Rumble Tumble (7 page)

9

Back at Leonard’s house, Leonard took the dillo into the woods while I made coffee. He came back a few minutes later carrying the empty trap. I watched him from the kitchen window. I thought he looked a little sad.

I poured us coffee, took the cups out on the back porch. Leonard joined me and we sat on the steps and sipped. I said, “When do we leave?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“That’s what I figured. That’s what I told Brett.”

“I think we ought to see we can take Brett’s car. We’ll need the trunk room.”

“Done,” I said. “She’ll be glad to do it.”

Leonard nodded. He said, “You want to back out, we can.”

“I didn’t say anything about backing out.”

“I know, but I’m givin’ you the room.”

“I’m committed. I asked you to help me, remember?”

“I remember.”

“If you want to back out, you can.”

“You’ve had to bring a man down before, Hap, and you brood over it still.”

“I’d hate for there to be a time I didn’t brood.”

“What we’re doin’ now ain’t self-defense. We’re goin’ lookin’ for trouble.”

“I know that.”

“You might have to kill someone.”

“I know that too.”

Leonard sipped his coffee, took a moment to study one of his fingernails. He wasn’t looking at me when he spoke.

“There’s things I can live with. Things even you don’t know about. I’m not complainin’, and I’m not apologizin’. I’m just sayin’ there’s things I can live with maybe you can’t.”

“Like killing people?”

“You got more bleeding heart in you than the whole Democratic Congress. You don’t like guns. You’re going against everything you believe because of Brett. You don’t owe this to her. Me, if I know where there’s a nest of poisonous vipers and I can stomp them flat, I think I ought to do it. I figure you’d feed the vipers, try to raise them up, maybe finance their college. I’m not saying one thing or another about this being wrong or right, I’m sayin’ how you are and what you’re goin’ to be dealing with. If what the midget said is true, we got the Oklahoma mafia going on here. We’re walkin’ onto their playin’ field, and we’ll be expected to play. These guys, they take their money, their drug pushin’, their pussy peddlin’, and their murderin’ seriously.”

I sat silent for a while. Leonard took my coffee cup and left, came back with filled cups for us both.

“You’re not altogether wrong, brother,” I said. “But I love Brett. Brett loves Tillie. So I got to do it.”

Leonard nodded. “Since you might stop in the middle of the action to pet a puppy dog, I figure I got no choice than to go in with you.”

“You always have a choice,” I said.

Leonard looked at me and laughed a strange laugh. “The hell I do.”

I didn’t know how to react to that. I eventually just looked away. Out at the edge of the woods, giving us a stunned look, was the armadillo.

“Your son has returned,” I said.

Leonard looked up and saw the dillo. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

We drove over to see my boss at the Black Lace Club, which was essentially a big nasty honky-tonk on the outskirts of town where women shook naked titties on stage to bad country-rock music and sometimes slipped their briefs down to give the drunks a view of the squirrel in the tree.

Most of the time, this led to the dancers having money tossed at them or pushed into their panties, but other times it led to drunks taking it as an invitation to walk on stage and screw whatever was in front of them. That meant the girls, me, the manager, another drunk, the stage, whatever.

It was my job to see they didn’t screw anyone, make too much noise, or fight each other over who could drink the most, had the fastest car and the biggest dick. It was a terrible place, a terrible job. In two weeks you could have more fights and nasty confrontations than three average persons had in a lifetime. It was one of the old-style bad places. Not the new places with clean floors and strobe lights and girls that looked as if they stepped out of the pages of
Playboy
. Not the places where the worst you had to deal with was some frat boy who thought he was tough. This was where the big bellies and the brainless collected. Guys that wouldn’t fit anyone’s idea of a stereotypical Hollywood tough guy, but the kind of guys who could take any one of those sleek, muscled-up ego machines and kick their asses until it bored them enough to stop.

I had come to feel working in this place was just helping it survive, and that was like feeding shit and sugar to disease-carrying flies. Why do it?

When I got there a couple of the daytime bouncers were on duty, and they knew me. They slapped me on the back and shook hands with Leonard when I introduced him. They were good guys, just shy on brains.

Day duty isn’t so bad. Mostly married businessmen on business trips who had wives back home who had gotten fat. They come in for a drink and a look-see, and maybe later they could get it up enough to jerk off back at the motel.

My boss, Billy Joe James, was sitting at a table auditioning a new girl who was dancing pitifully to a tune playing on a cheap recorder. She had about as much rhythm as a stick. She didn’t look bad, however. She was mostly ass, titties, and a dull expression. Looked about thirty, but a good thirty. She had a watery-looking tattoo of a red heart on her ass, and a red and blue tattoo that might have been a parrot, but could have been most anything, on her ankle.

Billy Joe saw me and Leonard, smiled at us. He waved the girl from the stage. She came down the steps like her feet hurt, which considering a large part of her outfit was a pair of tall red high heels, was likely. The rest of her had on a red G-string that was mostly up her twat.

When she came over to Billy Joe’s table, he said something to her and slapped her on the ass. She shrieked like it was all in good fun, grabbed her shirt off his table, and went away. She passed us, pulling on her long shirt, and the expression on her face told me she wasn’t having any kind of fun at all.

We went over and sat at the table and Billy Joe smiled at me. Billy Joe had a fat face any mother would love to hit. Many times. He said, “You ain’t come for money, I hope.”

“Actually, I have.”

Billy Joe nodded, wiped fingers through his oil-slicked brown hair. “Figures.” He looked at Leonard. “How’s it goin’, Pine?”

“It’s goin’,” Leonard said.

“You know I don’t pay nothing until Saturday morning,” Billy Joe said. “It’s always Saturday mornin’ that I pay.”

“Well, you know,” Leonard said, “right now, it’s bound to be Saturday mornin’ somewhere in the world, don’t you think?”

Billy Joe laughed a little, not like he thought the joke was all that goddamn funny, but like maybe a good yuk might take some of the seriousness out of Leonard’s looks.

“I got a little emergency here,” I said. “And I’m quitting.”

“Quitting? You can’t quit.”

“I just did.”

“Oh, shit, man, you’re my main bouncer. You can’t quit.”

“Just said I did.”

“You can’t.”

“I believe you’re not listenin’ to the man,” Leonard said. “Sounds like he’s quittin’ to me.”

“Shit.” Billy Joe looked at Leonard. “What about you, Pine? You lookin’ for work?”

“Not here I’m not.”

“You got a rep too. You’re one hell of a bouncer.”

“Not anymore. I’ve given up that profession. That and rose field worker and lay preacher are no longer on my résumé.”

“I pay pretty good, and hey, you get to look at a lot of titties.”

“I’ve seen titties and they don’t interest me much.”

“You some kind of fag?”

“Actually, I am.”

Billy Joe studied Leonard for a moment. “Yeah. Really?”

“Really,” Leonard said.

Billy Joe looked at me. “You and him? You know … you and him?”

“Only if my latest relationship with a female doesn’t work out,” I said. “Then, I got to consider it. I might even consider some bestiality. Come on, Billy Joe. I need my money and I need it now.”

Billy Joe nodded. “All right. But you decide you want to work again. Or you want to work, Pine. You come see me, okay? It don’t matter to me you’re queer. No offense. You know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” Leonard said. “I know what you mean.”

“We want to bounce,” I said, “you’ll be our first contact.”

Billy Joe pulled a wad of cash from his pants pocket, counted out the bills as if he was pulling each one from his intestines. I took my money and we left.

Out in Leonard’s truck, Leonard said, “Now I know why you take a long hot shower every mornin’ you come home from work.”

Back at Leonard’s I packed a suitcase, went into town to see Brett. I took her out to dinner on some of my money, told her our plans, then we went back to her place, sat on the couch and shared a nonalcoholic beer.

I told her about Haskel and the guns, about Leonard and the armadillo. I showed her the notepad with Leonard’s and my names on it I had taken from Haskel.

I took the pad over to her sink and set fire to it. We talked while it burned on the porcelain. When it was finally all gone, I flushed the ashes down the drain and turned on the garbage disposal. Brett got us another beer, and we sat on the couch and passed it back and forth.

“What time tomorrow?” Brett asked.

“Leonard will be by about nine. We’ll leave his truck here, load our guns and suitcases into your car, and start out.”

“I’m a little scared,” Brett said.

“I can understand that, but there’s no need for melodrama. What we’ll do is follow the address the midget gave us, see we can find Tillie, and if we can, we’ll take her home. I don’t think there’ll be any real trouble.”

“You’re saying that to make me feel good.”

“I really don’t think there will be any real trouble, but like I said before, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. But, it’ll be okay. We might have to pop somebody’s nose, but that’ll be the extent of it.”

“Promise?”

“No. I’m not that stupid.”

Brett packed her suitcase, then we got naked and went to bed. The hair on Brett’s mound, as we who read erotica like to call it, had begun to grow back. Mounting her was kind of scratchy, but being incredibly tough, I went ahead with the screwing anyway. Real men don’t whine over scratchy female pubic hair. We just get on with it.

Fact is, I was so tough, I made love to her three or four times.

Consequently, when the alarm went off at eight the next morning, I felt like six pounds of runny shit that had passed through a goose and been washed down-country by a flash flood. Brett opened one eye, looked grim, said, “Oh, dick.”

“Not right this moment,” I said. “He’s tired.”

Brett whacked me. “That doesn’t even interest me. I love you, but right now I could maybe marry anyone got me a cup of coffee.”

I didn’t get her a cup of coffee.

She didn’t get me one.

We lay there for another ten minutes. “All right,” I said. “On the double, we get up.”

We got up, but not quite on the double. We showered together, made love in the stall, then showered again. By the time we’d dried off, brushed our teeth, and dressed, Leonard had arrived.

We gathered our suitcases, locked the place, and met him outside. We loaded the guns, which Leonard had wrapped in blankets, into Brett’s trunk, tossed the suitcases on the back seat. Brett let Leonard drive. She sat between us on the front seat and we started out.

“See your son anymore?” I asked Leonard.

“He rooted up the place last night. He was sleeping peacefully under the porch this morning. I’ve decided to name him Bob.”

“That certainly took some strain,” Brett said.

“I get enough strain without trying to cleverly name an armadillo,” Leonard said.

We stopped at Burger King, bought some breakfast and lots of coffee, then headed for Oklahoma, minding the speed limit, minding our manners, minding our business, praying for hope, expecting rain.

10

We got on 59, headed north to 259, caught I-20 at Kilgore and went west toward Dallas. We skirted the roof of Dallas, hit 35, and except for a couple of pee breaks, we rode it all the way into Oklahoma.

We stopped at Ardmore about eight that evening and had dinner in a steak house. When we finished, we decided to find a place for the night and smoke on into Hootie Hoot early in the morning.

We got rooms at a cheap motel and toted the blanket-wrapped guns into the rooms with us, just in case someone decided to steal a spare out of our trunk and ended up with a bargain.

Brett and I had a small room that smelled strongly of detergent or disinfectant, but after brushing our teeth and washing our faces, we found the bed inviting and the smell less annoying. We didn’t feel like making love, which meant we were probably on our way to a solid relationship. We just slept together, cuddled up spoon style.

When we awoke the next morning it was raining lightly. We collected Leonard, had breakfast at the same cafe where we had eaten our steaks, and set out again. The rain began to fall harder, and the storm followed us all the way into Hootie Hoot, which lay about twenty-five miles outside of Oklahoma City.

When we got there, it was early afternoon and the rain had not stopped. Hootie Hoot was, as Red had said, a burg. There was a long street with old brick buildings. A theater, a cafe, a filling station, and, strangely enough, a taxi stand, with one old battered blue cab out front. I wondered where it took people. Up one side of the street and down the other?

We didn’t see any neon signs that blinked
BIG JIM
’
S HOOTIE HOOT WHOREHOUSE
, so we left town and found another cheap motel five miles out, not far from I-35. Leonard got a room next to ours. We bought some groceries at a little store across the highway, sat in Brett’s and my room laying out plans and eating store-bought ham and cheese sandwiches and Cheez Doodles.

Leonard finished his lunch, sat by the window. He held a can of Coke in one hand, held the curtain back with the other and watched the rain snap down on the parking lot. He said, “Thing is, whatever we do, we got to do it and be done with it.”

“My suggestion is we find the whorehouse and start from there,” I said.

“Now that’s a good idea,” Leonard said. “I’m glad you’re along, Hap. Me and Brett might not have thought of that.”

“Do we just go in and get her?” Brett asked.

“I don’t think that’d work so good,” I said. “Posing as a customer is probably the best way to go.”

“And you’ll have to be the customer,” Leonard said.

“You think they’ll know you’re gay?” Brett asked.

Leonard laughed. “No, but they’ll know I’m black.”

“Oh,” Brett said.

“Black or white may not matter,” Leonard said, “but this is a little burg in Oklahoma. I was in Maine, I’d be thinking the same thing. It might not matter, but on the other hand it might. My guess is this is a redneck operation.”

“Remember what Wilber said about Big Jim being nice to niggers,” I said. “That doesn’t bode well for Brother Leonard here.”

“No use getting the rednecks stirred we don’t have to,” Leonard said.

“That doesn’t sound like you,” I said.

“Older and wiser,” Leonard said.

“So you’ll go in?” Brett asked me.

“Yeah,” I said. “Thing we got to do next is find the whorehouse, and, as Leonard pointed out, maybe I ought to do the investigation work on that instead of him. They might not take kindly to a brother askin’ where the white women are.”

“Couldn’t some of the women be black?” Brett asked.

“They could,” I said, “but in redneck mentality it’s okay to screw a black woman, but it isn’t okay to have a relationship with her.”

“And it isn’t okay at all a black man screws a white woman,” Leonard said. “Weird territorial stuff.”

“And there’s another thing,” I said. “We don’t even know there’s a house of ill repute here.”

“Ill repute?” Leonard said. “Man, you been reading those Victorian novels again?”

“Red could have lied,” I said. “In fact, this is all starting to look like a big joke on us. He might not even have worked for any Big Jim. There might only be one grain of truth to the story. He knows your daughter works as a prostitute, and maybe he knows that because he was a customer.”

“The old postmarks on Till’s letters were out of Oklahoma City,” Brett said.

“Yeah,” I said, “a card mailed from here, most likely that’s where it would get stamped. But it’s all iffy.”

“I’m prepared for it not to work out,” Brett said. “But I’m more prepared to do something. It makes me feel like I’m trying.”

“I’ll start now,” I said.