“I couldn’t get that mad at you, buddy.”
“Yeah, we’re stuck with one another… Shit, Hap. It’s OK you told Florida. Hell, I know you got a head on you. She’s all right. I mean, you’re a dumb asshole, but what’s done is done, and she’s all right.”
“It just slipped out. A thing like that, it’s hard to keep under your hat.”
“It’s all right, bubba. It’s just I don’t know what to do exactly.”
“Me either,” I said.
26.
A few days went by. The recollection of those bodies burned my memories at night, found their way into my thoughts during the day. It was the same with Leonard. Not that he said much about it. But I could tell. I had known him long enough to see his feelings expressed in the way he moved or smiled or tried to laugh.
To flush the memories out we took to hard work. Manual labor has a way of sweating out impurities. Both physical and emotional.
We finished up the surface flooring late one afternoon and took what scraps of lumber were left over, and went to see MeMaw, dumped the stuff in her yard and made a pledge to patch her porch.
She was agreeable and very grateful. She told us how much Jesus loved us and took us inside and showed us our snapshot. She had pinned it on the wall near the snapshot of her youngest son, Hiram, who she said Leonard reminded her of. She said her boy would soon be home for a visit. When she said it, her entire face brightened and she looked no older than seventy-five. OK, eighty-five.
I looked at the snapshot of her son and the one containing me and Leonard. Well, Leonard and her son were both black, that much was similar.
We had to eat some homemade bread and preserves before we were allowed to consider leaving. It wasn’t a difficult task. We insisted she let us do a few chores for her as well, then we left out of the kitchen and shoved the lumber under her porch and vowed to be back to do the work in a day or two.
Back at Uncle Chester’s, just as the sun faded, Leonard put some water in a pot of yesterday’s pinto beans, dropped in a fresh strip of ham hock, and peppered it. While it stewed, I drove my pickup down Comanche Street to the East Side Grocery for a few supper items. It was a beautiful death to the day, and in the red and gray time before the dark, the East Side took on a sort of fairy brilliance. A lot of walkers had disappeared from the streets for supper, and those who had jobs were back from them and settled, so the streets were near empty and stained with the blood of the sun.
East Side Grocery was a center for more than commerce. It was where the old men gathered to rattle dominoes and cuss and tell about how they used to do this and used to do that. A bunch of them were sitting out front of the grocery, to the right of the door on the concrete walk, underneath an overhang with a tin-capped light that was already on and already swarmed with bugs. They were sitting on old metal lawn chairs playing dominoes on a fold-out table, laughing and drinking beer out of paper cups.
Behind them, stapled on the store wall, there were ads for great black blues musicians, like Bobby Blue Bland. Guys like that played the East Side often, and the white community never even knew it. There was also a colorful poster announcing East Side’s Summer Carnival, August 27th, the “Only All Black Sponsored Major Carnival In East Texas,” if one were to believe the poster. In addition, there were a variety of church and community project bulletins.
I nodded at the old men when I went in the store. They nodded and grinned amiably enough, but even though I had been here a lot of late, there was the usual suspicion on their faces, the unasked questions: Who’s the white guy? What’s he doin’ here? Why’s he keep hangin’ around?
The store owner had been at the domino table, and he reluctantly followed in after me and got behind the counter and waited. I picked up some bread and eggs and cornmeal mix, a six-pack of beer for Leonard, and looked for some nonalcoholic beer for me but didn’t find any. I got a six-pack of Diet Coke instead.
I took my stuff to the counter, plucked a couple of jerky sticks out of a box up front, threw them down with my purchase, and watched some hot links on metal pins turn and sweat and drip inside a humidity-beaded glass enclosure.
The owner had a lot of belly and a lot of gray hair and a sun roof that revealed a dark bald spot. He might have been five two. He appeared to have all his own teeth, and one of the front ones was gold as Rapunzel’s hair. He said, “That do you?”
“Yeah. How’s the dominoes?”
“I’m losing,” he said.
He tallied up my goods on the adding machine, and I continued to look around. I examined a frame on the wall behind the register containing the first dollar the store had taken in, and noted the dollar was play money. Below that, on a shelf, I saw something that startled me. Next to a jar of pickled pig’s feet was a larger jar stuffed with little slips of paper. It looked like one of the jars at Illium’s.
I said, “That jar with the coupons in it? That is coupons, isn’t it?”
He was bagging up my groceries; he stopped, glanced where I was indicating. “Yeah.”
“I’ve seen that setup a couple times,” I said. “The jars, I mean. There something to it besides you saving coupons?”
“That’s the church’s,” he said.
“How’s that?”
“Reverend Fitzgerald, he’s got him a deal with all the businesses in town. We cut coupons, we see them. Folks bring them and donate ’em. Fitzgerald saves them coupons for his youth programs. You know, take the soccer, baseball team out to eat. He’s got this deal with damn near everybody in the city. Even if the coupons expire, they let him use ’em. They gonna make money anyway, discount or not, him bringing in ten, twenty kids at a time, and often. He’s got more coupons than he can use. Illium done told us he gonna stop picking up for a while, he gets this batch. He says they done gettin’ yellow, they got so many. They could take soccer teams out for the next ten years and not run out of coupons. He done s’posed to got this here jar, but he ain’t showed. I reckon he’s been sick.”
Yeah, I thought, real sick.
“Mr. Moon’s the clearinghouse?” I asked.
“You know him?”
“Not really. Know who he is.”
“Yeah, he runs all manner errands for the church. He’s a real do gooder, that Illium. That sonsabitch dies, he’s gone sit on the right side of Jesus, and Jesus gone give him a juice harp, personal like, let him play a few spirituals.”
I figured Illium was probably twanging out a rendition of “The Old Rugged Cross” even as we spoke. I thanked the old man, paid up, and started back to the house, thinking about Illium, the church, Reverend Fitzgerald, and all those coupons, the connection right under our noses all the time.
Next day. A Saturday. Hot. Me and Leonard and Florida and Hanson, out at the lake near my old house, standing on the bank, shadowed by drooping willows, casting fishing lines in the water.
The fish weren’t biting, but the mosquitoes were. They were bad here because of the low areas where the water ran out of the lake and gathered in pools and turned torpid beneath the shades of the willows and gave the little bastards prime breeding grounds.
Florida, dressed in blue jean short-shorts, a short-sleeved blue sailor-style shirt, low-cut blue tennis shoes, and one of those stupid white fishing hats with a big brim that turns up in the front, was doing more slapping than casting.
“You should have worn long pants,” I said. “I told you.”
“Well, damnit, you were right,” she said.
Hanson slapped a mosquito on the side of his face, hard. He looked at his palm. In the center of it was a bloody mess protruding broken insect legs. He wiped the palm on his pants.
“Boys,” he said, “this is just peachy-keen fun, but you didn’t invite me out here to fish. I can tell way you keep looking at each other, so don’t fondle my balls – sorry, Florida.”
“It’s OK,” Florida said. “I’ve heard of them.”
“Get on with it,” Hanson said. “And next time, skip this fishing
shit and take me to a movie.”
“I don’t know you’re gonna like this,” Leonard said, “’cause, you see, what we want to do is make some kind’a deal.”
“I don’t like deals,” Hanson said. “It always means some guilty asshole gets off with less than he deserves.”
“We’re not guilty of anything,” Leonard said.
“Except withholding evidence,” I said.
“Yeah,” Leonard said, “there’s that.”
“All right,” Hanson said, reeling in his line, “that’s enough bullshit… You in on this Florida?”
“Nope,” she said. “I’m just a humble fisher girl. And their lawyer, if they need me.”
We all took a moment to slap at a black cloud of mosquitoes. Hanson said, “Let’s go someplace we can talk without pain. Few more minutes of this, I’m gonna need a transfusion.”
We walked back to Leonard’s car, which was up the hill and in the sunlight. The mosquitoes weren’t swarming there, there was just the occasional kamikaze. We took the rods and reels apart and put them in the trunk of the car with the fishing tackle. We poured the worms out so that they might breed and multiply. I watched them squirm around in the soft sand, making their way into the earth.
Florida climbed up on the hood of the car and stretched her legs and scratched at the knots the mosquitoes had made. On her, even the knots looked good. Hanson seemed to be taking note of that himself.
Hanson said, “I’m waiting. And not patiently.”
“Once upon a time,” Leonard said, “me and Hap found a dead guy in a pond.”
“Yeah,” I said, “in a bookmobile.”
“Come again,” Hanson said.
We explained about Illium but didn’t give his name or say where his body was. We didn’t tell him any more than we needed to. When we finished, Leonard said: “It’s gonna look bad for the ole boy, things you’re gonna find on his couch. A box of kid’s clothes and some kiddie fuck books. But it’s bullshit. He isn’t guilty of anything. Neither’s my uncle. You see, all this is connected to those missing kids, but it’s not connected the way it looks.”
“Another thing,” I said, “me and Leonard got to talking last night, thinking about what we’d seen, and we came up with something else. In this guy’s house-”
“The drowned guy?” Hanson said.
“Yeah,” I said. “You’ll find a dirty bathtub with pieces of hay in it. We figure he’d just finished mowing his field, was grabbed by whoever while he was in the bath, and drowned in his own tub. Then they put him in the van and ran it off in the pond. An autopsy will probably show the water in his lungs isn’t the pond water.”
We didn’t say anything else. We leaned against the car and waited. Hanson looked at us for a while. “That’s it?” he said. “You’re not telling me any more than that?”
“We’ll tell,” Leonard said, “but we want something.”
“You’re not in any position to want shit,” Hanson said. “It’s best you talk your asses off.”
“You know we haven’t done anything,” Leonard said. “We want to solve this crime, bad as you, but we want the deal you didn’t give my uncle. You help us solve the case, but we lead.”
“I can’t do that,” Hanson said. “Department wouldn’t stand for it, a couple of amateurs. Why do you think they didn’t let your uncle do it?”
“He was nuts?” Leonard said.
“Well,” Hanson said, “that was part of it.”
“We already got more leads than you on this missing child business,” I said. “You might be amazed what we got.”
Hanson studied the lake in the distance. A soft hot wind brought the smell of it to us. It stunk faintly of dead fish and stagnation. A large bird’s shadow fell over us and coasted away.
Hanson said, “If I wanted to do it, I couldn’t. I tell my superiors, they’ll laugh their asses off, me suggesting you guys run an investigation. They’d be on you assholes like rash on a baby’s butt. They got through with you, you wouldn’t know if you wanted to shit or go blind. And they’d stick me writing parking tickets.”
“We don’t want you to ask them anything,” I said. “Not yet. What we want is you to join up with us, and cheat a little. Show us the stuff you got on the case, we’ll show you something. We think we know what’s going on, but we want to set everything up, and the more we all know, the better. We see the files, we might recognize something there goes with what we already know.”
“I’ve read those files,” Hanson said. “There’s not a whole lot of help there.”
“Something that’ll jump out at us,” Leonard said, “won’t necessarily jump at you ’cause you don’t have the information we got.”
“Sounds like some shit talk to me,” Hanson said.
“This way,” I said, “when we turn it over to you, and nod out like we never existed, no one’s going to know we did anything, unless you want them to.”
“Of course, we’ll know,” Leonard said, “and that’s all that matters.”
“You had all your ducks in a row on this,” I said, “you could make those jackasses at the station stand up and notice, and you’d get the respect you deserve.”
“Not to mention solving an important crime,” Florida said.
Hanson turned and looked at her. “I thought you weren’t in on this.”
“Just a wee bit,” she said. They held each other’s eyes longer than made me comfortable.
“We’re deadly serious,” I said, drawing Hanson back to me. “We’ve got the guy that’s been murdering these kids by the ying-yang, and now we’re gonna put it in the wringer, crank it up a couple notches. You don’t help us, we’ll find some other way to get it done.”
“I could just run your asses in for obstructing justice,” Hanson said. “And ought to.”
“You could,” Leonard said, “but you don’t want to.”
“Say I don’t?”
“You want this murderer bad as we do,” I said, “and we can make things happen a lot quicker if you do it our way. You help us, we get the benefit of your experience, and you get to look like Supercop. Hell, aren’t you tired of being neglected? You solve this, on your own, with our help, you might end up chief.”
“And most important,” Leonard said, “those kids will have justice. Well, some kind of justice.”
“I don’t know,” Hanson said.
“We start with the body in the pond,” I said. “Telling you who it is and where it is. It’s not like we say, then to hell with it. It is, you play that one any way you want, then we feed you some more. Tell you what we know and how we know it and what we think it means. Then we’ll stick the killer’s dick in the wringer and put your hand on the crank.”
Hanson crossed his arms, furrowed his brow, and looked into the distance. A minute ticked by like it was an hour on holiday.
“What’ya say?” Leonard said.
“I’m thinking,” Hanson said. “Give me a minute to breathe here, will you? I’m thinking.”
27.
Some mornings the beautiful face of my ex-wife, Trudy, hangs over me like a moon, but when I open my eyes there’s only the sunlight as seen through tears. Some mornings the light itself is the color of her hair, and the smell of summer flowers is the smell of her skin.
Some mornings I awake and the bed is too huge and I cannot remember how I’ve come to where I am, cannot believe what happened to Trudy, or imagine that beautiful body and face of hers in the ground, withering, feeding the bugs and worms. I won’t allow myself to look straight on at the memory of violence that took her and wounded me and Leonard. She went wrong and I went after her, pulling my best friend behind. Gunpowder and bloodshed, sulfur and death were Trudy’s final perfume. And me and Leonard, we’ve got the scars.
I awoke the next morning having dreamed that way about poor, pretty Trudy, awoke feeling old and blue and not much for coffee. All this the consequence of Florida not being in my bed. She had not invited herself to stay and I had
n’t the guts to push it.
Her absence between the sheets had been part of why the old dreams of Trudy came back; part of the feeling behind my bones and viscera that violence was oncoming direct in my path, like bright lights on my side of the highway on a dark, wet night; the feeling I was about to meet wet grillwork head-on, followed by two hot tons of speeding steel.
I got dressed and went outside without waking Leonard and sat on the porch steps in the cool of the morning and watched the sunlight brighten. Long about the time you could call the morning golden, Hanson pulled up at the curb in a car I had not seen before, a beige Buick with a dent in the rear fender. He got out of the car with something under his arm and looked at me. He managed his cigar out of the inside of his coat and put it in his mouth and came up to the porch and sat on the step beside me. He looked tired. He rolled the cigar with his tongue and put what was under his arm on the steps between us. It was a thick manila folder.
“Glad you’re up,” Hanson said. “I was gonna wake you.”
“Thanks for giving Florida a ride home last night,” I said.
“Yeah, sure,” he said.
“That was damn nice of you.”
“No problem.”
“I like the idea of an officer of the law seeing her home safe.”
“Part of the job.”
We sat in silence for a while. Hanson shifted on the step so that he could pick up the folder and open it. He looked at the contents for a few moments, then put the folder on the porch. He said, “All right. We got a deal. I want you to know, ’cause of you and Leonard, I almost lit this damn cigar last night. Haven’t smoked in years, just sucked on it now and then, but I almost lit it.”
“Thanks for the folder,” I said, and meant it. “And the world thanks you for not lighting that damn cigar.”
“I photocopied all this shit last night, on the sly, and it gets out, well, my job is gone, and I just might be sleeping behind bars. And you and Leonard will be there too. You can bet on that. Here’s how it’s gonna work. I’m gonna leave you this, you give me the name of this guy in the pond, tell me where the pond is. I got some lies ready to use for leads. I find him there, we’re in business. I don’t, you are not only gonna give me this stuff back, I’m gonna punch both of you in the mouth and see to it you’re out of town.”
Mucho Mojo cap-2 Page 15
