Boots twisted his head until he could see in the back seat. “That you, Junior?”
Junior murmured, “Hello,” and waved shyly.
“Who’s your new gal pal?” Boots asked Junior.
Darnell squeaked up. “I’m a guy.”
“Oh sorry. It’s the pigtails.”
“Willie Nelson wears them.”
“Yeah, and a sight better than you, son,” said Boots. “What’s your name, boy?”
Darnell puffed up. “Nunya.”
“Nunya what?” asked Boots. He had his flashlight out of his belt and was shining it around the back seat.
“Nunya damn business.”
That was definitely not the right thing to say to Boots. “Step out of the car, son.”
Boots was at the back door of the Chevy, opening it now.
Darnell slid out of the car.
Boots ran his light beam up and down Darnell’s body. He looked a little messy and stoned standing there in his pigtails, plaid pedal pushers, and sloppy socks.
“You from out of town?” Boots asked.
“Just across the river. Washington County.”
“Why you here?”
“Passing through. Stopped to wet my whistle. Got some dinner over at Pokey’s. Junior needed a guitar man. Helping him out in exchange for a crash pad.”
Boots shined the light on Junior’s eyes. “That true?”
Junior kept his tinted glasses on and nodded yes.
Veenie piped up. “He’s staying at our place. We can vouch for him while he’s in town.”
Boots grunted. “That supposed to make me feel better?” He asked Darnell for a driver’s license. Darnell fumbled around until he got a brown leather biker’s wallet pried out of his back pocket. It was attached to his belt loop with a chain. He sprung it open. A bunch of Post-it Notes and condoms spilled out onto the ground.
Boots eyed the condoms, ran his flashlight beam over them, but said nothing.
Veenie peered up over my shoulder. She stared out at the condoms. One of them had a black wrapper with a picture of Batman on it.
“You got any Wolverine willie warmers?” Veenie asked Darnell. “I like that Wolverine. Boy, that wolf man could ravish me anytime. How-l-l-l!”
Fergie Junior groaned from the backseat. “Ma!”
Darnell nervously petted the ends of his pigtails.
Boots handed Darnell back his license. “How’d you get to town?”
“Bus. Like I said, just passing through. Got cousins up in Gnaw Bone. Hope to get a job with them. Own a junkyard up that way. I do auto body work when I’m not strumming.”
I was getting sleepy. And grumpy. “Why’d you pull us over, Boots?”
“You ran that stop.” He nodded back to the four-way in the middle of town.
“Rolling stop,” I corrected. “And tarnation, Boots, there isn’t another living soul awake this time of night.”
“I am.”
Veenie peered over at Boots and said, “You want an onion ring?” She dangled two on her little finger.
“That from Pokey’s?”
“Sure is.”
Boots took the onion ring and crunched on it. “Okay. Guess you gals can go. But next time I’m writing you a ticket. We got laws. You can’t be hot-rodding around town breaking the law just because you’re old.”
Darnell crawled back into the car. “What the fuck was that, man?” He craned his head around and watched Boots until the siren on the squad car whooped off and the car slid back into the shadows behind a dump truck in the lot at Guthrie’s Mill.
“Old people flirting,” said Veenie as she tossed back a fistful of Tums. “Bootsie has a crush on Ruby Jane, but she won’t put out. Won’t even talk to him unless he whips out his gun and badge. Poor guy has a bad case of country-fried blue balls.”
“Veenie,” I said, as we pulled into our driveway. I was already beginning to regret eating those onion rings. A belch the size of a basketball was rumbling up my esophagus. Something big was fixing to happen on the other end too.
“What?”
“Shut your pie hole or else you’ll be riding your bike to work all next week.”
Chapter Thirteen
It was late afternoon Saturday when Veenie and I spun onto the dirt road that led along the river to the Moon Glo Motor Lodge. We were headed to pick up Kandy for the séance. The motor lodge sign was up, but it no longer lit up at night. The neon that used to advertise “Magic Finger beds” had fizzled out long ago, probably about the same time as disco and my sex drive.
A pair of turkey buzzards had built a big old straw and mud nest on top of the word “Magic” in the neon sign. The mother bird appeared to be sitting on some eggs. She craned her ugly, red, bald head around as we bumped along past the sign. I had a feeling she was hoping we might be dinner.
“Lookie there,” said Veenie. “This place is a real love nest.”
“They could mow the road,” I bellyached as I squinted into the sun.
“Them high weeds are deliberate,” said Veenie. “Darn smart marketing.”
“How’s that?” I flipped down the visor and squinted some more.
“The tall weeds keep it discrete. Private. Romantic.”
“Romantic might be one word for it. Personally, anything mating in weeds this high I hope never to see naked.”
I pulled the Chevy tight to the office door. The motor lodge was painted bright white with grass-green trim. The paint blistered from the concrete building in giant boils. A metal “Vacancy” sign squeaked back and forth in the river breeze. A sign under the “Vacancy” sign read “Air Conditioned,” though someone had scrawled “NOT” in front of that. A hand-lettered cardboard sign tacked to the door read “$20 nite. $10 hour.” The front door was thrown open, and the inner screen door was propped open with a rusty spade with a cracked handle that looked to be permanently driven into the ground. At one time there might have been a flower bed in front of the office, but now there was just a scattering of cigarette butts trying to take seed.
The motor lodge consisted of ten rooms jutted out in a line from the right side of the office, with a narrow porch shading the entrance to the rooms. Metal scallop-backed chairs painted grass green sat along the walk, one by the side of each door. A double-bay ice machine chained shut with a combination padlock featured a sign that read “night crawlers $2.” I reckoned they meant worms for fishing, but based on the looks of the place, all sorts of things might be crawling around the Moon Glo Motor Lodge after dark, none of which I’d pay two dollars to meet up with.
“What room is Kandy holed up in?” I asked Veenie.
“Didn’t say.”
I climbed out of the Chevy and ambled up to the office. A man with a Buddha belly was sitting on an orange plastic sofa in the lobby. He was wearing camouflage cargo shorts and no shirt and was sunburned. His chest was covered in shaggy gray hair, and he wore plastic flip-flops and square, purple, plastic glasses way too big for his face. He held a sweating diet Coke can in one hand and a TV remote in the other and was squinting up at a small TV that sat on a shelf in the corner. A cigarette smoldered in a glass ashtray on a Formica table in front of him. The Formica had orange and black melted burn marks along the edges where people had left cigarettes to burn over the years. Gunsmoke was on the TV screen.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Sir.”
He took a hit off his cigarette, his eyes glued to the TV. “Yeah?”
“I’m looking for someone.”
“Ain’t we all, sugar?” He exhaled but kept his eyes on the TV. “Leave your cash on the counter. No need to register. It’s the twenty-first century. No one gives a shit anymore.”
“It’s a woman. I’m looking for a woman,” I said.
“Like I said, be as weird as you like, sugar, no one cares. Room two is empty. Linens are clean. Key’s on the wall behind the counter. Help yourself.”
Veenie popped into the office behind me. “It’s hot as the devil’s hairy ass ou
t here.” She sniffed the stale office air. “And it smells like foot fungus in here. What’s the hold up?”
Veenie was dressed in a new Goodwill outfit. She’d settled on a mystic seventies theme for the séance. Lime green, wide-legged culottes with a pair of purple Converse ankle sneakers and a white, leather, beaded vest with a shaggy lime turtleneck. The back of the vest had what looked to be gravy stains, but Veenie figured she could rub those out with a little white shoe polish. She’d been wrong. She looked like some kind of seventies yeti.
The office clerk looked up. “Cripes! You old gals swingers? Look, if there’s gonna be more than two of you, that’s five dollars extra. You’ll use more towels. Old people use a lot of towels. You horny seniors use too much lube.”
Veenie yanked the cord to the TV out of the wall.
“Ah, man, why’d you do that?”
“We’re looking for a woman. Kandy Huggins.”
“Oh yeah. She registered under an alias, Kandy Cane. Must be her. Room one. Not very creative, but then, we then we don’t get a lot of high IQ guests out this way. You ladies hookers? Not like I care, but I got an old pal up at Leisure Hills who’s having a ninetieth birthday party this week. We could use some cheap entertainment.”
“We’re not hookers,” said Veenie. “We’re hip.”
“If you say so.” He plugged the TV back in and went back to watching his programs.
Veenie and I strolled down to room one. Veenie pounded on the door. When she got no answer, she lugged a metal chair over and tossed it against the door.
The door creaked open. A white oval face peered out. It was the boss, Harry. He was wearing a woman’s kimono robe with a loud flower pattern and elbow-length sleeves. The robe showcased his skinny legs and knock-knees. His pewter-colored hair had sprouted a rooster tail in the back. His moustache was drooping in the humidity.
“Where’d you get that classy robe?” asked Veenie.
Harry blinked. “Kandy.” He tossed one shoulder backward. “She’s got taste.”
“Not in men, she don’t,” Veenie said.
Kandy appeared in the doorway. She was fully dressed, fiddling with fastening a silver-loop earring big enough to be a horse’s nose ring. She was wearing a long, ruffled, red skirt and an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse. “Hi gals. Almost ready. I finished a good while back, but Harry there is like a little Energizer Bunny. Keeps going and going and going.” She barked out a laugh in a cloud of smoke. “Boy, put a quarter in his bed stand and you sure get your money’s worth.”
Harry smirked like he was proud of himself.
Veenie slid in under Harry’s arm, not waiting to be invited in. Harry’s robe fell open revealing a yellow thong and a thin line of gray hair, like marching ants, which trailed from his belly button down into his thong.
“Put your pants on, Harry. No one wants to see that.”
He grabbed his pants and suit jacket and hobbled to the bathroom.
The room was tiny, barely big enough for two people to stand between the bed and the TV. The TV was an older, fatter model cradled in a metal roller stand. The mismatched bed sheets were twisted like a tornado had flung them around the room. The TV was on, but the sound was off. The room smelled like wet towels, bleached underpants, and some sort of cheap floral air freshener.
Veenie sniffed the place. “Not as romantic as I remember.”
Kandy shrugged. “Seen worse. Seen better. The bathroom is real clean. No mold in the shower. Plenty of toilet paper. They even have fancy two-ply nose tissues.”
Veenie made herself at home on the bed. She jumped up and down, testing the mattress. Dust flew. Thick clouds full of mites, hair, dry skin, cooties, and God knows what else. Her vest fringe flew like little white doves through the clouds of dust. “I couldn’t make whoopee on a mattress like this. Nope. Too many pokey springs. I got me one of them newfangled pillow top foam mattresses. It’s like doing it on top of a bowl of marshmallows.”
“Yeah,” said Kandy. “Those are real good.”
Veenie clasped her hands together in her lap. “You feeling psychic?”
Kandy was standing at a full-length mirror slathering on pink lipstick. She puckered. Blotted. Slathered some more. “Think so. Always helps when I have good sex. Gets my juices flowing.” Kandy tossed her hair and shoulders and did a little hoochie dance. Her silver and gold dangle bracelets clattered like gypsy clackers.
Harry strode out of the bathroom. His hair was slicked back, his tie tied, his jacket slung over one arm. He was carrying his fedora hat in his free hand. He looked as happy as a puppy with two peckers. He gave Kandy a little pat on her behind. “Ready to do some voodoo, sugar buns?”
Kandy grabbed her little silver shoulder purse and we all ambled out the door like a herd of turtles. Kandy was a little unsteady on her high heels, and Harry walked like he’d been ridden hard and put away wet. The sky was turning black as we settled into the Impala. Fist-sized clouds were rolling up the river. Thunder rumbled in the distance. The willow trees along the river had begun whooshing in the wind like squirrel tails.
“Oh boy!” cried Veenie. “I feel itchy. I can feel the ghosts. Makes my skin tingle.” She did a little itchy ass-dance in the front seat.
I thought she was being overly optimistic. The way she’d been wallowing in that bed where Kandy and Harry had bumped uglies, I’d lay wager her crotch was well on its way to becoming Knobby Waters’ next great cootie castle.
Chapter Fourteen
By the time we pulled into Dode’s farmhouse yard, the thunder was loud as God’s bowling alley. Rain splattered the windshield. The treetops whipped and scratched at the swollen bellies of the black clouds. Luckily Dode had a pair of automatic pole lights out by the barn. The storm had caused the electric eye sensor to flip the lights on. The lights sprayed a wide beam from the car to the house so we could see our way clear across the yard.
Dode was standing in overalls out on the front porch, waving our way. His rifle was leaned against the farmhouse door. He had a basket of what looked like flashlights sitting on the porch railing.
“Hot dog,” said Veenie pointing toward the claw-like trees in the orchard. “See that storm? That’s ghosts. They seen us coming.” She unfolded an orange Hoosier Feedbag plastic shopping bag that she found on the floorboard of the Impala and stretched it over her head. She stretched it tight under her chin and made a little bow. “How do I look?”
“Fetching,” I said.
In the backseat, Harry offered Kandy his suit jacket. He draped it up around her head and shoulders as they slid out of the car. She clung onto him big time as they slid across the yard toward the porch.
I pulled on my son Eddie’s old green 4-H windbreaker, which I kept in the car for emergencies, and puckered the hood up around my ears. Veenie and I burst out of the Impala and dashed for the front porch. Rain spattered my glasses, but I figured they could use a good cleaning.
“Whoa boy, some storm, eh?” said Dode. His eyes were shining in the dark. He had his thumbs hooked under the apron on his bib overalls. “Bet the ghosts like this, eh?” Dode eyed us. “This here the séance lady?” He nodded toward Kandy.
Kandy stepped out from under Harry’s jacket and shook her red locks. She finger-fluffed her hair before offering her ringed fingers to Dode. “Kandy Huggins,” she said, “from the Henry Huggins bunch down around Scottsburg. I’m psychic. Got called up here by your ghost.” Her bracelets jangled as they shook hands.
Dode’s eyes widened. “For real? I mean I heard tell people could talk to spirits. My mother’s people had the power. Course people today don’t believe in such stuff, but I know darn certain what I saw.”
Veenie asked Dode if he’d seen any ghosts the last few days.
He shook his head. “Not since you took that lady skeleton out of here. Not a snort. Not a peep. It’s like they all died.” He laughed nervously at his own joke.
Kandy assured us that silence was normal. “They’re gathering energy. Waitin
g for us to call ’em home.” She closed her eyes and felt the wet air with the palms of her hands. She wandered around the porch feeling the air like it was a thick wall. She stumbled on some uneven porch boards but recovered, clutching onto Harry. She shut her eyes and started in circles again, her hands held up high like a revival preacher.
Dode poked a piece of chaw into the pocket of his left jaw and sucked quietly. He followed Kandy’s every move, mesmerized.
Kandy stopped twirling in circles and stared cross the yard and through the light to the shadowy outline of the Wyatt mansion. “We need to set up our séance over where you found the body. Over yonder. That the house?”
Dode nodded. “But the sheriff, he came by yesterday, taped it all up. Said nobody should be messing around over there. It’s against the law. Said it was especially against the law if any old ladies showed up to snoop around.”
Kandy rolled her eyes. She adjusted her bracelets. “They always do that. Cops. They don’t understand spirits at all.”
Harry made a little squeaky sound. “I dunno, sugar. I got a license to protect. Trespassing could get me in a heap of trouble, baby.”
Kandy took him by the crook of his arm. She whispered into his ear like he was a small boy. “You aren’t afraid of a little trouble are you, Harry?”
“I dunno.” He shuffled his feet.
“Horse patootie,” said Veenie. “The sheriff had his chance at this case. He all but threw it at us. We aren’t hurting nothing.”
Kandy tossed in her two cents. “Heck, it’s Alta’s house. She invited us. If you look at it that way, and that’s the way any sane body would see the thing, it ain’t even illegal trespassing. We’re just going to visit a spell, like she asked.”
While we were standing around debating breaking and entering and a litany of other possible felonies, a pair of truck lights swung up the road. The rain was thick enough we couldn’t quite see who was coming. The lights bounced as the truck came closer over the rutted road. A white pickup, an older Ford F-150 with a cab on back, swung in and parked next to the Impala. A guy wearing a white baseball hat got out and strode across the yard toward the porch. He was wearing a pocket T-shirt with a red IU zip hoodie. He didn’t seem bothered by the rain, which we could see spilling off the bill of his cap.
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