PawPaw

“Since the Warren Commission’s and FBI’s investigation into the possibility of a conspiracy was seriously flawed, their failure to develop evidence of a conspiracy could not be given independent weight.”

“Following the completion of its investigation of organized crime, the committee concluded in its report that Carlos Marcello, Santos Trafficante, and James R. Hoffa each had the motive, means, and opportunity to plan and execute a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy.”

– The Congressional Committee on Assassinations JFK and MLK Assassination Report, 1976

By the time Judge Lottinger assumed my case, Hoffa had been missing for a year and was presumed dead. I believe Hoffa’s disappearance was why in 1976, the same year Lottinger stepped in and removed me from Partin custody, the Congressional Committee on Assassinations listed Hoffa as one of three men with the “motive, means, and opportunity to plan and execute a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy.”

Hoffa was missing and presumed dead and unable to defend himself or be interviewed further; I can’t imagine the timing was coincidental. The 1976 John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior Assassination Report was classified and the results hidden from public oversight for reasons I still don’t understand; every president since then chose to keep all or part classified and hidden from the public despite the Freedom of Information Act; that’s presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Senior, Clinton, Bush Junior, Obama, Trump his first term, and Biden (Trump released the final part when he assumed office for his second term in January 2025).

What’s relevant to my family’s history is that by 1976 no one needed to whitewash Big Daddy’s reputation or protect anyone named Edward Grady Partin from Louisiana law. I never learned what Governor McKeithen had to say about that. Big Daddy still ran the state under Governor Edwin Edwards in 1976, but I did not know that because I was barely five years old; to me, my world revolved around Mr. and Mrs. James “Ed” White and my monthly visits with Wendy and Daddy. My first memory of all of them in the sam month is so poignant I can still step into it today.

I wake up on the living room couch to the smell of PawPaw on Saturday mornings: Old Spice after shave, unfiltered Camel cigarettes, and black coffee. He’s smiling and kneeling by my head; from my perspective laying down he’s tilted sideways.

“Hey, d’er, Lil’ Buddy,” he says. “‘Bout time you woke up.”

I sit up and the world rightens itself and I hop off the couch and plop my big feet on the faded vinyl floor and without a pause I step into PawPaw’s open arms.

He is a wiry man who only reached Daddy’s chest and was practically invisible around Big Daddy, but his hug is strong and pure and I love him more than anything on Earth and today is going to be a wonderful day because PawPaw’s dressed in his Saturday tree-climbing clothes. His thick leather boots that could hold his metal tree-climbing spikes, like the horse spurs cowboys like The Lone Ranger wore on the small black and white television across the coffee table from my couch. PawPaw’s cheeks are as slick as a nonstick skillet, and I slide past his face as he squeezes me tight. PawPaw’s a small wiry man; on his knees, he’s my height and we see eye to eye. I feel loved; though I don’t know the words to use, for the rest of my life when I discuss what love feels like I remember what it was like to wake up and step into a hug with PawPaw.

He points towards the hallway leading to our home’s only bathroom and says: “Go on now,” he says. “Get in d’er and wash up before MawMaw’s up.”

I scuttle off to get washed up while PawPaw folds my sheets and puts them on the arm of the couch for when I go to bed later that night.

PawPaw was born James “Ed” White about three hours upriver from Baton Rouge in the pine forests surrounding Big Daddy’s home town of Woodville, Mississippi. They were the same age but had lived drastically different lives: Big Daddy was a dishonorably discharged marine who took over Woodville’s sawmill and trucking unions at 18 years old when all young and able men were away in WWII; PawPaw joined the navy and lost an eye working the maintenance shift on a ship and moved to Baton Rouge in the late 1940’s to do what he loved: heal trees.

PawPaw was the most respected tree surgeon in all of southern Loiusiana; families all along the 82 or so serpentine miles of River Road between Baton Rouge and the plantations surrounding New Orleans called on PawPaw to care for their treasured stately oak trees. And plantations from as far away as Saint Francisville an hour or two upriver called on him to landscape their grounds in time for wedding season photos. On Saturdays PawPaw and I would drive his old rusty Ford F150 truck with a chainsaw and extra jug of gas and oil mixture to trim broken branches and cover the wound with black tar so that termites don’t get in. We’d haul the branches back and burn them by the back barn on Sundays. On weekdays he was the custodian and groundskeeper of Glen Oaks High School, a small school of only 150 or so students but known all over Baton Rouge as having the healthiest live oak trees. I never saw him those mornings, but every weekday evening he’d come home with stubbly cheeks and smelling like unfiltered Camel cigarettes and Pine Sol and kneel down and open his arms for a hug from his Lil’ Buddy.

Big Daddy left Woodville in 1954 and moved to Baton Rouge to take over Teamsters local union #5 and “forcibly” install Jimmy Hoffa’s men (whatever that meant.) He and PawPaw sounded and smelled nothing alike: Big Daddy’s voice was smooth and calming and a siren’s call for everyone near him; when Brian Dennehy would portray Big Daddy in 1983, he’d use his acting lessons and news footage of Big Daddy to try to get the southern drawl just right, but not amount of acting could make anyone sound as soothing as Big Daddy’s. PawPaw didn’t get that reaction from people; sometimes it seemed I was the only one who could understand him. He spoke more like the Cajun French in some of the swampy areas where he took me fishing in his motor powered pirogue, similar to the New Orleans football fans on TV who omit their t’s and h’s and sing: Who D’at! Who D’at! Who D’at talkin’ ’bout beatin’ d’em Saints! Who D’at! Big Daddy had a big bass boat on False River, but I always caught more fish from PawPaw’s pirogue.

I’m giddy as I scuttle across the vinyl floor and into the hallway bathroom; Hearing PawPaw’s voice in the morning means I’d have a whole day with him. The bathroom is small and cluttered; it’s the only one and we share it with me, MawMaw, Linda, Craig, and the baby. They sleep in on Saturdays and it’s just PawPaw and me until cartoons come on the little TV.

I pee and flush and step on the rough wooden step stool PawPaw had made for me. I shove aside the cluttered bottles of after shave and cans of hairspray and wash my own hands in the sink. I hop down and plant both big feet onto the floor with a satisfying plop, take off my sleeping t-shirt, and pick up the short pants and daytime t-shirt laid out for me across the bathtub edge. I put on my socks and tennis shoes made for walking, and rush out the door.

I run into MawMaw. She’s wearing her fuzzy light blue slippers and shaggy grey-white bathrobe the color of her hair. She kneels down and locks her gaze straight ahead and into my eyes and smiles mischievously and says:

“Gimme some shugga!”

I cringe and bring my arms up to my chest, ready to defend my face.

She inches closer and says again: “Gimme some shugga!”

I giggle and bring my fists to my face, just below my cheeks; it’s my modified crawfish defense, like how a crawfish holds up both pinchers and keeps them pointed at you so you can’t grab their whiskers.

MawMaw’s not intimidated by my crawfish stance because she has her own pinchers; she leans closer and closer, snapping her thumb and fingers together and moving them towards mine.

“I’m gonna steal me some shugga,” she says.

She thrusts her pinchers out and ducks them down and tickles my exposed ribs; I erupt in giggles and my defense drops down. That’s when she strikes and peppers my cheeks with smacks of shugga’. I squeal and raise my hands back to my cheeks; she tickles me more and I squirm and wiggle and flap my hands up and down and laugh loudly.

“Shhh,” MawMaw whispers. “You gonna wake the baby.”

I shush and lower my hands and she instantly swoops in for some more shugga and I squeal again; she shushes me again and scoots me towards the kitchen.

“Get in there and help PawPaw make breakfast,” she says.

Before MawMaw was Mrs. James “Ed” White she Delores Shackleton, like the famous explorer, but that was from her first marriage. She was born into the rich Baton Rouge Lamar family who owned all the billboards between our house and the airport a few miles away, and then all along I-110 connecting Chemical Alley, Scotlandville, Zachary, and Baton Rouge. Today, Lamar Advertising is a publicly traded company that owns 80% of the billboards in America; if you see their little green Lamar banner under an advertisement, it’s a sign that you’re connected to MawMaw and my story. I never learned how she met and married PawPaw. She doesn’t sound like anyone I know. Except for shugga’, she articulates every word, like families on television do.

MawMaw steps into the bathroom and I begin to rush towards the kitchen but slam to a stop in front of the full sized hallway mirror. It’s the one MawMaw uses to check her lipstick and beehive hair dew after she puts on her daytime clothes. There’s a bright red line of lipstick the length of a caterpillar smudged horizontally where my head reached last week. I stand up straight; the bottom of the smudge touches the top of my head. Everyone said I’d be as big as Daddy one day but I don’t see it. I straighten my spine and lift my chin and push up on my toes; my head pokes above the little red smudge and I’m happy. I turn and scuttle over to the kitchen counter beside PawPaw.

I stand on the wooden platform he had made for me and peer through the sink window. Though obscured by a dusty bug screen and a few spider webs with desiccated insect carcasses, I can see the tall metal cattle gate and our fishing pond in front off the barn. There are piles and piles of logs and branches between the pond and the gate.

I ask PawPaw if we’re going to climb trees today; I speak more like MawMaw than PawPaw.

“Nope,” he says. “T’day is your day wit’ Wendy and Debbie,”

That sounds fun and I help PawPaw make breakfast. We break a couple of eggs into a big bowl and pour in milk from a plastic Blue Bonney gallon jug and PawPaw stirs it into a bubbly blur like the motor on our Pirogue froths up swampy water. He pours some Bisquick onto the foam and hands me a wooden spoon to mix it in. He lights the gas stove and drops a generous dollop of Crisco into a cast iron frying pan and it begins to sizzle. He tilts the batter and uses my spoon to pour splattering piles of pancakes into the pan. We make a few and put them on a plate in the warming oven under the stove. MawMaw walks up, still in her bathrobe and without that Wizard of Oz lipstick, and gives PawPaw some shugga. She pours herself a cup of coffee from the Mr. Coffee machine beside me; she adds milk and lots of shugga’. I hear someone in the bathroom, either Linda or Craig; the baby must still be asleep. PawPaw and I eat pancakes smothered in Aunt Jemima syrup while MawMaw finishes two cups of coffee; she cleans our plates for us and PawPaw pulls out his Camels.

He looks down at me mischievously. His good eye twinkles; the glass one looks just the same and is dark brown like mine and Daddy’s and Mamma Jean’s, not bright sky blue like Big Daddy’s and Grandma Foster’s. His salt and pepper hair is slicked back and the corners of smile reach both of his big ears. He pulls a dented silver Zippo from the little pocket in his blue jeans and holds a Camel pointed towards his lips; it’s backwards, and I gasp and tell him to wait! I tell him his Camel is backwards again; the little black camel goes in his mouth and he lights the other end.

PawPaw chuckles and says: “You right, Lil’ Buddy. You smarter d’an your PawPaw.”

He flips the cigarette around and lights it and takes a drag. He says: “How ’bout we go to d’ store and get some mo’ milk an’ cookie dough so MawMaw can make some cookies for when you get back from seein’ Wendy?”

My eyebrows shoot up and I ask if we can climb my tree; it’s the really big sprawling stately oak tree across from the convenience store.

PawPaw chuckles and says: “Of course, Lil’ Buddy. Let’s go so d’ey can have d’er breakfast.”

He gives MawMaw some shugga’ on the cheek and takes my hand and we walk out the kitchen door and into the carport with all of the crickets in our bait cage chirping. PawPaw pauses to grab a potato from a bag laying atop the washing machine and opens the bigger blade of his Old Henry two-blade folding knife to cut the potato into chunks that he drops into the cricket cage. He puts the Old Henry in the same pocket that has a little Zippo pocket and takes my hand. We have to squeeze through the small gap between his Ford F150 and piles of yellow pages phone books wrapped in plastic. We walk along the crunchy gravel carport and turn left onto the blacktop of Hooper Road. PawPaw holds my hand and stands between me the road in case a car speeds by; they go fast on d’at road, he once said. We walk and I bat the weeds and thistles that line the half mile walk along Hooper Road to the convenience store and the big oak tree.

I see the tree and its sprawling undulating branches covered in grey Spanish moss and let go of PawPaw’s hand and rush to the tree and reach up to the branch I know and grasp the top. My fingers slip in and over grooves in its old bark that are as deep and sprawly as the river pattern on the back of PawPaw’s sunburnt neck. I heave and heave but can not pull myself up. I feel PawPaw’s hands under my arms and I get stronger and pull myself onto the branch and swing my feet into the curve that formed a craddle I called a horse saddle; it’s about 40 feet from the trunk of the tree and the branch sways up and down with my weight. Hi Ho Silver! I say. I was riding like the Lone Ranger.

I change gears about that and look up; I may be able to reach the next branch. I stretch and grunt but can not reach it. Instead, I grab some moss and yank it off and hold it on my chin and look straight into PawPaw’s good eye and say I look Craig now. PawPaw chuckles and reaches up and grabs his own beard and puts it on; we laugh with each other like two old men who are best friends and know all the best jokes between us.

He puts his beard back on the tree and reminds me we have to get cookie dough and get back home before Wendy shows up. I keep my beard and reach out my arms and PawPaw swings me over the saddle and onto the ground. We hold hands and pause at the red light for Plank Road until it’s safe to cross. We reach the heavy glass door and PawPaw pushes it open and I put on my disguise. The bell above the door rings and the man behind the counter looks at us.

“Well hello there, Mr. Ed,” he says.

He looks at me and asks PawPaw: “Who do you have with you today?”

It’s me! I exclaim as I lower my beard.

“Wow!” he says. “Mr. Jason. I didn’t recognize you.”

I put the beard back on and he gasps and tells me it’s a good disguise. I tell him The Lone Ranger is a master of disguise and I am too. We chat while PawPaw gets a small carton of Blue Bonnet milk and chocolate chip cookie dough in a tube covered with drawings of elves living on a tree; that’s what Craig said PawPaw was, a forest elf; he said PawPaw was like Puck, an elf but more fun, and that’s why those cookies were always the ones I wanted.

PawPaw picks up a six pack of Miller pony bottles and steps beside me. Without being asked the man reaches up and brings a pack of Camels down to the counter. We get two plastic bags to carry things home; PawPaw carries the milk and ponies and I carry the cookie dough. PawPaw walks between the road and me and we talk and laugh and slap flowers that teeter and totter back at us. There are no cars on Hooper Road that early in the morning.

At home Linda and Craig’s car is gone – they’re never there when Wendy and Debbie show up. MawMaw is in her fancy flowered day clothes and bright red lipstick and beehive hair dew that makes her the taller than even Craig. MawMaw’s putting the milk in the refrigerator and PawPaw’s outside moving Yellow Pages and I hear the crunching gravel of a car pulling up; I walk through the carport door to join PawPaw.

Wendy and Debbie are in a dented Datsun hatchback that’s the faded yellow of one of last summer’s Yellow Pages left outside and bleached by the sun. PawPaw had fixed up that Datsun for Wendy as a gift; he fixed up cars for all the Kelly’s Girls that showed up at our house during the summer but the Datsun was special because it could hold a lot of Yellow Pages.

Debbie hops out of the passenger seat and squats down. I run over and leap into her waiting arms. Squatting down, she’s shorter than I am. Wendy stands beside the driver’s side close to PawPaw; she’s his height. Wendy asks if I was ready for our day. I say of course! I ask if we can get slushies at the 7-11 by the park. She says of course, we always do.

PawPaw, Wendy, and Debbie get busy loading Yellow Pages into the Datsun’s open hatchback and back seat with Yellow Pages. The Datsun sags with the weight of all the books, but PawPaw and Debbie seemed satisfied with their work and PawPaw’s confident the Datsun will make it. He should know; he fixed it up and gave it to Wendy, just like other cars he gave to what he called the Kelly Girls; he used his truck to pick up Yellow Pages every spring and Christmas catalos every fall, and all of those Kelly’s Girls delivered those all over Baton Rouge in a fleet of used cars whenever they found time between school and taking care of babies. The hatchback Datsun was the best car imaginable for that job. Wendy and Debbie stand back and smoked their red-filter cigarettes while PawPaw smoked a Camel, and they admire their work; I agree with everything they say.

They finish their cigarettes and we load into the car. PawPaw helps me get in and squeeze into a spot above a stack of books in my seat. MawMaw doesn’t come out – she never comes out to see Wendy. The Datsun grumbles awake, Wendy cranks the shift into first, and we lurch forward and send gravel sprinkling against the Ford truck. My head slams into Debbie’s seat when Wendy jerks to a stop just before reaching the blacktop, then it slams backwards and to the right as we lurch forward and to the left. We fly down Hooper Road, and at the stoplight where PawPaw and I walk to get milk and cigarettes we turn right onto Plank and accelerate past the airport and onto the I-110 south onramp. Wind whips my long curly hair, and we fly into the sky.

A squeak comes from the dashboard. Wendy checks to see if something is falling off the aging Datsun. It’s fine, but the squeak won’t stop. Wendy tells Debbie it’s annoying her. She slaps the dashboard and tells it to stop squeaking. It won’t. She hits it harder and tells it to stop. It won’t. She makes a fist and thumps the dashboard as hard as she could.

“Whoa, Wendy,” Debbie says. Her voice is calm. She rests her chubby and soft hand on Wendy’s slim and athletic forearm.

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

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

Debbie whips out Wendy’s Frisbee and flips it dish-side up. She pulls 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 dumps 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, Debbie deftly rolls a thin joint and puts it between her lips. In the blink of an eye, she’s refilled the baggie and tucked her blue bag and put the Frisbee into her floorboard and rolled up her window. It happens so fast that Wendy is still clutching the steering wheel with white knuckles, fuming at the squeaking dashboard.

“Roll up your window,” Debbie tells Wendy. She does, and Debbie whips out a Bic lighter and fires up the joint and takes a drag.

“Here,” she says through pursed lips and with a lung full of smoke. Wendy takes a hand off the steering wheel to accept the joint, and takes a deep drag. Debbie cranks the window handle around a few times to crack the window and exhales most of the smoke out; the wind whips some my way, and I inhale the dank smoke that reminds me of the squished skunk on the blacktop we could smell when the wind blew towards PawPaw’s house.

Wendy cracks her window, too, and exhales.

“See?” Debbie says. “Everything’s fine.” She takes the joint and turns on the radio and tells me to listen.

It’s Janis Joplin, she says. It’s that song we all know. She turns up the radio and sings to me:

Busted flat in Baton Rouge

Waitin’ for a train

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

We get to the part about Janis Joplin’s dirty red bandana, and Wendy whips out her clean red bandana and tells me it’s like this one. She’s ignoring the squeak and playing with Debbie and me while keeping her eyes on the road. Debbie sings with me and ties the bandana over her head like a pirate; she says now she has red hair, too, just like mine. I’m feeling fine, and laugh with Wendy and Debbie and sing along to Me and Bobby McGee.

A few hours latter, Debbie and I are pooped from running Yellow Pages to each door as Wendy lurched along beside us. But we’re finished, and Wendy says its time to celebrate with some slushies. We get in the Datsun and the back is now a cavernous space all my own. Wendy is driving smoothly now, and I see rather than feel us passing trees faster and faster. We zoom up the onramp and fly north on I-110, like Superman high above the houses below.

Debbie rolls up the windows and rolls a joint, lights it, and passes it to Wendy. I smell the skunk again. Debbie rotates her spherical torso around and reaches back and plucks my nose off my face and holds it in her closed fist with the tip poking out. I squeal like the dashboard, and point out that I know that’s not my thumb, it’s her finger. She showed me that last time.

“You’re so smart,” she says.

“How about this…” she says, and she grasps her forefinger with the tip poking out of her fist and yanked it off. I gasp! She pulled her finger off, and was holding it in the other hand!

She puts it back and accepts the joint from Wendy, takes a hit a hit and passes it back, then yanks her finger off again. And again and again. She shows me how to do it, and I sit back and practice while she and Wendy finish the joint.

It’s an entire joint to the airport exit at Plank Road, where we pull off and descend from I-110. We pass the convenience store and keep driving to the 7-11 near our park to get slushies. I get a Cherry flavor the color of MawMaw’s lipstick, Wendy gets a brown Coke the color of PawPaw’s eyes, and Debbie gets a 7-11 flavor blue the color Big Daddy’s eyes (7-11 calls it “blue rasberry,” but even those words laid over a 40 year old memory can’t make it taste like anything other than 7-11 blue, an artificial color more vibrant than the brightest sky blue I’ve ever seen).

We arrive at the park and Debbie sticks out her tongue and it’s blue and I laugh. Debbie pulls a mirror from her purse and has me stick out my tongue; it looks like MawMaw’s tube of lipstick. Wendy sticks out her tongue and it looks the same. We take the Frisbee and our slushies to the rusted and wobbling merry-go-round. I get on, and Wendy sits in the thick rubber swing held aloft with rusted chains that squeak like her dashboard when she swings, but she doesn’t seem to care. Debbie spins me and it squeaks like the swings. I laugh and giggle and cling to the thick round safety bar with one hand and my slushie with the other.

Round and round I spin, the rusted wobbly merry go round squeaking and Debbie laughing with me and sticking out her bright blue tongue every time I speed by. Wendy was squeaking on her rusted chain link swing, going higher and higher with each kick of her feet, and were having so much fun no one thinks to use the Frisbee. Soon Debbie – who was always easily winded – is panting and asks for a break. I take a turn in the swing, and Debbie and Wendy smoke cigarettes while Wendy gently pushes me.

Wendy says it’s time to go, that we’re going to see Brian, and I get excited about that. Brian the one handed drug dealer always has fun things to play with. We zoom down the road for half a joint and arrive at his trailer almost hidden behind a massive stately oak tree. Cathy, Debbie’s sister, is there, along with a few other people who all knew Wendy and Linda and PawPaw from Glen Oaks High School. Brian’s in the front yard, near the base of the oak tree, tinkering with his motorcycle. He’s one of the biggest people I know, almost as big as Daddy, with big bushy black hair and a muscular right arm. He hugs Wendy and Debbie, and points to his porch, where people are waiting with full baggies of herb.

Brian steps down in a swinging motion that I know know is a perfect wrestling shot, wraps his arm around me, and stands up and swings me around and plops me down on his motorcycle seat. He shows me how to use the cables he’s adding, and says that soon when I pulled this one (he pointed to the one by my right hand) it will pull the lever on this side (he pointed to the clutch), and then he could ride again.

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

“Hey Jason,” he says.

That stands out in my mind as much as his one strong arm; Brian was the only person other than Debbie and Wendy who called me by my name when I was out with them. Most just ignored me and stared away, dazed and confused.

“I got something for you,” Brian says.

He reaches around his neck and slips off a thin silver chain that I would later learn was an army dog-tag chain. Dangling from it is a Kennedy half dollar. Brian puts it in my hand and points to the date under Kennedy’s face and says: “That’s the year you were born, 1972.”

I take his word on that.

“Here,” he says, and takes it from my hand and slips the dog-tag chain into his mouth between his teeth. Like PawPaw at the end of a work day, Brian has rough black stubble on his cheeks. He doesn’t smell like Pine-Sol, he smells like skunk and motor oil. Bryan uses his fingers to twist the chain open, and slides the half dollar off and puts it back in my hand with Kenendy’s face and my birthdate showing.

“That’s a square hole,” he says with a tone that makes it seem as if a square hole is special.

“How’d it get there?” he asks.

I say someone put it there.

He says yes, but asks how.

I say with a drill (PawPaw had drill bits all over the kitchen table and a corded Sears Craftsman drill in the carport, so I knew what a drill was and what it did).

“But a drill is round. This hole is square,” he says. “Can you figure that out?”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know holes shouldn’t be square. But I held it and thought about it real hard, anyway. I trusted Brian, and if he said it was special then I’d figure out why, and how to do it. I could take my nose and finger off now, so I could probably do anything. I told him I’d figure it out.

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

He picks up the half and it rolls across his knuckles like a fat stinging catterpillar wiggles across the thin fingerling branches at the tip of an oak tree branch. It reaches his pinky; he catches it atop his thumb, brings it back to his forefinger, and the caterpillar rolls again. And again and again.

Brian stops the roll and holds the half in his fingertips and at my eye level. I see Kennedy’s face with the square hole through his forehead for a second, then the coin vanishes from my eyes with a subtle snap of Brian’s fingers; it wasn’t a trick, it was gone and his hand was empty.

How’d you do that! I shout gleefully. Like with my nose and Debbie’s finger coming off, it must be simple to do. But Brian says it’s hard, harder than making his motorcycle run with one hand. He says he’ll show me next time, when we have more time to practice. He says a dime or a quarter may be easier for me than the big half dollar, and that we can put a square hole in one of those next time, if I figure out how. He finagles the half back on to his dog tag chain, and drapes it over my neck.

“This is for you to keep,” he says. “So you’ll always know when you were born was special, and you’ll always have something to figure out and work on.”

The half dollar sits so low on my chest it’s practically at my belly button. I grasp the half with both hands – something not even Brian can do – and hold it up to eye level and ponder why making a square hole would be so hard that Brian wouldn’t just tell me how to do it.

Wendy calls that we had to go. Brian swoops me up and over his bike and back onto the ground, where my feet land at the same time and make a dull thud against the packed grassless dirt under Brian’s big oak tree. Wendy takes me to the car, and Debbie gets in the back so that Cathy can sit in front; she’s the older sister, and has that right, she says.

A full joint later, we’re driving along Florida Buelevard across from what I know know is Belaire subdivision, home of the Belaire High School Bengals, where I will be co-captain of the wresting team in twelve years. But I don’t know that now, I just know that this is home of the Chinese restaurant all-you-can-eat buffet with a fishbowl full of fortune cookies by the exit door; it would still be there when I would be cutting weight for wrestling, jogging by it with a hungry as I feel now; all of the second hand smoke has made me famished.

We passed the two massive dented blue dumpsters with grey clouds of swarming buzzing flies hovering over them, and into the parking lot of Debbie and Cathy’s mom’s brick apartment complex, where they lived with their brother – who was the exact image of Brian, but with two arms – and their fluffy haired Cajun mother who screeched when she talked and who Wendy tried to avoid because she was so loud. Usually, I’d agree that it was too loud, but I was hoping we’d go inside because there were always boxes of the funny named Little Debbie snack cakes that Debbie liked to point out, big one pound bags of Raisenettes, lots of stuffed chocolate donuts with the pirate on the packagers, and a bowl of fortune cookies that were usually stale but still sweet and fun to eat if only for the tiny pieces of paper inside that Debbie would read to me (they all said I was smart and handsome, or strong and brave).

Wendy said we had to go, that we were already late to get to Mr. White’s. I sat in the front and waved goodbye and played with my new Kennedy half dollar necklace while Wendy sped up Florida Buelvard, looking for a road to the interstate. I got tired quickly – probably from all the weed that day – and dozed off and don’t remember how we got back on I-110. But I remember being 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, and one was leaned over and peering in Wendy’s window and she was shaking me to wake me up.

“I was in a hurry, officer,” Wendy said, shaking my shoulder. “My little brother is sick.”

Flashes of red and white bounced off the Datusun’s rear-view mirror and hit the side of Wendy’s face and dazzled my half-awake eyes. Though I can’t be sure, I’d bet they were bloodshot from all the second hand weed I had inhaled that day. I must have looked sick. I stared at the officer, and must have liked what I saw because I smiled.

The officer glanced at his hand, which had Wendy’s driver’s license in it, and looked at me and smiled back and said: “Howdy, sir. What’s your name?”

“Jason Pah’tan” I said, pronouncing it like PawPaw did. Though he was from somewhere in the pine forests of Woodville Mississippi, near where Big Daddy was born, his accent was more like the southern Louisiana French Cajuns who pronounced “i” as “a,” and most people I remember back then would laugh when he pronounced my last name, not because he pronounced it differently, but because of a famous and funny plumber’s commercial on local television, Patin’s Plumbing, which showed a man recently home from a long day at work and covered in dirty water from trying to fix his own toilet, with Patin the Plumber stepping in to say, “Shoulda called Pah’tan!” It was PawPaw’s accent that said “d’is and d’at” instead of this and that, like how the New Orleans A’ints fans cheered: “Who d’at? Who d’at? Who d’at talkin’ ’bout beatin’ d’em Saints? Who d’at?” My daddy and Big Daddy pronounced their names like the big-bosoomed country singer Dolly Parton, but I was Jason Pah’tan.

The officer glanced back down at Wendy’s driver’s license and then back at me and asked: “You okay, Mr. Pah’tan?”

I nodded and said I was doin’ fine.

But I must have looked less than fine, groggy and with bloodshot eyes and a head that wouldn’t stay upright, because the officer handed Wendy her license and said, “All right, Miss Pah’tan. Get him home soon and tell your parents to look at him; but please slow down so you get there safely.”

He squatted down to look into my eyes, not down at an angle, and I’ll never forget how that made me feel: like an equal. He said, “You feel better now, Mr. Pah’tan. Keep an eye on the road for your sister, and get her home safely.”

I nodded as vigorously as my groggy mind would allow, and said, “Yes, s’uh. I will.”

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 Smith and Wesson .357 revolver like the one Big Daddy kept hidden on the back of his belt. 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, Wendy probably having learned how to drive a stick shift after a long day of delivering Yellow Pages door to door.

As we drove away, I peered back through the hatchback window and into the rotating red and blue lights, and watched the officer step back into his police car and fumble with his hands; the lights went off, and he pulled up a CB mouthpiece like the Teamster truckers used to talk to each other and said something into it. The car grew smaller and I couldn’t see him any more, then the lights came back on and the car u-turned so quickly I saw a wave of gravel shoot up behind him and dance across the asphalt as he sped away to help someone else.

Wendy gripped the steering wheel with both hands; her forearms were shaking and her knuckles were white.

“Don’t tell Mr. White what happened.” she said, glancing at me then whipping her gaze back to the road in front of us.

“He won’t want to know we got stopped by a cop,” she said. “Or saw Brian.”

She looked at me and smiled a smile only Wendy could smile, one that wanted both of us to be happy yet was full of fear and sadness. I reached out and touched her arm like Debbie had, and though nothing of her smile changed physically, it felt better to me and I said okay. She beamed at that, and turned her attention back to the road.

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 began to devour the cookies, and MawMaw reminded me to slow down. 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. 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.

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