Rumble Tumble

by Joe R. Lansdale

  “You gave him the headache. And besides, you gave Leonard a couple dollars and sent him for the aspirin.”

  “It don’t matter how the little fucker gets it, does it?”

  “I guess not,” I said.

  “He’s lucky I didn’t give him a new shape to his head. And don’t be so self-righteous. You were in on it.”

  I went quiet. We were lying in bed, the light out. We were both well on our sides of the bed, leaving quite a space between us.

  Brett said, “I’m sorry, Hap. Really. I shouldn’t have said that. Wasn’t for me you wouldn’t be involved. But you got to understand. This is my daughter we’re talking about. Whatever it takes, that’s what I’ll do, and it’s not like we’re dealing with the Pope here.”

  “I know, Brett, it’s just seeing the little guy take it. Fact is, I kind of admire him.”

  “Admire him?”

  “Not for who he is. Or what he’s done. But just the way he conducts himself.”

  “That prattling?”

  “No, that drives me shit-crazy. But he has a sense of honor. Strength. Dignity.”

  “Next thing you’ll be asking him to bench-press two hundred pounds and show you his pecker.”

  “I didn’t say I liked him. I said I kind of admire him.”

  “I’ll have to think about that one, Hap. You’re pitying him, not picking up on a sense of honor. I’ve done the same, so I know. I’m an expert at recognizing the difference between admiring someone and pitying them. You have some of my old personality.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You see someone that’s down, maybe not even someone you like, someone who’s got a fucked-up life or who’s taken a wrong turn, and you want to set them straight. You think all you got to do is get them on their feet. It’s like the woman who takes up with the sorry man because she thinks she sees something in him, thinks she can change him.”

  “I know Red’s worthless,” I said.

  “I’m not saying you’re taking him under your wing and feeding him worms, but I’m saying what you feel for him is pity and it comes out of the same urge as the woman who wants to change the sorry man. You feel pity because he’s a midget, or a dwarf, or whatever he is, like being small alone makes him worth a damn. He’d be sorry if he was eight feet tall. He’d be sorry if he had a nub dick and couldn’t pick up five pounds. He’d be sorry if he had a dick long as a rock python and could bench-press a gorilla carrying a sackful of coconuts. He might be sorry in a different way, but he’d be sorry.”

  “He was sold to a circus.”

  “There’s people been sold to circuses that didn’t grow up to strangle people over money. He admitted to robbing that diner while his partner whipped up on that poor man who cooked the steak ranchero.”

  “Boy, that must have been some steak ranchero,” I said. “Way he kept talking about it.”

  “Yeah,” Brett said, “and I’ll be honest. I started to ask him where the place was.”

  We both laughed.

  Brett said, “So you got to accept this guy isn’t worth the powder it would take to blow his ass up. Lice on the end of a dog’s dick have more sense of community than he does. He’s out for himself.”

  “I know that.”

  “I know you know that, but you got to really know it. Between my husband and you I took up with this guy lived in a shed. I mean that literally. A shed. He conned someone to let him live in their shed. He wasn’t even a particularly interesting, smart, or attractive guy, but he had a way of making you feel sorry for him. Sort of like an ugly mongrel puppy that had caught on fire and wasn’t nothing but bald spots and red meat. You just naturally wanted to help him. He was a piece of shit, and I met him and got hung up with him, and I let him come over to the house cold nights and warm his pecker.”

  “I don’t think I want to hear this.”

  “You know I wasn’t celibate before we met. I never claimed to be any goddamn nun.”

  “Yeah, I know, but I like to think in a little fantasy compartaient of my brain that you’ve been saving it just for me.”

  “You and a lot of others.”

  “Boy, that makes me feel good.”

  “I thought this pity I felt for him was love. I gave him money. I gave him chances. I took him out of the shed, and pretty soon he’s lodged in my house tighter than a stitch. He wouldn’t work. Not really. He’d piddle here and there to pick up a few bucks, but I never knew him to put in a full day’s work once. He liked a good three hours and then back to the TV set, or he’d set around and play his harmonica and lie about how he used to play with Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. Always had plans and opportunities just around the corner. He had a truck he borrowed that he was supposed to buy, and he drove it around for months, dodging the guy who owned it. And he never did buy it. He started talking about all that was wrong with it, dismissing the fact he’d been riding around in it for nearly half a year. I bought him a truck and he drove the other one over to the fella’s house who owned it, got out and left it and ran back to my car and we drove out of there like thieves. But still I’m not seeing who this guy really is. He kept on complaining about all the bad breaks he’d had. How he had to live like a nigger. No offense to Leonard. That’s how he put it. He complained about the shacks people let him live in, like maybe they should have fixed them up for him or moved him into their homes. These people weren’t slumlords. They were helping the guy out because they felt sorry for him, and he wasn’t paying a penny.

  “He complained they wanted him to do work for his room and board. It was always somebody else’s fault and always someone else’s responsibility to get him out of his bullshit. The truck I got him wasn’t good as he deserved. It had problems. He wanted better. He admitted he owed money for past hospital bills and to the IRS and said he couldn’t work because they’d take what he made. I paid his bankruptcy off. And it wasn’t a little bit of money. He supposedly took the money to a lawyer, but the bankruptcy never happened. I asked him about it, he got mad. Like it wasn’t something I was party to at all. He came up with new excuses. All of them lame. I began to realize what I thought might be a spark of salvation down there inside of him, a sort of muted intelligence, was nothing more than stupidity and shallowness, self-centeredness and misplaced ego. He didn’t really have any feelings outside of those for himself. He was a big con game. The level of his intelligence, if measured in inches, would have been just enough to get him up to where he could play in the toilet bowl with a long-handled spoon.

  “I like to never got rid of him, and finally it turned ugly. I was prepared to call the police and have him removed. I dreamed fondly of my husband with his head on fire and thought maybe this guy would look good with a fire cap too. I began to think of them negative thoughts, you know. But I determined to avoid arson on another human body, not because he didn’t deserve it, but because I thought I might not get off for it this time. I cut off his nookie. I cut off his food. I threatened the law. He finally got the hint. Besides, he knew it was all coming to an end. He’d been through it before. He had been working another sucker all along, some other person to feel sorry for him and to tell him how I mistreated him. So he went from my house to another shed. Last I heard was that person’s hospitality played out and he went to yet another shed. Always living in sheds or garages or shacking up in someone’s house on a cold night. Working all day long to keep from working.

  “By now, if the sorry cocksucker had gotten a job at a filling station and put in all the effort working he put into not working, he’d be vice president of goddamn Exxon. Anyway, it taught me a lesson. There’s folks out there down-and-out because of fate, but there’s lots of folks out there down-and-out because they aren’t worth squat. There really are bums, Hap. Not just homeless. And there’s even little circus-sold fucks out there who are not down-and-out at all, but have plenty of money and work in whorehouses as pimps and strangle and kill and rob people, and yet they want you to feel sorry for them because they’re sh
ort. I say, shit, riding dogs in a circus is good honest work compared to what he’s become. Hell, fuckin’ wood rats under a circus tent for spare change is even more honest work. You with me on all this?”

  “I think I’m tracking,” I said. “Except that part about the rats.”

  “Pretend I said chickens, or some kind of small furry animal other than a rat.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I can visualize that.”

  We lay there for a while, looking at the ceiling. And finally Brett said, “Will you hold me, baby?”

  I said, “Would you really kill Red he didn’t show us to your daughter?”

  “I’d like to. The urge would be there. But I guess not. Not just for that. But he doesn’t need to know that.”

  “I guess I did. Does that make you feel bad toward me?”

  “Nah,” Brett said, rolling up close. “Sometimes I can be so mean I scare myself. And I got to tell you, he got me crooked enough, I could punch his ticket.”

  I took her in my arms. She kissed my ear. I turned and kissed her lips, our tongues explored. A moment later we were making love, and for a while I wasn’t all that concerned about Red and his bloody head, his circus past, or even his torturous time in front of America’s Funniest Home Videos.

  16

  Next morning we were tooling down Highway 87 on our way into Lubbock, traveling some of the bleakest ugliest goddamn terrain this side of the moon. It’s the kind of landscape you think you’ll fall off of. Every time we passed a scrubby tree—more of a bush really—I wanted to jump out of the car, hold on to the tree for dear life, lest I be sucked away into some sort of Lovecraftian cosmic vacuum.

  Red, who Leonard had just quizzed for directions, was sitting in the back seat next to me eating his Hostess Twinkie breakfast. He said, with white filling on his lips, “I never claimed I knew exactly where The Farm was. I worked other locations when I was with the Bandito Supremes.”

  “This gets richer by the mile,” I said.

  Leonard said, “I suggest we kill him and just ask randomly at houses along the way where The Farm is. I think we got just as good a chance finding the place doing that as fuckin’ around with this ding-a-ling.”

  “I think the three of you feel I ought to help you if I did know,” said Red, “and I got to ask. Why should I?”

  “Because we will kill you if you don’t,” Leonard said.

  Red licked his fingers. “Well, that is some kind of incentive, I admit.”

  “We’re gonna drive to the Mexican border,” Leonard said, “and then, if you can’t tell us where The Farm is, I’m going to shoot you. First in one foot, then the other. Then your hands and shoulders. I’m going to make it painful, squatty.”

  “There you go with the short slurs,” Red said. “How would you like it if I called you a nigger, a jungle bunny, or a coon?”

  “I wouldn’t like it you called me honey, or even to a four-course dinner,” Leonard said. “I just don’t care for your sorry little ass.”

  “There’s that little stuff again,” Red said. He took off his hat and put it on the seat between us and shook his head sadly. The wad of bloody toilet paper was still stuck to the top of his head. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye, sadly, as if we were co-conspirators.

  “Red,” I said. “I don’t want anything to happen to you. Really. But you got to cooperate. I’m not going to try and stop anyone from doing what they got to do to find this place. We want to find Tillie, and we mean to do just that, even if we have to try and read heavenly signs and directions in your steaming guts.”

  “Well,” Red said, “I suppose if I don’t do something to help myself I’ll continue to spend my nights in chairs and eating Twinkies for breakfast.”

  “Absolutely,” Brett said.

  Red nodded. “Well, we need to see my brother.”

  “Your brother?” I said.

  “Yep,” Red said. “Herman. He knows where The Farm is.”

  “You said you knew,” Leonard said.

  “Sometimes I lie a little,” Red said.

  “What’s with your brother?” I asked.

  “He used to be a Bandito Supreme.”

  “If he used to be a Bandito Supreme,” I said, “he may not cotton to telling us where they hole up. He might also con us a little, get us dead. You might con us a little yourself, Red. You just said you lied.”

  “I might lie now and then,” Red said, “but I’m not lying right now. Herman is not only no longer with the Bandito Supremes, he’s a preacher.”

  “I’m almost afraid to ask,” Leonard said, “lest this story turn out to be as laborious as the Book of Mormon without the good parts, but how did your brother Herman go from being a Bandito Supreme to being a preacher?”

  “I’m not sure that’s such a big jump, from Nazi to preacher,” Brett said.

  “Very funny, lady,” Red said. “You’re one of those who has no respect for anything. Not even religion.”

  “Pardon me,” Brett said, “I didn’t know we were keeping you from prayer meetings.”

  “I don’t claim to be a churchgoer, though I ought to be,” Red said. “But I believe in the church, and I respect my brother for what he’s doing. Witnessing to the lost souls of West Texas.”

  “I got a feeling anyone lives out here is lost,” Brett said.

  “It is ugly, isn’t it?” Red said.

  “I don’t know why I’m persisting,” Leonard said. “But I want to know about this brother of yours, long as it doesn’t somehow lead back to that goddamn steak ranchero.”

  “Herman, unlike myself, is normal-sized. Well, that isn’t entirely accurate. He’s large. Six four, weighs about two-forty, and can bench-press almost four hundred. Quite a bit of weight, I assure you, but as I explained last night, considering my size and weight and the fact I can bench-press two hundred pounds, he’s not as strong as me, least not in a relative sense.”

  “Yeah,” Brett said, “but how long is his dong?”

  “I happily admit I have no idea,” Red said. “We had very little boyhood together, and we spent none of it measuring each other’s equipment. Are you interested in hearing about Herman, or not?”

  “I said I was curious,” Leonard said.

  Red, feeling important, leaned back in his seat. “Any chance I might smoke my last cigar? I’ve been saving it, and since my incarceration by you three, I haven’t had the privilege. From previous inspection I find that it’s broken in two, so it’ll be a short smoke.”

  “It’ll be shorter than that,” Brett said. “You aren’t going to smoke it in this car. It’ll make us all sick.”

  Red assumed a hangdog demeanor, but he was feeling too self-important not to continue his story. “Very well. As I was saying, Herman was normal, and I was not, and our parents deferred to him entirely. He could do all manner of sports activities well, while I, on the other hand, had a good mind. I could read and quote great passages of Shakespeare at a tender age. I hoped to impress my parents, but, alas, they weren’t interested in a short Hamlet who they found embarrassing at public functions.

  “At eleven years of age I ended up sold to a circus, apprenticed is the word they used, but undoubtedly, if you look at it clearly, it can only be determined that I was sold in the same manner you might sell a pup from a litter. It was purely a legality, this apprenticeship business. I was to be the circus owner’s ward. The owner was a Mr. Gonzolos. A nastier, fouler-mouthed, meaner-tempered man did not exist. He’s long dead now. I heard from old cronies that after I left the circus an elephant—undoubtedly brutalized and mistreated like myself—mauled, stomped, and rolled on him. I say with only the smallest bit of shame, because he did keep me clothed and fed, I feel absolutely no remorse over his death. What I remember most about Gonzolos was that he constantly complained of hemorrhoids and lack of money.”

  “Unless the elephant is your brother Herman,” Brett said, “I believe you’ve veered yet again.”

  “It’s important that you
understand my position in life to understand about my brother. He and my parents, in spite of their indulgence of him, had a falling out. It was about me, sad to say. Herman disliked the idea they sold his only sibling to a traveling-circus-cum-carnival-cumsideshow, and they became estranged. Fact is, I have no idea what happened to either of my parents, and like with Mr. Gonzolos, I can’t say I’ve pined over them much, and I’m sure there’s no inheritance awaiting me. They never liked me, and they never had any money either.

  “Herman fell in with some hooligans, spent time in jail, a bit of youth detention, and finally graduated to the big time. He got in with the Bandito Supremes, selling drugs. All of this he told me about, as I was not there to witness it. I was riding dogs and making a fool of myself in the circus at that time, but Herman went from being a football star in high school to selling heroin to twelve-year-olds. He did say that the bulk of his sales were to colored people, and at the time he felt that made everything all right. I can honestly say he doesn’t feel that way now. He figures a colored person has just as much right to live and prosper as anyone. Herman has become quite progressive, actually.”

  “Yeah,” Leonard said. “Speaking as one of those colored persons, I’d have to say Herman certainly sounds like a fuckin’ peach.”

  “Would it be all right I merely suck on the cigar and not smoke it?” Red said.

  “Go ahead,” Brett said.

  Red plucked the cigar from inside his coat. It was broken, but still together, held there by strands of tobacco. He pulled the cigar apart, returned one piece to his coat pocket, licked the end of the other, stuck it in his mouth and rolled it about as if tasting a Tootsie Roll Pop.

  “I said Herman had a change of heart, became a preacher, and he did, but before that change of heart he put me on the road to commerce. An act he now regrets and that I’m most thankful for. Without Herman, at my age, I might no longer be riding a dog in the circus, but cleaning up dog droppings instead. At the time Herman removed me from the circus, my career was already in the toilet and I was heading in the direction of a flush. I had become surly, and perhaps it was my own fault that my career was eroding, but be that as it may, I was soon to be either working the dog pens or walking the street, giving blow jobs under the guise of a child prostitute, when Herman tracked me down by assistance of a private detective. When Herman arrived, I was more than willing to go in with him and start a new life and enter into his business.”