The Adventures of Slim & Howdy

by Kix Brooks; Ronnie Dunn; Bill Fitzhugh

  “What’s that mean?” Buddy asked. “We both do it?”

  “I think it means we tied,” Howdy said with a wink and nod toward Slim. “Pick again.”

  Slim glowered.

  Second time Buddy drew a nine.

  Howdy picked a queen and that was all she wrote. Howdy scraped Buddy’s money toward the corner pocket where his other hand waited to meet it. Folded it into his roll and put it away. Skeets was collecting on the side bets while the onlookers began drifting back to their tables. But after a minute it was clear that Buddy wasn’t going anywhere, just stood there with arms folded across his chest. Finally he said, “Go on, then. Kick his ass.” Nodding at Slim.

  Howdy turned on a dime, got in Buddy’s face. “I don’t appreciate people telling me what to do.” He didn’t blink. Just two dark eyes staring from under the black hat, like a wild animal under the front porch.

  Buddy held his ground.

  Skeets, back at the bar counting his money, looked up long enough to see what was going on. He figured things might go south if he didn’t bring the curtain down now. He slipped the pistol into his waistband and walked across his bar like he was Augustus McCrae. Howdy was saying something when he got there.

  “Hey, cowboy, I won the bet,” he said. “I’ll kick his ass when I’m good and ready and not before. That’s what it’s like to be the winner.” Howdy walked past him saying, “Better luck next time.”

  Buddy turned to follow but got blocked by Skeets, standing there with his hand on the ivory grip of his pistol. “Son,” he said, “know when to walk away.”

  22

  MONDAY MORNING SLIM AND HOWDY HIT THE ROAD WITH a sack of the sausage and biscuit sandwiches and a couple of large coffees. It was Howdy’s turn to drive and he was looking forward to it, there being few things that lifted his spirit more than a clean windshield, a full tank of gas, and the open road. It was a four-hundred-mile drive, more or less, and they wouldn’t be creeping through Bluff Dale, Rockwood, and Eldorado with Howdy behind the wheel. They’d be taking I-35 down through Austin and San Antonio before turning west on Highway 90, heading for Uvalde and finally Del Rio.

  But that was a long way off. And, based on their history so far, they both knew there was no telling what might happen between where they were and where they were going.

  Just have to wait and see.

  They hadn’t been on the road too long before they started chewing over the previous night’s events, specifically the run-in with big Buddy Cooper. Even though Slim insisted he had the upper hand in the fight, had it all under control, didn’t need any help from anybody, he was quick to give Howdy his due on stepping in when he did with the card trick.

  “No problem,” Howdy said, but not with all the conviction in the world. He had something else on his mind, something that had been bothering him since last night.

  Slim didn’t seem to notice. He said something about how his night with Ginger might have been worth a pair of ass-kickings, though he was glad it hadn’t come to that.

  “Yeah, well, next time, maybe I’ll just keep out of it.”

  Slim couldn’t help but notice that. He said, “The hell’s got your feathers up?”

  “Pardon me,” Howdy said sarcastically. “That’s just the way us sorry-assed swamp crackers get.” Like his sensibilities had been trampled upon.

  Slim couldn’t believe it. “Are you kidding?”

  “That was a little harsh, don’t you think?”

  “Hell, wasn’t personal,” Slim said with a shrug. “Just figured I should play along with your setup, that’s all. ‘Sorry-ass swamp cracker’ was just the first thing to come to mind.”

  “That was the first thing?”

  “I thought it sounded pretty good,” Slim said. “You know, true to the moment.”

  “Like if I’d called you a seriously inbred hillbilly defective?”

  Slim gave him a sideways glance as he sipped his coffee. “No, not really, because I think you’ll find your hillbillies in the Ozarks and the Appalachians.”

  “That’s not my point.”

  “I mean, I’m not even from Texas hill country, so . . .”

  “You’re missing—”

  “And I’m pretty sure Louisiana’s full of swamps, so at least I was geographically accurate, but, well, forget it,” Slim said. “Next time I’ll be more circumspect in my word choice so as not to step on your tender toes.” It seemed counterproductive to get into a fight today over what had happened while Howdy was getting him out of a fight last night. So Slim said, “Good idea getting these biscuits.” He stuffed half of one into his mouth and looked out the window.

  Howdy was fine to let it slide. He’d brought it up, aired it out, and now he could let it go. He really wasn’t that pissed about it. He just liked busting Slim’s chops first thing in the morning. They drove along in silence for a while. Howdy hung an elbow out the window and turned his attention to testing the outer boundaries of the posted speed limit. After a few minutes he said to Slim, “What can you get away with in Texas, ten miles over? Fifteen?”

  “Asking the wrong guy,” Slim said. “And don’t expect me to split any goddam tickets you get.”

  Howdy tipped his hat, chuckled a bit, said, “Yes’m, Miss Daisy.” Then he took it up to seventy-five and started advancing on Austin just a bit faster than everybody else on the road. Not just because he figured it would grate on Slim, but that was part of it. After a minute he gestured toward the glove box, said, “Hand me that radar detector.”

  Slim popped the compartment, rooted around for a second, then shook his head. “It’s not in there.”

  “What? Somebody stole it?”

  Slim gave him a sideways glance. “Wouldn’t be the first time,” he said.

  “Well, dog dammit!” Howdy shook his head as if disappointed in human nature. “You just can’t trust people anymore.” He shrugged, then gassed the truck up to eighty. “Guess we’ll just have to do it the old-fashioned way.”

  Howdy took his driving seriously. Not the speed limit, of course, but the idea that cars and highways were designed to get you from one place to another as fast as possible without anybody getting hurt. He considered the notion that speed was the cause of most accidents nonsense. Hell, if that was the case, they’d never finish at Talladega, everybody’d be wrecked or dead. The real cause of most accidents was failure to maintain control, no matter what the speed. As far as Howdy was concerned, there were only two rules to driving. One: Never hit anything. And two: Never cause anyone else to hit anything. If everybody followed those rules, he figured, the world would be a safer place and everybody would get where they were going a lot sooner.

  Howdy was so enamored of his driving skills that he sometimes imagined that with a twist or two of fate, he could have ended up on the NASCAR circuit instead of the honky-tonk circuit. He had wide peripheral vision, quick reactions, and the ability to read other drivers, anticipate what they were going to do before they even decided they were going to do it. His sense of where things were and how they were moving in relation to where he was, was uncanny. He knew if a space was opening or closing and whether he could fit in it or not.

  He was never bored on long drives because he spent every moment measuring and adjusting and anticipating before making his move, improving his position, and looking for the next one. He imagined it was just like life, with every mile offering opportunities to get further ahead of the others, those not willing to make the effort, and it was that game of identifying the advantages and taking as many as he could that kept him engaged and made the time pass more quickly.

  It was his way of enjoying the journey as much as arriving at the destination a little sooner.

  It took Slim about twenty miles before he stopped reaching for the dashboard in a black panic and using the imaginary brake pedal on his side of the truck every time Howdy made a move in traffic. Eventually he realized Howdy knew what he was doing and that freed his mind to wander. And once you stoppe
d fearing for your life, six hours on the road gives a guy plenty of time to reflect on things.

  Slim had mixed feelings about his return to Del Rio. It wasn’t like he had wants or warrants or unpaid debts or somebody waiting to kill him, nothing as concrete as that. If he’d been the superstitious type, Slim would have said the place just seemed to have it in for him. But that was crazy talk. He didn’t believe that sort of thing. Shit, as the bumper sticker pointed out, just happened. But, in Slim’s experience, it seemed to happen more frequently in Del Rio than other places. At least to him.

  The place seemed more like a pair of loaded dice than a sleepy little border town across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Acuña. It was built around the customs station at the river, Laughlin Air Force Base to the south, and Devil’s Lake recreation area to the north. Del Rio. Ask most people, they’d say it meant “the river.” A few, with a better understanding of the language, knew it was “of the river,” since the name had been shortened in 1883 by the U.S. Postal Department from the original, San Felipe del Rio, a name bestowed after Spanish explorers offered a mass at the site on Saint Philip’s Day in 1635. Or so the legend had it.

  But Slim had his own translation, based on his own history with the place. For him, Del Rio was Spanish for “the place things went missing.”

  Things like his favorite guitar, a certain woman, and his dad.

  Slim wondered if something would go missing on this trip. Then he considered the possibility that maybe his luck had changed and maybe something would show up this time around. Only one way to find out.

  23

  ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF DEL RIO, HOWDY NOTICED THEY WERE low on gas, so he pulled into the Truck ’n’ Go Quicky Stop. An oasis for the long-haul driver. Self-serve gas pumps in front, diesel pumps out back that came with full service, if you asked for it over the phone that was right there on the pole. The full-service attendants came in the form of some hardworking girls willing and able to do whatever to the truck you wanted. At a price, of course.

  The Truck ’n’ Go Quicky Stop even offered rooms with beds and showers by the hour. The convenience store inside had everything a trucker might need from toiletries and pharmaceuticals to cell phones and GPS systems, from fried chicken to chicken-fried steak. They even had a full aisle of the latest CDs and DVDs. Business was good.

  After fueling up and scraping some bugs off the windshield, Slim and Howdy headed into town on the main drag, past greasy auto-repair places, rundown motels, check-cashing joints, and liquor stores. Howdy noticed an old mom-and-pop hardware store that was boarded up with plywood that he figured came from one of the nationally recognized home-improvement stores that had put mom and pop out of business in the first place.

  Even under bright blue skies and sunshine, Del Rio wouldn’t exactly stir the soul and fill its tank with hope. It was a dusty place, flat and struggling for air, hoping for the best against all odds. Like somebody had started with an idea for a nice town near that river with the grand name, then wandered off or died of ennui before they’d added any of the fine touches they had in mind.

  Arriving under ominous gray skies, as Slim and Howdy were, the only thing to lift their spirits was the knowledge that they wouldn’t be unemployed for at least two weeks. And that counted for something, ask any musician.

  This being Howdy’s first trip to Del Rio, and having arrived with higher expectations, he looked over at Slim and said, “I thought you said this was a paradise.”

  “I said a loaded pair of dice,” Slim replied. “But I’ll tell you what, you won’t find a better enchilada anywhere.”

  Howdy figured that was reason enough to keep going. He drove on, past the fancy new shopping center anchored by the Dollar Tree, then over the tracks of the old Southern Pacific railroad where, off to the left, they saw a small, free-standing building, hard to miss with all the neon green and orange paint. The exterior walls were billboards of cartoon scorpions, tarantulas, cobras, and rattlesnakes, like some roadside reptile attraction that had escaped from Florida in the sixties and settled in Del Rio in a successful bid to avoid all the tourists. The crude hand-painted sign over the door read, “Rattlesnake Jake’s—Exotic Pets.”

  A few miles later, near the far end of town, Howdy waved a hand at the great expanse of scrub surrounding them and said, “Did we miss it?”

  “Keep going,” Slim said, pointing ahead. “It’s up there on the left.”

  And sure enough it was. A fine-looking old building, with solid timber beams, over a hundred years old, jutting from the exterior walls at the top like something from the days—and maybe even the architect—of the Alamo. Nothing fancy, mind you, but kept up and cared for as if by people with a sense of history, people who knew the value of the past and the importance of preservation. Over the decades, the building, which was surrounded on three sides by a plank boardwalk, had been a trading post, a general store, and even the headquarters of the San Felipe Agricultural, Manufacturing, and Irrigation Company. It had character and strength and, in its only exterior nod to modernity, neon beer signs in the window as tastefully as can be done. The building’s façade arched smoothly upward in the center where the main crossbeam jutted out above all the others and pointed toward Mexico. In the space created by the arch, painted in bold script with drop shadows, were the words

  Lost and Found

  The parking lot was dust and gravel and empty for the most part when Slim and Howdy pulled in, just a couple of cars and trucks here and there. It was Monday and early enough that most folks were just finishing their day jobs.

  “Nice place,” Howdy said. “Looks like it could hold a crowd.”

  “Six or seven hundred I think,” Slim replied. “Gets pretty lively on the weekends.”

  The dust hadn’t settled from them pulling into the parking lot before some movement caught their eyes. A man roughly the size and shape of a buffalo was backing slowly out the building’s side door, his hands raised in the air. His head was shaved and he had a gold ring through his nose. And though he was too far away for Slim and Howdy to make out any details, he seemed to have something shiny, stainless steely, riding the crest of his bald head from between the eyes to the first vertebra of his spine, like a metallic Mohawk, or an unusual zipper.

  “Well now, that’s something you don’t see every day,” was Howdy’s observation.

  “True.” Slim nodded.

  Howdy squinted at the bald guy, trying to bring his head into focus. “What the hell is that?”

  “Looks like a bunch of silver studs or something.” Slim was right. They were piercings, fifteen of them, looked like stainless-steel bolts holding an empty skull shut.

  “Damn,” Howdy said. “I think you’re right.” He shook his head in disbelief. “You know, every time I see something like that, it makes me wonder if everybody’s nervous system is hooked up the same way.”

  Slim nodded again, then looked at the dark skies promising a thunderstorm. “I wonder if those things draw lightning.”

  As the bald guy continued backing out of the Lost and Found, he yelled, “You don’t know what the hale you’re talkin’ ’bout,” in an accent that sounded a lot more East Alabama than West Texas.

  The next thing Slim and Howdy saw coming out that side door was the barrel of a blue steel .38 in the slender hand of the striking woman who followed soon thereafter.

  Jodie Lee was already on the tall side, but with her hat and boots, she shot well past six feet. She wore an embroidered-eagle-design western shirt with front snap pockets and off-the-shelf jeans that fit like they were custom-tailored to every part she had. She was sporting a tribe’s worth of turquoise and silver jewelry around her waist, wrists, and her graceful neck. Falling from under the hat was a silky ponytail, prematurely gray, that rested between her shoulder blades.

  Jodie gave the impression of being handy with a gun as she wagged the .38 at the back end of a pickup with a hard-shell cover. “Open it up and let’s see,” she said.

  The bi
g bald guy glared at her, said, “I ain’t gotta prove nothin’ to you.” He spit in the dirt in a desperate show of machismo.

  Jodie pulled the hammer back on the .38, in a show of superior firepower. “Well, it’s me or the cops,” she said. “Up to you.”

  Slim nudged Howdy. “You think we ought to help?”

  “Him or her?”

  “I was thinking of Jodie,” Slim said.

  “Doesn’t look like she needs any.”

  The bald guy finally opened the back of his truck, revealing several cases of whiskey and beer. “That shit’s mine,” he insisted. “And you can’t prove otherwise.” He was about to slam the top down when Jodie fired a shot, kicking up some rocks near the guy’s feet. He jumped to one side and said, “The hell’s wrong with you, bitch, you crazy?”

  “A,” she said. “Watch your mouth. B. Let’s see the bottom of the boxes.” She cocked the hammer again.

  He tilted one of the boxes back and showed the L&F written in bold black marker on the bottom, the way she did all her stock when it came in.

  Jodie smiled. “Well, they once were lost but now they’re found,” she said in mock revelation. “Put ’em up here on the porch.” She tapped the place she meant with the silver toe of her boot, then backed up a step to make room. After the guy did what he was told, he slammed the hard shell down and said, “You just made a big mistake, honey. You don’t know who you’re screwin’ with.” He stormed to the cab of the truck and jerked the door open.

  “By the way,” Jodie said. “You go tearing outta here kicking up rocks, trying to pop me or one of my windows, this weapon is likely to discharge by accident in your general direction. And you’d be surprised at how accurate that can be.” She smiled, but not in a real friendly way. “So you better just ease on out and be sure you don’t come back.”