by Les Edgerton
When the procession started out I turned on my lights and waited for the last car. Then I became the last car. I had no idea which cemetery they were all headed for.
A rent-a-cop came up at the cemetery and asked what I was doing.
“That’s my father they’re burying over there,” I said.
“Oh,” he said, like that was fine with him, whatever, and he just stood there awhile by my car door looking over at the mob of people gathered around the mound of dirt you could see from where we were. Donna still hadn’t said anything since the funeral home.
There was a tent set up beside the dirt for those who wanted to get out of the sun. I thought I could see my mother but we were quite a ways away so I’m not sure. It looked like her from there, but then I’d never seen her in a black dress or a hat and she looked different. Maybe it was one of my aunts. From a distance who knows? The rent-a-cop kept standing there about two feet away and he just stared at the preacher even though where we were you couldn’t hear anything.
“I didn’t know cemeteries had their own police force,” I said, trying to keep a conversation from happening. “You lose a lot of bodies?” What was this guy’s problem anyway? He muttered something when he saw it wasn’t a joke I was making and walked away. I thought he was going to walk over to my father’s funeral but halfway there, he made a military turn and went instead toward another funeral that was taking place about two hundred yards away. They were planting them all over the place it looked like.
“Shouldn’t you go up or something?” Donna asked.
“Shouldn’t you mind your own business?” I shot back. “I might’ve gone up if we hadn’t been so fucking late. If you didn’t have to comb your hair forty thousand times, we’d been on time.” She had nothing to say to that. That was good. I was getting a mood, a real bad one. She wanted to play the dozens I could spot her eleven and still wipe the floor with her ass.
After a while, it was all over. The people started getting back in their cars. It was my mother, I saw now. She got in the lead car, the one with the funeral home chauffeur and the little plastic flag, and I think she spotted me. She kind of hesitated, looking our way like she was nearsighted and then climbed in the back with somebody looked like my Aunt Millie. She was helping her, holding her elbow.
I waited until the last car had left and then I got out and walked toward the big pile of dirt.
There he was in this black coffin. The ropes they’d used to lower him were still there, the ends snaked in esses in the dirt. Yellow shit, looked like clay. I bet the guys dug the graves were glad they had machines to do it now instead of having to use shovels. I stood there for a few minutes looking down at the casket. I just stood there looking and nothing came up in my mind. No thoughts at all, nothing. I looked over at the car and could barely see Donna’s head. Looked like she’d laid down in the seat to take a nap, just the top of her head showing where she leaned it against the door.
I just about jumped out of my skin when a voice said, right at my elbow. “Your dad, huh?”
It was that fucking rent-a-cop.
“I guess,” I said. “My mother got in a limo so it wasn’t her. You got a smoke on you?”
He gave me a funny look and then tapped one out of the pack he took from his shirt pocket. He held up his lighter but it kept going out in the breeze. “Here,” I said, grabbing it out of his hand. I got it lit after two, three tries, cupping my hand around it.
“How come you didn’t go up for the service,” he said. The guy was a nosy cocksucker. I slid my hand in my trouser pocket and felt the knife there. Taking a drag on my cigarette, I looked around. There wasn’t anybody around, only the people at the other funeral and it didn’t look like any of them could see us very well. There was a little hill between us and one of those mausoleums in the way, and the few people I could spot weren’t looking our way at all.
“You talk too much,” I said. I slid the knife out and pushed the button. He saw the knife and his eyes widened.
“Hey, buddy...”
“I got your ‘hey, buddy’ hangin’, Ace,” I said. “Get the fuck out of my face. Go bother somebody else.”
I don’t know why I lit the guy up like that. For a minute, I actually thought I was going to zip him. Fucking state trooper wannabe. He walked away very quickly, muttering under his breath when he was far enough away he thought I couldn’t hear him.
There wasn’t any real reason for even considering shanking this guy or even scaring him like I did but I didn’t feel particularly bad about it. Fucking rent-a-cops are zeros anyway. In fact, I felt kind of good about the whole thing. I folded the knife and put it back in my pocket.
I took a deep, last drag on the cigarette and flipped it down on top of the coffin. “There you go, Dad,” I said, looking down. “I forgot to bring flowers so I hope this is all right.” I spoke aloud, as if he could hear me and then I started laughing. I couldn’t help it.
Well, I said in my head, and then aloud. “Well.”
Donna started laying on the horn, a long blast and then another and then she really laid on it.
“Well, Pappy,” I said. “Well, well, well.”
Time I got back to the car it was starting to overheat. Steam was curling from the hood. I decided not to check it out there but find a gas station and see what the problem was. I wondered where I was going to spend the night.
CHAPTER 6
“I was bumrapped, you know.”
We were sitting on the balcony of the Seaport Cafe on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter in New Orleans, two hours after we’d driven across the Lake Ponchartrain Causeway. Knocking back Pearl beers and shots of Jack and watching the tourists down below. It was two days before Christmas, four days into our trip South.
Bud was drunk. I’m a sipper but Bud likes to slam ‘em down like it’s ten minutes to closing, even if it’s high noon.
I’d heard this story a thousand times. Every day in the joint. Every time something would get him down, some hack give him some shit, Bud would trot out his sadsack bumrap tale. Thing was, I knew he was telling the truth.
“I’m fucking this babe,” he says and I can finish the story, word for word, I’ve heard it so much, but I keep quiet and watch the tourists and make like I’m listening. There was a guy in a Santa Claus outfit staggering up the street, a go-cup in his white mitten. It felt about eighty degrees out, so I figured in that outfit it must be near a hundred. Santa must have got into the good eggnog, way he was stumbling around.
“I’m fucking this babe, what?—about three, four months, maybe longer. I’m eighteen she says; that’s what she told me a hundred times. I figure she’s lying, her boobs were still growing an inch a day, I swear! But I go along with the program. She acts eighteen. Hell, in bed, she acts thirty-eight. One night, we’re done burying the kielbasa for a while, we’re up in my crib and we must’ve dozed off watching the boob tube. Next thing I know, the door’s busting down and this little bitty guy, couldn’t been nobody else but her old man—same hook nose—comes flying in bustin’ the door down and starts popping me with this little toy gun. A .22. Fucking shorts. Not even long rifles, pukey-ass shorts. Can you believe that? You believe a guy tries to shoot a guy my size—hell, any size—with .22 shorts? Fucker’s nuts.”
The waiter came by and Bud reached out and grabbed his arm.
“Do it,” he said, pointing to our glasses.
The Santa was almost to our block now. I noticed he kept going up to the doors of the strip joints and peeking in. Maybe he was looking for Missus Santa.
“It turns out she’s fourteen, for chrissakes! I knew she wasn’t eighteen but I’d’ve guessed seventeen, maybe the back end of sixteen. But fourteen? That freaked me out. Freaked her out too, way her old man came in like J. Edgar Hoover. Scared her, she started screaming I’d raped her. Came up with this story about how I’d held a knife on her, picked her up at the bus station. She had quite an imagination, I’ll give her that. In some ways, I don’t b
lame her. Her father was little, but scary, even with that little pissy-ass cap gun. She’d already told me some stuff about him, how he usta nail her when she was sleeping, whale the crap out of her and then make her gobble his knob. I nailed ‘im, gave him a shot broke his jaw, but somebody, nosy neighbor probably, had already called the cops.”
He did his shooter and took a big draw on his beer.
“Yeah, I don’t really blame her for what she did. I blame the jury. And the judge. They shoulda seen what was going on, just some little chippy got caught by her daddy and was trying to get out of a mess. She was hard, son,” he said, looking at me to see if I was believing him.
I was and what I was thinking was about all them myths about guys in the joint. Every time you see a movie about the penitentiary or read a book, there’s this thing they got to put in, this bullshit that says everybody doing hard time claims he’s innocent. That’s pure horseshit. I knew maybe two thousand guys, time I spent in Pendleton and Bud’s the only one I ever knew said he was innocent. Everybody I ever met in there was proud of being an outlaw.
I figured out where that crap come from. Even though nobody claims to be bumrapped—least to other guys inside—you always claim you were wrongfully convicted when you talk to straights. I bet Charley Manson does the same thing. You talk to counselors, the parole board, anybody but another con, you tell them the system made a big mistake, your case.
So, what happens, I figure, is the guys that make these movies, they go interview cons for “background” and of course, the guy they talk to says, “Hey, I shouldn’t be in here. I’m innocent, man. Was some guy looked like me, my fucking evil twin maybe.” ‘Cause the thought is that somebody who has power will believe them and set them free.
Pardons. There’s lots of pardons the public don’t know about. The governor gives out a couple, three, four dozen a year. Big sentences, like the ten and a quarters you get for rape, for residence burglary, they all get cut loose with a pardon from the governor. Six-to-eight, six years, eight months Indiana says you got to serve on a ten and a quarter and then you’re eligible for a pardon. Eighty percent get it first time. You think a guy whose only shot at freedom is a pardon is going to tell somebody, “Yeah, I did it.” Yeah, sure. They feed you all this stuff that all they want to see is evidence of remorse but that’s a bunch of bull. Admit you’re guilty, you can kiss that pardon good-bye. Long as you get them to thinking there’s even a slight doubt of your innocence you got a shot the governor’s gonna sign that paper.
People don’t even know this goes on. They think a pardon is only doled out to a couple murderers every hundred years or so. That’s the ones make the news. More often as not, there’s a big deal in the papers about some guy who’s whacked his wife for sharing her love peach but has truly repented for his one slip and wants to rejoin society as he’s a changed man. The newspapers put it out that the governor’s really agonizing over it but at the last minute decides he can’t, in good conscience, let this poor soul go loose in proper society as he has to pay the full penalty for the terrible thing he’s done. This gets a lot of votes; the straights think, hey, this is one tough hombre we got heading up this state. If they knew he probably just signed a dozen and a half pardon orders to ten and a quarters the day before they’d shit purple bricks, but that shit never gets in the paper.
There’s lots of misconceptions like that. Makes me mad. I give up going to movies about prisons. I haven’t seen one yet that come close to the truth.
That’s why I believed Bud when he said he was bumrapped. He even said that to all us other cons which is why I believe him. Even those guys who truly were innocent—and there’s some in the joint that are, I know—even those guys would never claim a bum rap bumrap to another con. Another con thinks you’re not a lifelong hard case he’s gonna be all over your ass.
“Yeah, Bud,” I said. “I believe you, man.”
“Fucking judge,” he went on. “Most I shoulda got was statutory rape, give me a one to ten. Asshole judge goes on about how I deflowered this poor little mutt, probably ruined her entire life—shit, she was turning tricks when I met her and rolling half her tricks in a New York second—says the only thing his conscience will let him do is sentence me for first degree, which is the big one.”
That’s why Bud wasn’t on parole. He got one of them pardons after his six-eight the governor gives out like Halloween candy. Cost him five grand, his mom paid and we both know where half of that went, the half the lawyer didn’t stick in his own Swiss account. Anybody ever wonders why some sumbitch would spend a million dollars to get elected to a job that pays forty-two G’s a year should spend some time in the joint and the math would clear up fast.
Bud was chuckling but it wasn’t a laugh of joy. “Little bitch, she’s slick. Comes into court wearing this little gingham number with lace on the sleeves and her hair done up in one of them Shirley Temple perms. She had on fucking patent leather shoes. Christ, she looked twelve! I’d been on the jury I’da voted to convict. That’s what fried my ass.”
He went on and on some more but I was shutting him out now. I’d heard the story too many times. Besides, that Santa down below us was fun to watch. He was drunk as a Holstein got in the silage, staggering all over the place, his drink sloshing out of his go-cup making parts of his suit darker like blood. The sky was the same gray as the sidewalks now and it was cooling off fast. Santa lurched over to a group of tourists, two couples and a little girl belonged to one of them and reached over and patted one of the women on the ass. I woulda liked to pat her myself. She had on those things used to be called hot pants and she looked hot all right. She let out a little yell we heard clear up where we were and her husband or boyfriend or whatever clipped Santa, got him right on the button and down he went, his drink spraying every man jack in the party. There’s yelling and screaming and then this cop comes running up. He was in plainclothes like they mostly are in the Quarter and he puts his foot on Santa to keep him there and starts talking to the man. Pretty soon—he musta called someone on his beeper—here come two squad cars and they loaded up the whole bunch and took off. Couple of the cops had to whap Santa in the ribs with their sticks first.
“Bet he’s out picking sugar cane for the state tomorrow,” Bud said and I grinned.
“Yeah,” I said. “Kinda destroys your faith in Santy, doesn’t it?”
He looked at me and we both said it at the same time, laughing.
“Not!”
Just then, two lookers walked out from under the balcony we were on, must have been eating inside and Bud gave out a whistle and they stopped and looked up.
They waited for us to make our way down to the street.
“Those’re hookers, you know,” I said to Bud. He just grinned.
One of them was a blonde, the kind does it at home in the kitchen sink, the other had a nose that had seen a fist at one time, had the kind of crook you can only get from being broken. Her eyes were striking, though, emerald green which really stood out in contrast to her hair which was so black it had bluish tones to it.
“You’re a real flirt, aren’t you?” the one with the nose said.
“Fuck a buncha flirting,” I said. “Flirting’s like driving down cul-de-sacs. You waste a lot of gas and don’t never get to where you’re goin’. Me, I like to hit the open road and get right to my destination. Run the red lights, all the stop signs if I hafta.”
Turned out they were a couple of hookers like I’d thought. And yeah, we got down, had us some fun, copped us each a b.j. in a courtyard off St. Peter’s. A couple of times while the ladies were going at it, tourists would pop in, see us and pop right back out. The first time that happened, the girl was with me just turned her head a little to eyeball them and came up for air for just long enough to yell at them, “Fuck off, man. Can’t you see I’m working here!”
CHAPTER 7
A couple of days after the Tennessee thing and after our stop in New Orleans there was this little incident in Houm
a a day before we hit Lake Charles. Houma’s this little coonass town that’s fulla offshore riggers and such; mean, ornery fellas that work the oil rigs out in the Gulf for weeks at a time and then come to town with a pocketful of green and a hard-on that ain’t gone anywhere nice in weeks, looking for pussy and fun, fun being the chance to crush somebody’s cheekbones into their face with a fist.
We drove into this town at high noon just like Gary Cooper and the OK Corral and spied this bar on the outskirts of town that looked like our kind of place. They had a wooden sidewalk. I think they had a wooden sidewalk, but that mighta been another town we stopped in. I guess we stopped in pretty near every place that had a bar. We was pretty drunk that whole time. I said to Bud, let’s get us a camera and take a picture a’this.
As I say, it was high noon, Louisiana noon, which meant it was brighter outside than a J.C. Penney’s White Sale and we walked in the door and couldn’t see a thing for something like two, three minutes, it was that dark. When we could make out objects like tables and a bar and a bartender, we seen that he hadn’t had time to do his housekeeping as there wasn’t a whole stick of furniture in the place. I mean, tables, chairs, everything, was just plain busted up. It looked like a sawmill ten minutes after a wildcat strike.
We go over to the bar and sat down on the only two stools that had a couple, three legs still on ‘em, acting like this looked like every bar we’ve ever been in and the bartender sauntered over, toothpick sticking out the side of his mouth and said, in a cocky way, “Y’all ain’t Yankees, I hope.”
Well, I didn’t know it showed, but I went, “Well, pard, I was born in Texas but have lived in Indiana and Chicago and some other places. Does that make me a Yankee? I got to say, though, that I always lived in the south end of town, wherever I was, and that’s a fact.”
He said, “Me, I don’t care what you are, asshole, Chinese for all I care but I got to tell y’all, the riggers’re comin’ back in about an hour.”
