One Arm Willy and the Hand Jive

By Leonard Palmer

April, 1975. Life just doesn't seem to want to cooperate with cabbie-artist Johnny Jump. Having helped rid his rust belt city of a dangerous, corrupt alderman and his murderous paramour he now finds himself under threat of violent termination from the underworld associates of the recently expired elected official. He is told in no uncertain terms by the local police that he must disappear. Captain Leonard Featherstone of the PD suggests Johnny cool his heels in Featherstone’s home town of Jerusalem, a centuries old port town on the upper Mississippi River. Featherstone remembers Jerusalem fondly as an idyllic boyhood fantasy, and he offers to buy Johnny a one-way bus ticket and set him up with Featherstone’s Tenth Mountain Division buddy, former biker and combat veteran turned artist One-Arm Willy Stubbs....

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9781304306180

Book preview

One Arm Willy and the Hand Jive

One Arm Willy and the Hand Jive

First Edition

Copyright © 2013 Leonard Palmer

All rights reserved.

ISBN:  978-1-304-30618-0

http://www.LennyPalmer.com

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review. Queries regarding rights and permissions should be addressed to Leonard Palmer.

Huge thanks to Dave Supple, Aqua Bear and proprietor of Dave's Bar in San Francisco, Professor Thomas Fonte of Redondo Beach, California and Darlene Davies of Kenosha, Wisconsin, each of whom brought their special insights and opinions and enriched not only this novel, but this writer as well. This book is all the much better because of their care and attention

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

--Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

The Mad Man with a Shotgun

April, 1975

The shotgun was pointed right at my face.

Never mind that I was hiding behind a tree, as were the dozen other souls clustered in the woods with me, and the barrel of the gun was sticking out of a distant warehouse window pointed in our general direction, and at no one in particular; I knew that gun was pointed right at me, waiting for me to step out and take a load of double-aught buckshot right in my kisser.

I didn’t know any of the men taking refuge behind the trees. I didn’t know the town they came from, or their politics or their wives and kids or what they did for a living or how they spent their free time or what they liked to eat for dinner. Hell, I didn’t even know the man holed up in the cream city brick warehouse with the broad and placid expanse of the Mississippi River shining behind it, or why he felt the need to barricade himself behind closed doors to protect himself from the besieging crowd.

It was one of those what in the hell am I doing here and why moments, and scrunching behind a tree wasn’t going to give me any answers. Gun or no gun, it was gut check time.

This is it, Johnny Jump, I mumbled.

I abandoned the protection of my tree and stood in full view, my hands held high.

From astern and hidden from view a raspy smoker’s voice called out, What in the hell do you think you’re doing?

Hands aloft I turned to face my questioner, but all I could see was the edge of a bright red flannel shirt poking out from around a tree trunk.

Giving up, I replied. I’ve got no beef with this guy. He doesn’t want to shoot me.

He’ll shoot anybody, piped up another voice from hiding, this one younger and an octave higher. He doesn’t give a shit. He’s a crazy hippie bastard.

Sounds like my kind of guy, I said with false bravado. Grasshoppers scattered helter-skelter out of the weed-infested field as I began a slow march across the one hundred yards of clearing toward the warehouse. Don’t shoot! I called out.

I mumbled a paternoster as I walked. I had learned it years ago when I kept company with a woman of questionable sexual morals but strong Catholic principles. She took me to Sunday mass with her once, and as she intensely recited her beads I took in the pomp and circumstance, the incense and the Latin intonations. As we left the church she asked me what I thought of it all. I replied I really liked the saints in the murals on the walls, that they reminded me of the comic book characters I had enjoyed as a boy; a sort of heavenly panoply of superheroes. She retreated in a self-righteous huff, abandoning me on the street corner in front of the church as the mellifluous bells pealed the parishioner’s home. I never saw her again. I always wondered how she could reconcile charging for sex with her Catholicism. Then again, I’ve learned most people will compromise principles when it comes to cash.

Putting philosophical ruminations aside, I continued my anabasis toward the shotgun.

Unlike my long-ago and faraway Catholic paramour I hoped the crazy hippie bastard with the shotgun harbored a bit of Christian charity in his heart, and I hoped he wasn’t trigger happy. I didn’t relish the idea of my brains being splattered across the clover.

Let’s stop right here for a moment.

I owe you an explanation of exactly why I was in a strange town hundreds of miles from home in the company of total strangers with another total stranger menacing me with a scattergun for reasons unknown to me.

So let me begin at the beginning. Please bear in mind that these are my words and my words alone and don’t be fooled into thinking that anyone other than I penned this tome. I am indeed a lowly cab driver; a plebian reared in the poorest of circumstances and with a bare bones public education but I am as well-read as any college professor and I have a better vocabulary than most. I read constantly, and good stuff, too. I picked up the habit at an early age and honed it in prison where other than insuring he doesn’t get shanked a man doesn’t have much more to do than lift weights and read. I did both, and am proficient at both. I didn’t hire some half-assed amanuensis to rearrange my thoughts, or soften the edges or make more erudite the dangers and the startling revelations I encountered in the days that followed. If you want bullshit, search on the best seller lists.  You’re not going to find it here.

To be blunt, I wrote this not for you, but for me. I had to put this all down on paper, to try and make sense of it all. I have to do this, otherwise I just might go off the deep end and grab a gun and blow my brains out.

***

I was sitting in a black vinyl chair at a long vinyl-topped table in the police department interrogation room; a confined, sweaty, smelly space where I had spent many unpleasant hours during my most recent time of troubles. A huge cockroach crawled down a dingy green wall and disappeared into an almost invisible crack as I watched one of the two cops across from me torch a Perodi, one of those pygmy Italian cigars that resembled a shriveled goat turd and smelled like one, too. He took a short puff and grinned, opening his mouth to flash tobacco-stained teeth.

You’re a dead man, he said.

Actually, he didn’t say it with his voice. He couldn’t with Captain Leonard Featherstone sitting next to him. He said it with his eyes; cop’s eyes, icy gray shards that dissected me with a single piercing stare.

His name was Amerigo Ferraro, but everyone called him Andy. He was an old-line Moustache Pete, the kind you used to see in the saloons and social clubs of the Italian neighborhoods back in the day, holding court and playing the big shot. He would strut like a peacock; thick smoke trailing in his wake from his ubiquitous cigar; his obsequious black-robed bride following a submissive ten steps behind. He drank his espresso in a demitasse, pinky in the air, slurping it loudly like some minor-league actor hamming it up as a two-bit movie godfather. Local restaurants catered to his whims and many purchased an espresso machine specifically for detective Ferarro and the rest of his goomba buddies because they understood the value of keeping on the good side of a man who had a badge and a gun and the authority to use both. While I was thousands of miles distant in ‘Nam slogging away in country cheap hoods like Ferraro were playing life and death games back home. The most notable of these games was when then chief of police Bob Grissom got tangled in a love triangle that ended in very public murder. The chief’s wife had shot and killed his girl friend while they were arguing in the front seat of a squad car - in the police department parking lot, no less. The chief was dirty, rumored to be involved not only in illicit gambling and drug pushing, but also in a very clandestine murder for hire ring. To put the brakes on what could have been a very messy investigation and a lot of local names not only being dragged through the mud, but through the courts and into prison as well, the chief’s wife was rushed through a psychiatric evaluation, declared insane and institutionalized for a period of six months. Upon her release Grissom resigned, and the two of them disappeared; some say to the traditional dirt nap, others insist that they high tailed it to a tropical isle where they live in comfort on monies provided to insure their silence. I subscribe to the dirt nap theory, but whichever was true they were out of the way. The rumor was that the late Lou Pine and Andy Ferraro had worked out a deal with a sympathetic judge for a cut of the profits in the local gambling trade. Less than a year later the judge had been killed by a hit and run driver who had never been apprehended. It had all been wrapped and tied in a neat but deadly bow and the local political criminal enterprise continued to move along smoothly. Until I had bumped up against Lou Pine, that is.

Now Lou Pine was dead, and although I hadn’t been the trigger man I’m sure Andy Ferraro laid the blame on me.

I was also sure of another thing: when Andy Ferraro said you were a dead man, you were a dead man. Even with his eyes. I thought back to a quote I remembered from Machiavelli: "Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied."

That described Andy Ferraro to a T; and his ambition now included me. I was in his crosshairs, and I knew that the longer I hung around he would sooner or later pull the trigger.

The real bitch about all of this was that I didn’t give a rat’s sorry rear end about whether or not Lou Pine or Andy Ferarro or crooked judges and lawyers and elected officials drove big black Lincolns or Caddies or smoked their fat cigars or ate thick steaks or drank their expensive brandy in snifters as they picked the city clean with their murderous Ponzi schemes. I merely wanted to be left in peace to drive my cab, knock back the occasional Jim Beam and create art. I only became involved when I discovered my best friend sprawled out on a lonely side street gutted like a fish and swore a blood oath to find and destroy his killers. That, my friends, is real life, and that was what brought me into the interrogation room facing an unspoken but very real threat of death from a porcine low-life like Andy Ferraro.

Ferraro cocked his head slightly and stared at me as if I were some curiosity in a carnival sideshow. He had heard the rumors about me giving away one million dollars in boosted bank loot from an ancient heist; untraceable cash that could have been all mine with no questions asked. The almighty dollar was everything to men like Andy Ferraro; it meant not only wealth but also power and control. Outside of a way to procure my few needs money to me was nothing; it was actually an impediment to my goal of creating art. It was why I nixed the loot. Unlike Andy Ferraro I found no comfort and certainly no power in wealth; I found power in canvas and brushes and paints and my ability to stay true to my vision. Guys like me not only confounded guys like Andy Ferraro, guys like me also terrified guys like Andy Ferraro. It was the classic conflict, and the main reason why for millennia men and women who bucked the system were smeared in the press and the rumor mill or tossed in dungeons, tacked to crosses, hung from trees, decapitated with the guillotine and marched in uniformed rows into barbed wire and withering machine gun fire; the last all in the name of patriotism. I learned about patriotism in the rice paddies and jungles in ‘Nam, where you were reduced to insuring the VC or NVA popping away at you didn’t put an AK-47 round in your ass cheeks while you were wondering all the while why you were stuck in some godforsaken hell hole of a country shooting at strangers who were shooting back at you for reasons no one really understood outside of the big brass who were thousands of miles distant and out of harm’s way. People spoke out then against the war, but they were clubbed into submission. They weren’t only threatening patriotism, they were threatening the guns instead of butter cash flow, and that was their cardinal sin. The rationale of the power brokers has always been very simple: if you can’t logically challenge doubters, you silence them. Permanently.

That made Andy Ferraro all the more dangerous.

I looked to Lenny Featherstone for support. Featherstone had been promoted to Captain from Detective in the wake of the death of Alderman Lou Pine and was now engaged in a deadly political struggle with Ferraro and his allies in the police department and city hall to see who was going to run the city once and for all. It was classic Lone Ranger, black hat vs. white hat stuff. As a kid I used to love watching the old black-and-white fare on my Grandma Jones’ beater TV, the one with the coat hanger for an antenna. I would lay propped on my elbows on her threadbare Persian rug, chin in my hands, intently wrapped up in the tales of the masked man and his Indian companion as they brought the bad guys to justice while the smells of Grandma Jones’ ham hocks and greens wafted deliciously through the house. But the Lone Ranger and Tonto never killed anyone. Here it was different. This was real, not some vapid 1950s TV western. It was bona fide black hat, white hat. Life or death. No in-betweens.

I didn’t have the luxury of sitting this one out, watching from the sidelines as I did when I was a kid. I was once again in the thick of it, and the odds were not in my favor. So when Lenny Featherstone whisked me out of the interrogation room on some flimsy excuse about me using the head and pulled me aside and made me an offer I couldn’t