“Fuck you,” Parade Float said again.
“You run out of your daily word allotment,” I said, “how you gonna beg us for mercy?”
“Wooo,” Mohawk said. “This little talk could lead to something.”
“Don’t make me happy prematurely,” Leonard said.
And then Leonard moved. His cane went out between Mohawk’s legs, and he popped it forward, locking one of Mohawk’s knees, and the move tossed Mohawk face-forward off the porch.
Leonard stepped aside and Mohawk hit the ground on his head. Sounded like it hurt.
That was my cue. As Parade Float stepped off the porch to get involved, I shot out a side kick and hit him on his stepping leg, square on the kneecap. He came down on his head too. He got both hands under him, started to rise, and I kicked him in the throat with about a third of what I had.
He rolled over on his back holding his throat, gurgling. The shower cap stayed in place. I never realized how tight those little buddies fit. Maybe it was just the light blue ones.
Leonard had Mohawk up now and had dropped his cane and was working Mohawk with a series of lefts and rights and knee lifts, and he wouldn’t let him fall. Mohawk’s body was jumping all over the yard, like he had a pogo stick up his ass.
“That’s enough, Leonard,” I said. “Your knuckles will swell.”
Leonard hit Mohawk a couple more under the short ribs and didn’t move in close enough to support him this time. Mohawk crumpled on the grass, made a noise like gas escaping.
Parade Float had gotten to his knees. He was still holding his throat, sputtering. I checked out the folks on the porch next door. They were just standing there. In tough postures, of course.
Leonard yelled at them. “You retards want some, come on over.”
Nobody wanted any. Which made me happy. I didn’t want to tear up my brand new J. C. Penney’s suit.
Leonard picked up his cane and looked at Parade Float, said, “I see you or your buddy here again, even see someone reminds me of you two, we’re gonna kill you.”
“Couldn’t we just mess up their hair instead?” I said.
“No,” Leonard said. “I want to kill them.”
“There you are, guys,” I said. “Death or nothing.”
Mohawk had casually crawled to the edge of the yard near the bottle tree and was trying to get up. Parade Float had it together enough now that he could get up and go over and help Mohawk to his feet. They limped and wheezed toward the house next door.
A tall black man on the porch over there yelled, “Your times are comin’, you two. It’s comin’.”
“Nice meeting you, neighbors,” Leonard said, and he got out his key and we went inside.
4.
The house was hot and filthy, the fireplace was full of trash, and there were great skeins of cobwebs all about. As we moved, dust puffed and floated in the sunlight that bled through thickly curtained windows and the place smelled sour and the smell came from a variety of things. One of them I felt certain was Uncle Chester himself. You die in a house and lay there for two days in the heat, you get a little ripe, and so do your surroundings.
I left the front door open. Not that it helped much. There wasn’t any wind stirring.
“Damn,” Leonard said. “It’s like he didn’t live here.”
Considering the aroma he’d left behind, I felt that was debatable, but I said, “He was old, Leonard. Maybe he didn’t move around much.”
“He wasn’t that old.”
“You hadn’t seen or heard from him in years. He could have been in a bad way.”
“Maybe him giving me this place was some kind of final jab in the heart. I loved this house when I was a kid. He knew that. Shit, look at it now.”
“Final days he maybe got his shit together. Decided to let bygones be bygones. Ms. Grange said he left you some money too.”
“Confederate, most likely.”
We moved on through the house. The kitchen was squalid with dirty dishes stacked in the sink and paper plates and TV dinner receptacles stuffed in the trash can. There was a pile of debris around the can, as if Chester had finally given up taking out the garbage and had started merely throwing stuff in that general direction.
Flies buzzed on patrol. On the counter, in a TV dinner tray, squirming in something green and fuzzy that might have been a partial enchilada, were maggots.
“Well,” I said. “He damn sure lived in here.”
“Shit,” Leonard said. “This ain’t no recent mess.”
“No. He worked on this one.”
Off the kitchen was a bedroom. We went in there. It was relatively neat. On the nightstand by the bed was a worn hardback copy of Thoreau’s Walden. That was Leonard’s favorite book, especially the chapter titled “Self Reliance.”
I looked around the room. One wall was mostly bookshelf. The books were behind sliding glass.
Leonard went over to the closed curtain and opened it. The window glass was dusty yellow and tracked with fly specks. The frame had bars mounted on the outside of it, and you could see the house where Mohawk, Parade Float, and the assholes stayed.
“Old man was scared,” I said.
“He wasn’t never scared of nothing,” Leonard said.
“You get older, you got to get scared. Courage is in proportion to your size and physical condition and what caliber weapon you carry. Some cases how much liquor, crack, or heroin you got in you.”
“Man, this neighborhood hadn’t never been ritzy, but it’s really gone to the fucking dogs.”
“Dogs wouldn’t have it.”
“This shit next door. I don’t get it. Crack house and anyone with a glass eye in their head could tell that’s what it is, but what’re the cops doing? Kid was getting a jolt of horse on the porch, man. Right out in front of God and everybody.”
“That’s probably a free jolt,” I said. “Horse doesn’t come cheap. Later on, they get him needing a little, they’ll tell him to try some rock. He takes that and he comes back ’cause it’s got him and it’s cheap. A kid can get rock for five dollars, even if he’s got to steal trinkets to sell.”
Leonard closed the curtain and we went out into the hallway and past the bathroom into the room next door.
“Jesus,” Leonard said.
The room was full of ceiling-high stacks of yellowed newspapers. There was a little path between the stuff. We went down that, and the path turned left and opened up. There was a chair and table in the opening with a small rotating fan and papers on it.
If you sat in the chair and looked across the table, you could see the window opposite it, and provided the curtains hadn’t been drawn shut, I figured I’d have been able to see bars and a dusty view of the crack house.
There was a ballpoint pen and a composition notebook on the desk. The notebook was open and I looked at the page. Uncle Chester had been doodling. There were a number of little rectangles and the rectangles were numbered. There were some lines drawn at the top and bottom and on the sides.
It looked as if Uncle Chester hadn’t had enough to do.
It was hot in there and the dust we’d stirred hung about in the dead air and around our heads like a veil. It choked me.
We went out of there and back into the living room, started out the front door to get some air, and that’s when we noticed that besides the lock the key worked, there were no fewer than five locks or barricades on the door frame, you wanted to use them. There were two chain locks, a dead bolt, and a metal bar that fit into slots on either side of the door, and at the bottom and top of the door were swivel catches.
“He wasn’t fucking around on security,” I said.
“The assholes next door, I reckon,” Leonard said.
We stood on the porch and the air was still not moving and it was still hot, but it was a hell of a lot more comfortable than the decaying air inside the house. Another couple of hours, the temperature would be down to ninety and the wind might be stirring, and inside the house, you had all the
windows open and a fan going, you might be able to breathe without a respirator.
I looked over at the crack house. No one was visible. I said, “You did all right for a fella on a cane.”
“Motherfuckers are lucky I can’t get around good as usual. Another week, I’ll be taking a dance class.”
“That post with the bottles. What the hell is it? Ornamentation?”
“It’s mojo shit. Protects you from evil spirits. Spirits supposed to go into the bottles and get trapped. Or maybe they go in and are tossed out and transformed into something safe. Don’t know for sure. I remember seeing them now and then as a kid. Hearing about them. But Uncle Chester, he never believed in that shit. He was always practical as a hangman.”
“There’s things about people you never know, Leonard. Even people close as you and me. Hell, I might listen to polka records, all you know.”
“Reckon so. Listen here, Hap. I got to see that lawyer tomorrow. Think I could get you to stay with me here tonight?”
“If I don’t want to?”
“Long walk home.”
“What I figured.”
Though we hadn’t planned on staying, we had brought a change of clothes with us, in anticipation of stopping somewhere to shed our suits so we could maybe get a bite to eat and go to a movie.
We put on the clothes and set about tidying the place up some. I drove into town proper and bought some plastic trash bags and some cleaning stuff, and when I got back, Leonard had started washing dishes in the sink.
While he did that, I pulled back all the curtains and opened all the windows and picked up the trash and bagged it and took it out to the side of the house.
Time I got that done, Leonard had finished the dishes and was doing general cleaning. Sweeping, mopping, beating down cobwebs with a broom, polishing the window bars, spraying Lysol about.
“There’s roaches in here big enough to own property,” Leonard said.
“I know. One just helped me carry the trash out.”
Time we finished what we were willing to do, we were sweaty and dusty, and we took turns in the bathroom, washing up best we could. There wasn’t any hot water.
We turned on the porch light and closed the windows and locked up the joint and stuffed the trunk and backseat with garbage bags and drove off. We put the garbage in a university dumpster when no one was looking, and went to a Burger King and ate. We went to a movie after that and came back to the house solid dark, watching to see if any of our friends next door were waiting to surprise us.
Guess they were still mulling over the ass kicking earlier that day. We could see a knot full of them out on the dark front porch over there, looking at us. We picked up the newspapers in the driveway and waved at our crack house buddies and went on in the house.
Leonard gave me the bedroom and took the couch in the living room. We laid about and read newspapers for a while, then sacked out. I left the bedroom door open to keep air circulating and I raised the window and turned on the overhead fan.
From where I lay, I could turn and look out the doorway and see Leonard lying in there on his back on the couch, his arm thrown over his eyes.
“I’m sorry about your uncle,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Everybody has to go.”
“Yeah. I wish things had worked out better between us.”
“He loved you, Leonard. Otherwise he wouldn’t have left you the house.”
“I’d have liked for him to have told me he loved me. Sometimes, when I’m stupid, I feel guilty for being homosexual. Like I had some choice in how my hormones got put together. Uncle Chester found out, he treated me like I was a pervert. Like being gay means you molest children or take advantage of weaker men for sex.”
“He wasn’t any different than a lot of folks, Leonard.”
“I’ve never forced anything on anyone else, and mostly I don’t bother with sex at all. I got the problem of being attracted mostly to straight men and that doesn’t work. Lot of gay guys act gay and that bothers me.”
“That’s odd, Leonard.”
“No, that’s pretty standard with a lot of gays. I think somewhat like a woman, I guess. I want to have a relationship with a man, but somehow, gay guys don’t normally do much for me. I guess I’ve been taught they’re odd, and I’m one of them. Go figure. I tell you, nature played a fucking joke on me.”
“Ha. Ha.”
“Hap, you ever feel funny being my friend, knowing I’m gay?”
“I don’t normally think about it. I mean, you’re not exactly a gay prototype.”
“No one is.”
“I mean, I’m not aware of it much, and when I am, I guess it strikes me odd. I accept it, but don’t understand it. I don’t see gays as perverts. Some are, some aren’t, same as heterosexuals. But I am an East Texas boy and my background is Baptist-”
“I’m East Texas and Baptist background too.”
“I know. I’m just saying. Sometimes, I am aware of it. It doesn’t bother me exactly, but I’m aware of it and I feel a little confused.”
“Think you’re confused. Life would be easier, I was straight.”
“Yep, but you ain’t.”
“Damn. Wish I’d thought of that.”
“You ever watch Leave It to Beaver?”
“Yeah.”
“End of that show, way I remember it anyway, the two brothers, Wally and the Beaver, they used to share a room and have a talk before they turned out the light and went to bed. In that talk they summed up the episode you just watched, and the problems they’d gone through, and everything was capped off and solved in those last few minutes and they moved onto new stuff next week with no baggage. You know what?”
“What?”
“Life ain’t like that.”
“No, it ain’t. Good night, Wally.”
“Good night, Beave.”
5.
Next morning Leonard called and made an appointment with Florida Grange and we drove over there.
Uptown or not, her building was in the cheap section, right next to a burned-out apartment complex on a red clay hill that had a highway cut through it. The apartment complex had burned down three years back and had yet to be rebuilt, and the clay on which it lay had started to shift toward the highway.
We entered her building and rode the elevator upstairs and saw a middle-aged woman exit a door holding her jaw. We passed the office she had come out of. It was the office of a dentist named Mallory. Florida Grange, Attorney at Law, was between it and a bail bond office.
We went in. No secretary. No lobby. The room was about the size of the men’s restroom at the YMCA and it was mostly taken up with desk and chairs and file cabinets and a word processor. On the wall were framed degrees and certificates that vouched for Florida Grange’s professional abilities.
Florida Grange was sitting behind her desk. She smiled when we came in and stood up and extended her hand, first to Leonard, then to me. When I shook it, the two large silver bracelets on her wrist rattled together.
She was wearing a short snow-white dress that made her chocolate skin and long kinky black hair radiant. I figured her for thirty years old, maybe thirty-five at the outside. Sweet chocolate in a smooth white wrapper.
I felt a bit self-conscious being there with her, wearing the clothes I’d slept in. I had brushed my teeth with some of Uncle Chester’s toothpaste and my forefinger.
We took seats and Florida Grange sat back behind the desk and picked up a folder and said, “This is simple and won’t take long. But it is a private matter, Mr. Pine.”
She smiled at me when she said that, just to make sure I didn’t break out crying.
“Me and Hap ain’t that private. Nothing you got to say he can’t hear. You already said I get the house and some money. There anything else?”
“It’s a matter of how much… You’re right, Mr. Pine. I’m being melodramatic.”
“Leonard. I don’t like to be called Mr. Pine. Call him Hap.”
“I don’t know,” Leonard said. “I live for formality. I don’t get some of it, I might get depressed.”
She smiled at him. I wished she’d smile at me that way. “He left you the house and some money. One hundred thousand dollars.”
Maybe that’s why she didn’t smile at me the same way. I didn’t have one hundred thousand dollars.
“Where in hell did he get money like that?” Leonard said. “He was a security guard when he was working.”
She shrugged. “If he’d been saving a while, that’s not that unusual. Perhaps he had some bonds come due. Whatever, you inherited that much money. I’ll arrange for you to receive it. One last thing, he left you this envelope and its contents.”
She opened her desk drawer and removed a thick manila envelope. She handed it to Leonard. He opened it and peeked inside. He gave it to me. I peeked inside. There were a lot of newspaper clippings in there. I saw that one was a coupon for a dollar off a pizza. Good. We liked pizza.
I shook the envelope. Something heavy moved inside. I held the envelope so that whatever it was slid out through the clippings and into my palm.
It was a key. I gave it to Leonard.
“Looks like a safety-deposit box,” he said.
“My thoughts exactly,” I said.
“Goddamn, Doc!” came a clear voice through the wall.
Florida Grange, Attorney at Law, looked embarrassed, said, “I don’t think he’s a very good dentist. People yell a lot.”
“That’s all right,” Leonard said. “We don’t plan to use him.”
“I keep planning to move,” she said.
Leonard said, “Which was Uncle Chester’s bank, you know?”
“Certainly. LaBorde, Main and North.”
Leonard nodded, put the key back in the envelope. “You said you didn’t know him, but you’re his lawyer. You talked to him. You must have got some kind of impression.”
“I met him about a month ago,” she said. “He came to me and wanted me to handle his affairs.”
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