The Troubles of Johnny Cannon (22 page)

We kept on our course and they didn't say much else to us for another good twenty minutes. We could see the land of the good old U.S. of A. in front of us. The radio came back.

“Johnny Cannon, you are cleared to land at Bates Field, the Mobile airport. Your guardian is on his way here and he will take you where you need to go.”

I didn't much reckon I knew who they meant by my guardian, but it was something else he said that got me as worried as a cat in a rocking-chair store.

“Excuse me, mister, but I was wondering if you could help me out with something.”

“Roger that. Go ahead.”

“How do you land one of these things?”

Carlos shot me a look like he was wishing he had a parachute. I sort of wished I did too. The radio was quiet for another good five minutes, and then a different voice came through.

“Johnny Cannon, this is Major Steve Harrison, flight instructor for the Alabama Air National Guard. I taught your brother how to land a plane and I'm going to teach you how too.”

The legendary Major Harrison. I was dumbstruck, so I nodded.

“Did you copy that?”

Carlos nudged me. “You have to speak into the little boxy thing.”

“I copy that, mister,” I said.

Major Harrison started telling me real specific instructions about moving the rudders and changing the speed and such, and I was real thankful to Tommy that I could understand it. As we got closer and closer to Mobile, we started going down and I really felt good about landing that big hunk of metal.

That is, I felt good until I actually saw the landing strip.

Dadgum, it's a whole different story when you're watching your brother bringing you in for a landing on one of them things. It looks plenty big, and plenty long enough, and there don't seem to be no reason to worry.

But when it's you landing it, that landing strip looks like the smallest little piece of concrete with no hope of keeping your airplane on it. I was sure we was going to crash and burn like the
Hindenburg
did back on May 6, 1937.

“Okay, Johnny, you're coming down just fine. Now, keep your nose up.”

I looked up at the ceiling. Carlos nudged me again and pointed at the nose of the plane. I pulled back on the yoke. The nose of the plane started to lift up.

“Not too much, now. Not too much.”

I kept pulling back. It didn't feel like too much yet.

“No, Johnny, you're going to flip it. Nose down a little.”

I sure didn't want to flip it, so I cranked the yoke away from me.

“Not that much!”
Major Harrison yelled into the radio.

Too late. We smacked right into the ground like a car hitting a wall.

“Straighten out, you need to straighten out.”

I was trying. We rolled a little and our wheels was sparking against the runway. We skidded along the way and I got thrown from the seat into Carlos. Then I thought to cut our engines off.

We finally came to a stop.

“Johnny! Johnny!”

I picked up the radio.

“Yes sir?”

He started laughing.

“Are you still alive, Johnny?”

I felt of myself to make sure.

“Yes sir, I sure am.”

“Then that was a good landing. Congratulations.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE INVASION

W
e'd had to sit around at the airport for a while so we could get checked out and asked a whole mess of questions. Carlos had told me to keep as quiet about things as I could, 'cause he said you couldn't never know who you could trust. So I didn't spill nothing about the Captain or Tommy being on ice or nothing. It was real hard when Major Harrison was telling me how sorry he was that my brother had died. I accepted his condolences and left it at that.

After a little while, one of them fellas came into the room and said that my guardian was there. Scared me half to death, 'cause I reckoned Captain Morris had shown up to hog-tie me and throw me in the back of his pickup.

Instead, Mr. Thomassen came in.

Come to find out, he was the reason they wasn't too surprised when I radioed in. After he'd woken up in the ditch, he started calling up every person in the government that owed him money and told them he'd cancel their debt if they found me and got me home safe. Turns out Major Harrison owed him something fierce, so as soon as he heard my name, he got right on it. I was never so glad that folks had gambling problems before in my life.

Mr. Thomassen and Carlos hugged on each other like two best friends would, sort of how I reckoned me and Willie would when we saw each other again. Then, after we got done appeasing the folks there at the airport, we got into his Cadillac to head home. That's when we told him about what had happened in Havana.

“So Dr. Morris is on his way to Cullman?” he said.

“Most likely,” I said. “And we got to get the tape to Short-Guy so Pa can get out. We should call him up from Birmingham, and the National Guard, and maybe even the president. Somebody needs to go over and protect the Parkinses.”

“Right,” he said. He started to say something else to me, but I had to admit, I was starting to fall asleep, so I wasn't listening so good. It had been a real long day.

He grinned in the rearview mirror and turned on the radio. Then he and Carlos started talking to each other in Spanish. I listened to the music and, in two minutes, I was fast asleep.

I must have been real tired, 'cause I slept almost the whole way from Mobile to Cullman County. When I woke up, it was darker than the inside of a skunk's butt.

“Where we at?” I said. I interrupted a conversation they was having.

“Fifty miles away,” Mr. Thomassen said.

I could have guessed that, actually. I recognized some of them hills as being home. Even though I hadn't been gone but a day or two, it felt like it had been forever since I'd seen them. Sure it was dark, but there ain't no darkness that can hide home from you.

Anyway, there was a light I could see on the horizon. A light I hadn't never seen before.

“Say, what's that?” I said, pointing over to the light.

Mr. Thomassen looked.

“It looks like a fire, by my guess.” He watched it for a bit. “Yes, definitely a fire. Look at how it's flickering.”

“Do you reckon it's a forest fire?”

“Probably. There isn't anything over there, that I can think of.”

I had to swallow real hard.

“No, there is,” I said. “That's where Colony is.”

“Oh, those poor people. The last thing they need is a fire.”

“They ain't got no fire department over there either.” I was starting to get sick to my stomach. “We need to go over there and help them.”

“We can call the fire department from the shop. We have to find Dr. Morris.”

I knew that was the sensible thing to do. I knew we had to have priorities, and I knew that going off track was the worst idea anyone could have.

But somebody had to stand up for Colony.

“Mr. Thomassen, we got to do it. We can't let them poor folk burn.”

He let out a sigh, but he didn't argue. He got off the highway and started taking them back roads that you had to take to get to Colony. I wasn't sure if he was mad about it or not, but I was sure glad that he was doing it.

As we got closer to the limits of Colony, it was becoming more and more clear that there was serious trouble. It wasn't so much that there was a wide fire burning. It was that the fire was burning at the most important place in Colony. At least in my opinion.

It was burning the church.

When we got a little closer, I saw Mr. Thomassen and Carlos both get tense, and Mr. Thomassen stopped on the side of the road real short of where we was supposed to be going.

“What's wrong?” I said. “We need to go help out.”

“This fire was no accident,” Mr. Thomassen said.

“What you mean?” I said, then I saw what they'd seen.

All around the church, watching it burn and carrying torches of their own, was a bunch of fellas with white robes and white hoods on their heads.

It was the Klan.

And that could only mean one thing.

Cullman had invaded Colony.

“We can't get involved in something like this. Not right now,” Mr. Thomassen said.

“We can't
not
get involved,” I said. “For all we know, Willie and his pa are up there. And maybe the tape.”

“Johnny, we should go get the sheriff. This is bigger than we can handle.”

I was watching the building as it was falling apart. The flames was starting to reach up to the steeple.

“There ain't no time,” I said.

Carlos reached back and squeezed my knee.

“Well then,
chico
, what do you suggest? Something from that survival guide of yours?”

I reached in my pocket. Then I got an idea.

“Superman,” I said, and I showed them both the action figure. Mr. Thomassen looked at me in the rearview mirror.

“I think we'd have a better shot getting the sheriff.”

I shook my head.

“No, not actually Superman,” I said. “Back in 1946, there was a fella that wanted to hit the Klan where it hurt. So he got in there with them and learned all their secrets, every single dirty little thing that they was hiding, 'cause it would make them seem less scary to folks on the outside. 'Cause that's how the Klan gets their power, from folks's fear.”

“So, he was Superman?”

“No. He gave all the information to the fellas that was running the Superman radio show. They made a whole series out of it, called
Superman and the Clan of the Fiery Cross
. And the story was that Superman beat the Klan by getting in there among them, drawing their fire, and pulling off their masks. Which is just what the show did to the real Klan, it pulled off their masks. It was the biggest punch in the gut the Klan ever got.”

“So you're saying—” Mr. Thomassen said.

“We should do the exact same thing,” I said.

We drew straws real fast and Carlos got the short one. I was super glad. I reckoned I'd done faced death enough times for one day.

Me and Mr. Thomassen got out of the car and snuck up to the back side of them Klansmen. I was hoping I could see Reverend Parkins or Willie, maybe, and that they was okay. Or, if they was stuck in the church, maybe we could hurry up and get them out.

But then I saw what the mess of them fellas was doing together, and I completely forgot all about our plan. 'Cause they was all gathered around Reverend Parkins, who was lying on the ground, covering up his head. And they was all kicking him.

It felt like a bone in my brain snapped in half. I started to run out of the shadows, but Mr. Thomassen stopped me.

“Patience,” he said. “We'll get him.”

The hooded fellas stopped kicking Reverend Parkins all of a sudden and a couple of them tilted their hooded heads like they was hearing something. Then I heard it too.

Carlos was singing some Cuban song as he staggered out of the darkness right in there among them.

“¡Buenas noches, amigos!”
he said, waving a beer bottle he must have found in the dirt on the way up there. “Beautiful fire.” He walked over to Reverend Parkins and held his bottle out to him.
“¿Cerveza, padre?”

One of the fellas that had been doing the kicking gave Carlos a push.

“Move on. This don't concern you.”

Carlos held his hand up to his ear.

“
¿Que?
I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you through your pillowcase.”

The fella stepped closer and yelled.

“I said, move on, this—”

Carlos grabbed his hood and ripped it off.

It was Bob Gorman. He started cussing something fierce and wound up to punch Carlos, but then he stopped.

Mr. Thomassen had darted out of the shadows quick as a whip and had his pistol in the back of his head.

“Hello, Bob. It's true what they say, when the cat's away.”

Bob raised his hands above his head and got perfectly still. All them other hooded finks did the exact opposite. They all took off running.

“Now, I think we need to have a long conversation regarding your debt,” Mr. Thomassen said.

I went to check on Reverend Parkins.

“They took Willie,” he said, his voice all raspy. “We heard they were burning the church, so we came down. One of them grabbed Willie while the others attacked me. I don't know where they went.”

“Don't worry, I'll find him. Tell me, what did the fella look—”

I heard a kid's voice cussing from the other side of the church. Said something about his bike chain getting stuck.

I jumped up and ran around the other side in time to see a fat Junior Klansman trying to take off on his bicycle.

I tackled him and yanked his hood off.

Eddie started crying immediately.

“Who took Willie?” I yelled in his face.

“I don't know,” he blubbered. “It was a stranger we didn't know. This was all his idea.”

“A stranger?”

“Yeah. A Texan with a mustache.”

Captain Morris.

“Where did he take him?”

“He said something about getting to the house.”

I felt all ready to backhand him right across his fat face, had my hand raised and everything, and he knew it was coming 'cause he braced himself for it. But then I saw Carlos helping Reverend Parkins, and Reverend Parkins was looking over at me, and I just couldn't do it. I dropped my hand.

“I knew you was a backstabbing, low-life scumbag,” I said. “But I used to at least think you was human. Now that I've seen what you done this time, though, I know I was wrong. You can't do something like this, to people like them, and have a drop of human blood in your body.”

He just kept on crying. I took his bike and headed up the mountain.

It didn't matter to me that the church was ten miles away from Willie's house, or that I was pretty tired from facing them Klansmen, I pedaled harder and faster than I ever had in my life. There wasn't no way I was going to let the Captain hurt Willie, or Mrs. Parkins, or their little girl.

I was almost to their house when I heard screaming. Only it wasn't coming from the Parkinses' house. I heard it coming all the way from my house.

And I could tell the voice was Willie's.

I jumped off the bike and cut through the woods that was between our houses. I ran over the mountain to our backyard and slipped in behind our shed to try and figure out where the yelling was coming from. It didn't take too long.

“Where is the tape?” the Captain yelled. They was in the kitchen. I could see through the window there was some water boiling.

“I ain't telling you,” Willie said. He sounded like he'd already been hurt some.

I heard some splashing, and then what sounded like meat getting sizzled.

And Willie screamed bloody murder.

I snuck over to the kitchen window and peeked in.

Willie was tied up to a chair with his pants off. Steam was coming off his good leg, right out of some blisters. The Captain was filling up a coffee mug with boiling water.

“Where is it?” he said. He started tilting that cup over Willie's leg.

Willie had his teeth clenched and he was breathing really hard.

“You might as well just kill me. You ain't getting nothing out of me.”

“Murder is too easy,” the Captain said, and then he poured out his cup onto the leg.

I had to turn my head, but I knew what was happening 'cause Willie was screaming something fierce.

“I've got plenty of water. And the good news is, I've got plenty of time, too. Nobody in this county is going to come looking for you, not for a while.” He jammed a glob of tobacco into his mouth. “So, go ahead and take your time. You'll tell me where it is eventually.” He started to get more water into his cup.

I had to do something.

I ran around to the front yard where our busted-up truck was still sitting. I reached through the missing windshield and started honking the horn.

I could hear the Captain cussing. I heard him head through the house and start to open the front door, so I ran around to the back.

I hopped through the back door and went in there where Willie was.

As soon as he saw me he started fighting back some tears. I went over to untie him.

“No,” he said, “you got to get the tape first.”

“I got to get you out of here.” I showed him the cut that was still on my hand. “We're blood brothers, remember?”

“Yeah, and I ain't letting your pa get punished for something he didn't do.” He forced himself to smile at me. “I don't wear short pants anyhow. I'll survive this a little longer.”

I didn't want to do it. The thought of letting him take all that for me and my pa wasn't right. You just didn't do that for somebody.

Not unless you was brothers.

“Okay, where's the tape?”

“You remember all them holes I made in your shed's roof with the rifle?”

He didn't have to say no more. I bolted out of there, and it was just in time, 'cause I heard the Captain heading back into the house. I went behind the shed and started climbing up the pile of wood that was stacked up. All the while, I could still hear Willie screaming and the Captain doing more pouring. It made it real hard to concentrate.