“I been over to see him, Hap. He’s doin’ pretty goddamn good. Amazing, actually. He gets better, I’ll tell him all this shit. He’d want to know.”
“What about Big Man Mountain?”
“Still hasn’t turned up. He took off in Pierre’s red Mercedes.”
“That ought to show up.”
“My guess is he dumped it right away, caught a bus to someplace hot and dry.”
“Right now, Texas is hot and dry.”
“Drier yet. Mexico.”
“I don’t know I should ask, but how about the wife?”
“We’re separated, Hap. I think maybe it won’t work out, know what I’m sayin’?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s seein’ this fuckin’ insurance guy kind of regular-like. Did I tell you he smokes?”
“Yeah.”
“Sonofabitch,” Charlie said.
“I hear that,” I said.
Ella was buried the next day. I went to the funeral with Brett. Day after that, Leon was put down. Leonard and I got together, made a deal to pay for his funeral. Doing that tapped me out, but it didn’t matter.
It was a hot day with a hot wind and the striped funeral tent rustled as the preacher talked a hot wind of his own. Leon got as good a sendoff as a launch party for the dead can be, considering, as is often the case, the minister who preached the sermon didn’t know him from creamed corn.
Later, when me and Leonard and Brett walked with Clinton out to his car, he said, “Wouldn’t none of that stuff preacher said about Leon true.”
“It’s just the way it’s done,” Brett said.
“Yeah,” Clinton said, “well, they ought to do it some other kinda way. They made Leon all out to be this suit-type man. Shit, I’m gonna miss my bro.”
“I’m sorry, Clinton,” I said. “It’s sort of my fault.”
“More like mine since I asked you and Leon to help out,” Leonard said.
“And mine,” Brett said. “He was helping me.”
“No, it ain’t y’all no kind of way,” Clinton said. “It’s that sonofabitch killed him’s fault. Me and Leon, we knew what we was gettin’ into. You folks hang tough.”
Clinton, trying to hold his head up and stay solid, climbed in his car and clattered away.
“I got to tell you,” Brett said. “I first met those two, I thought they were just a couple of ignorant thugs. I think now they’re better than most of the educated people I know.”
“Leon and Clinton,” Leonard said, “they invented grit. I’m gonna miss ole Scum Eye. He was a stand-up guy.”
Brett took us both by the arms. “So are you two guys,” she said. And with her holding our arms, we walked down to my pickup and drove away from the hot wind and the striped funeral tent, the headstones rising up sad and white and gray.
Next few days weren’t so bad. Things started to sort themselves out. I got a job at a club, bouncing. The pay wasn’t much, but I figured I could do it for a week or two until I found something else. Only thing was, I didn’t start for a couple of days, and I was dead broke.
Brett soothed that. She managed to take some time off from work, even if she didn’t have it coming. We spent a lot of time together, at her place and mine, getting to know each other better, and from my end I certainly liked what I had come to know.
Brett coming out to my house changed the place. She couldn’t stand the way I did things, so she did it her way, and I liked her way better. The dishes were cleaner and neater and the house smelled better. The gym-sock stink in the bathroom was gone and the mold was off the shower curtain.
’Course, Brett made me do all the work to get the place in shipshape condition, and she was one hell of a D.I. I figured next thing coming was I’d have little wooden plaques with slogans on them hanging over the kitchen sink and the bathroom shitter.
On a hot Sunday morning, two weeks after all hell had gone down, the sky began to darken and threaten rain. By eleven A.M. the heat was dissipating and the air turned cool. I got up and opened all the windows. In the distance, in the dark clouds, lightning bolts hopped and squirmed as if mating.
Brett and I had spent a large portion of the morning in bed, making love, and now we were in the kitchen. Brett was wearing one of my T-shirts, and she sure did it more justice than I could have, especially since that was all she was wearing. I liked to watch her move, leaning over the sink, messing with pots and pans, trying to find something in the cabinet worth fixing for lunch.
I was in deck shoes, torn jeans and a black T-shirt so faded it looked the color of ancient cigarette ash. I washed my hands and surveyed the interior of the refrigerator. It was as lonesome in there as Custer on the Little Big Horn.
“Hap,” Brett said, “even I can’t make a meal out of this stuff, and I can toast shit and bricks and make you happy. This calls for severe action. I’m gonna go to town and buy some grub.”
“I’d offer you money, but I don’t have any.”
“Hell, I know that.”
“I’ll pay you back when I get my first check.”
“You can buy me a meal.”
Brett darted into the bedroom, pulled on a dress and shoes, bounced out of there with my truck keys. I stood on the porch and waved. She wasn’t gone thirty seconds before I took notice of the sky. It had changed. The air was neither cool nor hot. I felt as if I was in the middle of a bowl, and the sky, which had gone green, was gradually descending on me. I knew the signs. Tornado.
I wished I had noticed before Brett drove away. Now there was nothing I could do but stand there in the eerie silence, wondering if it would happen, wondering if she would be okay. A car on the road is not a good place to be during a tornado.
I watched to see if a funnel might be forming. The clouds were nervous, though not as nervous as me. They rolled and twisted and at times I fancied I could see them dipping down like the bottom part of a blackened snow cone, but in the next moment it looked like nothing more than a wispy black cloud.
I decided to pour myself a cup of coffee, sit on the front porch and keep an eye on things. Weather turned sour and the sky skipped down, I was going to make a run for the bathroom and my tub, supposedly one of the safest places you could be during a tornado, if for no other reason than the plumbing is rooted deep into the ground. But of course there was really no safe place to be during a tornado, unless it was someplace where the tornado wasn’t.
Before I got back to the front porch, the rain came, blowing hard, and there was a sudden blast of hail so ferocious I couldn’t stay on the porch. Sitting there was like being a victim of a biblical stoning.
I rushed inside, shaking the rain off of me, listening to it blow at a slant under the porch and slam the wall. A chunk of ice literally the size of a baseball crashed through the window behind the couch, flew over it, slammed against the floor and bounced and hit a chair in the kitchen, thudded back into the living room, rolled to the middle of the floor.
I turned to look at the broken window. Rain and smaller chunks of hail were slamming against it now, and I heard another glass go in the bedroom. It was eerie, the wind blowing that way, pushing the hail straight before it. If this wasn’t a tornado, it would damn sure do until the real thing showed up.
I was thinking about pouring another cup of coffee and nesting in the bathtub with a flashlight and a book and one ear cocked for wind. Anything to get my mind off the storm and Brett being in it. But I didn’t do that. I guess it was people like me that waited until the last minute and were taken away by the wind. Instead I went to the side window of my living room and glanced out. Trees were bending way too far, and I saw lightning leap out of the sky and smack one like an insolent teenager, knocking pine bark and needles a-flying.
When I turned around the back door jumped away from the wall with an explosion of busted lock, and I thought, goddamn, the twister’s got me, but then I saw it was a human tornado.
Big Man Mountain. He came quickly into the room. He was wearing jeans and a f
ilthy white T-shirt and his clod-hopper boots. He was soaked with rain and it ran off of him in great rivulets and pooled quickly at his feet. He looked like hell. He was pale as Casper the Ghost.
I thought about my gun, back in my bedroom in the nightstand drawer, and I started to run for it, but Big Man came through the open kitchen and into the living room at a rush. I braced myself to fight, but he leaped up and twisted and shot out both feet and hit me with a drop-kick that flung me across the room and into the front door with a sound like someone dropping a dead blowfish on the dock. It hurt like a sonofabitch. I tried to get up but didn’t have any wind in me. Big Man had hold of me and lifted me over his head as if I were a sack of flour, tossed me back onto the floor. I tried to curl my body and duck my chin, roll with the fall, but it still hurt like hell.
Next thing I knew, Big Man had me by the head and was yanking me around and whirling me onto the couch. I came to a sitting position and shot out my foot as he came at me, scored a good one on his chin. He went back and I came up and he swung and I went under and struck out with a knee that caught him in the thigh, and it was a good shot, right on that point in the thigh that makes you wish it was someone else’s leg, even your mother’s. I whipped my arm around and hammered him in the kidneys, slid in behind him, tried to grab him in a stranglehold. But this wasn’t smart. That was his game.
Big Man grabbed my arm, bent forward suddenly, and I found myself flying. I landed on the couch again, facedown. I tried to get up but took a kick in the ass, right above the blow hole, right there on the tip of the spinal cord. I went out, and when I awoke I was in hell.
I was on the couch, sitting. My feet were tied with a twisted coat hanger and my wrists were bound behind my back with what I figured was the same. At my back the wind and small pellets of ice whirled through the broken glass and smacked the back of my head, neck, and shoulders. The couch was soaked with cold rain.
Big Man had pulled a chair up in front of the couch and he was looking at me. To his right he had placed another chair. On the chair, from my cabinets and closets, were a variety of items. Straightened coat hangers, a butcher knife, a corkscrew, pliers, and an ice pick. There was also a glass of water and a bottle of aspirin.
Big Man had taken his shirt off, and he was a massive hunk, with a big solid belly and a hairy chest and arms that looked like knotted ship cables. On his right lower arm was a large festered wound. His face was oily and covered with sweat beads the size of his own knuckles, which were considerably larger than diesel truck lug bolts. He was holding his head up with difficulty. His breathing was bad. His face had gone from pale to blue, but not as blue as his lips. His eyes were scummy around the edges and the whites were no longer whites, but reds. In his left hand he held a Swiss Army knife open to the spoon.
“I was thinking of your eyes,” he said. “I thought they might be a good place to start. But I’m having second thoughts. I say let you see what there is to see until the very last.”
“There’s no reason to do this, Big Man,” I said. “It’s all over. You did Pierre in yourself. What’s the point?”
Big Man smiled at me. His teeth appeared not to have been cleaned in ages. They were yellow, with brown roots that were probably from chewing tobacco.
“The point is completion, ” Big Man said. “No one believes in completion anymore. I do. I finish what I start. I was paid to do you in, get a video and a book, and now I’m here to do just that. I could have done the nigger, but you worked out better. I been hiding in the woods. You’re easier to get to here. You, the nigger, the cunt, it don’t matter, long as I come up with what I set out to come up with. The book. The video.”
“It’s over, Big Man.”
Big Man shook his head. “No. The other night was left undone, Mr. Collins, but as you can see, here we are again.”
“You did your job, man. Pierre isn’t here to pay you anymore. You’re not obligated.”
“He hired me. He didn’t pay me. I had to extract some vengeance for that. I took a little money from him, a few items I could sell. Nothing that drastically exceeded what was owed me for the job I had done so far. He wanted to not pay me because I didn’t get the video and the book. He wasn’t giving me enough time. Jesus, you know, Collins, I feel like shit.”
“Big Man. Listen. The notebook, the videos. The cops have them.”
“You said that before.”
“And I lied, but this time it’s true. It’s all over. I wasn’t trying to blackmail anyone. That wasn’t my purpose.”
“Shut up. I got a headache. I’ll do the talkin’.”
“That looks like a bite,” I said, nodding toward the wound on his arm.
“Fox. I was campin’. Livin’ in the woods in Pierre’s Mercedes. I got out to take a piss. Fox came at me. Leaped at me. Bit me. I strangled it. I never seen one do like that before.”
“It was rabid, Big Man. You’ve been bitten by a rabid fox.”
“No.”
“Yes. A rabid squirrel bit me, so I should know!”
Big Man burst out laughing. “A rabid squirrel! What’s your game, Mr. Collins?”
“Big Man, I don’t have the video or the notebook. Your job is over.”
“It’s over when I say it’s over. And if you don’t have the video or the notebook, well, I’ll know for sure after we try out a few of these instruments. A corkscrew twisted into the knee, just above the knee joint. You wouldn’t believe-”
“Yes, I would.”
“Oh, no. Experiencing it is the only way to believe it. I’ve tried it on myself. It really hurts. Of course, I didn’t go as deep into my flesh as I’m going to go into yours. I’m going to screw it right into your leg and through the muscle and nerves and into the bone. Then I’m going to do your triceps tendons. Now there’s some pain, my man.”
The house rattled. The rain slammed harder and harder.
Big Man took the aspirin bottle and unscrewed it and shook several aspirin into his mouth. He picked up the glass of water, tried to sip it. He tossed it across the room, spat the aspirin in my lap.
“I can’t swallow,” he said. “Hell of a cold.”
“It’s the water. Hydrophobia. You have rabies, Big Man. You need a doctor. It may not be too late.”
Big Man stood up violently, causing the chair he had been sitting in to fall backwards to the floor. “I do not have rabies. I startled a fox, that’s all. You’re not going to frighten me.”
“I got bit by the squirrel, doctor told me a story about a boy got bit and died screaming in bed, gnashing his teeth. Finally his father smothered him. Whatever you do to me, it won’t be half of what’s going to happen to you. Call the doctor, Big Man. Get some help. This rabies stuff, it’s got you half out of your mind. Maybe more.”
“Oh, you think you’re clever. Well, you aren’t. I’m gonna start with the coat hanger.” Big Man closed up the Swiss Army knife and jammed it in his pants pocket. He grabbed the straightened wire hanger off the chair. “What we’re gonna do is, I’m gonna pull down your pants, Collins, then I’m going to insert this up your asshole slowly, twisting, pushing, and you are gonna talk like a sonofabitch. You’re gonna-”
The front door came open suddenly, and standing in the doorway, soaked to the skin, was Brett. Water was running out of her hair and into her eyes, and she was scared-looking and talking as the door came open. “Truck ran off in a ditch. I-”
Then she saw Big Man.
“Come on in, honey,” Big Man said. “You’re just in time to see me screw this up your lover’s ass. Maybe up the pee-hole in his dick. Fact is, that sounds better. I haven’t tried that.”
Brett’s face went slack and her right hand smoothed the side of her thigh and dropped lower and took the hem of her dress. She lifted it, and I could see her panties, all wet and sticking to her like cobwebs, and I could see her beautiful legs. One of them had a belt around it with a holster strapped to it and a. 38 in the holster. I had forgotten about that. She didn’t go anywhere
without it anymore.
She came up with the. 38 and fired three times, so goddamn quick it was almost like one shot.
Big Man looked down at his chest. Three small red spots appeared on his filthy T-shirt. He looked at Brett, said, “You’re first, split tail. Right up the cunt.”
He stepped toward her, holding the coat hanger, which wobbled like a giant insect antennae. Brett fired twice more.
Big Man paused, as if he had been strolling and decided not to cross at a certain traffic light, but to go the other way. He stepped back once, turned around, started walking toward the back door. He fell and grabbed the counter that separated the living room from the kitchen and held himself up. Brett fired again, and Big Man reached behind him, fanned at his spine like he was trying to swat a wasp.
He kept his feet, went out the back door walking briskly, but not running.
“Brett,” I said. “You all right?”
“I guess so,” Brett said, stepping out of the doorway and into the house.
“There’s pliers on the chair here. Get them, undo these coat hangers.”
Brett got the pliers and started twisting my ankles and wrists free.
“That must have been Big Man,” she said.
“In the flesh,” I said. When I was free I rushed to the bedroom, came back with my shotgun, a flashlight, and my. 38. I gave Brett the shotgun. “He comes back, cut down on him with this.”
“You bet,” she said. I kissed her. Her lips trembled, and so did mine.
I took my. 38, went out the back way, into the rain and the dark and wind so stout it could have blown Jesus off the cross.
There was no trail to follow in the blasting rain, but I went the path of least resistance into the woods. It was the way he would have gone, hit like he was. I found an animal trail and went along that, and once in the glow of my flashlight I saw blood on the leafy ground, being washing away by the rain. Fast and hard as it was raining, that meant Big Man was a very short space ahead of me.
As I went, I heard limbs cracking under the stress of the wind, and the tops of trees nodded down and lashed above me like mad women wailing. I went along until the trees broke and there was a clearing where there had been a bit of forest fire, and next to the clearing was a dirt road, more of a trail really, and in the clearing was what had to be Pierre’s red Mercedes. It had been lashed by limbs and splattered with mud, which had dried so hard even the rain wasn’t knocking it off. The windshield was cracked in several places. It was easy to figure Big Man had been using it like a tank, driving down the wooded backroads and sometimes over no roads at all, trying to avoid the cops. Looking for me, trying to finish some mad mission made madder by the bite of a rabid animal.
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