I got up to get away from there just as the desk man called out, Last call for Flight 884.” They couldn’t have watchers at all the boarding areas. I’d just have to get to Chicago, call the Blind Man, and try and work something out. As I walked past the desk, a guy slammed into me. He bounced back a few feet, put a nasty expression on his face, and then dropped it when he saw mine. A clown in his late thirties, trying to pass for a much younger guy: hair carefully styled forward to cover a receding hairline, silk shirt open to mid-chest, fancy sunglasses dangling from a gold chain around his neck. I moved away slowly and watched as he approached the desk.
“I got a ticket for this flight,” he barked out, like he was used to being obeyed.
“Of course, sir. May I see your boarding pass?”
“I don’t have a goddamn pass. Can’t I get one here?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the desk man told him, “the flight is all boarded at this time. We have four more boarding passes outstanding. We can certainly issue one to you, but it has to be on what we call the ‘modified standby’ basis. If the people holding boarding passes don’t show up five minutes before flight time, we will call your name and give you the pass.”
“What kind of crap is this?” the clown demanded. “I paid good money for this ticket.”
“I’m sure you did, sir. But that’s the procedure. I’m sure you won’t have any trouble boarding. This happens all the time on these short flights. Just give us your ticket, and we’ll call you by name just before the flight leaves, all right?”
I guess it wasn’t all right, but the clown had no choice. He slammed his ticket down on the counter, tossed his leather jacket casually over one shoulder, and took a seat near the desk.
It wasn’t a great shot, but it was the best one I’d had in a while. I waited a couple of heartbeats and followed the clown to the desk. I listened patiently to their explanation, left my ticket, and was told that they would call me by name when my turn came.
I didn’t have much time. I walked over to where the clown was sitting, smoking a cigarette like he’d invented it. “Look,” I told him, “I need to get on that flight to Augusta. It’s important to me. Business reasons.”
“So what’s that to me?” he smirked, shrugging his shoulders.
“I know you got ahead of me on the list, okay? It’s worth a hundred to me to change places with you. Let me go when your name is called, and you can go when they call mine, if they do,” I told him, taking out a pair of fifties and holding them out to him.
His eyes lit up. I could see the wheels turning in his head. He knew a sucker when he saw one. “What if we both get on?” he wanted to know.
“That’s my tough luck,” I said. “I need to do everything possible to get on the flight. It’s important to me.”
He appeared to hesitate, but it was no contest. “My name’s Morrison,” he said, taking the fifties from my hand. “Steele,” I said, and walked toward the desk.
The watchers hadn’t looked at us. A couple of minutes passed. I gently worked myself away from the clown, watching the watchers. The desk man piped up: “Mr. Morrison, Mr. Albert Morrison, we have your boarding pass.” I shot up from my seat, grabbed the pass, and hit the walkway. The little blonde sang out, “Have a pleasant flight, Mr. Morrison,” as I passed. I could feel the heat of the hunters’ eyes on my back.
I wasn’t fifty feet into the runway when I heard, “Mr. Steele, Mr. Henry Steele, we have your boarding pass.” I kept going and found my seat in the front of the plane.
I watched the aisle and, sure enough, the clown passed me by, heading for the smoking section in the rear. I thought he winked at me, but I couldn’t be sure.
The flight to Augusta was only half an hour, but the plane couldn’t outrun a phone call. The airport was a tiny thing, just one building, with a short walk to the cabs outside. The clown passed by me as I was heading outside, bumped me with his shoulder, held up my two fifties in his hand, and gave me a greasy smile. “It’s a hard world,” he said, moving out ahead of me.
I watched as two men swung in behind him. One was carrying a golf bag; the other had his hands free.
James Hannah
(b. 1951)
Readers of hard-boiled and dark-suspense fiction are unlikely to be familiar with James Hannah’s name. A Texan who earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Hannah is a short-story writer whose small but impressive output has appeared exclusively in such literary magazines as Cimarron Review, Crazyhorse, Florida Review, and Quarterly West. His first collection, Desperate Measures (1988), includes ten stories about “desperate people, desperate solutions,” in the words of his publisher, in which “there is no god but chance, and life’s surprises are seldom sources of joy.” Noir writer James Crumley called them “stories for brave readers,” and indeed they are.
It would be inaccurate to pin a “hard-boiled” label on Hannah’s fiction; nevertheless, the best of his tales have all the elements of style, characterization, insight, and social commentary of the classic hard-boiled story. Junior Jackson, the narrator of “Junior Jackson’s Parable,” is the most desperate of all of Hannah’s desperate people, and a true noir creation: it is difficult to imagine a more completely disaffected and dissatisfied individual, or a world more disordered than the one in which he exists. His parable is a dark and cautionary one about life and wasted lives in the American Southwest as the twentieth century lurches headlong toward its final days.
B. P.
Junior Jackson’s Parable
(1988)
I tore out to Mama’s. Punched the old Chevy pickup and slung gravel halfway down Papermill Drive. I’d left the goddamned phone out in the service bay at the Firestone store dangling after the bitch’d hung up on me.
I flew past the Sonic. Luckless sonofabitch, I kept saying. Luckless, worthless, sorry stupid sonofabitch. And pushed down harder on the accelerator, rattling the shitty unleaded through the carb.
I guess I’d had enough. Roger Blake, my court-appointed lawyer, said that later a hundred times. He painted all sorts of pictures of me and her and him — mostly true — but some I couldn’t quite make out. Wondered who the hell he was talking about exactly. But the fucking D.A.! What a peckerhead he was. When he called his surprise witness a couple of days before the trial ended and grinned down at me, all three of us knew I’d really fucked the duck. I dropped my stare to my ugly worthless hands.
But I didn’t only have the shotgun on my mind. That’s what the peckerhead kept harping on. The shotgun. Twelve-gauge. Buckshot, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. I mean, it passed through my mind, sure, but I’d had enough, you know. I guess I was mainly just going to Mama’s and leaving everything behind — the Firestone store, our mobile home over in Regency Gardens behind Wal-Mart, the Casbah Club. Daddy’s gun came to me somewhere on the farm-to-market road. Came and went. Came back some more. Sitting in his closet behind boxes of coveralls he’d saved from the mill, old broken Emerson fans. In my mind maybe I even crammed the gun back deeper, covered it with clothes.
Remember, you’d had enough, Roger Blake reminded me. And he wasn’t lying; I’d had all the shit a man can take. Luckless bastard.