He never forgot his hard beginnings, and reminded anyone who admired his fine home today that it all began in a single-room hut with a roof that dropped dirt, scorpions, and big, black centipedes with yellow legs into a person’s bed or the stew pot, if someone forgot to put the lid back on it.
“I hope you’ll stay a spell,” the old man said, smiling and chewing on a cigar that he would never light. “Maybe we’ll kill the fatted calf for the prodigal son, if you’re a mind to visit a day or two.”
“Sir, I am honored to stand in your home and in your presence, and thank you for your kind hospitality,” McKay said, and bowed slightly for the old gentleman. “I am glad to stay a day or two, but insist that you allow me to pitch in with the chores so I am not such a burden.”
“Hell, son, we got a tribe of wetbacks that take care of the chores,” the old man said with a laugh, and coughed a wad out of his throat that he held in his mouth until he could amble to the back door and launch it into the flower bed by the patio.
Tommy rolled his eyes at the thoughtless remark, and looked at Mama and Marguerite Sanchez, who smiled back at him and shook their heads as the three of them watched the old cowboy totter his way back to his rocking chair and sit down.
“Now, for supper, I want you girls to fix us a mess of those flat enchiladas with the chili meat, hot sauce, and salad between the tortillas that you stack up like pancakes,” Lyle said, rocking the chair and his knobby knees bobbing back and forth as he pushed with his long, skinny legs. “This boy ain’t ate good over in that Vietnam, so I expect a plate of decent food would set right with him. Ain’t that right, boy?”
“A plate of Mama’s enchiladas sets right with me anytime,” McKay said with a smile, and looked at the two Sanchez women. “I think I could eat them for breakfast, dinner, and supper seven days a week and never get tired of them.”
“Spoke like a true Texas gentleman, Mister McKay,” the old man said and laughed, and cleared his throat again and took another trip to the patio door for a spit.
“You all be over here by six o’clock sharp,” Lyle Langtree said, rocking in his chair. “I don’t want to have to wait supper on them wild kids of yours, either. Mama Langtree, my boy, Sonny, and his wife, Vanessa, with their tribe of younguns, they’ll all be back shortly. I expect Mama and Vanessa and her two girls will help in the kitchen, too. So I guess I’ll see you back here in a little bit, unless the good Lord takes me first.”
Then the old man returned his stare out the patio doors, gazing across the hills where the whirlwinds twisted up dust in the afternoon heat, and once in a while, if a person had extra-good eyes, he could spot a mule deer that might have strayed up from the mountains in the Big Bend country.
“Not much time,” Tommy McKay said, walking back across the patio with the two Sanchez women and glancing at his wristwatch.
“We already have most of the meal cooked,” Mama said, and put her arm inside the crook of Tommy’s. Marguerite walked close at his other side.
“Mama, I need to talk about Jimmy. I need all of you to hear me. Not just you, but Henry and Hector and José and Marguerite,” Tommy said, stopping on the white stucco house’s long front porch where a glider and several other metal chairs sat.
“I know what you want to tell me,” Mama Sanchez said, putting up her hands, and then taking both of Tommy’s in hers. Tears immediately filled her eyes. “My boys and my girls, they all read the letters. Your letters, and the letters from the colonel, Jimmy’s commanding officer, and from his sergeant, that good man named Rhodes. Why must you torture yourself so much, my good boy? It breaks my heart to see you grieve so deeply for my son.”
Then the woman walked to the metal glider and sat and patted her hand on a spot next to her.
“Sentarse, por favor,”
she said in Spanish, asking the young man to please sit with her.
Tommy settled on the swinging chair next to the woman and swallowed against a hard lump that grew big as a baseball in his throat.
“Marguerite, you tell the boys to come out here and listen, too,” she said to her daughter, and then took Tommy’s hand. “They may want to say something as well.”
“I have to explain myself, and ask for you to forgive me,” Tommy said, and tears flowed from his eyes when he spoke.
“You did nothing but risk your life to save my son!” Mama Sanchez said as her three boys and daughter returned to the porch and sat down. “Why must you need forgiveness? I read the letters, and what you did saved all those men, too. Jimmy is proud of you! Can’t you understand?”
“If I had not gone on patrol with him, he would have been more careful,” Tommy said, swallowing against the lump and choking out his words.
“If you had not gone on patrol my son would have died without his best friend, the boy he called his brother, by his side,” Mama Sanchez said, crying as she spoke. “He would have died whether you had gone or not. God put you with him, so he could die with someone who loved him close to him. Tommy, we love you like our own. We love you more because you were with our Jimmy, and you cared for him so much that you risked your own life for him.”
Tommy McKay put his face in his hands and he cried. Mama Sanchez held him close to her, tucking his head under her chin, and she cried, too. Henry knelt by them both, with Hector and José standing behind him, tears flowing down their cheeks as well. Marguerite sat quietly by her mother, her hands folded in her lap, sobbing, too, in short, silent breaths.
As the family held each other close, Tommy remembered what Buck Taylor had told him: “Don’t go trying to kill all those demons at once, and share the grief with the people you love.”
“WHAT’S THIS, VIP seating?” Brian Pitts asked James Harris as the two men sat on a bench in the brig’s recreation yard where the guards showed movies on the cell block wall, and purposefully left a wide gap between Mau Mau and Celestine Anderson. Harris had ordered his lieutenant to keep long noses and pointed ears away from his and the Snowman’s private conference. He added that he would include the others at the appropriate time.
In the dim light cast from the projector, the Ax Man glared at Brian Pitts, feeling pangs of jealousy as he watched the commander of the Freedom Hill chapter of the Black Stone Rangers confiding secrets with a new man. A white man!
“We high-risk, so the guards they keep us up front where the light shine good on us,” Harris said with a chuckle, and glanced over his shoulder where he saw Iron Balls and Bad John leaning against a hooch wall, absorbed in a cartoon featuring Yosemite Sam trying to blow Bugs Bunny to smithereens.
“Look here,” Pitts whispered, taking advantage of his first real opportunity to talk to his old partner about their very secret matter of two million dollars in cash and the stash of dope that the other million dollars had bought. “You did good, getting this gang started and putting this notion of a prison riot in the heads of these dudes.”
“We gonna make national headlines back in the world, you wait and see,” Harris said with a smile, still focused on the idea of standing in the limelight and bringing attention to the black cause.
“I know, and that’s cool, but Mau Mau, we got our money and our dope to think about,” Pitts whispered, looking to see that no one eavesdropped. “I took a million dollars and bought enough heroin and Buddha that we can roll it into fifty million bucks, man!”
“What about that other two million we gonna split?” Harris said, whispering in a panicked voice.
“You didn’t hear me?” Pitts strained, clenching his teeth. “Listen closely to me. Fifty million dollars, man! It’s just sitting in a tunnel out west of Saigon. Our two million in cash, too, right there with it.”
“You bury our money out west of Saigon?” Harris said, his voice rising loud enough that Celestine Anderson turned his head when he heard the word “money.”
“Shhhh!” Pitts hissed, putting his hand over Harris’s mouth. “Not so fucking loud!”
“Huong and Bao they got away, and I know that they went straight to the stash and have it under their control,” Pitts said, and looked at Harris’s eyes. “You remember what I said about loyalty, and why it was important? This is why. I know Huong will stick with us. Our stuff will be there when we can break out of this hole.”
“So you wants to get this riot going so we can bust loose and go south, right?” Harris said, smiling.
“Fuck an A, man,” Pitts said, smiling back. “I mean civil rights is cool and all, but fifty million dollars is a whole lot more cool.”
“You got that right, Jack,” Harris said, and looked over his shoulder and nodded to Celestine Anderson to wait just one more minute. “So we bring down this house, and you and me, we splits out the back door.”
“You and me, and Bobby Matthews,” Pitts said, giving the Ax Man a friendly wink and getting a snarl in return.
“Who that?” Harris said, twisting his neck as though he might see him in the crowd of dark faces watching the cartoon. “Oh, yeah, that dude we let in the rangers. Why he so special?”
“Like I said, his partner, Tommy Joyner, got popped when the army took us down,” Pitts said, and pointed to his shoulder. “Same asshole that nailed me, killed Tommy and Chung. I ever see that motherfucker again, I’ll park a .45-caliber hardball straight up his tailpipe. I want to put the muzzle of my pistol up his asshole and empty the magazine.”
“So this kid Matthews, he thrown in with you down there at Saigon,” Harris whispered.
“Yeah,” Pitts answered, and smiled at Anderson, now taunting the angry man. “What I said about loyalty goes deep. I ain’t never cut you out, and I won’t cut this man out either. Fifty million goes a long way among friends.”
“So, what we need to do?” Harris said, looking at Anderson and three other rangers all staring at him and Pitts.
“Go ahead and bring in the boys, and we’ll lay out our plan for them, but when we head south, Mau Mau, it’s just you, me, and Matthews,” Pitts said, and waved at Anderson to bring the others close.
Harris looked at Ax Man, too, and motioned for him to come near.
“Snowman, he got a plan on how we bring this motherfucker down,” Harris smiled at the four rangers who slid close to him on the bench. “Once they get this piece-of-shit movie rolling, we talk about what we gonna do.”
All hands, including the guards’ day shift and the brig’s two officers, came for the evening’s showing of Stanley Kubrick’s blockbuster science-fiction hit
2001: A Space Odyssey
. Even on the white-painted concrete block wall, the picture didn’t look all that bad. However, halfway through the feature, most of the audience dozed off with boredom.
Chief Warrant Officer Frank Holden and First Lieutenant Michael Schuller surveyed the disappointed crowd and decided that they would stick to action films, Westerns, and comedies in the future. They had
Eight on the Lam,
starring Bob Hope, Phyllis Diller, and Jonathan Winters slated for the next movie night, August 16, 1968, and decided that shows like it would suit the prisoners best.
“I figure there be two times of the day when we can bust things open here, when everybody in the brig gets put in one place, all together,” Harris told his cohorts. “One time is when we eat and go out in the rec yard, and the other time is like tonight, at the movies.”
“We want to launch this happening on August 16, when everyone’s out here in the rec yard, at the movies,” Pitts said, looking to his right and left as he talked, and glancing at Iron Balls and Bad John, who had begun looking at the suspicious group talking. Then they looked around at other prisoners and saw that many of them now idly chatted instead of watching the picture, so they shrugged off the confab and focused back on the man in the space suit growing really old and then becoming a baby at the same time. “The advantage that movie night has is that it’s dark.”
“See, when it dark, the guards they might not want to drop gas on our ass,” Harris added. “We got the advantage at night. None of these dudes want to put on a gas mask in the daylight. They can’t see shit. At night, they sure as hell can’t see shit out those goggle eyes, so they ain’t going to want to pop the CS.”
“So when the movie ends, and the projector gets shut off, when we have that window of darkness, before they turn on the yard lights, we kick off the riot,” Pitts said, and nodded at Harris.
“See,” Harris added without consulting Brian Pitts, but thinking on his own to cover their escape, “when everybody in the yard gets busy burning this motherfucker down, we gonna take our Black Stone Rangers and go out the fence.”
“We gonna escape?” Anderson said and smiled.
“Fuck an A, bro,” Harris said and put out his fist for Anderson to dap. “We going out and join up with the Viet Cong. Then we come back and kill these motherfuckers.”
“Fuck yeah,” Anderson said, and looked at Bad John and Iron Balls watching him. “I gonna come back and commit special duty on those two motherfuckers for sure.”
Brian Pitts leaned over and whispered to Anderson, “Be cool, man. When the time comes, we gonna let you go straight at those two dudes. You gonna start the fight we need to set this whole thing off.”
“I like that,” Anderson said, still looking at Iron Balls and Bad John.
“Mau Mau, he’s going to get into a pushing match with me while the film is still rolling,” Pitts said, looking at Harris. “The guards will take him up to control, to see the duty warden. Once they get him inside, then Ax Man, you can do what you like to Bad John. I want you to take him down hard. The rest of us will deal with Iron Balls.”
“What I do up in control?” Harris said, puzzled at how he could help up there.
“Everybody’s gonna be running down here, because of the fight, and that’s when you just hang back and pull down all the switches, opening the gates,” Pitts said with a wide grin. “You just stay quiet and keep out of the way when the shit goes down, and our little hoorah will give you all the time you’re gonna need. Just a second or two to grab those gate handles and pull them down.”