Rumble Tumble

by Joe R. Lansdale

  I had purchased the rolling calamity for three hundred dollars after my truck got destroyed during the tornado, and the way I saw it now, I’d paid about two hundred and ninety-nine dollars too much, even if it had come with a pack of rubbers in the glove box, half a cigar in the ashtray, and air in three tires.

  I had put air in the fourth tire, and one of these days I was going to toss out that cigar and the rubbers. There was also a row of hardened gum that had been mashed underneath the dash, and I had plans to remove that as well. So far the urge hadn’t hit me. The most I had done to redecorate the Nova was put my .38 Smith & Wesson in the glove box on top of the pack of rubbers.

  As I drove over to Brett’s, I tried to decide what to say. What to do. Everything I thought of struck me wrong. Maybe we could just keep things like they were? Then again, I did that, eventually I’d lose her. I had to make up my mind one way or another, and suddenly I knew what the problem was.

  I didn’t feel worthy.

  I worked a night job at a club, beating people up who misbehaved. What kind of job is that for a grown man? What did that offer a woman like Brett? I didn’t even have a home, a decent car, or, for that matter, any decent clothes. I was just a goddamn vagabond living day to day on the grace and goodwill of friends like Leonard and Brett.

  I had been raised by solid blue-collar folk, and they had reared me to respect and like myself, to have confidence, and for years I had plenty. But these past few years, it had begun to erode. I was a middle-aged man who still didn’t have a career, and it looked less and less like I would ever have one.

  What could I do? I was smart enough, but what were my credentials? Lifting big rocks? Eating dust in the rose fields? Slapping drunks upside the head, twisting their wrists, and throwing them into a parking lot? It wasn’t much of a résumé.

  And my looks weren’t going to carry me through either. I was graying at the temples, balding at the crown, growing thick, and my face had a look of hound dog sadness about it, as if I had second sight and knew bad things were coming.

  When I got over to Brett’s she was sitting in an aluminum chair on the front lawn fighting lovebugs and mosquitoes. I could see her from the curb where I’d parked. I got out and went over there, smiling. Brett wasn’t smiling, however, and I got a nasty feeling in my gut, like maybe I’d waited too long to make up my mind one way or another.

  “You like bugs?” I asked.

  “Not really,” she said, and this time she smiled. It was a little strained, but it was a smile.

  “You look like maybe you’re smiling around something sour.”

  “I’m glad to see you,” she said. “Especially now.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “Yeah. Let’s go inside.”

  Inside, we picked lovebugs out of each other’s hair and opened the screen and threw them out. There was a pot of coffee on, and Brett poured us cups. We sat at the table, then she looked at me and tears began to squeeze out of her eyes and run down her cheeks.

  “Brett, what’s wrong, honey?”

  “It’s Tillie, Hap.”

  Tillie was Brett’s wayward daughter. A young woman who had gotten mixed up in drugs and prostitution and whose last letter home was hopeful because her pimp had stopped beating her as much and her limp was better. Brett had tried to talk her out of the life, had offered to have us come get her, but she didn’t want out, or didn’t know how to get out, or it was some kind of stubborn pride thing. It was hard to say. Frankly, I tried not to involve myself unless Brett involved me.

  “What’s the score?” I asked.

  “There’s a man in a motel wants to talk to me about her. He called this morning. Says she’s in trouble and I should talk to him.”

  “He didn’t tell you what about over the phone?”

  Brett shook her head. “He wants money.”

  “To tell you what kind of trouble she’s in?”

  “I’m supposed to go over there around one o’clock and bring five hundred dollars. I told him I had to have someone drive me. I didn’t want to go there by myself.”

  “That’s a smart idea.”

  “He said that was okay.”

  “I don’t like the sound of it,” I said.

  “Neither do I, but he said Tillie was in deep shit and I ought to know about it. He said Tillie paid him some to tell me she was and that I’m supposed to pay him some before he tells me what the problem is, and he said if cops come he won’t tell me anything and everything is off. But I come with one person and five hundred dollars, he’ll tell me what I need to know.”

  “A real Good Samaritan.”

  “I got a gun,” Brett said. “I can use it, and it’s legal. But I still don’t like going over there by myself, gun or not. Me with all that money. I don’t know he’s got someone with him or not. But him talking about Tillie like he knows her, I got to go see.”

  “No problem. We’ll both go.”

  3

  My wreck was iffy just driving into town, so we went in Brett’s blue Plymouth Fury. Like me, she had recently traded cars, and though this one was many years old and not exactly a road racer, it had been regularly serviced, and could get up to seventy miles an hour without the assistance of a tow truck. It’s also nice to be driven around town by a good-looking redhead, even if you’re on a bicycle built for two.

  On the way over to the motel the lovebugs pelleted the windshield and collected beneath the motionless wipers like dead soldiers in trenches, left greasy yellow and green spots all over the glass.

  We got to the LaBorde Motor Inn about ten minutes before one and parked in front of a row of doors. I had brought the pistol from my glove box, and I stuck it under my shirt against my spine.

  Brett has a thigh holster, and she wore a skirt so she could wear the holster and the snub-nose .38 she owns. It’s not that she goes around wearing a thigh holster and a .38, but recent events had led to this, and she has a license. In Texas, with the right training and certification you’re allowed to carry a concealed handgun. It’s a law Leonard loves and I hate, but I’m a hypocrite, because I keep a revolver in my glove box, and from time to time on my person. I’m even more of a hypocrite because, unlike Brett, I never bothered to get a license.

  We walked to the metal stairs, went up and found the number the caller had given Brett, and knocked. Thirty seconds didn’t pass before the door opened and a face showed over the chain inside the door, and it was some face. It looked like first base after a hot season in the Astrodome: pocked and beaten and not too clean. He stuck the face out enough so I could see his nose had been broken and some teeth with it, and recently. Behind the face I could see a body that looked as if it ought to be used to hold up something heavy. He took the chain off for a better look at us, and we got a better look at him. He wore a dirty white dress shirt and black pants with gray pinstripes and shiny black dress shoes, except for the toe tips, which looked to have been dipped in shit.

  “You Brett?” he said.

  Brett nodded.

  “We told you not to bring nobody,” he said.

  “You, or whoever I spoke to, said I could have someone drive me,” Brett said.

  “We thought you meant some other woman,” the face said.

  “I didn’t say that,” Brett said. “What’s it matter?”

  “I don’t know it matters,” said the man, “but we didn’t think you’d bring no man.”

  “Well,” Brett said. “I don’t know why you shouldn’t have thought it.”

  “Hey,” I said, “do I look dangerous to you?”

  “Naw, you don’t look dangerous,” he said, and he walked away from the door and we followed inside.

  The first thing I noticed was a midget sitting on the bed. I think that’s normal, noticing a midget first. He had on a tailored blue Western suit and shiny blue cowboy boots and a gold cowboy shirt with silver snaps and a string tie with a silver cow head clasp holding it together. The suit looked as if it had once been expensive and nic
e, but now it was covered in filth and so was the shirt. The steer horns leaned a little too far left and somehow gave the midget an unbalanced look, as if he had been laid out without the use of a plumb line. I figured originally a hat had gone with the outfit, but now his blazing red hair was scattered over his head in such a way if you took a photo of it, it might look like a man with his head on fire, à la Brett’s ex-husband. He had a big thick cigar in his mouth, but it wasn’t lit, and his feet dangled off the side of the bed almost two feet from the ground. He had a face I couldn’t judge for age. He might have been thirty or forty or fifty. For all I knew, he was twenty-one and constipated or had just previously passed a kidney stone.

  Second thing I noticed was the big guy had drawn a little silver automatic out from behind his back. The rest of the room sort of lost interest for me after that.

  The big guy sat down in a chair with his automatic and held it against his thigh. Next to his chair was a table lamp, and on the table was a glass containing a clear liquid that I guessed from the smell in the room wasn’t water. And considering how rank our hosts smelled, this meant some goddamn serious drinking had been going on.

  “What’s the gun for?” I asked.

  “He’s the nervous type,” said the midget.

  “What about you?” I said. “You nervous?”

  “No, I’m not nervous,” said the midget. “Not as long as he’s got the gun. Y’all sit somewhere.”

  Brett took a chair and I sat on the edge of the bed so I could see both guys. I said to the big guy, “You shoot that off, you got the noise to worry about.”

  “I’m not that worried,” said the big guy.

  “Drink?” said the midget.

  Brett and I declined. Brett said, “One of you called me about my daughter.”

  “That was me,” said the midget.

  “Told me you had information and to bring money for it, and I have. Five hundred dollars.”

  “We should have said a thousand,” said the midget.

  “But you didn’t,” I said. “You said five hundred and here we are with it.”

  “It’s all I got,” Brett said.

  “And we don’t know what you got is worth five hundred dollars,” I said.

  The big guy said, “It might not be worth five cents, but we can take the five hundred dollars anyway.”

  I reached quickly behind my back, under my shirt, and pointed my gun at the big man. I said, “You might not.”

  The midget laughed. “You know, you could be right.”

  The big man wiggled the gun against his thigh like he wanted to lift it. I said, “Nope, nope, nope.”

  “Easy does it, Wilber,” said the midget. “This man’s got a look in his eye. Like someone who might have grown up on cowboy movies.”

  “Let’s just have you put the gun on the table there, away from your drink,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to confuse what you might be reaching for.”

  The midget made with his odd laugh again.

  Brett moved slowly and smoothly and her hand went under her skirt and came back out. She was holding the snub-nose. She pointed it at the midget.

  “Oh, ho,” said the midget.

  “Just in case you got a gun too, shorty,” Brett said.

  “I got one,” the dwarf said, “but it’s in my suitcase.”

  “I told you that was a dumb place to put it,” said the big man, placing his automatic on the table.

  “Turns out you’re right,” said the midget. Then to me: “I thought you said a gun would make noise.”

  “It will,” I said, “but like your buddy here, I’m not that worried about it. Now, you either got something to say, or you don’t.”

  “We got plenty,” said the midget. “First, I’d like to say you got good legs, lady.”

  “Thanks,” Brett said. “My day’s made.”

  “I’d also like to know what these bugs are all about. Is this a consistent thing here in East Texas?”

  “Every year about this time,” I said. “They’re not usually this thick. Don’t usually mate this long. Lots of them are supposed to signify a forthcoming bad winter or lots of rain. Might be both. Least that’s the folklore.”

  “In Oklahoma we’re having quite a run on mosquitoes,” the midget said. “Big things. Very fat. They carry disease, you know?”

  “We’ve got mosquito problems here too,” I said. “And roaches. And June bugs. And all manner of squiggly-shit bugs who have names I don’t know, but that’s all the entomology lesson you get today. Tell us what you got to tell, or we walk. With the five hundred dollars.”

  “Walk, you don’t learn about daughterpoo,” said the midget.

  “Yeah,” I said, “but we walk after I pistol-whip the both of you, and what the two of you learn is it hurts.”

  “You look like a man would hit a midget,” said the midget.

  “You betcha,” I said, and tried to sound convincing, the way Leonard would sound, because he was definitely a man would hit a midget, or anyone who fucked with him.

  The midget touched his jacket, said, “I want to reach inside here, get a match and light my smoke. That okay?”

  “No,” Brett said. “I don’t like it.”

  “I talk better I got a smoke,” the midget said.

  “I bet you can talk good either way,” I said. Then to the big guy: “I’m liking where that gun is less and less. Brett, you mind taking it?”

  Brett leaned over and grabbed the automatic off the table and dropped it onto her lap. She held the .38 on the big guy now. The big guy looked at the gun in her lap, then at her face, then at her gun. He grimaced, and considering how he already looked, it wasn’t pretty.

  I turned so I could lay my gun across my knee. That way it was easy to move and point at the midget should he find something inside his coat I didn’t like, but it was a little less personal this way.

  “I really would like to smoke,” he said.

  Brett nodded. The midget reached inside his coat and brought out a little folder of matches. He peeled one off and lit his cigar. The room turned foul quickly. He said, “This daughter you got, lady. She’s in some manure up to her eyeballs.”

  “And you drove all the way down here to tell us,” I said. “You’re some good goddamn citizens, aren’t you?”

  “We drove down here ’cause we thought it might get us some money,” the midget said. “And we need money. We’re on our way to Mexico. Me and Wilber, we worked for Jim Clemente up until a day or so ago. But we had an unfortunate turn of events. We got our hand caught in the till, so to speak.”

  “Who’s Jim Clemente?” I said.

  “He’s the main man in Tulsa, that’s what he is. You want a whore, you buy one, somehow money goes back to him. Some little chippie in boogie town does a coon and gets ten bucks, Clemente, he gets six of it. You want someone killed, he’s the one has it done. He has folks who do it.”

  “Like you two?” I said.

  “Yeah, like us.”

  “What do you do?” Brett said to the midget. “Punch them in the butt?”

  “It’s not nice to make fun of a physical liability,” said the midget.

  “Look at it this way,” Brett said, “you can drink out of the toilet without straining your back.”

  “That’s no way to talk to a professional,” said the midget.

  “Professional, my ass,” I said. “You didn’t search either of us when we came in. You’re about as organized as the Iraqi army.”

  “We been through some hard times,” said the midget. “We’re a bit scattered. And we aren’t in that line of business anymore. By the way. They call me Red.”

  “I don’t give a flyin’ shit your name’s God,” Brett said. “You tell me about my daughter now, or I’m gonna shoot holes in your little kneecaps.”

  “My goodness,” Red said. “What a foul-mouthed lady. I never could stand a woman cursed and talked tough.”

  “I’m not askin’ you to stand it,” Brett said. “I
’m askin’ you to stand bullet holes in your kneecaps. After that, maybe I’ll shoot off the head of your little dick.”

  “Well,” Red said, puffing his cigar. “I could ill afford that. Let me try and put it in a nutshell.”

  “You couldn’t put it in a number ten washtub,” Wilber said.

  Red ignored him, said, “Wilber and I worked for Jim Clemente. We did odd jobs for him. We checked on things for him. One of the things we checked on was hookers. Your daughter, ma’am, is a hooker, and with the kind of mouth you have, I can see how she might have drifted from the straight and narrow. In my case, my old mama sold me to a carnival. I rode big dogs on a little red saddle. I had some acts with chimpanzees as well. Little rascals are always fornicating or defecating on something, and it doesn’t bother them to throw dung either, I’ll promise you that. Humiliating. It gave me a bad outlook on life. That and always looking at people’s crotches.”

  Brett said, “I don’t care you had to wear diapers, fuck a duck, and eat monkey shit.”

  “I just bet you don’t, lady,” Red said. He took hold of his cigar, turned it around in his mouth, pulled it out, blew smoke, put it back and looked at the toes of his boots. He said, “What I’m doing is trying to find a place to begin.”

  “Just about anywhere is starting to look good,” I said.

  “Then, I suppose I should start with the strangulation of Maude Fields. Does that seem appropriate to you, Wilber?”

  “That’ll work,” Wilber said.

  4

  The air-conditioning unit cut off and back on. A blast of cold air filled the room. Red said, “This Maude was a madam out of Oklahoma City. She worked for Jim Clemente. Not that she wanted to, but if Jim decided you were working for him, then you were working for him. Like I said, some whore put out for money somewhere, Big Jim, he knew about it and you owed him. Someone snorted some coke or sold a rock, he got a share. He was fair in his own way. Maude got the largest cut of the meat she was selling, but Jim, he got a share, and it got so Maude was obstreperous. Holding out. She’d been warned. More than once. Jim can be a very warm and understanding guy, but he doesn’t like to warn someone more than twice.