We worked on the house until early afternoon, had some sandwiches, decided we ought to drive into town and buy a few cleaning supplies. We went in my truck. On the way back to Leonard’s house, he said, “This Old Pine Road, where Horse Dick got it. Could we drive over there?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Guess I’d like to see the spot where this guy they thought I killed bought it.”
“I don’t know that’s such a good idea,” I said.
“Come on, Hap.”
I didn’t much care for it, but we drove out to Old Pine Road, which isn’t much of a road, really. It’s narrow and winds through a heavily wooded area and links up with a highway that leads to Lufkin. It’s shady because of the trees, and not too heavily traveled.
We drove along, finally saw some tire tracks burned into the road, heading through the underbrush and into a large oak tree. Beyond the oak the ground was covered in a deep carpet of kudzu vines and wildflowers, and the hill rolled down steep and turned level as it met the woods.
We pulled to the side of the road, got out and looked around. It was a bright, hot day, and everything I looked at seemed to be viewed through a piece of transparent, lemon-colored rock candy. The air was full of pollen. Every time I took a breath it was like sniffing flour. Within minutes my throat was scratchy and my nose was plugged. It didn’t help my cold much.
We looked at the oak, could see where the bike struck it. It was a damn good strike. A chunk had been taken out of the tree as if with an axe.
“If the shotgun hadn’t killed him,” Leonard said, “you can bet this tree wouldn’t have done him any good.”
“Without the shotgun, he wouldn’t have hit the tree,” I said. “Now you’ve seen it. Make you feel any better?”
“No. I don’t really know why I wanted to see it.”
We stood under the oak out of the sunlight while Leonard dealt with his thoughts, stood there hugging the shade. Not that it helped. It was still hot and the pollen was thick.
“You know,” Leonard said, “I bet I could put a weenie on a stick, poke it out from under this shade, and the sun would cook it… What’s that?”
Leonard was turned away from the road, looking down the hill, toward the woods. I looked and saw a scattering of mosquitoes buzzing at the edge of the woods where shadow gave way to light. The insects rolled and rose and dropped like a tiny black cloud amongst the trees. I could imagine them looking up at us, thinking, Come on down and we’ll strip your bones, for we are the piranha of the air.
It was the mosquitoes I thought Leonard was talking about, but then I followed his pointing finger and saw what he saw. It lay partially buried in the vines near the woods. It was silver, and the sunlight bounced off of it as if it were a mirror. The reflected light was painful to view and caused me to squint my eyes.
“I don’t know what it is,” I said.
“Could be a piece off the motorcycle,” Leonard said.
“Cops looked the place over,” I said.
“Don’t forget, it’s the LaBorde cops we’re talking about. Charlie, excluded, of course. I bet they didn’t even go down the hill. At least not all the way. Especially the fat ones. They went down too far, they wouldn’t have been able to get back up.”
“What if it is part of the motorcycle?” I said. “So what?”
“It could lead to the solving of the case.”
“What, a fender? The handlebars?”
“You need to read some Agatha Christie, man.”
“Why? Am I being punished?”
“You read her, you’ll find nothing is too small. Let’s go down and see what it is.”
“It’s a steep hill.”
“I bet that’s exactly what the fat cops said.”
“They were right.”
“We’re manly men. We can do it.”
“Will you carry me?”
“Nope.”
We went down the hill, our ankles clutched by kudzu and all manner of undergrowth, and when we were within twenty feet of it I thought it was a huge wad of aluminum foil. Then I saw that what I thought were the natural crumples of a wad of foil were not crumples, but dents, and it wasn’t foil, it was a motorcycle helmet. I could see part of the visor, and it was cracked, and I could see something behind the visor, and Leonard, who was slightly ahead of me, could see it too because he stopped walking, made a kind of startled move and let his breath out slowly.
“Shit,” he said. “Goddamn shit.”
I went on past where he was standing, got closer. There was a head in the helmet, and there was a body attached to the head, and the body was twisted down into the vines. I couldn’t see the body from atop the hill, just a piece of the helmet, but I could see all of it easily from this angle, and the legs and arms looked as if they were nothing more than the limbs of a scarecrow, stuffed with straw, twisted into the kudzu.
I squatted down and looked at the face inside the helmet. The head was turned in there too far and was covered in what looked like molasses but wasn’t. There were ants and maggots on the part of the face I could see. The wind had changed and the smell of death rode on it and blew into my nostrils and defeated the plugs of pollen. It was all I could do not to get sick.
I got up and turned Leonard by grabbing him by the elbow and started us up the hill.
“It was Raul, wasn’t it?” Leonard said.
“Yep.”
11
We made an anonymous call to the police department and they came and got the body, and next day they made a big deal out of it in the papers, about how the cops had done this great detective work.
There was stuff about the murder of Horse Dick, though he wasn’t called that. There was no mention of the fact Raul was found just down the hill from where Horse bought it. But it was pretty clear, if you read between the lines, that Raul had been on the back of the bike.
It wasn’t clear how Horse, between collecting knots from Leonard, ended up with Raul and the two of them had gone riding. But it appeared when Horse got his head blown off, the bike had gone into a tree, and so had Raul, and Raul had hit the tree so hard it had knocked him willy-nilly down the hill and into the vines.
That was pretty much the sum of all that was known.
Two days later Raul’s parents came from Houston and had him buried in a little graveyard out in the country. It was a quiet shady place with Civil War veterans, black folks, and paupers, and for some reason they decided not to haul him home but to have him planted there.
Leonard wasn’t invited to the funeral or the burying, but he went to the burial anyway. The graveyard was on one side of a blacktop road, and there was a cluster of oaks on the other side. We parked beneath them, sat on the hood of the rented Chevy, and watched the service.
We didn’t have on black. We didn’t have on ties. The coffin was bronze. The family was weeping.
The whole thing was over in short time, then the cars filed out. One of the people attending the funeral stood by the fence for a while, started across the road toward us. He was dressed in black, all neat. At first he was hard to recognize without his Hawaiian shirt, cheap suit, and porkpie hat.
“Thought you might be here,” he said to Leonard.
“Yeah,” Leonard said.
“I’m sorry,” Charlie said. “You should have been invited.”
“Family don’t like queers,” Leonard said. “Far as they were concerned, Raul wasn’t queer. He was just a little confused. Any day now he’d quit suckin’ dicks and start dive-bombing pussy.”
“Easy, Leonard,” I said.
“Yeah,” Leonard said. “Easy.”
Charlie climbed onto the Chevy’s hood, sat by Leonard. “I wasn’t invited either. Came anyway. Thought whoever did it might show up. You know, like in the movies. Returning to the scene of the crime.”
“You don’t mean me, do you?” Leonard said.
“No,” Charlie said.
“Well, you sure don’t mean me,” I said.
“So we heard,” Leonard said.
“Shits went out there to investigate the site didn’t do much of a job,” Charlie said.
“Boy, that surprises me,” Leonard said. “A dead queer, I thought everybody would be in a hurry.”
“It ain’t one dead queer,” Charlie said. “It’s two.”
“All right,” Leonard said. “Two dead queers.”
“Could it be one of you boys called in about the body?” Charlie asked.
“Could be,” I said.
“Thought so. You boys are too nosey to let something lay.”
“Hey, we did better than you guys,” I said.
“That’s what gets my goat,” Charlie said. “Want a little tidbit, boys?”
“Sure,” I said.
“The two dead queers,” Charlie said. “One of them was a cop.”
We both stared at Charlie. I said, “Well, since it wasn’t Raul, that leaves Horse.”
“See,” Charlie said, “your powers of deduction. Phenomenal.”
“Don’t fuck around here,” Leonard said. “I’m not in the mood. Horse Dick was a cop?”
“Yep,” Charlie said. He reached inside his suit coat, brought out a flattened pack of cigarettes. He put one in his mouth, got out a lighter, and lit it. He said, “He was working undercover.”
“Under Raul’s covers,” Leonard said.
“He was on special assignment,” Charlie said. “Didn’t know it till the other day. It wasn’t part of my business. This was something the chief set up.”
“The chief set up stuff with a gay cop?” I said.
“Didn’t know he was gay,” Charlie said. “Chief knew, guy wouldn’t have been a cop, let alone on assignment. I’d seen the guy around, but he wasn’t part of my action. I didn’t connect the death of the biker with the cop’s death, not until it got to be more common knowledge. It was slow to leak around the department. Chief thought it made him look like an idiot, so he wasn’t blowin’ any trumpets.”
“I’ll be a sonofabitch,” I said.
“Guys are running a lot of drugs through the Blazing Wheel,” Charlie said. “So Chief got Horse… McNee… and that’s another alias. His real name is Bill Jenkins. Anyway, Chief got him to go undercover. Horse got involved with Raul, then he and Raul got dead.”
“You think it had something to do with Horse being a cop, or being gay?” I said.
“Don’t know,” Charlie said, shaking his head as he blew out smoke. “Maybe both. Maybe neither. Whatever, I wanted y’all to know, ’cause truth of the matter is this one may not get the attention it deserves. Cop gets killed in the line of duty, we’re all over it. But, like you said, Leonard, couple of fags, Chief being like he is, seeing this as some reflection on the department and himself… It could fall between the cracks. Might already be there. I maybe can’t do what ought to be done. Get what I’m sayin’?”
“Yeah,” Leonard said. “We get what you’re sayin’.”
“I didn’t really know Raul that much,” Charlie said. “I hate he’s dead, though. I mean, you liked him.”
“Good enough,” Leonard said.
Charlie finished his smoke, climbed off the hood. “See you boys later.”
Charlie went down to his car and drove away.
We sat there for a while watching the grave digger with his backhoe. He threw the dirt in fast and got things tidy, drove the backhoe through a large gate on the other side of the graveyard, wheeled it onto a trailer hooked to a truck. He fastened the backhoe down. He locked the gate up. He drove the trailer and the backhoe away.
Two men took down the striped funeral tent and placed the flowers and wreaths the bereaved had ordered onto and around the grave. They loaded up and got out of there.
We walked down to the graveyard, went through the gate. Walked past gravestones. I read some of them. Civil War dates. One worn stone bore the faded words BELOVED SLAVE AND SERVANT chiseled on it, which I thought was kind of ironic.
One said JAKE REMINGTON, adding, NO RELATION TO THE ARTIST OR THE GUN MANUFACTOR OF THE SAME LAST NAME. There was a Jane Skipforth, who died in the early 1900s, FROM COMPLICATIONS WITH MEN. A Bill Smith, who died in World War I. HIS PLANE WENT DOWN, BUT HIS SPIRIT SOARS. A Frank Jerbovavitch, who got old and died. A Willie, no dates, just Willie. A Fred Russel, just dates. No mention of his relationship to the famous western artist of the same last name.
And so it went. But it really didn’t matter what was said or wasn’t. Now they were all brothers and sisters under the dirt.
Leonard stood at Raul’s grave, said, “Somehow, it don’t mean nothin’, a grave. Just like when my uncle got buried. He’s dead, and that’s all there is to it.”
Leonard kicked some dirt onto the grave and we left.
12
When we got back to Leonard’s house we drank some coffee and chatted a bit, but it wasn’t a lively sort of chat.
After a while, I took a hint, told Leonard I was going home, and I’d call him the next day. He almost helped me to the door. He stood on the porch as I was getting in my pickup.
“Hap,” he said, “ain’t no one I’d rather have around than you. But sometimes I don’t want no one around.”
“I understand.”
“This is one of those times.”
“No problem.”
I drove home, wheeled by Leonard’s old house, the one down the road from me, gave it a longing once-over. It was boarded up and graying, and the old television antenna shooting up the side of the house, spreading out on top of the roof, had been ravaged by wind. It looked like some kind of giant alien hand gone to rot, leaving only bones. Paint flaked like psoriasis off the porch and the front door. The grass was tall and nodding in the wind.
I wished Leonard would move away from his uncle’s house and come home. The place wasn’t much, but I liked him down the road from me. We had had some good times out here, and maybe we’d never have them again. Life was starting to get in the way.
I was pretty wired when I got home, so I tried a shower, but that didn’t help. I sat around for a while, trying to read, trying to watch television, trying to listen to music. None of this did me any good.
The day wore on. I got to thinking about Brett. I looked at my watch. It was late afternoon, but she wouldn’t have to go to work until late. I dialed her number. She answered on the third ring.
“Honey, I was beginning to think I was going to have to part my hair on the other side,” she said.
“Come again?”
“I thought I was losing my touch.”
“Do you practice it much?”
“Actually, I don’t. And I’m not normally such a floozy, but I haven’t met anyone that’s interested me in ages.”
“That’s flattering. What interested you in me?”
“I just love that little bald spot.”
“I don’t think you mean that.”
“You know, you’re right. I don’t.” Brett laughed. The laugh was as nice as her smile. “I don’t know. Not really. There’s just something about you. You remind me of a big puppy dog. I think that’s it.”
“Woof, woof,” I said.
“How about taking me to dinner? I haven’t eaten yet, and I’ve got to go to work before long. I’ve had one of those days where all I’ve had to eat is coffee.”
“Well, I’ve had one of those days too. Maybe we can cheer each other up.”
“Forty-five minutes,” she said.
We went to an expensive place called the West Coast. The place looks better than the food tastes, though the food isn’t bad. The West Coast is on a hill and has a large advertising sign out front that lists the specials of the week, most of the specials being some kind of seafood or steak.
The restaurant itself is made of great slabs of lumber and vast expan
ses of glass. It has well-manicured bushes and lots of parking places. For some reason, people dress up when they go there.
I dressed up a little myself. Dark slacks, dark blue sport jacket with a light blue shirt. I wiped off my shoes with a wash rag until they almost looked as if they had been polished. I had a tie in my coat pocket that I decided not to wear. It was a nice tie. Maybe later I could get it out and show it to Brett, just to give her some idea of what I might have looked like had I worn it.
When I picked up Brett, I wished I had on the tie. She looked nice. She had on a white blouse with a blue design on it, a blue skirt, dark blue shoes, and dark hose. Her makeup was spare and her hair was as lustrous as a goddess’s. The blouse revealed the tops of her breasts and she smelled so good I thought I might have to pull over to the side of the road and cry for a while.
“I hope I look all right,” she said. “I started to just shit in the face of all feminists tonight and wear an all-purpose deluxe tight-as-sin polyester screw-me-to-death outfit and no panties. I wear that, when I walk it looks like my thangamajig is shellin’ a walnut.”
All I could respond with was, “I’m sure that would have been very nice too.”
“Well, this will have to do. I didn’t want you to spring a leak on our first date.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “Looks great.”
“I hope so,” she said. “Actually, it’s kind of painful. I got on one of those bras hikes your titties up. They aren’t as formfitting as the goddamn box says they are. I feel like I got a truck jack under each one of ’em.”
We made romantic small talk like that on the way over, and once inside and seated at our table, a guy dressed in a white dinner jacket stood up at an organ and played and sang in a manner so awful I thought for a moment he was a comedian. When I realized he wasn’t, I said, “I’m sorry. I could have taken you to Burger King and we could have listened to Fats Domino on the jukebox. This clown wasn’t here last time I came.”
“That must have been Christmas Eve 1984, because I been here a lot and he’s been here since I’ve been coming, and he’s never been able to carry a note in a sealed Tupperware container. He can do a damn good ‘Pop Goes the Weasel,’ though, and come Christmas he has a medley that ends with ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ that’ll break your goddamn heart.”
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