Willy Lee

"You're a dangerous man," she said with a wide, enticing grin.

James took her hand, "No honey, I'm just reckless." She giggled bashfully, not understanding and shaking the brown ringlets that fell around her big eyes. "Dangerous happens to other people. That's the secret if you want to know the truth. People say I'm dangerous, but I'm just reckless." He leveled his sinister eyes on me, "I let other people worry about dangerous."

"It's stupid," I told the slicked down hair on the back of his head as we left the diner. "You stick out like a sore thumb when you carry on like that." He didn't turn to look at me but waved his hand. I stopped, frustrated, and looked up into the blank sky for some kind of explanation. "It's dangerous when you're us."

"Now what did I tell you about that?" He didn't stop until he reached the passenger seat of the car where he immediately settled down and waited patiently for me to compose myself and catch up

Driving him was always like this. He'd spout his rhetoric or snatches of poetry he'd written about himself, fall into melancholic staring and suddenly launch into a topic aged two days as if you were just discussing it. "You worry too goddamn much." I rolled my eyes. "Understand that James Cagney James understands the tolerable subtleties. I cant be you fretting over what I did was right or wrong, plowing your value beneath your sense of risk every second of your life. I cant be you and be me."

Rain was falling, the dots on the window cast shadows drawn across his face like a veil, his eyes shifting slowly from telephone poles streetlights, cars and me. The low appraisal of each was written in the thin line of his mouth, and I had had enough.

"Being me has kept you alive."

His expression broke with a flash of lightening, like he'd been waiting for this bait. "You really think that?" The razor smile was back. "I'm a prime mover, and you're a cog. You think you're doing favors for me?" He placed his hat on his knee, and groomed it while he spoke. "Don't be so sure I aint who they want me to be."

"And what is that?"

"Not the cull, no matter how much I look like it to you. I'm the Judas goat, I walk in the slaughterhouse just the same but come out the other side. They need this villain, they want James Cagney James to get away and twist his mustache, cackling."

"I know your name, Willy Lee." He shot me an acid look, the only sound was the rain coming down in sheets and popping off the roof with hollow metallic pings.

"How'd you know that?" He asked with taught voice.

"I just do."

"We traveled miles in dark and quiet, his mood settled in a low place like thick morning fog. "My mother named me Willy Lee after her brother, who died when she was young. I asked her what I'm supposed to be like, carrying the name of a dead man I never met, what she hoped I'd be. She told me there's always a job nobody wants to do, makes 'em sick just knowing it needs to be done. The man that steps up for that job will always have steady work and silent gratitude. My uncle was that man. I come to find out he done every shit job a pecker wood could dream up, till one day he fell of the mast of a ship and plunked down in the ocean so hard he never even bobbed back up so they could bury him. And that's the man she wanted me to be, that's the man I tried to be."

"Is that who you are?"

He let out a bitter laugh. "I wouldn't be that idiot for anything. I learned what he forgot, one hand for you, one hand for the boat. That's something I aint forgot yet."