Vanilla Ride

by Joe R. Lansdale

  “Brown Ford,” I said.

  “Yep,” he said.

  Jim Bob and Tonto looked too. The Ford pulled up at a pump and a guy about the size of Tonto, and then Tonto again, got out. It wasn’t just that he was tall. He was no taller than Tonto, but he was wide as a truck and had a chest big enough to store a winter’s worth of corn in it. His legs were bigger around than my waist and his head looked like someone had anchored a medicine ball to his neck. He had blond hair and a little goatee and the kind of tan that comes from solar lamps. I figured he had fallen off Jack’s beanstalk and was learning to make his way in our world.

  There was another guy in the front of the Ford, and two in the back, and they just sat. After a while, when the gas was done, the others got out and they all came in.

  We watched them carefully. The big guy who had been driving and who put in the gas looked back at us and nodded. Just a regular guy, bigger than most regular guys, seeing some other regular guys, acknowledging us. We nodded back.

  We kind of huddled over our food and whispered.

  “They might not be anything,” Leonard said.

  “Maybe not,” I said.

  “Lots of brown Fords,” Jim Bob said.

  “Yep,” I said.

  “Bullshit,” Tonto said. “They’re somebody. They got guns. I can see the bulges under their shirts.”

  “Maybe those are cell phone cases,” Jim Bob said.

  Tonto looked at Jim Bob. They both smiled.

  “But,” Jim Bob said, “probably not.”

  “If they’ve been following us without me seeing them,” Tonto said, “they’re good. And Hap, you’re good. You spotted them and I didn’t.”

  “They want us to know they’re following now,” Jim Bob said. “They want us to know they’re tired of playing.”

  “I didn’t know we were playing,” Tonto said, “but now that I do, I’m ready to get out the toys. Ah, here they come.”

  They came back and sat at the table next to us. My side of the bench was closer to the big guy, and on the other side of our table was Tonto, and he shifted a little so that one of his hands was under the table and the other was lying on top of it next to a gnawed chicken leg.

  They were all big guys. Only the driver, the guy on my side, was as big as Tonto, but the others were easily bigger than the rest of us. I got to thinking we weren’t nearly as nifty as we thought. These guys had been on us for a while, and though I had gotten glimpses of them, they were good, damn good, at least as far as sneaking went. Thing I was wondering was when exactly did they get on us, and were they FBI guys or guys from the Dixie Mafia. I was voting pretty heavily on the latter.

  The big guy had some chicken and was about to eat it. I said, “That chicken isn’t nearly as nasty as it looks.”

  The big guy paused with the chicken close to his mouth. “Yeah. That’s good to hear. I was worried.”

  “The links, they’re not bad either. You guys, you don’t look like fishermen.”

  “Neither do you,” said the big guy.

  “We’re just riding around,” I said.

  “That’s a coincidence,” the big guy said. “So are we.” He bit into the chicken and chewed, then looked at me and nodded. “You’re right. That’s pretty damn good.”

  He paused and wiped his hands on some paper towels that were on a roller in the center of the table. He shifted on the bench and turned toward me, said, “We’re more the hunter type.”

  “Now that,” Jim Bob said, “is one big goddamn fucking coincidence. So are we.”

  “Really?” said the big guy.

  “Oh, yeah,” Jim Bob said. “Big fucking time.”

  “What do you hunt?”

  “Skunks mostly,” Jim Bob said.

  “Oh,” the big guy said. “I don’t believe there’s a season for that.”

  “What makes it thrilling,” Jim Bob said. “Ain’t nothing better than sneaking up on a skunk, or a weasel, and blowing them right out from over their ass.”

  “I can see that,” said the big man, and he pushed the paper plate with the chicken on it away from him. “It sure was good to chat with you boys. You know, the weather looks as if it’s going to turn bad.”

  “Yeah?” Leonard said.

  “Oh yeah, big-time. I think I heard it on the radio. Thing is, I wanted to share that because you don’t want to get caught up in a big old storm that might blow you away. That would suck.”

  “Yeah, and it would mess up our hair,” I said.

  He gave me a smile thin as the edge of a razor blade. “You got any information for us? You might know where we can find a good place to stop for the day, and get some things we need, and then maybe the storm won’t come.”

  “And what kind of place is that?” I said.

  “Someplace with a couple of dumb kids with lots of money who aren’t any of your business.”

  “Shit,” I said, “you know what another big coincidence is?”

  “What’s that?” the big guy said.

  “We’re in the same business,” I said.

  “Are we?” he said.

  “Sounds like it. We too are looking for two sweet kids with lots of money that could be a port in the storm, and we think of them as our business, all the way.”

  “Huh,” he said. “Well, we wouldn’t want to cross up, would we?”

  “It could happen, though, couldn’t it?” Jim Bob said. “I mean, us both looking for two sweet kids and some money and a nice place to ride out the storm.”

  “Storm like the one that’s coming,” the big guy said, “it could blow your little port flat out of existence.”

  “We’ve ridden a lot of storms,” Jim Bob said.

  “Hell,” Leonard said, “we’re like storm chasers. We’re like the storm chasers.”

  “I think you’re a bunch of amateurs,” the big guy said. “I think a good wind comes along, might just blow you completely out of the ball game.”

  “You know,” Jim Bob said, “you were going pretty good there with the storm analogies, and then you got to go and screw it up with the ball game thing. That doesn’t scan.”

  The big guy looked at Tonto, said, “What about the Indian? He talk?”

  “Just smoke signals,” Jim Bob said. “And you know what, none of your buddies are talking, so I don’t think that’s fair to ask.”

  “My buddies aren’t my buddies, and they say what I tell them to say and when I say it,” the big guy said. “And before I go, just so we stay with the storm analogy, you best not go out without your slickers and your hip boots, and maybe an umbrella.”

  “We got umbrellas out the ass,” Jim Bob said.

  Big Guy studied us for a moment, said to his boys, “Wrap this shit up, and let’s go.”

  The big guy and his bunch wrapped their chicken and links, put them back in the sacks, and carried them out.

  I watched them through the glass as they walked toward the Ford. I said, “Just so I’m certain, when he said slickers, boots, and umbrellas, he was talking about guns, right?”

  “Yep,” Leonard said. “That was my take.”

  “And they’re the storm?”

  “Bingo.”

  Tonto, who had just taken a bite of a link wrapped in bread, said, “This would be a lot better with hot sauce, some of that fancy mustard that’s got a tang.”

  36

  Full as ticks, we drove to another store near the lake where they sold fishing supplies and rented boats, and parked in front of it and sat in the van. Out front was a rack with T-shirts on it with Lake O’ the Pines logos. The wind moved them about.

  The place was doing pretty brisk business for the time of the year. There were cars parked to the left and the right of us and people got out and went in and came out carrying fishing supplies, coolers, snacks, and items like caps and bait. One of the people who parked and got out was a blond woman in jogging pants with a tight top and a baseball cap with her long hair tied up in a ponytail hanging over the stretch ban
d at the back of her cap. The jogging pants were tight and I worried a little about her circulation and watched her out of biological interest until she went into the store. I didn’t see her face, but she had the kind of body, hair, and walk that assured you she looked good and knew it.

  Over the top of the joint the sky was losing its blue and turning the color of polished silver and there were starting to be dark puffs of clouds. The lake could be seen on either side of the building and the water was growing choppy; little white waves like nightcaps rose up and fell down. Jim Bob opened up the flooring and got out some handguns. I took a .38 automatic with a clip holster and put it on under my coat. I preferred revolvers—more dependable—but, alas, the times were a-changin’ and nearly everyone these days carried an automatic for more firepower. Leonard took a nine with clip holster and Jim Bob clipped on a .38 automatic similar to mine under his coat. Tonto had never stopped being armed. He still had his twin .45s.

  “What makes me nervous,” I said, “is the fact we weren’t armed back there, unless you count a chicken leg and a link sausage.”

  “I was,” Tonto said.

  “Yeah, but what about the rest of us?” I said.

  “You had my best wishes,” Tonto said.

  Leonard said, “Here’s my question. They’re so goddamn sneaky, how come they decided to come to us like that?”

  “Way we were wandering around,” Jim Bob said, “my figure is they thought we knew they were following us. They didn’t know we didn’t know what the hell we were doing, so they thought we were giving them a hard time, being clever. And I think they thought they’d be all scary and we’d tell them what they wanted to know, then they’d run us off and they’d find the boy and the girl and all that money.”

  “They obviously didn’t know me and Hap had our picture taken with a bear,” Leonard said. “They ain’t so tough. You see me give that bear a bad look, Hap?”

  “No.”

  “I haven’t been followed like that in a long time,” Tonto said. “Thought I was being careful, and I’m pretty damn careful, and still, they were following. That takes some chops. I mean, I haven’t never been followed before where I didn’t know.”

  “You said it couldn’t happen,” I said.

  “I was wrong,” Tonto said. “Those guys are good.”

  “The big guy,” Jim Bob said, “he knows what he’s doing, all right.”

  “You think they’ll take a run at us?” I said.

  “I think they still hope we’ll lead them to something,” Jim Bob said.

  “How did they get onto us so quick?” Leonard said.

  “Someone somewhere told them something,” Tonto said. “You got to wonder who and when, but the thing that matters is, time comes they’ll stop fucking around and come for us. They’ll maybe think they can make us talk by pulling out fingernails or cutting off eyelids or some such thing, sticking a stick up our dicks.”

  “That eyelid part,” I said. “I want to be up front and go on record right now. I’ll talk like you haven’t never heard anyone talk before if that’s done to me. I’ll be like a whole flock of canaries. They won’t have enough paper to write down what I got to say. And they start threatening my dick, I’ll start making stuff up to go along with it.”

  We had tried to do it the easy way, which was drive over to the side of the lake where Hirem said the cabins were, but the easy way turned out hard, so we were going to cut to the chase and ask directions. We waited until the traffic at the store played out, then I went inside and found the owner behind a counter that contained whoopee cushions, fake dog shit, and all manner of redneck yuks. An older woman with gray hair and a face only a blind, prideless mother could love was behind the counter arranging a stack of little Texas flags on sticks in a large decorative coffee cup.

  She said, “What can I do you for, honey?”

  I gave her my winning smile, though I couldn’t remember the last time it had won me anything. “Me and some buddies, we were supposed to meet a friend here on the lake, but we’re kind of confused.”

  “Lake’s out back of here. How confusing is that?”

  I grinned like that was the best I had heard since my joke about the dog with the shot-up paw. Come to think of it, Leonard was right. That joke sucked.

  “This buddy of ours said he was gonna meet us at a cabin on the east side of the lake—”

  She pointed. “That’s east.”

  “Yes, ma’am, we been over there. But the problem is, we can’t find where we’re supposed to meet him. He said a fellow named Bill Jordan had some cabins—”

  “Bill Jordan. That old fart is in the ground, some three years now. He don’t own them anymore.”

  “Oh, well, that puts a damper on things.”

  “A crippled fella with a funny haircut owns them now, but he don’t rent out much. Got a pension.”

  “I see. Well, I’m pretty sure my friend is meeting us there. That’s what he said anyway. He hasn’t been here in a while, so he probably rented from the other fella.”

  “It’s kind of hard to get to actually,” she said. “Road is near washed out and it winds up in the pines. Good hunting up there, though. I know a fellow killed a wild hog there big enough to tussle with an elephant.”

  “That a fact?”

  “Of course not. Ain’t no hogs big as elephants. But it was big.”

  “I see. So, you go around on the east side, but where do you turn? We were all over that place, and we couldn’t find what we were looking for.”

  She got a piece of paper and a pencil and drew me a map, explaining as she did. Pushing it across the counter, she said, “Now, you got to watch all the ruts and potholes, and it’s narrow and there’s limbs all grown up around it. I was up there last year taking the crippled fella with a funny haircut some supplies. He calls up and I deliver. For a little extra fee, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Anyway, it’s like the goddamn Amazon up there.”

  “Well, thanks.”

  I started to go out. She said, “You know, you wanted to, there’s an easier way. It’ll take a little longer, but it’s still easier, and you’d have to get going before the storm comes up, ’cause one is coming.”

  “So we were told.”

  “You could rent one of my boats, take it straight across the lake, and you could just dock at the place.”

  “How long would that take?”

  “About an hour, maybe two if you get some tough wind and you ain’t no hand with a boat. You go now, you got to rent the boat for overnight. Or you can rent if for a few days if you’d rather be over there awhile.”

  “How much is the boat?” I asked.

  37

  In the van I explained about the map and the boat. I said, “Me and Leonard can take the boat across, and you guys can follow the map. Thing is, I think you don’t want to go over there right away, because you do, they might follow.”

  “They won’t fool me again,” Tonto said.

  “Just in case they do, however,” I said, “we could go across by boat, which they may not expect, see if we can find Hirem’s boy, the girl, and the money. It might even be a sneakier way to come up on them if they’re there. We can maybe call you when we get there and you can come around.”

  “Checked my phone a little while ago,” Jim Bob said. “No signal out here.”

  “All right,” I said. “Go do something that will give us two hours before you arrive, and we’ll take the boat across. We get there early we’ll hold our own until you show up. I think we can handle two kids and a pile of money.”

  “But if that big fellow and his pals show up before we do,” Jim Bob said, “you might have your hands full.”

  “They been full before,” Leonard said.

  We spent some of our money on fishing poles and a bucket of minnows for show, a can of gas, bought a couple of sandwiches and a bag of vanilla wafers and a six-pack of Dr Pepper. The owner of the store, who told us her name was Annie, to
ok us down to the boat and gave us instructions, and we set out.

  It was really choppy and the boat rode high and dropped low. It was making my stomach queasy. The motor churned the water behind us and I pointed the bow due east, like Annie had suggested. There was a big stump in the middle of the lake she had directed us to, and when we got to that, she said we ought to start following a line of orange buoys and then those would go away and we had to hold due east until we saw a strip of land. She said it would be a lot farther away than we thought it was. Thing then was, when we got closer, we’d see a rise of pine trees and a dock out front of them, and there was a little trail that led up from the dock to the cabins.

  For the moment, that stump in the distance was my bearing.

  When we were out a ways, we overturned the minnow bucket into the lake and let all our guys go. Leonard said, “Swim, little fishes. Go, make your way in this big wet world. Make us proud.”

  The stump showed up and then the orange buoys. We followed those until they played out, but we couldn’t see a strip of land. Not yet. It was a big lake. All we could see was water, and the sky had darkened and it had started to rain, and we didn’t so much as have an umbrella.

  The rain grew thick, and then I got nervous because the boat was holding water. Leonard took the minnow bucket and started bailing. I kept hold of the motor throttle and thought maybe I might regain some religion, because the water was jumping now and the rain had gotten so wild I could hardly see my hand in front of my face, let alone a distant strip of land sporting pine trees.

  I decided keeping my hand on the throttle and using my wits would probably do me better than religion, and I kept at it. The rain kept at it too. We bounced up and down, and at one point the boat listed to port and water splashed in heavily, and Leonard was really working that bucket.

  “That damn rain is cold,” he said.

  “What, you think I haven’t noticed?”

  We went on like that for a while, and I feared we had gone off point and were traveling in the wrong direction, maybe even boating in circles. But then the rain slacked and I saw a strip of land and some pines rising up. I glanced at my watch, putting it close to my face. We had been at it for an hour and a half.