Son of Fletch

10

Thirsty,” Jack said. “Really?” Fletch said. “How could that be? Why, you’re not even as warm as last night’s pizza yet.”

He was driving with the windows open. The station wagon’s air conditioner was not on.

From the car’s passenger seat, Jack watched Fletch’s face. “I wonder how Carrie and Leary are doing.”

The dashboard clock said nine-fifteen. If all had gone well, Leary was in chains in the back of a police car on his way back to prison. Carrie was on her way back to the farm. The bull calf was on his way back to pasture, of course having no idea why he had been loaded on a truck and taken for a ride to nowhere that morning.

If all had gone well.

Jack looked into the backseat where Professor The Reverend Doctor Kris Kriegel slept soundly. His pudgy hands were folded in his lap. He snored.

Jack said, “Leary certainly was a sight, being dragged down the road in a pen on the back of Carrie’s truck, being shit on and kicked by that young bull all the way.”

“Wasn’t he though?” Fletch agreed. “I wonder if he felt anything at all like that young woman he kidnapped?”

Jack smiled. “Shall I sing a few bars of ‘Let the Punishment Fit the Crime’?”

“Can you?”

“No.”

“That’s good.”

Jack said, “I’m amazed at the way you have kept us all weak, incapacitated.”

“All?”

“Not Moreno, of course. Him you got killed.”

“Are you incapacitated?”

“No, “Jack said. “Why aren’t I? Why didn’t you put me in the gully, too? You could have talked me into it.” Fletch did not answer. “I know. Because you’re curious. ‘Mildly curious’ about me. You want to see what I will do. Do you think you can handle me? Or is it that you trust me?”

“Neither.”

“So you’re just taking a chance with me.”

“A very big chance.”

Rounding a curve in the road, they came across a dozen vehicles lined up, stopped. They were waiting to go through a roadblock.

Fletch slowed the station wagon but proceeded up the left lane.

“What are you doing?” Jack asked in alarm.

“Not waiting for the roadblock. I hope my neighbors don’t think me arrogant. Can’t quite explain to them I have the fugitives the cops are looking for, can I?”

“Are you turning us in?”

His arm out the window, Fletch waved at Deputy Michael Jackson.

Michael waved back and shouted, “Hey, wait!”

Fletch stopped. He cursed himself for not putting luggage in the car. Then he remembered he had left the garbage bag full of prison clothes and boots outside his back door, and he cursed himself again.

Michael put his hands on the windowsill of the door beside Jack. “Hey, Jack. Are you going to be home next weekend?”

“Maybe,” Jack said. “I’m not sure.”

“I’m off duty next Saturday, and there’s a party down at the river. Want to come?”

“Sounds good.”

“Girls,” Michael said.

“Sounds better.”

“You might bring your guitar.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll call your dad.” Michael looked into the backseat. “Who’s that?”

In the backseat, blinking slowly, Kriegel was waking up. The guitar was propped up on the seat beside him. Their shapes were similar. The guitar had the more attractive neck.

Fletch said, “That’s Jack’s teacher. Professor Josiah Black. We just picked him up this morning.”

“Good morning, sir,” Michael said.

Kriegel said, “I’m very thirsty.”

“How do you feel this morning, Michael?” Fletch asked.

The deputy stuck his fingers between his collar and his neck. “Still wet. Thanks for the coffee last night, Mister Fletcher. Sammy and Bobby are using your Jeep this morning. They’re still up by your place.”

“No harm done?”

“Began slidin’ downhill once and almost tipped over once, but other than that, we’re fine. That Jeep is fun!” Michael slapped the side of the station wagon, as he would the flank of a horse. “Well, don’t mean to hold you up. See you next Saturday, Jack.”

As Fletch worked his way through the roadblock, Jack waved his arm out the window at the deputy.

Then he returned to watching Fletch’s face. “Glad he didn’t hold us up any.”

“Nice of him,” Fletch agreed.

Kriegel cleared his throat. “I am very thirsty, I said.”

Fletch said, “Oh.”

Kriegel asked, “Who is this Professor Josiah Black?”

Neither Fletch nor Jack answered.

Kriegel insisted. “What did you mean by ‘Josiah Black’?”

Fletch did not answer.

“It comes from an old American song, sir,” Jack answered.

“What’s the name of the song?”

Jack said, “‘Ol’ Black Joe.”’

“‘Ol’ Black Joe’?” Kriegel spluttered. “You called me an old, black Joe? Is that supposed to be funny?”

“I had to tell him something, didn’t I?” Fletch asked. “Couldn’t say you are Santa Claus now, could I?”

“Mister Fletcher,” Kriegel intoned, “whether you like it or not, you are a member of our tribe.”

“What tribe is that?” Fletch asked.

Kriegel took a moment to collect his thoughts. “How do you feel?”

“Fine.”

“I mean, don’t you realize you are the most despised person on earth?”

“Who, me?”

“You are the intelligent, educated to some degree, I gather, well-off, middle-aged, heterosexual white male. On this earth, you are distinctly the minority. Yet you and your kind have made the world, as we know it, what it is. For centuries, you have created the religious and political institutions, the businesses, the wars, laws that protect and suit you to the exclusion of others, while exploiting all people of color, Indians, Negroids, Orientals, even those less fortunate than yourself of the same tribe, the laborers, as well as all women and children.”

“Wow.” Fletch well knew these sentiments. He had been confronted with such often enough. “And all this time I thought I was just gettin’ along best I could.”

“Do you consider yourself ‘responsible’?”

“Oh, yes.”

“According to current cant, you are responsible for everything wrong with the world. Being ‘responsible,’ so it is said, is just your rationalization for controlling everyone else in the world, so you can have everything your way. The whole world is rebelling against you, Mister Fletcher. The women, the children, the Indians, the Negroids, the Orientals, and even some of your own kind we shall call here the liberals.” His voice dripped irony. “How do you feel, being so despised?”

Driving the station wagon, Fletch said nothing.

“Have you ever stopped to ask yourself,” Kriegel continued rhetorically, “why the Anglo-Saxon has had more than his share of the world’s good fortune?”

Fletch yawned. “Why?”

“Because we, not the Jews, not the Moslems, not the people of color, are the true descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

“‘E=MC²,’” Fletch quoted.

“What?”

“Cool, clear water,” Fletch sang.

Kriegel ran his tongue around inside his mouth. “How can I be so thirsty when I swallowed half a raging river last night?”

“You should have swallowed the other half, too.”

“You had better consider this seriously, Mister Fletcher.”

“What, your being thirsty? Chew buttons.”

They crossed the border into Alabama. The land had flattened. There were wide cotton fields on both sides of the road.

Dry-mouthed, Kriegel persisted lecturing in the backseat. “As the world’s populations increase, as the world’s resources decline, as the global economy thins, we, the true minority, are an endangered species. Within a few hundred years, if it takes that long, people like you will not exist. There will be chaos.”

“That’s quite a leap, isn’t it?”

“The truth is, it is the white male, the Aryan, the Anglo-Saxon, who has brought the only real order to this earth that this earth has ever known.”

“Oh, come now. What about Shaka Zulu?”

“Hear my word. This century some white people have tried to preach the equality of men and women, equality of the races, even the equality of children with adults. We must all live together in perfect harmony. Isn’t that the way some popular song goes? Have you visited universities or prisons lately, Mister Fletcher?”

“In fact, I have,” Fletch said. “Both.”

“And have you seen that in the great bastions of higher learning—once the exclusive enclaves of white males—women, Negroids, Asians, instead of integrating, have resegregated themselves into Women’s Studies, Afro-American Studies, Asian Studies? They have established separate colleges within the existing university structures. There is no place from the Balkans to the city of Los Angeles where tribal wars are not raging. Am I right? Humans basically are tribal, Mister Fletcher, something your government does not understand. There is the individual. There is the family. There is the tribe. In this country, after these two hundred years of democracy, the melting pot, you see the family breaking down, as a result of these impossible ideas. Is it a good thing? The tribes aren’t breaking down. They never will, anywhere in the world. Tribes support family. The family supports the individual. You had better realize to which tribe you belong, Mister Fletcher.

“God, am I thirsty.”

“Are you, indeed?” Fletch asked.

“Terribly, terribly thirsty. Can’t we stop for something to drink?”

“I don’t think that would be wise. You didn’t look half as nice in jailhouse denim, Doctor.”

“I’m thirsty, too,” Jack assured Kriegel. “I think it has something to do with the ham we had for breakfast.”

Fletch aimed a wide grin at him.

Jack asked Fletch, “You didn’t have any ham for breakfast, did you?”

“Just eggs and juice.”

“What else are you doing to incapacitate us?”

Fletch threw him another wide grin.

“I’ve got to have something to drink,” Kriegel said. “Soon.”

“If, as you say,” Fletch asked, “this tribal business is so natural, and happening anyway, why does it need encouragement?”

“We must protect ourselves, Mister Fletcher, to survive. We are the minority,” Kriegel said. “Doesn’t that frighten you?”

“Not really,” Fletch said. “But then again, everyone likes me.”

“It is natural to want one’s own kind to survive.”

“I have a different view,” Fletch said.

Through his dry throat, Kriegel said, patiently, “What would that be?”

“That tribalism is being used, around the world, by a lot of would-be tinpot demagogues and dictators, warlords, simply to grab power and all the good things for themselves. That that is what really goes on in the world, among whites, blacks, Orientals, women, children, always has and always will: power-mongering based on individual greed.”

Kriegel said, “I’m too thirsty to talk more.”

Fletch asked, “You don’t want me to respond?”

“I can’t think of any response you would have worth listening to.” Kriegel sighed. “What experience have you of these matters?”

“Some.” Fletch smiled. “For example, have you noticed that statistically the more separatism the worse the social, economic, health statistics regarding each underclass, women, children, gays, Afro-Americans, Jews, Native Americans, Asians, become in relation to the whole? Fractionalism, whatever, is like some kind of a weird, self-absorbing prism. It’s like a family in which the members, instead of loving and supporting each other, are negative toward each other, are suspicious of each other, hateful, destructive.

The individual suffers. The whole suffers. Haven’t you noticed that?”

“As I said…”

Through the rearview mirror, Fletch watched Kriegel’s eyes close again. Shortly, he was snoring.

“Ummm.” Fletch smiled at Jack. “Not the first time I’ve noticed that those who lecture, frequently don’t listen.”

What was weird to Fletch was that within that month, an Afro-American leader had sat with Fletch on the terrace behind the farmhouse and said much the same thing Kriegel had just said—only he said people of ‘Fletch’s kind’ would be extinct within 150 years.

Fletch was aware Jack was watching him.

Never had Fletch felt so studied.

Fletch said, “I’ve never been an easy convert.”

Quietly, Jack asked, “Is it possible you’re not listening?”

“I think I am. I think I have been. Listening and thinking. The Separate-but-Equal Doctrine was established in the 1896 United States Supreme Court decision Plessy vs. Ferguson. Thus were established the so-called Jim Crow Laws. At the time, I guess some thought it a big liberal leap forward. In the 1960s it was thought there could not be equality without integration. Then what? What has happened? Racism has taken off its coat,” Fletch said. “It is changing. Or clarifying. Now there are tribal wars everywhere. ‘Ethnic cleansing’ has become a slogan around the world. That can’t be denied.”

“And you’re not one to go with the flow?”

“Never have been.”

“You called her Princess Annie Maggie?”

“What’s that got to do with what we’re talking about?”

“Something.” Jack looked through the side window. “I think it has something to do with it. At least at one point in your life you accepted a hierarchical structure.”

“Oh, I see. You think you’ve got me.”

“Haven’t I?” Jack asked.

FLETCH SAID, “OI VEY!“

“Oi vey?” Jack said.

Softly, Jack had been playing the guitar and singing “Ol’ Black Joe.”

Going through the main square of Tolliver, Alabama, Fletch swerved the station wagon and stopped next to the curb.

Carrie was approaching them in the truck.

She parked against the curb on her side of the road.

Leary was still in the pen in the back of the truck.

Getting out of the station wagon, Fletch crossed the road to her.

“What in hell?” he asked.

“Fletch,” Carrie said through the truck window, “Have you ever heard the expression ‘I couldn’t get arrested’?”

“What happened? What are you doing here?”

“I got to the intersection at nine o’clock, on the dot. I pumped the accelerator, making the truck jerk so the jerk on the back would think we had engine trouble. I stopped. Fletch, there were no cops there! Not sign one of them. I got out, put the hood up, fiddled around with the engine. The goon in back was trying to climb over the cab’s rooftop to help me. The calf bull kept buttin’ him back. I had no choice but to slam down the hood and get going again.”

“You didn’t even go through a roadblock?”

“I never saw a cop anywhere. Not one. All the way here. I even sped. Went through stop signs. I tell you, man, I couldn’t even get arrested. Do you think all the cops in two states have gone fishin’?”

“I doubt they’d catch any fish, either.”

“I figured the best thing to do was come here. I’ve driven around the square four times, waiting for you. Tolliver doesn’t seem to have even a traffic cop! Not even a school crossing guard!”

“My God, I’m sorry. I never meant to put you at risk for such a long time.”

“I’m fine.” Carrie indicated the back of the truck with her thumb. “Better than he is.”

Fletch went to the back of the truck. “Hello, Leary. Have a nice ride?”

Leary was a mess. The calf bull had knocked out two of Leary’s teeth. His eyes were blackened and swollen. His face was cut. There was a deep gash on his bare left shoulder. He was covered with dung.

His skin was painfully burned, as red as the setting sun. On top of the sunburn, Leary had dozens of tick bites.

Through his swollen lips, Leary said, “I’m firsty.”

Fletch could not help a twinge of compassion for him.

The bull calf was no worse for his experience.

Carrie said, “He’s crisped up pretty good.”

Fletch had returned to the cab’s window. “Beat up pretty good, too. Jack and Kriegel have been complaining of being thirsty all the way down.”

Carrie smiled. “Bless their hearts.”

“I guess you have to come with us now. Damn, I didn’t mean this to happen. What happened to the sheriff? I couldn’t have been more clear with him. How could he let you get by?”

“I don’t know. Surprised me, too.”

“Well, I guess you have to follow us.”

“To the encampment?”

“Hey!” Leary shouted at him. “I’m firsty.”

“Oh, shut up!” Fletch said. “Are you a tough guy, or not?”

“Tough guy,” Leary confirmed.

“So.” Fletch sighed. “Turn around and follow us.”

“Okay.”

“Carrie …”

“What?”

“You did do what you said you were going to do, didn’t you? You did go to that intersection. I mean, you didn’t come here because you were worried about me, or anything, did you?”

“Shoot no.” She smiled. “I’ve seen too much of these villains as it is.”

“I can’t understand what happened to the sheriff.”

“Best-laid plans,” Carrie said, “often get screwed up.”

“Yeah. But I’m not sure we can take care of both of us. Bringing a woman, you, into a camp full of psychotic males … When we get there, you watch your mouth, will you?”

“Why, I’ll be as quiet as a church mouse while the collection plate is being passed.”

“Nothing you say can change these fools, you know.”

“Only thing they need,” Carrie said, “is shoo tin’.”

“Let’s not start anything, all right?”

Carrie stuck her jaw out. “I won’t if they don’t.”

Back across the road, Fletch opened the door to the front passenger seat. “You drive,” he said to Jack. “I’m not about to pass myself off as one of your merry band.”

Scooting across the seat, Jack asked, “Do you know how to get to this encampment?”

“Sure.” Fletch closed the door. “You know stupid people can’t keep secrets.”

Watching Carrie through the rearview mirror pull the truck up behind them, Jack said, “I was pretty sure you didn’t mean Carrie to meet us here.”

Fletch said nothing.