Son of Fletch Read online

  “Yes, I see,” Kriegel said.

  “Wasn’t it Julius Caesar,” Fletch asked, “who said something about divide and skinny through?”

  “He said, ‘All roads lead to Rome.’”

  “That, too,” Fletch agreed. “Quite a phrasemaker, that Caesar feller. I knew you know your military history.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Kriegel.

  Fletch folded up the torn map. “Right! We’d better get going. Your followers await you.”

  “GET ABOARD,” FLETCH said to Leary.

  “How?”

  In the driveway, Leary looked at the tall steel pen rising up from the back of the pickup truck. He was wearing Fletch’s rubber boots and the overalls split down to his thighs. The overalls were held up by straps over his shirtless shoulders.

  “Oh, yeah,” Fletch said as if he had not considered the matter before.’ ‘You’re too big to climb over the grill, aren’t you?

  “What’s that?” Leary pointed at the 450-pound bull calf already in the pen on the back of the truck.

  “A little cow,” Fletch said.

  “Why can’t I ride up front with the lady?” Leary asked.

  “Because you have to hold on to the little cow,” Fletch said. “You don’t want it to get hurt, do you?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. See, there’s hay there. You feed the little cow the hay as you go along.”

  “Does the little cow need the hay as we go along?”

  “You don’t think Ms. Carrie can drive the truck and feed the little cow hay at the same time, do you?”

  “No.”

  “This is a real job of work you’re doin’.”

  “Oh.”

  “The cops will never recognize you this way.”

  “No.”

  “This is a great disguise, you see.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And Ms. Carrie can’t reach back and hold on to the little cow, can she?”

  “No,” Leary agreed. “I can see that.”

  “So you have to ride in back with the little cow.”

  “I don’t know,” Leary said. In the morning sunlight, sweat already was pouring down his fat, white skin.

  Jack was standing at the back of the truck watching.

  Kriegel had come out of the house and immediately slumped into the backseat of the station wagon. He sat with his head leaning on the palm of one hand.

  Fletch stepped close to Leary and said, softly, “You’re not afraid, are you? Of that little cow?”

  “Of course not!” Leary shouted.

  With the driver’s door open, Carrie said, “We’ve got to get goin’.”

  “Here, Jack.” Fletch grabbed the steel bars on one side of the rear grill. “Help me lift this up.”

  They lifted that section of the grill just high enough for Leary to crawl under it onto the truck.

  “Come on!” Fletch said sharply. “We can’t hold this thing all day! Get aboard, or I’ll put you down in the henhouse with the rest of the chickens!”

  The bull calf, seeing the opening, tried to get under the grill to get off the truck.

  Leary, crawling under the grill onto the truck, butted heads with the bull calf.

  Neither expressed surprise or pain.

  Fletch and Jack dropped the stanchions of the grill section into their deep holes.

  Carrie gave Fletch a wide, delighted grin before stepping into the truck and starting the engine.

  Fletch shouted at Leary, “Now, hold on to that little cow!”

  Standing, with his feet spread, Leary grabbed the bull calf’s tail.

  As Carrie started the truck down the driveway, Leary’s boots slipped in wet manure already on the floor of the pickup truck’s bed. He landed on his ass. On the manure.

  Both his hands still held on to the bull calf’s tail.

  “Hold on to it!” Fletch ordered.

  “It’s shittin’ on me!” Leary yelled halfway down the driveway.

  It certainly was.

  Jack turned his back to the station wagon. Keeping his back, his shoulders steady, arms at his sides, he was laughing hard but silently.

  Fletch watched Carrie drive the truck along the road out of sight. Leary was trying to stand up, regain his footing on the manure on the floor of the truck’s bed. He was doing a good job of holding on to the bull calf’s tail.

  For his efforts he was getting liberally sprayed with wet dung.

  Then Fletch watched Jack choking with laughter.

  “Oh, hello.” Fletch slapped Jack on the back. “How are you feeling?”

  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 guita
r 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.”

  Fl
etch 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?”