The Boys Who Woke Up Early Read online

  A pretty girl using a word like “horseshit” rocked me on my heels a little. In the clarity of hindsight, I realize Mary Lou was right, but at the time the idea seemed radical, and I needed to ponder a bit before discussing it further, so I turned the conversation toward school and the girls basketball team. Mary Lou had high hopes for the latter—hoped to get more playing time this year as Gina’s substitute —and had a lot to say about it.

  Pretty soon I had filled a couple of baskets with apples, and Susannah came back with a round of soft drinks for us, the glass bottles dripping from the spring and their contents deliciously cold. Susannah put Mary Lou’s Sun Drop into the picking basket. Mary Lou hoisted it aloft, pulled a church key from her watch pocket, popped the cap off the bottle, and drank the citrusy cola without ever leaving her perch. It was a pretty thing to watch her throat move as she swallowed the liquid.

  I thanked her for the Grapette, and Susannah for bringing it to me, and reluctantly headed back to Dad’s truck.

  Chapter 2

  It wasn’t surprising Jack chose TV characters to emulate. Early’s youth often chose badly. Todd Powell, for example, was the son of a lumberyard foreman, and their Scotch-Irish ancestors had been cutting trees in these mountains for generations. Yet Todd dressed like an Italian-American street kid from New York. He wore black T-shirts with the sleeves rolled tight to emphasize the size of his biceps, and also to contain a pack of Camels in one sleeve. Because he had seen some tough youngster in a movie wearing a St. Christopher medal dangling around his neck, Todd wore one too, even though he and his family were Baptists, a denomination with no special regard for Catholic saints.

  Our parents, though not uncaring, were too busy to rein us in. Early was too poor for much professional leadership so it depended on volunteers. Besides holding a demanding day job, Todd’s dad was an engineer on the volunteer fire department and was active in their church, which meant night meetings and choir practice. My father had similar commitments. When Dad got home from nine or ten hours running the knitting mill, he barely had time for supper before he went out the door to a training session at the fire department or to town council.

  Every four years my father and his brother, who was a pharmacist, would argue over the mayor’s job, each wanting the other to run for the office because nobody else would. Once, Dad tried to duck his turn by intentionally missing the filing deadline. He stopped a loom at the mill and did some minor and unnecessary maintenance on it so he’d have lint on his clothes and hair, making it credible when he claimed to have been delayed by an emergency at work. He was a wiry man in good shape from his constant activity, so he parked two blocks away from the election department and sprinted to the door just so he’d be out of breath when he got there, and rushed in saying, “Oh, dammit, I’m too late!”

  The clerk pointed at the electric clock and said, “You made it.” The clock was stopped at five minutes to five because she had unplugged it. Dad always said, “I didn’t get elected to that second term as mayor; I got elect-ricuted to it.”

  The women were just as busy with their PTA and church work, book clubs, and Red Cross auxiliary. Nearly every teenager lived with two parents, or maybe stepparents, yet our worlds and theirs overlapped but rarely. We lived in parallel universes, kids apart from adults—the boys especially. I had no idea how my father dealt with the human problems of running the mill or the town council. And he mostly didn’t know how I dealt with the juvenile equivalents, except when I mishandled a problem so spectacularly that adult authorities brought it to his attention.

  Our school history books were no help, either. Selected in Richmond, they presented role models who were nearly all old Tidewater aristocrats like Robert E. Lee. But Early lay far west of Richmond, almost on the West Virginia line. Early kids understood that nearly all of us were descended from hillbillies, not Tidewater planters.

  Once my mother got a bee in her bonnet about getting us kids into the Children of the Confederacy, perhaps in the desperate hope I would become interested in history and pull up my grades. So she asked my grandfather, her father-in-law, for stories about any ancestors who served in the Civil War—the more aristocratic, the better.

  “It won’t do to shake that family tree too hard,” he told her. “You might not like what falls out.”

  I knew some of my ancestors trapped mink and raccoons for a living not so long ago. My great-great-grandfather had carried a Confederate musket, I knew, but Mom’s persistent research revealed he did so only because he was conscripted. It also revealed that some of his cousins crossed into West Virginia to wear the Union blue and plug a few of those stuck-up sons-a-bitches from Richmond. We dropped the idea of becoming Children of the Confederacy soon after.

  Even the statue on the courthouse lawn was a suspect exemplar. Most people called it Jubal Early, after the Confederate general, but it actually represented some enlisted man, his likeness donated to towns all over the South in the 1920s and ’30s by a group of ladies seeking to reinforce public allegiance to the Lost Cause. Troops from my neck of the woods had been among the shoeless hordes placed under Jubal Early’s command after Stonewall Jackson got killed, but that was the extent of General Early’s relationship to Early County. The place was in fact named for an obscure settler, Samuel Early, distantly related to the general if related at all, who built a blacksmith shop and trading post hereabouts after the Revolution.

  I myself had the dubious honor of being named Thomas Jackson Shelor. In a different time and place I might have been called “Tom,” an enviably masculine name, or even “Jack,” which seemed to me the best of all names, for it called to mind a dozen or more “Jack tales” old-timers had been telling for generations about a poor but brave and clever mountain boy who killed three-headed giants and outsmarted cruel kings. But no, my name was a third-generation hand-me-down originally bestowed on my great-grandfather to honor the Confederate general Thomas Jackson. And since the general was better known as “Stonewall” Jackson, my nickname also became “Stonewall” briefly, before being shortened to “Stony.” I didn’t like my nickname because wits often modified it to “Stonehead.” Unfortunately, “Stony” fit me all too well, evoking the stone silence that overcame me when I needed to think of something to say to a girl.

  I sometimes blamed my name for the bad deeds of my youth. At other times I blamed the effective absence of my father. But nowadays I just blame myself for being an immature dumb ass. It didn’t help that until my growth spurt, I was small for my age. My name, size, and immaturity made me a target of a lot of teasing, and a little bullying. I didn’t distinguish between the two or take either well, so up through the ninth grade I got into a lot of fights. Enough that I got good at fighting. Eventually I hurt one guy pretty bad. He surely needed hurting, but it was something that hardly ever happened in Early, and it made me kind of a black sheep. It also got me arrested.

  I spent my sophomore and junior years on juvenile probation, there to remain until my eighteenth birthday. My crime was unrelated to motor vehicles, but the juvenile court judge ordered I could have no driver’s license until he said so. He said I could hunt with a rifle or shotgun, because nearly everyone did, but I had better not be caught with any handgun, or with one of the switchblades nearly every other male teenager owned, nor liquor—including beer. Of course, I was supposed to stay out of fights. I had to show my every report card to the juvenile probation officer, if I could get the poor overworked guy to look at it. And I had to perform community service, ringing the bell at Early Southern Baptist Church for four services a week.

  = = =

  With the limitations of my probation, my reputation, and my personality, I neither dated much nor had many friends. Fortunately, that meant nobody I cared about laughed at me for hanging around with a guy who pretended he was a jazz musician from the Peter Gunn show. But I began to have my own reservations when Jack decided to become Peter Gunn himself. We were sitting in his bedroom one afternoon when he told me he had formed a detective agency.

  “You’re crazy,” I said. “You need a license to be a private detective. Nobody’s gonna give a license to somebody sixteen years old.”

  “Do you know how to get a private detective’s license in Virginia?” he asked. After a pause he answered his own question. “I wrote to Richmond to find out. All you have to do is apply for one and pay five dollars for it. I already sent in my application.”

  I never actually saw that license, but I kind of believed he got one, because in his right hand Jack held strong evidence that the adult world was not as careful about such things as I had thought. The evidence was a .45-caliber, snub-nosed Webley revolver. You could mail-order a Webley for as little as twenty-four dollars if you signed a statement saying you were at least twenty-one years old, had never been convicted of a felony, and weren’t a drunk or a drug addict or mentally ill. I had never tried to buy a mail-order gun because I assumed someone would check that statement about my age, catch me, and I would soon be off to the reformatory I had so narrowly avoided in the past. But like my country-boy peers, I had spent many a school library period reading hunting-and-fishing magazines and drooling over ads for bargain-priced military surplus guns, so I knew about this one.

  Webley .45s were British guns from World War I, high-quality and rather powerful. But they weren’t popular in the United States because they were odd-looking and bulky and required British ammunition that was hard to get. To make them easier to sell, some mail-order houses modified Webleys to shoot the same ammunition as a Colt .45 automatic. That cartridge was not only easy to get in the U.S. but even more powerful than the original Webley ammo. For marketing reasons, some importers also tried to make Webleys resemble th
e snub-nosed .38 revolvers carried by TV detectives. This was done by cutting the long military barrel down as short as possible. On a few pistols, Jack’s being one, they had gone even further, eliminating weight and bulk by grinding off any steel that could possibly be spared, such as the hammer spur, and the lanyard ring, and part of the butt.

  Jack wanted me to teach him how to shoot. I guess he had forgotten that he had told me he already knew how. I didn’t tell him I wasn’t supposed to go near a pistol, because I didn’t want to explain why.

  Of course, carrying a pistol without a permit was illegal for anyone, and permits were hard to get. But Jack figured laws didn’t apply to future private detectives, so he jerry-rigged a shoulder holster from the toe of an old bedroom slipper, equipping it with shoulder straps made from an old belt and a necktie. It was a good thing he had big feet, because even with so many parts chopped off it, the Webley was still bulky and barely fit into the slipper toe. When he put on his Continental-cut jacket over the gun and shoulder holster, it looked like he had a big tumor under his left arm. He put a box of cartridges in the pocket of his tight-fitting Continental pants and started for the door but winced with the first step. Bigger than a half brick, the box was digging painfully into his groin. He put the box into his right jacket pocket, but the box of fifty fat .45 cartridges was so heavy it pulled that side of his coat way down, which lifted the other side up. Finally, Jack emptied the cartridges from the box and put half of them in the coat’s left side pocket, and half in the right, creating a ball in the center of each one.

  “It doesn’t look like I’m carrying ammunition, does it?” he asked.

  “Not exactly,” I said. “It looks like you’re carrying hand grenades. Why’d you buy such a cannon, anyway? Even cops just carry .38s.”

  “If I have to shoot a nigger, I want him to know he’s dead,” Jack said.

  I didn’t approve of Jack’s apparent hostility toward blacks, but it was far from rare in Early. Who knew if he really thought that way or if that was just how he thought he should talk while living amongst us yahoos? I wasn’t going to waste a sermon on a counterfeit sinner, so all I said was, “Try not to shoot one.”

  It was October and unseasonably warm, but it had been raining for days, and clouds still hung low over the mountains. I tucked the cuffs of my jeans into my hunting boots to keep them out of the mud I knew we would encounter wherever we went to shoot. Jack had on the pointy-toed Italian shoes, and his sunglasses. Now that he was a detective, he no longer smiled all the time, as he had when he was pretending to be a stoned beatnik jazzman, but tried to look serious instead. It was wonderful to me how he could get two disguises out of the same sunglasses. At least he’d gotten rid of the beret and the failed attempt at a beard.

  Jack had the use of his father’s Impala that afternoon. There was an aftermarket turntable under the dashboard that played 45-rpm records, the first one I had ever seen in a car. He put the needle down on a record and it started playing “The Ballad of Thunder Road” as we headed out his driveway. It was the theme song from the most popular drive-in movie ever made. Everybody knew the lyrics, and I should have been smart enough to get out of the car when Jack selected that record. It’s all about driving too fast and being chased by cops, and in the last verse, getting killed.

  By the time that verse played, Jack’s speedometer needle was somewhere north of 80 mph and the smile had crept back onto Jack’s face. There were no four-lane roads in Early County and few straight ones, and he went into curves at velocities I had never before experienced. He drifted the car expertly through each curve, but every time he went into another I thought I was facing doom. The car had seat belts, which not all cars did in those days, but I had neglected to buckle mine earlier, and now I was having a hard time doing it because the car bounced so much at this speed.

  “Lord have mercy! Slow down!” I yelled.

  “Hee, hee, hee, hee,” Jack giggled. This was not reassuring, for Jack sometimes giggled when I felt like screaming in terror.

  The place we were going to shoot was maybe three miles from town, up an unpaved road. When we got there, I saw that the rain had turned the dirt road to mud. I would have suggested we look for a less muddy place if Jack would have looked for it at some reasonable speed. But I didn’t want to chance riding even another mile with him in such a reckless mood, so I told him this was the best place we would find.

  Jack was afraid of getting his father’s car stuck in the mud, so we parked it on the shoulder of the paved road and walked up the unpaved one. In some places the road had been cut through clay hillsides, and there was no path to walk that wasn’t through rain-soaked clay. Once Jack hopped back on one foot to retrieve a shoe that had come off in the mud. As he bent over to pick up the shoe, the gun fell out of its homemade holster, and we had to clean the mud out of its barrel with the eraser of my mechanical pencil and a handkerchief. We had to clean Jack’s sunglasses too, because they fell off when he snatched at the falling gun.

  Eventually we reached a flat and reasonably dry area beside the road; behind this flat rose a high clay bank that would safely backstop our bullets. Other people took target practice there, so there were many shot-up tin cans lying around. I selected a four-pound coffee can that had only .22-caliber holes in it, so we could distinguish any made by Jack’s bigger .45 slugs. I set it upright against the bank for our target.

  Having my own pride, I had not told Jack that I had no pistoling experience except a couple of outings with a .32 Owlhead, an obsolete pocket revolver that was notoriously limited in power but pretty easy to shoot. I did not foresee what would happen if somebody fired a powerful .45 auto cartridge through a gun that had been radically shortened and lightened. And I didn’t know what would happen if that gun were fired by a skinny teenager with no firearms experience.

  What happens is that when the kid pulls the trigger, there follow an impressive report and muzzle flash, a rib-rattling recoil, and the aforesaid teenager falls flat on his butt and throws the gun about fifty feet.

  “The goddamn thing blew up!” Jack yelled. “Stay down! It might throw shrapnel.”

  I cautiously approached the smoking pistol. “I don’t think it can blow up again,” I said. “It ain’t cocked.” I picked it up out of the mud. “I can’t see any pieces gone, at least none that weren’t gone already. I don’t think it blew up. I think it’s just a hard kicker.”

  We cleaned the mud off the gun and Jack tried again, this time holding the gun with both hands and bending his arms sharply, on the theory that bent arms would take up the shock better than stiff ones. This was a poor theory, it turned out, because the recoiling pistol drove Jack’s fists back into his nose hard enough to bring tears to his eyes. When he finally learned to hold it with both arms outstretched and stiff, his whole body seemed to recoil with the pistol, so that his head snapped forward and his sunglasses came off with every shot. But Jack was having fun now.

  “Hee, hee, hee,” he giggled again. “Pick up my sunglasses, will you?”

  The big tin can he was shooting at was maybe thirty feet away. “You’re hitting a little to the left,” I told him. “Aim a little to the right to compensate.”

  “How much to the right?” he asked.

  “About two feet.”

  A hardware store in town sold .45 ammunition for about five dollars per box of fifty, which was fortunate, because if Jack ever had to shoot anybody he was going to need the whole box, and after that day he always carried that much. He also carried a homemade blackjack in his hip pocket, a set of handcuffs hung over the waistband at the back of his trousers, and occasionally a magnifying glass, a small flashlight, a bent briar pipe, and a pigskin pouch of tobacco. With all that stuff in his pockets, I suggested Jack wear suspenders, but they weren’t fashionable, so he wouldn’t. The getup did have one advantage: You didn’t notice the pointy-toed shoes anymore because the pants legs hung low and mostly covered them.