“To Mr. Jap.”
I touched my glass to his can and we began to eat.
Maybe it was the friendly clink of knife and fork against our plates, the hot hushpuppies, or the rapidly warming air. Or maybe it was only the beer that unlocked Allen’s tongue and set him talking about Mr. Jap and Miss Elsie and Dallas.
I knew that Allen had been born in Charlotte and that his father was killed in a stock car pileup before he was eight, but I didn’t know that his mother had been the neighborhood punchboard, good-hearted and lazy and never too particular about who supported her. I didn’t know that he used to run away to down here whenever his latest “uncle” got too free with belt or strap.
“Mama always made them send me back, but sometimes I got to stay for three or four weeks till she could get the money together for my bus ticket. Aunt Elsie was real good to me. That woman made the best lard biscuits in the world, big as bear claws, and she never grudged me a bite. She’d give me clothes that Dallas had outgrowed and take me to town for new tennis shoes ’cause mine always had holes in ’em. And Uncle Jap treated me like I was his.” Allen gave me a crooked smile. “I used to really wish I was, you know?”
Clean hand-me-downs, new sneakers, all the hot biscuits and molasses a growing boy could eat, plus a male relative who wasn’t a mean drunk. Who would think that this old clapboard farmhouse had once been Eden?
Allen took another big swallow of his beer.
“Even after I was grown and Aunt Elsie was dead, Uncle Jap never turned me away from his door.”
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,” I said softly.
“Yeah,” said Allen, who might not know the poem but had lived its meaning. “This is the only real home I ever had after my daddy died.”
I could have needled him about making—or not making—homes with any of the women he’d married or fathered children with over the years, but that seemed like pettiness tonight.
“Uncle Jap and Dallas taught me how to drive before I was big enough to see over the steering wheel. Had to look through it to tell where I was going. I’ll never forget the first load of ’shine I ran with Dallas. He was seventeen, I was twelve. That old Hudson out yonder under the shed? They hollowed out the back seat so we could hide the jars. Four cases of ’em. It wasn’t much of a run, just from the crossroads over to a shot house on the other side of Holly Springs, forty, forty-five miles roundtrip. I was a little nervous going, but everything was cool till coming back through Varina, this town cop pulled up beside us and motioned for Dallas to pull over. Which he did. Only he waited till the cop got out of his patrol car and started walking toward us and then he gunned it. We must’ve been doing sixty-five by the time we got to the railroad crossing there at Forty-Two ’cause I know for sure all four wheels left the ground.
“That ol’ cop was pretty good though. He hung right with us all the way down to Harnett County. Dallas finally lost him on them dirt roads around Panther Lake. When we got home and told Uncle Jap about it, the onliest thing he asked us was did we remember to muddy up the license plate? We said yes and he laughed and told Dallas not to get too cocky ’cause next time he might not be so lucky.”
Allen crushed the flimsy aluminum can in his big fist and went back to the refrigerator. “Another one for you?”
I shook my head. “You ever bring your kids down here?”
“Yep. Keith and Wendy Nicole, both.” He popped the top on a fresh beer. The foam bubbled up and wet his mustache. He brushed it away with the back of his hand. “Hell, I even brought Tiffany and her mama by one day and Tiffany’s not even my young’un. But none of ’em ever really took to Uncle Jap. Guess he was too old then.”
“Or they were too young?”
“Maybe.”
“Did you see them this weekend?”
“See who?” he asked, suddenly wary.
“Wendy Nicole or Tiffany.”
“I told you. I went to Greensboro.”
‘To see about a car, yeah, I know. But you also went to Charlotte.”
“Dwight tell you everything he hears?”
“Enough,” I lied.
“I swear to God my ass is a blue banana if they hear about it.”
“If who hear about it?”
“Sally and Katie, of course.”
I took a final bite of my flaky catfish fillet while I worked it out. If he’d spent last night with ex-wife Sally in Charlotte and didn’t want her to know he’d been in Greensboro on Saturday, that must mean that Katie—?
“That man you went to see about a car. Hollyfield?”
“Raiford? What about him?”
“Is Katie Morgan his sister? The one whose name you couldn’t remember this morning?”
“I thought you said Dwight told you all that.”
“No, you said he did.”
“Shit.”
“And you’re in it up to your neck, aren’t you?”
“No more’n usual, darlin’,” he sighed. “No more’n usual.”
Once again I wondered how on earth I could have been so young, so recklessly naive to run off with such a shiftless womanizer. In the harsh overhead light, he looked every year of the knockabout life he’d led, like a car that had just rolled 200,000 on its odometer.
“Dwight ask you where you got the money to give your harem?”
He preened a little at the term, then gave a self-deprecating shrug. “Won’t none of his business long as I could prove I won’t here when Uncle Jap’s got stolen.”
Shaking my head, I got up and stacked our dishes in the sink and put on my jacket.
He followed me outside to the car. His voice was husky and a little embarrassed as he asked if I’d walk over to the garage with him and show him where it’d happened.
“I just pulled into the driveway good this morning and that deputy was setting here waiting for me. Dwight says Mr. Kezzie found him?”
“Yes.”
We made our way down the sandy drive by the dim glow of a bare bulb on the back porch to the garage two hundred feet away. Yellow crime scene ribbons lay around on the ground, but I knew Dwight had finished with the building. Mr. Jap’s rattletrap truck loomed up before us, still parked where he’d left it Saturday morning. Allen touched the fender as we passed, almost like someone comforting an old horse that had lost its master.
He fumbled with the garage lock in the darkness, then opened the side door and flicked on the lights.
“He was lying there,” I said.
In the fluorescent light, Mr. Jap’s dried blood looked like only another grease spot on the stained concrete.
The old-fashioned iron safe still stood agape and the door lay on the floor in front of it. Gray fingerprint powder covered the acetylene torch which had been used to burn off the hinges. Someone—Dwight or one of his detectives, probably—had gathered up the strewn papers and piled them neatly inside the safe since I was here.
Allen began to look through them. “Dwight said they took Uncle Jap’s corn money. You reckon that was all?”
“Did he have anything else?”
Allen shrugged. “Not that I know of. Just his marker chits where people owed him money. Far as I know, Billy Wall’s the only one he was holding paper on these days.”
His lips quirked in a rueful smile beneath his bushy mustache. “He always wanted to be a big shot, like your daddy. ‘Kezzie Knott holds paper on half the county,’ he’d say. If he didn’t have but two dimes to rub together, he’d try and lend you one of ’em just so you’d owe him. Before Merrilee settled him down, Petey Grimes and me, we’d get Uncle Jap to bankroll us to cars and stuff just to make him feel good. Soon as we’d pay him back, he’d be wanting to lend us some more. Hey, here’s his bankbook.”
He opened the small green passbook and riffled the pages. “Look at this. Not but three hundred dollars in it. Pitiful. Eighty-one years old and he barely got enough Social Security to live on.”