Page 6 of The Bootlegger’s Bride

H e got off the school bus with Lonnie Sullivan at his side and followed Wayne Thurman through the chain-link gate into the dusty schoolyard of the brown-brick building.

“Hey, Thurman!”

The older boy stopped and turned with a smirk painted on his face. A.J. approached, heart thumping, and spat, “You got a big mouth.”

Thurman looked down at him. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Gonna shut it once and for all.”

“You and what army, little man,” he said, smiling as he glanced at Lonnie standing beside A.J.

A.J. handed the book he carried to Lonnie.

Then he turned back to Thurman with a left hook to his teeth and a right to his gut.

When Thurman bent over he kicked him between the legs.

The older boy fell to earth. A.J. jumped on his chest and began pounding his ears with either fist as the taste of rising dust and the smell of blood came to him.

Thurman, swinging wildly, managed to land punches on A.J.’s face and jaw that the latter did not feel. He sensed nothing but the black rage boiling inside. He continued to punch and kick even as Mr. Gage, the gym instructor, and Mrs. Bush, his teacher, pulled him off the other boy.

At last, he came back into himself. Gasping, he found his arms pinned behind him by Mr. Gage.

A.J. looked down to Wayne Thurman lying on the schoolyard dirt, bright blood seeping from his ears and nose glistening in the warm morning sun.

He wondered what exactly had happened. He remembered getting off the school bus and calling out Thurman, but after that it was a blur. Punches were thrown, he knew that much.

§

A. J. slouched in a polished wooden armchair clutching his book.

Blood dripped from his nose to his new tee shirt and blue jeans.

On the wide walnut desk before him rested a nameplate reading “Clyde Lee, Principal.” Beyond it sat a scowling red-faced man, wavy brown hair parted down the middle.

Leaning forward he rested his forearms on a green blotter as a ceiling fan limped squawking in circles above him.

“Not off to a very good start today, are we A.J.? Nor for the school year.”

The boy stared down at the hardwood floor between his black P.F. Flyers. “No, sir,” he agreed. But he didn’t regret what he did to Thurman. He’d had no choice.

“Not the first time you’ve been in a fight on school property. I told you before: What occurs beyond the school grounds is beyond my jurisdiction. Why couldn’t this wait?”

A.J. gazed out the tall, open, second-story window toward the schoolyard below.

He felt the rumble and heard the roar of tractor-trailer trucks ambling through Mitchell, Illinois, on U.S.

Route 66 By-Pass, where the school sat. The smell of their exhaust mingled with the grassy aroma of surrounding wheat fields and the school’s perpetual scent of floor polish.

“Because.”

Mr. Lee sat silent, waiting, still scowling. A.J. didn’t take it personally. Lee scowled at everyone. Finally, A.J. went on, “Because Wayne was ripe for a whipping, so I gave him one.”

“And why did he need a whipping so urgently?”

A.J. shrugged. “I dunno. Stuff he said on the bus.”

The principal shook his head and harrumphed. “This is serious, A.J. You aren’t a child anymore. We had to send Thurman to the nurse. I’m afraid I’ll have to call your mother.”

A.J. sat up straight. “She’s got nothing to do with it!” He could feel the lie burning his face and looked away from Mr. Lee’s steady gaze.

The principal leaned back and sat squinting at A.J. Then he rolled his chair away from the desk. “Wait.”

The man rose and strode from his office, heels tapping the polished floor. Closing the door behind him he called to his secretary: “Mrs. Tate…”

A.J. rose and put an ear to the thick door. He could hear them whispering. He was able to make out a few of Mrs. Tate’s words: “Blue Note…Richard Dupuis… with his aunt now…” Which was enough. The sound of footsteps approaching chased A.J. back to his chair.

The door clicked. Mr. Lee pushed through it and stood over him. He had stopped scowling for once, studying A.J. with pursed lips as if pondering a tricky math problem. At last, he said:

“Maybe you did what you felt you had to do, A.J. But you did it at the wrong time and wrong place. You understand what I’m telling you?”

A.J. continued to study the slat floor. “Yes, sir.”

“I have to send you home for the day. Cool off over the weekend and put this incident behind you. Remember, if it happens again there will be serious consequences.” Back came the scowl.

A.J. nodded. To first- and second-graders serious consequences meant being subjected to Mr. Lee’s electric paddle, a myth the older boys helped spread.

A more realistic consequence of continued violent behavior on A.J.

’s part was likely permanent expulsion and maybe reform school.

That he could not endure, to be taken away from the lake and locked up inside some dark institution.

The thought of it made his stomach rise.

It made him sick. The principal went on.

“Mrs. Tate is typing up a note for you to take home. I can drive you.”

A.J. rose. “I’ll hoof it.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to walk on the highway, A.J.”

“I’ll go along the tracks. The shortcut. It ain’t but a mile.”

Mr. Lee grimaced and said, “Isn’t.” Then he laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Okay. But be careful. Watch out for hoboes.”

A.J. promised that he would. But he’d never seen a hobo except in movies and wasn’t sure he could tell one apart from other men who lived along the lake.

§

Book in hand he skirted the fresh-smelling wheat field behind the school and marched to the railroad track that intersected the lake.

He walked between the gleaming steel rails, stepping from wooden tie to wooden tie over the white rock roadbed where wildflowers sprouted.

The chemical aroma of creosote wafted up from the dark ties as the hot September sun rose toward midday.

Ahead he soon saw the lake on whose bank two low Indian mounds lay.

These also were covered with yellow-green wheat standing dead still in the windless morning.

He had been to Monks Mound, the tallest of the Cahokian structures, beyond the south end of Long Lake, where once sat the great Mississippian city that was home to tens of thousands.

He wondered what it was like for them and wished he could have been among them hunting, fishing, and canoeing instead of sitting inside the old brick building doing reading, writing, and arithmetic—always stuff he already knew.

A.J. figured they were people much like him, folks who cherished and worshipped the waters and woods, the fields and animals.

He didn’t cotton much to church going and was no good memorizing Bible passages and such in Sunday school.

And he wasn’t afraid of God’s hand or going to Hell like the other kids were.

None of that stuck to him. But that didn’t mean he dismissed spiritual existence.

He felt it springing from the earth, from every rock and blade of grass, in every firefly and fish he caught.

From the bones of the Indians in the burial mounds along the lake and from the arrowheads he found there.

The world vibrated with those presences, making it all sacred and meaningful to him, connecting him to the past and to the land.

And he felt it as well in himself, kin to those beings dead and alive, animate and otherwise.

This was his world and he felt it throbbing deep inside him.

This was where he belonged. Which was why the threat of reform school scared and sickened him so.

He dropped down the steep bank to the lake and removed his tee shirt. With a branch he pushed aside a line of lime-green moss at the shore and squatted to wash the blood from the white shirt. Then he rose and used it to daub bloodstains from his jeans and rinsed it again in lake water.

When he was younger he and the other kids along the lake, boys and girls alike, played cowboys and Indians most every day.

A.J. always angled to be an Indian Brave not a cowpoke, eager to scalp settlers and the Long Knives as if to honor his Cherokee heritage.

Shirtless and barefooted, a red paisley handkerchief worn as an Indian headband where he tucked blue jay and cardinal feathers, a hunting knife sheathed on the belt of his faded jeans where also dangled a good-luck rabbit’s foot on a short brass chain—this had been his summertime uniform.

Even today he still listened to the stories of cowboys and Indians on the radio— Tom Mix, Hopalong Cassidy , and The Cisco Kid, Fort Laramie, Red Ryder , and The Lone Ranger .

He moved down the shore until he came to the boat dock behind the house where Uncle Raymond’s parents lived, the last home at the lake road’s dead end.

There he wrung out the tee shirt and stretched it on the hot dock to dry.

Then he moved into the shade of a willow on the lakeshore with his book to wait till school was out and he could go home as if nothing had happened.

As he lowered himself onto the sandy bank he heard the crinkle of the sealed envelope in his back pocket.

He withdrew it, tore it open, and read the note inside, the one Mr. Lee had Mrs. Tate type.

It stated simply that A.J. had gotten into a fight with another boy and as a result was expelled for the day.

He would be welcomed back to class Monday, after he had promised to obey school rules and not fight on school property.

That wasn’t quite true, as A.J. had made no such promise. To Mr. Lee’s credit, however, he did not mention the cause of the fight, of which he was apparently aware. Still, A.J. tore the note into scraps and buried them in the sand beside him.

Then he opened the book he carried everywhere these days, a thick, fifty-year-old reference he had sneaked out of the school library.

Everyone including his teachers thought he was dim or deranged and uninterested in learning because he seldom completed his homework or paid attention in class.

No, he was just bored shitless. Miles ahead of the herd.

While they were still reading comic books he was devouring real literature his mother had guided him to—Dickens and Kipling and Twain, books a boy would like—then more grown-up fiction and poetry.

But what he liked most was history. Real stories about real people and places—the Oregon Trail and Lewis & Clark, explorers, presidents, and pioneers.

But most of all Indian lore and stories.

Now from his pilfered book he read again of the Plains Indians and gazed at pen-and-ink drawings of the Kickapoo, Kaskaskia, Illiniwek, and Sioux roasting game at campfires, spearing fish from streams, canoeing reedy waters, and passing icy winter nights in caves and lean-tos.

Not knowing well his own father, he felt that these men who roamed the same fields and paddled the same waters as he were true kin as well. And he prayed that he might grow into that sort of man, a brave.