I passed a dirt road and a dirty white sign on a metal post that read: beech road. Backing up, I turned into the road. It seemed to be all woods until I passed a few new and neat-looking ranch houses, and after another couple hundred yards a weather-beaten shack with a new tarpaper roof, the remains of a fence. A coloured kid about twelve was sitting in the yard with his back to me. I stopped the Chevvy and walked back to the yard. Suddenly there was a coughing sound, exactly like a mortar shell going off. I looked around wildly, was so startled I nearly hit the ground.
The kid was watching a bright red rocket about a foot long hissing up through the air. It went a few hundred feet high, did a cockeyed somersault, then came spiraling down to the ground at the boy's feet.
“What's that?”
He jumped as he turned to stare at me, a solemn-faced youngster in a worn sweater and torn dungarees and patched shoes. “Whatcha think it is? It's a rocket.” He touched a small plastic stand. “This is my rocket launcher. Pip, isn't it?”
It was a crazy scene: the shack that probably hadn't changed since it was built before the Civil War, and the sleek little rocket.
He opened a paper bag, showed me some white powder. “I put a charge of this atomic fuel in the launcher, add water, and when the reaction reaches its prime I release the rocket. Came in the mail today. Cost me four bucks but— Hey, Mister, you live around here?”
“No. Does Mrs. Mamie Guy live on this road?”
“You bet. Keep going and you'll see a house on the other side of the road. Be lot of clothes hanging on the lines.” He lowered his voice. “You know my folks?”
“No.”
“Well, if you should meet them, don't say anything about this rocket. I worked extra hard and saved to buy it, but my Pop would whale me if he knew. Someday I'm going to build a big one, take me to the moon.”
“What's so special on the moon?”
He looked at me with disgust, then sat down with his back to me, said, “Blast off, Mister.”
I headed toward the car. In a minute there was the slight cough again and the rocket shot high into the air, flying in an arc. It came down several hundred feet away in the leaves of a tall young tree. The kid ran over and started throwing stones at it.
“Why don't you climb up after it?” I called out.
“It's Pop's new pear tree. May break and then I'd really get it. Mama's due home in half hour. I got to work fast.”
I walked over to him. The tree was about a dozen feet high, the trunk a few inches thick. I grabbed the trunk and shook it. The rocket fell to a lower branch. I shook it again but it didn't budge. “How much do you weigh?”
“Sixty-three pounds.”
“Think you can hold yourself straight if I lift you?”
“You bet.”
“Now hold yourself rigid, or you'll fall and break both our necks.” I squatted, grabbed him around the waist and took a deep breath—as if getting ready to jerk and press a bar-bell. I got the kid up to my chest, then held him up at arm's length. He reached up and pushed the rocket out of the branches. I dropped him to my chest, then to the ground.
“Gee, you're strong, Mister.”
“Launch that in a field the next time,” I said, brushing my coat, wiping the sweat from my face.
He followed me back to the car and as I drove off he asked, “What's your name?”
“Captain Video,” I called back and had to grin. Big deaclass="underline" the murderer was captured knocking a rocket ship out of a pear tree.
The Guy house wasn't far down the road, and a copy of the other shack except it was bigger and in better condition. Clotheslines zigzagged all over the yard, with a few sheets swaying in the wind like sails.
A thin dark woman came to the door. Her hair was uncombed and her face sweaty. She could have been thirty, or forty-five, the work-worn look all over her. “My name is Jones. Mrs. Simpson told me you knew Porky Thomas,” I said, going into my pitch about being a true-crime writer.
“I have nothing to say. I told them television people once, I ain't got time to made mud fly. I don't believe in snooping into other people's lives.” She shut the door.
At least she didn't know I was staying at the Davises' or that I had a Jaguar. “Mrs. Guy, I'm not with any TV studio. I only want to ask a few questions.”
“Ask somebody who has time for loafing. I have work to do.”
“Can I talk to your husband?”
“That's up to him. He ain't home now.”
I stood there for a moment, lit my pipe. Walking back to the car I saw the rocket kid watching me. He said, “Aunt Mamie is cross on the days when she does her heavy washing. You want to talk to her real bad, Mister?”
“Yeah.”
He called out, “Aunt Mamie.” She came to the door a moment later. “What you want, Kenneth? You know I'm rushed today.”
“This is a nice man, Aunt Mamie. I was stuck up in a tree and he stopped his car to help me. Yes he did.”
She wiped her wet hands on her gray dress. “I'm wasting more time not talking to you. All right, come in, if you want.”
The kid winked at me. “Guess I'd best go home and hide my rocket good. So long, Mr. Video.”
The kitchen of the shack had several irons heating on the big coal stove, and smelled of damp starch. She pointed to a chair between two wicker baskets of clothes, said, “You can sit there. Only reason I'm talking to you is because you're coloured. That's the truth. I didn't even open the door to those TV people. Ought to mind their business, that's what. I hear Porky was killed.” Her voice was as thin as her body.
“That's what I want to ask about, Mrs. Guy.”
“You wasting my time. He used to deliver laundry for me, but that was a long time ago, when my Edward was born, and he's going on ten now. I ain't seen hide nor hair of Porky since then, and just as well.”
“Mrs. Simpson told me he stole some shirts from you, slapped your face.”
“That old talking machine. Yes, he did take two silk shirts from a bundle he was delivering. And he did slap me when I accused him of it. But my husband took him down a peg, and that was all. Porky even continued working for me for a time, then he quit me.”
“Did he have any enemies in Bingston—before the business with May Russell?”
She shrugged her bony shoulders. “None special. What you driving at, Mr. Jones?”
“I thought someone from around here might have gone to New York and killed him.”
“Folks here got more to do with their time than that. Lot of people didn't like him. I never trusted him, myself. But nobody would kill him. That's all I know. I got ironing to do. All these damn sheets got to be ironed so my husband can take them over to Kentucky after supper.”
I stood up. “Thanks for your time. People come all the way from Kentucky to give you laundry?”
“Shucks, all the way is less than twelve miles. I got all the work I can handle. Nobody does clothes like Mamie Guy. Especially delicate things. I never tore anything in my life. Them silk shirts Porky took a liking to, they was from a Kentucky family. Tell you the truth, the shirts was too small for him. He took 'em out of spite and meanness, get even with his cousins. It was McDonald shirts.”