The Two-Bear Mambo

by Joe R. Lansdale

  The Chief, a fat man wearing a straw hat and boots with a khaki pants leg inside one and outside the other, watched the house burn, his hands behind his back. The rain hadn’t slowed this baby down a bit. The firemen were all volunteers in regular clothing with a couple of fire hats and one Scott Pack between them—not that they needed it. They were on or around the truck and had a weak spew of water sputtering from a thick white hose. One of them got a brainstorm, got off the truck, turned on a leaky garden hose and started spewing that through a window that had been blown out by the hot pressure of the fire. He might as well have been pissing on an oil well blaze. Two other guys were eating Hostess Twinkies, one of them managing to chew with a cigarette in one corner of his mouth.

  “We seem to have this thing about fire and the law lately,” I said.

  “That’s the truth,” Leonard said.

  The house, which from the looks of things had never been any great shakes, was a lost cause. I’d had enough experience from Leonard’s fires to know when a house was a goner, and this sonofabitch was a goner.

  We got out of the car and walked over to the Chief. He noticed us out of the corner of his left eye. Rain was dripping off the brim of his hat. He had little pop eyes, like a Boston terrier, and his chin went back and low and reminded me of an iguana. He lifted his head slightly as if he was sighting us from a rock. As he did, rain splashed into his left eye and he blinked it out. Black goo, the source being the Red Man package poking out of his shirt pocket, oozed out of the corners of his mouth and slid into wrinkles that served as culverts on either side of his chin. His belly moved when he moved, and sometimes when he didn’t. Like it had a mind of its own and places it wanted to go. Worse though, even if you didn’t want to look, you couldn’t help but notice the bulge in his pants. He’d obviously been ruptured and was in need of a truss. His right leg looked to be sprouting a grapefruit.

  Near the grapefruit, riding in a long black holster, was a .44 Western-style revolver. Chief Cantuck appeared to be in his fifties. Maybe older. A face like that, a belly like that, it was hard to tell.

  “Who are you?” he said, turning to give us a full view.

  “Hap Collins,” I said, and we shook hands.

  Leonard stuck out his hand and the Chief hesitated, then took it the way you might take hold of something dead. Leonard grabbed Chief Cantuck’s hand hard and shook briskly. “Leonard Pine, Smartest Nigger in the World.”

  “What?” said the Chief.

  “It’s just a little joke of his,” I said.

  “Well, all right. Look here, what do y’all want? This is law and fire department business. You ain’t supposed to be hanging around here.”

  I said, “Lady at your office, with a hair cone on her head, said we’d find you here.”

  “Yeah, well, say what you want and get it over with,” Chief Cantuck said. “And I don’t know about you, but I think that cone of hair looks pretty good.”

  “Appears you’ve lost this one,” Leonard said, nodding at the house.

  “Yeah, guess it does,” said Cantuck. “No big loss. White trash rental. Bill Spray owns it, rents it to anyone with thirty-five dollars a month or any gal wants to grease his rope. One or both of them things, and the place is yours on a monthly basis, long as he don’t have to fix nothing.”

  “Guess it wasn’t the sort of joint attracted the Rockefellers,” I said.

  “No, it wasn’t. But a couple hundred dollars’ worth of plywood, a few two-by-fours and some tin and cardboard, Bill can throw this buddy up again and start rentin’. Too bad the renters weren’t inside. I’d have liked it all right had they gotten cooked with it. I been called out here half a dozen times by the neighbors. Always fightin’. Big ole fat gal and a couple of men lived here. Those two men fight over that sow like she was goddamn Marilyn Monroe.

  “Last time I was in here they had all kinds of pornography strewn about. Them magazines with women with their hands up their holes, or their asses in the air with a carrot jammed in it. Stuff like that. And it wasn’t just pussy magazines. They had’m some sex toys. Them little vibrating plastic dicks with knobs on ’em, like old cucumbers. Look here.”

  He pointed to something in the ashes: two large batteries lying in a flesh-colored puddle the shape of a large banana.

  “That’s one of them plastic dicks. Just me thinking about that thing being shoved up that old whore’s hole makes me kinda woozy. There’s some Elvis cards, though. I kicked them aside to let them smoke out.”

  “Beg pardon?” I said.

  “Elvis cards.” He walked over a ways and kicked at something. It was a charred deck of playing cards with Elvis’s picture on the back.

  “The heat gets off of ’em, I’ll probably keep those.”

  “Why?” Leonard asked.

  “Elvis is on them.”

  “Ah,” Leonard said.

  “It ain’t the kind of music you people listen to,” Cantuck told him. “My wife, she thinks Elvis is God. She’ll like them cards, burned or not. Now what the fuck you want?”

  “We’re looking for a friend of ours,” I said, “and we thought you might know something about her. Her name is Florida Grange.”

  “Colored gal?” Cantuck said.

  “Could be her,” Leonard said. “Depends on what color she was.”

  “You tryin’ to be funny?” Cantuck said.

  “I didn’t say I was the Funniest Nigger in the World, I said I was the Smartest Nigger in the World.”

  “You’re about to be the Most Ass-Whupped Nigger in the World.”

  Leonard got that look in his eye. The one he gets when he’s burning the house next door or administering a serious head beating to some fool who has pushed too far.

  “Come on, Leonard,” I said. “Shut up, would you?”

  Leonard studied Cantuck for a moment, turned and walked back to his car and got inside.

  “He’s just worried,” I said. “You see, she’s his sister.”

  “Yeah?” Cantuck said. “Well, I’ll tell you something. I don’t give a flying shit if she’s his fucking Siamese twin and she left town with his left nut in her pocket. Ain’t no nigger gonna be funny on me. And what the fuck you doin’ hangin’ around with a coon like that? We don’t cotton to that shit here. I got nigger friends, but I don’t associate with ’em.”

  “You certainly sound close, you and your nigger friends. Chief, anyone ever tell you guys you might be a little out of step? Behind the times?”

  “Yeah, and we don’t give a flying shit.”

  “You’ve heard of civil rights, of course?”

  “Yeah, and I uphold them, they got to be upheld. That’s what that gal was here about, some nigger’s civil rights. Ain’t my fault the stupid fuck hung himself.”

  “I don’t care about any of that. I just want to know about Florida.”

  Cantuck paused, gave me a look I couldn’t quite decipher. He said, “Comely nigger. I’ve always said I’d fuck a nigger, but wouldn’t tell anybody, but that one I’d fuck and maybe brag on it a time or two. She had an ass on her.”

  Deep breath, Hap. He’s just a stereotypical ignorant redneck. You’ve known them before. Nothing you say will alter their thinking. Nothing short of death will change them.

  “You see,” I said, “they work for me. Leonard and Florida. They’re good workers, and now and then, well, me and her. Shit, Chief, after what you just said, you know what I mean.”

  I grinned in what I hoped was a lecherous manner.

  Cantuck smiled. “My daddy used to tell me a nigger gal wasn’t good for but one thing, and they were damn good at that. He was Chief here way back, and he dealt with a lot of niggers. Nigger gals paid him a lot of fines in a special manner. If you know what I mean. I take after my old man in that department. I’ll fuck anything that ain’t nailed down and has a hole. In fact, when I was a boy, I tore the ass out of a few chickens putting the dick to ’em. Got so every time my mama found a dead chicken she’d take the belt to
me, whether I did it or not. Pigs squealed at night, Mom came in my room and beat me.”

  “No wonder you got a strained nut.”

  “Yeah. Well, maybe that’s what happened. I do dearly love to fuck … My nut really look bad?”

  “Well, I was you, I’d get a truss or something. Shit, man, don’t that hurt?”

  “Not if I turn kinda casual like.”

  “Not to dismiss a man’s nuts too lightly, Chief, but where is Florida?”

  “Hell, boy, it’s gettin’ cold out here. Let’s you and me go sit in the car and talk.”

  I got in on the passenger side. There was a shotgun on a rack between myself and Cantuck. He cranked the car and turned on the heater. On the dash, and stuck all about the car, there was every kind of charity sticker you could imagine. Muscular dystrophy. Diabetes. Cancer.

  “You give to all those charities?” I asked. “Or do you just collect stickers?”

  “I give,” he said. “A dollar or two here and there. It ain’t like I’m raking in the big bucks here, so I don’t give much, but I give. I think it’s something you ought to do. Christian charity. I had a son had MD. He died of it just last year. Since then, and even before, I can’t stand to see nobody crippled, not even a nigger.”

  He sat quietly for a moment, staring at the MD sticker. “That boy of mine,” he said. “Jimmy. He got so bad, only way he could get around was me totin’ him. He was eleven. My youngest. Damn good age for a boy, but for him it was hell. Spittin’ image of me. Good boy. Never did nothing but try and be good. Made good grades until he got so bad he just couldn’t study. His body turned to jelly. Just goddamn jelly.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “He was a good boy. He was a good boy right to the end, trying to cheer me up. Trying to smile. He died with me holding his hand. It was so little, I closed mine, you couldn’t even see his. He hadn’t had that shit, hell, he’d gone to college and made something of himself. God bless him.”

  “I truly am sorry, Chief.”

  “Well, don’t whine about it. You didn’t know him. Wasn’t nothing to you. I shouldn’t even have said anything to you about it … now, this nigger gal.”

  “Florida.”

  “Yeah, Florida. She came to the jail, asked a few questions, left, and I didn’t see her again, ’cept around town. Over at the filling station getting some gas in that little car of hers.”

  “A gray Toyota.”

  “That’s the one. Real sporty.”

  “That’s all you know about her?”

  “That’s it. I heard a few of the boys mention they’d seen her and that she dressed a little too rich, if you know what I mean, but had she been a couple shades paler, they might have taken her to church, and to a little social after.”

  I thought of Florida and her dresses. Mostly short. Mostly tight. I thought of the story Charlie told me. I had a sudden red-hot and angry vision of the Chief with an upholstery needle threaded with wire.

  “Let me ask a couple of questions that don’t have to do with Florida,” I said. “This guy that hung himself in jail. Why?”

  “Who’s to know a nigger’s mind? I wasn’t even around. I was out of town.”

  “Lot of hangings in your little jail?”

  Chief Cantuck studied me a moment. “You a reporter? The colored gal said she was doing some kind of article. Said she was a lawyer too, though I ain’t sure about that.”

  “She was.”

  “If she was, then you just shit on yourself, pilgrim. She was a lawyer, then she didn’t work for you, did she?”

  “Well, she did law work.”

  “I think you’re full of it, buddy.”

  I had been feeling superior and condescending to the old man, and he’d been baiting me all along. Dropping sugar in front of me until he got me close enough to whack with the swatter. His tone was different now. A lot less cracker. “You think you’re so smart,” he said. “Well, I got to tell you, you ain’t that smart.”

  “I see that,” I said.

  He casually slipped the leather trigger guard off his revolver and shifted toward me in the seat, his hand resting on the butt of his pistol. A bead of sweat formed immediately on my upper lip and ran into my mouth.

  “Listen here. I knew you and that smartass nigger were full of shit soon as I saw you. Ain’t a word come out of your mouth that’s even kin to the truth. There’s nothing about you boys that fits, so I figure you’re trouble. More do-gooders trying to come down here and check on our nigger trouble and make it into something it isn’t. I haven’t heard one do-gooder ask about the people this nigger killed. The white man this guitar plunker cut up for a few dollars.”

  “I didn’t say anything about his guilt or innocence. I’m just asking about Florida.”

  “Don’t take me for a fool ’cause I got swollen nuts and bad teeth and I eat too much. I’m on the dime much as you are, College Boy.”

  “Actually, I dropped out. And I’m way past being a boy.”

  “Well, you should have finished college, boy. Might have learned something. Let me tell you this, Swiftie. That little nigger came snooping around asking questions. She wanted to see if that boy was murdered. She figured the Caucasian Knights was in on it. Let me tell you something. The Knights are ripe in this town, and they’re mostly nothing but a bunch of mean bastards, just like the Klan, which is really all they are, but now and then they do a good thing or two. There’s folks need killin’.”

  “Then you’re saying the Klan, or these Knights, killed the prisoner?”

  “’Course I ain’t. But I’m tellin’ you this. The Knights take note of meddlers, and they don’t worry much about a dead nigger, but they worry about the ones worry about a dead nigger. Understand me?”

  “I believe I do. Your hand on that gun, is that some kind of threat?”

  “Yeah,” he said, taking the gun out of its holster and laying it on his knee. “It could be. And you see, sometimes, you wave one around like this …” He waved the revolver in my direction and placed it back on his knee, “and you got your mind on something else, a gun can go off, even if you was just showin’ it to a fella wanted to see it.”

  “That would be murder, Chief. My friend in the car wouldn’t like that.”

  “And I wouldn’t care. He might have an accident too. You and him both might end up in the ashes of that fire there, and them firemen might be settin’ you on fire instead of puttin’ you out. I’m not saying they would, but it could happen. I mean, shit, boy, you two look to me to be the type would like them plastic dicks and stuff. You might even have been with the white trash lives here, and say the white trash went out for some beer and left you two in the house, and you were fucking around with some kind of electric dick or something. Started a fire. I even like the idea of us finding them rubber dicks up your butts, you know, just for looks … But however it’s played, we come up with a cooked nigger in a house where white trash lives, we could pin damn near anything on the trash lives there.

  “As it is, they’re gonna be leaving town, just because I’m fed up with them. They don’t know it yet, but when I find them, they’re gonna be leaving. And right away. It ain’t like they’re gonna need to pack. And if they don’t want to leave, I’m gonna persuade them. I’m hoping I won’t have to persuade you and maybe take them down with you to make things look nice and pretty.”

  “Me either,” I said, and looked carefully at the gun on his knee. His fingers flexed against it, making me as nervous as a goat at a barbecue.

  “Listen here, Swiftie. There’s been folks worried about dead niggers before, and some of them ain’t so worried now. About nothing. Get me?”

  “You’re coming across.”

  “Let me add something to that. Ain’t a Klan member in this town or around it ever been convicted of shit. That sort of line your ducks up, Swiftie?”

  “I believe it does.”

  It had started to rain again. The water ran in such thick rivulets on the windshield I co
uldn’t see out. The car heater was too warm.

  “One last thing,” Cantuck said. “For the record. That gal. I didn’t do a thing to her and have no reason to suspicion anyone I know did. Clear? But I wouldn’t put anything past the Knights, and contrary to what you probably think, I found out they did something to someone didn’t need it done, I’d come down on them.”

  “Sure.”

  “Now, you get in the car with your pet nigger, and you two go back to wherever you come from, where you and him can eat and sleep together, or whatever it is you want to do with niggers. But, fella, don’t get in my way again, and don’t ever let me hear you mention my balls again. It ain’t polite. And lastly, I ain’t never fucked a chicken in my life, but I thought it was the sort of thing you’d expect. You fuck with me, Swiftie, you better be thinking two and three moves ahead.”

  “What about the pigs? Did you fuck them?”

  “Get out of the car, Swiftie.”

  When I closed Leonard’s car door, Leonard said, “Learn anything?”

  “Yeah, you wouldn’t believe the stuff the Chief knows about the political situation in Albania.”

  “Yeah, but I bet that fucker don’t know their major imports and exports.”

  “That cracker isn’t as stupid as we thought, Leonard. Mean. Dangerous. Ignorant. But stupid he isn’t. And subtle he isn’t. In fact, his very nonsubtle statements about our temporary position in his community were so clearly stated, I’d like you to crank the car right now, and leave.”

  Leonard looked where I was looking. The firefighters were no longer fighting the fire. They were all turned in our direction, glaring. One of them was chewing a fresh Twinkie and the sticky white innards were covering his mouth like mad dog foam.

  “I think maybe they ain’t never seen anyone cute as us,” Leonard said.

  Chief Cantuck got out of his car and walked in our direction, stopped and waited. He had his gun in his hand, held by his side.

  “He thinks we’re cute too,” Leonard said.