Wesson Apartments was engraved in stone above the door. The building filled the corner of Riviera and Yosemite streets, a modest looking neighborhood. I didn’t know anybody down here. I wondered who in the hell Libby knew down here. I wondered what she was doing in there. Several times I opened my door, ready to go find out. Each time I shut the door and waited some more.
An endless, fidgety hour later, Jimmy Herndon came out of the Wesson Apartments with his arm around my sister. They kissed, he waved, and she walked away toward Grand River, stride bouncy, arms embracing her books.
I fired up the Ford and laid a hot streak of rubber as I swerved onto Riviera Street and rolled abreast of Libby. Her eyes widened when she saw me; then she looked resolutely ahead as she walked. “Go away, Benjy.”
I kept my tone reasonable. “Need a ride, don’t you?”
“I’m fine. Now go away.”
I babied the Ford along, keeping even with Libby. “Come on, hop in,” I said. “You really don’t want to ride that sweaty old bus all the way home, do you?”
She looked at me suspiciously, then tossed her head in what passed for acceptance. I stopped the Ford, she crossed in front and got in. I managed to keep the lid on till we’d turned the corner and were part of the westbound rush up Grand River.
“You’re not seeing that son of a bitch no more, Libby Perkins, or I’ll break both your arms for ya, I swear to God!”
“I’ll see him all I want!” she shouted back. “And you got no right to spy on me.”
I calmed myself with difficulty. “Listen. Herndon’s trouble. He done got into a knife-fight, and somebody died, and the cops are after him.”
I did not get the expected shocked silence. “He didn’t kill anybody,” Libby came back readily. “It was all a big mixup. An accident. They’re just picking on him.”
“How come you know so much about it?” She didn’t answer. “Don’t tell me you were with him when it happened.”
She shrugged and began to play with the window crank, mouth ugly. “What about you? You’re not exactly Mister Simon Pure yourself. I’ve smelled beer on your breath, plentya times. And I know you’re weedin’ off every chance you get. And you prob’ly got some kind of trashy girlfriend stashed away somewhere.”
“I’m seventeen,” I said. “Makes all the difference.”
“No,” she shot back. “You’re a boy and I’m a girl. That’s the difference.” She turned on the radio. It was playing “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.” I shut it off on the third beat. Libby scowled and went on, “Mama put you up to this. She thinks just ’cause I’m a girl that I can’t handle things. Well, I can. Every damn bit as well as you.”
Silence prevailed till I made the turn onto Burgess, three blocks from home.
Libby said softly, “You just forget what you saw today. If you snitch to Mama and Daddy, I’ll say you’re a liar.”
“Stay away from him, Libby.”
“You can’t stop me. Mama and Daddy can’t stop me.” She smiled. “Nobody can stop me. Nobody at all.”
As we turned onto our street, I waved at Mrs. Wilder, and she waved back from her porch swing.
“So,” Fast Eddie said from the shotgun seat, “we gonna thump some rump this afternoon or what, men?”
I slowed the ’51 to a stop in front of Sun Ya’s on Grand River as the radio played “Cathy’s Clown.” “We’re just gonna reason with Mr. Herndon. That’s all.”
Fast grinned at me and jerked a thumb toward the back seat. “Is that why we’re bringing along all this Bubba-beef? Because they’re so articulate?”
I glanced in the rear view. The Bubbas filled the back seat with biceps, shoulders, football jerseys, and identical grins. “Reason with him,” one of them said. “Damn straight,” chimed in the other.
Their real names were Joe and Frank Szewczklieuski. But everybody had referred to them as Bubba, both singular and plural, almost as far back as I could remember. The handle was hung on them by my daddy. Being, like everyone else, unable to tell them apart, he was uncomfortable calling them Joe or Frank. And he never could learn how to pronounce their last name, no matter how patiently we tutored him. One day in frustration he called them Bubba, and it stuck.
It was a hot, sunny Tuesday noon. I’d worked the morning at the grocery and then collected the guys for our little visit to Jimmy Herndon. Libby was safely in summer school so I figured the coast was clear. My reasoning was, if I couldn’t talk her out of him, maybe I could encourage him out of her.
The light changed to green, the song changed to “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” and the topic changed to the Detroit Tigers: sorry as hell, tied for fifth with the Washington Senators and going nowhere fast. I lighted a Camel and joined the bad-mouthing, which went from baseball to women, to beer to women, to Fast Eddie’s new band to women, and from there, neatly, to beer.
“Hey, Ben,” a Bubba said, “tall boys Saturday night.”
“Your turn to buy,” the other chimed in.
“Damn, that’s right,” I said. “Guess I’ll be hitting the usual source. If I can catch Denny on duty. He still doesn’t card, does he?”
“Nah,” Fast Eddie said, “but I think he’s on vacation.”
“I’ll figure it out,” I vowed. “Don’t worry, guys. It’s only Tuesday. By Saturday, a case of tall boys will be ours.”
We crossed Livernois; on the home stretch now. Fast Eddie rubbed his hands together. “I think we ought to take Herndon in an alley and lay waste to his face.”
Eddie’s zeal would have been disquieting if it were not so suspect. “Just let me do the talking, Fast,” I said. “Y’all are along for moral support and that’s all.”
“You guys hold him,” Fast said ominously, “and I’ll hit him.”
I rounded the corner and pulled into the half-full parking lot of the Riviera Theatre. We parked, got out, and crossed Riviera Street, making for the doorway of the Wesson Apartments. We’d just hit the sidewalk when Fast Eddie said blandly, “Hey, guys, I better stay out here and watch the car.”
The Bubbas snickered. I glared at Eddie. “What do you mean, ‘watch the car’? It ain’t going nowhere.”
He was already heading back. “I’ll just sit on the hood and scare off the thieves. You guys have fun.”
He waltzed away, whistling a cheerful tune. “Come on, guys,” I muttered to the Bubbas.
The foyer of the Wesson was small, airless, and empty except for a row of metal mailboxes nailed to the cheap plaster wall. Each box had a name and not one of them was Herndon.
“What now?” I asked the Bubbas. Their only reply was a shared grin. I had a brainstorm. “Come on,” I said, and led them to an apartment door. A brisk knock brought the face of a small busty woman with loose dentures, a small mustache, and a hairnet. “Yaaaassssss?” she asked, wobbling.
“Looking for Jimmy Herndon, ma’am,” I said. “He lives in the building here. Big beefy guy? Blond? Works the carnival?”
“Upstairs,” she said with a Smirnoff accent. “Try upstairs, the door with the Tigers decals.” She slammed the door.
“Now we’re cooking,” I said. The Bubbas trailed me like a herd of steer, up a flight of narrow wood stairs to the second floor. I knocked on the door and it swung open obligingly.
I damn near swallowed my tongue.
It was a small one-room apartment with windows looking out over Yosemite Street. The Murphy bed was held down by the stark naked Jimmy Herndon, who gaped at us through the smoke of his cigarette, and a trim young dark-haired woman who, I realized as she gave a strangled “Eep!” and tried to cover herself, was not Libby.