The Troubles of Johnny Cannon (21 page)

He blinked at me like I was crazy. Maybe he didn't speak no Spanish, either. I tried using what had worked with Carlos.

“I am
looking-o
for the
place-o
where
el
folks trying to
escape-o
might get on
el
boat. Can
you-o
show
me-o
?” That was the best I could do.

He shook his head. Dadgummit.

I was about to try again, but a soldier driving a motorcycle with a sidecar drove up. I ducked behind the fella I was talking to.

“I don't know if you know Carlos Martí,” I whispered, “but I'm his little pal. Hide me.”

The fella must have understood that, 'cause he got in front of me better.

“No más pan,”
the soldier barked at them folks. I think that meant there wasn't no more bread.
“Vamanos.”

The people started shuffling away, some of them grumbling a bit. The soldier yelled at them and they shut up. The fella I was hiding behind tapped me and pointed me at the motorcycle the soldier was on. I wasn't real sure what he meant by that. Then he started hollering at the guard.

“¡Tiranía! ¡Tiranía!”
That reminded me of what John Wilkes Booth had shouted after he shot Lincoln, about tyrants.
“Para escapar del infierno, ¡nos venden al diablo!”
I found out later that he'd said, “To escape from Hell, we are sold to the Devil.”

Well, that didn't seem to sit too well with the soldier. He hopped off the motorcycle and came running at the fella. The fella took off running down the street, yelling
“¡Tiranía! ¡Tiranía!”
as he went.

And the motorcycle was just sitting there, still running.

I hopped on that motorcycle and I took off. And, since I only knew one direction to go, I drove back up the hill to
La Cabaña
. I reckon I was hoping Carlos would be waiting for me.

He wasn't.

I pulled up right under a big window, not really sure what to do next. I pulled out my survival guide, which had helped me so far, and opened it to:

December 17, 1903—First Flight by Orville Wright.

What was interesting about that story, I remembered, was that the Wright brothers had called every newspaper in the area to come out and witness it, but only one showed up. Nobody else believed it was going to be big news.

You don't need everybody on your side. You only need one.

Down at the bottom was the lesson I learned from Eddie, 'cause he'd hung a water balloon over my head and dropped it on me during math.

Always make sure you look up.

Just then the window above me busted through and a fella came flying down. It was Carlos. He ran over and jumped in the sidecar.

“Go! Go! Go!” he yelled.

The guards was already shooting at us, so I kicked it into gear like I saw them do in the movies and we took off.

“What'll we do next?” I said.

“We need to go to the airport.”

Yeah, flying was probably a much better option than paddling a rowboat to Florida.

He started giving me directions and we moved all through the city. It was actually easier to drive a motorcycle than it was to drive a truck, which surprised me. Maybe I'd get a motorcycle of my own someday. A blue one. And I could put the Superman symbol on it.

I almost ran over a chicken 'cause I was too busy dreaming about my Super-Cycle that I wasn't paying no attention.

“Stop here,” Carlos said.

We wasn't nowhere near the airport.

“Why are we here?” I said. He didn't answer.

He hopped out of the sidecar and ran up to the building we was next to. It had boards all over the windows and doors, and there was big signs that said
DECLARAR EN RUINA
on it. But up at the top, faded and torn up, there was another sign.

CASABLANCA

This was Mr. Thomassen's club.

Carlos ran over to the wall next to the door and he kicked at one of the bricks. It wasn't a brick. It was just plaster. He reached into the hole and pulled out a briefcase and then he ran back to the sidecar.

“What's in that?” I said.

“It doesn't affect you,” he said, and looked behind us. “But those men will. Let's go.”

Yeah, them soldiers was coming our way. He told me where to go so we could get turned around and we took off again.

We sped through town as best as I could drive and finally made our way to the back side of the airport. It was still pretty banged up from when them folks had bombed it right before the Bay of Pigs invasion. Still, it looked like they was sending out flights and stuff, and I reckoned it was the best bet we had to get back to Cullman.

“Okay, what's next?” Carlos said.

“What do you mean, ‘what's next'? I thought we was following your plan.”

“I got us this far,” he said. “You're the one with the survival guide. What do we do next?”

“It ain't magic, and I ain't no wizard or nothing.” I looked out at the airstrips, where there was planes getting loaded up with passengers and such. One plane had a bunch of soldiers around it. I looked closer.

Castro and Che was there talking to Captain Morris, who was getting ready to board.

“He's going to fly home?” I said. “I didn't know planes still flew from here to America.”

“Only to transport children,” Carlos said. “A Catholic priest in America has arranged for Cuban children to fly to the States until they can be reunited with their families.”

“And Captain Morris is joining them to tear apart mine.”

Carlos nodded.

“If my cousin, Raúl, has his way, those children are flying to their doom. He's hoping to use the success of defeating America's plans to convince Russia that Cuba is a good place to store weapons. And missiles. All to destroy America.”

My chest got tight. Missiles in Cuba? I didn't want to be around if that ever happened.

“Maybe we could sneak onto that plane,” I said.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Hitchcock, I think you have me confused with Cary Grant,” he said.

“Huh?”

“This isn't a movie. Those guns have bullets that will kill us.”

“What happened to all that running-in-with-no-plan stuff you was saying back in the cell?” I said.

“That was when there was no other way. Now there
is
another.” He pointed over to another airstrip, where a little airplane was getting warmed up. The pilot was sitting, talking to a couple of other fellas, and they was all drinking some beer together. “Do you see what I see?”

“A free ride to America?” I said.

“And no guns,” he said.

We made a pretty good plan, I thought. We ditched the motorcycle and snuck around behind them fellas with the airplane. Then all we had to do was sneak onto the plane without them seeing us and, once we was up in the air, Carlos said he could convince the pilot to fly us to America.

It wasn't until we was halfway up behind them that I realized the big problem with our plan. There was three of them and two of us. Even though they didn't have guns, they had more fists than we could probably handle. Especially with Carlos being all banged up.

Them fellas was finishing off their beer and Carlos was trying to get up to the door on the other side of the plane. I didn't know how to do hand signals in Spanish, so I had to change the plan without telling him.

I ran at them fellas and tried to tackle them.

And that's when I found out that they really
did
have guns.

They pulled out handguns and pointed them right at me. I stuck my hands up in the air. They was yelling stuff in Spanish at me and I really wished Carlos could help me out with it, 'cause I didn't know what they was saying.

Instead he helped me out a different way.

He ran around behind them and slugged two of them with the briefcase. The other one was so surprised, he didn't pay no attention when I wound up and landed a zinger right on his chin.

Carlos grabbed one of their guns and tossed it to me and he took the other two. We both climbed onto the airplane. Once we got in the seats, we stared at each other.

“Well, let's get going,” I said.

“Yes, let's,” he said.

Neither of us did nothing.

“So, take off,” I told him.

“I don't know how to fly.”

“You ain't a pilot?” Dadgummit, that made things more interesting.

“No, I assumed you knew how because of your brother.”

“I do. But I'm only twelve. I ain't allowed to fly. It ain't safe.”

Just then, them fellas we knocked down went off running, hollering at the top of their lungs for any of them soldiers that was standing around.

“Do you know what else isn't safe?” he said. He didn't need to tell me the answer.

I did exactly like Tommy'd always showed me, turning the knobs and flipping the switches. I got us moving on down the runway.

“Could you go faster?” he said. Turns out, there was a couple of jeeps that was heading our way with them soldiers. They was bound and determined that we wasn't leaving Cuba.

“Going as fast as I can,” I said. Then them soldiers started firing. “Okay, I'll try to go faster.”

At the end of the runway there was a great big old fence, which wouldn't be no big deal since we was going to be up in the air before we hit it. Except for one small problem.

I couldn't remember how to get us up there.

It was the simplest thing, the easiest part of flying, how to lift off of the ground. But something about them fellas shooting and us being in Cuba, and maybe every other problem that was bouncing around in my head, was keeping that simple thing from making any sense to me. I just stared at the yoke that was right in front of me and we headed straight toward that fence.

“Anytime,” Carlos said.

“I-I don't remember how,” I said.

“Don't you pull back on the stick thing?”

I knew he was right, but I couldn't make myself do it. I was too scared. It all hit me at once, all the panic that I'd been fighting off that whole time. It made me about paralyzed.

He reached over and grabbed the yoke and yanked back on it. We shot up in the air and just cleared that fence. Them fellas behind us sprayed the air with their bullets and a couple hit our plane. Well, I reckon we didn't own it or nothing. So I didn't let it worry me too much.

I took a deep breath and grabbed ahold of the yoke and started steering. Them fellas kept firing, but we was getting away from them faster than they could aim good at us. After a few minutes, we'd done left the land of Cuba behind us and we was over the water. I pointed us north, 'cause I reckoned that was where home was.

“Well, I reckon we're pretty darn close to home free,” I said.

“As long as they don't deploy the fighters,” he said. “I don't think they will, so no worries. They don't need to draw any more attention to this story than they already have.”

His confidence didn't keep me from looking out them windows every fifteen minutes, though. I was waiting for us to get a rocket shot at us.

Now, I ain't going to sit here and lie to you. Flying an airplane is a lot harder than it looks, and even though I'd done helped my brother out a hundred times or more, I really didn't have no idea what I was doing up there. That's why, even though Carlos said the Florida Keys was only about a hundred miles from Havana, we went two and a half hours staring at the ocean below us. We should have hit Florida in forty-five minutes.

See, when you're up there and you ain't got nothing but water below you, and you're depending on a compass that ain't accounting for the wind blowing you around a bit, it's real easy to get off course.

I started getting real nervous and I had Carlos try to hunt a map for us so I could maybe figure out where we was at. And then, to get my mind off of it all, I decided to take a peek inside the briefcase while he was looking underneath one of them seats.

It was filled with bundles of bills. And they wasn't no small bills, like ones or fives. They was five-hundred-dollar bills, all stacked real nice and banded together. I started to try and count how much money was in there, but Carlos closed the briefcase real fast.

“I told you this didn't concern you,” he said. He handed me a map. “Now, where are we?”

It really didn't do no good looking at the map, 'cause I didn't have nothing to go by but water. Still, I tried to use my brain like how Willie might and came up with a general idea.

“Well, we're flying at about one hundred seventy miles per hour, and we've been going for nearly three hours. So we ought to be right smack in the middle of Florida, but we ain't.”

“Clearly.” He didn't look too happy. I had to think some more.

“But, the wind's been blowing at us real hard from the east. So, if I thought we was going north but instead we've been going northwest, then we might be about here.” I pointed at a spot in the Gulf of Mexico. It was maybe a hundred miles from Alabama.

Just then the radio that I didn't even realize was on started speaking.

“Attention, aircraft. You are entering American airspace. Please identify yourself.”

I reckoned that was a good sign. I picked up the microphone and talked back to them.

“Hi. My name's Johnny Cannon, and I'm from Cullman, Alabama. I'm Tommy Cannon's brother, he's a pilot with the Guard. This here airplane is from Cuba, though. I don't reckon y'all want it up in the States, but if you'd wait till I land before you do anything to it, I'd be much obliged.”

They was quiet for a bit.

“Aircraft, did you say you were Johnny Cannon?”

“Yes sir, I sure did.”

“Copy that.”