Vanilla Ride

by Joe R. Lansdale

  The wind was really whistling now and the boat was struggling. Leonard was bailing like a maniac.

  “Almost there,” I said.

  The engine sputtered and died. We were out of gas.

  “Now,” Leonard said, “if a goddamn whale will swallow us, it will be a perfect day.”

  38

  The gas can was under one of the seats, and I pulled it out and went about trying to pour some of it in the outboard tank. Way the water made the boat hump up and down it was hard work, and some of the gas went into the lake.

  I finally finished with the can, but by that time we had drifted a considerable distance. I didn’t care. It didn’t matter to me right then if we got to where we were going or if we just made land, any land, and because of that, when I saw a glimpse of shoreline, I took the boat in that direction. I hoped we wouldn’t bring the boat up against a stump, ’cause at the speed we were going if we hit one, we’d be flung into the cold deep churning water, and that wouldn’t be good. Still, I couldn’t seem to slow the throttle down. The rain was slamming us and it was cold and I wanted off the lake.

  Something went wrong, and we went into the water, the grateful minnows we had released would save us. Like Aquaman, we would call to them and they would come and lift us out of the water on their shiny backs and carry us ashore.

  But I wasn’t counting on it.

  Most likely, we’d drown like rats.

  I saw it just before we hit it. I thought it was a log, but it was an alligator, and when we struck it the boat jumped and I went out of it as if shot from a catapult. I caught a glimpse of Leonard, still clinging to the handle of the minnow bucket, go up and over and make a nice little flip into the water and disappear under the waves.

  I swam and my arm hit the gator and I screamed like a little girl. The rest of the gator sailed on past me and I could smell a rotten odor, realized the big bastard was dead, and had been awhile. He might have died up in the reeds along the bank and the storm had stirred him loose. He sailed past and the waves rolled over him and took him under and then I went under. When I came up the minnow bucket was floating past me. I grabbed at it like it was a life raft.

  Holding on to it, I kicked toward shore, but shore had moved away. Or so it seemed. The water had carried me out farther and quicker than I could imagine. The lake was so cold I could hardly get a breath. I looked around for Leonard and didn’t see him. I looked around for the boat, didn’t see it either. Annie was going to be pissed.

  I kicked toward what looked like shore and hoped a live alligator didn’t find me, hoped in this weather they would be somewhere cozy. Then again, I wasn’t sure if alligators liked it cozy. Maybe they liked the rain.

  I called out for Leonard, but the wind took my voice and carried it away and all I got out of my yelling was a hoarse throat.

  And then my feet were touching ground. Not well, but they were touching. I pushed on toward some reeds, and after what seemed like enough time for the Big Bang to have happened and all the species on the planet to have developed and moved on out to the stars, I made it to some waving grass and reeds and stumbled into that, went down a few times, came up with a mouthful of muddy water. As I tromped through, barely able to stand, hardly able to see, I came across a long four-foot-wide fragment of our boat. On his back in the water, hanging on to the fragment, was a big black guy.

  “Leonard,” I said.

  He let go of the board and sat up in the water and said, “Well, Ahab, that boat trip was sure a good idea.”

  I checked for my .38. I still had it.

  Leonard checked for his automatic. Still there. Well, at least we had that going for us. We were in a position to add to the worst nature of man and the final downfall of the world. By God, we had our guns.

  Leonard stood up slowly and looked around. The minnow bucket had floated up into the tall grass and was hung there. He focused on it, said, “I guess the cookies and the Dr Pepper didn’t make it.”

  “Missing in action,” I said.

  “Now that’s a blow,” Leonard said.

  Slogging along the shoreline through the rain, we saw a boathouse and made our way over there. It was wide open and we went inside. There was a boat floating in a stall and there was fishing tackle in the boat, and on one wall were some croaker sacks for hunting and some nasty-looking towels that were probably used to wipe the boat down after fishing. There were four rain slickers on nails. A fairly large dead fish floated belly-up near the boat and the waves washed at it until it went under the flooring, out of sight.

  We used the towels to dry off and to dry our weapons, hoping they’d still shoot. The towels made us dry enough, but they left us smelling like fish. We sat on the edge of the boathouse dock with the heavy damp towels over our shoulders and looked out at the boat that was docked there. There were paddles in the bottom of the boat and no motor. The boat was bouncing up and down and we could see the lake from where we sat, and the rain was furious. Everything was gray. It was as if the sky and the lake had joined together.

  I pulled my cell phone out of my pants pocket, shook the water out of it. It was still working, but there wasn’t any signal, like Jim Bob had said. I put it away.

  “I saw a dead alligator,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, I think I saw him too,” Leonard said.

  “Was he big and dark?”

  “Yep.”

  “That was him, all right.”

  “Say he was dead?”

  “Very.”

  “Thank goodness for small favors.”

  We waited for the downpour to slack off, but it didn’t. Freezing, we toweled off again and took a couple of slickers off the wall and put them on and went to where we had come in and stood in the open doorway and looked out at the rain.

  “I don’t want to,” Leonard said.

  “Me neither,” I said.

  “But, alas …” Leonard said, and we went out into the rain.

  39

  I had no idea where we had ended up, but my guess was near where we wanted to be. But that didn’t change the fact that near was not the same as being there, and every tree looked pretty much like the other, and I didn’t see any trails. We wandered around in the rain, damp inside our slickers but better off now with the hoods pulled up and the cold rain not coming right down on us.

  Ending up again where the boat had come apart, or at least where part of it had been in the tall grass with Leonard, we again saw the foam minnow bucket caught up in the grass, and floating in the water where it hadn’t been before, pushed up in the shallows, was our six-pack of Dr Pepper.

  Leonard waded out in the water and got the six-pack, carried it by its plastic holder onto the shore. He set it down on the ground and pulled one of the Dr Peppers off one of the plastic rings, pulled the tab, and nearly drank the whole thing with one big gulp.

  He peeled off another and handed it to me, and then got another for himself. We both drank. When he was finished he dropped the can on the ground with the other one and said, “I’m tough enough today to litter.”

  Even under the circumstances, anal as I am about such things, I wanted to find a trash can but figured it might be best in this situation to be able to draw the .38 more than be an environmentalist and tote an empty can around. Reluctantly, we left the three remaining Dr Peppers there and wandered around like a couple of geese.

  I saw a narrow trail and pointed it out, and Leonard said, “Who the hell knows? Let’s try it.”

  The trail went up a steep hill, through some pines. The pines were close together and the soil there was sandy and had turned the color of milk-and-flour gravy. The rain ran down the hill and into ruts that tires had made, and the whole thing was just wide enough for a car. After we had walked halfway up the hill, the trees got thick enough to cut the rain a bit, and finally we broke out at the top of a hill into a clearing, and there was a line of little cabins that made our tourist court digs look like the Taj Mahal. There was one cabin that wasn’t in a row, and
it was a little off to the side. I presumed that would belong to the owner, the fellow Annie had called The Crippled Fellow With A Funny Haircut.

  There was a car in front of one of the cabins. It was the only car present. It was a black Escalade.

  “Dat dere, Brer Bear,” Leonard said, “be duh goddamn car we be lookin’ for, and in dat dere cabin—”

  “Leonard. That’s enough.”

  “Okay. I figure they’re inside, with the money. Or what’s left of it.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Well, I don’t see any brown Fords, and I don’t see our guys yet, so my suggestion is we waltz ourselves over to yon cabin and knock on the door and stick guns in their faces.”

  “That’ll work,” I said. “And if it doesn’t, we’ll improvise.”

  Observing the cabin briefly, we decided Leonard would go around front and I’d go around back. I ducked under a low window and looked toward the big cabin to see if anyone was watching me from there. If they were, they were very clever. I wondered too if anyone was in any of the other cabins. I thought not. No cars. But they could be gone for a bowl of chili. Perhaps they were all over at Annie’s, chatting and laughing it up about some plastic dog shit and a whoopee cushion.

  Around back, I pulled the .38 and pressed up against the door, pushing my ear tight. I listened. The rain was so loud I couldn’t hear myself think. I pushed against the door to see how sturdy it was, decided it wasn’t that sturdy.

  I heard the front door budge, and I knew Leonard was in. I hit the back door with my shoulder and was in, stumbling. There really wasn’t anywhere to go. The back door led through a little kitchen and right into the bedroom/living room, where our two lovebirds were sacked out in a bedraggled bed. The boy reached for an automatic lying at the bedside, but Leonard was already there and he grabbed it and pulled it back. He now had a gun in either hand.

  The boy sat up in bed, and when he did the sheet fell back from the young lady. She was wearing a thin white bra. It was cold in the room, and the tips of her breasts punched at it like ice picks. Leonard said, “Don’t panic, kid. We don’t want to hurt you.”

  “We’ll give the money back,” the boy, Tim, said. “We don’t want it.”

  “You wanted it when you took it,” I said.

  “I didn’t think it would matter then,” the boy said.

  “So why does it matter now?” I said, pushing back the hood on the rain slicker.

  “I guess I knew better, but we been thinking it over. We want to give it back. Just let us go and take the money.”

  “Looks like to me,” Leonard said, “you been doing more than thinking.”

  “Please don’t hurt us,” Tim said.

  “We don’t want to hurt you,” Leonard said, closing the front door he had knocked open, cutting back the cold wind. “We’re on a mission from your dad … sort of. We’re also working for the law and for ourselves.”

  “You’re not… with the organization?” Tim asked.

  “Organization?” I said. “You mean the Dixie Mafia?”

  Tim nodded.

  “Nope. We are freelancers.”

  The girl, who had not spoken, said, “You want the money for yourselves?”

  “That would be nice,” I said, “but no. That isn’t the deal.”

  I studied her closely. She was worth running off with. Her hair was cut short, almost man style, but she was a fine-looking girl with a long, sleek neck and deep eyes you’d like to fall into, especially if you were a young man, and from what I could see of her body she wasn’t going to make anyone turn their eyes away in disgust.

  We lowered our guns. Leonard pushed back his rain hood and sat on the windowsill. I went and shut the back door to the kitchen, came back and found a chair. I said, “You two just stay there for a minute. What we’re gonna do is we’re gonna wait for some friends of ours, and then we’re going to load you, along with the money—where is it, by the way?”

  “Under the bed,” Tim said.

  “Under the bed?” Leonard said. “That’s as sneaky as you get? You put it under the bed? They put it under the bed, Hap.”

  “You’re not very good criminals,” I said. “But you’re lucky we’re the ones found you, and we found you for your dad, and we’re taking you and the money back and things are maybe going to be okay, except for the part where your dad squeals about his business and you all have to go into witness protection. Maybe your dad does some prison. Up in the air right now.”

  “Oh hell,” Tim said.

  “Yep,” I said. “Oh hell.”

  I looked at Leonard. He was turned slightly so he could see out the window. Rivulets of rain ran down the window and it was clouded over. Leonard used the palm of his hand to wipe the inside a bit, and then he said, “It just keeps on coming.” He looked at me, said, “Brown Ford.”

  40

  “Drop your cock and grab your socks,” I said, looking at Tim. “In fact, forget the socks. Nab some drawers pronto, ’cause it’s about to get interesting in here.”

  “Oh hell,” Tim said, threw back the covers, and scrambled out naked, grabbing some pants off the floor. The girl, whose name I had yet to know, came out of the bed on the other side, pulling on jeans.

  Leonard said, “You know what’s really swell, both the goddamn doors are already broken in.”

  I went over to the window and looked out. The big guy we had met over chicken and links was wearing a raincoat with a hood and he was standing by the Escalade, looking it over like a prospective buyer. He had an automatic with a silencer in his right hand. The other three guys were out of the car now and one of them had a double-barrel shotgun and the other two had handguns. I felt my asshole pucker, and in that instant every good meal, hot fuck, blue sky I had ever experienced jumped through my head.

  I didn’t know how they had found us—hit or miss, or maybe they had talked to Annie, bought some whoopee cushions and a box of fake dog shit in exchange for information about what it was some guys might be asking her about.

  It didn’t really matter now.

  Big Guy looked up at the house, and Leonard and I moved away from the window.

  “There’s nothing left but for you two to get under the bed with the money,” I said. “And hope things go better than I think they will.”

  They did as I suggested. When Leonard and I were dead, it would be easy pickings for Big Guy and his posse. Pop these two and take the dough, stop off for photos with the bear and a couple of hot links, then home.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” Leonard said. “The cavalry has arrived. Sort of.”

  I looked.

  Tonto’s van had pulled up and he and Jim Bob were out of the car. They weren’t wearing rain gear. Tonto had his coat pushed back and the .45 holsters were empty; the guns were in his hands. Jim Bob was carrying a pump twelve-gauge with a shortened barrel. They were walking toward the Ford and the four guys as if they were meeting for tea.

  Big Guy said something, and then two of his guys, one with the shotgun, the other with a pistol, went back toward where they had parked the Ford. Big Guy eased toward us slowly, and one of the other guys started around the cabin, toward the back.

  “Who you want?” I said.

  “The big motherfucker,” Leonard said.

  “Good.”

  I hurried into the kitchen and stepped up on the counter that was near the door and pointed my weapon, waited. There was a slight sound at the back door, and then it was pushed back gently. I saw a hand with an automatic poke in, and then I heard a shot from the front of the cabin, Leonard’s or Big Guy’s weapon. I didn’t know for sure. And then the guy at the kitchen door, perhaps smelling blood in the water, charged in and I shot him above the ear and he fell back against the wall and his head stayed propped against it while the rest of him spread out in that relaxed manner only the dead have. There was blood on the wall.

  I jumped down and charged into the other room. Big Guy had Leonard by the neck and was lifting him off the f
loor with both hands. Leonard’s gun was on the floor between Big Guy’s legs, and Big Guy’s weapon was thrown up against the wall. I wasn’t sure how things had got that way, who had fired and who was hit, but before I could blow Big Guy’s brains out, I heard a shotgun blast outside, and then another, and then Leonard went sailing across the room, slammed onto the bed hard enough for the slats to break and the girl to scream from under there, and then Leonard was up and the kids were crawling out from under the bed, cowering in the corner.

  I lifted up my .38 and shot Big Guy directly in the chest. He stepped across the room quickly and grabbed my gun hand, and slapped the hell out of me with the back of his other hand. I did a nice backwards roll, and when I got it together, Big Guy was firing at me with my .38.

  Leonard leaped like a panther and hit Big Guy above the knees with the side of his body, trying to clip him. Didn’t work. He bounced off.

  I got the gun from the dead guy in the kitchen, a nine-mil, and went back to help Leonard. Leonard was grabbed again, and Big Guy was slinging him around like wet laundry. I couldn’t get a good aim.

  All of this was going on at the same time there was a lot of racket outside. Gunfire, cursing, screams.

  Finally Big Guy tired enough, that Leonard, still hanging high while this guy choked him, was able to slap his hands over Big Guy’s ears. Big Guy dropped him. I tried to shoot Big Guy as he came rushing toward me, but the gun jammed.

  Typical.

  He grabbed me around the waist and pushed me backwards and slammed me into the wall so that the back of my neck hit a bookshelf and the shelf came loose and fell and the one above it fell too, hitting me on top of the head dead center. At least the owner wasn’t a reader; no books fell on my head.

  Next thing I knew I was pitched against the far wall next to the open front door. I got up and saw Leonard throw a right hook into Big Guy’s body and jerk back his hand with a sour look on his face.