The Two-Bear Mambo

by Joe R. Lansdale

  “Nope,” Leonard said. “I have enough problems of my own. Me and Raul, we’ve had hell trying to get a lubricant we like. K-Y is highly overrated. I bet we been through twenty-five tubes of this and that.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” Charlie said. “But you might check Kmart. They got all kinds of lubricant stuff there, at reasonable prices. From Vaseline to forty-weight lube oil.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be needing it now,” Leonard said. “Unless I’m just gonna use a little bit of it in the palm of my hand.”

  “Bobby Joe Soothe,” Hanson said, “was a black man had him a little accident.”

  “I did hear about that,” I said. “On the news. Hung himself in Grovetown jail with his shoelaces. Something like that.”

  “Something like that,” Hanson said. “There’s a back story though. You see, this Bobby Joe Soothe, he was the grandson of L.C. Soothe. Heard of L.C.?”

  “Hell yeah,” Leonard said. “Country blues guitar. I got some of his stuff. One of those boxed set things. One of the greats. East Texas legend of the late twenties, early thirties. Kind of like Robert Johnson. Had the same story about him. That he sold his soul to the devil to play way he did. Some kind of deal where he took a piss in a fruit jar and took it to the crossroads and the devil came and drank it, then the devil peed in a jar, and L.C. drank it, then L.C. had the devil in him and the devil had his soul. After that, L.C. could play that old standard guitar like a sonofabitch. Used a pocketknife or a bottle neck for a slide.”

  “I can’t think of nothing I’d want so bad I’d drink wee-wee out of a fruit jar,” Charlie said.

  “L.C. only made a few records,” Leonard said, “but he was a big influence on East Texas blues men. The records are rare. I think he made some recordings on 78s, whatever the method was then, and they were never released, or lost. I don’t remember the details. It’s just the general stuff I know about, and I got that out of the booklet in the collection box.”

  “All I know,” Hanson said, “is a fella from up North read an article in some music magazine about this Bobby Joe Soothe who was tryin’ to build a name on his grandfather’s name, and Bobby Joe said he had in his possession this recorded, but unreleased record L.C. had made. Said too he was singing some songs L.C. had left written down, but never recorded. This Bobby Joe had a bit of reputation for good blues himself, see. So this Northern fella made contact with him, made some promises of money for the record, came down here to check it out, and supposedly, Bobby Joe cut that white boy’s throat, took his money, then got hauled into jail where he decided he couldn’t go on and hung himself with his shoe strings.”

  “I thought they didn’t let prisoners keep stuff like shoe strings and belts,” I said.

  “Not supposed to,” Hanson said. “Interesting thing is, there’s been more hangings and accidents and suicides of this kind in that jail in the past forty-five years than there’s been accidental prisoner deaths in all the state of Texas since nineteen sixty-five. And that includes goddamn Huntsville Prison. Guess I ought to give the cracker runs the place now some credit, though. Only one hanging, the Soothe hanging, has happened in the twelve years he’s been Chief in Grovetown.”

  “What happened to the recordings?” Leonard asked.

  “No one knows,” Hanson said.

  “How does Florida come into this?” I asked.

  “I’m gettin’ to that,” Hanson said. “Florida, as you know, is an ambitious gal. She decided lawyering wasn’t enough. She wanted to go out and do some investigative work. Go to Grovetown, ask some questions, use her law credentials, maybe get some kind of article out of this, move herself into investigative journalism. I think she wants to be on television. She’s got the looks, the voice, the brains, and the personality, so it’s not a far-fetched kind of idea. She’s been sort of looking around for something to tie her to a bigger gig. A journalism career. Thought if she cow-girl’d this one, she could write her own ticket.”

  “In other words,” I said. “Florida was looking for a rat to ride, and smelled one in Grovetown?”

  “Yep,” Hanson said. “She went down there couple weeks ago. I told her not to, that it was dangerous. She didn’t listen, and that didn’t surprise me. We hadn’t been doing that good anyway. We were supposed to get married, but didn’t.”

  “Kind of thought the date for that had come and passed,” I said.

  “Figured you were marking your calendar,” Hanson said. “Thing is though, me and her had a fight. She thought I was being a male chauvinist jerk. If being worried about someone you care about, being realistic about what can happen to them is being a jerk, then I’m a jerk. Grovetown is a scary place for black folk to go hang around and try to pry into stuff, but she went anyway.”

  “Florida doesn’t strike me as that brave,” I said. “Least not in that way. Considering my own experiences with her, I’d say she’s been cautious in the past.”

  “She’s cautious till she wants something,” Hanson said.

  “True,” I said. “Selfishness is one of her major traits.”

  “She got to Grovetown,” Hanson said, “cooled some, called to say she was okay, and that things between me and her had reached a wall. She called again a few days later to say she was okay, and things were going good, but she didn’t give details, and she said she’d have someone come for her stuff when she gets back.”

  “So you’re split up?” Leonard said. “Like me and Raul. It’s like a disease going around.”

  “Guess that means you don’t get to keep the aerobic book and the one on making love to a man,” I said.

  “Looks that way,” Hanson said. “I gotta tell you. I like that gal. Really. But I gotta tell you too, and this will sound like some horseshit since I’ve been fuckin’ her, but it was getting so our relationship was more like father and daughter, her being so much younger. Thinking so different and all.”

  “I don’t think I like the sound of that father and daughter stuff,” Charlie said. “Not with you throwing the pork to her.”

  “You know what I mean,” Hanson said. “I think I was gonna cut it off between us. I didn’t feel right. Maybe it’s not just because she’s so young, but because I still love my ex-wife, goddammit. You know, like that’s gonna go somewhere.”

  This was a new wrinkle. I said, “So if you were developing a more father-daughter relationship than a romantic one, and she cut the romance off, why are you so moony? And why does your kitchen look like a tornado blew through it?”

  “She spent the night with me morning before she left,” Hanson said. “We had an argument. It got out of hand. I grabbed her. I’m ashamed of that, but I did. But she got right up in my face, see, and it was just reflex. I grabbed her and hurt her arm a little. It wasn’t on purpose, guys, really. I’m no woman beater.”

  “We’re all human,” I said. “Everybody fucks up now and then.”

  “Really, I never hit a woman in my life, and I didn’t hit her, but I grabbed her. She could be so infuriating. She was standing in there with the refrigerator open, looking for something for breakfast, and that’s when the argument started and the door got left open. She pulled some celery out of there, hit me with it, and I grabbed her. When I realized what I’d done and let her go, she snatched up the frying pan and hit me on the shoulder with it and burned me, dropped it on the floor. I still got the egg on my pajamas. She left five minutes later and I haven’t changed a thing in there since.”

  “Kind of a shrine, huh?” Leonard said.

  “I keep telling him she’ll get over it,” Charlie said. “Hell, she called from Grovetown, didn’t she? She knows Marve just lost his cool, and she had something to do with it. They’re both to blame. A lesson was learned.”

  “It’s not the getting back together that’s bothering me,” Hanson said. “I mean, not that way, you know. I’m just worried about her down there, and if I go check on her, that’s just more male chauvinist stuff, and there’s no reason she should report to me
, and theoretically, she’s out of my life, but …”

  “Why don’t you go there anyway?” Leonard said. “You could see she’s all right, and if you’re telling it straight, it’s not like the relationship is coming back together anyway. Or that you want it to. So what’s it matter she gets mad at this point?”

  “I’d like to end this on a note of respect,” Hanson said. “Not like I’m spying on her.”

  “And you think these two dimwits showing up down there ain’t gonna make her suspicious?” Charlie said. “Hell, she knows them. She knows Hap biblically.”

  “Thanks, Charlie,” I said, “you certainly know how to defuse a tense or worrisome moment.”

  “It’s different,” Hanson said. “She sees you two, you could say Charlie told you about her, and you thought you might go down and check on her. Old times’ sake.”

  “Oh, now I told them about her,” Charlie said.

  “Maybe you could act like you’d like to take her on a date, Hap. Something like that.”

  “That sounds convincing,” Charlie said. “I can see why you been so tired all week. All the heavy thinking it took to come up with that, I’d be strained too.”

  “Yeah, you’re right, Charlie,” Hanson said. “It won’t work. It was a major stupid idea. It’s like I been having a sack of shit for a head lately. Idea like that sucks big time.”

  “I can feel a draft from it over here,” Charlie said.

  “Yeah,” Hanson said. “Let’s have some eggnog, then, Hap, Leonard, we’ll take y’all back to the hoosegow.”

  “Grovetown,” I said, “it’s a place I been wanting to visit. I’d just like to go by the house, get a change of clothes, maybe a paperback to go.”

  “Unless, of course,” Leonard said, “you’d prefer we leave tonight. Right now.”

  4

  It was after midnight, Christmas Day, when I took the wheel of Charlie’s car and drove him over to Leonard’s. Idea was, Leonard was going to get his car and follow me to Charlie’s place. I’d drop Charlie and his car off, then we’d leave in Leonard’s heap. Charlie was just too drunk to drive.

  It had grown quite cold and it was a clear night. Kind of night I relished when I was a kid. My dad, who worked as a mechanic, or at the foundry from time to time, would go out in the yard with me and we’d throw a blanket over our shoulders and sit on the porch stoop and look at the stars. We were well out in the country then, and there were no streetlights, and with the house lights off the stars glowed in the black satin heavens like white dots of neon.

  Dad was a heavy man and very tired and we didn’t play ball together or do any of the classic stuff fathers and sons are supposed to do. He put in twelve-hour days and did hard manual labor, so he wasn’t up for much ball chasing when he came home. But he did his best. He taught me about the woods when he had time, went to my school plays, made sure I had money for comic books, and found the time, now and then, when he should have been sleeping, to sit on the porch and point out the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, and he had names for some of the other stars I’ve forgotten, but they weren’t the names you normally hear. They were names given the constellations by his father or grandfather, and they had known the stars as well as a seasoned truck driver knows a road map.

  Dad told me stories while we looked at the stars. He had known Bonnie and Clyde. He had driven around Gladewater, Texas, with them one Fourth of July and tossed firecrackers out the windows of their automobile. At the time, he didn’t know they were being pursued by every law enforcement agency in Texas.

  Late one night during the depths of the Great Depression, down by the railroad track where he was hoboing, he and his friends had met Pretty Boy Floyd. He had fought bareknuckle and wrestled at county fairs for money. He knew handed-down stories of Billy the Kid, Belle Starr, Sam Bass, and Jessie James, and when he was a child, he’d seen Frank James giving a talk in a Sears store on the ills of crime. He may have yarned a little, but I liked it all anyway.

  Now, the stories I heard were off the late-night news. Rapes and serial murders and child molestations. Children with guns and no imagination and less ambition. It wasn’t a world my father would have understood. Last time I had seen him was a Christmas many years ago. He looked as if he’d just viewed the new world he was living in for the very first time and didn’t like it and didn’t want to stay. He was dead in two weeks. A heart attack and he was out of there.

  When we got to Leonard’s, I knew he was hoping Raul hadn’t left, but Raul’s Ford station wagon was gone. There were a couple of cops there, watching the place. Leonard thanked them, shooed them off, and Charlie let him.

  Leonard went inside while we sat in Charlie’s car with the engine running and the heater turned high. It was quite cozy. Charlie was pretty drunk, but when he spoke his words were clear, so I figured he still had a few brain cells left.

  “Here’s y’all’s Christmas present,” Charlie said. “Some advice. Don’t do this thing for Hanson.”

  “It beats jail,” I said.

  “You ain’t goin’ to jail. You know that. Hanson ain’t gonna do shit. He’ll get Leonard out of this. He knows the Chief knows he knows about the crack house. Chief knows Hanson is gonna nail him one day, somehow, if he don’t get rid of him first. They’re just playing some kind of cat-and-mouse shit. Chief fires him, Hanson can make a big enough stink all the fumigators in LaBorde couldn’t get rid of it. Chief knows he’s got to get rid of Hanson, but he hasn’t figured how. Gives him every shit job there is, hoping he’ll get killed. But Hanson, he takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’. So, what I’m saying is, Hanson decides to get Leonard off, he’ll get him off. He knows enough about where the bodies are buried to handle that.”

  Charlie turned to look at what was left of the house next door. A charred frame, a pile of gray ash, and a few wisps of smoke. “You know,” Charlie said, “that is Leonard’s best job yet.”

  “He likes his work. And Charlie, thanks for the advice, but odd as this sounds, Hanson’s kind of a friend. Considering Florida and I once had this thing going, I think he’s pretty much in need or he wouldn’t ask me to get involved.”

  “All right,” Charlie said, cracking the passenger window and getting out a cigarette. “I give you that.” He pushed in the car lighter. “But this is his problem. Not yours. He feels there’s something really wrong, he ought to take care of it himself. He ought not send citizens down there to do his dirty work.”

  “I think he’s just a little concerned is all and doesn’t feel it’s a legal matter.”

  “Grovetown is a shithole, Hap. You ought not go down there with Leonard. They don’t like black folks unless they’re swabbing out a toilet or sweeping a floor. That’s the main reason Hanson didn’t want Florida going down there. He thought it was dumb some little black gal like her going down to Honky-land. He told her so. She thought it was some kind of male chauvinist bullshit. He was just talking good sense. There’s people down there don’t believe civil rights is a real law. They still think everyone ought to own ’em a nigger. Let me tell you something. I spent a week in that armpit on account of my sister’s husband, Arnold—may he grow like an onion with his head in the ground. He left her. He was working the lumber mill there, had this thing going with a secretary, decided one day this chippie’s pussy was all he wanted to smell, so he and her got out of Grovetown and left Sis sittin’ on her ass with two kids, both of ’em in diapers. I had to go over there and get her. There were arrangements to be made. Old bills. Some things to sell. Usual shit. I sent her home and stayed to do the stuff she wasn’t emotionally fit to do. I went into that town three, four times a week, and I tell you, man, it’s like a time warp. Hardly any blacks come into town if they haven’t got some kind of business—like buying groceries. Getting gas. Necessary stuff. And they see a white man coming they step off the sidewalk and assume a Rastus position. All teeth and bent heads. It’s what’s expected of them. It’s what they know. They don’t do that, Klan over there—
or rather some offshoot of it, calls itself the Supreme Knights of the Caucasian Order, or some ridiculous handle like that—decides some black is uppity, they’ll come down on ’em. Blacks in Grovetown are outflanked. Whites have all the power there. All the power.”

  “Lot of blacks would argue it’s that way everywhere.”

  “And they’d be wrong. Everywhere ain’t like Grovetown. They go to Grovetown, they’re gonna find out things are a lot better elsewhere than they think. They’re gonna find what it’s like to be back in the sixties, before that Civil Rights Act. They’re gonna realize things aren’t near as bad as they’ve been. Except in Grovetown. Late as four, five years ago, a black woman was tarred and feathered by some of those Klan ass wipes. She was raped too, ten, fifteen times. Guys did that are the kind of creeps would stand up and tell you how whites and blacks ought not to be together, and whites and blacks shouldn’t date, but they don’t mind stealing some black pussy from some poor woman, tarring and feathering her. Hot tar, Hap. That shit is intense. That’s not something anyone wants on them. She damn near died ’cause most of her pores were closed up. And then there was one other little touch. They sewed up her snatch. Sewed it up with a leather-craft needle and baling wire.”

  “Good God. What the hell did she do to get them down on her?”

  “You’ll like this. They didn’t like the way she dressed. She was some young gal, nineteen, twenty at the oldest. Grew up in Grovetown, went off to the university here, went back to Grovetown for spring break, forgot how to play the game. Maybe thought times had changed. Year or two to someone that young is an eternity. Maybe she took an Afro-American course and bought a dashiki. Thought ’cause of that the whole world changed. She developed some pride, like anyone ought to. But then she went home and got that knocked out of her. Word was—and this was based on a couple of unsigned, unaddressed letters the editors of the university paper got from Grovetown—this all happened because this Klan offshoot thought she wore, as they put it, provocative clothing of an indecent nature,’ and that the university wasn’t for ‘colored,’ and such things as education were wasted on them. It was signed the Grand Exalted Cyclops of the Supreme Knights of the Caucasian Assholes, or whatever the fuck they are.”