“Don’t you worry yo’ head none—Johnny’ll take care of her boy.”

I replaced the cushions on the couch and lay down. Out the window I could see the reverend, a big man around two hundred fifty pounds. He was smoking a cigar. All the windows in the Cadillac were rolled up and the engine was running. The sky was getting darker.

The first couple of songs were nondescript pieces about God, salvation, and hell. They were Johnny’s own compositions, and she sang them at full volume, only slightly flat. Every now and then a high-pitched wail would accent a verse or repeat a phrase. Johnny would smile and nod her head.

“Dat’s my sistah. She sings reeeal good high ... real good.”

I nodded my head slowly and stared at the ceiling. A song ended.

“This here’s the one I sent to Uncle Billy.” I resolved it would be the last I would hear.

“Mistah Phil Elliott is a good man!

He nevah do no wrong ...”

“Johnny, what in the hell is that?” I sat straight up. I could hear the reverend’s deep bass.

“He nevah do no wrong.”

“Shhh ...” Johnny held her finger to her lips and scowled at me.

“Mistah Phil Elliott is a fine man

He nevah go downtown ...”

“He nevah go downtown.” A high-pitched scream identified Johnny’s sister.

“She sure do sing reeeal good high.”

“Goddammit, Johnny, you can’t—” I started to get up from the couch.

“Shhh ...”

“Yessir, he’s a good man

And nevah fool with God.

He ... nevah ... fool ... with ... God.”

The sister began to beat hell out of the piano.

“Goddammit, Johnny, shut that thing off.” I was heading for the recorder. “You can’t send that to a radio station.”

“I already done it.” She beat me to the Wollensak. “I sent a copy to Uncle Billy Bunk ... he’s always talkin’ ’bout ya’ll.”

The futility dawned on me and I stopped in the middle of the living room. With my hands on my hips I stood, staring at the floor. I stifled a smile.

“Okay, Johnny,” I said finally. “I gotta go. Clean this place up, will you? I’ll pay you extra.” Maxwell said I overpaid Johnny, but she was the only maid I had. If God had wanted me to have a real maid, he wouldn’t have sent me Johnny.

And after all, I never fool with God. “And Johnny, thanks for burying John David.”

I turned and started out the front door, my mind already moving toward the practice field.

“If’n I don’ finish today—I’ll come back,” she called after me. “We got this doin’s at the church an’ I—”

“All right, Johnny.” I waved my hand over my head without breaking stride, my mind already in the training room.

“Hi, Reverend,” I called out as I passed the rusting car.

The reverend grinned and waved, the cigar clamped firmly between his teeth.

The sky was black. Big drops of rain started. By the time I got back to the toll road and headed north again the rain was falling in sheets.

I kept my speed under fifty, pushed in a tape and began to think over the events of the morning. John David was dead. I regretted more than ever that insane night when I had almost killed him and everything else. It scared me to know that person, but I guess John David understood. He had come back. I quit feeding him for his own protection, figuring the wilds of Texas safer than living with a madman. That evening had been a culmination in rage of a week that had begun with my demotion to the bench and had ended with my tax accountant disappearing with three years’ income records and eight thousand dollars of my money. Poor John David, he had stayed with me through the hardest of times.

I made a concerted effort to stop thinking of deceased friends and began to consider the burglary. Things had disappeared from the garage before. It was not surprising; the neighborhood was not the best. An old residential district, it was making the difficult transition to an apartment-commercial area. The change would take years to complete. Until then, with the resultant higher taxes and better security, transients could move through undetected. In the twelve-block square that surrounds my house there were scores of new apartment buildings and an incredible number of attendant crimes of violence. I considered myself lucky that I hadn’t been raped.

The flashing red lights brought my attention back to the rain-slicked highway. The storm had slackened some, but the rain was still coming down cold and hard. Traffic in the south-bound lanes was backed up, but not stopped. An ancient black Chevrolet pickup track was turned sideways in the two outside lanes. Its rear axle had broken in half. Police cars were stationed in front of and behind the immobile truck, their flashing lights reflected eerily in the rain. A gray-headed black man in striped bib overalls stood, soaking wet, by the tailgate of the Chevrolet. He was talking to a policeman. Two other officers were directing traffic past the scene. The black man looked desolate. A truck farmer on his way to farmer’s market, his corn, okra, and tomatoes were scattered across three lanes of traffic. Grim-faced men in business suits smiled slightly as they navigated their machines through the overturned baskets. Once they reached clear pavement they roared away toward town, trying to make up lost minutes.