Vanilla Ride

by Joe R. Lansdale

  “We’re someone.”

  “I mean someone Tanedrue knows. I can’t call him. Cell phones don’t work out there, and that’s all they got. Cell phones. They like it that way. Hell, I don’t even have a phone. Just let me have yours, so I can call someone in town they know, and then you can go on. I see them, I can tell them something, whatever you want, make it some kind of misunderstanding, and I can say you apologized—”

  “Not likely,” I said.

  “You don’t want to get into this any deeper and drag me down too. You do, and hell will be coming.”

  “Too late,” I said. “Did you really like it out there, Gadget?”

  Again, hesitation. “I don’t know.”

  “That means no,” I said.

  “I loved Tanedrue.”

  “Loved?”

  “Love. I love him.”

  “You want to go back because you’re using. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “I think it is.”

  “I said it isn’t.”

  “It isn’t Tanedrue you want, it’s the monkey.”

  “I just like it. I’m not hooked.”

  “That’s what they all say.”

  She held her stomach.

  I said, “You hungry?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s start with the idea that you are.”

  “Sometimes, I try to eat, I throw up.”

  “That’s the drugs, or …”

  “I’m not pregnant. I been careful about that.”

  “So, you do have some common sense. Damn, girl. You don’t have to do this, live like trash.”

  “You a social worker?”

  “No. Unlike social workers, I really care.”

  She took a long time to respond again. That was okay. I was getting used to it.

  “Tanedrue, he said he was gonna quit dealing, soon as he got us a nest egg.”

  “A rotten egg.”

  “He meant it. He loves me.”

  “You are young, aren’t you?”

  “You don’t know everything.”

  “I don’t know anything. Older I get, less I think I know. But I know this, and I’m going to be crude to make my point. What Tanedrue has is a dumb bitch he can screw and lie to and feed drugs to, and when he’s through with you, when you get so fucked up you can’t tell the difference between a fat mouse and a full-grown elephant, he’ll get rid of you, kid. You won’t be fresh meat to him no more. You won’t be pretty, and you won’t be nothing but a whining whore with a habit. Maybe just some dumb dead bitch in a ditch somewhere.”

  “I ain’t no whore.”

  “You will be. That’s how it’ll work. He’ll turn you out, baby. So he can make a few more bucks off his horse before it dies. He’ll tell you how you’re doin’ it for the two of you, and it don’t mean nothin’, not really—”

  “Shut up! You don’t know everything.”

  “You said that already, and I even agreed with you.”

  Leonard opened the door, said, “Give me some gas money.”

  “You pay”

  “I haven’t got any money.”

  I gave him some money, hesitated, said, “Let’s get some coffee. Gadget here, she might could eat something.”

  “I’m not hungry,” she said.

  “Then watch us drink coffee,” I said. “And if you run off, we’ll just chase you down. We don’t care how it looks or what anyone thinks. We are wild and crazy guys.”

  “What if Tanedrue and the rest of them come and find you?” she said.

  “That would be bad for them,” Leonard said. “Didn’t you just hear Hap say we were wild and crazy?”

  10

  I parked us near the garage between some yellow lines and under the overhang. The rain plunked on the aluminum above us like buckshot. The guy who had been reading Poontang Palace was still inside the garage, but now he was digging around in a toolbox, probably trying to find a big enough hammer to beat some sort of automotive problem into submission.

  Inside the joint we got the same table as before and the guy who waited on us before came over, said, “You must like it here, back in the same day, and now with a friend.”

  “We don’t like the fries, just want to go on record with that,” Leonard said. “But the hamburgers do the alligator rock. And she’s not a friend.”

  “What?” the waiter said.

  “He likes the hamburgers,” I said. “He doesn’t like the fries. The girl is not a friend. She’s a friend of a friend.”

  The waiter didn’t look at me. He studied Leonard for a moment. Leonard smiled. There was always something about that smile. It was less like a smile and more like a snake trying to grin up a frog right before it struck and ate it.

  The waiter looked away from Leonard, looked at me. “What happened to your face?”

  I reached up and touched the scratches on my cheeks. “Briars.”

  “You ought to see his ass,” Leonard said. “That’s where the real work was done.”

  “That right?” the waiter said. “Sorry I asked. Here’s menus.”

  When the waiter went away, I said, “What you going to have, Gadget?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “That crummy way you feel, that’s because you’re so hungry your belly thinks your throat’s cut. Have some soup. They got soup here. I don’t know how it is, but stay away from the French fries. Soup, any kind of soup, if it’s fresh, it’s pretty hard to mess up.”

  She didn’t order anything, but when the waiter came back I ordered a cup of coffee and a bowl of chicken soup and Leonard ordered another hamburger, minus the fries, potato chips instead.

  When the waiter was gone, I looked at Leonard, said, “You just ate couple hours ago. Maybe less. You want another hamburger?”

  “Whipping the pure-dee-dog-doodie out of people makes me hungry. Don’t it you?”

  “A little.”

  The food came and I drank the coffee and pushed the soup over close to Gadget. I said, “I don’t want the soup after all. Why don’t you give it a taste? It smells pretty good.”

  She shook her head. “I know what you’re doing.”

  I nodded. “Suit yourself.”

  Leonard dug into his hamburger. “Oh, Jesus, this is so good it makes you want to hold down a wild hog and fuck it in the ass.”

  “That passes for manners at his house,” I said to Gadget.

  “I’ve heard worse.”

  I noticed she had picked up the spoon and was starting to stir the soup. I pushed the crackers over close to her. She opened one of the cracker packages and bit a corner off the cracker. She crumbled the rest in her soup. I turned at an angle so I wasn’t watching her. I got up and went over and ordered some pie and a glass of milk. When my pie and milk came, Leonard had to have the same, and now Gadget, finished with her soup, wanted some pie and milk too.

  By this time she was starting to look better. I had a feeling it had been a long time since she’d eaten anything besides cheese crackers, potato chips, peanut butter and Cracker Jack. My guess was she was the neatnik who put the paper towels over the dog piles.

  I paid the bill because Leonard didn’t have any money, or said he didn’t, and we drove out of there. The rain had died out and everything, even the crummy little town, looked better than before, spit-cleaned by nature. We hadn’t gone a mile before we looked back and saw Gadget had gone to sleep in the backseat, her belly full, and maybe, for a moment, satiated.

  Of course, there was that hairy old cocaine monkey, and when she woke up, it was sure to chatter and show its ass.

  I tried to tell myself we had done all we could do. What Marvin had asked. But somehow I didn’t feel satisfied that we could say “job well done.” I kept thinking about what Tanedrue had said, about what Gadget had said. About how we didn’t know what we had done and that hell was coming.

  11

  When we got back to LaBorde, Gadget was still sleeping. We drove through
the wet town on out into the country where Marvin Hanson stayed. He lived there with his daughter and his wife. They had once been a very close family then Marvin’s pecker had gotten excited about a young woman; the same young woman I had liked. She was dead now, and Marvin had gone back to his family and I had gotten over my feelings of wanting to skin him and nail his hide to the side of a barn and throw knives at it. Got over it long ago. Me and him and Leonard had gone through a lot, and we were bonded, as they like to say.

  Marvin and his wife, Rachel, had gotten back together, and they were doing all right. But during that time, their daughter, JoAnna, had gone through some stuff, and then she had a daughter of her own, Julie, aka Gadget, by the guy who had run off. I didn’t know that until Marvin told me. I knew I had never met him, but then again, much as Leonard and I liked Marvin, his family didn’t hang with us, didn’t even send us a Christmas card. They could have had three more kids, and close as the three of us were, we might not have known.

  Now they all lived in a small two-bedroom house out in the country, trying to pull everything together and live happily ever after.

  The house was off a rain-slick red clay road, and we started down it just as Gadget awakened and sat up in the backseat.

  “If you hadn’t had such a bad day,” I said, “I’d have made you wear your seat belt, and I should have anyway.”

  “You’re not my daddy,” she said.

  “No,” Leonard said, “and from what I’ve heard, your daddy, whoever he is, isn’t claiming you either. You weren’t nothin’ to him but a hump and a squirt.”

  Gadget crossed her arms and sat back in her seat and looked mad. I gave Leonard a look that could have paralyzed a chicken at twenty paces. If it bothered him, struck a nerve anywhere inside that hard black hide, I didn’t notice it.

  We drove up to Marvin’s house and I got out and opened the back door of the truck. Gadget got out with her arms still crossed and walked briskly toward the house. I tried very hard not to notice that from the rear in those very short shorts she had what might be a championship butt. If not, it was certainly a top contender.

  Marvin came out on the porch with his cane, and Gadget walked by him like he wasn’t there, went inside and slammed the door. Marvin looked back at her through the screen. I could see his shoulders slouch. JoAnna, Gadget’s mother, came out on the porch. She looked at us and tried to smile, then went back inside. I heard her call out for her daughter.

  We hadn’t moved away from the truck. We leaned against it and waited. Marvin came out and nodded at me. “Thanks.” He looked at Leonard. “Thanks.”

  “We didn’t have anything else to do,” Leonard said. “Me and him, we usually save this day for a little Bible study, but all the dirty parts we’ve read so much they don’t do anything for us anymore.”

  Marvin ignored Leonard, as was often his custom, looked at me, said, “You got her back, but other than that, how did it go?”

  “Let me see,” I said. “We went to the trailer, and the guy you beat with the cane was playing with his balls, which he kept in a somewhat overly snug pair of Scooby Doo boxer shorts. Leonard jerked him out of the trailer and bounced his head, and then we went inside and some guy got kicked in the balls a few times. A guy got his face flattened on a wall. The guy who was playing with his balls pulled a gun and Leonard shot him and I stuffed the bullet hole with a shirt.”

  “Bullet hole?” Marvin said.

  “Yeah,” Leonard said. “I shot the guy you beat with a cane.”

  “You shot him?”

  “In the fat part of the thigh.”

  “He was shooting to kill,” I said. “But he missed and only wounded him.”

  “He was going to shoot us,” Leonard said.

  Marvin shook his head. “Damn, I’d have gone myself, guys. You know that, hadn’t been for this bum leg.”

  “You think we don’t know that?” Leonard said.

  “You could catch some shit for shooting someone, even if it wasn’t life-threatening,” Marvin said.

  “Yeah, maybe,” Leonard said. “Hap, he threw a dog out the window.”

  “It was trying to bite me … We got rid of the guns and Leonard lectured them on fixing the place up a bit. Gave out a fashion tip … Oh, and there was dog crap all over the place. Oh yeah, I broke their CD player and stomped the shit out of a really bad rap CD.”

  “That’s an oxymoron,” Marvin said.

  “They had drugs,” Leonard said.

  “And not just a little,” I said. “Not some baggie of grass. Gadget… she’s got some juice in her moose, man. She’s hooked on the snort. She’s not just smokin’ weed.”

  “No,” Marvin said.

  “I’d recommend some kind of clinic, and quick,” I said. “You give her any slack, she’ll be back out there snorting some of what I flushed down the toilet. She thinks she’s in love with numb nuts, Tanedrue, but down deep I think she knows he’s what nature wipes its ass on. Just isn’t ready to face it. Not yet. Way I figure, Tanedrue has got her hooked on drugs so he can use her until he doesn’t want to use her. Hell, man, I don’t need to tell you that. You know how it works. Sorry we got to lay it on you like this.”

  “Yeah,” Marvin said.

  “It ain’t good news,” Leonard said, “but it’s the news.”

  “I think we’re home free, far as those yo-yos are concerned,” I said. “All done.”

  Marvin thought for a moment, then said, “Cops over there are dirty as a wino’s drawers. Drug dealers own them, so don’t be so sure they won’t try and screw you over, bring in some artillery, a mechanic to go with it, and it’ll be my fault. I shouldn’t have asked you.”

  “No one else to ask,” Leonard said. “No one else would be so stupid.”

  “You have a point,” Marvin said.

  “My take is the dirty cops might not like we fucked with their guys,” I said, “but I can’t see them doing anything about it. They don’t really know who we are. Gadget didn’t tell them, ’cause she didn’t even get our names right. They know we’re connected to you, though. That I’m sure of.”

  “I sort of let slip how much I enjoyed you beating Tanedrue’s ass with the walking stick,” Leonard said. “But then again, I wasn’t really trying to hide. We didn’t do no sneakin’. I did want to mention, however, that Gadget said you said we thought we were funny, as if it weren’t confirmed.”

  Marvin ignored that.

  “It was pretty much our usual plan,” I said. “We just went in there and beat the hell out of ’em, tossed a dog out a window, shot one of ’em in the leg, and messed up the paneling. It got a little wilder than we thought. I know that’s a synopsis of a synopsis I already gave you, but that part about us not being really funny, that really hurt, man, and I didn’t want to revisit that territory.”

  “I see scratches,” Marvin said, nodding at my face.

  “He tried to fuck a cat,” Leonard said, “and the cat didn’t like it.”

  “Those look like some pretty good claws,” Marvin said. “Like maybe Gadget did it.”

  “Now I remember why you were a good policeman,” I said. “I had to hit her. I’m not proud of it.”

  “You did what you had to do, I’m sure,” he said.

  “We got to go,” I said. “Gadget, she’s got to have some serious detox, buddy.”

  “That costs serious money,” Marvin said.

  “Maybe so,” I said, “but unless you’re going to lock her in a room and feed her soup through a straw while she’s tied down to a bed wearing a strait jacket, you got to find a way, man.”

  “I know,” he said. “And I will. But I am worried about you guys. When I asked for help I was thinking about Gadget, and not much else. I should have known better. I did know better. All I could think about was her, and the only people I knew to ask were you. I knew it could have consequences for you, for all of us. But I had to get her out of there. Listen, I know two, three guys we could get for protection. There’s Jim Bob, and
maybe that friend of yours, Veil.”

  “I hope Veil doesn’t hear you address us as friends,” Leonard said. “He might shoot us all. As for Jim Bob, no need to stir him up.”

  “And there’s another guy that owes me. He could help.”

  We shook our heads.

  “You fellas sure?”

  “We been over this,” Leonard said. “We don’t need anyone, and you don’t owe us a thing. Besides, those guys today, they don’t want to mess with me and Hap again because we are two badass motherfuckers. Didn’t I tell you Hap threw a dog out a window?”

  As I drove us away, I said, “Two badass motherfuckers?”

  “Sound convincing?”

  “It sounds like you have been watching too much Shaft or Superfly.”

  “Marvin has enough to worry about. We knew what we were getting into when we took the job.”

  I nodded. “Absolutely.”

  We chatted a bit about how we actually thought things would be okay. About how they were small-time goobers and they wouldn’t mess with Marvin either, ’cause there was no mileage in that.

  By the time we got back to LaBorde, we had almost convinced ourselves that we were in fact badass motherfuckers. Had we felt any tougher, we’d have stopped by the side of the road to shit in plain sight and wipe our asses on dried grass with sticker burs in it.

  12

  By the next day things seemed to have gone back to normal. You know, the basics: killing another perfectly good day and knowing you weren’t going to get it back.

  Brett was working at her nurse job, and I at a typically shabby day job at a construction site. Actually, it was a crummy two-day job picking up lumber and nails and all the stuff the major workers dropped. When I was hired, my boss, a black guy, told me, “You’re just one of the niggers, or wetbacks. Used to be they did what you’re doin’. I did what you’re doin’. Now you got to do it. That’s the job, take it or leave it. You’re late, I hire a beaner at half your price.”

  I took it. I got paid by the day, and that was good. I still had a little money from another job I’d done that had to do with the sort of stuff Leonard and I excelled at. Intellectual work, like kicking someone’s ass up under their ears and convincing ourselves it was for the greater good. It was rough on the knuckles, bad on the shoes, and tough on the conscience, or at least it was on mine.