“Yep. No matter how tough you are, you can’t whip a bunch of guys at one time if they want to whip you bad enough. And if they whip you damn good and dead solid, it hurts like a sonofabitch.”
“That’s the lesson. Not only is the Blazing Wheel a biker bar, it’s a seriously Caucasian bar. Dixie flag. The whole works. You’re not even gonna find James Brown on the jukebox in this joint. Charlie Pride wouldn’t be welcome. And here I am, a nigger with an attitude and a stick. A very solid stick, I might add. And I see this guy I’ve seen with Raul, and I walk over to him, holding this damn honkie knocker by my side-”
“Honkie knocker?”
“Sorry. Slipped out. No offense intended… And I say, ‘I’m Leonard Pine, and you’ve been fuckin’ with my boyfriend.’
“That’s original.”
“Wish I’d thought the line over better, but that’s what came out. Horse Dick threw a right cross at my head, and I drilled his arm on the inside with my stick, went to knockin’ apples on his head. That first noggin shot I hit him so hard I bet his fuckin’ dog back home shit a turd in the shape of a praying Jesus. All this happened quick-like, and these guys decided they were gonna skin me for knockin’ their buddy, so I pull my pistol, shoot a hole in the floor and scare them back. I go out to the car and they follow.”
“And you pull the twelve-gauge and shoot out the neon sign and blow up some bikes.”
“You heard about that?”
“Same place I got the news about the shotgun, the broom handle, and the revolver. Charlie.”
“That goddamn Charlie is one knowledgeable sonofabitch, ain’t he?”
“That he is.”
“So I went away from there, and a few of these guys followed, but I lost them. Or thought I did. I decided Duffin’s pasture was a good place to hide. I pulled in, killed the lights, parked, and sat. I think, all right, I’ve lost them. I start to relax. I have a bag of cookies in the car there, and I’m eatin’ them, and I glance in the rearview mirror, and what do I see?”
“An old gentleman and eight tiny reindeer.”
“The biker fucks. I wasn’t slick as I thought. They’d seen me turn in, left their bikes down the road somewhere, and were sneakin’ up on my highly attractive shiny black ass.”
“But you were sneakier.”
“I slid to the other side of the car, opened the door and slipped into the grass, draggin’ my twelve-gauge with me. I crawled along for a bit, then got up and ran. Them sonofabitches seen me. They let out a whoop, and the race was on. I went into the woods. I looped wide and doubled back and got down in the creek and saw them crossin’ down a ways, goin’ up on the bank. I went down the creek about a mile and came up in the woods, and goddamned if some of them hadn’t wandered up right where I come out. Asswipes had me surrounded.”
“So they scalped you and ate you.”
“I crawled right between those fuckers, and they didn’t hear nor see me, so I kept on crawlin’.”
“Isn’t this story attributed to Daniel Boone?”
“You know Webb’s hog farm?”
“Yeah. And I see this comin’.”
“I crawled up to the edge of the farm, through the slats of one of the hog pens. They say hogs shit in one corner of the pen, but someone forgot to tell these fuckin’ hogs that, or Webb needs to get his ass out there with a shovel more, ’cause I can seriously testify that this entire pen had the intense aroma of pig shit gone bad and then made worse.
“I was in this swill, lookin’ out, and I seen the bikers trottin’ along the side of the farm there. I knew they hadn’t seen me, but they were close enough I could have smelled them, if I hadn’t had my nose full of pig shit. You know what I did, Hap?”
“Is this question rhetorical?”
“No.”
“You eased into the pig shit and hid.”
“You ought to be on fuckin’ Jeopardy!, Hap. That’s exactly what I did. I slid myself into that muck so there wasn’t nothing but my head and arms and that twelve-gauge stickin’ out. I made up my mind they came for me I was gonna’ start blowin’ kneecaps off. But when they got downwind of that pig shit, they began to cuss and head back into the woods.”
“It takes a real man to lay down in pig shit and not complain,” I said.
“I fought off a couple of amorous pigs, climbed through the fence, made the road, but stayed more in the woods. After a while, I heard their bikes and hunched down in the underbrush and watched them drive by. I waited a few minutes, thought about going back for my car, decided they’d expect that and might have a guard there. I crossed the road, went across Murdoch’s old pasture, crossed into the woods behind your house, jimmied a window with a tire iron out of your truck, and climbed inside. I was plumb tuckered out. I lay in your bed there all the mornin’ and the day until you showed up and woke me.”
“Just like Goldilocks and the three bears.”
“Well, yeah.”
“What about my tire iron?”
“It’s under the porch. Damn, Hap, you’re supposed to show me some sympathy. Fuck your tire iron.”
“You brought this on yourself, man. And you fucked up my sheets. And you damn well better not have lost my tire iron.”
“If it makes you feel better, I’ve got hog shit in my twelve-gauge.”
“I’m tryin’ to figure on this thing, Leonard, and it isn’t adding up so good. Horse Dick lost his head out by Old Pine Road. That isn’t anywhere near the Duffin pasture. But all these bikers were chasin’ you and he wasn’t. Seems to me, I was Horse Dick, and it was my noggin with the bumps on it, I’d have been leading the pack. But he went off in another direction and got himself shot.”
“Maybe he got confused. Those were some serious adjustments I made on his punkin. I hit him so hard I may have even changed his past, but I didn’t kill him.”
“Oh, by the way,” I said, “you know your Rambler? They burned that mother to the ground.”
“Crap! You enjoyed telling me that, didn’t you? You’ve always hated that car, and this from a man with a Datsun pickup.”
“I think you ought to turn yourself in, Leonard. Not just because you drove a Rambler, but because Charlie will make sure the right thing is done.”
“I’m not sure there’s much Charlie can do.”
“Once we start shooting holes in what at first seems obvious, we can clear you. You don’t turn yourself in, they can say you’re runnin’ and hidin’ because you’re guilty.”
Leonard shook his head. “I don’t know what the hell to do. I’m damned if I do, and damned if I don’t.”
I heard the phone ringing in the house. I said, “I’ll answer that while you clean the hog shit off my floor and carpet.”
“Do I have to?”
“Damn straight. And don’t just wipe the surface. You use some cleanser and de-stinker. It’s all under the kitchen sink.”
“De-stinker?” Leonard said.
It was Doc Sylvan on the phone.
“Are you out of your mind?” he asked.
“I’m not sure one way or the other.”
“I can believe that. You have to have those shots, Hap, or you will die.”
“Come on, Doc, I got five days before the next one.”
“What about the insurance problem? You forgot about that?”
“Can’t you fudge a little? I had to leave the hospital. It wasn’t by choice, but I had to.”
“Why?”
“I haven’t done laundry in days.”
“You went home to do laundry!”
“I had some bills to pay.”
“Why don’t you just say you needed to wash your hair?”
“Well, it does need it.”
“Hap, listen here. You come back to the hospital tonight and stay, and I’ll work something out. But you got to be there tonight. I can rig something for you being out of the room a while. Say I had you over at the office for tests, but that’s as far as I go. Doing something like that, getting caught, I could lo
se my license, and I don’t think you make enough to support us both.”
“Not in the style to which you are accustomed. Fact is, I don’t make enough to support me. In any kind of style.”
“You be in the hospital tonight, and I promise I will have you out of there within two days, and still make the insurance work. It’ll take some finagling, but I’ll do it. Just to get you out of my hair.”
“Got you.”
“I will be by the hospital at eight-thirty tonight, Hap. Be there. In bed.”
“In one of those little gowns?”
“You bet.”
“Shall I wear a little perfume?”
“Please do.”
“I think you just want to see me naked, Doc.”
“It’s all I think about.”
Leonard came in with a scrub brush full of hog shit, a pail of stinky water, and a couple of towels.
“These towels weren’t the good stuff, were they?” he asked.
“Not anymore.”
“They have holes in them.”
“Yeah, and the bad towels have more holes in them. You clean the mess up?”
“Yeah.”
We went out back and Leonard dumped the water on the ground and used the water hose to clean the brush and towels. He hung the towels on my clothesline. He said, “I’ve been hesitating to ask. But what about Raul? Charlie know anything about him?”
I shook my head.
Leonard said, “That worries me. I hope he’s all right.”
Leonard’s voice would have sounded calm to anyone who didn’t know him, but I caught the tremolo there. He was not only worried, he was scared. Maybe not for himself, but certainly for Raul.
“He’s probably all right,” I said.
“Maybe you could check around. Just to see. It’s not like I can go out and look for him.”
“I wouldn’t know where to start, Leonard. He may have run off back to Houston. He’s done that before, right?”
Leonard nodded.
“I figure him and Horse Dick had a fight,” I said, “and he went away, then you stepped into the picture a day late and a dollar short and got your ass in a crack with all this business. Right now, way I see it, and you better believe me on this, Raul is the least of your worries.”
“I guess you’re right,” Leonard said. “Just forget it.”
7
But that wasn’t the end of Leonard’s wheedling about Raul. He worked on me for an hour, and since nothing else was shaking and our time was ticking away, I decided if I could locate Raul I could find out better what this was all about. Raul might have some idea who would want to kill his new boyfriend, and if he did, that could lead to placing Leonard in the clear.
I also decided that if I was going to start looking, I had best do it before the net was put out for Leonard. For all I knew, some cop other than Charlie had already put two and two together and they were seining for my buddy at this very moment. Even Charlie, if put in the wrong position, might have to break his promise to me and cast the net himself.
I left Leonard with a glass of milk, a bag of vanilla cookies, and a sad expression, drove into town and over to his place. I thought if I was Raul, I might go to Leonard’s place to hide. It wouldn’t be smart, since the cops were bound to look there, but if I was Raul and had all the street savvy of a broken knickknack, that might be what I’d do.
On the way, I tried to figure Raul for the part of Horse Dick’s murderer, but that didn’t play. Raul didn’t have the temperament to step on a slug, let alone aim a shotgun at someone and blow off their head. Not even in self-defense could I imagine Raul doing such a thing.
But where the hell was he?
When I got to Leonard’s house the day had turned off a little warm, but not uncomfortable. A light breeze was blowing and the blue sky was as clear as the Virgin Mary’s conscience. All the lily-white clouds had blown away, or sunk into the sky, and it seemed like a day when you shouldn’t have a care in the world.
I got out my key to the house and went inside. Raul was nowhere in sight. But the house didn’t look like Charlie had described it to me. It had been turned inside out.
The living room couch had been pulled out into a bed, and the thin mattress had been tossed on the floor. The stereo was turned over and the back was ripped off the television set. In the bedroom the dresser mirror was broken, and the mattress had been cut apart and the cotton stuffing strewn about like the guts of a cloud. The closet door was thrown wide. Leonard’s shotguns and rifles lay on the floor, and everything in the closet from clothes to coats to ammunition to income tax records were heaped to one side.
In all the rooms the drawers had been dumped, books pulled onto the floors, and in the kitchen the flour, sugar, baking soda, stuff like that, were strewn about or were in the sink. In the bathroom the ceramic lid to the back of the toilet had been dropped and broken on the floor and someone had been pawing about in the plumbing.
I checked the back door. It had been jimmied, the lock snapped free by a crowbar, or some similar instrument. I pushed it open, stepped onto the screened-in porch Leonard had rebuilt, examined the aluminum-framed screen door that led outside. I was surprised to discover it was locked.
I went down the steps and looked around. The rain from the other night had left the ground soft and there were footprints in the mud. Big goddamn shoe prints. Bastard must have worn a size fourteen. The tracks were leading away from the house, not to it. I followed them into the woods, and from there I lost them. I was a fair tracker, but I wasn’t the Deerslayer.
Still, I took a flyer and went on through the woods a piece, over to where the foliage gave way to a muddy country road, and started up again on the other side. I walked out to the edge of the road just as an old pollen-coated brown pickup with two young men in it clattered by. They waved at me and I waved back.
I walked onto the road and looked around. It was a dirt road, so there were plenty of tracks, of course. Nothing odd about that. I walked along a piece and found a tire-smashed armadillo and a flattened copperhead, and finally took note of what I determined were the marks of motorcycle tires. Normally, that wouldn’t mean much, but they ran off the side of the road, and I discovered where they trailed red mud across the grass and into the woods. The bike had been pushed, because there were shoe tracks alongside the tire marks. The same big shoe tracks.
It didn’t take an Einstein to figure someone had driven off the road, pushed their bike into concealment, made their way on foot through the woods and into Leonard’s house. The tracks got lost in the thick leaves, so I went on through the woods and back to Leonard’s house and looked out back carefully until I found where the footprints exited the woods and came up on the south side of the back porch. I hadn’t seen these tracks earlier.
Whoever had entered the house had entered here, probably that way instead of through the screen door to stay down and out of view.
They had cut the screen loose at the bottom of the porch with wire cutters, pushed the screen up, slid under and inside. Then they’d jimmied the back door, and gone in. I assumed they had been quick and silent and purposeful about their task, entered at night, and taken their time ransacking the joint. Gone out the way they’d come in.
I decided I was thirsty, went inside the house and opened the refrigerator. The ice trays had been emptied on the floor and they had melted and water had run into some of the flour. There was a big footprint there, mixed with mud. I managed not to step in anything.
Some of the stuff inside the fridge had been thrown about. There were a few beers and Cokes in the fridge. I got one of the Cokes and popped the top and went out on the back porch and sat down on the steps and tried to think while I sipped it.
It might have been a common burglary, but I couldn’t figure what they had burgled. It didn’t look like vandalism either, least not completely. Someone had been looking for something. And whoever had done the looking had owned a motorcycle. Horse Dick had owned a bike. The bikers
who chased Leonard owned motorcycles. The kid that delivered newspapers on this street owned one too. But he didn’t wear a size-fourteen shoe. Who the hell did?
I finished the Coke and looked at the tracks again, those leading into the woods, and those coming up on the side of the porch. I studied them carefully. They were pressed in pretty deep. Whoever had made those tracks was one big sonofabitch, and not just his shoe size. Guy could have been anywhere from two-fifty to three hundred pounds, or more. Maybe it was Bigfoot. Or Smokey the Bear. The thought of someone that huge made me a little queasy.
I went back through the house one more time, looking for clues, but nothing important jumped out at me. Which didn’t surprise me. I wasn’t much of a detective. I had enough problems just keeping up with socks that matched.
I closed the back door as best it would close, went through the house, locked the front door, stood on the front porch, finished my Coke and looked around.
The spot where the crack house used to be next door was nothing now but a patch of scorched earth and lumber. Someone’s chickens were loose and pecking around in the ruins. I wondered what would happen if the chickens found some old drugs in there. A little crack, some cocaine. They would certainly lay interesting eggs.
Across the street where MeMaw used to live a new owner had moved in. The new owner had painted the house hot Pepto-Bismol pink with chocolate trim, and they liked dark blue curtains and had yard butts on the brutally mowed lawn.
Yard butts are what Leonard and I call those stupid, painted, plywood cutouts that are supposed to look like an old man or an old grandma bending over in the yard, the grandpa showing you his overall-covered ass, the grandma’s dress hiked up, showing you her white-lace panties.
Leonard once told me he wanted to buy one of those plastic vaginas and butt holes you could get in sex shops and glue it on the seat of one of those grandmas. He figured if you were supposed to be looking up her dress, you might as well see something. It certainly would have been funny to see the owners of those yard butts come out the next morning to discover grandma giving the neighborhood a show.
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