"Yeah, no shit." The cloud of smoke nodded.
Machovich had suffered through one year of a technical college where he grew to strongly resent his father's ambition that his eldest son would one day hold down a respectable job at Ethyl Corporation, making solvents. Macovich moved out of the house his freshman year and joined the Army, where he learned to fly helicopters, and then moved on to law enforcement. A couple months back, he gave his father a framed autographed picture of the First Family, just to rub it in a little bit. Mrs. Crimm had written a nice personal inscription on it that said, "First Lady Maude Crimm."
A cigarette butt sailed in a perfect arc and landed on the pavement, where it glowered like an angry eye.
"All I gotta do is say one word to the guv about you flying as my co-pilot and he take care of you," Macovich bragged without the slightest intention of facilitating helicopter flying or anything else for Andy-except trouble, maybe. "That's assuming he don't remember me. Now if that pool shark daughter decides to make a fuss, then I might be best off speaking to him another time. Wooo, I'd better light up quick before they come out."
For a brief instant, the smoke cleared enough for Andy to remember that Thorlo Macovich was the biggest black male he had ever met.
"Now, it ain't the guv who mind people smoking." Macovich lit another menthol cigarette. "But the First Lady-wooo."The smoke shook its head." 'Member that interview she did in the paper the other Sunday on tertiary smoke? I mean, how?" The cloud of smoke went on and on. "What? I inhale, then I blow it in your mouth, then you hurry and locate a third party and blow it in their mouth?"
"You'd better blow it somewhere quick," Andy said as he worked out a plan. "Here they come."
Ten
The most malignant smoke in Virginia was not generated by Salem Lights but by a highway pirate named Smoke, who had been consummately evil from birth. His lengthy rap sheet of crimes as a juvenile ranged from truancy to setting cats on fire to malicious wounding and homicide. Although he had finally been brought to justice in Virginia several years earlier, he had managed to break out of a maximum-security prison by forming a noose of sheets and pretending to hang himself from his stainless steel bed.
When prison guard A. P. Pinn noticed Smoke slumped over on the floor, a noose around his neck, bug-eyed with his tongue protruding, Pinn threw open the cell door and rushed inside to see if the inmate might still be alive. Smoke was, and he jumped up and smashed a food tray against Pinn's head. Then Smoke quickly dressed in Pinn's uniform and sunglasses and walked out of the penitentiary without detection. Pinn had gone on to write a book about his ordeal and published it himself. Betrayed had not sold very well, and Pinn turned to hosting a local cable show called Head to Head with Pinn.
Smoke watched Pinn Head, as he called the show, every week to make sure there were no leads on his disappearance or any suspicion that he was the leader of a pack of road dogs. In a way, it disappointed him that Pinn had never so much as alluded to him except to mention that being trayed had traumatized Pinn and no one can relate to what it's like to be smacked in the head with meat loaf and instant potatoes until they have had it happen at least once.
Pinn's show had gotten under way and Smoke and his road dogs were gathered in their stolen Winnebago, which was parked behind pine trees on a vacant lot in the north side of the city. Smoke pointed the remote control and turned up the sound as Pinn smiled into the camera and talked with Reverend Pontius Justice about the Neighborhood Watch program the reverend had just kicked off in Shockhoe Bottom, near the Farmers' Market.
"Look at that motherfucker, " Smoke said as he gulped down an Old Milwaukee. "He thinks he's something. "
Pinn was dressed in a double-breasted shiny black suit, a black shirt and black tie and obviously had bleached his big teeth. When Smoke had known Pinn in the pen, the guard had worn thick tinted glasses. Now he must have contact lenses that caused him to squint a lot.
"What does he think this is? The Academy Awards? I can still see the knot on his head from where I hit him with the tray. " Smoke pointed.
"He always had that bump on the back of his head, " said Cat, the most senior road dog. "See, he didn't use to shave his head and put wax on it like he does now. So the bump shows up. Man, he got one shiny head. Need to wear sunglasses to even look at it. " Cat squinted through cigarette smoke and tapped an ash into a beer can.
"What kinda wax you think he use?" asked another road dog named Possum, who was puny and unhealthy-looking and tended to stay in his room during the day, watching TV with the lights out. "Bee wax, you think? Hey, maybe he use Bed Head. 'Member that dude I bought the gun from? I ask him how he got his head so shiny and he say he use Bed Head that he got in New York in one of them Cosmetic Centers, and it cost like twenty bucks. It's in a little stick you gotta push up from the bottom and then rub it on your hand like dod'rant… "
"That fucker putting dod'rant on his head?" said a third road dog, Cuda, which was short for Barracuda. He stared blearily at Pinn's polished scalp.
"Shut up!" Smoke turned up the volume again.
He was getting excited because Pinn was warming up to the very subject Smoke had been waiting to hear about.
"… In your book Betrayed, " Reverend Justice was saying from his overstuffed chair next to a plyboard wall painted to look like a bookcase next to a cheery fireplace, "you went on at great length about how neighbors got to be neighbors instead of just living in the neighborhood. I believe I'm quoting correctly. "
"Uh huh, I said that. "
"So if we love our brothers and sisters and keep an eye on them coming and going, the neighborhood will change. "
"Uh huh. Yeah, I might have said that. "
"Did you have this philosophy before you got banged in the head?"
"I don't recall. Might have. " Pinn sat straighter in his chair and stared into the camera as he fondled the satin tie he had bought at S amp;K for nine-ninety-five. "I do know I was being neighborly when I checked on that dead inmate, and next thing I know, I'm unconscience on that hard cement floor. He took my uniform and everything in it. " Pinn was getting riled by the memory and it was becoming difficult for him to look serene and wise. "You 'magine that? How would you"-he pointed his finger at his TV audience-"like it someone smack you aside the head and left you naked, implying to the prison population and other guards that maybe you had a male honey who done something to you, 'cause you was found face down with nothing on!"
The reverend was turning pale and beginning to sweat under the hot lights. "That's what forgiveness… " He tried to cut Pinn off.
"Forgiveness my ass! I ain't forgiving that punk. Hell, no. I find him one of these days and then we see who smacks who. " He glared into the camera, staring straight at Smoke. "And let me tell you, someone knows where that snake in the weed is. You seen him, you call this toll-free number at the bottom of the screen and we send you a reward. " He repeated the number several times. "He go by the street name of Smoke and is a plain-looking white boy with dreadlocks and what he calls a beard that got about as much hair as a possum tail. "
"Hey!" Possum objected, tossing an empty beer can at the TV.
Smoke pushed Possum off the ottoman and ordered
him to shut up. "You bust that TV and I'm going to bust your head!"
"Now I don't know what Smoke is wearing these days 'cause last time I seen him he was in an orange jumpsuit, but he's a young white male 'bout twenty-one or -two and mean as a snake, " Pinn went on. "I guarantee he ain't doing nothing to help the neighborhood. Not hardly no way! Now you listen up. " He searched the faceless audience behind the camera. "You want some snake in the weed slithering around your neighborhood?"
"We will absolutely keep an eye out in the neighborhood, " Reverend Justice promised with a nod as he mopped his face with a handkerchief. "Sure is a lot of meanness out there. Just look at this most recent awful case of Moses Custer getting beat on and his Peterbilt being hijacked right there next to the pumpkin stand. "