“Yeah,” Leonard said, “but they might not be.”
“You got you a little something planned,” Haskel said. “A job.”
“Nothing like that,” Leonard said. “All right, wrap it up.”
“Don’t you want to see this stuff work?” Haskel asked.
“Yeah, well,” Leonard said. “I reckon.”
8
“We can go outside for these,” Haskel said. “I use the range in back for the heavy shit.”
Leonard and I each carried a rifle and Haskel carried the sawed-off and the revolvers and ammunition in a cloth bag. He walked us out the door, down the trail, and over near the hog pens. He put the bag down, broke open the double-barrel and took two shells out of his overalls pocket and pushed them into the gun.
“Watch this,” Haskel said, and suddenly he turned toward the hog pen and cut down with both barrels. There was a sound like God letting a big one and the fence splintered. When the smoke and dirt and hog shit cleared, both hogs lay with their feet in the air.
“Goddamn,” Leonard said. “Wasn’t any call for that.”
“Gonna eat ’em anyway,” Haskel said, opening the shotgun and popping out the shells. “Soon as I get you two packin’, I’ll get my woman to help crank them sonofabitches up with the wrecker and we’ll scrape ’em. Scrapin’ a hog beats scaldin’ any day. Still got to use lots of hot water, but it ain’t quite the work. Come here, now.”
We followed Haskel down the trail to a spot at the base of the barn. “Ya’ll want telescopic sights for these?”
“No,” Leonard said.
“Might ought to have ’em,” Haskel said.
Leonard shook his head.
Haskel said, “See them bumps on the hill out there?”
We nodded.
He swapped his shotgun for the rifle Leonard was carrying.
“Watch this.” Haskel jerked the rifle up and fired and cocked and fired in rapid succession. The bumps on the hill went away. “Come on out with me now,” Haskel said.
As we walked we could smell yet another awful stench. It wasn’t the outhouse and it wasn’t the pigs; it was something long dead and rotting. It was more armadillo carcasses. They were spread at the base of the little sand hill, and at the top of the hill we saw what Haskel had been shooting. The heads off buried armadillos. We stood at the top of the hill, and all around the spots where the exploded heads stuck out of the dirt there were bones and fragments of skulls and brains, and down on the far side of the hill were wire cages. All but one of the cages was empty. It housed a frightened armadillo that kept darting from one end to the other.
“Were those armadillos alive?” Leonard asked.
“Ain’t no fun shootin’ a dead’n,” Haskel said. “Fuckers root up everything. Figure this is how they pay.”
“They’re just doin’ what their instincts tell ’em,” Leonard said.
“Reckon so,” Haskel said. “But so am I.”
Leonard carefully laid the shotgun down, then I heard the wind, but I didn’t see the punch. It was a right cross, I think, and it caught Haskel on the left side of his cheek and it made a cracking sound, and Haskel seemed to leap away from the hill. He hit the ground at its base, rolled and lay on his face. I was amazed to see that the rifle Haskel had been holding was in Leonard’s left hand. He had snatched the weapon and punched Haskel in less time than it took to spit.
Leonard raised his knuckles to his mouth and sucked on them. I went down the hill to see if Haskel was dead. I lifted his head up and dirt fell out of his mouth. I set him up, got behind him and pulled the little revolver out of his overalls pocket and gave him a couple of whacks on the back with the palm of my hand. He coughed and rolled his eyes.
“You fugger,” Haskel said.
Leonard came down the hill and got out his wallet. He looked at me and sighed, took out the bills. There were a lot of them, large bills. Hundreds. I knew he had gotten them out of the bank for this gun buy, that it was a chunk of the money from the recent sell of his uncle’s old house.
Leonard pushed the bills down the front of Haskel’s overalls. “Here’s the money for the weapons and ammo, shitwipe. We’ll pick them up on the way out. That diller in the cage down there, I’ve tossed in another fifty, so I’m taking him with me. Cage too. Any of your friends, or you, show up to bother us on account of this, I want you to know they’re gonna miss all future meals. And I can find my way back here too, and I do, it won’t be to try and sell you no vacuum cleaner. You happen to wake up when I’m through with you, it’ll be with a tube in your nose and a shit bag strapped to your hip.”
“Azoles,” Haskel said, then stretched out on the ground and turned his head to the side and lay still.
I emptied Haskel’s revolver, dropping the shells in my hand. I put the shells in my pocket and leaned down and put the gun back in Haskel’s pocket. I picked up the cloth bag on my way away from there.
Leonard got the armadillo cage, carried it down the hill with one hand, the rifle in the other, the shotgun tucked under his arm. Down at the barn, we went inside and I got the notepad with our names on it and bent it in half and shoved it in my back pocket. We gathered up the guns and the ammo.
We went out to the truck. Leonard put the dillo in the truck bed. I stepped over the dead possum and got inside the truck with my weapons and ammo. Leonard went around and opened the driver’s door and put the guns and ammunition he was carrying inside.
Sherilee, without her finger in her nose for a change, sort of materialized. She said to Leonard, “Ain’t that our armadillo?”
“I bought him,” Leonard said, closing the door and leaning against his truck.
“Pa traps ’em.”
“Uh huh.”
“Where’s Pa?”
“He got a little tired. He’s up on the hill there, resting.”
“In the dirt?”
“He was sort of overcome with exhaustion.”
“You hit him didn’t you?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Sometimes he hits me. He knocked me out oncet with a shoe.”
“Just consider that one for you,” Leonard said, “and call it even.”
“He ain’t so bad sometimes,” the little girl said.
“You ought to tell someone about the hogs. Haskel shot ’em.”
“He does that sometimes,” said the little girl. “When they get big.”
“Well, they ain’t gonna get no bigger.”
“Reckon not.”
Leonard gave the little girl a pat on the head and drove us out of there. When we reached the main road, we saw Haskel’s two boys walking. They had cane fishing poles on their shoulders and sullen looks on their dirty faces. They didn’t wave at us.
When we had gone a few miles down the road, Leonard pulled over to the side, got the cage out of the back of the pickup and walked into the woods, set it on the ground, and opened it.
The armadillo sat quietly, looking at the open space. Lovebugs buzzed around our heads and caught in our hair and clothes.
“Go on and git,” Leonard said.
The armadillo did not go on and git.
Leonard picked up a stick and poked at the armadillo’s rear end, but the beast didn’t seem any more ready to leave. Leonard picked up the cage and gently poured the armadillo onto the ground. The armadillo landed on its feet and turned its head and sniffed the air. It appeared to be in shock, and considering what had happened to his relatives, I couldn’t blame him.
“Now, you go on and stay out of trouble,” Leonard said.
The armadillo moved slightly so that it stood next to Leonard’s leg. It made a snuffling sound, as if smelling Leonard’s socks, or maybe working up to a good cry.
Leonard picked up the cage, and we went back to the truck. When Leonard put the cage in the truck bed, we looked up to see the dillo had followed us to the edge of the woods.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” I said.
“No, me either.
I reckon the little fella don’t know he’s comin’ or goin’.”
Leonard went around and got in the truck, started up, and drove off. I looked in the side mirror, said, “He’s standing in the middle of the road.”
“Dammit,” Leonard said. He found a spot to pull around, went back and parked, got out and grabbed the cage. He opened it and set it on the ground in front of the dillo. The beast ambled into the cage and lay down. Leonard closed the cage and put the armadillo in the truck bed and got back behind the wheel, paused to pull lovebugs from his hair and toss them out the window.
“Damnedest thing I ever saw,” Leonard said, rolling up the window. “Couldn’t leave him though. He’d probably end up caught again, target practice for Haskel.”
“Probably. Think Haskel is going to hunt us down and kill us?”
“You destroyed the record.”
“Haskel could have memorized our names.”
“Let him come see us, then.”
“That was one hell of a punch you hit Haskel with.”
“Actually, I must be getting old. Skin on my knuckles scraped worse than usual.”
“Can you still get your pecker up?”
“I can hang an American flag on it and wave it.”
“Then you’re not getting old.”
“What’re you snickerin’ about?”
“Your dillo.”
“What about him?”
“Neat,” I said. “You’ve got an heir.”
9
Back at Leonard’s house, Leonard took the dillo into the woods while I made coffee. He came back a few minutes later carrying the empty trap. I watched him from the kitchen window. I thought he looked a little sad.
I poured us coffee, took the cups out on the back porch. Leonard joined me and we sat on the steps and sipped. I said, “When do we leave?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“That’s what I figured. That’s what I told Brett.”
“I think we ought to see we can take Brett’s car. We’ll need the trunk room.”
“Done,” I said. “She’ll be glad to do it.”
Leonard nodded. He said, “You want to back out, we can.”
“I didn’t say anything about backing out.”
“I know, but I’m givin’ you the room.”
“I’m committed. I asked you to help me, remember?”
“I remember.”
“If you want to back out, you can.”
“You’ve had to bring a man down before, Hap, and you brood over it still.”
“I’d hate for there to be a time I didn’t brood.”
“What we’re doin’ now ain’t self-defense. We’re goin’ lookin’ for trouble.”
“I know that.”
“You might have to kill someone.”
“I know that too.”
Leonard sipped his coffee, took a moment to study one of his fingernails. He wasn’t looking at me when he spoke.
“There’s things I can live with. Things even you don’t know about. I’m not complainin’, and I’m not apologizin’. I’m just sayin’ there’s things I can live with maybe you can’t.”
“Like killing people?”
“You got more bleeding heart in you than the whole Democratic Congress. You don’t like guns. You’re going against everything you believe because of Brett. You don’t owe this to her. Me, if I know where there’s a nest of poisonous vipers and I can stomp them flat, I think I ought to do it. I figure you’d feed the vipers, try to raise them up, maybe finance their college. I’m not saying one thing or another about this being wrong or right, I’m sayin’ how you are and what you’re goin’ to be dealing with. If what the midget said is true, we got the Oklahoma mafia going on here. We’re walkin’ onto their playin’ field, and we’ll be expected to play. These guys, they take their money, their drug pushin’, their pussy peddlin’, and their murderin’ seriously.”
I sat silent for a while. Leonard took my coffee cup and left, came back with filled cups for us both.
“You’re not altogether wrong, brother,” I said. “But I love Brett. Brett loves Tillie. So I got to do it.”
Leonard nodded. “Since you might stop in the middle of the action to pet a puppy dog, I figure I got no choice than to go in with you.”
“You always have a choice,” I said.
Leonard looked at me and laughed a strange laugh. “The hell I do.”
I didn’t know how to react to that. I eventually just looked away. Out at the edge of the woods, giving us a stunned look, was the armadillo.
“Your son has returned,” I said.
Leonard looked up and saw the dillo. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
We drove over to see my boss at the Black Lace Club, which was essentially a big nasty honky-tonk on the outskirts of town where women shook naked titties on stage to bad country-rock music and sometimes slipped their briefs down to give the drunks a view of the squirrel in the tree.
Most of the time, this led to the dancers having money tossed at them or pushed into their panties, but other times it led to drunks taking it as an invitation to walk on stage and screw whatever was in front of them. That meant the girls, me, the manager, another drunk, the stage, whatever.
It was my job to see they didn’t screw anyone, make too much noise, or fight each other over who could drink the most, had the fastest car and the biggest dick. It was a terrible place, a terrible job. In two weeks you could have more fights and nasty confrontations than three average persons had in a lifetime. It was one of the old-style bad places. Not the new places with clean floors and strobe lights and girls that looked as if they stepped out of the pages of Playboy. Not the places where the worst you had to deal with was some frat boy who thought he was tough. This was where the big bellies and the brainless collected. Guys that wouldn’t fit anyone’s idea of a stereotypical Hollywood tough guy, but the kind of guys who could take any one of those sleek, muscled-up ego machines and kick their asses until it bored them enough to stop.
I had come to feel working in this place was just helping it survive, and that was like feeding shit and sugar to disease-carrying flies. Why do it?
When I got there a couple of the daytime bouncers were on duty, and they knew me. They slapped me on the back and shook hands with Leonard when I introduced him. They were good guys, just shy on brains.
Day duty isn’t so bad. Mostly married businessmen on business trips who had wives back home who had gotten fat. They come in for a drink and a look-see, and maybe later they could get it up enough to jerk off back at the motel.
My boss, Billy Joe James, was sitting at a table auditioning a new girl who was dancing pitifully to a tune playing on a cheap recorder. She had about as much rhythm as a stick. She didn’t look bad, however. She was mostly ass, titties, and a dull expression. Looked about thirty, but a good thirty. She had a watery-looking tattoo of a red heart on her ass, and a red and blue tattoo that might have been a parrot, but could have been most anything, on her ankle.
Billy Joe saw me and Leonard, smiled at us. He waved the girl from the stage. She came down the steps like her feet hurt, which considering a large part of her outfit was a pair of tall red high heels, was likely. The rest of her had on a red G-string that was mostly up her twat.
When she came over to Billy Joe’s table, he said something to her and slapped her on the ass. She shrieked like it was all in good fun, grabbed her shirt off his table, and went away. She passed us, pulling on her long shirt, and the expression on her face told me she wasn’t having any kind of fun at all.
We went over and sat at the table and Billy Joe smiled at me. Billy Joe had a fat face any mother would love to hit. Many times. He said, “You ain’t come for money, I hope.”
“Actually, I have.”
Billy Joe nodded, wiped fingers through his oil-slicked brown hair. “Figures.” He looked at Leonard. “How’s it goin’, Pine?”
“It’s goin’,” Leonard said.
“You k
now I don’t pay nothing until Saturday morning,” Billy Joe said. “It’s always Saturday mornin’ that I pay.”
“Well, you know,” Leonard said, “right now, it’s bound to be Saturday mornin’ somewhere in the world, don’t you think?”
Billy Joe laughed a little, not like he thought the joke was all that goddamn funny, but like maybe a good yuk might take some of the seriousness out of Leonard’s looks.
“I got a little emergency here,” I said. “And I’m quitting.”
“Quitting? You can’t quit.”
“I just did.”
“Oh, shit, man, you’re my main bouncer. You can’t quit.”
“Just said I did.”
“You can’t.”
“I believe you’re not listenin’ to the man,” Leonard said. “Sounds like he’s quittin’ to me.”
“Shit.” Billy Joe looked at Leonard. “What about you, Pine? You lookin’ for work?”
“Not here I’m not.”
“You got a rep too. You’re one hell of a bouncer.”
“Not anymore. I’ve given up that profession. That and rose field worker and lay preacher are no longer on my résumé.”
“I pay pretty good, and hey, you get to look at a lot of titties.”
“I’ve seen titties and they don’t interest me much.”
“You some kind of fag?”
“Actually, I am.”
Billy Joe studied Leonard for a moment. “Yeah. Really?”
“Really,” Leonard said.
Billy Joe looked at me. “You and him? You know … you and him?”
“Only if my latest relationship with a female doesn’t work out,” I said. “Then, I got to consider it. I might even consider some bestiality. Come on, Billy Joe. I need my money and I need it now.”
Billy Joe nodded. “All right. But you decide you want to work again. Or you want to work, Pine. You come see me, okay? It don’t matter to me you’re queer. No offense. You know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” Leonard said. “I know what you mean.”
“We want to bounce,” I said, “you’ll be our first contact.”
Billy Joe pulled a wad of cash from his pants pocket, counted out the bills as if he was pulling each one from his intestines. I took my money and we left.
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