yet,” Ozay joked.
They both chuckled, and Marina paid the bill.
Paul Ferris was meeting Tony Antonino at San Francisco’s Little Joe’s on Broadway. The lack of parking in North Beach made Paul a little late. Tony sat at a corner table next to the window and waved Paul inside.
“God! The traffic! Sorry.”
“Good to see you Paul. Please sit.” Antonino’s office was around the corner next to Chinatown’s Melvin Belli Building, but he loved Italian food. “I won’t make this long. Got a trial to attend in an hour.”
“Have you got anything for me on Lenny James’s disappearance?”
Tony looked down and reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a small piece of paper and gave it to Paul. Lincoln Kennedy was the name on it.
“It was Jason Frank before that,” Tony said.
“Jason Frank of the Weather bombing trial three years ago?” Paul scratched his head in confusion. “I knew him as an undergrad at UC Berkeley. Back then, the rumor was that he was recruited by the CIA.”
“The same one. Strange, though. Apparently he dropped the CIA for the Weather Underground. The charges against him were dropped. I think he was intent on saving his own butt in the Weather trial, so he maintained that he was tricked into the plot by the other Weather people. It was suspected that he gave names. He got off, and I know that after the trial he disappeared. Found out later he surfaced in Humboldt County.
“I have a friend there that does the kind of legal stuff up there that I do down here. Name’s Bates, Joe Bates. Joe tells me there a lot of people hiding out in the boonies. We’ve been working on a land grant case in Humboldt for years that’s really divided the Indian community. Ahem! I don’t want to bore you.”
“No! Go ahead. I’m definitely interested.”
“I’ll make it short. You’ve got the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) don’t-rock-the-boat types vs. the American Indian Movement (AIM) radicals. This land grant battle may mean the return of millions of acres to three tribes. So, the stakes are pretty high. It turns out that Lincoln has been seen with members of AIM on occasion. Check it out, I do think it’s worth a shot.” Antonino had stopped eating his large plate of fettuccine Alfredo and was working on a German beer; Paul had barely touched his meal.
“Thanks a million, Tony. My book on the Weather Underground will be coming out next month. I’ll be sure to send you a copy. You and Maria have to come visit sometime. You know you’re always welcome.”
Ozay drove his rental up a quiet sycamore-lined street to his sister Clari’s bungalow duplex a block from the Exposition Park complex in south central L.A. He hadn’t been there in over a year. While married to Shelly Wright, he would visit with the kids every year. Clari lived with her their maternal grandmother, Rena Broussard.
“I think Granma Rena’s waking up,” Ozay’s sister Clari announced. “I know she would be disappointed if she missed you.”
“It’ll be good to see her too.”
“Granma Rena! Your grandson Ozay is here to see you!”
Granma Rena Broussard was clearly, once, a very beautiful woman. Her long curly grey hair hung down to her breast. And at eighty-two her skin—except for minor wrinkles and a couple of long grey hairs that decorated her chin—was still clear of blemishes. “Christ, Ozay, son! Where on God’s earth you been? Come and give yo grandmamma Rena some sugar.” Rena entered the living room with a cane but didn’t actually use it.
“Hi Granma Rena!” Ozay said, soaking up his grandma’s big hug and having quick flashes of thirty years earlier, hanging onto his grandma’s flowered dress and being lovingly picked up in the air and held. They sat and talked; mostly Rena talked. She spoke with a southern dialect, like poor blacks, but Rena had had some college—she had been a nurse for forty years. Rena glowed with a light that could only come from a life that had been full of love. Ozay decided to see if Rena was in the mood to talk about her long-dead husband, Ozay’s grandfather. When he started asking questions, a deep furrow appeared between Rena’s eyebrows.
“Ozay, I need ta tell ya some things ‘bout ya granpa I never told ya befo’. You know ya named afta Ozay, yo half-Cherokee granpa. I think it was like the Spanish ‘Jose,’ just mispronounced. When I would push him, he’d admit ta not really knowing, ‘cause he was an orphan raised by his aunt an’ his Cherokee uncle, who claim that his mama and papa died in a fire. Clari, would ya bring me some tea? Just heat up the little bit of water left over in the tea pot.”
“The sassafras mint, or the chamomile, Grammy?”
“Sassafras mint, sweetie.” She then resumed her conversation with Ozay. “Uuh, yes, chil’.” Grandma Rena pulled a handkerchief out of her robe pocket and blew her nose. “You see, back in those days life was hard fa country people. The War, the civil that is, left blacks, Indians, and whites struggling ta get by. Most went north, and the ones that stayed did what they did best, farm and bootleg. Yo grandpa found out the merry-wana he and his family had been growing and smoking for generations, Lawd, was in demand as much as the licka in Tulsa, Kansas City, Denver and outside Nawlins. Organized dealers didn’t have a strong grip in these places. And it left it wide open for ya grandpa. Ya just had ta have a fast automobile ta do it. So Grandpa Ozay and his brothers learned how ta build fast cars and they became notorious fa they runs. They never could catch yo grandpa, until…. Ya see, the ‘holler crackers’ got wind of Ozay’s exploits, and wanted in on the spoils.”
“The holler crackers?” Ozay asked.
“Never heard of a holler cracker, have you? Well, in the Arkansas Ozarks, ya got thousands of little wooded river valleys where the Hillbillies would grow their weed and set up their stills—way up stream in the hollers.”
Clari brought in the tea and Rena continued.
“Most of the hollers were small-time family operations that produced moonshine and one crop of merry-wana a year. I think yo grandpa’s success was his downfall. He never thought he would get caught. He did a run one night and was caught in a roadblock, but it wasn’t the federal agents, it was holler crackers. Ozay was no fool, so he always carried a shotgun. Shots were fired and Ozay got away, leaving two white men dead.” Rema carefully sipped her hot tea. “He was probably the only Indian to get away with it, in those days.”
“Wait a minute! He killed two white men and got away with it?”
“As I live and breathe, chil’! Afterward, we all moved from Cherokee County, Oklahoma, to Cherokee County, east Texas. I suppose the shooting had something to do with it. We got some property, remote, out in the sticks, so the family could continue their operations undisturbed.” She adjusted her dentures with her tongue before continuing. “Your grandpa went to his grave and never told a soul ‘cept me. No suh! Never talked about it to no one. Y’all have ta excuse me, I have a potty call.”
“We need to talk more, Granma Rena. I’m real interested.”
“You know I’ll be here, chil’. My mind’s slipping these days. I been wanting to tell ya, ya got a cousin: ya ant Tillie’s son, ‘bout yo age. Billy…Vas…, a Mexican name. I forget. Heard he lives up near you, somewhere. Lawd, yo ant Tillie tried ta raise Billy by herself, ‘til he run off. She tried ta sing for a living, but ya couldn’t tell her she wasn’t good enough. Po chil’ took ta drugs and hooked up with a black Mexican-Indian…now I remember, Vasquez was his name, he had coal-black long hair he wore in a pony tail.”
“I got a cousin named Billy, somewhere near San Francisco?”
“That what ya ant told me.”
“I’ve been dying to see the girls, Ozay!” Clari broke in. “When are you going to bring them down here? We have plenty of room here for them to stay, you know.”
“I know, Clari, but it all depends on Shelly and her new squeeze. So far he hasn’t been