The Big Book of Hap and Leonard

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Here’s something else. Terrible things are being said in this scene, and terrible things are happening, with even worse things to come, but it’s still very funny in a horrible way. Lansdale can wring humor out of any situation, even this one. You might hate yourself for laughing, you might look back and wish you hadn’t laughed, but you’re going to laugh. It’s the language that does it, as when a man describes Chihuahuas: “Sonofabitches would rather bark and piss than fornicate and eat. That’s the thing about ’em. They got no priorities. My sister had one of them little poots, and she use to jack him off once a week ’cause he was tense. Never could figure out what was wrong with the sonofabitch lickin’ his noodle like any other respectable dog.” You’re not going to find a passage like that in anybody else’s books.

  Hap and Leonard deal out a lot of punishment over the course of the series, but they take a lot of punishment, too. More than most men could handle, I think. After the scene from The Two-Bear Mambo I quote above, for example, there’s a brawl in which the two come out on the bad end of a serious beating. In Bad Chili, we find out about Hap’s first meeting with Jim Bob Luke, just after Hap has been tied to a chair with a car battery attached to his testicles. He’s had a jolt from the battery, too, and if you can’t imagine what something like that might to do a fellow, Lansdale is quite happy to tell you. And he does.

  It should be pretty obvious by now that the entire series is not exactly what a reader would want to dip into when looking for some polite, politically correct fiction or for something to read aloud at a Sunday School picnic. Every book is full of cussing, sex, and heavy-duty violence. Not to mention a lot of laughs. It’s a tough act to pull off, but Lansdale is a master at doing it. The opening of Bad Chili, which describes Hap and Leonard’s battle with the rabid squirrel, is downright hilarious, even though it’s also frightening and doesn’t end well for the squirrel. Or Hap, for that matter.

  No one should get the idea that books full of cussing, sex, and heavy-duty violence can’t be socially conscious or present serious ideas and thoughtful commentary. Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard works, besides containing all of the above and being funny besides, are also full of thoughtful social commentary, but it’s couched in such a fast-moving narrative that some of it would be easy to overlook. Not the criticism of racism, of course. That’s everywhere in the books, but you don’t have to look too hard to find comments on the environment, politics, relationships, and friendships. Nothing about any of this is obtrusive, but it’s all there if you want it.

  Hap and Leonard are always true to themselves and to their friends, and while they’re willing to use violence if they have to, and kill if they have to, they do have a code of sorts. They believe in sticking up for each other, their friends, and people who need their help. They don’t take kindly to insults, and they believe in payback. They’re tough, resourceful, and all too human. What’s not to like?

  I have one other theory about the books and stories about Hap and Leonard. It’s that nobody really cares about the plots. (I think this is true of a lot of crime novels, in fact, maybe even my own.) The plot is just the writer’s excuse for setting down a tale that ties the pages together. What people really care about is the characters and the writing, or, as Robert B. Parker put it about his own novels, “They like the sound of the words on the page.” Those two things are what make series books a success. Readers want to find out more about the characters and what they’re up to. It’s almost as if they’re real people, old friends whom you like to hear from every now and then. It doesn’t matter how long the series becomes. Readers don’t want it to end. They want their old friends to endure.

  And readers want to keep hearing the author’s voice. It becomes a familiar comfort, and from the first page of each story, you know that you’re hearing something unique to an individual, a way of writing that comes from a particular place within a particular person, something that nobody else can duplicate.

  It’s true that people try. A series can continue even after an author’s death if the estate finds a writer to carry it forward. Most often I find these continuations remind me of another story about Mark Twain, when his wife tried to shame him about his cussing by repeating what he said. He told her that she had the words but not the tune. Lansdale has his own tune, and it’s not like anyone else’s. It’s unique, his alone, and it carries the reader along with a sound that nobody else can duplicate. He’s been around for a while now, easily long enough for other writers to try to capture some of the magic that appears on his pages, but if they have the words, they don’t have the tune. Lansdale’s still out there singing his own song, and that’s what we want to hear.

  Being an old guy, considerably older than Joe Lansdale, as he’s always quick to remind me, I sometimes get a little nostalgic. It’s been a good many years since we sat up on the second floor of the Memorial Student Center during AggieCon and talked about our books and our editors and how things were going in the writing game. Who knew that Joe Lansdale would become a bestselling writer with movies and a TV series based on his work or that he’d become a literary god in Italy? (I’m not making that up. You can ask him.)

  I was lucky to be around for the birth of Hap and Leonard, and we’ve all been lucky enough to read the books. This new story collection is a good reason for celebration, as it collects a number of the stories into one volume. Anyone experiencing them for the first time is in for a rare treat. Those of us who have read them before are ready to hear from the guys again and to hear that voice that’s like no other. It doesn’t get much better than that.

  Bill Crider lives in scenic Alvin, Texas, near Houston and the Texas Gulf Coast, where he’s suffered the effects of both Hurricane Ike and Hurricane Alicia. He was the Division Chair of English and Humanities at Alvin Community College before his retirement in 2002. Bill is the author of more than fifty published novels and numerous short stories. He won the Anthony Award for best first mystery novel in 1987 for Too Late to Die. He and his wife, Judy, won the best short story Anthony in 2002 for “Chocolate Moose.” His story “Cranked” from Damn Near Dead (Busted Flush Press) was nominated for the Edgar Award, the Anthony Award, and the Derringer Award. It won the latter. He’s won the Golden Duck Award for best juvenile science-fiction novel and has been nominated for a Shamus. His latest novel is Between the Living and the Dead (St. Martin’s). Check out his homepage at www.billcrider.com, or take a look at his peculiar blog at http://billcrider.blogspot.com.

  Hyenas

  “The hyenas are hungry—they howl for food.”

  —King Solomon’s Mines, H. Rider Haggard

  When I drove over to the nightclub, Leonard was sitting on the curb holding a bloody rag to his head. Two police cruisers were parked just down from where he sat. One of the cops, Jane Bowden, a stout woman with her blonde hair tied back, was standing by Leonard. I knew her a little. She was a friend of my girlfriend, Brett. There was a guy stretched out in the parking lot on his back.

  I parked and walked over, glanced at the man on the ground.

  He didn’t look so good, like a poisoned insect on its way out. His eyes, which could be barely seen through the swelling, were roaming around in his head like maybe they were about to go down a drain. His mouth was bloody, but no bloodier than his nose and cheekbones. He was missing teeth. I knew that because quite a few of them were on his chest, like Chiclets he had spat out. I saw what looked like a chunk of his hair lying near by. The parking lot light made the hunk of blond hairappear bronze. He was missing a shoe. I saw it just under one of the cop cars. It was still tied.

  I went over and tried not to look too grim or too happy. Truth was I didn’t know how to play it, because I didn’t know the situation. I didn’t know who had started what, and why.

  Jane had called and told me to come down to the Big Frog Club because Leonard was in trouble. Since she didn’t say he was in jail, I was thinking positive on the way over.

  When Leonard saw me, he said, “Hey, Hap.” />
  “Hey,” I said. I looked at Jane. “Well, what happened?”

  “It’s a little complicated,” Jane said. “Seems Leonard here was in the club, and one of the guys said something, and Leonard said something, and then the two guys inside—”

  “Inside?”

  “You’ll immediately know who they are if you go in the club. One of them actually had his head shoved through the Sheetrock, and the other guy got his hair parted with a chair. He’s behind the bar taking a nap.”

  “Ouch.”

  “That’s what he said,” Jane said.

  “So . . . I hate to ask . . . but how bad a trouble is Leonard in?”

  “There’s paperwork, and that puts me off of him,” Jane said, “but everyone says the three guys started it, and Leonard ended it, and, well, there were three of them and one of him.”

  “How come this one is out in the parking lot?” I said, pointing to the fellow with his teeth on his chest.

  Leonard looked over at me, but didn’t say anything. Sometimes he knew when to keep his mouth shut, but you could put those times on the head of a pin and have enough left over to engrave the first page of the King James Bible and a couple of fart jokes.

  “Reason that guy’s here, and the other two are inside,” Jane said, “is he could run faster.”

  “But not fast enough?” I said.

  “That’s where we got a little problem. You see, that guy, he’s knocked out so hard his astral self took a trip to somewhere far away. Maybe interplanetary. He’s really out of here, and he hasn’t shown signs of reentry.”

  No sooner had she said that then an ambulance pulled up. A guy and a woman got out and went over and looked at the guy on the ground. The male attendant said, “I guess clubbing doesn’t agree with him.”

  “Either kind of clubbing didn’t agree with him,” the female EMT said.

  It took me a minute to get what she meant. To do their job, I guess you have to have a sense of humor, lame as it might be.

  They looked him over where he lay, and I was glad to hear him come around. He said something that sounded like a whale farting underwater, and then he said, “Nigger,” quite clearly.

  Leonard said, “I can hear that, motherfucker.”

  The guy went silent.

  They loaded him in the ambulance.

  “Don’t forget his shoe,” I said, pointing at it. But they didn’t pay me any mind. Hell, they worked for the city.

  “We got a bit of a problem here,” Jane said. “You see, once this guy ran for it, and Leonard chased him, it couldn’t quite be called self-defense.”

  “I didn’t want him to come back,” Leonard said. “I was chasing him down because I was in fear of my life.”

  “Uh-huh,” Jane said.

  “He turned on me when I caught up with him,” Leonard said.

  “Just be quiet, Leonard,” she said. “Things will go better. You see, the part that’s hard to reconcile, as we in the law business say, is Leonard turning him around and then beating him like a bongo drum. Leonard grabbed him by the throat and hit him a lot.”

  “A few times,” Leonard said. “He called me nigger.”

  “You called him asshole,” Jane said. “That’s what the witnesses said.”

  “He started it,” Leonard said. “And there’s that whole deep cultural wound associated with the word nigger, and me being black and all. That’s how it is. Look it up.”

  “No joke,” she said. “You’re black?”

  “To the bone,” Leonard said.

  Jane turned her attention back to me. “A guy watching all this,” she pointed to a fellow standing over by the open door of the club, “he said Leonard hit that guy a lot.”

  “Define a lot,” I said.

  “After the nose was broke and the cheekbones were crushed, and that’s just my analysis, Leonard set about knocking out his teeth, said while he was doing it, according to the gentleman over there, and I quote, ‘All the better to suck dick with, you sonofabitch,’ unquote.”

  “So, Leonard’s going to jail?”

  “What Leonard has going for him is yon man in yon ambulance—”

  I looked to see it drive off with the lights on, but it wasn’t speeding and there wasn’t any siren.

  “—hit Leonard with a chair first, and he did call him the Nigger word.”

  “You mean the N word. When you say Nigger word, well, you’ve said nigger.”

  “Did I say the Nigger word instead of the N word?”

  “You did.”

  “If you’re quoting someone said Nigger, isn’t that different?”

  “I think so.”

  “Hey,” Leonard said. “Sitting right here.”

  “Well, hell, I’ve pulled two shifts,” Jane said. “Another hour on the job and I’ll be calling everybody sweetie baby. Anyway, back to Leonard. Somewhere between the N word and him chasing the track star out into the lot, he hit one of the other attackers with a chair and slammed the other guy’s head into the wall. Ralph, that’s my partner, he’s in there right now trying to get the fellow’s head out of the wall without breaking something. Either wall or victim.”

  “Actually,” I said, “Leonard had to have been provoked. He’s normally very sweet.”

  “No shit?” Jane said.

  “No shit.”

  “I don’t think so. But here’s what we’re going to do. You bring Leonard by the station tomorrow morning, not the crack of dawn, but before lunch, and we’ll fill out some papers. I won’t be there. I’ll be snoozing. But I got my notes and I got statements, and I’m going to turn those in, so they’ll be there. And, just as a sidenote, I really did enjoy seeing that fellow’s head stuck in the wall. Before you go, you need to go in there and take a peek, if they haven’t got his head loose. They haven’t, then you don’t want to miss this. It’s a fucking classic.”

  I did take a look inside the Big Frog Club before I drove Leonard home, and the cop trying to work the guy’s head out of the Sheetrock was snickering. He looked at me and lost it, made a spitting sound, and let go of him and wandered off, bent over and hooting.

  Another cop, smiling, went over and, without a whole lot of conviction, pulled one of the guy’s ears—the other one wasn’t visible—said, “Come on out, now.”

  The guy’s head was pretty far through the wall. It was poking into a bathroom. He must have turned his back to escape and found a wall, and then Leonard shoved the back of his head, pushing the front of it through the wall and into the bathroom. He was all scratched up, like a cat had been sharpening its claws on his face.

  The bathroom walls had never really been laid out, just Sheetrocked, so it hadn’t been too hard to push the guy’s head through. I took a good look at him. His chin had locked behind a support board, and the back of his head was locked behind another. He had fit in there easily enough, but in such a way he couldn’t get out, and the cops didn’t seem to be working that hard to release him.

  I said, “You had some antlers, we could just leave you there and tell folks you’re a deer.”

  “Fuck you,” he said, but it was weak and without conviction, so I didn’t take offense.

  I used the urinal, which was just under him and smiled as I peed. I didn’t flush. I went back in the main room and saw the back of the guy. He was bent slightly with his butt in the air, standing on his tip-toes, probably getting a good bracing from the piss in the urinal.

  I went over to the bar, leaned and peeked over. The other guy Leonard had hit was awake and had his back against the bar. A broken chair was on the floor next to him.

  I said, “You put your dick in a beehive, my friend.”

  “Tell me about it,” he said. “We was just funnin’.”

  “Yeah, how fun was it?”

  “Not so much,” he said.

  I got Leonard and drove him home.

  When we were at my place, I sat Leonard in a chair in the kitchen. Brett, my gorgeous redhead, came downstairs. She was wearing a pair o
f my pajamas and she looked cute in them, as they were oversized. She was barefoot and her red painted toenails stood out like miniature Easter eggs. She came over and looked at Leonard.

  “Anyone check you over?” she said.

  “Wouldn’t let them,” he said.

  Brett made him move his hand and the bloody rag. She checked out the wound. She’s a nurse, so she was the right one to do it.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” she said. “I think you can get by without stitches.”

  “Yeah, well, it feels bad,” Leonard said.

  “Would some vanilla cookies and cold milk make it feel better?” she said.

  “Hell, yeah,” Leonard said. “Maybe after the milk, a Dr. Pepper.”

  “That can be arranged,” Brett said, “but first, come in the bathroom and let me patch you up.”

  When that was finished, Leonard came in with a bandage on his head. Brett got him a plate with some cookies on it and a big glass of cold milk. Leonard sat and smiled and dipped the cookies in the milk.

  I said, “So, what happened?”

  “They called me a queer.”

  “You are a queer,” I said.

  “It was their tone of voice,” he said.

  “How did they know?” Brett said.

  “I made a very delicate pass at one of them,” Leonard said.

  “How delicate?” I asked.

  “I merely asked him if he was gay, because he looked it, and then the shit hit the fan.”

  “Actually, you hit a guy with a chair, shoved another guy’s head through some Sheetrock, and beat the cold dead dog shit out of the other guy in the parking lot. No fan was involved.”