Briar Patch Boogie: A Hap and Leonard Novelette

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Mavis nodded.

  “Good, cause your mouth is going to be full of my dick a long time tonight.”

  Baseball Cap said, “What about them?”

  “It’s going to go bad for them. I was thinking we could cut Lois’s head off and put it on the stump, do the same to these boys, have a few hours of target practice, but you know what? I think we let them go, see what kind of sport they are. But I’m not giving them an hour. I’m giving them fifteen minutes because they’re such smart mouth boys. I don’t like smart mouths. Ask Lois. Well, never mind on that.”

  I was hoping Leonard wouldn’t say anything at just that moment, wired as Aussie Hat was, and thankfully he didn’t.

  Aussie Hat held one of the arrows up. “See that point,” he said. “That’s real fine steel. That point, I’ve shot it through old refrigerator doors. Went right through it and ripped the feathers off the shaft.”

  “Yeah, but we ain’t no refrigerators,” Leonard said.

  “No, you are not,” said Aussie Hat.

  “Giving us less time, why not make it a little more sporting?” Leonard said. “Give us our knives and canteens back.”

  “You’re not going to live long enough to need a drink,” Aussie Hat said. “Shit, give them their knives, not that it’ll matter. No canteens.”

  Mavis, wanting to make an impression, hurried to get them.

  No one said anything until Mavis came back with the knives. She handed them to us, and then looked at Lois’s body on the ground. A fly had lit on one of Lois’s blue eyeballs. Mavis trembled ever so slightly.

  “I knew her for years,” Mavis said. It was something that just slipped out.

  “Well, you won’t be knowing her next year,” Aussie Hat said. “You got any complaints you want to lodge, baby?”

  Mavis shook her head.

  “So, you got no problem with holding down the barge and not going hunting? Am I right?”

  Mavis nodded.

  “Am I right,” Aussie Hat said again.

  “Yes,” Mavis said. “You’re right.”

  “Thought I was. All right, then. Fifteen minutes for our Daniel Boones here, and then we pincushion their asses. See that path there. You are clear to begin there, and you get a fifteen minute start. After that, hell’s coming.”

  “So far we’re still standing here without a countdown,” Leonard said, “and I can smell your rotten breath from over here. I’d like to move on, if you mean it.”

  I saw Aussie Hat’s eye twitch.

  Leonard could do that to a person.

  “Go now,” Aussie Hat said. “Or I’m going to kill you both right here. Mavis, mark the time.”

  Mavis grabbed Baseball Cap’s wrist, lifted his hand and looked at his watch. Baseball Cap let her. His face looked as if it were full of Novocain. I believe he was still thinking about Lois. Even he had been surprised at that.

  “Starting...now,” she said, and dropped his arm.

  We started running across the burnt clearing and into the woods where there was a wide deer trail. It went straight for awhile and we went straight with it. When the trail bent around behind some trees and we were concealed by them, we darted into the first slightly clear spot we saw in the underbrush, hunkering low, crawling through gaps in the greenery, raising up when we could, running hard when we were able to.

  The sun was full up now, and we wanted to go in the direction from which it had risen—East. That led back across the water, back to our crummy rental cabin and to our ride. We could drive out of the deep woods then, down the red–clay road that led to the highway.

  · · ·

  We came to a small run of water that wetted down our boots and jumped on the other side of it and ran along the edge of it. It was down below the main trail bordered by brush and trees and wads of vines.

  The assholes had actually waited fifteen minutes, or so I estimated, because we could hear them running along the main trail. They hadn’t figured out we had gone off the path, thinking maybe we were complete rubes. Soon they would realize our footprints weren’t showing up, and they’d backtrack and find where we had dodged into the thicket.

  On the other side of the thin run of water was another hill, but we didn’t go up that. If they were to come through the brush fast as we had, along the path we had made, they would see us up on that hill, and with their weapons they wouldn’t have to be close to get a bead on us. We continued along the edge of the little creek, leaving tracks, but too much in a hurry to worry about it. Finally the hill sloped off sharply, and there was a rent in the trees to the left of the creek. That’s the way we went, along another animal trail, this one much smaller than the first.

  We eventually halted long enough to see if we could hear them coming. We couldn’t. They could have been sneaking, but I didn’t think so. They were confident and had been charging about like bulldozers. Not being able to hear them meant they had gone the wrong way, or had paused and were trying to figure which way we had taken. If they had any hunting skills at all, that wouldn’t take long.

  “We ought to fix ourselves up,” I said.

  “You got an idea?”

  I found a small tree and bent it over until it snapped. Where the little tree had broken off there was a somewhat sharp point. I edged this keener and sharper with my knife, trimmed the small limbs off until I had a spear of about seven feet long and about half as thick as my wrist. Leonard did the same with another young, thin tree. When we had spears made, we started moving again. I was beginning to feel thirsty, and I might have been hungry as well. I couldn’t tell if the gnawing in my stomach was a need for food and water, or the churning acid of fear.

  They found the way we went, because we could hear them back there. Pretty soon they would cross the creek and be on the path we were running along, and they could come quickly too, and they could shoot at us with the arrows or the pistol, and they could do it from a distance.

  Without really talking about it, we found a path between two great oaks, and we took that. It didn’t go far before the trees were entwining and it was hard to go that way, but by then there was no going back. We kept at it and fought our way through. After that we came to the swamp we had crossed before and started wading into it. It wasn’t deep, but as before, it was a slow slog. Snakes were everywhere; though I only saw one moccasin, the rest of them were water snakes of one sort or another. The water was a scummy–silver in the sunlight.

  Through the trees to our right was a slope, and down the slope were weeping willows, and between them you could see the lake. The slope actually rose up like a rim at first, and then where the water was high it flowed over a little in a shiny waterfall, more of a trickle really.

  About half way across the swamp, with thicker woods in sight, an arrow passed over my shoulder with a sound like someone sucking in their breath real hard. It missed me by less than an inch.

  I glanced back, and there they were, stringing arrows and sending them at us. One clipped the top of Leonard’s ear, shooting up a little streak of blood. Leonard veered right and yelled for me to follow. To stay where it was swampy was suicide. They could stand where they were for a long time and have us in range as we mucked along.

  Toward the slope we went. Another arrow slipped between us, close enough had I been an inch thicker I’d have been wearing it. We jumped down the slope, still holding our spears, slipping and sliding on our asses, coming to the willows below. We both laid on our backs and let the wet slope of wild grass coast us down. I went right through a split in willow trees and was jettisoned off into the lake with a splash as loud as if an anvil had been dropped from an airplane. I tried to cling to the spear, but lost it. Leonard was hung up between willows by his spear, the ends of it sticking out on either side of his body. He turned it so it was straight, pushed off, and was sailed out into the water near me.

  By this time I realized the water along the bank was shallow because of sand deposits, and I had recovered my spear. When I looked up, the two of th
em were at the top of the slope. I could see them through the trees.

  Aussie Hat was stringing his bow, and about that time Baseball Cap, who was standing too close to the edge, slipped, and down the slope he went on his belly, losing his bow and the arrow. I watched as he sailed perfectly between the trees I had gone through, and then he shot up and out, like he was doing an impression of Superman. I stuck the butt of my homemade spear in the sand, buried it deep, and lined that point up with him, the way a Masai warrior might do on dry land with a leaping lion.

  He came down on top of the spear point with a hard impact. I could hear the thud of the spear, then a ripping sound. Baseball Cap screamed and the force of his hit rocked the spear backwards and I lost my grip and he went sailing over my shoulder, speared on my crude lance.

  Leonard had managed his way back to shore, where he picked up the bow Baseball Cap had dropped. The bow had three arrows in the special rack on the side of the bow. Leonard pulled one into position as an arrow whizzed past him, lifted it and shot. His aim was terrible. He might as well have been trying to hit a gnat on the other side of the swamp.

  “Hap,” he said, and gave me a look of frustration.

  I half–walked and half–swam to him and took the bow and pulled another arrow in place, just as Aussie Hat, who had now dropped to one knee on the edge of the swampy slope, was aiming down at us. I don’t know how to explain it, but I have an unerring aim with most weapons, rifles, shotguns, handguns, and from past experience, I knew I wasn’t any slouch with a bow and arrow either. I pulled the arrow back, the bow cord groaning as I did, and let it go. The arrow flew straight with a whistling sound. Aussie Hat moved to one side, so it didn’t hit him in the throat like I had hoped. Still, he took the shot in the shoulder, grunted, dropped his bow and fell back out of sight. His bow tumbled down the hill and caught up amidst the willows. We waited to see if he would show with the pistol, but he didn’t. A few minutes later his hat came floating down on the water slide and hung up in some brush growing out of the side of the slope.

  Edging my way along the bank, I found a place where I could get behind some trees. I strung another arrow from the bow rack, crouched, peeked between the trees, and waited, but Aussie Hat didn’t poke his head over the slope.

  I looked back in the water. Leonard had gotten the spear I had stuck in Baseball Cap, and he was using it to guide the body to shore. Except Baseball Cap wasn’t dead. He was stuck like a fly on a display pin. He groaned slightly and blood ran out of his mouth. His cap floated between his legs.

  Leonard got hold of his head, pushed him under water and held him there. After a glance up the slope, assuring myself Aussie Hat wasn’t in sight, I slipped back down and into the lake, and partly swam and partly walked over to them.

  “Leonard,” I said. “Let him go.”

  “He’s going to die anyway.”

  “Let him die then. Let him go.”

  “You’re no fun.”

  Leonard let him go and dragged him up so that his head and shoulders were on the bank. He stuck his arms through roots growing out from the bank, and they held him in place. The back end of the spear stood straight up out of his chest.

  Baseball Cap, minus the cap, coughed blood and water. I eased over to him. He looked up at me.

  “You’re the only ones ever got away,” he said.

  “Told you we would,” Leonard said.

  “Goddamn it,” he said. “Lois. She was all right.”

  He gulped big and was still, his eyes open and unmoving.

  “One down,” Leonard said.

  · · ·

  Leonard and I went wide of each other, made our way up the slope. It was a hard go, but we made it by using the willows and wet roots sticking out of the grass on the incline. I had taken the quiver from Baseball Cap’s body. It was one of those things where the arrows are well–fastened in them and are not easily able to fall out. They had survived his slide and his dunking in the water, not to mention a spear through him where the point came out of his back and moved the quiver to one side. I gave Leonard three arrows, and I took three. Leonard found Aussie Hat’s bow, and he took that. Now we were both armed. Leonard couldn’t have hit an elephant in the ass with one of those arrows, if he was standing twenty feet away, but it was something.

  When I got to the top of the slope, Aussie Hat wasn’t there, nor did he seem to be lying in hiding. He didn’t take a shot at us from concealment.

  It made sense to us that he would try and go back toward the barge. He was wounded now and it seemed smarter of him to try and escape, then to stay with the hunt. But a guy like that, you couldn’t be sure.

  Wet to the bone, and sliming with the swamp and the lake, we stayed apart, but within eyeshot, and made our way back the way we had come. When we got out of the swamp water, we found blood in the brush and against trees. Aussie Hat was making his way back the way we had come. When we come to the last true trail we were on, we found him lying in the center of it with his back against a tree and the pistol clutched in his hand, his hand on his right thigh. The arrow I had shot was sticking out of his shoulder.

  It was obvious he was dead.

  “Bled out,” Leonard said.

  · · ·

  I took the pistol. We decided we’d go back to the barge and get Mavis, and use the barge to make our way around to the part of the lake where our cabin was, but when we got to where the barge had been, it was gone. Lois’s body was gone. The head of the poor murdered woman was still there.

  Without any recourse, we started back through the woods, past Aussie Hat’s body, and on through the swamp. Eventually we passed the woman’s headless body. It took some time, but finally we came to the cabin and our car. We didn’t get anything out of the cabin. Leonard had the keys with him. I put the pistol on the seat between us, and Leonard, without a word, drove us out of there.

  · · ·

  Not a whole lot to tell after that, but I will say this. We were jailed for three days. They wouldn’t let us go and show them where the bodies were, and they didn’t believe our story. It was obvious they thought if anyone was dead out there, it was because we killed them. They were partly right.

  Finally they let Leonard call Marvin, our cop friend in LaBorde, and some words were exchanged between the Chief there and Marvin. We spent another night in the cell, Leonard on one cot, me in the other across the way.

  Silver lining was they gave us plenty of water to drink, and they were serving macaroni and cheese again for the third time in a row. For lunches we had been having peanut butter sandwiches with water, but it wasn’t perfect. What kind of heathen serves a peanut butter sandwich without a glass of milk?

  Marvin came, and at first that didn’t help much, but finally he talked them into letting us lead them to the bodies. We showed them the woman’s body first, and in that short time it had already started to decompose in the heat and as the two men had predicted, animals had been at it. It had been pulled about ten yards from where we had seen it last, and it was ripped up good. Ants and maggots had done their work as well. We took them on a guided tour that ended up with the bodies of the men, Baseball Cap still floating partially in the lake, and Aussie Hat still holding down his spot on the animal trail. The barge and Mavis, and Lois’s body, were still gone, of course.

  We described Lois and Mavis to the cops. Three days later, they found Lois’s body on the barge, which had been abandoned, tied to the shore in a narrow cove off the lake, about a mile from where it had been the last time we saw it.

  They found the skulls of other women at the spot where the barge had been parked. All the skulls had arrow or bullet holes in them. They finally took our detailed statement and let us go home.

  To shorten it up, the two men’s bodies were identified. Both had been in prison, and though there had been suspicions about them before for other crimes, none those suspicions had anything to do with missing women. Nothing had been proved, but much had been considered.

  Lois wa
s discovered to have been a hard worker in the medical profession, a party girl who liked to run with a rough crowd, or so her co–workers said. No one really claimed to be her friend, but her penchant for men on the bad side was well known. And though the cops were certain once they found Lois it would lead to them finding Mavis, none of the people Lois worked with had heard of anyone named Mavis. In spite of her party girl persona, no one could believe Lois would be involved in what she was involved in. Mavis went unfound.

  I checked six months ago and they still hadn’t found her. I hope they do, but I have this odd and unfounded feeling they may not. I figure soon as those two men traveled down that trail, she had dragged Lois out of there as a sign of respect, and then sailed away, severing ties with the men because she had realized that she, same as Lois, was expendable, nothing more than a warm body to pass the time with.

  Yet, she wasn’t one of life’s innocents. She may have taken Lois’s body away from there, but I had seen her dance with a dead woman’s skull, and didn’t have one ounce of sympathy for her. I hoped she was somewhere in a dark room hanging from a rope with a turned over chair at her feet.

  Me and Leonard got lectures from the cops, but in the end we got a nice write up as heroes in a few newspapers. Our involvement in the whole mess was ruled as two citizens trying to find out who the killers of the young woman were, and it was more importantly decided those two who had died at our hands were killed in self defense, which was true enough.

  The woman we had come upon, the dying lady, had been named Sally Ernst. She had a daughter. I wondered how the kid was doing.

  So far, neither me or Leonard have talked about going fishing again.

  Excerpt

  If you enjoyed Briar Patch Boogie, it wouldn't be the worst thing if you were to head back to where you bought it and leave a nice review with some stars attached. It goes a long way.

  And if you did like Briar Patch Boogie, maybe you'll like Act of Love, too. It was Lansdale's very first published novel, introducing the character of Marvin Hanson. It starts out like this: