Brian the one-armed drug dealer

And We have commanded people to ˹honour˺ their parents. Their mothers bore them through hardship upon hardship, and their weaning takes two years. So be grateful to Me and your parents. To Me is the final return. 

– Surah Luqman 31:14

PawPaw and I stepped off the blacktop and onto our gravel driveway; I plopped extra hard so I could hear gravely crunches with every step.

Linda and Craig’s car was gone (they always left when Wendy was scheduled to visit). MawMaw’s car was parked in the yard on some contraption that held up one of the rear corners; a few feet away a tire lay on the ground like a fallen soldier. I don’t know if the tire was being fixed or if the brakes were, but the car had been there as long as I could remember and weeds that grew faster than I did were peering at us over the top of the tire.

We passed MawMaw’s car and squeezed between PawPaw’s rusted brown Ford pickup and the stacks of Yellow Pages. PawPaw paused by the crickets and pointed out that they had eaten the potato pieces. He was right; PawPaw was always right about anything in nature. He stomped his feet on the rough doormat to knock off any mud clumping to his shoes and to let MawMaw know he was about to open the door. He stepped inside and I stomped my feet the same way and followed him. MawMaw was standing beside the gurgling Mr. Coffee and the kitchen smelled like Camels and black coffee.

MawMaw squatted down and locked her gaze on my eyes and said: “Gimme some shugga!”

She was so close to the carport door that I didn’t have anywhere to go. I clenched the handle of my plastic bag of cookie dough and brought it up to my chin and giggled. MawMaw inched closer and held her crawfish pinchers poised for attack.

“I’m gonna steal me some shugga!” she said.

With my hands full I had no chance to defend myself; she smacked all over my cheeks and I could feel the residual greasy bright red lipstick and I knew I had been shot and was bleeding badly. With most of her ammunition gone, MawMaw turned on PawPaw and gave him some shugga but was firing blanks; his cheeks were clean and I was rubbing mine and smearing red on the backs of my hands.

“Go on and get cleaned up,” MawMaw told me. “I’ll take the dough and bake some cookies for when Wendy brings you home.”

I scurried off and came back a few minutes later with cheeks as clean as PawPaw’s just in time to hear gravel crunching from a car pulling up behind PawPaw’s truck.

I rushed out the house and to carport. Past the piles of phone books I see Wendy and Denise parked behind PawPaw’s truck. They were in the dented Datsun hatchback that used to be behind MawMaw’s car. It was the faded yellow of last summer’s Yellow Pages left outside and bleached by the sun, and until recently had been sitting in PawPaw’s front yard.

I rushed to the passenger side of the Datsun and Denise steps out and kneels down. When she squatted down to hug me she was shorter than I was. She opened her arms and I squeezed between them; Denise was plump and her arms were thick and I had to lean in I have to lean in to hug her. I squirted back out and showed her how I had learned to pull off my nose like she showed me last time; I reached up to my face with my right hand and yanked it off and held it up for her to see. My nose was poking between my first and second fingers; it looked a lot like my thumb, but Denise gasped and said I learned well.

Her voice had the sweet sound of Cajun French. She was Denise Leboux from Thibadeux; Denise moved to Baton Rouge as a little girl and went to Glen Oaks High School with Wendy. Denise pronounced my name Pa’tan, like the plumber named Patin on Saturday morning TV commercials who showed up when a woman who looked like MawMaw stood in ankle deep water and he said: “Shoulda called Pa’tan!”

“Aren’t you going to say hello to Wendy?” Denise asked.

I looked up and Wendy’s standing by PawPaw on the driver’s side. I quickly crunch-crunch-crunched around the Datsun; Wendy squated down and was taller than Denise but not as tall as PawPaw when they hug me.

Wendy was Wendy Anne Pa’tan. She had strawberry blonde hair and hazel eyes that crinkled in the corners like crows feet when she smiled. Wendy was fit with athletic arms but a bosom bigger than Denise’s. Uncle Keith had told me she had the finest ass in all of Glen Oaks High (but I didn’t know what that meant back then; Keith was a few years younger than Wendy and Denise and didn’t know how to talk to kids yet). She had swam for the Glen Oaks team (the small school didn’t have a track or a pool, but they had a van to shuttle Wendy and a few others to Saint Joseph’s Academy where they shared their gym and pool). Her hug was strong and I gave what I got and squeezed as hard as I could. When I stepped back she held me at arm’s length and told me I had grown.

Wendy didn’t sound like anyone I knew, though sometimes she sounded like Denise. She was born in Toronto to Joyce Hicks Rothdram. Granny was born Hicks but married a man named Rothdram and fled Toronto to live with Auntie Lo and Uncle Bob with five years later (Uncle Bob was a French Canadian from Prince Edward Island near where the Cajuns had come from; he had taught Wendy a few French words when she was my age and she sounded to Denise like MawMaw sounded to PawPaw). I never learned that grandfather’s first name and Wendy never spoke of him; when asked, Granny would not give details but would scoff and say that she could never fault Wendy for her mistakes. Uncle Bob would remain silent. Wendy articulated like MawMaw but had a nasally Canadian accent like Granny.

I told Wendy that I climbed into the saddle on my tree by myself that morning. She said we’d go to the park and climb on the merry-go-round after we delivered the Yellow Pages.

We began loading the Datsun. Denise made sure I know the back right seat was mine – the one behind her seat – and suggested I arrange books on the floorboard while they loaded the hatchback. I focused on my job and they did theres. When we finished the Datsun sagged like an old mare carrying too many sacks of potatoes to a market.

Wendy and Denise stood back to admire their work and smoke their red-filtered cigarettes. PawPaw smoked an unfiltered Camel that he had put the right side in his mouth that time. I played with weeds growing in the mushy ground along the gravel driveway. They finished their cigarettes and we squeeze into the car. PawPaw helped me get in the back seat; we had loaded so many that there was hardly any room for me and I sat on atop a pile of around ten books. I was so tall that my head poked above Denise’s headrest like the weeds poking their heads above MawMaw’s tire.

Denise got in the front and turned her head to see me looking down at her; she was surprised I had grown so quickly and I have to explain to her that I was sitting on a stack of Yellow Pages. Wendy got in the driver’s seat and the Datsun grumbled awake. PawPaw told us goodbye. MawMaw didn’t come out (she never came out to see us leave). Wendy cranked the shift into first and we all lurched forward and the Datsun’s tires sent gravel sprinkling against the Ford truck with the rat-a-tat sound of a small caliber machine gun. PawPaw dodged the wave of gravel and chuckled and waved goodbye.

We reached the end of the driveway and the Datsun slammed to a halt and my face slammed into Denise’s headrest. Wendy cursed something I don’t understand and Denise told her it was fine and that driving a stick takes practice. The Datsun grumbled to life again and we whipped onto the blacktop and flew down Hooper towards Plank Road.

We stopped at the red light and I pointed to the saddle in my tree and Wendy says maybe we could stop there on the way back and I could show her. The light turned green and we lurched forward and turned right and a minute later passed the airport and went up the I-110 onramp towards Baton Rouge. I-110 is elevated over some swampy land and neighborhoods built before it that had become run down and littered with old refrigerators and more car parts than what was piled behind PawPaw’s barn, but out in the open. I look down at the faces looking up and imagine I’m flying in one of the airplanes we always see overhead. The windows are open and my hair blows and I stick out my hand palm-down and flat and rotate my wrist so my hand flys up and down like Superman; Denise had shown me that before Wendy got the Datsun and Denise drove us to the park in her mom’s car.

A squeaky mouse must have lived under the dashboard like the rat that would one day live under my maroon beret; Wendy was driving with one hand and feeling around the dashboard to see if she could get the squeaking to stop. She turned of the radio and opened and shut the ashtray and slapped down on the dashboard but the mouse wouldn’t stop squeaking. Wendy told Denise it was annoying and she slapped the dashboard harder and tells it to stop. It won’t and she makes a fist and shouts for it to stop and slams down on the dashboard hard three times.

“Whoa, Wendy.” Denise said. She rested her chubby hand on Wendy’s slim forearm; Wendy’s was clenching the stickshift and her knuckles were white.

“Calm down,” Denise said. “It’ll be fine. It’s just a little squeak.”

“Here,” she said. “I’ll roll us a joint.”

Denise whipped out the Frisbee she would bring with us to the park and flipped it dish-side up. She pulled out her little blue hand-sewn bag with tiny yellow flowers embroidered on it, and withdraws a plastic sandwhich bag rolled around a tiny bit of seeded herb. She rolled up her window and asked Wendy to roll up hers. Denise dumped the herb into the Frisbee and uses the rigid cardboard edge of rolling papers to push the herb up and allow seeds to roll down. Like one of the TV cowboys rolling a cigarette, Denise deftly rolled a thin joint and puts it between her fleshy lips. In the blink of an eye and with the dexterity of a magician vanishing a handkerchief she had refilled the baggie and tucked her blue bag away and put the Frisbee into her floorboard. It happened so fast that Wendy was still clutching the steering wheel with white knuckles and fuming at the squeaking dashboard.

Denise produces a Bic lighter and lights the joint and takes a drag.

“Here,” she said through pursed lips and with a lung full of smoke. Wendy took her right hand off the steering wheel and accepted the joint and took a deep drag. Denise rolled the window handle down a half turn and looked up and exhaled a stream of smoke towards the thin opening. Most of the smoke out but some floats me and it smells like the squished skunk in the weeds along Hooper Road PawPaw and I once walked past.

Wendy cracked her window and exhaled but kept her eyes on the road. She relaxed and handed the joint back to Denise.

“See?” v said. “Everything’s fine.” She took another drag and they passed back and forth a few times and laughed about nothing in particular.

I was feeling pretty fine myself when Denise turned on the radio. She and Wendy gasped and Denise turned up the radio and Janis Joplin’s raspy voice that sounded like she had a mouth full of gravel sang to us; it was her 1971 posthumous hit Me and Bobby McGee that every radio station in Baton Rouge seemed to play all day every day. Wendy remained silent but Denise joined in and sang:

Busted flat in Baton Rouge

Waitin’ for a train

When I’s feeling near as faded as my jeans…

Janis got to the part about her dirty red bandana and Denise pulled out her clean red bandana and handed it to me and sang to me. I was feeling fine but didn’t know what to do with it so I just clenched the red bandana and laughed while Denise sang the blues.

Soon after the joint was finished we pulled off Drusilla lane near the fancy Drusilla Seafood restaurant and a mile from where Auntie Lo and Uncle Bob lived in Sherwood Forest subdivision near the Sherwood Forest Country Club. But didn’t go to their house. Instead, Wendy passed Auntie Lo and Uncle Bob’s and stopped in sight of Westminster Elementary, where I would begin school two months later. She kept the car running and Denise and I hopped out and began walking copies of the Yellow Pages to each doorstep. Denise began with the books on my seat and then the ones in my floorboard. v and I walked back and forth while Wendy lurched forward and stopped. About an hour or two later we’re finished and Wendy says it’s time to celebrate with Slushies. She tells Denise it’ll be her treat and we get back on I-10 and are soon flying above downtown towards I-110 and the little park with a merry-go-round. Another joint later we eased down the off-ramp towards the 7-11 and its Slushie machine with the fuzzy white smiling polar bear that always made me giggle, even when I wasn’t high from second hand smoke.

We took our Slushies and only had time for a sip or two before we reached the small neighborhood park tucked off Hooper Road that no one ever seemed to visit except us. Wendy slammed to a hault under the shade of a cluster of tall pine trees. We rolled the windows all the way down to allow a breeze (though in the muggy southern Louisiana summers the breeze was more like a sauna). But we could smell the flowers and sit in the shade and sip our Slushies peacefully. Red azelea flowers are all around us Wendy leaned her seat back and sipped the Coca-Cola flavored Slushie she always got and told Denise that azeleas like to grow in acidic soil under pine trees; she learned a lot of things like that from PawPaw and said she would like to work in a nursery one day.

Denise said she would be good at that. She sipped a bright blue raspberry Slushie (she always got a different flavor and I usually asked for whatever she did). She said didn’t know what she would do. She was still living with her mom and brother and sister and sister’s baby and sleeping on the couch in their two bedroom apartment like I did at PawPaw’s house. Wendy had moved into a two bedroom a few doors down and it was the place Judge Pughe had said was “a fine home,” but it was not by anyone I knew’s standards a fine home; it was a cockroach infested shithole in a subsidized brick strip of apartments behind a swarm of flies circling grease bins of an all-you-can-eat Chinese restaurant off Florida Boulevard near Belaire High School, where I’d begin seven years later and binge on Chinese food after every wrestling season ended. Behind the single-level maroon brick appartments with tiny window cutouts like the ones in the city jail cells was a wooded swamp that bred armies of mosquitos with the sole intention of biting me. There was no air conditioning and my memories of it would be the smell of grease and the sound of buzzing swarms of flies wafting in through open windows with patched screens to keep out the mosquitoes. When I first read in my court reports that “the trial judge” said our apartment was “a fine home” that was the first sign I saw that not all court records told the whole story.

I slurped my Slushie and didn’t say anything. I was floating somewhere above the couple of fluffy white clouds slowly drifting across the blue sky above our park; I had forgotten about the merry-go-round and was focused on sucking blue rasberry juice from my straw like a hummingbird sucks nectar from an azelea.

v woke me out of my hummingbird dream when she rotated her spherical torso around and stuck out her bright blue tongue. I burst into giggles and she told me to stick out my tongue too. She laughed and reached into her magic purse and produced a folding makeup mirror and flipped it open and showed me what I looked like. I laughed too; it was like MawMaw’s red lipstick on my cheeks, but my tongue had turned blue. I tried to wipe it off but it wouldn’t go anywhere so I stopped trying sat there sticking my tongue out and made “ahhh” sounds with v and giggled with her so intensely that I never saw her make that mirror vanish.

Denise stopped laughing and looked serious and that brought me to attention. I watched her hold up the back of her right hand and she struggle to get her hefty left arm over her headrest. She slowly brought her left hand over her right forefinger.

“Watch this, Jason,” she said.

She didn’t need to say anything; when Denise got serious, I knew something wonderful was about to happen and my attention was sharper than a bayonet going into battle for the second time, when you knew it was important and were ready and wouldn’t miss anything again. Denise had fooled me before; this time I was focused on her hands and nothing else.

She took a deep breath and kept her gaze on her finger and drew my attention there. She yanked her left hand away as she made a popping sound with her tongue, and that popping sound snapped me out of my attention and I saw her right finger missing from that hand and rotated my head to see it clenched a foot away by the fingers of her left hand the same way I held my nose when I pretended to take it off.

I gasped! I couldn’t focus on her missing left finger and the left hand clenching it at the same time; my head whipped back and forth between the two. I know I was high, but that was the most amazing miracle I had ever seen.

I excitedly asked how she did it and she taught me. Conveniently, Denise was left-handed and I’m right-handed; watching her demonstrate slowly was like looking in a mirror and easier to learn. In no time at all I was practicing removing my finger and holding it a foot away. Denise said the pop! sound was important and she taught me how to do that, too.

Denise and Wendy laughed with me and I sat there pop! pop! popping until a song came and Wendy gasped like I had and leaned forward to turn up up the radio. She said it was our song because it was Saturday and we were in the park, too; it was Chicago’s 1971 Saturday in the Park. She and Denise knew the lyrics but I did not but it didn’t matter because I was high and having a wonderful day in the park, but I’d hear it so many times in the 70’s that I can still recall the lyrics today:

Saturday in the park
I think it was the Fourth of July
Saturday in the park
I think it was the Fourth of July
People dancing, people laughing
A man selling ice cream
Singing Italian songs

A lot of my memories of Wendy and Denise revolve around the radio in that Datsun, and some songs were so popular back then that they played every time we were together, especially Janis Joplins Me and Bobby McGee which I thought was called Busted Flat in Baton Rouge until I was in middle school in the 80’s and heard a radio DJ talking about the song and how it was released posthumously. When I saw Janis Joplin on the back of a vinyl album cover at one of Wendy and Denise’s friend’s house that same year, I see that Denise looked a bit like a chubby Janis and smiled the same (though they sounded nothing alike). And when Denise would give me my first fake thumb tip with the tiny red silk handkerchief that could fit inside and hide on the tip of your thumb, she would call it her tiny red bandana and remind me of singing that song when they picked me up from Mr. White’s house. Saturday in the park was just as probable in the mid 1970’s and not a forced coincidence.

The one song that would always make Wendy’s usually cheerful hazel eyes squint and leak tears and lead Denise to turn off the radio and roll another joint was Led Zepplin’s 1971 Going to California. I never learned the lyrics (probably because Wendy always turned it off), but a quick search on the internet says they went like this:

Spent my days with a woman unkind
Smoked my stuff and drank all my wine
Made up my mind to make a new start
Going to California with an achin’ in my heart
Someone told me there’s a girl out there
With love in her eyes and flowers in her hair

It turns out that was the song playing in the coffee shop where Wendy held me in her strong swimmer’s arms and saw the hand-written note by a young man looking for someone to split gas on a cross-country road trip to California. It was an easy drive; I-110 joins I-10 in downtown Baton Rouge and ends about 1,830 miles later at the Santa Monica pier in Los Angeles. You get on and go straight without the chance of missing a turn and 27 hours later you’re on the beach in California where Led Zepplin played live and Jim Morrison and The Doors droned their bluesy songs and things could be perfect. Wendy woke up and it took her a few weeks to scrimp together enough money for a bus ticket back to Baton Rouge, but by then my dad was back in town and I was living with PawPaw and Judge Pughe said she couldn’t get me back until she found a job and paid for her own place to live. She stayed with Denise and slept on the floor for a while, then moved in with Auntie Lo and Uncle Bob; I never learned why she didn’t stay with Granny, who only lived three miles from PawPaw on the other side of I-110 and the airport in Glen Oaks subdivision.

Four years after returning from California, Wendy was working for PawPaw’s Kelly Girls earning $512 a month and renting a subsidized apartment in Denise’s complex. I grew to know Wendy one Saturday a month in the mid to late 1970’s when she worked for PawPaw and I rode with Denise and her in the passenger and sang every song that driver knew in her old dented Datsun that was as faded as Janis Joplin’s blue jeans. Sometimes we’d go back and eat Chinese lunch and Denise would get extra fortune cookies for us to crunch on after a joint and she’d read them to me and tell me that no matter what the fortune cookie said the future is whatever I wanted to be. Those were the days it was raining (and it rained a lot in Baton Rouge towards the end of summer and fall hurricane and football season). On cool spring days and muggy but clear summer days we always ended up back at the park and usually finished the day at Craig and Linda’s old house covered in Craig’s pshycodelic artwork of cookie elves in moss-laden cypress swamp trees and where Brian the one handed drug dealer lived.

I don’t think we played in the park that day. Usually we’d spin around on the rusted creaky merry-go-round (most outdoor metals rust in muggy Baton Rouge after the paint flakes off) or swing from seats held to the tall metal poles by squeaky chains. I recall not playing on the swings and focusing on the pop! pop! pop! of my new magic trick and showing it to Denise dozens of times and her being surprised every time. I remember that we threw our empty Slushies in the overflowing rusted oil drum Baton Rouge Parks and Recreation used as trash bins back then and headed to Brian’s house.

Brian was in the front yard under the shade of a sprawling oak tree whose branches had been cut off to allow parking spaces for a few cars circled around it. He was tinkering with his motorcycle like he seemed to do all the time; to be fair, it must have been difficult working on any motor with only one arm; his left arm was missing at the shoulder and he kept his t-shirt folded and tucked into the arm pit to hide the stub. His right arm was as strong and thick as a sturdy oak branch.

Brian was one of the biggest people I knew. I saw him standing next to Daddy one day and they were the same hight, but even with only one arm Brian seemed more muscular and therefore bigger. His chest was thick and his waist was small and he always wore a tight fitting t-shirt and jeans that accented his physique and seemed to make his missing arm disappear; in other words, you never saw Brian as handicapped. He was always busy tinkering with something; his bushy black curly hair was caught in momentum and always waving a beat behind the motion of his body.

He stopped tinkering with his motorcycle and wraps his tree branch around Wendy and picked her up with his hug. He squated down and gave Denise a gentle squeeze then knelt down and held up his hand for me to high-five.

He stands up and whispers something to Wendy and points to his porch and the gaggle of Wendy and Denise’s friends lounging there. Denise’s sister Camile LeBoux was there with the baby. A skunk must have lived under the porch because Brian’s house always smelled like the skunk PawPaw and I saw squished on Hooper Road. They walk over and I stay with my best buddy Brian.

In one fluid step he swooped down in swinging motion I now know was a perfect wrestling shot, one that keeps your hips under your shoulders and lowers keeps your thigh poised for power; he wraps his arm around me and stands up and rotated so quickly that felt like I was spinning on a fast merry-go-round. I was giggling when he plopped me on his motorcycle seat.

Brian showed me what he was working on and how to use the cables on the right side – the one with the brake and the gas, he said – to pull the lever on the left side, which was the clutch. He said that other than the clutch he didn’t need the left side; all he had to do was make it easier for his right finger to squeeze the extra lever he added and pull the cable and all the pullies. He demonstrated with his finger; it was as thick and hairy as the stinging caterpillars that fell from oak trees in the spring.

I sat there there moving cablesand must have gotten excited and said something insightful, because Brian said I was right and a smart kid.

“Hey Jason,” he said. His voice was a deep but cheerful baritone and his accent was neutral. “I got something for you.”

He reached around his neck and slipped off a thin beaded stainless steel chain I now know was a military dog tag chain. I don’t know if Brian was in the military, but it was 1976 and Vietnam had just ended and there was always talk on the radio and among people lounging on Brian’s porch about ending the draft. If he was in the military that wasn’t where he lost his arm; Wendy once told me he lost it in a motorcycle accident and that he grew stronger after the accident.

With his strong right arm he held up the dog tag chain; dangling from it where dog tags would usually be was a Kennedy half dollar with a hole drilled in the forehead near where the real President Kennedy had been shot in 1963. There never was consensus on how many shots were fired, but video footage shows his head bursting out from at least one shot attributed to Lee Harvey Oswald. A scoffed theory proposed by the government was that a bouncing-bullet led to other wounds in Kennedy and an injury to the Texas governor riding beside him in Kennedy’s open convertible. Three 6.5mm rounds matching Oswald’s Italian army surplus rifle were found looking down at where Kennedy was shot and laid in a perfect pattern along the 6th floor windowsill of a book repository where Oswald had worked; another unfired round was inexplicably found beside the governor’s hospital gurney later that day.

1976 was only 13 years after the murder; all of Baton Rouge had an opinion on what happened, but no one I’ve ever met believed the 1964 Warren Report that Oswald acted alone. He was a New Orleans native who trained in the Baton Rouge civil air force under the alias Harvey Lee, so we were as linked to his tale as we were to Janis Joplin’s song Me and Bobby McGee. One of the most common points I remember hearing was that Oswald’s marksmanship records from the marines showed he was an atrocious shot; he couldn’t have hit PawPaw’s barn from our kitchen window, especially firing a mass produced WWII-era short-barreled 6.5mm Italian carbine, even with the scope a Dallas gunsmith had put on it a few months before Kennedy was killed. If Brian had an opinion on what happened to Kennedy he never shared it with Wendy or me. I believe he simply liked having something hefty hanging from his neck as a dog tag he chose instead of one forced upon him by the draft; that heft combing from a Kennedy half dollar and the coincidence of my family background was just lagniappe to my memory of that Saturday.

Brian asked me to hold out my hand and he lets the half rest in my palm and lowers his hand so that the chain coils around it. He pointed his fuzzy caterpillar forefinger at the date.

“That’s the year you were born,” he said. “1972.”

I took his word on that.

“They made them in silver after they shot Kennedy,” he said. “Like the Lone Ranger’s bullets,” he added (everyone knew I looked up to the Lone Ranger). “But silver’s too soft. Now they’re the same hard metal as quarters and other coins.”

I knew what he meant. As recently as a Saturday morning that month the Lone Ranger and a town’s war hero mayor (or something like that) were tied to a post on the floor with their hands behind their back; they escaped because the Lone Ranger intentionally angered the guard and mentioned the medal around the mayor’s neck; the guard ripped it off and stomped on it with the heel of his spurred cowboy boot and left them to die. The Lone Ranger wiggled it into his hands and explained that silver was soft and the stomping flattened it into a sharp edge that he was using to cut his ropes. He stood up and untied the mayor and captured all the bandits and I never forgot that silver was a soft metal.

“Here,” Brian said; he took the half dollar from my hand and pinched the chain with his teeth. “Keep your hand there,” he mumbled through clenched teeth.

I stared as intently as if Denise were doing a magic trick. Brian had rough black stubble on his cheeks like PawPaw at the end of a long workday, but he didn’t smell like Pine-Sol or cigarettes. He smelled like motor oil with a hint of skunk. And his stubble did not have PawPaw’s grey; his was pure black. Brian gave the impression that if he found a razor sharp enough to trim his beard it would pop back in the blink of an eye. Whatever he was about to do, I knew it would be worth watching.

He used his fingers to untwist the dogtag clasp. He gently guided the half dollar down the chain and into my outstretched palm with Kennedy’s face and my birthday showing. He piled the chain beside it.

“That’s a square hole,” he said with a tone that implied a square hole was somehow special. I didn’t know any better and I stared at it and remained silent, waiting for the hole to do change or for something to crawl out of it.

“How’d it get there?” he asked.

I said someone put it there.

He said yes, but asks how.

I said with a drill (PawPaw had drill bits all over the kitchen table and a corded Sears Craftsman drill in the carport; I knew what a drill was and what it did; I thought making a hole was easy.)

“But a drill is round,” Brian said. “This hole is square. Can you figure out how it got there?”

I didn’t know what to say. But I held the half and thought about it real hard, anyway. I trusted Brian. If he said it was special then I’d figure out why and how to do it.

I told him I’d figure it out.

“Tell me when you do,” he said.”Keep it until then. And see if you can learn to do this with it…”

He picked the half out of my hand and it rolled it across his hairy caterpillar knuckles just like a stinging caterpillar rolled over the twigs on the tip of a tree branch before dropping on someone’s head. It reached his pinky and would have fallen off like a caterpillar, but Brian’s thumb caught it and brought it under his hand and back around for another run. He did that again and again; there was no trick, it was skill from probably more years of practice than I had been alive.

Brian stopped the roll and held the half in his fingertips at my eye level and with Kennedy’s face and that square hole in clear view. Brian made a pop! sound like Denise yanking off her finger and the coin vanished from my eyes; his fingers were spread open and the coin was no where to be seen.

How’d you do that! I shouted.

He said he’d show me next time. We’d have more time to practice then.

He told me to watch his fingertips and I did. His hand jerks an inch and the half appears back between his fingertips with Kennedy’s face staring at me again. I asked him again how he did that and he said again that he’d show me next time.

He rolled the half across his knuckles a few more times and said that it would help if I could do that. He said it’s just practice; I already knew all I needed to know, I just had to work on it every day. He said a a quarter or a dime may be easier for my hands than the big half dollar. He said that we could put a square hole in other coins next time if I could figure out how.

“Just try things without worrying if you’ll get it right,” he said. “One day you may surprise yourself.”

He finagled the half back onto his dog tag chain and draped it over my neck.

“This is for you to keep,” he said. “So you’ll always know that 1972 was a special year because that’s when you were born.”

“And,” he added. “If you’re ever bored, you’ll always have a coin handy and something to do.”

I looked down. The half dollar sat so low on my chest that it almost touched my belly button. I feel it and though I don’t know what silver feels like I know it’s harder than silver because Brian told me so. I held it up with both hands – something not even Brian could do – and stare at the square hole and still don’t see why that’s special, but I believe Brian and tell him I will practice for next time.

Wendy called over and said we had to go. Brian swooped me up and over his bike and back onto the ground. My feet land and make a dull thud against the hard-packed grassless dirt under the oak tree. Brian asks Wendy if she got what she needed and she said yes and thanked him. She tells me that Denise is staying and that she’ll ride home with Camile. I look over and Denise sees me and exhales smoke and waves at me; I wave back. Brian hugged Wendy and gave me a high five and we get back in the car; this time I get to sit in the front seat and operate the radio.

I don’t recall which songs played. I was sleeping and feeling sluggish. Wendy drove with the windows up and it was warm and I leaned back in the comfortable seat and drifted to sleep.

I woke up on Plank Road, close enough to the airport to see planes landing and just around the corner from a strip mall of pawn shops, payday loans, and Tony’s Seafood, which had a bubbling water tank bigger than my living room and full of live catfish that they’d cut and fry for you. There were always a lot of policemen near there; one was leaning down of Wendy’s rolled down window and peering inside at us. She was shaking my shoulder and that’s what woke me up.

“I was in a hurry, officer,” she said. “My little brother is sick and I wanted to get him home quickly.”

Wendy was scared. Red and blue flashes bounced off the Datusun’s rear-view mirror and hit the side of her face and agitated her already pale and slightly paranoid countenance. I stared at the officer; I sensed something about him that I trusted. I smiled, and it turns out that I have Big Daddy’s charming smile; it’s more in the shape of our cheeks than our lips, as if our cheeks pull up the corners of our mouths rather than the smile forcing it’s way up. People swooned when they saw us smile.

The officer smiled back. He said: “Howdy, sir. What’s your name?”

Jason Pa’tan I said, pronouncing my last name like Denise did (I always talked like Denise for a few days after seeing her).

The officer was holding Wendy’s driver’s license and he glanced down at it and then back at me.

“You okay, Jason?” he asked.

I nodded and said I was feelin’ fine.

But I must have looked less than fine. Though I can’t be sure, I’d bet my eyes were probably like PawPaw’s at the end of a long day, except from all of the second hand smoke I had inhaled all day instead of Pine-sol and sawdust. And I was still sluggish from just waking up. I must have looked sick.

“What’s your sister’s name, Jason?” he asked.

I said Wendy.

He thanked me and handed Wendy her license and said, “All right, Miss Pa’tan. Get him home. But please slow down so you get there safely.”

He squatted down so he could look straight into my eyes, not down like he had been. I felt important.

He said, “You feel better now, Mr. Pah’tan. Keep an eye on the road for your sister. Get her home safely.”

I nodded as vigorously as my groggy mind would allow and assured him I would.

He stood up and his face vanished from sight, leaving me staring at a tool belt with a flashlight bigger than my forearm and a big steel revolver bigger than the Lone Ranger’s gun. I believe it was a .357 Smith and Wesson revolver with a 6.5″ inch barrel, similar to the one with a 4″ barrel like the one Big Daddy kept hidden on the back of his belt and the Model 10 Lee Harvey Oswald used to shoot and kill Officer Tippit. Those pistols could fire either short .38’s like the ones used in the little Colt detective’s special that Jack Ruby used to shoot Oswald. Midsized .38’s were a formidable midway between the .38 and .357; even the FBI still used .39P’s in the 1970’s before they switched to 9mm semi-automatics in the 80’s, but in the 1970’s revolvers were my first impression with firearms, and because of The Lone Ranger I was fascinated with every one I saw. I’ve read that Smith and Wesson had police contracts all over America in the 1970’s, so it’s likely my memory of his sidearm is correct; and it’s a realistic sticking point because I’d debate using a 9mm in combat only 14 years later, when that officer’s smiling face was still relatively fresh in my memory compared to today, when it’s more like looking at a memory of a memory.

The officer’s hand tapped Wendy’s open window twice and he stepped back a step towards traffic, as if to protect the Datsun and everyone inside from cars flying by Plank road in a hurry to pawn something or get some catfish. Wendy thanked him, and we pulled out slowly an smoothly; she had gotten better at driving a stick after a long day of starts and stops delivering Yellow Pages door to door. And she was high; few people move quickly after a joint, even joints made from whatever weak weed was available back then.

I rotated my head and peere through the hatchback’s window as we drove away. I was mesmerized by the rotating lights. The officer stepped into his car and the lights turned off; he was small by then but I could see him pull a CB mouthpiece like the ones the Teamsters showed me in their 18 wheelers and he spoke into it. His car grew smaller and I couldn’t see him inside any more. Suddenly his lights came back on and the car u-turned as quickly as Brian making a half dollar disappear. The officer rode off in his steel horse to help someone else that day.

Wendy gripped the steering wheel with both hands. Her forearms were shaking and her knuckles were white. She glanced at me.

“Don’t tell Mr. White what happened.” she said.

She looked back at the road in front of us.

“He won’t want to know we got stopped by a cop,” she said. “Or saw Brian. And don’t tell your dad either.”

I said I wouldn’t.

She looked at me and smiled a smile that wanted both of us to be happy yet was full of fear and sadness. I reached out and touched her arm like Denise had. She beamed and her eyes crinkled those crow feet crinkles that would become a permanent part of her face by her 30’s, but in 1976 they were just the sign of a teenage girl smiling a genuine smile.

“You’re a good kid,” she said. “Just like a good friend.”

Wendy looked back towards the road and concentrated on driving home safely and without being noticed, that fine line between not too fast and not too slowly, the .38P of driving home.

Wendy and I would talk about that day only a few years later in family counseling; our memories were so identical that we laughed about it (though we both hid the parts about being high). The only difference wasn’t discussed, and that was the long-term effects. I would always say Wendy taught me to call her by her first name so people would think I was her little brother; she would forever tell people that she taught me to call her Wendy so that we’d have a relationship like friends, unlike her estranged relationship with Granny.

We got home safely. The Datsun came to a stop in the gravel driveway behind an empty carport, and MawMaw opened the door beside PawPaw’s cricket cage, and stood framed by white paint with her bright ruby read lipstick as bright as the flashing police car lights had been and her hair done up in a beehive standing improbably tall atop her head and held in place by copious amounts of hairspray from those cans piled in the bathroom. I swung open the Datsun’s door and leaped out and landed on the gravel with a satisfying crunch. I could hear PawPaw’s hundreds of crickets welcoming me home with a chorus of chirps, and I could almost smell MawMaw’s hairspray.

She squatted down and stuck out her arms, and when I got close enough to her aura of hairspray she said: “Gimme some shugga!”

I lept into her arms and tried to bury myself in her blouse to protect my face, but I was no match for her machine gun fire lips, and soon I was covered in shugga.

“Get inside and wash up before you have cookies,” she said. I could smell the freshly baked chocolate chips becoming me from the kitchen, overriding MawMaw’s hairspray. The smell of cookies and the chirping of crickets told me I was home.

“Say goodbye to Wendy first,” MawMaw said as she stood up.

I turned and waved to Wendy, who was standing beside her open car door and had that sad smile on again. She waved back, and I disappeared and ran to the hallway and stopped in front of the hallway mirror just long enough to glance at my face and smear a few shugga scars across my cheek in a fruitless effort to wipe them off. Inside the bathroom, I stood on the stool PawPaw made for me and scrubbed and scrubbed and came out clean. I flew back to the kitchen table, where PawPaw’s tools had been pushed aside to make room for a plate of maybe five or six cookies and a glass of whole milk were waiting.

I devoured my plate of cookies and washed them down with Blue Bell from the carton PawPaw and I had brought home. I don’t know what it was about returning from a day at Brian the one armed drug dealer’s house, but I couldn’t get enough food down to my belly fast enough; I had heard that feeling was called the munchies, and I had a bad case of the munchies. It took so much effort to slow down and eat my cookies that I didn’t think about Wendy or wonder if she got home safely.

PawPaw showed up after sunset smelling of Camel cigarettes, sweat, and chainsaw oil. He kneeled down inside the kitchen and I lept into his arms. I showed him my half dollar and told him Brian gave it to me (that slipped had slipped out with MawMaw and she wasn’t mad so I told PawPaw; I never told Wendy that I broke my promise to not tell them we had seen Brian again). He said it was a fine necklace and that he had no idea how the square hole got in it; but just like Brian he said I was smart and could figure it out if I worked at it every day.

That night PawPaw gave me a quarter that fit my fingers to practice rolling it across my knuckles (I had disproportionately large hands as a kid, just like I had big feet – MawMaw said I’d grow into those, too – but a Kennedy half dollar was too big, for even me). PawPaw went to the hallway bathroom to take a shower and I was asleep on the couch before I saw him again or before Linda and Craig returned with the baby.

I slept wearing Brian’s1972 Kennedy half dollar with a square hole in the head. I don’t remember if I dreamed or not, but if I did I’m sure it was a good dream; it had been a good day and I was still flying high.

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