The Sound and the Furry (23 page)

“A goddamn monster of a red herring,” Bernie said.

Which would be a snap to spot, and can you imagine the smell? So where was it?

“Maybe we’ve got to go back to square one.”

That was bad. The last time we’d gone back to square one? The Portapotty case.

Bernie went over to a trash can and dropped his cigarette butt inside.

“Let’s roll,” he said.

We hopped into the car, me actually hopping but Bernie getting in nice and smoothly,
the way smoking Bernie did. I sat up straight and tall, on high alert, the only way
to go if we were in for a rerun of the Portapotty case. As we drove away, an old man
in a torn T-shirt stepped out of the shadows, took Bernie’s cigarette butt out of
the trash, and started smoking what was left.

We walked up to Cleotis’s crib. Was this square one? Bernie knocked on that big and
heavy front door. We waited for the little eyeball slot to open up, which it did not.
I listened for the sound of anyone moving around inside, heard none. Bernie knocked
again, harder. He called through the door.

“Cleotis, open up.”

The door remained closed.

“Got a follow-up question or two, won’t take more than a minute.”

Silence from inside.

“Easy questions, Cleotis, and then you can get right back to the grindstone.”

I knew grindstones—Nixon Panero had one, for example, at his auto body shop—“Stay
clear of them sparks,” Nixon said, which I’d already been doing, believe me—but I
hadn’t spotted Cleotis’s on our first visit, would be on the lookout this time. I
was all set. What was the holdup?

Bernie has this real quiet voice he sometimes uses for talking to himself. I heard
it now. “Maybe they’ve all gone off to yoga class.”

That hadn’t even crossed my mind! I’d been to yoga once myself, and only very briefly,
on an evening when we’d gone to pick up Suzie and her class hadn’t quite finished.
Until that moment, yoga had been a complete mystery to me, and then to see that it
was all about humans stretching just like me, head way down and butt way up: how exciting
was that! A bit too exciting, as it turned out, my memory of the exact endgame kind
of fuzzy—although endgames in general are sometimes the most fun of all. But the point
was that if yoga was next on our schedule, I was good to go.

Bernie raised his fist to knock one more time, knock good and hard—I could tell from
the way his knuckles went yellowish—when a motorcycle came down the street. We turned
to look, saw a huge bike rolling along real slow, the engine going
THROB THROB THROB
in a way that was low and booming at the same time. The rider glanced our way and
pulled over, sticking out his foot to balance the bike. He wore a black helmet with
a dark visor that covered his face clear down to his mouth. He jutted his chin in
our direction and said something hard to hear, on account of that
THROB THROB THROB
. We went over to him.

“What’s up?” Bernie said.

The biker’s mouth opened. His upfront teeth, the two on top, were gold. You see that
from time to time in this business. Once we spent practically a whole afternoon searching
for a gold tooth that had fallen in a gutter after a little dustup between Bernie
and a gangbanger. The gangbanger had been so grateful after we’d found it, although
no handshaking went on what with him being cuffed by that time.

“Yeah, whassup for sure,” said the biker. “Whassup wit’ you, señor?”

Bernie gave him a look and so did I. A short but real muscular dude, almost as wide
as he was tall: the kind Bernie says is built like a fire hydrant. That saying of
his had led to a bit of confusion on my part in the past and right then I told myself
I wasn’t going there today even if this was the most fire hydranty dude on earth.

“You live in the neighborhood?” Bernie said.

The biker turned his head, maybe glancing around; hard to tell, with that dark visor
hiding his eyes. “This shithole?” he said.

“Not your kind of thing?” Bernie said.

“No, is not,” the biker said. He flashed that golden smile. “And you? You from the
hood?”

“Not this particular hood,” Bernie said. “Just visiting.”

“Visiting Cleotis?”

“You know him?”

“Sure thing,” said the biker. “How about you?”

“Wouldn’t be visiting otherwise.”

“Yeah? You friends?”

“More like acquaintances.”

“Acquaintances? I do not know this word.”

“Conocidos.”

“Ah, conocidos,” the biker said. “Cleotis had many, many conocidos round here. They
gonna miss him.”

“Why is that?” Bernie said.

“You are maybe not a close conocido, eh? Cleotis he moved away.”

“I just saw him this morning.”

The biker shrugged.

“Why did he leave?” Bernie said.

“Business, right? Go where is the business—the American dream, man.”

“Heard of it,” Bernie said. “Is that what brings you here?”

The biker laughed. “I am a dreamer, too.”

“Don’t look like a dreamer,” Bernie said. “But it’s hard to tell with that visor over
your face.”

The laughter stopped.

“I’m Bernie Little and this is Chet.”

The visor turned my way. Was there room for me to jam a
paw in between it and his face? All of a sudden I wanted to give that a try, bad of
me, I know. “Big dog,” the biker said.

“And friendly with everybody. Just about. What’s your name?”

“My name?”

“I just told you ours.”

The biker was still for a moment. Then he nodded. “Pyro.”

“Your name is Pyro?”

“Si.”

Bernie held out his hand. “Nice meeting you, Pyro.”

Pyro just sat for a few moments, leaving Bernie’s hand hanging there. Then, real slow,
he extended his own hand, wider than Bernie’s but not as long, and also not beautiful
like Bernie’s. Pyro had one of the thickest wrists I’d ever seen on a man, although
it was mostly hidden under the sleeve of his shirt.

They gripped each other’s hands. Bernie shot a sharp glance at Pyro’s wrist, but there
wasn’t much of it to see. One quick up-and-down pump and then Pyro was all done with
the greeting part of our little encounter and tried to withdraw his hand. Bernie didn’t
let him.

“Hey, man, what the hell?” Pyro said, sounding a bit angry. Inside he was real angry:
that gives off a smell I don’t miss, but no time to go into it now, because at the
same time I was picking up another scent off him, namely the scent of that aftershave
that comes in the square green bottle.

“Just being friendly in the American way,” Bernie said. “What’s your best guess on
where Cleotis went to pursue his dream?”

Pyro’s mouth opened, closed, opened again. “Houston,” he said, his voice quieter than
it had been but the anger inside him had flowed into it, if that made any sense, and
set it throbbing, kind of like his bike but in a human way. “Everybody goes to Houston.”

Bernie released his hand. Pyro wiped it on his jeans, then gripped the handlebar.

“More opportunity in Houston,” Bernie said. “What with the oil business and all.”

Pyro turned to him, seemed to be giving Bernie a long look from under that visor.
Then he hit the throttle and the
THROB THROB THROB
rose to a roar that shook the air—I felt it—and he zoomed off down the street, the
front wheel rising right up over the broken pavement. We watched him go.

“I had a bike once myself,” Bernie said.

I was just finding that out now? But what great news! Was there anything to stop us
from getting another one? Today?

“Easy, big guy. Down.”

“I didn’t handle that very well,” Bernie said as we crossed the bridge over the river.
“But how do you get a guy to roll up his sleeve?”

What was this? The truth was I’d been caught up in watching all that water on the
move and hadn’t been paying the closest attention even though I always pay the closest
attention to Bernie. How do you get a guy to roll up his sleeve? Was that the question?
You could grab the end of the sleeve with your teeth and roll it back for him. Other
than that, I had no suggestions. I wondered what guy Bernie might be talking about
for a while and then went back to watching the river flow. I could have watched it
forever, but my eyelids got heavy. That had happened to me many times although never
quite like this. I felt like I was flowing along with the mighty Mississip, even part
of it. Made no sense, I know.

It was dark by the time we got to the rutted road that led to the dock where
Little Jazz
was tied up. The Porsche’s headlights were
like drills drilling light into the darkness, something Bernie had said late one night
out in the desert and which I’d never forgotten even though I didn’t understand it
the least little bit. Not that I didn’t know what a drill was—we had one in the tool
box back home; the last time it had come out the shock from Bernie drilling into some
wire or other had knocked him flat, but he’d been up in no time with hardly any help
from me and our power returned the very next day.

Back to our headlights drilling into the darkness, trees and bushes lighting up and
then vanishing, some of them trailing those mossy fringes. We came around the last
turn and the dock appeared, with the houseboat next to it, and the bayou beyond. A
cloud drifted across the sky, uncovering the moon, and suddenly there were tiny moons
rippling all over the water. I was just starting to enjoy the sight when I felt Bernie
tense up beside me. He stopped the car real quick, cut the lights, and leaned forward,
peering at the houseboat. I did the same.

Little Jazz
looked like a piece of squarish darkness cut out of the rest of the night. Everything
was still, except for all those rippling moons. Then a faint yellow glow flashed for
a moment through one of little round windows at the front of the cabin. I thought:
.38 Special.

Bernie took the .38 Special out of the glove box and stuck it in his belt, and also
the flashlight, which hadn’t occurred to me, not needing it personally. He put his
finger across his lips, our signal for not making a sound. We got out of the car and
moved silently toward the dock, me completely silent and Bernie just about.

T
he light reappeared in the little round window in the front—bow! I remembered!—of
Little Jazz
, a wavering sort of glow, like someone was moving around inside. We stepped onto
the dock. It made a little creaking noise under Bernie’s foot, that actually didn’t
sound that little to me, but there was no reaction on his face, so not a problem.
And we had the .38—fact one as Bernie liked to say and I liked to hear. It was in
his hand now, always nice to see, so much better than in the belt.

Side by side, we walked onto the deck of the boat about halfway between the bow and
whatever the back was called; it would come to me. The moonlight made seeing pretty
easy, at least for me, but I was more concerned with smells at that moment, of which
there were lots, of course, but two caught my attention right away. One—the strange
toady, snaky, even lizardy smell, but with that odd poopy peppery add-on—seemed to
be coming up from under the boat, kind of weird. The other was the smell of a man,
a man I was pretty sure I’d smelled before. The door leading to the house part of
the boat—living room, kitchen, bedroom, lined up like shotgun cribs I’d been in—hung
open. Being first
through doorways is one of my little things, but Bernie was right behind me.