Rogues

by George R. R. Martin

  “Left,” Kevin said. Moon Crater didn’t choose. “But—”

  Before Kevin could protest again, Leonard swung that axe handle. It whistled caught the man on the side of the knee, which is where it’s the weakest. I heard a sound like someone’s breaking a rack of pool balls. Kevin screamed and went down holding his knee.

  “One,” Leonard said.

  Moon Crater made a break for it. I owed Leonard one, so I chased Moon Crater down and grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around and threw a right cross into his face, and his face took it. He fell down. Before he could get up Leonard was there with the axe handle. I think it took about three whacks for Leonard to catch him good; I don’t really remember. I looked away. But I think it was the right leg.

  We drove Leonard’s car to a church lot, which struck us as ironic, and I drove us in mine over to Marvel Creek. I said, “What if those guys get out of the woods and call? Warn Buster.”

  “It’s miles to their car,” Leonard said. “It’s miles to No Enterprise. They got broke legs. Besides, it was you didn’t want me to kill them. Up to me, they’d be in the Sabine River somewhere with fish nibbling on them.”

  “You are cold, man,” I said.

  “Absolutely,” Leonard said.

  We thought we’d stake out the Gospel Opry, but when we drove by, there was action there. A big crowd. Leonard said, “They’re loading them inside. What is it? Nine? Ten o’clock? I didn’t know Jesus stayed up this late.”

  “True. He’s usually early to bed and early to rise.”

  I got my gun and put it under my shirt in the small of my back. We left the axe handle in the backseat with its memories. As we walked up, we saw the crowd was growing.

  I said to an old man on a cane, “What’s up?”

  “The Gospel Opry usually. Talent show tonight, though. Y’all don’t know about it?”

  “No,” I said. “We don’t.”

  “It’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys. There’s people who sing and dance and do comedy. Good clean fun.” He looked at Leonard. “You’ll be able to get in, son. I remember when your color couldn’t.”

  “My, how times have changed,” Leonard said.

  I glanced around and saw a line going through another door, off to the side. I said to the old man, “Who are they?”

  “The talent. They signed up to perform.”

  Leonard said, “Come on, Hap.”

  We got in line at the talent door.

  “More fun than a barrel of monkeys,” I said, “and they let your kind in, Leonard.”

  “Well, suh, I sho’ is beholding to some peckerwoods for that. Sho’ is.”

  Inside there was a little man at a desk. He wore a bad wig. He asked us our name. We gave him our first names. Leonard said we were a singing act.

  The little man couldn’t find us on the roster, of course.

  “We were set,” I said. “We called ahead and everything. They think we’re the bee’s knees over in Overton.”

  “Overton is so small you can throw a rock across it,” the man said.

  “Yep, but we’re still big there,” I said.

  He thought about it a moment, said, “Look here. There’s a couple of guys who play bagpipes that canceled. Laundry lost their kilts or some such something. I’ll give you their spot. You didn’t get registered, but it’ll work out. So you sing?”

  “Like fucking birds,” Leonard said.

  The man looked at him, grinned slowly. Jesus didn’t seem to always be at his house. He waved us inside, and we went.

  “A singing group?” I said.

  “The bee’s knees,” Leonard said.

  Way it worked is we were guided backstage. There were a lot of acts there. One old man had on what looked like a sergeant’s uniform. He was potbellied, bald, and looked as if he should have been on oxygen. He had a ventriloquist dummy with him. It was dressed up like a private, with a field cap and everything. I got to tell you, I seriously hate me some ventriloquist dummies. When I was a kid, late at night, I caught an old movie titled Dead of Night, an anthology film. One of the sections was about a man and a ventriloquist dummy that takes over his life. It scared the living dog shit out of me. I see a block of wood that might be carved into a ventriloquist dummy I get nervous. And this dummy looked as if the rats and someone with an ice pick had been at him.

  “How long you been doing this?” I said.

  He wheezed a moment before answering. “I used to make real money at it. No one will have me now, except these talent shows, some kids’ parties. I don’t do as well as I once did. They got the goddamn Internet now. Oh, you boys won’t tell on me, will you? They like us to watch our language.”

  “We won’t say a fucking word,” Leonard said.

  The old man laughed. He leaned in close. “Neither of you boys got a drink, do you?”

  We admitted that we didn’t.

  “That’s all right, then. Just wondering.” He shook the doll a little, causing dust to stir up. “Private Johnson is getting worn-out. My wife took a knife to him once, and used him to beat me over the head. It did some damage to him and me. I fart it blacks me out and I wake up wearing a tutu.”

  He barked then at his joke, and then he carried on. “I haven’t had the money to get him fixed. I act like the one eyelid he’s got that droops is just part of the act. It adds character.”

  “Sure it does,” I said. “You’ll knock them dead.”

  I hoped he didn’t knock himself dead. He was red-faced and breathing heavy and looked as if he might blow a major hose at any moment. Maybe his talk about farting and blacking out wasn’t just a joke.

  We all stood there in line, looking out at the stage. There were some dance acts going on out there. The band sounded like cows dying. The dancers moved like they had wooden legs. Next a young, beak-nosed man who played a fiddle so bad it sounded like he was sawing on a log did his act. It was the kind of noise that made your asshole pucker.

  “The sisters will win this thing,” said the old man. “I ain’t seen them yet, but they’ll probably show soon. Those dried-up-cunt bitches. They enter ever week and win the five hundred dollars. It’s those damn hymns. It gets the Jesus going in folks, and they feel like they got to vote for them. Shit, I’m up.”

  The old man waddled out with that horrible doll, picked up a stool on the way out. His act was so painful I thought I might use a curtain rope to hang myself, but at the same time I admired the old bastard. He wasn’t a quitter. He wheezed and tried to throw his voice, but by the end of his act the dummy looked healthier than he did.

  He came back with his doll and stool. He sat on the stool. “I tried to hit a high note there, when Private sang ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,’ and I damn near shit on myself. I think one of my rib bones moved.”

  “You did fine,” I said.

  “I did fine about fifty years ago and it was a spring morning and I had just knocked off a piece of ass. I did fine then. Least that’s how I like to remember it. Might have been a hot afternoon in the dead of summer and it might have been a stump-broke cow.”

  “Just sit there and rest,” I said.

  “You’re all right,” he said to me. “Sure you haven’t a drink?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  There was another dance troupe on stage, and a guy with some bowling pins he was going to juggle was next in line. Leonard and I glanced around, trying to take in the place. It didn’t look like a joint where a prostitute would be kept, or in this case made to go for free until she was used up. It didn’t look like a place where someone sold drugs. It looked like a place full of bad entertainment. That’s what made it a good hideout, of course, but I wasn’t convinced.

  I noticed that the acts that finished were ushered along a certain path, and that there were two guys on either side of a dark stairway. They didn’t look like church deacons, but I decided to call them that in my mind. I left Leonard and walked over to the stairway, looked up it. I said, “What’s up there?”
/>
  One of the men stepped forward, said, “That’s private, sir.”

  I went back to Leonard. I said, “There’s a whole nuther floor up there.”

  “There’s a stairway on the other side of the stage too,” he said. “You can see it from here. Its got bookends on either side of it too.”

  I looked. Sure enough. Two more guys. If the two near us were not church deacons, those two were not in the choir. Upstairs could have just been a storage place for hymn books, but I doubted it.

  “Buster don’t work the brothers,” Leonard said. “All white thugs.”

  “It may not seem that long ago to them that your kind couldn’t come in, and it may be they liked it like that.”

  “That really isn’t true,” Leonard said. “They did come in here, and you know it.”

  “They did janitor work,” I said, “and they used to come up the stairs at the back and sat up there in the balcony.”

  “Nigger money was good as any,” Leonard said. “I know. I sat up there in the balcony once and spat on a white boy’s head.”

  “You did not,” I said.

  “No, but now and again I like to dream.”

  We were whispering a game plan, when all of a sudden the little fellow that had signed us in came over. He said, “The Honey Girls are sick.”

  “Who?” I said.

  “The gospel singers I told you about,” said the old ventriloquist, who had come over. “Their adult diapers probably got bunched up and they couldn’t make it. Or they heard that young girl come on and sing and left. I know they were here. I seen them, the smug assholes.”

  “That’ll be enough,” said the little man.

  “Sorry,” said the ventriloquist, and he waddled back to his stool.

  I had my mind on other things, and hadn’t even noticed the young girl, not really. But in the back of my mind I sort of remembered her doing a Patsy Cline number, and not badly at all.

  “Honey Sisters say they got sick,” said the little man.

  “Both of them?” Leonard said.

  “It hit them sudden, so you two are on next.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  Leonard grabbed my elbow, “Come on, I still remember ‘The Old Rugged Cross.’ ”

  “You’re yanking me,” I said. “We’re really going out there”?”

  “I sing in the shower,” Leonard said. “I do all right.”

  “Oh, hell,” I said.

  Well, went out there, and I knew that old tune too. I am an atheist, but I like a good gospel tune now and again. We didn’t have any music, but there was the house band and they knew the tune, sort of, though I didn’t remember it with a tuba solo. We started out with it. Leonard was good, actually; he sounded way all right. I sort of chimed in when he lifted a hand to me, but after a few lines I forgot the words, so I started singing nonsense. An old lady in the front row in a wheelchair said, “Get the hook.”

  Leonard finished out while I snapped my fingers and tried to look cool. I think had I had sunglasses I could have pulled it off.

  When we finished, or more less quit, they were glad to see us go. Someone even threw a wadded-up paper cup at me. Fuckers missed.

  When we exited on the other side, Leonard said, “Damn, Hap. You fucked it up. We could have won that prize money. Or I could have.”

  “I didn’t make us out as a duet, since we have never sung together even once. I never intended to go out there.”

  “I’ve always wanted to do that.”

  “You sounded all right,” I said, “but don’t be thinking of it as a second job.”

  “As for you,” Leonard said, “you don’t be thinking of it at all. Now, let’s see if we can find Tillie.”

  “If she’s alive,” I said.

  “She’s alive, they are going to pay for it. If she’s dead, they’re going to pay for it, and then pay a dividend.”

  I didn’t even like Tillie, but I sure liked Brett. Brett called her a bent twig. She’d say, “Hap, she’s a bent twig, but she’s not broken. She can weather the storm and come out on the other side.”

  She was pretty much still in the storm as far as I was concerned, but if the information we had was right, she didn’t deserve this; this was even worse than what should happen to politicians. We headed toward the staircase on the side where we exited, near the choirboys. A man over there pointed us toward an exit. He was a chubby guy in a faded, purple leisure suit old enough to belong in a museum. He said, “That was bad, boys. Real bad.”

  We ignored him and headed for the staircase.

  “Not over there,” he said, and he grabbed my sleeve. I shook him loose and kept going. I had a feeling that most everyone here had no idea what was going on upstairs, no idea that the man who ran the Gospel Opry was about as reverent and kind as the business end of a hatchet.

  “Those guys don’t kid,” said the man who had grabbed my sleeve. He was talking about the two boys at the stairs. They stepped out, one toward me, one toward Leonard.

  The choirboy on my side said, “You don’t come this way.”

  I kicked him in the balls and he bent a little and I hit him with a right hook. He went against the wall and came off of it mad. I hit him again, a straight right to the jaw. He went to one knee and tried to draw a pistol from under his coat. I pulled mine and hit him in the head with it. He went to his hands and knees, and I hit him again. He kind of bent his elbows like he had failed to do a push-up and lay on the floor. It was then that I noticed my leg where Kevin had hit me with the axe handle was really aching. I noticed this because I was going to kick him again and decided against it.

  I looked over at Leonard. His man was already unconscious at the base of the stairs. I think he took him out with one good punch. I rolled my man over and took his gun. I had one in either hand, now. I went up the stairs behind Leonard. Back onstage I heard laughter. Someone had finally succeeded at something. A joke maybe.

  When I got to the top of the stairs, Leonard had taken an automatic off of the man he had hit and he had it at the ready. I turned and looked down, wondering if the deacons across the way knew what we were up to. If they didn’t, they would soon. I figured the man who grabbed my sleeve would tell them. He might not know what really went on here, but he knew who he worked for.

  Of course, if we were wrong, and what we expected was not at the top of the stairs, was really a bingo parlor, we would have a lot of explaining to do. For that matter, we could have a lot of explaining to do anyway.

  The deacons figured it out. They came running across the stage in the middle of a dance number with a man and a woman in a horse suit. The man was the back end, the horse’s ass. I knew this because I came back down the stairs because I heard running. It gave me a view of the stage. The deacons knocked the horse over and the man and woman spilled out of it. The couple said some words you wouldn’t expect to hear at a Gospel Opry. God probably made a big black mark in their book right then.

  The deacons didn’t have guns drawn, and they almost ran right over me they were coming so fast. When they saw my revolver, as well as the automatic I had taken off one of the choirboys, they stopped up short. They froze like ice cubes.

  I said, “Do you really want to get dead?”

  One man shook his head and started to run, across the stage again, past the horse which had been put together again. A tinny trumpet was playing somewhere, and a piano. The horse was dancing. That goddamn tuba was hitting some random notes; that guy, he ought to be put down in the ground with that tuba.

  The other deacon, the one that didn’t run, put his hands up. He said. “You got to at least take my gun, so I can say I was unarmed.”

  “That’ll work,” I said. “But pull it easy.”

  He did, squatted down and put it on the floor and backed up. “I got no beef,” he said.

  “That’s good,” I said. “because I am in one shitty mood.”

  He backed out and went across the stage, walking fast. The couple in the horse suit just q
uit then. The woman pulled off the horse’s head and tossed it into the audience. I hoped she hit the old woman in the wheelchair who said to get the hook.

  I picked up his gun, a little nine, and went up the stairs again. Leonard was waiting.

  “Stop to go to the bathroom?” he asked.

  “I was disarming a gentleman.”

  Leonard pointed with his handgun. “There’s one door. Shall we see what’s on the other side? Lady or the tiger.”

  “I think we might get both,” I said.

  We moved quickly down the hall and Leonard kicked at the door and it swung back and came loose, hanging on one hinge, and then it came loose and fell. It was a toilet. It was empty.

  “They were guarding a bathroom?” Leonard said. “Really.”

  There was probably some way to get across, but we didn’t see it right away, and we were in a bit of a hurry. We put the guns in our waistbands, under our shirts, went down the stairs and behind the stage. The Gospel Opry folks were not deterred. The action, such as it was, was still going on. It was some kind of comedy act. When we got to the other side, we passed the man and the woman who had been wearing the horse outfit. They gave us the hard eye.

  “Were you two part of the disruption?” said the woman.

  “No, ma’am,” I said, and kept going. We went up the stairs where the deacons had been. We pulled out our guns. There were two doors along the hallway.

  “I’ll take one, you take the other,” Leonard said.

  We chose a door, nodded at one another, and stomp-kicked them. My door went back completely off the hinges, old as it was. I could hear Leonard still kicking as I went through.

  There was a bed in the room, and a little light to the right, and there was a row of four chairs on that side, and I’m dying if I’m lying, there were four men in those chairs, and the one closest to the light was reading a newspaper. It was like they were in a barbershop waiting their turn. Tillie was on the bed, and a nude man was on her, his naked ass bobbing like a basketball. Tillie wasn’t there really. She was in some other zone. She had her eyes open, but they might as well have been closed. She looked skeletal. My guess is she hadn’t been fed in a while, outside of what was in a needle. She looked a lot like Brett, if Brett were a concentration-camp survivor, and that disturbed me even more.