The summer I was thirteen years old I worked in Cocoa Beach, Florida, building roads and houses for my uncle’s construction company. One afternoon when we were paving a street in one hundred and five degree heat, a police car pulled up to the site, stopped, and two cops got out, guns drawn. They moved swiftly toward the steam roller, which was being operated by Boo Ruffert, a former Georgia sheriff. The cops proceeded without a word and grabbed Boo, dragging him down from his perch atop the steam roller. I was shoveling limerock off of a curb directly across from the action, and I watched the cops handcuff Ruffert and begin double-timing him toward their beige and white. Jake Farkas, who had been sweeping behind Boo, jumped up onto the steam roller and shut it down before the machine went out of control and careened off the road. My uncle came running out of the trailer he used as an office and intercepted the policemen before they locked Boo Ruffert into the patrol car.
“Wait!” my uncle shouted at the cops. “What are you doing with him?”
“This man is wanted on a charge of child molestation in Georgia,” said one of them. “We have a warrant for his arrest.”
“Want to see it?” asked the other cop. He was holding the nose of his revolver against Ruffert’s right temple.
“Listen,” said my uncle, “Boo here is my best heavy equipment operator. He’s almost finished with this street.”
My uncle pulled out a roll of bills from one of his trouser pockets.
“Let me buy you fellows some lunch. Ruffert won’t go anywhere, I’ll keep an eye on him. You boys have something to eat while he finishes up here.”
He held two fifties out toward them. “How about it?”
The cops looked at the money in my uncle’s hand, then stuffed Ruffert into the back seat.
“Sorry,” said one, “you’ll have to get yourself another man. This one’s headed to the hoosegow.”
I had walked over and stood watching and listening to this exchange. I looked at Ruffert through the left side rear window. Boo grinned at me, exposing several brown teeth, and winked his right eye, the one with the heart-shaped blood spot on the lower outside corner of the white. I guessed Boo’s age to be about forty. Jake Farkas came up and stood next to me. Jake always had the stub of a dead Indian, as he called cigars, in his mouth, usually a Crook, and three or four days’ worth of whiskers on his face. He was in his early thirties but had already fathered, he told me, approximately thirteen children.
“You think you can ride her down the rest of the way?” my uncle asked Jake.
“Sure thing,” Jake said.
My uncle turned and walked back to the trailer.
“Did you know about Boo?” I asked. “That he was a wanted man?”
Jake chuckled and said, “My dear old Mama used to say it’s always good to be wanted, but I’m older now and I know that my dear old Mama weren’t always right.”
Jake strode to the steam roller, hopped up into the seat and cranked it over. I went back to shoveling limerock.
That evening, after my uncle dropped me off at a local movie theater while he went off to play cards, a bizarre incident occurred. I figured he was going to see a woman and that he knew I knew but seeing as how he had a wife in Miami, I assumed he thought it prudent not to tell me any more than he had to. I was not particularly fond of my aunt; my uncle knew this and most probably also knew I would never have betrayed his confidence had he chosen to tell me the truth, but this way neither of us had to compromise ourselves.
The movie was Zulu, which depicted red-jacketed, heavily-armed British soldiers in South Africa battling against Shaka’s spear-throwing warriors. The theater was segregated; white patrons were seated downstairs and black patrons were seated in the balcony. This was in 1964, so some small progress had been made regarding racial equality in Florida in that both whites and blacks were at least allowed to be in the movie theater together.
The redcoats were vastly outnumbered by the Zulus, but their highly-disciplined British square defense—one line kneeling and firing as the line behind them stood and cleaned and reloaded their rifles—kept the natives at bay. The outcome, however, was inevitable; at some point the Zulus would overwhelm them. As the battle raged, there came from the balcony increasing shouts of exhortation directed at the Zulus, which incited equally fervent vocalizing by the white members of the audience below. The din inside the theater grew louder and more and more heated, practically drowning out the soundtrack of the picture.
Suddenly, the lights in the theater came on and the film stopped. The cinema manager jumped up onstage and stood in front of the screen. He was a large, mostly bald, clean-shaven white man wearing a baggy green suit. He held a lit cigarette between the second and third fingers of his right hand, the one he used to gesticulate and point toward the balcony. The crowd was silent.
“Listen up!” he shouted. “Any further ruckus and I’m throwin’ all you niggers out of here!”
The manager kept his two cigarette fingers pointed at the balcony section for at least twenty seconds longer; then he put them to his mouth, took a long drag on the cigarette, exhaled smoke so that it curlicued slowly away from him and vanished in the lights, and dropped the butt to the floor where he ground it out with his right shoe. He did not lower his eyes from the cheap seats until he jumped down from the stage and unhurriedly proceeded up the center aisle and out into the lobby. The sound of the doors swinging shut was the only noise in the theater until the house lights blinked out and the projector resumed rolling.
The film ended with Shaka’s Zulus acknowledging the bravery and ingenuity of the British regulars by saluting them and deciding against slaughtering them wholesale, thereby emerging victorious by having made the grandest and noblest heroic gesture possible before disappearing over a distant rise. I waited until almost every other patron had left the theater before I did. There was no trouble outside. The manager stood in front of the ticket booth, smoking. Up close, I could see several dark stains on the jacket and pants of his suit.
My uncle was parked in front of the theater. I climbed into his white Cadillac convertible and he drove away.
“How was the show?” he asked.
“Good,” I said, “there was lots of fighting. Did you win?”
“Win?”
“Yeah, at the poker game.”
“A little,” said my uncle. “I always win a little.”
We drove for a while without saying anything, then I asked, “What do you think will happen to Boo?”
“He’ll do some hard time, I’m sure,” my uncle said. “It’s a bad business, messing with children.”
“Was it a boy or a girl that he messed with?”
“A girl.”
“How old was she?”
“Jake told me she was ten.”
“How does he know?”
“What difference does it make? Ruffert was a wanted man, you won’t ever see him again. Tell me more about the movie.”