A Quiet Vendetta

even less for the history of his country. I was an American, born and bred. I was no more Cuban than Eisenhower, or so I believed.

But violence was in my blood, it seemed, perhaps hereditary, carried in some airborne virus that my father exhaled, and though many years later I would see a pattern, a series of smaller, less significant events that preordained what was to come, it was a single defining event that ultimately dictated the course of my life.

The month was September of 1952. I was home alone. My father was drunk in some bar, wagering what little money he had on some senseless and grievous harm he intended to do to someone, my mother in the market collecting provisions, and the man came to our house. The salesman. He stood there on the porch, his yellow- checkered pants, his short-sleeved shirt, his tie hanging around his midriff, his hat in his hand.

‘Hi there,’ he said as I drew out from within the shadows of the hallway. ‘My name is Carryl Chevron. Know that sounds like a lady’s name, but it ain’t, sure ain’t a lady’s name, young man. Is your folks home?’

I shook my head, all of fifteen years old, standing there in shorts and shoes, my chest bare, my head wrapped in a damp towel. The spring had been a bitch, the summer worse, and even as it dragged its sorry ass towards fall the heat was still oppressive.

‘I’m lookin’ for some folks who’s int’rested in learnin’ here,’ Carryl Chevron said, and then he turned his head back towards the road as if he was looking for something. His eyes glinted, glimmered like the moon, and I wiped my hand beneath my nose and leaned against the door jamb in the shady porch of that beat-to-shit house.

‘Lookin’ for some folks that might be tempted towards wisdom, know what I mean?’ Again the tilted head, the glimmering eyes, his face glowing something that I had only seen in my father’s face when he sat in his chair, his bottle in his hand. Somewhere a dog started barking. I glanced towards the sound, but even as I turned I knew I was interested in what this man was saying.

I turned back. The man smiled.

‘Is that real gold in your teeth?’ I asked, as I peered into the shadow that filled the man’s mouth.

Carryl Chevron – a man who’d spent much of his life telling folks that he didn’t have a girl’s name, who’d been bruised and burned emotionally for this one parental curse, yet who’d never had the foresight and logic to change it – laughed suddenly, abruptly, nodded his head and reddened his face. ‘Why yes, sure it’s real gold. You think someone such as me, someone who carries such wisdom across the world, would have anything but real gold and diamonds in his teeth?’ And then he leaned forward, and with the hand that wasn’t balancing him against the jamb, he tugged back his lip and showed me a gleaming gold canine, in its center a small glassy stud that seemed to shine with the same light that beamed from his eyes.

‘Gold and diamonds,’ he managed to say with half his mouth moving. ‘Real gold and real diamonds and real wisdom right there in the back of my car. You wanna see them?’

‘See them?’ I asked. ‘See what?’

‘My ’cyclopedias, my ’cyclopedias, young man. Books so filled with wisdom and learnin’ you’ll never need to look any other place than right between the leather covers, right there, packed like smart marching soldiers in the back of my vee-cule. You wanna see?’

‘You’re selling books?’ I asked, and for a moment I could see my mother’s face, the way she pleaded with me to read, to learn, to absorb everything that the world could offer.

The man stepped back, looked suddenly amazed, offended even. ‘Books!’ he exclaimed. ‘Books? You call them volumes of genius books? Boy, where the hell did you get yourself growed up?’

‘Zachary Road, Evangeline… why, where did you grow up?’

Chevron just smiled. ‘I’ll bring one,’ he said. ‘I’ll bring one right up here and show you.’

He walked back to the dirt road, to his car, and from the rear seat he lifted out a box and balanced it on the edge of the fender. From the box he took a large black book that appeared to weigh many pounds, and even as I saw it, all of fifteen years old, I knew that that was the kind of place where folks got their smarts. I watched Carryl Chevron walk right up onto the porch carrying that book, and though I couldn’t really read worth a damn, could only just manage to write my name, and even then some of the letters being backwards, I just knew I had to have them. Had to. I believed it was what my mother would have wanted. She would be proud if I managed to obtain and own such things.

‘Here we are,’ Chevron said. ‘Volume One. Aardvark through Aix-La-Chapelle to Canteloupe. In here we find Abacus, Acapulco, the Aegean Sea, Appalachian Mountains, Athlete’s Foot, Milton Babbitt, the Bayeux Tapestry, the Congress of Berlin, Boccherini, Cadiz, Catherine De Medici, Cherokee Indians, China… everything, just everything right here that a young man such as yourself might ever wish to know.’ He leaned forward, held out the opened book, the smell of crisp paper, the tang of new leather, the print, the pictures, the wisdom of it all. ‘Everything,’ Chevron whispered, ‘and it could all be yours.’

And me, standing there with my skinny arms and my bare chest, the damp towel wrapped around my head like a turban, reached out to touch the understanding that seemed to ooze from the pages. The book was snapped shut, withdrawn immediately as if on elastic.

‘Buy… or be stupid for the rest of your life. Wisdom is priceless, young man, but here we have wisdom going for nothing, driven here from the heart of the world for you. For you, young man.’

I heard what the man was saying, and in some way it could really have been my mother. The world was there to be understood, she had told me, and this man appeared to have brought that world to my doorstep.

Chevron held the book tightly between his hands and leaned towards me. ‘You know where your folks keep the money, huh? You know how mad they’d be if they learned I’d been out here giving such things away and they missed the opportunity of a lifetime. Where are they? Out working?’

‘They’re out,’ I said. ‘Won’t be back for a little while, I reckon.’ I kept glancing at the book Chevron held in his hands. There was something magnetic about it, something that drew me towards it. ‘My dad has money, but I don’t figure he’d be interested in some books though,’ I said, and already I was trying to work out what I was going to do, how I was going to make these books my own.

‘Aah,’ Chevron sighed, as if he understood something that could only be understood by the two of us. ‘We know, don’t we? Young man… we know what’s here even if no-one else has the brains to figure it out. This can be our little secret, our little secret, just you and me. Maybe you should just go get some money and then you and I can make a deal, okay? You and I can make a deal, I’ll drive away, and then when your folks come back they’ll be so grateful that you took advantage of the opportunity that I’m giving you here.’

I hesitated for a moment, closed one eye and looked at Carryl Chevron, looked once more at the book he held in his hands. I could hear the sound of my mind working overtime; I didn’t know what to do, but I had to do something.

‘How many are there?’ I asked.

‘Nine,’ he said. ‘Nine books in all. All of them just like this one, right there in the box in the back of my car.’

Again I hesitated, not because I was in doubt about what I wanted but because I was uncertain of what I was going to do to get it. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘bring them in. I’ll get you some money, but you’re not to tell anyone, right? You don’t tell anyone you came here and gave me the books.’

Chevron smiled. A dream, he thought, another dream; the right place, the right time of day, another dumbfuck kid who knew where the money was kept and could be worked like a bellows.

Chevron walked back to the car and retrieved the box from the rear seat. He lumbered back, his cheap shirt chafing his shoulders and elbows, sweat running down his chest like a river. Times like this he didn’t care, times like this it was worth it. The trip had been good. Here a week in this Godforsaken shithole of a territory, and this would be his fifth sale, one of them to an old guy who seemed too blind to read, and sure as hell hadn’t managed to see the difference between a ten-dollar and a hundred-dollar bill, the rest to kids such as this one, kids old enough to know where the cash was stashed, young enough to be fascinated and think nothing of consequences. Work fast, dump this crap, drive on, lose yourself out there in another worn-out dustbowl of a town where no-one knew who he was or would ever see him again. He’d be back in New Orleans within three or four days, out of the state inside a week: fat through a goose.

He reached the porch, stood there for a moment, and then shoved on the screen door, stepping through it before it banged back against the jamb. He stood in the cool darkness of the hallway, his nostrils twitching at the rank undercurrent of alcohol and piss and body odor. It never ceased to amaze him how people could actually live like this. He dropped the box of books on the floor, nothing more than a deadweight meal-ticket as far as he was concerned, and waited for the kid.