“Hold on, hold on, don’t belt it all down on the first pull. There’s plenty here.”
I slowed way down.
“OK, Bud, you’ve run away from home, where is that?”
I don’t know if it was because of the red pop juicing up my brain or because I’m such a good liar, but one of those things got me thinking again real quick.
The first thing I knew was that no matter what I told him this man wasn’t going to let me stay out here by myself, but the nervous way he kept looking around was making things seem so scary that not staying out here was OK.
The second thing I knew was that I couldn’t tell this man about the Home or the Amoses. I wasn’t about to let him take me back to either one of them.
The man said, “Where’s home, Bud?”
Then another jolt of red pop must’ve pumped through my heart because my brain came up with a perfect lie.
“I ran away from Grand Rapids, sir.”
See how perfect the lie was? Maybe this guy would feel sorry for me and put me on a bus to Grand Rapids and I wouldn’t have to do any more doggone walking. He must have some money, anyone driving a car like this would have to be rich or at least know somebody who was rich.
The man scratched under the back of his hat and said, “Grand Rapids!” He said that like it was the most unbelievable thing in the world, like you’d need to put six exclamation points after it.
Something about the way he said it made me nervous but I answered him. “Yes, sir.” That’s the bad thing about lying, once you say one you’ve usually got to stick with it.
“Well I’ll be . . . ,” the man said. “That’s where I’m from, I left there not an hour and a half ago.”
He snatched the bottle out of my hand, grabbed my arm, walked me over to the passenger’s side of the car and started to open the door.
I was glad I was going to be getting a ride but I said, “Sir, I left my suitcase over in the bushes, can we please get it?”
“See, my eyes aren’t near as bad as I thought they were, I knew you had a box or something. Bud-not-Buddy, you don’t know how lucky you are I came through here, some of these Owosso folks used to have a sign hanging along here that said, and I’m going to clean up the language for you, it said, ‘To Our Negro Friends Who Are Passing Through, Kindly Don’t Let the Sun Set on Your Rear End in Owosso!’”
He must not have trusted me ’cause he kept holt of my arm. We went over to the bushes and I grabbed my suitcase. Then he walked me back to the car.
When he opened the passenger’s side door I could see that there was a big box sitting on the front seat. The man never let go of my arm and wrestled the box over into the backseat.
If he would’ve let go of my arm for just one second I would’ve run like the devil was chasing me. On the side of the box some big red letters said as clear as anything, URGENT: CONTAINS HUMAN BLOOD!!!
Oh, man, here we go again!
My heart started jumping around in my stomach. The only kind of people who would carry human blood around in a car were vampires! They must drink it if they were taking a long trip and couldn’t find any people to get blood from. This guy figured he’d rather have my fresh blood than blood out of a bottle!
I barely heard him say, “Get in. I’m going back to Grand Rapids tomorrow, I’ll send a telegram to your folks and then take you back.”
Then he made his first mistake, he let go of my arm. I slid into the car and he closed the door behind me. Quick as anything I locked the door and crawled over to the driver’s side of the car and pulled that door closed and locked it just as the vampire reached for the handle to get in. I dug around in my pocket and pulled my knife out and put it under my leg.
I put my hands on the steering wheel and looked at the gearshift to try to figure which way was “Go.” I stretched my legs out as far as they’d reach and could just get to the gas pedal.
I pulled the gear lever down and the car took off with the vampire running as hard as he could to catch me.
Wow! If I kept things like this up I would knock Baby Face Nelson off the FBI’s ten most wanted list!
THE CAR ONLY WENT thirty giant steps before it commenced to bucking and finally cut right off. The vampire guy finally caught up with me. He was looking very surprised, he just tapped on the window with his knuckle. He said, “Roll the window down for a minute, Bud.”
Sometimes it’s terrible to have been brought up proper. I couldn’t help myself, I rolled the window down just enough so that our words could get in and out but his hand or claws couldn’t.
He said, “OK, what’s this?”
I said, “Don’t you think I can read? How come you’re carrying real human blood around in your car?” I showed him my jackknife. “I’ma warn you, I know how to kill vampires. This knife is genuine solid twenty-four-karat silver.”
He put both of his hands over his face and shook his head back and forth a couple of times. He said, “Sweet baby Jesus, why me?”
Then he said, “Bud, if you were from Flint I might think you believe that, but you’re a Grand Rapids boy, you’ve got to be smarter than that. If I was a vampire why have I got that sandwich and bottle of red pop?”
I thought for a second, then the answer jumped out. “Bait!”
He put his hands back over his face. This time when he pulled them away he was laughing. He said, “Bud, if I was a vampire I wouldn’t have to catch little boys, I’d just stick my fangs into one of those bottles and have my supper. Besides, where’ve you ever heard of a vampire that knew how to drive a car?”
That made sense, in all the moving picture shows I’d seen and all the books I’d read about vampires I never could think of seeing one that could drive a car. But I wasn’t going to take any chances.
“Could I please see your teeth, sir?”
“What?”
“Your teeth, sir.”
The man mumbled something, shook his head again, then leaned close to the window glass and opened his mouth.
Even though he didn’t have fangs his teeth still looked kinda scary. They looked like they could bite a pretty good grapefruit-sized chunk out of you.
Then he said, “Bud, I’ve got to get this blood to Hurley Hospital in Flint, they need it right away for someone’s operation. I can look at you and tell you’re far too smart to believe in any nonsense like vampires, son. Be a good boy and open the door.”
I pulled the lock up for him and scooted over to the passenger’s side of the car. I unlocked my door just in case he had any tricks up his sleeve.
He got in the car and said, “You’ll never know how grateful I am to you, Bud. I’ll take that horrible image of you putting the car in gear to drive away while I stood by the side of the road in Owosso, Michigan, at two-thirty in the morning to my grave with me. Thank God you don’t know how to drive.”
“No, sir, but if you’da showed me some fangs I’da learned real quick.”
Just in case, I watched the way he put the car in gear so’s the next time something like this happened I’d know how to make a clean getaway. Me and the man headed back toward Flint, driving over the same road it took me so long to walk. Going like this I wasn’t never going to get away from this doggone city.
We hadn’t been driving for a minute before he started asking a whole slew of questions. Questions that I had to be very careful about giving the right answers to.
He said, “Don’t you feel bad about worrying your mother like this, Bud-not-Buddy?”
“My mother is dead, sir.” Most times if you tell a adult that they’ll leave you alone, but not this man.
“What? I’m sorry to hear that, Bud. So you stay with your daddy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Right in Grand Rapids?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What’s his name, does he work for the railroad?”
“No, sir.” The seed started sticking its head out further and further. “His name is Herman E. Calloway and he plays the biggest doggon
e fiddle you’ll ever see.”
The man shouted, “What?”
I said, “Really, sir, I swear ’fore God it’s the biggest fiddle in the world.”
He said, “I know your father, everybody in Grand Rapids does.”
I didn’t say anything.
He said, “Well, I’ll be. You know, at first glimpse I wouldn’t say you look that much like Herman, but now that I look at you I suppose you do. Of course he’s quite a bit bigger, if you know what I mean.”
This was the best news I’d had all day, my face nearly split in half from my giant smile. “Yes, sir, folks say I’m the spitting image of my old man.”
He really started shooting the questions at me so to stop him I said, “Sir, could I please have the sandwich and the rest of the red pop before I answer any more questions?”
He slapped his forehead and said, “Oh, I’m sorry, Bud, I was so surprised about who you are and so happy that you didn’t drive off that I forgot all about our deal.”
He handed me the sandwich and the pop and the apple. I was so hungry that I forgot all about scraping the mustard off the baloney sandwich and even like that it was the best sandwich I’d ever had in my life.
“Bud,” he said, “my name’s Mr. Lewis. Now if you were about fifteen, twenty years older you could call me Lefty. But you’re not, so you can’t. Mr. Lewis will do just fine.”
I shoved the part of the sandwich that I was chewing into the side of my mouth so I could say, “Yes, sir, Mr. Lewis, sir.”
He said, “I’m not ashamed to admit it, you gave me a scare here tonight that I’ll never forget. I just know I’ll be having nightmares about meeting you for the rest of my life. I’ll wake up in a cold sweat many a night with the picture of you and my car pulling away with that blood on the seat.
“I can see it all now, I’ll be sound asleep, deep in the middle of a Ruth Dandridge dream, when all of a sudden I’ll be standing on the side of the road in Owosso, Michigan, at two-thirty in the morning and I’ll be seeing my car and that blood pulling away with nothing of you showing but that little peanut-head of yours peeking up over the dash.”
He looked at me out of the side of his eye.
“Anyone ever tell you you’ve got a little peanut-head?” I glugged down the pop I’d been swishing around in my mouth and said, “No, sir.”
“Well,” he said, “this may be the first time but unless you undergo some major surgery I’ll bet it won’t be the last.”
“Yes, sir.”
He waited a second, then sounded kind of disappointed when he said, “Don’t take it so seriously, Bud, I am teasing, you know.”
I started in on the apple. “Yes, sir.”
“Ever been in the army, Bud?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, I’ve got to tell you, I haven’t heard so many ‘sirs’ since I was back at Fort Gordon in Georgia training for the Big War.”
I almost said, “Yes, sir,” but I looked at him and guessed he was still teasing.
I took another drink of the red pop and saw that when I was raising the bottle I’d accidentally let some of the sandwich slip out of my mouth down into the pop. There were a couple of chunks of chewed-up bread, a blob of baloney and some of the mustard swimming around in the bottle. The mustard was real pretty, it looked like some kind of magical fog, every time I moved the bottle the mustardy smoke went into a different kind of shape.
Lefty Lewis said, “How about sharing that pop, Bud?”
Uh-oh. He took one look and handed it back.
He said, “Nothing personal, Bud, I’ve raised three kids and have two grandkids, I’ve learned the hard way about drinking after young folks. But I do believe you need to get in and see a doctor soon, son, it looks to me like you’ve got a serious backwash problem, that’s the most food I’ve ever seen floating around in a bottle of pop. In fact, that doesn’t look like red pop anymore, it looks more like red stew.”
I real quick chugged the rest of the pop down and ate the apple real slow because I figured as soon as I was done with it the questions would start up again.
Lefty Lewis said, “Aren’t you sleepy?”
This was perfect! I could pretend I was falling asleep and then come up with some answers that would get me to Grand Rapids for sure. I yawned real big. “A little bit, sir.”
“All right, here, give me that core, I think the only thing that’s left is a seed or two anyway.”
I handed him the apple core and he put it and the wax paper from the sandwich in the paper bag.
“You just stretch out there and have some sleep. In about an hour you’ll be in a nice comfortable bed. We can have our talk in the morning.”
He reached in the backseat and said, “Here,” and handed me a jacket. “You can use this for a blanket.”
The jacket smelled real good, like spice and soap.
Lefty Lewis said, “Oh, Bud-not-Buddy, one more thing before you doze off. Could you reach over into that box and hand me one of those bottles of blood? I haven’t had a bite to eat all day.”
I kept my eyes closed and smiled. I knew I was going to be safe, because I’d never heard of a vampire that could drive a car and I’d never seen one that had such a good sense of humor. Besides, I kept my jackknife open under my leg and he looked like he’d believed me when I told him it was made out of real silver, even though it probably wasn’t.
As soon as I had the jacket over me the smell of the spice and soap and the sound of the crickets and toady-frogs outside made my eyes get real heavy.
WOW! I must have been real, real tired. Walking and ducking in and out of the bushes between Flint and Owosso was a lot more work than I thought it was.
Most of the time since Momma died, if someone even walks close to where I’m sleeping I’m up in a flash, my eyes fly open and I’m looking right at them. At one of the foster houses where I’d stayed a woman told me she knew I was going to be a criminal because “anyone who sleeps that light has got to have a guilty conscience.” Most of the time the sound of someone else going from sleep breathing to awake breathing in the same room as me is enough to get me up.
But this morning I felt like I was at the bottom of a well that someone had filled with tons of thick chocolate pudding. Someone was calling my name from way up at the top of the well. She was saying, “Bud. Bud. Bud.”
Waves from the pudding were slogging me back and forth, back and forth.
“Bud. Wake up, Bud.” It was a woman’s voice and her hands were trying to shake me awake. Uh-oh. This is Number 29 of my rules:
RULES AND THINGS NUMBER 29
When You Wake Up and Don’t Know for Sure Where You’re At and There’s a Bunch of People Standing Around You, It’s Best to Pretend You’re Still Asleep Until You Can Figure Out What’s Going On and What You Should Do.
I kept my eyes closed, acting like I was out cold.
The woman said, “Poppa, what on earth are all these lumps and bites on this baby’s face?”
A man answered, “Well, he was walking all the way from Grand Rapids to Flint, it looks like he provided a pretty paltry meal for every mosquito on the way.”
The woman said, “This poor child must be dead, I hate getting him up. I wish he could stay with us for a while, at least until he’s had his sleep.”
Then I remembered who I was with because Lefty Lewis said, “I know, but I’ve got to get back. He can sleep in the car on the way back to Grand Rapids.”
The woman rolled back the blanket they’d put over me and said, “Poppa, look at his legs, this boy’s as skinny as a rail.”
Shucks, they’d taken off my knickers when they put me in this bed. Now I was going to have to pretend I was asleep even longer, at least until I could figure a way out of being so embarrassed.
Lefty Lewis said, “Yeah, he’s puny. Good thing his legs don’t touch when he walks ’cause if those two twigs got to rubbing against one another he’d have a fire going in no time.”
The woman said, “
That’s not funny. He doesn’t look like he’s been fed right. Now who’s his father again, you said you know him?”
“Everyone in Grand Rapids does, I’m surprised you can’t remember him. He’s quite a big fish there.”
See! I told you it was smart to pretend you were asleep some of the time. Now I was going to learn some things about my father.
The woman said, “What kind of man is he that he let this child be so thin? And look at the condition of the boy’s clothes. Everything is either too small for him or almost in tatters. Where is this child’s mother? There’s not much of a woman’s touch about him.”
Lefty Lewis said, “It seems to me that the Mrs. Calloway I knew passed a long time ago. The boy says he’s ten and I’m sure she died quite a while before that. But you know how musicians are, there must be at least a few Mrs. Calloways I don’t know anything about.”
That meant that my dad was married to someone before he married my mom.
Lefty Lewis’s daughter said, “Well, I think it’s a sin. I’m of half a mind to keep this boy for a while to put some fear in his daddy’s heart. But he probably wouldn’t even miss him.”
Lefty Lewis said, “Now you stop being so judgmental, Herman’s got a reputation for being no-nonsense, not mean.”
“Does this child have any brothers or sisters?”
“I believe he’s got a sister, but she’d have to be his half-sister, she must be full-grown by now.”
The woman pulled the blanket back over my legs and shook me again. I was glad I could stop pretending I was asleep, I was sick and tired of hearing about how skinny I am and what a mixed-up family I come from. She said real soft, “Bud, wake up. Come on, sweetie, I’ve got a nice breakfast waiting for you.”
Food! I started blinking and acting like those were the first words I’d heard that morning. I said, “Huh?” like I was kind of confused.
The woman smiled real big and said, “Oh-ho, I see that got your attention, didn’t it? Good morning, young man.”
“Good morning, ma’am. Good morning, Mr. Lewis.”
He said, “Hey, you remembered my name, I’m impressed. Good morning, Walking Willie. We’ve got to hit the road in a bit, better hurry up and get some food in your belly.”