Bad Chili

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Big Man moved very close to me. He said. “We hit the crank, you get the juice, I can tell you now, you’re most likely gonna shit yourself. If not this shot, the next one. Save the humiliation. Take the bat. We’ll tidy you up a bit afterwards, pull your pants up, dump you in your nigger’s yard. That way, you don’t rot somewhere.”

  “I don’t think you’d do that,” I said.

  “Use the bat?”

  “Clean me up and dump me where I’d be found.”

  “You might be right,” Big Man said, “but you could go out without all that pain. All right, Collins. The moment of truth. One last time, then Kinney, he’s got to hit the crank, and then we got to start breakin’ some things too. Where is the video?”

  “What video?”

  “Hit it, Kinney.”

  And Kinney did and the world went black and then white and then it threw colors all around and I felt my body jump like frog legs on a griddle, then I heard a scream, a loud, horrible scream, like a woman in fear, but the scream was mine. The room was blood-red, then black, and out of the blackness Big Man’s face floated and hung above me like a moon made of gangrene flesh surrounded by hair and the sweet smell of a breath mint.

  “How was that?” Big Man asked.

  It took a while for me to get my breath. “Invigorating,” I said.

  “Oh,” Big Man said. “You liked that, huh?”

  Again, some time passed. I said, “I prefer it as a one-time experience.”

  “I bet. We got to do it again, Collins. Unless you want to tell me something I want to know. I’ll say this for you, you let a fart like the clap of creation, but you didn’t shit yourself. But let me tell you this. Booger, he knows better than to stand behind that chair. Shit has a way of flyin’ out from the back there and sprayin’. Those stains on the pillow, what you think that is?”

  “Olive oil?”

  “Shit. A little blood.”

  “You might as well finish me,” I said. “You aren’t going to get anything from me, because I don’t know anything.”

  “He might be tellin’ the truth,” Booger said.

  “Yeah,” Big Man said. “He might. But things still got to come out the same. How’s about we give him another boost?”

  I already felt as if I were going to pass out. I pulled up all my reserves, which were mostly AWOL, and steeled myself.

  There was an explosion and the walls of the shack vibrated and the floor jumped and the lightbulb above me rocked and I realized it wasn’t my balls and brain dealing with electricity. It was a real explosion, outside the shack.

  Big Man bent down, snapped a revolver out of an ankle holster, leaped for the door, jerked it open. The night was bright orange and yellow with flecks of red. I could see the ’64 Impala. It was blazing, sending up gasoline and oil to the great motor gods of the heavens.

  A sound behind me. A wham! Followed by another. Then another. Booger leaped and got hold of the ball bat, and Pock Face jerked back from where he was kneeling. The wires on the battery jumped out of the bowl, and the bowl turned over and the ice ran under my ass. Pock Face bumped my chair and I went over sideways. Pock’s head knocked against the lightbulb, sent it swinging.

  Then it all happened in the alternating light and shadow of the swaying bulb.

  Big Man popped a shot from his little ankle gun. It made a bright burst in the shadows. The bulb swung back and there was a blast from a shotgun.

  Pock Face, a.k.a. Kinney, hurtled over my chair, crashed to the floor next to me. Some of the dark jelly that was now his face slapped against my cheek and chin. The blood was so hot it stung.

  Big Man bellowed, bolted through the open door as another blast from the shotgun ripped into the air where he had been standing. Fragments of the wall and door frame leaped toward me.

  Shadow.

  A tall man, the one with the shotgun, stumped past me, and as the light swung back and finally came to rest, I saw his shotgun stock swing out, catch Booger upside the head with a sound like someone popping loose the vacuum-packed lid of a jar.

  Booger took the blow with a grunt and a spray of teeth. He swung the bat, but the man holding the shotgun used his weapon to block it, brought the barrel around in a short arc and hit Booger in the face. Booger did a kind of backwards hop, hit the table, knocked it flat, fell down on top of it.

  The man with the shotgun kicked his boot into Booger’s balls. Booger screamed and the man fit the shotgun into Booger’s mouth. He said, “Good night, ass-lick,” and fired.

  Booger’s head sort of went away.

  * * *

  I lay very still. The man with the shotgun squatted down and looked at me. He was a lean-faced dude wearing a stained white cowboy hat, old boots, blue jeans, and a faded western shirt decorated with little green flowers. I realized the face belonged to the man in the yellow Pontiac.

  “Your ass is hangin’ out, friend,” he said.

  “I’m also tied to a chair.”

  “I see that.”

  “You planning on shooting me, too?”

  “Well, you are kinda gift-wrapped . . . But no.”

  The cowboy took a large knife from his jeans pocket, cut the cord on my feet and around my chest, then he got behind me and went to work on the wire, twisting it free.

  I wobbled as I tried to stand. The cowboy put the knife away with one quick movement, took my arm and helped me. I pulled up my pants and fastened them. I said, “Man, I don’t know what to say . . . Did you have to kill them?”

  “How about ‘Howdy’? And yeah, I guess I did. I started to just yell time-out, but decided that wasn’t a good idea. I’m Jim Bob Luke.”

  “Hap Collins,” I said.

  “I know who you are,” he said. “I followed them out here, then drove past, you know, to stay cool, so they wouldn’t know I was following them, but the sonofabitches sort of lost me for a time or I’d have been here sooner.”

  “I’m just glad you showed up. Not that I understand why. What about Big Man?”

  “Oh, I ain’t worried. I been watchin’ the doors.”

  “Confident, aren’t you?”

  “I invented the goddamn word. Now, why don’t you use your shirtsleeve and wipe them brains off your face, and let’s skedaddle before ole big un comes back.”

  “I thought you were confident.”

  “I am. But I ain’t stupid.”

  20

  Jim Bob Luke led me out through the back way, over the door he had kicked down. We went quickly into the woods. He moved well in the woods, and we went along like that and found a spot where we could look through the foliage, back at the shack and the raging fire of the Impala, but there wasn’t any sign of Big Man Mountain.

  “Hated to burn a classic car like that,” Jim Bob said. “I started to just kick the door down and come in blazin’, but I like a little edge. You any good with guns?”

  “I don’t like them, but I’m good with them.”

  “Good. I got another one here, and it ain’t no peashooter. It’s a forty-five automatic.”

  He gave it to me. We sat there and watched the car burn. The fire wasn’t so high now and it licked around the frame of the Impala like the devil’s tongue licking the bones of an animal.

  “Ole big un is out there somewhere,” Jim Bob said. “I’m tryin’ to decide I want to hunt him down or not.”

  “He has a gun.”

  “I know. He shot at me with it. He’s a shitty shot. Couldn’t hit a circus elephant in the ass with a trick stool. But out here in the dark, and this being his stomping grounds, maybe I ought not. How you feelin’?”

  “Queasy.”

  “Can you buck up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Come on.”

  We moved deeper into the woods, along the edge of a swampy creek, then finally out of the trees into a clearing. We climbed under a barbed-wire fence and onto the grass next to the road. The yellow Pontiac was parked there, in the grass. It sat on four flat tires.

  �
��Well,” Jim Bob said, looking around. “Looks like ole big un got here ahead of us.”

  “Think he’s watching us?”

  “Could be.”

  Jim Bob reached in his back pocket, took out a penlight and flashed it around. He found tracks in the soft dirt of the road. He said, “Motherfucker’s got some feet on him, don’t he?”

  “I’ll say.”

  “And look here.”

  Jim Bob put the penlight’s glow on the side of his car. There was a deep scrape along the side.

  “He just had to do that, didn’t he?” Jim Bob said. “Well, the scraped paint don’t stop me, and I got me four spares in the trunk, so fuck him. I used to be a goddamn Boy Scout. I came prepared.”

  I hurt something awful downstairs in the ball department, but I changed the tires while Jim Bob kept guard with the shotgun. “Why’d he just do the tires?” I said. “Why not screw something else up?”

  “I think we interrupted him,” Jim Bob said. “And he didn’t want any part of this shotgun.”

  I changed the tires as fast as I could, constantly expecting a shot in the back. But Big Man Mountain didn’t come out of the woods with his little ankle gun blazing. He didn’t offer to help me with the lug bolts. A Saint Bernard didn’t bring me a keg.

  When all four spares were on, Jim Bob put the flats in the trunk along with the jack and drove us out of there. I couldn’t hold out any longer. The pain was too much. The activity had made it worse. I passed out on the car seat.

  * * *

  When I awoke, Jim Bob had my feet and Leonard had my arms. I looked up at Leonard. He said, “Take it easy, brother. You all right now.”

  “Funny,” I said. “I don’t feel all right.”

  I closed my eyes and they carried me away and put me on a cloud and the cloud was comfortable, except for a fire built between my legs, but I couldn’t move to get away from the fire; no matter how hard I tried it followed me, and finally I slept, fire or no fire, and in my dream heads kept exploding, and two rabid squirrels, one with a pocked face, the other one black with a shaved head, bit me repeated on the balls, while another squirrel, very plump with oversized feet and a beard and devil’s horns, turned a crank on a battery that threw sparks.

  21

  When I awoke it was early morning, still dark. There were strands of light in the darkness outside, but the strands seemed to be suffering against the night, as if blackness had decided to push the light back and hold it down until it stopped breathing.

  And maybe it just seemed that way because I had witnessed two men killed and hadn’t had any breakfast and my balls felt as if someone had borrowed them during the night for a game of Ping-Pong and had put them back in reverse.

  I went into Leonard’s kitchen, saw Jim Bob sitting at the table with Leonard. They were drinking beer. Jim Bob had his hat cocked back on his head, his legs resting on a chair.

  “Breakfast of champions,” I said.

  “There you have it,” Jim Bob said. “Pour these suds on a bowl of cornflakes, you get all the vitamins you need for a day.”

  I got a glass and the milk jug out of the fridge and sat at the table. I poured milk in my glass. Even doing that made my balls hurt.

  Leonard said, “Jim Bob here’s been tellin’ me about last night. Just started telling me some other stuff. Actually, now that I think about it, I been tellin’ him stuff, and I don’t know why.”

  “I’m charmin’,” Jim Bob said.

  “Yeah, and I could be fuckin’ up, talkin’ like that,” Leonard said. “I don’t even know you.”

  Jim Bob grinned. “Like I said. I’m charmin’.”

  “You saved my man’s life, here,” Leonard said. “That gives you some points. But it don’t give you the game. Know what I’m sayin’?”

  “I think I’m pickin’ up the important parts,” Jim Bob said.

  “Way I see it,” I said, “I could use lots of explanation. And let me throw in a tip, Jim Bob. Don’t try and follow people in a yellow Pontiac. It’s conspicuous.”

  “Hell,” Jim Bob said. “I know that. I wasn’t all that worried you saw me or not. Not later on. I followed you lots you didn’t see me, yellow Pontiac or not. Actually, my preferred toolin’ vehicle is a red fifties Cadillac I call the Red Bitch, but right now it’s in the shop. Or to be more exact, it’s being rebuilt from the tires up. I fucked that baby up big-time. Ran it into a brick wall tryin’ to run over a sonofabitch tried to kill me.”

  “You’re quick to take people out, aren’t you?” I said.

  “Wooo,” Jim Bob said. “Now that he’s at the house all safe and sound with his balls in his drawers, he don’t want to like no killin’s. Let me tell you something, Collins. Wasn’t for me, you’d have charcoal briquets for nuts right now. You think I could have gone in there last night and them boys would have just challenged me to a paper-rock-scissors contest?”

  “Ole Hap here,” Leonard said, “he swats a fly, he’s gonna brood on it for a couple days, maybe put out a little sugar on a dog turd for the relatives.”

  “I’m just saying two men are dead. I’m not saying I’m against you saving my life or protecting your own. It had to be done, but I’m not proud of the fact.”

  “Hell, I’m proud,” Jim Bob said. “Only thing I regret about drizzly shits like that is I can’t kill them three or four times apiece.”

  “How do you know about us?” I asked.

  “He’s a private detective,” Leonard said. “He also knows Charlie.”

  “That certainly helps with the detective work, doesn’t it?” I said.

  “That’s a fact,” Jim Bob said. “But I done told Leonard some of this stuff.”

  “How about you go over it a little more?” I said.

  Jim Bob upended his beer. “You got any more of this piss?”

  “Fridge,” Leonard said.

  Jim Bob got up, found himself a beer, sat down. He twisted off the top and took a deep jolt. He sounded like a pig sucking on a nursing bottle.

  When he had slogged about half the beer down, he sat the bottle on the table, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, said, “I reckon I can give you the short sporty version.”

  “I get the feeling nothing you say is going to be short,” I said.

  Jim Bob grinned at me. “You got a point there. I won’t kid you, I like to hear myself talk, ’cause I’m so goddamn interestin’.”

  “Then make me interested,” I said.

  “Whoa, goddamn it, hold off,” Jim Bob said. “Incoming.”

  Jim Bob lifted his hip and let a fart fly.

  “I been saving that one,” he said.

  “It was nice of you to share it with us,” Leonard said.

  “Yeah, well, sniff deep and you can have a Mexican dinner secondhand,” Jim Bob said.

  “Don’t you get a little tired working so hard to be folksy?” I said.

  “Naw,” Jim Bob said. “I figure it’s kind of an edge. People don’t know what you’re really thinking. They think you’re just a shallow good ole boy.”

  “But you aren’t?” I said.

  Jim Bob gave me a dazzling smile. “Naw, Collins, I ain’t. But you can believe what you want.”

  “Jim Bob’s here because of a kid named Custer Stevens,” Leonard said.

  “That’s right,” Jim Bob said. “His parents live in Houston. I have my office over in Pasadena, Texas. Or I call it an office. It’s a little pig farm I own. These days you got to shoot the bad guys and raise your own meat, ’cause the pay for private detective work stinks.”

  “You’re drifting again,” I said.

  “So I am,” Jim Bob said. “Well, this Stevens, his boy come down here to go to the university. Damnedest thing was they sent him here to get him out of the big city, thought he’d be nice and safe here. Neither one of ’em knew Custer liked to suck dicks. Anyway, Stevens had a chum down here named Richard Dane. Few years back I did some work for ole Dane, and Dane recommended me to Stevens.”

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p; “You get around, don’t you?” I said.

  “I certainly do,” Jim Bob said. “There ain’t hardly a town in East Texas I ain’t worked in one way or another. There’s people all over the place got problems, and I’m a problem solver.”

  “You left out what this Dane recommended you to do,” Leonard said.

  “Well, this boy, Custer, he come down here and got in with boys liked to do the brown-eye express, and pretty soon he’s hanging out in the park shoppin’ for goober. He meets a guy, and this guy takes him into the middle of the park, then a bunch of guys jump out, beat him up, knock Custer’s teeth out, make him do a circle suck and a goober jerk for about fifteen minutes.”

  “And they put it on film,” I said.

  “Exactly. Custer decides to phone his parents about the fact he’s a Hershey highway kinda guy, tells them what happened. They get all bent out of shape about his sexual preference, but when they drive down to see him, see the beatin’ he’s took, hear about the video, they forget all that shit and do the right thing. They go to the police. They talk to the chief. He gives ’em a line of shit, but they can tell pretty quick-like he don’t give a fuck about a fag and they get vibes he thinks the whole thing serves the boy right.

  “To shorten it up, the boy leaves school, goes home, and they wait for justice. And wait. And wait. Chief ain’t do’n dick. He’s shufflin’ some papers. Now, Richard Dane comes in. He’s in contact with Stevens, and he’s the one recommended the boy go to college here in the first place, so Dane, he feels guilty. He tells Stevens I done some work for him once came out satisfactory, and he might want to hire me to snoop around. Stevens hires me. I know Charlie on the department from a little job a year back. I call him, drive down to visit. Charlie helps where he can, but it ain’t much. He tells me about the other beatings in the park. All of them swept under the rug by the chief, so I start poking my nose around and this fella McNee keeps comin’ up.”

  “Horse,” I said.

  “That’s the one,” Jim Bob said. “I check out the park, this guy’s always around. There’s gay action, this guy’s around. You wouldn’t believe how many propositions I got from goober grabbers while I was doin’ this.”