Mucho Mojo cap-2

by Joe R. Lansdale

  When I got to Uncle Chester’s, I went on past and across the street to MeMaw’s. The porch light was on, and Hiram’s muddy van was in the driveway. The porch overhang was dripping water like rain off the bill of a cap. I climbed on the porch and knocked on the door. A full minute passed before Hiram answered. He was wearing a different set of clothes than I had seen him wearing at the carnival. His hair was wet and his face was flushed and sweaty. He was a little out of breath. He had his van keys in his hand.

  I said, “How’s MeMaw?”

  “The same,” he said. “I’m going up there.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Man, I don’t mean to be rude, but I got to run. I was just going out.”

  “I just need a minute,” I said and pushed my way inside, and he closed the door. The house had the faint and pleasant aroma of home cooking. I looked at the photographs on the wall, the picture of Jesus behind the stove. The cheap, yellowed curtains. The place seemed a lot less clean than when I had seen it last, and smaller, and darker.

  Hiram said, “You look like hell.”

  “I been busy. I bet you’re fixing to light out, aren’t you?”

  “What I was saying. I got to get back to the hospital. I need to get on back right now, spell my sister.”

  “I think you think the Reverend’s going to do some talking. I don’t think you’re going to the hospital. I think you’re going to run like a goddamn deer.”

  He looked at me, trying to think of something to say. “The Reverend?” he said.

  “Did you know you and I just missed each other?” I said.

  “How’s that?”

  “I got something for you that’ll explain.”

  I went over to the kitchen table, took the cloth out from under my arm, and shook the book of Psalms out of it. I took the American flag, popped it wide, let it float down over the table and the book.

  “I believe you dropped this,” I said. “At least it wasn’t the Texas flag… You were going to wrap a child’s body in it, weren’t you, Hiram. Stick a sheet from the Psalms in one of the magazines hidden up there. That day I was over here, you quoted part of a Bible verse. That was from the Psalms, wasn’t it? MeMaw saw you got religious training.”

  “Hap-”

  “You didn’t know I was at the house, Hiram. You thought the Reverend was caught and going to talk, and you were just about to make a run for it. You know what? Fitzgerald’s dead. And T.J., hell, he wouldn’t remember you an hour from now. Not so it’d cause you any trouble anyway. But you panicked, and that’s what nails you.”

  “Hap-”

  “Oh yeah, there is someone who’ll remember you. You dropped the kid too. The one you were watching at the petting zoo. I bet he got a good look at you, seeing how it wouldn’t have mattered had things gone according to plan. Simple plan, huh? Fitzgerald loaded the kids back in the bus, said he had to stay for some reason, would catch a ride, whatever, then you helped him grab the boy. Or rather you helped trick the boy. He was someone Fitzgerald knew from the church, someone he gave a free pass to, someone he was acting like a father to, one of the lost ones. And T.J., he was on the bus, but he got off too, to help. He’d do anything for his brother.”

  “You got to understand, Hap. I didn’t start any of this.”

  “I don’t need to understand anything. All I understand is you and Fitz and T.J., every year, killed a young boy, cut him up and buried him under that house. That’s all I need to understand. The why of it doesn’t mean a thing to me.”

  “I was going to stop. Really.”

  “No. I don’t think so. And it doesn’t matter anyway.”

  Hiram seemed to consider a moment, then whirled and snatched up one of the kitchen chairs and came for me. He brought it around and hit me on the side, and my injured ribs exploded with pain, but I moved into him as he swung, and cut the force of the blow. I grabbed his face with both my hands and slammed my forehead forward, into his nose, and he jerked back, spewing blood. He dropped the chair, fell leaning against the stove. The impact shook the wall, and the picture of Jesus rocked on its nail and came loose and fell on top of the stove and the glass shattered.

  He came at me again, but I moved in with a right to the stomach, hooked a left to his head. It wasn’t a good left. My ribs hurt too bad to put the torque into it. He hit me high above the ear, not a good shot, but all those blows I’d taken from Fitzgerld were wearing on me. I could feel my legs going rubber. I covered my face with my arms and fist and let him chunk a while. He wasn’t any better a boxer than he had been before, just a scrapper, and his wind wasn’t any better either. The blows stung a little, but Leonard gave me worse when we sparred.

  After a few hits Hiram began to breathe hard through his mouth, gulping air like a whale gulping plankton. I broke my cover and hooked between his hands with a solid right and took out what breath he had left, then put him down with a swinging elbow. That last technique made my injured rib move a way it wasn’t supposed to move, and I felt it stab against my side. The damn thing had been cracked, and now it had broken loose. I couldn’t help but lean against the sink and feel sick, and when I turned to look at Hiram, he was up. He’d gotten a butcher knife off the cabinet, and he lunged at me with it. He wasn’t any better a knife fighter than he was a boxer.

  I parried the lunge to the outside with my arm and grabbed his wrist and pulled him off balance and tugged him against the sink counter and used my free hand to strike him behind the head with my forearm, driving him down into the porcelain sink. His head made a sound like a clay jar breaking and he went out, would have hit the floor if his chin hadn’t hung on the edge of the sink. I kicked his feet out from under him and he went down, sprawled on the floor with blood running out of his mouth. His hand opened slowly, like a flower blooming, and the knife lay free in his palm. I kicked it away. I stood over him a moment, feeling something I couldn’t put a name to.

  Finally, I leaned against the sink and tried to get my breath. I was starting to lose it. MeMaw’s kitchen was spinning like a Disney World ride. I turned on the faucet and ran some cold water into my hands and splashed it on my face and rubbed it through my hair. That didn’t help much. I held my head low in the sink beneath the faucet and let the water run over my neck and the back of my skull. A few minutes later the spinning stopped and my rib really began to ache.

  I eased my way over to the phone and called the law, asked them to patch me through to Lieutenant Hanson, and to tell him his good buddy Hap Collins was on the line with a murderer in tow.

  39.

  Four nights after Hiram went down, MeMaw died, and two months later I was still thinking about her. I was glad she never woke up. Never knew. Hiram had lied about his sister being with MeMaw. He’d never called anyone. The need to kill had been so strong inside him, he’d left his dying mother’s side to do what he felt he had to do. The whole thing haunted me like a ghost.

  I was thinking about this one warm but pleasant afternoon while me and Leonard were out on the lake fishing, not catching anything, of course, just drifting around in the boat, untangling moss from our lines and watching birds fly over.

  At least most of the mosquitoes had called it a season. It was still warm enough that a few of them came out on scouting missions, looking for a place to land, a place to refuel, a place that generally seemed to be located somewhere on the back of my neck, but an occasional quick slap took care of that matter.

  “Get your mind off of it,” Leonard said.

  “What?”

  “You just took the bait off your hook and cast the empty hook back in the water. I’d say you’re thinking about Florida or Hiram.”

  I had been thinking about Florida earlier. And Hanson. They were going to get married. Florida had invited me to the wedding. By mail. She said she hoped I’d come. Word from Charlie, who still shopped at Kmart, was that Hanson was hoping I’d stay home. I kept thinking I ought to wish Florida and Hanson well and be happy for them. That was the right thin
g to do, but I kept hoping she’d miscalculate and get her period on her wedding night. It was the least fate could do for me.

  “It’s Hiram,” I said. “The whole mess.”

  I reeled the line in, gingerly. My ribs were a lot better, but I still found simple things painful. The doctor had wanted to put a body cast around me, but I’d had broken ribs before. After he helped me get them set, I’d insisted on an Ace bandage, wrapped tight. I figured another month from now I could put on a Chubby Checker record and do the twist. Leonard had recovered just fine; the sprain had gone away within a week.

  “You know,” I said, “I kinda liked Hiram. He had a good side.”

  “You kinda liked his bullshit. There’s no balance in having a good side when you got the other side he had. Hell, you don’t know he had a good side. He had a good front, man. That guy had more masks than a gaggle of trick-or-treaters. Look the way he went off and left his mother so he could kill that kid.”

  “I guess. You think he’ll get life, or a needle full of shit?”

  “I pray for the needle. I’d like to be there to push the plunger in the fucker, or maybe just forget the dope and jab him to death with the needle.”

  “The thing that worries me about you, Leonard, is you have such a hard time getting in touch with your true feelings.”

  “Yeah, I’m gonna get me an analyst can help me out on that. Tell me why I’m queer, too. They like stuff like that. He’ll want to know if I dream about my daddy’s dick. Hell, maybe I’m lucky, shrink’ll be some blond stud that’s queer himself.”

  “Hope springs eternal.”

  “Listen, man, you worry too much about the psychology of things. That stuff’s just head voodoo. It don’t mean a thing. You took all the psychiatric and psychology degrees in the world, balanced that paper against the truth, there wouldn’t be enough there to wipe a baby’s ass on.”

  “Maybe. But it figures with Fitzgerald, if the stuff Hiram says was true, and I think it was, but Hiram, I don’t know.”

  “You want everything to come up neat, Hap. That’s bullshit. What Hiram said about Fitzgerald is probably true, what he said about himself is probably bullshit. What you’re doing, is still blaming yourself for not figuring Hiram sooner.”

  “I should have seen it. Shit, everything was there. Boxes of flags in Hiram’s van, and each of the bodies had been wrapped in cloth, and he had quoted that piece out of Psalms. Add to that the fact he was here every year at the time of the murders, knew the Reverend and had a history with him. Toss in the religious connection, the way he’d acted that night I handed him Ivan, all drugged and dying, the way he looked at the kid like I’d given him a gift from God. The thought of that, knowing what I know now, gives me chills.”

  “Monday morning quarterbacking. I’ve heard it all, Hap, and frankly, I’m tired of it. Look, amigo, I don’t blame myself. You shouldn’t blame yourself. Hiram was cool, and Fitzgerald, hell, he was ripe for the part and was guilty too. We had our eyes on him and couldn’t see the whole of it. That flag shit, hell, who would have thought of that? Only way it would come together is the way it did. You found the flag and the kid. But the thing is, another kid didn’t go down. We got ’em all. I’m gonna feel sorry for anyone, it’s T.J., rotting away in some state institution. Not that I’d want the fucker on the street, but in his case, I got a tear or two for him.”

  “I don’t see any.”

  “I cry on the inside. And I hope every day the poor bastard will die in his sleep. He ain’t nothing for this world. Shit, Fitzgerald told T.J. his own dick was a snake, he’d have believed it. Cut it off and tied it in a knot had Fitzgerald wanted him to.”

  “No doubt about that.”

  “Actually, thing that cheers me at night is thinking of that motherfucker falling down that well. I wish I could have been close enough to hear his bones break.”

  “Your humanity overwhelms me, Leonard.”

  “Now forget Hiram, the whole mess. Set your hook. Personally, I put my next bait on the hook, I’m gonna pretend I’m putting the needle in Hiram’s eye… Come on man, let’s catch at least a couple perch. I’d like fish for dinner.”

  “You know what it is, Leonard?”

  “No, but I’m gonna find out.”

  “It’s the fact they were the same, and yet, they were different.”

  “Hiram and Fitzgerald?”

  “Yeah. I mean, Hiram says they were the same, but what do you think?”

  “Same thing I thought yesterday. They’re both better off dead, and when Hiram goes and makes it a duo, I’ll buy a party hat and a noisemaker. But since you just got to talk about it, let me give you my last word, brother. Fitzgerald, if Hiram can be believed – and like you, I believe this part – got jacked around early on, right? What did you call him?”

  “Psychotic.”

  “Right. And Hiram, he was a psychopath. No matter what story he tells about how he and Fitzgerald were turned into what they were. I don’t buy it. Least not in Hiram’s case.”

  I remembered the story Hiram told, or at least I remembered it as best Hanson would tell it to me later. Hiram told the law and the psychiatrists he couldn’t help himself; he’d been made that way. Said when he was a boy he spent time with Fitz, and Fitz’s father raped not only his son, but him as well. This, he said, was why the old man killed his wife. Not that he thought she might be sleeping around. That was just the bullshit he told me to distance himself from Fitzgerald. The old man’s wife caught the elder Fitzgerald in the act with him and Fitz. Hiram said they watched the old man murder her and wrap her in a flag from the church. Then he made them help load the body in his car, go to the Hampstead house with him, watch him dispose of her by candlelight, all the while telling them it was the will of God. Words confirmed by the image on the wall, the water-spot face of Christ.

  Hiram said the old man told him he ever said a word, he’d do the same to MeMaw, so Hiram had been quiet all those years. But the memory wouldn’t go away, and he’d wake up at night and see the blood and think of it oozing through that flag. He’d envision the water spot on the wall and smell the fresh dirt beneath the house, and he’d feel angry. He developed an urge to light fires and make little animals suffer. He did both on the sly.

  When he was a grown man, animals weren’t enough. And he and Fitzgerald, scarred by the same crime at the same time, found a linking between them. The murders began. They felt they were doing the will of God, getting rid of those sad cases, those admonitions. Or so said Hiram.

  “You see, man,” Leonard said, “Hiram was lying. He understood the reasons Fitzgerald was the way he was too well to be operating by them himself. It had been Fitzgerald who had believed in what he was doing; he was the one with the psychotic delusions that he was doing God’s work as given him to do by his daddy. But you can’t let Fitzgerald off the hook either. He made a choice. And there was something else, man. He had those porno mags same as Hiram, and the sex with the kids, they can say that was part of the pattern, but it all sounds like a power trip to me, plain and simple. But let’s give Fitzgerald a little room and say it isn’t all his fault. Not much room, but enough to turn around in, and then let’s go on to Hiram.

  “Hiram, he got a bad break for a kid too, but hell, that wasn’t his environment. He’d got over it in time, dealt with it, told eventually, he’d wanted to. But he liked the killing from the start, was born with a wire twisted and a piston loose. I bet he was doing them animals in before he ever got butt-fucked and in on that murder. With Hiram, it was like dropping ole Br’er Rabbit in the briar patch. He was born and bred for it, same as some dogs come out bad and others come out good, and they come from the same stock. MeMaw was good people, but that didn’t mean the genes didn’t come together in Hiram crooked somewhere. Got the wrong combination.”

  “Then in a way,” I said, “that means he couldn’t help it.”

  “Bad dogs can’t help but bite either. I’ve seen ’em born vicious and just get worse as they got
older, no matter how good you treated ’em. They can’t help it, but I couldn’t help putting a bullet through their heads either. You don’t bite me, or try to bite me but once… . Shit, Hap, some things just are. Hiram was a predator from birth, and he enjoyed feeding Fitzgerald’s religious frenzy, so in turn he could feed his own needs. Think about what they found in Tyler.”

  When Hiram’s home was checked into, the police in Tyler found souvenirs, more souvenirs than could have come from those dead boys under the Hampstead place. It looked as if once a year in LaBorde hadn’t been enough for Hiram. In time, if he talked more, the Tyler police felt certain they’d clear up a lot of local cases involving missing children.

  “No telling how many kids Hiram’s nailed,” Leonard said. “Here, in Tyler, on his route. He had the perfect job for his little hobby. And he’d kept right on doing it until he was stopped or the grave got him.”

  “I know,” I said. “I guess there’s a part of me thinks somewhere along the line everyone could have been saved. Maybe not come out perfect, but not come out a monster either.”

  “Hap, my man, there is evil in the world. True evil. It doesn’t twirl its mustache and it doesn’t wear black and it doesn’t slink and it doesn’t come in any one color or sex. Sometimes evil comes from good places, like MeMaw, and sometimes it can wear all kinds of good faces and talk good as anyone can talk, but it’s just a face and it’s just talk. Evil’s real, man. Same as good.”

  “And what about T.J.? How does he fit into your theory?”

  “I don’t care if he fits at all, Hap. Now shut up and fish.”

  I baited my hook and did just that, but I never could get my mind right. I kept thinking about it all, wondering if the kid we’d saved would have a chance now, or if he’d just go right back to the street. I wondered if at this very moment he might be sticking a shot of horse into his arm.

  We didn’t catch any fish. Leonard was pissed. His mouth was set for a finny friend. We stopped off at Kroger’s on the way home and went in there to buy a fish to fry. They were all out. We got some fish sticks and took them home and baked them in the oven.