The Two-Bear Mambo

by Joe R. Lansdale

  “You put Soothe in there with her?”

  “Florida’s idea,” he said. “Just temporary. Way the weather’s been, washing the place and all, no one could tell we’d done anything when they dug up Soothe’s spot.”

  “Clever,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

  Grave digging is not nearly as easy as you might think. It’s backbreaking, and next to picking corn out of pig shit with tweezers it’s the most boring thing in the world. I tried to focus on things other than my injuries, my sore muscles.

  I tried not to think about Florida possibly being down there, and I began to hope I was wrong. If she was dead, I wasn’t sure I wanted to find her now. I tried not to think about her being forced to bring those Klan idiots out here, show them where Soothe was buried. I tried not to think about what they did to her afterwards, before they put her down here with Soothe and Mrs. Burk.

  As we dug, the water ran down the hill and tried to fill the grave. We could hear the woods crackling as the water ran over the dried branches and leaves, and in the distance I could hear a roaring, which I figured was the rush of the creek swelling. But we kept digging, slogging into the mud, and after about an hour my shovel hit something hard. We scraped it clean. A coffin. Wood.

  I stood there on top of it, not knowing exactly what to do next. Tim said, “Mrs. Burk, she’s under that box.”

  I had a sudden uncomfortable thought. I said, “What if Florida told the Klan folks you helped do this? You think your father will have you done in?”

  I looked at Tim. He shrugged. “If she’d told, and they were going to do something, I reckon they would have done it already. Let’s widen the grave a bit.”

  “It’s wide enough. Let’s pop the lid.”

  “Let’s widen it so we can pull it out. I think we got to pull it out, don’t you? You lost the tarp, so we have to somehow get the coffin up the hill.”

  We started digging again, widening the grave. That nasty snake of my subconscious began to work at me again. It was trying to tell me something, as it often did.

  Tim climbed out of the grave. He got the big flashlight he had carried with him, turned it on, tilted it at the edge of the grave so that it shone down on the coffin. It had grown nearly dark as midnight in the time we had been digging. Water was nearly to my knees, and rising.

  “Why don’t you pop the lid now,” he said. “Use your shovel.”

  I looked up at Tim. He was standing above me, leaning on his shovel, one hand in his pocket. The rain was so thick, it seemed to be a sheath around him. Lightning sawed across the sky in bright, crooked explosions.

  “All right,” I said.

  I took the tip of my shovel, started forcing it under the lid of the cheap coffin. It wasn’t really an official coffin, which would have taken tools to open. It was one of those cheap kind they called pressed wood, which was essentially high-caliber cardboard. It was already starting to come apart due to all the rain since Soothe had been buried. Then reburied.

  It popped free, and the stench from it was horrible. Lying on top of what had to be Soothe, though there wasn’t much of him to recognize—bones and skin stretched over a skull so tight it looked like a stocking mask—there was another badly decomposed body. The features were basically gone and the hair was patchy. Flesh hung from the skull like chunks of dried glue and above the right eye socket the forehead was pushed in. The rain splashed on it, made the flesh loosen and it slid off the bone as if it were alive and seeking shelter.

  In spite of the damage, I recognized the short blue dress the corpse wore, and there was one blue earring dangling from a rotting lobe, and in that instant, I knew I had been a sap all along. I knew what that blue thing under Tim’s stove was suddenly, and I knew why Tim wanted the grave widened.

  It had to accommodate me. Then Leonard.

  I dropped the shovel, reached for the gun in my coat pocket, tried to turn, but didn’t make it. Tim hit me across the back of the head with his shovel, knocked me against the grave wall.

  My head was splitting. I assumed I had only been out for seconds, because when I came to Tim was stepping into the grave, a foot on Florida’s corpse. He reached the pistol that had fallen from my hand out of the coffin and pointed it at me. I was too dazed to do anything. There were just enough brain cells cooking to know I ought to be doing something and wasn’t.

  I was standing up, lodged between the coffin and the wall of the grave. There hadn’t been room to fall down. Tim was squatting in the coffin now, still pointing my gun at me. If that wasn’t enough, he pulled a little automatic from his coat pocket with his empty hand, aimed it at me too.

  Two-Gun Tim.

  “It’s nothing personal,” he said. “I didn’t want to kill you and Leonard, but I got to now. I kept thinking you’d just go off. I mean, I like you. I liked Florida. It was just one of those things. You knew though. Right there a while ago. You knew. How?”

  It took me a second to make my mouth work, but I wanted every second I could buy. “Her earring is missing. I realized it’s under your stove, at the store.”

  “Thanks for telling me,” Tim said. “I’ll get rid of it. Me and her, we struggled. I figure it got caught in my coat, and when I hung it up to dry, the earring fell out, rolled under the stove.”

  “You stupid sonofabitch.”

  “Hey, look who’s on the end of the gun, pal. Ain’t me.”

  “You’re the one told the Klan me and Leonard were going home.”

  “You just kept pushing, Hap. I thought maybe after that beating you took, that would fix you. But hearing you talk to Cantuck … I don’t know. I wasn’t so sure, and I had to be. And I didn’t mean for Bacon to get it. I made an anonymous phone call to Draighten, told him where you two would be. I said you’d be coming from Bacon’s place. Everyone knows Bacon.”

  “Why would you do this?”

  “I think I need to get this over with, Hap. I don’t dislike you, it’s hard enough to do, but I got to do it.”

  “I don’t think it’s that hard for you, buddy.”

  “Oh, you don’t know. It’s not easy for me at all. I don’t like killing.”

  “But you get by.”

  “What I want you to do is step out of the grave. I want you to get out right now, get on your knees up at the edge.”

  I thought about that. I realized he didn’t want to shoot me in case Leonard might hear the shot. Which in this rain wasn’t likely, but I decided not to mention that. He wanted me at the edge of the grave on my knees so he could bean me with the shovel again. Bean me on the head, then roll me in between the edge of the coffin and the grave wall. The other side would fit Leonard.

  “I don’t think I want to climb out,” I said.

  “Then I shoot you here.”

  “Why would you kill Florida?”

  “The money. That’s it. I liked Florida. Really. But she talked too much. I knew she carried her savings somewhere in her car, and I got to thinking about it. She drove out here behind me and I moved the body like she wanted, and I didn’t really have it planned, but I knew then I could kill her, take the money, and no one would ever know. I needed that money, Hap, and everything was right for it. Grovetown wasn’t going to get too worked up about a missing black girl. Maybe Cantuck. But he ain’t Sherlock Holmes, you know. It was quite a bit of money she had. And not hid all that well either. Taped under the seat. All that money and she was going to buy some stupid recording with it.”

  “Heaven forbid someone spend their own money the way they want.”

  “I didn’t like the way she wanted to use me, neither. Try and make me think she might bed me, but I knew she wouldn’t. I put Florida in the coffin with Soothe, put them on top of Burk.

  “I drove Florida’s car down the road there, off to a fishing spot I used to use. There’s swampy water there so goddamn deep it might go to the center of the earth. I pushed the car off in it, walked back and drove out.”

  “Just for money? You killed her for that?” />
  “I fucked her too. I figured she was gonna die, wasn’t any use in that pussy going to waste. I wouldn’t have hurt her, had some fun with her, had I not meant to kill her. It’s just … I was gonna do her in, might as well get some pleasure from her. It wasn’t that good by the way. Fight like she did, it isn’t that good.”

  Greed. Tim had killed that wonderful, beautiful woman for money and sex. I’d assigned everything that had happened to bigotry, but it was greed and lust. Two sins much older, and as basic as the instinctive mating of those two National Geographic bears. I felt like an idiot. I felt angry. I felt as if my heart would explode.

  “Come on, Hap, get out of the hole.”

  “If you’re gonna bang me with that shovel,” I said, “I’d rather take the bullet.”

  “I do that, Leonard hears the shot, he might drive off, then folks would come here to investigate, figure things out. I got to get you both, Hap. You might as well come on and let me do it. I can kill you with one blow if you’re out of the grave. I can make it quick. After I got some from Florida, that’s what I did. One blow with a rock.”

  In the grave, lodged like I was, I didn’t have a chance in a million. But the other way, maybe …

  “You don’t come out,” Tim said, “I’ll chance shooting you. I don’t think Leonard can hear anyway, but I got an idea he did hear it, he’d know it was a gunshot, and it’ll be tidier this way.”

  “All right, but promise me you’ll do it right. Hard and quick. Same for Leonard.”

  “I’ll have to shoot Leonard, most likely. He won’t expect it, though, and I’ll do it up close. Right in the temple, okay?”

  I thought, if you get that close, and Leonard has an inkling what you’re going to do, he’s going to snap your arm off at the elbow and use it to swab out your asshole. I thought, Leonard, old buddy, I go down, please don’t fall for this bastard. Don’t fall for it.

  Tim put the automatic in his pocket and kept my revolver. He said, “Get up tight against the grave wall.”

  I did. He climbed out carefully, keeping an eye on me. He got the flashlight and held it on my face, blinding me. The light bobbed low and came back up. I couldn’t make out what he was doing behind the light, but I had an idea. He was slipping the revolver into his pocket, picking up the shovel.

  I put a foot inside the coffin, between Florida’s stick legs, prepared to reach for the edge of the grave. I figured soon as I did that, that’s when Tim would strike. He’d get me before I got out, right in the head, then all he had to do was make sure I was pushed down between the coffin and the dirt, go up and talk to Leonard. He wouldn’t have to worry about the noise of the gun then. One snap and it was all over.

  In the split second before I raised my hands to take hold of the edge of the grave, I thought about trying to snatch up the shovel I dropped, but knew that wouldn’t work. I wasn’t quick enough for that. Not quick enough to get hold of it, come out of the grave and hit him with it.

  I took hold of the edge of the grave with both hands, then the flashlight dropped, and I heard the whistling of the shovel being swung. I threw my hands up in a wide X pattern and twisted my head to the side as the shovel came down and hit my wrists and pain exploded in me, but I had twisted my body so that it carried the power of the blow to the side, and with a quick turn of my arms, I wrenched the shovel free, dropped it, seized the sides of the grave, pulled myself up into a crouch.

  The flashlight still lay on the ground, and there was a dark shape behind it, and I dove for it, was rewarded by my arms encircling Tim’s neck.

  I dropped my grasp from his neck to his sides, pinned his arms against him just as he reached into his coat pockets to get hold of the guns. I used my right knee to strike him in the side of the leg, on the pressure point there. He sagged and I butted him in the face, and he went down. I was all over him then, but the water flowing under us made us slide and we went backwards into the grave. We hit the coffin and the sides blew out, and the bodies beneath us leaped up. I felt a bony arm clasp my face, blocking my vision, filling my head with the stink of rotting meat. I don’t know if it was me or Tim that screamed, but one of us did.

  The rest of the coffin came apart beneath us, and we rolled in a wreck of bones and flesh. I came up on top, driving straight punches into Tim’s face, and they were good punches, but I’d forgotten about the shovel I’d left in the grave, and Tim got hold of it, and though he didn’t have room to swing it, he popped it forward, banging me between the eyes with the handle, then he was on top of me, trying to strangle me. I thrashed amidst the wreckage of Soothe and Florida, brought the sides of my hands down hard behind his elbows, pushed in. He couldn’t hold the choke. I was gaining control. In another second I was going to turn him over and be on top, and he knew it. He shoved to his feet, leaped for the edge of the grave.

  I managed to grab his leg. He kicked back reflexively. It was a lucky shot to the jaw. In the instant I was dealing with the pain he got out of the grave. I got it together pretty quick, went after him, stumbling over the flashlight as I went. The light spun toward him, showed him in its glow, then rolled away, but not before I saw he had pulled the automatic from his coat pocket.

  Then there was a sound, like a stick snapping, and Tim did a little trick with his legs, as if he were trying to bury his heels in the earth, then he sagged and fell on his side, did a few kicks that carried him around in a semicircle, then he stopped moving. I could hear his breathing. It was hard and heavy.

  “Hap. You okay?”

  Leonard grew out of the darkness, limped toward me. He was holding his pistol. I answered, “Just barely.”

  “I got to thinking about things,” Leonard said. “He went from not wanting to cooperate to being awfully anxious to cooperate. He wanted me to come even when you didn’t. I got to wondering why he was so eager to get us down here. I’d have been here sooner, but the leg isn’t working so well.”

  “I’m just glad you came … shit!” I glanced where Tim had been lying. He was no longer there.

  Leonard wheeled with the gun and I got hold of the flashlight. I shined it about the graveyard. Tim, walking as if he were imitating the scarecrow in the Oz movie, was making bad time toward the far side of the graveyard, toward the woods. He got to the barbed wire fence, fell against it and stuck there, his upper body bending over it, as if he were trying to fold in half. Then I heard a loud cracking, a roar, like the sound of a freight train magnified by ten. In the glow of the flashlight I saw a tall silver mass of flying needles coming out of the forest. Pines snapped and crackled into toothpicks. Great oaks screamed as they were pulled from the ground.

  The mass of silver needles was a great wall of water. Before I could say, “I’ll be a sonofabitch,” the wall came down on us like a thousand pianos falling, and the great gray mountain of wetness pushed Leonard and me together and carried us away.

  We held to each other and the water carried us high up, then under, and I couldn’t breathe, and it was the marsh all over again, only worse, because the power of the water was so awesome there was no fighting back, no swimming. It churned us up and carried us through the heights of trees. We clung to each other and breathed again. Then it was down once more into choking darkness and confusion. A moment later, we were on top of the water again, coughing, and the next thing I knew I was hung in a tree, my body slamming against the tree trunk. There was a great weight tearing at my right shoulder, and I realized it was because I was holding on to Leonard and the water was jerking at him and trying to take him and my shoulder with it.

  “Let go, Hap, you stubborn sonofabitch!”

  I could see Leonard’s shape now, at the end of my arm, and the bastard let go of my hand, but I held his wrist and gritted my teeth. It was like the marsh, and I hadn’t let go and we had made it, and I wouldn’t let go this time.

  “Let go!” Leonard said, “or it’ll take us both!”

  “Then it will,” I said.

  I heard Leonard laugh. A choked w
ater laugh. A crazy laugh. Then he snapped his wrist loose of my fingers and the dark churning water pulled him from me, washed him away.

  30

  A few hours before morning a hot gold corkscrew of lightning hit the top of a pine across the way and knocked it in half and caught it on fire. The rain sizzled in the flames and the tree burned out quickly and the fiery limbs that fell off of it were consumed by the flooding waters.

  Then the rain stopped and the clouds split open like cotton candy being torn by greedy fingers and the wind blew their remnants away. A great gold moon rose high up and was visible through the summit of the trees—a pocked Happy Face against black velvet. I looked at the stars and thought first of my father, pointing out the shapes in the heavens, then of Florida and how we had once made love in her car and lay on her car hood afterwards looking at the stars, feeling as if they were near and belonged to us.

  In time the moonlight and starlight brightened even more and I spied a strange configuration in a massive oak, as if nature had made an image of the crucified Christ out of debris and put Heaven’s spotlights on it. I watched it for a long time, uneasy with it, then nodded some, thinking of Leonard.

  Dawn came rosy, as if it had never rained, and the moon was dissolved by sunlight and the sun itself was a bleeding red boil that did little to warm the chilled air. The water below me had dropped ten feet, but it was still a rush of mud and wreckage. A bloated cow was wedged between a pine and a sweet gum, and with the water no longer rushing, I could hear flies working the carcass, getting their breakfast. I ached all over. I was freezing. My coat and clothes crinkled and popped with ice when I moved. Ice fell out of my hair.

  I tried to stretch, get positioned on the limb some way I wouldn’t ache, but that wasn’t possible. Nothing was comfortable. But as I moved I could see the shape in the oak clearly.

  It was Florida. Her corpse, mostly devoid of flesh now, her left leg missing from the knee down, was hung up in the oak amidst a wad of limbs and vines and shattered lumber. Her stick arms were spread wide and her skull was tilted down on the neck bones, held together by peeling strips of flesh and muscle. Hungry crows were so thick on top of her skull, flapping their wings, pecking at her flesh, they looked like windblown black hair. One arm was raised slightly higher than the other, and the skeletal hand pointed to the sky.