by Bobby Byrd
He held the hand up above his head. Well, he lifted it to about shoulder height. Probably the most he had moved in a while. He said, “Boys, do you see this? Do you see the humanity in this?”
I thought: Humanity?
“This hand tried to take my money and stuck its finger up my old lady’s ass … Maybe all six. Look at it now.”
His boys all laughed. It was like the best goddamn joke ever told, way they yucked it up.
“Well, now,” Big O said, “that motherfucker won’t be touchin’ nothin’, won’t be handlin’ nobody’s money, not even his own, and we got this dude to thank.”
Way Big O looked at me then made me a little choked up. I thought there might even be a tear in his eye. “Oh,” he said, “I loved that woman. God, I did. But I had to cut her loose. She hadn’t fucked around, me and her might have gotten married, and all this,” he waved Jack’s hand around, “would have been hers to share. But no. She couldn’t keep her pants on. It’s a sad situation. And though I can’t bring her back, this here hand, it gives me some kind of happiness. I want you to know that.”
“I’m glad I could have been of assistance,” I said.
“That’s good. That’s good. Put this back in the pickle jar, will you?”
I took the hand and dropped it in the jar.
Big O looked at me, and I looked at him. After a long moment, he said, “Well, thanks.”
I said, “You’re welcome.”
We kept looking at one another. I cleared my throat. Big O shifted a little in his chair. Not much, but a little.
“Seems to me,” I said, “there was a bounty on Jack. Some money.”
“Oh,” Big O said. “That’s right, there was.”
“He was quite a problem.”
“Was he now … Yeah, well, I can see the knot on your head. You ought to buy that thing its own cap. Somethin’ nice.”
Everyone on the couch laughed. I laughed too. I said, “Yeah, it’s big. And if I had some money, like say, $100,000, I’d maybe put out ten or twenty for a nice designer cap.”
I was smiling, waiting for my laugh, but nothing came. I glaced at Be Bop. He was looking off like maybe he heard his mother calling somewhere in the distance.
Big O said, “Now that Jack’s dead, I got to tell you, I’ve sort of lost the fever.”
“Lost the fever?” I said.
“He was alive, I was all worked up. Now that he’s dead, I got to consider, is he really worth $100,000?”
“Wait a minute, that was the deal. That’s the deal you spread all over.”
“I’ve heard those rumors,” Big O said.
“Rumors?”
“Oh, you can’t believe everything you hear. You just can’t.”
I stood there stunned.
Big O said, “But I want you to know, I’m grateful. You want a Coke, a beer before you go?”
“No. I want the goddamn money you promised.”
That had come out of my mouth like vomit. It surprised even me.
Everyone in the room was silent.
Big O breathed heavy, said, “Here’s the deal, friend. You take your jar of pickles, and Jack’s six fingers, and you carry them away. ’Cause if you don’t, if you want to keep askin’ me for money I don’t want to pay, your head is gonna be in that jar, but not before I have it shoved up your ass. You savvy?’
It took me a moment, but I said, “Yeah. I savvy.”
Lying in bed with Loodie, not being able to do the deed, I said, “I’m gonna get that fat son of a bitch. He promised me money. I fought Jack with a piece of firewood and a hatchet. I fell off a roof. I slept in my car in the cold. I was nearly killed.”
“That sucks,” Loodie said.
“Sucks? You got snookered too. You was gonna get fifty thousand, now you’re gonna get dick.”
“Actually, tonight I’m not even gettin’ that.”
“Sorry, baby. I’m just so mad … Ever’ Thursday mornin’, Big O, he goes to an appointment at Dr. Jacobs’. I can get him there.”
“He has his men, you know.”
“Yeah. But when he goes in the office, maybe he don’t. And maybe I check it out this Thursday, find out when he goes in, and next Thursday I maybe go inside and wait on him.”
“How would you do that?”
“I’m thinkin’ on it, baby.”
“I don’t think it’s such a good idea.”
“You lost fifty grand, and so did I, so blowin’ a hole in his head is as close as we’ll get to satisfaction.”
So Thursday morning I’m going in the garage, to go and check things out, and when I get in the car, before I can open up the garage and back out, a head raises up in the backseat, and a gun barrel, like a wet kiss, pushes against the side of my neck.
I can see him in the mirror. It’s Lou Boo. He says: “You got to go where I tell you, else I shoot a hole in you.”
I said, “Loodie.”
“Yeah, she come to us right away.”
“Come on, man. I was just mad. I wasn’t gonna do nothin’.”
“So here it is Thursday mornin’, and now you’re tellin’ me you wasn’t goin’ nowhere.”
“I was gonna go out and get some breakfast. Really.”
“Don’t believe you.”
“Shit,” I said.
“Yeah, shit,” Lou Boo said.
“How’d you get in here without me knowin’?”
“I’m like a fuckin’ ninja … And the door slides up, you pull it from the bottom.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.”
“Come on, Lou Boo, give a brother a break. You know how it is.”
Lou Boo laughed a little. “Ah, man. Don’t play the brother card. I’m what you might call one of them social progressives. I don’t see color, even if it’s the same as mine. Let’s go, my man.”
It was high morning and cool when we arrived. I drove my car right up to where the pool was dug out, way Lou Boo told me. There was a cement-mixer truck parked nearby for the pool. We stopped, and Lou Boo told me to leave it in neutral. I did. I got out and walked with him to where Big O was sitting in his motorized scooter with Loodie on his lap. His boys were all around him.
Be Bop pointed his finger at me and dropped his thumb. “My man,” he said.
When I was standing in front of Big O, he said, “Now, I want you to understand, you wouldn’t be here had you not decided to kill me. I can’t have that, now can I?”
I didn’t say anything.
I looked at Loodie, she shrugged.
“I figured you owed me money,” I said.
“Yeah,” Big O said. “I know. You see, Loodie, she comes and tells me she’s gonna make a deal with you to kill Jack and make you think you made a deal with her. That way, the deal I made was with her, not you. You followin’ me on this, swivel dick? Then, you come up with this idea to kill me at the doctor’s office. Loodie, she came right to me.”
“So,” I said, “you’re gettin’ Loodie out of the deal, and she’s gettin’ a hundred thousand.”
“That sounds about right, yeah,” Big O said.
I thought about that. Her straddling that fat bastard on his scooter. I shook my head, glared at her, said, “Damn, girl.”
She didn’t look right at me.
Big O said, “Loodie, you go on in the house there and amuse yourself. Get a beer or somethin’. Watch a little TV. Do your nails. Whatever.” Loodie started walking toward the trailers. When she was inside, Big O said, “Hell, boy. I know how she is, and I know what she is. It’s gonna be white gravy on sweet chocolate bread for me. And when I get tired of it, she gonna find a hole out here next to you. I got me all kind of room here. I ain’t usin’ the lake-boat stalls no more. That’s risky. Here is good. Though I’m gonna have to dig another spot for a pool, but that’s how it is. Ain’t no big thing, really.”
“She used me,” I said. “She’s the one led me to this.”
“No doubt, boy. But you got to understand.
She come to me and made the deal before you did anything. I got to honor that.”
“I could just go on,” I said. “I could forget all about it. I was just mad. I wouldn’t never bother you. Hell, I can move. I can go out of state.”
“I know that,” he said. “But I got this rule, and it’s simple. You threaten to kill me, I got to have you taken care of. Ain’t that my rule, boys?”
There was a lot of agreement.
Lou Boo was last. He said, “Yep, that’s the way you do it, boss.”
Big O said, “Lou Boo, put him in the car, will you?”
Lou Boo put the gun to back of my head, said, “Get on your knees.”
“Fuck you,” I answered, but he hit me hard behind the head. Next thing I know I’m on my knees, and he’s got my hands behind my back and has fastened a plastic tie over my wrists.
“Get in the car,” Lou Boo said.
I fought him all the way, but Be Bop came out and kicked me in the nuts a couple of times, hard enough I threw up, and then they dragged me to the car and shoved me inside behind the wheel and rolled down the windows and closed the door.
Then they went behind the car and pushed. The car wobbled, then fell, straight down, hit so hard the air bag blew out and knocked the shit out of me. I couldn’t move with it the way it was, my hands bound behind my back, the car on its nose, its back wheels against the side of the hole. It looked like I was trying to drive to hell. I was stunned and bleeding. The bag had knocked a tooth out. I heard the sound of a motor above me, a little motor. The scooter.
I could hear Big O up there. “If you hear me, want you to know I’m having one of the boys bring the cement truck around. We’re gonna fill this hole with cement, and put, I don’t know, a tennis court or somethin’ on top of it. But the thing I want you to know is this is what happens when someone fucks with Big O.”
“You stink,” I said. “And you’re fat. And you’re ugly.”
He couldn’t hear me. I was mostly talking into the air bag.
I heard the scooter go away, followed by the sound of a truck and a beeping as it backed up. Next I heard the churning of the cement in the big mixer that was on the back of it. Then the cement slid down and pounded on the roof and started to slide over the windshield. I closed my eyes and held my breath, and then I felt the cold, wet cement touch my elbow as it came through the open window. I thought about some way out, but there was nothing there, and I knew that within moments there wouldn’t be anything left for me to think about at all.
DUCKWEED
BY GEORGE WIER
Littlefield
Carlos McDaniel was skimming duckweed when the two men came and shot him full of holes.
It was at his ex-wife’s uncle’s place, fifteen miles south and east of College Station, Texas, and it had a summer cabin on it, complete with air-conditioning and an ancient refrigerator always stocked with Cokes, cheap beer, and sandwich materials. The cabin stood ten feet from the edge of the one-acre lake.
The lake was little more than an overgrown duck pond, but it was all the water anyone could need on a hot summer day when the only breeze came from the flapping wings of wild waterfowl and even the water moccasins lay listless on the floating platform, unmindful of interlopers. It was a hidden spot, well away from competing salesmen and customers who gravitated to the two extremes: bored-stiff disinterest or unrealistic expectation. Carlos got more of those two kinds than any other as a real estate salesman. And when they got to be a little too much for a bright-eyed young man with all of life ahead of him and a ticket for this Saturday’s Lotto Texas in his pocket, he would climb in his ’77 Datsun short-bed pickup and head for the country and the cool, spring-fed waters of Hidden Lake. And his share of the beer.
When blacktop gave way to caliche gravel and a long-following geyser trail of fine, reddish dust spreading out like a comet’s tail, only then could he breathe deeply and begin to take in life again.
Hidden Lake, as his ex’s family called it, lay at the tail end of everything. The last county road doubled back on itself toward the north and west at the turnout of the lane to his ex’s family property. The property was the last customer on the water and electric line, and it was five hundred yards from the Navasota River, which defines the county’s easternmost border.
The family—the few that were left of them—hardly ever came out, and almost never in the middle of the week. Carlos would have some alone time. Some time to look at nature and think and let things settle out. Skimming the duckweed was a damned dirty job, and damned if he didn’t love doing it.
This day he hadn’t bothered locking the gate to the property behind him, as he more often than not did. Possibly things would have turned out differently if he had, but then again, who could know? There are no could-have-beens, should-have-beens, or would-have-beens to life, other than what we consider in the universe-wide space behind our eyes. There is only the moment right here and now.
Carlos looked up from the task at hand when he had the feeling he was being watched.
He had managed to get the floating landscape timbers in a fairly straight line and was just skirting the edge of the floating platform, whereon lay three large and completely still cottonmouth moccasins, when he felt it. There was movement there under the shade trees some thirty feet away. The sun was hot and bright overhead and he squinted.
“Hello,” he called out.
They weren’t family—or rather ex-family. He’d never seen the two men before in his life.
They were dressed as if they had just come from a highend real estate closing. His first errant thought was that they were potential clients who had gone to a lot of trouble to find him.
In a way, he was right.
The water came up to Carlos’s chest. It was a good thing they had waited until he was nearly done before happening along. Ten minutes before and they would have come upon him slogging through the muck on the opposite shore with his bare ass dripping mud and water.
“Hello,” one of the two men said, and waved. The man smiled.
Carlos almost waved back, but he was mindful of the snakes, just three feet away. Snakes couldn’t hear worth a damn, but they could sense movement, and cottonmouths are known for their aggressiveness.
“Give me a minute, will you? Go on in the house. There’s beer and Cokes in there. Also, I’m not exactly dressed for visitors at the moment.”
Carlos had a towel in his pickup, and he was thinking about how he’d look trying to move across the yard to get to it before the two glanced back out the front window. Chances were they’d get an eyeful no matter what he did. But that was all right. They were guys, after all. And something else was beginning to take hold inside of him. A far-off song, like a radio picking up a skip on a clear night: the opening chords of the world’s oldest song—opportunity. Anyone coming this far to see him must want something awfully bad.
And he was right about that as well.
The two men went inside without further word.
Carlos pulled the leading timber up into the mud of the bank and made a break for the truck. The towel was there behind the seat where he’d left it, but it wasn’t a beach towel. He kept it there for those moments when the old Datsun itself had had enough and decided it was time to overheat. You had to have a thick, dry towel to remove a hot radiator cap, and the towel—complete with the three Powerpuff Girls: Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup (the only thing he’d truly walked away with to call his own from his former marriage)—wrapped around him just enough for him to make a small knot. Even that, in the final analysis, would do him little good.
The towel would have to do.
Carlos stepped up to the front porch and slid the glass doorway back on its tracks. The track needed a good cleaning out and a bit of graphite to smooth the slide of the door, but like all things, there was never enough time.
The air inside was cool. Not cold, but just enough to make him shiver. He was still wet and water trickled down his legs. There were tiny
green specks of duckweed all over him. He usually went from the lake right into the shower because if he dried off with the duckweed still on him it tended to stick like glue.
The two men came in from the kitchen. Each had a Coke in hand. One of the men was smiling, the other looked at him with dead-fish eyes.
Carlos shivered again.
“How can I help you fellas?” he asked. It came out sounding uncertain, and he knew it.
“Just a little information,” the smiling fellow said. His big teeth were as false as the rest of him, Carlos suddenly knew. That song—that radio-skip melody—was no closer now than the background hum leftover from the Big Bang.
“You guys cops?” Carlos asked.
The dead-fish-eyed fellow laughed. It was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.
For Carlos the temperature in the room plummeted.
“No,” Smiley said, cutting his own light chuckle off short. “Not cops. Businessmen, Mr. McDaniel. Just like yourself. You had a client. A lady.”
“I’ve got a lot of lady clients. And you said ‘had.’ I don’t keep track of my old clients very well. Which is maybe why I’m not pulling down a hundred Gs a year.”
“We understand, Mr. McDaniel. We really do. This lady you’d not easily forget.”
“Who is she?”
“Your first name is Carlos, right?” Smiley asked. “But your last name is McDaniel. You got some greaser blood in you?”
“I don’t think I like you,” Carlos said.
“You don’t have to,” Smiley said. “Who’s the bean eater? With a last name like McDaniel, it’d have to be your mother, right?”
He felt it then, strong. The floodgates of adrenaline opening somewhere in his body. It was going to be either fight or run. Running, at the moment, looked best. Two on one with him naked in his ex’s uncle’s cabin, a mile to the nearest neighbor? Not good odds.
But Carlos fought the urge to run. Who can truly tell the future?
“I’ll tell you what you want to know,” he said. “Then you can leave.”
“Smart fellow, right, Sammy?”