The Troubles of Johnny Cannon by Isaiah Campbell

Author:Isaiah Campbell
Language: eng
Format: epub

CHAPTER SEVEN

ALL BLOOD NO BODY

It was funny, what with the news of Tommy dying, that whole Bay of Pigs thing stopped seeming so important to me or Pa. Or to anybody else for that matter. Folks just sort of stopped talking about it once the week was up. It’d be in the paper every once in a while, but that was about it. I didn’t see Short-Guy poking his nose anywhere either, so I reckoned maybe we was in the clear.

Captain Morris stuck around for the next few days to give me and Pa his support. It was real nice of him to do that. He went with me into town a few times. Sometimes he’d go off on his own and strike up conversations with folks like a regular Cullmanite. He seemed to get along with Bob Gorman a lot better than me or Pa ever did. He avoided Mr. Thomassen like I avoided eating onions, though. I thought that was a bit odd, but then again, Pa was avoiding most everybody anymore. So maybe that’s just what grown-ups did when they was sad.

He wasn’t there when the petty officer came to deliver the official letter, same as the one the Captain had given. And it didn’t take a genius to see that this fella was lying about the whole thing. Either that or he was the worst truth-teller there’d ever been.

Oh, sure, he did make it all official and made us feel real important. He told us that it was a crash off the coast of Korea, and they couldn’t never find Tommy’s body no matter how hard they looked. Told us he was a real hero, though, never saw nobody he wouldn’t help out. Loved his country like he’d loved his ma.

And through it all I knew he was lying through his teeth. Even if he didn’t know it.

After the officer left, Pa called our pastor so we could get started preparing for a funeral. Since there wasn’t going to be no body, the pastor suggested we make a memorial of some of Tommy’s personal belongings we had around the house. Pa agreed, and we set to finding the perfect things to symbolize who Tommy was. The Captain offered to help out, but Pa didn’t think Tommy would be too keen on that, so he said it was just a family project. I felt real bad for that, and I think it hurt the Captain, too, ’cause he said he had business to take care of somewhere else anyway, so it wasn’t no skin off his teeth. He left town again after that. I didn’t enjoy watching him go this time at all.

Me and Pa went into Tommy’s room and dug out his keepsake box. There was a stack of comic books, some baseball cards, his Captain Midnight decoder ring, and a photo from the newspaper of us with the two biggest fish anyone in Cullman had ever caught. There was also newspaper clippings from all his air shows, and the photos from his graduation from boot camp.

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