Deadbeat - the first 4 chapters

Deadbeat

1.

     A man always takes full responsibility for his actions. That’s what Uncle Buddy used to say to us boys who followed him around all the time, hanging on his every word. Uncle Buddy was something of an enigma. I don’t remember when he came to town, he just showed up one day. He never told us where he came from, but from the way he talked we knew he wasn’t from East Texas. He didn’t have that slow, sugary drawl that everyone else had, and he spoke at a faster clip. But, he knew how to bait a hook, could shoot hickory nuts out of a  tree from fifty yards, and knew more stories than a bunch of adolescent boys from a small farm town ever knew existed. My buddies and I hung around him, and our parents didn’t mind, because they knew he always taught us to be responsible, never cursed in our presence, and would conk or thump our noggins with his calloused index finger whenever he caught us misbehaving. This was in the 1950s before corporal punishment became taboo, and when any adult was considered responsible for any child within his or her reach.

     Uncle Buddy wasn’t really my uncle, and his name wasn’t Buddy. I didn’t know that, of course, until just before I graduated from high school. He died that year. Just went to bed in the little two room shack that he’d built himself, and never woke up. One of his neighbors found the body when the place started to stink.

     They had a big funeral for him. Every black person in town came, and even a few of the white farmers for whom he occasionally did odd jobs came and sat in the back of the little white frame church that was filled to capacity.

     I remember it vividly because it was in early April, and it had already started to get hot – not hot like it gets in the summer, but hot enough that sitting in a packed building with nothing but little paper fans flapping ineffectually and moving the warm around that you’re soaking wet pretty quick. I also remember it because that was the day I discovered who Uncle Buddy really was.

     His real name was Oscar Perlmutter. They had it printed in real fancy letters on the mimeographed program that was handed out to everyone as they entered the church. That day, sitting in a middle pew in that hot church, I finally learned his name. The program also had a blurry picture of him as a much younger man wearing a military uniform. Back home after the service, when I asked my dad about it, he told me what he knew. Oscar had originally come from St. Louis, Missouri, where he’d lived since coming home from World War II. He’d originally come from a little town in Oregon, but while in a military hospital recovering from wounds he’d sustained driving supplies across Germany for Patton’s Third Army, he’d met a black nurse, one of the few in England at the time, and when he was demobilized, he followed her to St. Louis. My dad didn’t know her name. He said Oscar would never speak it, and looked pained whenever he talked about her, which was seldom. I know he never told us kids her name – or anything else about his past.

     He’d planned to marry her, though. That much he did tell my dad. He also told him why they never wed. A week before the wedding, his fiancée was coming home from the local black=owned hospital where she worked as a nurse supervisor. She’d had the night shift in the ER. As she was crossing the street a block from the apartment they shared, a driver came careening around the corner in a pickup truck. She was knocked twenty feet to land a in a crumpled and bleeding heap on the sidewalk. The paramedics pronounced her dead at the scene. The pickup driver drove away, but not before Oscar, who had been attracted by the sound of screaming - the other pedestrians who had witnessed the accident – came out of the apartment just as the truck was speeding away. He got a good look at the driver, a middle aged white man in a plaid shirt and overalls, with a frightened look on his sunburned face. He also got a good look at the vehicle’s plate number.