“Yeah, you’re kind of fucked up,” Brett said. “You boys want more coffee?”
“That would be nice,” Leonard said.
“Well,” Brett said, “I want some too, so I’m going to do what any good domesticated woman does, I’m going to have Leonard make it.”
“Hell with that,” Leonard said. “I’m going to the coffee shop.”
“You know what?” Brett said. “I think I was just bitten by a ghost of women past. I’ll go down and make the coffee. You two visit.”
When Brett was downstairs, Leonard pulled his chair closer to me. “You feelin’ better, brother?”
“I think so. I’m just not entirely certain what’s real and what isn’t, but more and more things are coming back to me.”
“Do you remember that five hundred dollars you owe me?”
“Nope. That isn’t coming back.”
Leonard grinned and gave my hand a pat. He said, “Now, while you’re weak, I can smother you with a pillow.”
“Way I feel, you could smother me with a thought.”
We sat silent for a few moments.
“Sometimes in war,” Leonard said, “there are soldiers who killed too much and saw too much, and they have nervous collapses. Sometimes they have it right there, right after they killed someone, or lost a buddy, but mostly they come home and have it years later.”
“And you never had any of that?”
“Once I woke up in a sweat remembering that I had lost a harmonica in the war.”
“A harmonica?”
“My uncle gave it to me, and I had it over there. I never played it. He gave it to me when I was a kid. That and a cap gun and cowboy bandanna. I lost the cap gun, and once when I was in the woods, hunting, and had to shit, I wiped my ass on the bandanna and lost my sentimentality toward it. But I had that harmonica, and though I couldn’t play a lick, I took it to war with me. It was kind of like a charm.”
“So, you’re telling me I lost my harmonica and had a nervous breakdown? I don’t own a harmonica, Leonard.”
“In a way, I am telling you that you lost your harmonica. There were guys went over there to war and came back and went along fine for years. I was once told by an army buddy that anyone killed someone had some kind of hole in them, even if they felt the person killed needed to be killed. Because on some level, human beings identify with other human beings to such an extent they start to see themselves as the dead human. You may be okay for a while, but in time, those things you do, things you’ve seen, they come home to roost, like pterodactyls.”
“Do you have moments like that?” I asked.
“I don’t. Not if I thought what I did was the right thing to do. I’m pretty self-righteous. I mean, there are guys out there, sociopaths that end up in war, and for them it’s like a free hand job every day. They like it. They don’t feel. That’s different. I think it needs to be done, I don’t brood. You, you’re always digging into your feelings. You leave them raw, mess with them so much. You’ve seen plenty, but last night you saw one too many. And I think Vanilla Ride, meeting her, may have been a big trigger, not just poor old Bert. She was the gun. Bert was the bullet.”
Vanilla had been a while ago, but he was right, she was in the back of my mind all the time.
“Vanilla is a beautiful woman,” Leonard said, “charming, very feminine, and she can kill you with an ice pick or a gun, maybe her bare hands, and sleep like a baby. And I know you. In the back of your mind you’re thinking: Once she was a kid like me, and she grew up to kill, and she grew up do it for money and not care who she killed or why. You feel like you might be slipping over into her bit of darkness. I tell you, man, no way. You ain’t comin’ from, and ain’t never been comin’ from, the farm where she was raised.”
“Farm?”
“Figure of speech.”
“How bad was I?” I said.
“I’ve seen a lot worse. But, know what I think? I think you might have sat in that chair for days, maybe starved to death if Brett hadn’t come along, called me.” Leonard swallowed and his facial expression changed. “You know what Brett said to me when you were in the chair? She said he’s your brother, he loves you, maybe more than me. Fix him.”
“And you did,” I said.
“I put a Band-Aid on it. You got to be your own doctor. A little bed rest perks you up. A little experience helps you deal with it. But it’s like a super staph infection. It gets better, but it doesn’t go away.”
29
In Marvin’s office, he said, “I thought you fuckers had retired.”
“No,” Leonard said. “We were on strike.”
“For what?”
“Better working conditions
Well, you’re shit out of luck.”
“What we figured,” Leonard said. “That’s why the strike is over.”
Marvin eyed me. “You’re awful quiet. Usually I can’t shut you up. No wisecracks?”
“Not today,” I said.
“Hap found a body. Bert, Mini’s stepdad. He’s been killed.”
“No shit,” Marvin said.
“I just missed the murderer,” I said, and I told him what we knew. About how Bert was scared, and claimed to have information, and then he was dead. I told him about the SUV, the phone call from Bert’s phone.
“You tell the police?” Marvin asked.
“Not yet.”
“That’s not smart,” Marvin said.
“I haven’t been feeling smart,” I said. “I have been, shall we say, under the weather.”
“I can work this out a bit,” Marvin said. “An anonymous tip. Let the cops know the body is there, but not who told them. Or I know a couple of them well enough they’ll pretend they don’t know who told them. You all right, Hap?”
“Pretty much,” I said.
Marvin picked up a pencil from his desk and tapped his teeth with it. “How does Bert’s murder tie in with the rest of it?”
“Therein lies the pickle,” Leonard said. “We don’t know.”
The pickle of it all hung in the air like a zeppelin.
“So we don’t know shit?” Marvin asked.
“If we do,” Leonard said, “we haven’t figured out that we do. Not yet. But no doubt in our minds, it’s all connected.”
“You said Bert thought someone was after him?” Marvin said. “Couldn’t it have been someone else did it? Someone not connected to all this? I mean some reason besides our case?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But it’s all a little too sweet to be a coincidence. We talk to Bert. He wants to see us. He ends up dead. And I get a call on his phone, and a hang-up. I think that was a kind of threat. A warning at least.”
“All right, then,” Marvin said. “See if you can tie it all together.”
“We will go about detecting, then,” Leonard said, standing up.
“You mean you two will go about bumbling in the hopes that happens to lead to something.”
“Yeah,” Leonard said. “That’s pretty much it.”
30
Out in the parking lot, as we got in Leonard’s car, he said, “To Marvin, we are nothing more than a couple of minions. Carrier pigeons to carry messages and bring messages back. Slaves to his judgment. Faces in the crowd.”
“You’ve had way too much coffee,” I said.
“I do feel a little itchy, like my nerves could jerk a decorative knot in my dick. But, minions though we may be, it beats honest work.”
“Actually, we don’t seem to do much, just find out about dead people,” I said.
“And in your case, you even found one that’s fresher than the rest.”
“He wasn’t all that fresh.”
“Since the others, the vampires, are all in the ground,” Leonard said. “He was the lily of the bunch.”
“Ha! If they’re vampires, they may not be in the ground.”
“Oh, you are wise.”
When we were well situated in the car, seat-belted in and hoping it would start, Leonard
said, “I’m confused.”
“About what?”
“Who do we annoy next? We have a list, but… who?”
“I vote Cason Statler,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because we can.”
“Now you’re startin’ to sound like yourself,” Leonard said.
But I wasn’t myself. I wasn’t even close.
The drive over to Camp Rapture was nice because it was a pretty day. The rain had cleared up and the sun was out, and the car was a little warm inside. We wheeled to the Camp Rapture Report, the newspaper Cason worked for, and went inside.
Cason was sitting at his desk in the middle of the newspaper office. There were other reporters around, but fewer than I had imagined. There was also an advertising department. One of the women who worked there was overweight and frumpy with pissblonde hair that looked to have been made by electricity and a sense of humor. She was wearing a too-short top that showed a lot of belly and a silver belly ring. She had on shorts that showed way too much ass and on the ass was a tattoo that looked like something an arthritic chicken had scratched in the dirt while dying.
My take is you can dress any way you want, but my amendment to that is that you have to have mirrors at your house, and you have to use them, and you must not lie to yourself about what they show.
“Damn,” I said. “I think my right eye just went dead.”
“Wishful thinking,” Leonard said.
“Oh, the humanity.”
Cason looked up from his work, saw us, stopped typing, and watched as we approached his desk. There was one spare chair, and I took it. Leonard put his hip against the side of Cason’s desk. All three of us looked at the woman in advertising with the too-little clothes and the too-much flesh.
“I try to forget she’s over there,” Cason said, “and then I get my mind off forgetting, and look up, and there she is, and I’m wounded all over again.”
I said, “Does she actually sell any advertising?”
“She threatens to take the shorts off if they don’t buy any,” Cason said.
“Ouch,” Leonard said.
“She’s the curse of the newspaper,” Cason said. “The editor is starting a dress code just to get some clothes on her. The flyer went out today from the boss saying we got to dress nicer, and a certain way. Normally I’m against dress codes. I think it violates our civil rights, but in Carrie’s case, I’m going to make an exception. You got to think of the children. Small animals. Our way of life. The planet earth.”
“If you’re through insulting the poor woman,” I said, “is there a place where we can talk private?” I said.
“The break room.”
Our trip to the break room was short. By the time we had gotten bad coffee in Styrofoam cups and told what we knew to Cason, we were being shuffled away. Cason followed us out to the car. He said, “There’s this guy works here, does research, Mercury is his last name, he can find something about anything. I’m gonna put him on this.”
“Really?” Leonard said. “His name is Mercury?”
“Really,” Cason said. “He lives for research, and anything to do with something odd, that’s his meat. Dumb-asses who think they’re vampires, that’s odd and he’ll like it, and he’ll research them until he falls over dead. I’ll talk to him and see if he can get on it.”
“You seem quick to shuffle us off.”
“Got a lunch date.”
“With a lady?” I said.
“None of your business,” he said, got in his car, and drove away.
31
As we were driving, Leonard said, “You think Cason’s too busy dropping the rope down the well to do us any good?”
“I think he’s the kind of guy that can screw and chew gum and do math problems all at the same time.”
“I doubt Cason’s date would appreciate his ability to do more than one thing at a time.”
“True,” I said, “but my guess is he’ll have lunch, knock him off a piece, get with this Mercury fella, and have something for us pretty damn quick. He’s pretty high-energy.”
“And if your description is right, he’s not particularly thoughtful,” Leonard said.
Leonard made a curve and looked at me out of the corner of his eye.
“How you feelin’, Hap?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It comes in waves. Sometimes I feel fine, other times I want to go back to that big armchair and not get up.”
“The chair’s at the dump, and since we’re not going to the dump to let you sit in it, that means you just got to live with things.”
“How do you do it, Leonard?”
“Because I have to.”
“That’s no kind of answer.”
“It’s my answer. I look at it this way. If what I choose to do seems right to me, I do it.”
“And what if,” I said, “what I choose to do seems right, but isn’t. Ku Klux Klan people think they’re right, but they aren’t.”
“I get your point. But you just made a point. You said they aren’t right, those KKK fucks, and being a black man, I have to agree. But saying they’re wrong means you have what you think is a clear-cut position, and you back it up with experience and facts. Like it or not, you believe you can tell right from wrong, and I trust your judgment and mine on those matters more than I trust the judgment of paranoid and inferior-feeling assholes who are all about making people’s lives miserable because they can. I’m simple enough about the matter to consider that if I’m doing something to protect someone or make their life better, and I have the ability to do it, and I’m going to feel good about myself afterward, that’s what I do.”
“Seems more complicated than that to me,” I said.
“Didn’t say it wasn’t complicated for some. What I said was it’s easy for me. Do you think if we hadn’t killed those who were trying to kill us in the past, they would have let us go with a pat on the butt? Do you really think there’s a god that sorts them out and punishes them if someone here in reality land doesn’t?”
“No. But we’re part of the problem.”
“Let me ask you why we put ourselves in those positions.”
“We’re stupid.”
“Next answer.”
I sighed. “We were trying to help someone, or we were trying to help ourselves, and at least once, we were trying to make some money.”
Leonard turned a wicked eye toward me, and then put it back on the road.
“That was my fault,” I said.
“Just looking for an acknowledgment… Let me give you the bottom line, Hap. People we’ve chosen to help over the years, had we not helped them, it wouldn’t have turned out well. The people we killed, if we hadn’t, would have gone on doing what they were doing, which wasn’t good. You are who you are, and you are an avenging angel. You were born to it. For some years I’ve been trying to figure what my career ought to be. What can I make of myself? Then one night, while I was pulling my johnson, having to use both hands, of course, I had a epiphany. I’m following my calling as surely as those who grow up to be astronauts or firemen or doctors. So are you. Maybe it’s a kind of post-traumatic stress you’re suffering. But I don’t think the reason you had a nervous breakdown was about what you’ve done. It’s about you trying to find a way to stop being you, and you can’t.”
32
We went to my house and sat around because we weren’t exactly sure what in the hell we were doing or how to go about it.
Brett was at work, wouldn’t be home until midnight, so we broke out the checkers and played for a while.
Late afternoon my cell rang. It was Cason.
“Mercury is on it, and he’ll have something for us day after tomorrow at the latest, maybe sooner.”
“Us?”
“Am I helping, or what?”
“You are.”
“Then it’s us. So long, Hap.”
…
We were too lazy to cook, so we drove into town and had dinner at a cafe. We
digested awhile at a coffee shop, then went over to the gym to work out, kick the bag and punch the mitts, then we drove back. As we turned on my street, we saw a car stop three houses up from mine in the Apostle’s Baptist Church parking lot and turn off the lights. The car was one of those low-slung jobs that in the light from the street looked like an angry rodent crouched to attack.
Leonard slowed, said, “Think maybe those are eager churchgoers who have come to wait until the church doors open on Sunday?”
“Seems unlikely.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
We drove by. I turned in the seat and looked out the back. The car was still sitting there. A little red dot from a cigarette was visible. No one had got out.
“What do you think?” I said.
“I think they’re bracing themselves to do something bad, and I got a feeling it isn’t the church they got a quarrel with.”
“Couldn’t be us, could it?” I said.
“It’s hard to believe anyone could be angry with us,” Leonard said, “but yes, I believe they have come to visit us. Call it instinct. Call it experience.”
“Someone somewhere is always mad at us.”
“Yeah, that’s probably more accurate.”
Leonard turned the corner and we went around the block and on the back street. We parked at the curb next to an empty lot with high grass. I opened Leonard’s glove box and got out his automatic.
“That’s my gun.”
“Not today,” I said.
Leonard pulled a short club out from under his car seat, lifted his deerstalker from the middle of the seat, and put it on. We got out and went across the field. At the end of the field we came to a backyard, and crossed that without any dogs barking. From there we could see mine and Brett’s house and the board fence around the backyard.
We didn’t say anything to each other. Sliding across the yard, through the night, we came to the fence and climbed over it, and fell into the backyard. We went across the dead grass and I got my key and opened the back door and we slipped in.
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