In the black leather bucket seat next to me was this lemon-haired, string bean of a kid who Granny had informed me was my kin, to use her word. I studied him. He had blue eyes with long, pale lashes, fair skin with a faint blue vein showing just over the left temple. His straight, lank hair fell into his eyes. He would be considered cute, and when he filled out and reached his mid-teens, the girls would probably consider him a stud or a fox, or whatever the word of the day might be.
Granny said he was my half sister’s son.
Which was double news to me. I didn’t know I had a sister, whole or fractioned, and obviously, I didn’t know about a son. It all had to do with my no-account mother-Granny’s phrase again-who ran off to Oklahoma with a man she didn’t marry, a man who left after fathering a daughter, Janet by name.
My mother had spent her last half-dozen years in an alcoholic fog, living alone in a third-floor walk-up apartment in Tulsa. Although the roughneck was long since gone, dear old Mom never came back to Florida, which is a euphemistic way of saying, she never saw me after dropping me off at Granny’s on her way out of state and out of mind. Still, she always sent a card at Christmas and on my birthday, sometimes with a few dollars or a shirt that was hopelessly small.
I know a psychologist would say I’m into heavy denial, but I don’t remember missing her, and when she died in my junior year in high school, it didn’t mean that much. I still had Granny, and now apparently, so did Kip, son of unknown, unmarried, half sister Janet, who was in drug rehab in Houston or Phoenix or Albuquerque, those cities tending to merge in Granny’s mind.
“ How come you’re not in school?” I asked Kip, as we roared north, passing a Winnebago with mushy tires on the two-lane road lined with conch shell stands and ticky-tack motels.
“ It’s summer vacation,” he answered, giving me a pitying look.
“ Right. I knew that.”
We both studied the double white line a moment, and he said, “You ever see Fast Times at Ridgemont High?”
“ Must have missed it.”
“ It was so cool. Sean Penn is this dweeb named Spicoli, who orders pizza delivered to his homeroom.”
“ Cool,” I agreed.
I stayed quiet a while, sneaking peeks at the kid’s profile as the wind blasted his hair back off his face. Okay, maybe there was some resemblance. He would be more finely chiseled than his roughly hewn uncle, and just now he seemed so fragile that something within me, something buried in the genetic material we shared, made me want to protect him. Trouble was, I had precious little experience with children, and I didn’t know where to begin.
“ I did see Blackboard Jungle,” I said, “but that was before your time.”
“ Yeah, it’s been on the classics channel. Sidney Poitier and Vic Morrow were totally awesome, and the music over the credits was way cool.”
“ Way cool,” I agreed again.
I gunned the convertible around a rental Ford Taurus whose occupants had slowed to stare at an osprey nest lodged on top of a telephone pole. “The song you liked was ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and His Comets.”
Granny had asked me to teach the kid some things. I wasn’t sure what I could do, unless he wanted to know some of the history of rock and roll, or maybe how to get by an offensive tackle with the swim move. In the meantime, there was work to do.
“ Kip, I have to ask you some questions to get ready for the hearing tomorrow.”
“ Yeah.”
“ Why’d you do it?”
“ Who said I did? There’s a presumption of innocence, and if the state can’t prove its case, the judge has to dismiss it, just like Paul Winfield did when Harrison Ford was charged with murder in Presumed Innocent.”
Most clients who try to teach me the law are jailhouse lawyers. Now I had a kid with a J.D. from HBO. “Listen up, Kip. I’m your lawyer, so you tell me the truth without being a smartass. Got it?”
“ Are you a good lawyer or a goofball like Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinnie?”
To our left, the sun was setting over a swampy field of saw grass. Three web-footed terns dipped and cawed, scanning the shallow water for dinner. I gunned the Olds to pass a Jeep hauling a Boston Whaler on a shimmying trailer and said, “Granny gave me the A-form, so I know what the cops say you did. I’m assuming you spray-painted the wall since you were caught with blue paint on your pants, and there’s a witness who saw you chuck the can through a display window. If that’s not enough, you admitted everything to the cop who came to the scene.”
“ He didn’t read me my rights. Not even like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon 3, when he knocks the bad guy unconscious, then says, ‘You have the right to remain silent.’
“ But they’ll testify they did. They always do. Besides, the physical evidence and the eyewitness are enough to convict, even without the confession. So, bottom line, little guy, tell me what was going through that mind of yours.”
“ What’s the big deal? Timothy Hutton did the same thing in Turk 182 as a protest. That’s where I got the idea.”
I hit the brakes and the old car groaned and whinnied as we stopped on the edge of a ditch filled with water, weeds, and probably alligators. We were just south of the Card Sound Bridge, and the traffic was slowing down to watch a flock, or is it a gaggle, of herons heading for the water.
Turning to the kid who allegedly shared my blood, I said, “I don’t care about movies, okay, and I want you to stop showing off. I know you’re bright. I know you wrap yourself in the movies because you don’t have a real family, and you’ve been bounced around so much, you don’t have any real friends, either. But I’m here for you. Do you understand what I’m saying?
“ You’re my lawyer.”
“ I’m your friend and…” I took a deep breath as an eighteen-wheeler roared by, kicking up dust. “I’m family, too.’’
He looked at me skeptically.
“ Look, Kip, neither one of us knows exactly what to do. You don’t know how to be a nephew, and I don’t know how to be an uncle. So, we’ll learn together. When the hearing’s over, I’ll take you back to Granny’s if they don’t send you off to Raiford.”
He gave me a funny look, like I’d hurt his feelings, but he wasn’t going to let it show.
“ I’ll come down and visit you,” I added quickly, “and you can come to Miami and visit me. I’ll try to do the uncle things like buying you ice cream, taking you fishing-”
“ Or to the movies.”
“ Right. And you’ll do the nephew things like…” What the hell were nephew things? “Like cutting the grass, changing the oil in the Olds, and waxing down the sailboards.”
“ You’ll have to show me how,” he said happily, seeming to welcome the opportunity to work up a sweat.
“ It’s a deal,” I responded, and we exchanged high fives.
“ Can we go to the movies tonight?” he asked.
“ No. I have to meet a client.”
“ A murderer, like Jeff Bridges in Jagged Edge?”
“ Nobody ever mistook Blinky Baroso for Jeff Bridges,” I said. “Danny DeVito, maybe.”
I pushed the clutch to the floor, grabbed the chrome ball on the stick shift, eased out the clutch while giving it some gas- leaded, high-octane-and tore up gravel, then burned rubber getting back onto the road. I figured the first lesson in nephew training was safe driving, which I sum up as follows: If you’ve got three hundred fifty cubic inches, use them all.
I live in a coral rock house between Poinciana and Kumquat in Coconut Grove. The house is a two-story pillbox that has withstood sixty years of hurricanes, a number of Super Bowl parties, and many years of benign neglect. Just after nine p.m., I pulled the Olds under a chinaberry tree that serves as a carport and showed Kip how to put up the canvas top. He seemed to like helping. Then I grabbed the duffel bag with all his worldly belongings and led him to the front door, which I opened by banging my good shoulder into the humidity-swollen wood. The door yielded with a groan, or was that me?