The Other Side of Bad (The Tucker Novels)

by R. O. Barton

  So far, no one had to get rid of any buggers.

  “Don’t worry, Teemo, he’s only here to protect us from hijackers. He does what I say. Isn’t that right, Tucker?”

  I looked at Teemo for a moment, then at Robby, and said, “If you’re not worried about this guy, then I’m not. It’s cool.”

  “No, Tucker, Teemo is my friend, understand. You’re just coming along to help load the grass, get it…it’s okay,” Robby said ,speaking very distinctly and slowly, crossing his hands with the palms turned down, like an umpire calling a slide safe.

  Not only was I a bad ass. I was a dumb ass, too.

  It was all I could do not to say ‘duh,’ so I just nodded and tried to look dumb and dangerous. Dumb I could do.

  I must have pulled it off. The dumb part anyway. Teemo seemed to relax a little.

  “Steel, Rowbee, all deese gun, eet no good,” he said, waving his hands around, taking in the guns stuck in the front of pants and visible holsters.

  “You don’t expect us to go without a way to protect ourselves, do you?” Robby asked.

  “Protect from wha?” Teemo asked. “You weet me, you mi amigo. You leave gun here, come back and geet after we do deal, hokay? Eets all feext up, evryting goeeng to be fine.”

  No one seemed to know what to do, so I said, as dumb as I could, “I don’t need no gun to protect you from some fuckin’ greasers.”

  I threw my shotgun on the bed, hoping I didn’t overdo it.

  “Thas righ, no gun, we all amigo…friends, si?” Teemo said with a big smile.

  Robby looked at me and picked his nose, just for a second. It looked so natural I wondered if it was a signal.

  Both Allen and Phil saw him do it and looked equally baffled. Maybe he had an itch and didn’t realize he did it.

  Before we had much time to think about it, Robby said, “Okay,” and threw his pistol on the bed.

  Allen and Phil did the same, and when Teemo looked at me for my turn, I pulled my cowboy shirt open to show I wasn’t carrying a pistol. My Colt .45 tucked into the back of my pants was as warm and soothing as a hot water bottle. I imagined my fellow thespians feeling the same.

  “Satisfied… amigo?” Robby said, smiling with deceiving boyish charm.

  Teemo looked at us not quite sure, but other than frisking us, what choice did he have.

  “Si, Rowbee, eez good, mucho mejor… how you say…”

  “Better,” I said. Some of my Spanish was still lingering around.

  He glanced at me sharply. He didn’t like that. And I didn’t like, that he didn’t like that I might speak the lingo.

  What I did like was, he didn’t know.

  Now, Allen had a bugger, looked like it must be a big one. He must have picked up on the same thing.

  “Allen, you stay here and watch the guns,” Robby said, as he picked up the money.

  Good touch, Robby.

  Hearing this, Teemo relaxed, smiled and said, “Thas good, I bring dem back before soonnrice.”

  I didn’t like this guy’s accent. I’d bet he speaks English a lot better than he puts on. I couldn’t put my finger on the reason why, but, it was there.

  Robby opened the door, and we all walked outside. It was like walking into a dry sauna. It was close to 6 o’clock, and the sun was peeking at us through purple clouds to the west. It was going to be a beautiful sunset. I was looking forward to the cool nights that come to this part of the country.

  In front of our room was a brand new Ford XLT pickup. A shiny black job that looked fully loaded. I felt the beginnings of a bugger. I couldn’t help but think Teemo may have bought the truck with some of the hijacked money. But, if no one else had a bugger, why should I?

  We walked past the XLT to the middle parking area where the Bronco was parked with the trailer.

  As planned, we left the doors to the Bronco open while we loaded up, and Teemo did do a nonchalant inspection.

  Before Robby could sit behind the driver’s seat, Teemo said, “Robby, why don jew go weeth me, for . . . compañía.”

  We hadn’t thought about this. Robby looked at me for a moment. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t.

  Finally he shrugged and said, “Why the fuck not,” then threw the duffel of money into the Bronco.

  That didn’t go unnoticed by Teemo.

  After they walked over to the new truck, I said to Phil, “You want me to drive?”

  “No, I’ll drive. Better if your hands are free, just in case.”

  Sounded good . . . and, not so good.

  We followed Robby and Teemo out onto Guadalupe. We drove west on Guadalupe until we came to Guerrero Ave. We turned south on Guerrero and were out of town within ten minutes.

  It was a pretty drive. Often we were alongside the Rio Grande.

  “That the Rio Grande?” Phil asked.

  Again, I was reminded that the other three had never been anywhere around Laredo but the Holiday Inn. This was new to them, too. I didn’t find any comfort in that.

  “Yeah, I believe so,” I said, remembering seeing it on the road atlas on the trip down.

  “Doesn’t look like we can drive across it.”

  “Not here anyway. It’s supposed to get much wider somewhere south of here, and much shallower, you know, as it spreads out.”

  “Better get a lot fuckin’ shallower.”

  “Yeah.” What else was there to say about that.

  Guerrero turned into Hwy 83. It was desolate country. Flat and brown with just a few scrub trees, mesquite bushes, and some kind of native junipers mixed in with cactus. We saw a few longhorn steers, and I marveled at their ability to survive in this outwardly barren country.

  Highway 83 wasn’t much of a highway, and Teemo was in no hurry. We never got over 50 mph. It was dark when we drove into what I supposed was the outskirts of Zapata. There were a few houses along the highway. I couldn’t tell what tax bracket the owners were in, but the candlelight coming from some of the windows gave me a notion. It was hard to believe we were still in the U. S. of A.

  Zapata wasn’t anything to write home about. We were through it before I got much of a feel for it. From what I could tell, it was a ranching town. We crossed a body of water and the sign of the bridge said, “Rio Grande.” It was about a quarter mile across.

  “Now that’s more like it,” Phil said.

  “I’m crawling over to get the corks,” I said.

  A minute later I had three brown grocery bags placed between my feet, the orange corks glowed from the dashboard lights.

  “When’re you going to start throwing them out?” Phil asked.

  “Just as soon as I think we can’t find our way back without throwing them out.”

  In one of the grocery bags was a pencil and a memo pad from the hotel. I put them in my lap. After a second thought, I pulled my .45 out from behind my back and put it between my legs.

  Phil watched this in silence, nodding his head.

  Chapter 33

  Almost to Mexico

  About 35 miles south of Zapata, we drove into a little dust bowl of a town called Lopeno. We passed a gas station that was open. In the washed out yellow light from the station, I saw a cowboy wearing dusty chaps, pumping gas into an old faded red pickup truck. Standing nonchalantly in the back of the pickup was a fully saddled buckskin quarter horse, with a lariat hanging from the saddle horn. His head was a full three feet above the cab of the truck, his ears standing straight up as he watched his partner gas up. There were no sides or anything to keep the horse from tumbling out sideways, only his steady balance.

  I smiled as I thought, ‘a real working team, those two’.

  “Allen told me you used to Rodeo.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What’d ya do?”

  “Calf roping and bull riding.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  “Were you any good?”

  “Not at calf roping, had a great horse and bad ankles.”

&n
bsp; “When did you stop?”

  “About a year ago.”

  “Why, get hurt?”

  “No, a good friend did, got stepped on by a bull, in the chest, almost died.”

  He looked over at me and said, “Scare you?”

  “Yeah, but not as much as my wife telling me she wouldn’t give me anymore if I kept riding,” I said.

  With a small laugh, he said, “Yeah, I’ve seen your wife. That’d do it for me, too. No offense, Tucker, I meant it as a compliment.”

  I sat there, remembering Margie, standing in the candlelight wearing a shear negligee, holding a glass of champagne, when she gave me that ultimatum. I hadn’t seen her in three weeks and had spent the last week of that sitting in a Fort Worth hospital with my rodeo partner, Jimmy Green. Waiting to see if he was going to live or not.

  Her exact words were, ‘Like what you see?’

  I could only nod.

  Then she said, ‘If you ever get on another bull, you’ll never get on this again.’

  I never got on another bull. It wasn’t that hard of a decision, because, something else was.

  A few miles south of Lopeno, Teemo’s right blinker came on. We turned west on a small dirt road.

  “You gonna throw some out now?” Phil asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “Whatcha waitin’ for?”

  “It’s just the first turn off the highway, don’t get nervous, we don’t know how many turns we’re going to make and how many of these we’re going to have to use. I’d hate to run out somewhere in the real boonies.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.”

  “But, I’ll write this turn down, so we don’t get confused as to when I started making notes,” I said as I wrote down, ‘1- t-R’.

  Phil said, “Good idea.”

  About half a mile later, the road started to veer back south, paralleling 83. A mile or so further, Teemo slowed and turned right again.

  I rolled down my window and said, “Lag back a bit, let him get a little ahead before you turn. I’d hate for him to look in his mirror and see these flying out our window.”

  For some reason, this tickled Phil and he laughed. It sounded like nerves to me.

  As we turned onto what was no more than a trail of tire tracks, I threw a string out, and I wrote ‘2- t-R’, on the pad.

  “Cool,” Phil said, his teeth shining white by the console lights.

  There was comfort in knowing that, if need be, we were going to be able to find our way back by ourselves. I hoped we wouldn’t have to do that.

  I laugh out loud.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I just got a picture of Teemo bringing us back out and him seeing all these orange glowing balls at every turn.”

  We both laughed . . . a little nervously. I noticed there were hardly any tracks on the ground.

  Ten minutes later, Teemo stopped and in the light from his headlights, I could see water. His arm came out of his window and he motioned the go ahead for us to follow him, then slowly pulled into the water.

  As preplanned, Phil and I jumped out to turn the front lugs, allowing Teemo to get the small lead we needed.

  After getting back in, I rolled down the window, and Phil reached over and put it into four-wheel drive.

  When I felt the time was right, I threw out two strings, then we followed them into the water.

  It was easy going. The water never came up to the running boards. After what seemed like a mile, but, was probably closer to a couple hundred yards, we saw them come out onto dry land.

  “Lag back…”

  “I got it, I got it!” he said quickly.

  “Sorry,” I said. I could tell he was very nervous. “I guess I’m just a little nervous.”

  He looked over at me “Yeah, me too.”

  As soon as we got all fours on the ground, I dropped out two strings. I wanted to make sure we could spot these devices. The strings were so they wouldn’t roll off.

  In the headlights I saw some driftwood and brush piles that were piled up, like a current had made them.

  “It’s an island,” I said.

  “An island?”

  “Yeah, see the driftwood and piles of brush.”

  He looked, then said, “I think you’re right. I’ll lag back a bit.”

  I dropped another string. There was no road, and we were leaving no tracks that I could see.

  In less than a minute, Teemo entered the water again. I dropped out two more strings.

  “Shit,” Phil said.

  This time the water was higher, it came up past the tops of the tires, making for slow going. Phil did a good job of not pushing the water up into the engine. We were going slow, the trailer was floating, but there was no current, so it stayed behind us. In just a few minutes, we saw Teemo’s truck rise up on dry ground.

  As we came out of the water, I dropped another string of corks. I could see scrub brush and cactus now.

  “We’re in Mexico,” I said.

  There was no road to speak of, and after a quarter of a mile of slowly following Teemo and Robby, I said, “Stop.”

  “What?”

  “Stop!”

  Phil slammed on the brakes, I leaned way out the window and laid a string on the ground, very carefully, parallel to the car.

  “Go!” I yelled.

  He took off, spinning the tires, raising a little dust behind us.

  “What’s that all about?”

  “There’s no road here. When we come back this way, we need to know in what direction to go. We didn’t bring a compass, so the only way we can tell is the direction I lay the string.”

  His head quickly turned in my direction.

  “Yeah,” he said nodding. “Yeah.”

  “The next time I say stop, try not to raise any dust, okay?”

  Looking straight ahead, he nodded, “I got it.”

  I only had to say ‘stop’ two more times before Teemo turned north onto a paved road.

  The cloudless night sky was a dark blue crayon, the only light coming from the headlights and stars. There was no other traffic. I looked at the clock on the dash. It was 8:47.

  We were following Teemo and Robby at a steady 65 mph. It felt like a 100 mph, jetting through the black night. The stars were bright in the moonless sky. The desert flatness giving the sparkling heavens above us, a bowl hanging over our heads effect. The inside of the bowl was covered with trillions of pin lights.

  “What the fuck is that!” Phil screamed.

  “What?” I said, jerking my eyes to the road.

  “I saw something cross the road, it looked like a big leaf or something, but it looked alive.”’

  I started watching the road for live leaves. A minute later, I saw three of them scurrying across the road in front of us, then a crunching sound when we ran over one.

  “That, what the fuck’s that!” Phil yelled.

  My skin crawled, I shivered and felt sick to my stomach.

  Then another one was moving from left to right, and there was a couple of brown greasy spots on the pavement where Teemo’s truck had run over some.

  “Jesus Christ, they look like…” Phil started.

  “Tarantulas,” I said. “They’re fucking tarantulas...fuck…fuck.”

  I’d heard about this, but secretly prayed I would never see it.

  I had a little arachnophobia problem. Okay. A big problem.

  I was born in the Philippine Islands, the home of the largest spider in the world, the giant bird spider, at maturity reaching a diameter of 13 inches. The Filipino’s called them potato spiders because they like to lay up in potato sacks and have their young. The potatoes taking the place of small rocks the spiders like to nest in.

  When I was about three, my mother had rolled a G. I. bomb at one she’d seen coming across the utility room floor, where my parents kept the 50-pound sack of potatoes.

  She was in the kitchen, and I, just coming in from the back yard, and being the toddler I was, simply stood at
the door to the utility room and watched this giant bug walk across the floor.

  A G. I. bomb, about the size of a can of shaving cream, was much like a hand grenade, in being that you pulled a pin and a few seconds later it would explode with about as much bang as a cherry bomb, expelling a cloud of DDT in a 20-some-odd foot circle.

  This particular spider was a female and was carrying her young on her back. They were about the size of quarters.

  Upon seeing this green cylindrical container rolling towards her, and her ugly babies, she, of course, pounced on it, trapping it easily. When the bomb exploded, I was covered with hundreds of them. They were all over me, on my face, crawling in my hair and in my mouth. These particular spiders have large fangs for holding on to the birds they jumped on in trees, but no venom. Needless to say, the babies had a nasty little bite. I was told the Filipino gardener almost drowned me with a water hose getting them off of me. But, not before they had done their psychological damage.

  “Tarantulas!” screamed Phil, pounding on the steering wheel. “I hate fuckin’ spiders, I hate them. I hate them!”

  I was becoming very fond of Phil.

  “They look like leaves blowing across the road,” I said. “Let’s just pretend that’s what they are. They’re leaves…they’re leaves…they’re leaves.”

  “They’re leaves,” he said, “they’re leaves. Yeah, that’s right, they’re leaves.”

  It was our mantra.

  An hour later, the leaves had become much less numerous, then stopped altogether. We didn’t know why, and we didn’t care, we were just happy not to see them.

  Teemo slowed and turned on his left blinker. Phil was getting good at lagging. We made the turn, and I tossed out a couple of strings of corks. We found ourselves on a well-defined dirt road.

  For another 20 minutes we followed Teemo down a straight road. We were definitely in the middle of nowhere. But, because of our strings of painted corks and turning notations, we didn’t feel lost, maybe.

  Teemo slowed again and made a left turn, that would put us heading south. I threw out another couple of strings, made another notation on the pad and said, “Ya know, if we hadn’t been throwing these things out and making these notations, we’d be as fucked up as a snake in a lawn mower.”