A Fine Kettle of Fish Read online

  A Fine Kettle of Fish

  By Lou Bradshaw

  Copyright June, 2005 by Louis E. Bradshaw

  All rights reserved and may not be copied or reproduced in any way without written permission from the author.

  Cover Art by the author

  Copyright 2009 by Lou Bradshaw

  A message from the author

  This is a work of fiction; the events, characters, and location are products of my imagination. The town of Doubling, Missouri does not exist. Webster County, Missouri does exist, but the characters portrayed as the sheriff and his deputies are fictional. Known political, sports, and entertainment figures such as John F. Kennedy and Elvis Presley did however exist.

  This story has no moral, and it makes no point the only thing it proves is that I know how to type.

  This book is dedicated to my wife, Avon, who said to me, “If you don’t have anything to do, I’ll find something. Why don’t you go read a book, or write one?”

  I would like to give very special thank you to my editor and sister, Jeanette Schaefer, who with unflagging determination found proper homes for hundreds of hopelessly lost and misplaced commas and periods. With the compassion comparable only to a fifteenth century Franciscan monk, she pointed out the flaws in my liberal arts and parties education. Ya gotta love her.

  Forward

  This is a book for guys; the gentle gender may also enjoy it. It’s for anyone who can remember hot cars we had or wished we had and hot girls we also wished we had. It is a nostalgic trip full of fun and frustrations, a story of doing things we should never have done, and being in places we should never have been. We all have memories of the fun and fear of being almost grown, and we all have a few memories of a few stupid things we’d like to forget. My hope is that this little story will stir some of your memories and give you a little smile while you shake your head and wonder how you ever survived being a dumb kid.

  Lou Bradshaw

  Introduction

  Young Lee Brickey is the kind of son that any mother would hope for…almost. He is bright, easy going, an apt student, a hard worker, and a thief. Actually, he is more of an opportunist than a thief Things just land in his lap, and he keeps them. Working after school and on weekends at his father’s garage and towing service, he has more than ample opportunity for things to drop into his lap. As a high school senior in a small Missouri town and with a father who remembers what it was like to be young, Lee has been given the kind of freedom unheard of in the early 1960s; the kind of freedom that most of his peers can only dream of.

  The worst that could ever happen, he thought, would be getting caught in the back seat with a six-pack and the daughter of the man holding the flashlight. He quickly learns that the world outside of Doubling, Missouri can be a cruel and deadly place when four pounds of heroin are dropped into his lap at the scene of a fatal accident. Realizing that he is over his head, he turns the merchandise over to the local law. The size and circumstance of the find attracts the attention of state and federal agencies, which set up a foolproof sting operation using Lee as bait.

  When he starts classes at a nearby state college, Lee realizes that he can no longer slam through life with abandon because a commitment to his father has to be honored. The class work is harder and more complex than high school, and so are the girls, but both are much more interesting and exciting. As Lee fumbles and stumbles his way into maturity, he also goes from frying pans into fires at an ever-increasing rate.

  Table of Contents

  A Fine Kettle of Fish

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  It was cold, bitter cold, real teeth rattling cold, but cold wasn’t our problem at that moment. The cold was something that only affected our personal comfort. Our real problem was that there was some old fool standing back there in the middle of the road shooting at us with a rifle, and that could mean major personal discomfort. Mickey’s old car was digging for all it was worth, which wasn’t very much on a good day. This was not a good day. We were stupid enough to think that we would never get caught. I heard someone once say that beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clear to the bone. Well, stupid goes all the way to the marrow. Right about then, I could feel my bone marrow going numb with stupid.

  This all started on that day, January 7, 1960, the first Thursday of the new year. This was to be my year, the year I would at last graduate from high school, the year I would start college, etc., and so on. As it looked right then, I would probably wind up dead in Mickey’s old pile of crap Chevy. Not only would I be dead, but I’d be dead in the same general vicinity as Mickey Although, Mickey would probably not be killed, with his dumb luck he’d survive.

  I have no idea how we got out of there in one piece, since neither of us was looking over the dashboard. We were both scrunched down as small as we could get. I remember looking over at Mickey through a crack that found its way between my tightly

  closed eyelids. He was hunkered down with his hands up high on the wheel, and his head down between his shoulders, and his shoulders were practically in his lap. I can remember Mickey kept saying, “Oh Jesus.” over and over. He’d never admit it, but I’m sure he was praying. I don’t remember for sure, but I’ll bet that I was. All the while we were scrunching and praying, that old fool back there was firing off round after round. At least two of those bullets hit something on that old car, but we had no idea what. All we could do was hope that he didn’t hit the gas tank. Of course there wouldn’t have been much in it, so maybe that wouldn’t have been too bad.

  Some way, God only knows how, we got off the Whitakers’ lane and onto the county road. We were almost back to town when we pulled off into the woods so we could inspect the damage – and exhale. What we found were two nice little holes in the trunk lid of that 11-year-old pile of junk. That meant that the old fool wasn’t just shooting to scare us (which he did with some degree of success), but he was shooting at us. Being shot at is something that leaves a fella just a little bit unsettled, if you know what I mean. When we finally determined that the only reason we were shaking was because of the cold, and not because we were scared out of our minds, we eased that wreck out of the woods and headed for town.

  Mickey and I had ourselves a perfect little scheme to keep our gas tanks off of empty by tapping a few selected farm tanks. It was so simple and so easy we didn’t see how anything could ever go wrong. The Whitakers had a daughter in our school; a cheerleading little princess. They never missed a basketball game, and there was a big game that very night. It was the same with the Peobles. They were would-be politicians

  and went to every county council meeting. The Simpsons have Wednesday night church, and so on and so forth. It just couldn’t fail if you knew what day it was and had some idea of what was go
ing on in the area. That was my job because Mickey never knew what day it was.

  Our first order of business when we got into town was to get that car out of sight, so we took it to my Dad’s service station and picked up my car. The next thing we had to do was set up an alibi, so we went to the basketball game. The gym was like a sweatbox after being out in the cold. Sure enough, there sat the Whitakers in their usual seats watching their little darling go through her hokey routines on the sidelines. Seeing them there didn’t help my nerves any, and I could smell a set up about as well as I could smell Schemp’s pig farm on a ripe day. We stayed at the game just long enough to be seen by about a hundred kids who wouldn’t remember when we got there or when we left only that they saw us. I had to drag that moron Mickey out the gym; the idiot wanted to see the rest of the game. I promised myself right then that if I ever got involved with another caper (which I most likely would) I’d go solo.

  We patched that old car up pretty slick back at the station. We told Earl, the night man, that Mickey backed into a brick wall and messed up his trunk. Earl didn’t even look at it. When I told him to close up when he was ready and that I would clean up the grease bay, that was all he needed to hear. Aside from being no smarter than Mickey, Earl was lazy.

  A little Bondo, some sandpaper, a can of spray paint that almost matched, and some mud was all it took. It wouldn’t pass even a moderate inspection, but it would do

  until we could do it right, which we probably never would. Needless to say I didn’t get my best nights sleep that night. I kept dreaming of machine guns and Howitzers chasing me while Mickey played basketball with Earl.

  Friday morning came pretty early, and the day was a world-class drudge. I could barely keep my eyes open in civics class, but that wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. Mickey didn’t look any better. The worst thing was having to listen to the little princess, Mary Ellen Whitaker, AKA Moe Ellen, tell about how her uncle John had staked out their place last night to catch the gas stealers that had been ravaging the county lately. Apparently, they were in a black Studabaker, and he thought he might have hit one of them, but he wasn’t sure. He never found any blood. Blind old geezer wouldn’t know a Studabaker from a Frisco locomotive. I felt a lot better. Although, I did have a pang for poor old Nick Drago; he had the only black Studabaker in town. Lucky for him that he had been playing in that basketball game last night.

  This all happened a long time ago, but most of it is still so vividly etched in my memory that it seems like it happened this morning.

  It was the first week of January 1960; Eisenhower was the President, but Elvis was the King, cigarettes were 25 cents a pack, gas was 22 cents a gallon, and Dick Clark was probably already over 40. It was a great time to be young if you didn’t mind thinking about the crazy Ruskies dropping bombs on you and if you could put up with the frustrations of raging hormones in a straight laced society.

  I lived (and still do) in a small town about 20 miles east of Springfield, Missouri, in the southwest corner of the state. The town of Doubling, Missouri had a population of

  about 2000 people and is located on U.S. highway 60. We lived in a modest old 2-story house on East Adams Street; I was born there and had spent my first 17 ½ years there. The other members of my family in order of importance are: my mother, Della Brickey; my father, Frank (Brick) Brickey; my sister, Nancy (Nan); and my brother Curtis. Curtis doesn’t really matter because he’s an accountant in St. Louis, and besides he’s also an arrogant bastard. Oh yeah, I’m Lee, Lee Roy Brickey (2 words – Lee and Roy).

  Folks around here have always called me Little Brick, but I prefer Lee. They tried to call Curtis Little Brick, but he wouldn’t put up with it, so I got stuck with it. I can see problems with any kind of name that starts with little, but that’s another story. Brick (I call him that just because I always have) owned a 6-pump gas station with a three bay garage and a small food shop. That’s where I could be found almost everyday after school and on Saturdays pumping gas, airing tires, and smearing windshields for 75 cents an hour. If it hadn’t been for my sideline work, I wouldn’t have been able to survive.

  No, I didn’t rebuild engines or tune up cars in my spare time; it wasn’t anything quite that sophisticated or civilized. I was a crook! Oh, I wasn’t a gangster or a hood or even a petty thief. I just sort of accumulated things and disposed of things in an unorthodox manner. Sometimes things just presented themselves to me or dropped into my lap, and I couldn’t seem to throw them back. My criminal career started the year before while on a wrecker call. I generally went out on tow truck calls in the evenings, because Brick hated to leave home once he got there. There was this preacher from one of the local churches, in fact our church, who wound up in a ditch, so I went to pull him out. When I got his car back on the road we found that he had broken a tie-rod and would have to be towed in.

  The preacher called me over to the side of the car away from the deputy who was busy writing up a report. He kind of looked over to see if the deputy was watching (which he wasn’t, he was too busy trying to spell Ford) and handed me a five-dollar bill.

  He said, “Little Brick, there is a case of Budweiser in the trunk. I don’t have any idea where it came from, but it can’t be there in the morning. I believe you are a man of integrity and know how to be discrete, if you get my meaning.”

  I didn’t know what discrete meant, but I sure as hell knew what a case of Bud meant and a five spot to boot. I hoped he hadn’t intended that money as payment for the tow, because he was getting a bill for that from Brick. Well, that case of beer was in my trunk before the preacher’s car was off the hook, along with his jack and all the loose change under his seats. I left that pair of red silk panties under the front seat. They were about a size 10, and Mrs. Preacher was at least a size 45. I don’t know if I suddenly lost respect for the parson or gained some.

  It wasn’t long before I had quite a thriving business going on the side. The trick was not to take anything that would be missed right away. A totaled vehicle could have all sorts things misplaced from hubcaps to a transmission. With a few salvage yard connections that I’d set up, it wasn’t long before I was clearing an extra $40 to $60 a month, tax-free. Mostly though, it was beer, wine, and whiskey, which I would find under the seats or in the trunks. I would then bootleg the loot to my friends and enemies alike. My friends of course got a better price. The gas-stealing scheme was merely an attempt to expand. Expansion was not feasible at that time.

  1960 was barely a week old, and so far I’ve been shot at, scared nearly to death, froze my butt off, and had to listen to dumb Moe Ellen Whitaker refer to us as a petroleum theft ring. If this is what this year is going to be like, then I don’t want any part of it. It was just too damned exiting.

  * * *

  January crawled; there was just no other way to describe it. I know that January only has 31 days in it, about the same as a whole bunch of other months, but for some reason, it seemed to have at least 60 and every other one was a Monday. It was pretty much a long and uneventful string of days, sleeping in civics, pumping gas, and an occasional buzz from my outlaw enterprise. I thought for a short time that I had come up with a new scheme for the empty tank syndrome, which meant shorting customers by a few tenths on their fill-ups, and then recouping the surplus for myself. The only problem with that was it was messing with Brick’s business, and I didn’t feel right about it.

  One bright spot was that Liz (Elizabeth) McCord was at last starting to fill out. Liz lived across the street and one house down, and I had and unobstructed shot at her window from mine with my Olympic 10x50 binoculars. I had known Liz all my life, and we were generally buddies along with Mack (Macklin) Taylor. Mack lived next door to me and directly across from Liz, and, therefore, he didn’t have a good angle to her window. So when he was home, which wasn’t often anymore, we spent a goodly amount of time in my room. Until we started high school the three of us were inseparable. We shared a lot of firsts together such as first cigare
tte (a stale Pall Mall that Liz procured) and a first kiss, which at age 11 we all agreed it wasn’t worth the effort. We were buddies, three blind mice just banging around trying to keep our tails from being chopped off. All through grade school it was one for all, and we didn’t care if one of us occasionally wore a dress.

  After the eighth grade things changed. For one thing, Liz started hanging out with the girls and had less and less interest in her old tom-boy ways. Another, more serious thing happened. Mack went away to a seminary school in Cape Girardeau, which was about 200 miles away on the Mississippi. It seemed that an old maid aunt wanted a priest in the family, and poor old Mack was elected or should I say anointed. To my way of thinking there were 2 chances of that happening, fat and slim. I wasn’t about to accept the proposition that my best buddy was going into that as real until the time came for them to strap that collar on, and maybe not even then if I could help it.

  Anyway, when Mack went away things were never quite the same with Liz and me. We were like 2 bolts holding something in place that was supposed to have 3 bolts. We held together but never quite fit just right. We were still good friends but seemed to spend a lot of our tine making each other the butt of some joke. There was always the knowledge that either of us would have gone to the wall for the other, but it was never spoken.

  Chapter 2

  January was finally coming to an end and none too soon. With the exception of the few afore mentioned highlights, January was pretty dull. Here it was the last weekend of the month, and Mom, Brick, and Nan had gone to St. Louis to visit Curtis and meet his fiancé. I sure was sorry to have missed that, but somebody had to stay here and take care of business and kind of keep the home fires burning. I was willing to sacrifice the warmth of his smile and brotherly love and stand to my post at Brick’s Texaco Service Center.