Bad Chili

by Joe R. Lansdale

  We didn’t let on we knew he was following us. We wanted him to make a move, but he never did. Kept his distance, wasn’t always there, but just when you thought he was gone for sure, he’d show up again, like a pee stain in your shorts.

  The only really good thing about those few days was Brett. We spent a lot of time together, getting to know each other, solidifying our relationship, allowing our souls to meld into one, and, of course, fucking like two anacondas during mating season.

  So, life wasn’t all bad on my end, but Leonard, well, he was like a pot of water on the stove. You never knew when he’d boil. Little things like that lousy tick and a burn on his balls set him off. And all those videos that had gone missing, his John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies were in the batch. He really took that hard. And the fact his J. C. Penney’s suit had been mistreated and had a stain of some kind on it didn’t set well with him either. Just grumpy, is what he was. It was getting so I wanted to find Raul’s killer just so I wouldn’t have to hear Leonard bitch.

  One day, because we hadn’t figured out our next move, which with us was common, Leonard and I went miniature-golfing. Spring had choked off pretty much for good, it seemed. It was late April and unseasonably hot, like two rats in caps and sweaters fucking in a wool sock under a sun lamp.

  The sand at the little golf course was turning pure white from the heat, was as thin as bleached flour, and the gravel that was mixed with it crunched wearily under our hot, heavy feet. No trees. Kids screaming and shoving. And the windmill on the tenth hole didn’t work; wouldn’t turn, so you had to kind of boost your ball over the boards on the side, shoot from the foul area, knock it back in. Done that way, it was hard to figure your points. I wanted to just pass up the hole altogether, but Leonard wouldn’t hear of it.

  “A man starts, a man finishes, no matter what,” he said.

  “Yeah, right, boss.”

  We batted the ball around for a while, and by the time we finished I had won and Leonard was in an even more foul mood.

  “I used to be good at this,” Leonard said. “You know me and Raul played a lot?”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  “Yeah. I always beat him. I can’t believe you beat me.”

  “Look, you want the truth, Leonard, I boosted the ball with my foot on the windmill hole. Okay. It gave me the one-point difference.”

  “What I figured . . . You’re not just sayin’ that?”

  “Nope. I boosted it.”

  “Cross your heart and hope to—”

  “Leonard. I said, I boosted it.”

  “I thought I saw you do that out of the corner of my eye.”

  “Let’s don’t get too carried away.”

  “Then you didn’t really?”

  “I did, but I was very clever about it. You didn’t see me.”

  “Good,” Leonard said, “loser buys lunch.”

  * * *

  There was a little restaurant in front of the miniature-golf course, and we went in there to eat. It was supposed to be a health-food place, so most of the food tasted like yesterday’s dog shit reheated and hammered, but they made a pretty good meat loaf. We had that. We sat near the window.

  The yellow Pontiac, which had followed us from home, was sitting across the street in the Kroger parking lot. It was a good spot. The traffic on North Street was heavy, and it would be hard for us to get over there before he spotted us, cranked up, and left.

  “You think he thinks we don’t see him?” Leonard said.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Leonard ate a bite of his meat loaf, said, “Remember how this meat loaf used to just pass muster?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It tastes like it was rolled in someone’s dirty socks now.”

  “Oh, good. I can’t wait . . . Who do you think the guy in the Pontiac is working for?”

  “King Arthur,” Leonard said.

  “You didn’t exactly take time to think about that answer.”

  “No. You asked me what I thought, and I told you.”

  “You got to remember, I saw Mr. Pontiac before we ever went out to the chili empire.”

  “That’s because he had my house staked out. He was waiting to see who came in. You happened to be there.”

  “But he quit following me. He just showed up again recently.”

  “Right after we went out to the Chili King’s place of business. Seems obvious to me.”

  “Why did he stop following me in between?”

  “Maybe he lost you and didn’t find you again. Until lately. Hell, you gave Bissinggame your address and mine.”

  I nodded. “That works pretty good. I like it. I doubt it’s true, but we’ll go with it. I hate unsolved stuff.”

  “Me too,” Leonard said. “Want to go over and knock on his door?”

  “We’d never make it. He’d be gone before we got halfway across the street.”

  “You think he’s takin’ notes, snappin’ pictures?”

  “I don’t care if he’s playing with himself over there, I’m tired of him following us around. It makes me nervous.”

  As if he had heard us, the car began to roll. It went out of the Kroger lot and onto the street and headed north.

  “Shall we chase it?” Leonard said.

  “What?” I said. “And miss this meat loaf? . . . What the fuck we eatin’ here for?”

  “It’s cheap and all we can afford,” Leonard said.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Pass the hot sauce.”

  * * *

  After lunch we came up with an idea. It may not have been the best in the world, but it was an idea, and when we had one, we liked to grab on to it and hold it tight, ’cause we might not have another.

  We stopped at a gas station, filled up, and headed south for Houston. It was almost a three-hour drive, and then we got lost, so we spent five hours from LaBorde to the store I had written down on my list, East Side Video.

  East Side Video was in an okay section of town and it had lots of videos. We looked around the store for a while, then went over to the fellow behind the counter. He was in his late twenties, with longish red hair done up in corn rows. He looked up at us. He had a pimple on his chin like a volcano. It had such a puss head on it you wanted to hit it with something.

  “Help you?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’re looking for a special kind of movie.”

  “What kind?” he asked.

  “Well, I don’t see it on the shelves. It’s . . . a little different.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “You mean in-and-out stuff? We got that, but we don’t put it out next to Mickey Mouse.”

  “It’s under the counter, then?” Leonard said.

  “Yeah. We got some stuff you can look at.”

  “What we’re really looking for is a little different from that,” I said.

  “How different?”

  “Real different,” Leonard said. “We were told you had some tapes, some stuff like they make in Japan.”

  The guy pursed his lips. “Yeah? Who told you this?”

  “Some guy,” Leonard said.

  The counter man nodded. “We got some tapes we sell that are a little different.”

  “One we’re interested in . . . well . . . it’s got queers getting the shit kicked out them,” Leonard said.

  The redhead grinned. “Yeah. Some people think they’re real. They look real ’cause they’re so sloppy. Yeah, we got that. It’s not common knowledge, but we got it. We sell ’em. Not good quality. I mean, it ain’t gonna be Ole Yeller, know what I’m sayin’?”

  “Sell a lot of them?”

  “No,” said the counter man, “but at a hundred dollars a pop, we don’t have to sell a lot. Come to think of it, I guess we do a pretty good business with it.”

  “Against the law?” Leonard asked.

  “Why you ask?”

  “Just wondering,” Leonard said. “And if it is, maybe we got to think twice about buying it.”

  �
�Technically it’s covered by the First Amendment. ’Cause it ain’t real. Just looks real. But there’s folks don’t like the idea, so we keep it under the counter.”

  “We seen the one our friend had,” Leonard said. “It looked real.”

  “’Tween you and me,” the counter man said, “it might be real. But the people make ’em claim they ain’t. They get cornered, they say they bought them from a video enthusiast and they’re just showin’ what someone took a video of. Kind of like reporting the news. You know, like that fellow few years ago did the video of executions. We got that one here, you want it.”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  “These queer kick videos, I figure what the hell, one more queer with a black eye ain’t nothing to me. I’d kick one of the little faggots myself, make him suck my dick I wanted it sucked, though I ain’t so sure I’d want a queer’s lips on my tootie-toot, know what I’m sayin’? AIDS and all. Fucker might bite me.”

  I could sense Leonard’s tension. This guy kept it up, he was gonna wake up with a shelf full of videos shoved up his ass.

  “All right,” I said. “We’ll take one. If it’s one thing we like to see, it’s a queer get his.”

  The kid reached under the counter and brought out a tape in a cheap box with a photocopied cover that read: KICKIN’ FAIRIES.

  “Nice title,” I said.

  “Yeah, they ain’t real original,” the kid said. “But I seen this one, and I tell you, if it’s set up, it’s set up good. It looks real as a car wreck.”

  I peeled a hundred dollars out of my wallet, just like I had it to spare. I put it on the counter.

  The kid took the money and shoved the video at me and said, “No receipt on this stuff. No returns. We don’t buy this shit back. We can run off another one cheaper than we can fuck with that.”

  “I.R.S. might not like you not keeping records on this stuff,” Leonard said.

  “I.R.S. might not know,” the kid said.

  * * *

  We drove into the nightfall, cruised mostly silent back to LaBorde, the video on the seat between us.

  18

  I won’t describe the video we bought in great detail. We watched it when we got back to Leonard’s place. It gave me nightmares. Like the kid said, if it was set up, then it was a horribly beautiful setup.

  In this one some thugs in the park, presumably the same cowardly thugs from the first video, still wearing their bar codes across their faces, took a brick and knocked a young man’s teeth out and made him suck them, bloody mouth and all. Then they kicked his ass and left him lying in the dirt. If it was special effects, it was damn good special effects. But considering the way the rest of the video looked, I doubted there was anything artificial about it.

  “Do we show this to Charlie?” I said.

  “Not yet,” Leonard said.

  “Why not? I don’t like the idea of this thing being in my house.”

  “We’ll put it inside the couch at my old place, with the rest of the stuff.”

  “I don’t like that either.”

  I took the video out of the machine and put it back in its box.

  “I never thought I’d live to see such a thing as this,” I said. “I can’t believe it. What in the hell has happened to everyone? Every time I turn around, I’m amazed at how little I know about human nature. About anything, for that matter. But this . . .”

  “Whatever it is,” Leonard said, “I’m tired of it being given names and excuses. Guy sells drugs, it’s because his grandma died. Poor kids sell drugs, it’s because they’re poor. Guy goes off his rocker, kills someone, it’s because he eats Twinkies and the sugar gave him a rush. I reckon sometimes it is those things, but you know what? I don’t give a shit. I think a person ought to be responsible for being an asshole. Used to, person had to be responsible, had to pay the price, there was less of this shit then.”

  “There’re more people now, Leonard. More pressures.”

  “There are more assholes,” Leonard said, “and it ain’t got a damn thing to do with pressure. Or say it does. So what? You ain’t been pressured, man?”

  “Leonard, you yourself are talking about going out and eliminating some people. What’s the difference?”

  “Difference is, I’m responsible for my actions. I ain’t gonna say I got a bad hotdog and it gave me a bellyache and that made me do it. I’m gonna do it ’cause I want to do it, and I got my eyes wide open going in, and if I can do it and get away with it I will. As for you, I only want you to go so far. I don’t want to be responsible for your actions.”

  “It would be hard for me not to help you,” I said.

  “I know,” Leonard said.

  “What about Charlie?”

  “Wait a bit.”

  “How long?”

  “A bit. I want to see we can find some things on our own. We solve it, we got things laid out so the chief can’t tuck it under his ass, then we show it to Charlie and maybe I don’t have to empty my box of shotgun shells.”

  * * *

  A day later I started looking for honest work. The dough I had made offshore had been damn good, but at the rate it was going, it wouldn’t be long before I had nothing more than an empty palm and a flapping wallet.

  I went first to the aluminum-chair factory, but just walking in the door made my stomach hurt. Factories and foundries, and I’ve worked in both, were my idea of hell on earth. I stood there a moment smelling machinery oil and listening to the thud of the machines at work, watching people shuffle about as if they were pushing great boulders up a hill, and I went out of there.

  I went to a local feed company for a try. The foreman told me quite frankly, “We mostly just hire niggers and wetbacks ’cause they work cheap.”

  “I work cheap,” I said.

  “Yeah, but the way we work someone, we wouldn’t do that to a white man.”

  “Well, that’s certainly white of you,” I said.

  “Yeah, ain’t it,” he said.

  I left that cocksucker to it, drove all over town, tried a lot of places, but there wasn’t much available, and what was available wasn’t worth having. I put in some applications. One that looked promising was a job at the chicken plant, being a security guard. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but at my age exactly what I wanted I couldn’t get and what I could get I didn’t want.

  I began to think of the rose fields again, where I always found work, but decided against it. That hot sun, that dust up the nose, I just didn’t think I could go back to it. It was a young man’s job on his way to somewhere, a foolish man’s job on his way to nowhere, or the last job a man could get.

  It was a pretty sad situation. Here I was in my mid-forties and no real job, no retirement fund, dog-turd insurance, and a squirrel bite on the arm.

  After a day of unsuccessful job hunting, I drove over to Brett’s and took her to dinner at a kind of home-cooking joint, then we went back to her place, went to bed and made love, which was a damn sight better than looking for a job or working in the aluminum-chair plant. Though, considering most anything is, that isn’t giving Brett the sort of compliment she deserves.

  As we lay in bed, we began to talk. We talked about all kinds of things, and gradually we got around to me and my life and I told her about my job search, and how I had never really settled into anything, jobwise, that mattered. I told her about Leonard, that he was black and gay and that he and I were as close as brothers. Probably closer.

  “Wow!” she said. “I’ve never really known any black people, you know, close up. Friend-like. Way you say you guys are.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “You know, I was one of them kind always thought that line about ‘some of my best friends are niggers’ made a certain sense. I didn’t mean nothing by it, I was just ignorant as a fuckin’ post. Later on, I was all for civil rights, and I went out of my way to treat the blacks in school like they were my friends. Condescending is what I was. In other words, I was actually a blue-collar redn
eck trying to come across like a middle-class stiff ass trying to show those poor niggers what a liberal I was. So I haven’t really hung around that many blacks.”

  “You didn’t mention the gay part.”

  “Yeah, there’s that, too. I always kind of thought of gays as perverts growing up. I never hung around any. Maybe it’s high time I gave it a try. This Leonard, he’s your brother, I reckon he ought to be mine too.”

  “You couldn’t have said anything better.”

  “Great,” she said. “I get to be the first in my family to hang around with niggers and queers.”

  I laughed at her.

  “’Course,” she said, “my family background was the kind of folks thought you touched a black person’s hand you could get cut, like sharkskin can cut you. I grew up thinking all blacks did was fuck, which seems like a fairly legitimate pursuit, actually.”

  “I like it.”

  “Yeah. It passes the time. My daddy, he was the kind of guy thought miniature golf ought to be Olympic sports, called blacks darkies when he wasn’t calling them ‘shines’ or ‘niggers.’ My mother, who was a kind of liberal for where we lived, called them ‘nigras’ or ‘coloreds’ and thought they ought to have the right to vote but should have their own toilets and water fountains. Later on, after civil rights, she never did like the idea of going into a filling station and thinking a black ass had been on the crapper ahead of her. So, you see, I’ve had some hurdles to overcome.”

  “Well, your old man might have been a racist, but I’ll tell you, when it comes to miniature golf as an Olympic sport, he might have been on to something. It’s a hell of a lot more entertaining than skating.”

  Brett grinned. “Give us a kiss.”

  I did. And another.

  “Now,” she said, “make love to me and try to have it last longer this time.”