Mucho Mojo

by Joe R. Lansdale

  “All right,” Fitzgerald said, “we can do that. T.J., move aside. You fellas come on in.”

  34.

  The only light in the gym was the sunlight that came through high shutter windows, and it was bright to the center of the gym, but there its reach played out and the shadow took over, grew darker toward the far wall.

  The Reverend took off his T-shirt and showed us a hard body, and said, “Hiram, you and me. We’ll start easy, get warm.”

  Hiram nodded, picked up some blue boxing gloves lying against the wall, and put them on. They were the slip-on kind. No strings.

  The Reverend pulled on a pair of red gloves, and he and Hiram moved toward the center of the gym, and the line of light and shadow split them down the middle, putting one side of their bodies in the light, the other in the dark, but then they began to move, to bob and weave, to shuffle and dance, and they were one moment in brightness, the next in shadow.

  Back and forth, around and around, reaching out with the gloves, slow at first, touching, jabbing, and then they came together and the blows were smooth and soft and not too quick, and on the sidelines T.J. watched like an attack dog, ready for the word.

  They slugged and dodged and bobbed and weaved, and Hiram was, as he said, a scrapper, not a boxer but a scrapper. He threw his punches wide and dropped his hands, but he was fast and game and landed shots because of it. Fitzgerald was somewhere between a boxer and a brawler. It was obvious he was holding back. He could easily have been a retired heavyweight, a guy that might have been a contender.

  They eventually came together in the center of the gym, locked arms, and began moving around and around in a circle, light and shadow, their foreheads pushed together as if they were Siamese twins connected by flesh and brain tissue. Around and around. T.J. carefully watching.

  Finally Fitzgerald pushed Hiram away and smiled at him. “You’re a little better, my man.”

  “I been working out at a gym,” Hiram said when he got his breath. “But I’ve had all I want.”

  “You tire too easily,” Fitzgerald said.

  “That’s the truth,” Hiram said.

  Fitzgerald looked at me. “You want to go?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Fitzgerald turned to T.J. “Take it easy, T.J. It’s just fun.”

  T.J. nodded, but there wasn’t anything on his face that showed he thought any fun was going on. He didn’t relax a bit. Tiny rivers of sweat rolled down his face, and he stood partially crouched.

  “Kinda takes the thrill out of it with him at my back,” I said.

  “He’s all right,” Fitzgerald said. “He’s just overly protective.”

  I got the gloves from Hiram and pulled them on. They were sweaty inside, and hot. It was starting to warm up in the gym, as the air-conditioning was off and the air came from the same place as the light—the outside.

  “You should go to church,” Fitzgerald said to me. “Everyone should go to church.”

  “How do you know I don’t?” I said. “I might preach somewhere. God might have sent me here to whip your butt.”

  “No,” he said, smiling. “I don’t think so. Your friend, he went to church, he might realize the perversion of his homosexuality. He could change his ways. There might be forgiveness from the Lord.”

  “Might be?” I said.

  I took up a southpaw position and we moved and threw some jabs, but there was no real connection. Fitzgerald said, “There’s no true home in the House of the Lord for the sodomite, young man.”

  “Let it be, Fitz,” Hiram said from the sidelines. “Just box.”

  I threw a quick jab and hit the Reverend on the forehead, and we started shuffling about, looking for openings. I said, “You make homosexuality sound like a true sin. Right up there with murderers, child molesters, false prophets. You might as well include unmarried mothers and illegitimate children.”

  Fitzgerald studied me curiously. He jabbed and right-crossed and hooked. Lightly. I blocked and countered with a weak combination.

  We moved apart, he said, “There are some who are lost to the joys of heaven. They have to be put aside.”

  “Aside?” I said, and hooked him with a left to the gut, hooked him hard. He covered and slid back. “What’s ‘aside’ mean, Reverend? You sound as if you’re out to punish souls instead of save them.”

  His face turned into a black Kabuki mask, and he came with a jab and a crossing combination. I took it on the side of my face and rolled it, but it still hurt. We weren’t playing tag now. I got my focus. I let myself settle. I tried not to concentrate too much. I tried to relax and let the reflexes take over. I thought too much, I was going to get hit while putting together a combination. I had to react, not plan, and I had to remember not to kick. We were boxing.

  I threw a jab and tried a hook, and Fitzgerald leaned away from the jab and moved outside of the hook and came over my hand and hit me with a right cross over the left eye.

  I bobbed and weaved and let a couple of shots ricochet off me while I got it together, then we were close and the fists were flying and I was distantly aware of the sound of the gloves as they slapped on our sweaty flesh, and I was aware of moving in and out of light and shadow, and finally, when he stood in shadow and I stood in light, with the sun at my back, I decided to hold him. I wasn’t going to move. He wasn’t coming into the light. He was going to take what I had to give in shadow. Take it and like it.

  I took a few myself and had to like it, but I had moved beyond pain. It was going to take a damn good shot for me to feel it now. We weren’t playing. We were hitting. Hiram said, “Hey, men, too much,” but we didn’t stop, we kept slinging and the sound of the gloves became sweet, like a backbeat to good music, and Fitzgerald tried to press hard, to move around me, to move into the light, to push against me and bring himself to my side of the gym, but I wouldn’t let him. He tied me up, I shoved him off and jabbed him. He tried to circle, I hooked and crossed.

  Hiram was calling something from the side, but I wasn’t aware of it anymore, I couldn’t make sense of his words. There was a copper taste in my mouth. And then there was a great shadow, like a cloud moving before the sun, and I knew T.J. had slid up behind me, eclipsing my light, and I sensed him close to me, ready to grab me, and I thought of those children, like rag dolls in his hands.

  Fitzgerald tried to bob and explode, like Smokin’ Joe Frazier, but when he bobbed, I uppercut him solid enough to bring him on his toes, and I hooked him on the jaw and was driving him back farther into shadow, going with him, deeper into shadow, and he was in trouble, but holding up, and then I felt a vise fasten around my body, trapping my arms to my sides, and I could smell anxiety sweat as T.J. crushed me to him and the gym began to spin. I struggled in his grasp, thought about stomping back and down to break his kneecaps, or driving the back of my head into his face, but this was a friendly situation, nothing serious here—a little out of hand, but friendly. Any second T.J. would let go. He’d realize his brother was in no real trouble here. He’d drop me. Someone would stop him.

  The walls of the gym turned to hot liquid and flowed over me and the ceiling fell down and light and shadow scrambled and there were bongos in my head and I realized I had waited too late, because T.J. wasn’t going to put me down, and I was too weak now to do anything about it.

  Bright and dark, bending in upon themselves, whirling around and around to the tune of blood pounding in my skull, and I had a flash of that dream where I was underwater in the bookmobile with Illium and Chester and the dead boy with the flesh floating away from his bones. . . .

  * * *

  When I awoke, I was on the floor of the gym. First thing I saw was Hiram. He was leaning over me. He looked concerned. He said, “Hap, you OK?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Fitzgerald came into view. “Sorry about T.J. Normally, he stays in check. He got the feeling we were really into it. He squeezed your air out.”

  “I know,” I said. “And we were into it.”
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  I sat up slowly. The gym was only moving a little. My ribs were mildly sore. I figured that would balance out the knot on my head I’d gotten the night before. I’d certainly had an interesting two days, and it wasn’t even lunch yet.

  T.J. was standing against the far wall with his hands by his sides and his head hung. He looked as passive as a puppet. I thought: Klaatu barada nikto.

  “Yeah,” Fitzgerald said, “we were into it. It’s my turn to apologize again. For T.J. And for going so hard, keeping up with the rhetoric. I guess I do bear a little animosity for the other day, and I just can’t help but be a preacher. By the way, you were putting it on me pretty good. But I’d have come back.”

  “Now we’ll never know, will we?”

  “Maybe we’ll do it again sometime.”

  I got up slowly with Hiram’s assistance. “It could happen,” I said.

  * * *

  On the way home, Hiram was quiet until we turned onto Comanche Street. He said, “Man, there’s more than stuff between him and Leonard. What’s the deal with you two, that’s what I want to know?”

  “Bad chemistry,” I said.

  35.

  When we got back and I was out of the van telling Hiram ’bye, apologizing for going in the first place and letting things escalate the way they did, I began to feel a strange sensation.

  It was partially due to the fact that Hanson’s car was parked at the curb along with a pickup I didn’t recognize, and of course, I knew what that meant. But there was something else, and I didn’t understand it until I was on Uncle Chester’s porch about to open the door. Then it hit me.

  The sensation was fear. Because now I knew what I thought I’d known all along. Fitzgerald was a killer.

  I had been with him and his giant brother, and I had been unconscious on the floor of Fitzgerald’s gym. I had pushed certain buttons inside Fitzgerald and inside myself, and it was possible I had fucked things up. I had let the Reverend know I knew something was going on with him and the kids.

  Perhaps all that had saved me and Hiram was the fact that Fitzgerald assumed someone, like MeMaw, knew where we were going. Then again, had he been inclined, he could have taken his chances, put us unconscious in Hiram’s van and taken us for a little drive that ended at the bottom of some pond somewhere—an exit like Illium’s. Maybe kiddie porn would be found in our possession. And when the good Reverend was questioned, all he had to say was we never arrived. Or that we came and went.

  Then again, that might have been too complicated in broad daylight, or Fitzgerald may have figured me for nothing more than a belligerent sinner and not worthy of action.

  I felt like a fool attempting to beard the lion in his own den, but I felt another thing now. An absolute certainty Fitzgerald, with the help of his poor brother, was our killer. It all fit together too damn neat to be otherwise.

  I was trembling by the time I discovered the front door was locked. I realized Leonard and the others had gone on up to the Hampstead place.

  I got a shovel off the back porch and went up there too, along the creek bed and through the woods.

  * * *

  When I arrived at the Hampstead place, Hanson was there, along with his crew. Unexpectedly, the retired coroner from Houston had brought his own crew. They were dressed in white paper suits and gas masks with charcoal filters. The front steps had been removed and a number of boards had been taken off the porch. White suits were crawling under there, busy as grubs in shit.

  Inside the house, down in the open trapdoor, Leonard and Charlie, wearing paper suits and gas masks, were bringing out buckets containing dirt and worms and dirty lard. The worms were long and red and very busy. Leonard put his flashlight on the bucket, and I watched them squirm, like dancers under spotlights. The odor that came from the bucket and from the dank dark below was stronger than sun-hot road-kill.

  “Where you been?” Leonard said through his mask. He sounded like Darth Vader.

  “Visiting a friend.”

  “Good time for it, asshole.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Hi, Hap,” Charlie said.

  “Hi, Charlie. See you’re wearing those Kmart shoes.”

  “Won’t leave home without ’em.”

  “You see Mohawk . . . Melton, tell him Hap says hey, will you?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Hanson introduced me to the retired coroner, Doc Warren, an old wizened white-haired guy who looked as if he might have been dug up himself. He had on a paper suit and gloves. He was sitting on the floor by the trapdoor taking a rest. He was sweaty and tired looking. His filtered mask was in his lap. There were fragments of bone on a plastic drop-cloth beside him. Very small bones. He didn’t bother to get up or shake my hand.

  He said, “You and your friend have found quite a mess.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  Turned out they had located four bodies. One of them, the one that smelled, the one I had first discovered, had been there about a year. As I had suspected, something in the soil down there, the way the water flooded in, had caused it to decay slowly, in spite of the East Texas heat. That lard in the bucket was not lard at all. It had once been flesh. It was now the result of decay and putrefaction. With the lard were bones. A child’s bones.

  The rest of the bodies were not bodies at all, but bones, skeletal remains. Warren estimated the other bones had been there some time. They were all the bones of children. There was enough evidence to suggest the bodies had been cut up and wrapped in cloth and put in cardboard boxes and wrapped in chicken wire, then buried carefully.

  “I believe you’ll find enough bones to make up for the missing kids from the East Side,” I said. “Maybe more.”

  “I believe you’re right,” Doc Warren said.

  Leonard popped out of the hole. He said, “Hey, Hap, you gonna supervise, or what?”

  “Is the job open?”

  “Ha,” Leonard said, and disappeared back into the trapdoor hole.

  “You’ll need to slip on one of these paper suits, get a gas mask,” Hanson said.

  “You got to watch infection,” Warren said, “case there’s any more bodies with meat on them. Streptococci likes to get in your lungs and into cuts. It can fuck you up big time.”

  I put on a paper suit and gas mask and went to work. It’s not a day I’ll forget. Sometimes, even now, I awake from a dream where I’m crawling on my belly beneath that old, rotten house, turning my shovel awkwardly in the dirt, and the smell of that child, the one that was lard and bone, still seems strong in my nostrils.

  By nightfall we’d found the remains of nine children. And one large skeleton—well, what was left of a large skeleton. Warren said it was a woman. He estimated she had been there a long time. Thirty years or longer. Warren concluded her skull had been cracked, and she had most likely been cut up the same way as the kids. There were no immediate signs of cloth, but around her remains was a coil of chicken wire.

  Later, paper suits disposed of, back at Uncle Chester’s, we sat around and drank coffee. The crew that had come along with Doc Warren had parked on the far side of the woods, and when they finished for the day, they left that way. I never saw them again. Hanson’s crew, a black man and woman who worked for the fire department, departed in the pickup in the yard. I never saw them again either. That left me and Leonard, Hanson, Warren, and Charlie.

  We were sitting around the kitchen table drinking coffee, and I was thinking about those big fat red worms, wondering how long it would take them to work their way into my coffin when I was dead, and trying to tell myself it didn’t matter, when Hanson said, “Something licks the bag here. That woman’s body being that old, the killer would have to have started when he was a kid. Unless he’s a geriatric fucker.”

  “Watch your mouth,” Warren said.

  “No offense,” Hanson said.

  “Yeah, well,” Warren said, “I get my feelings hurt easy.”

  “But that’s right, ain’t it?” Hanson said.
“Same M.O.”

  “It’s passed down,” Warren said. “Just a fucking minute.” Warren put his fingers in his mouth and plucked out his false teeth and put them on the table by his coffee cup. “Sonofabitches are a bad fit,” he said, and his lips flapped like flags in the wind.

  “Goddamn,” Leonard said, “put ’em back. I’m trying to drink my coffee here.”

  Warren ignored him. When he talked, he could be understood, but it sounded as if he had a rag in his mouth.

  “You see, I think the original murder, the woman, was done by someone who had a child helping. Took him up there, showed him how to do it. Sanctified it somehow in the child’s mind—”

  “And he’s repeating it,” Hanson said.

  “Yep,” Warren said. “Good ole Freudian stuff. ’Course, nothing says the murderer has to be a man, or that it was a boy that saw him do it, but I’d bet you money. I’d say too, whoever did this is some kind of religious nut, and he’s got that and this ritual, this murder he saw take place as a child, all twisted up in his head. That water stain up there looking like it does, and his first impression of it coming to him as a child, well, it could have had quite an impact.”

  “I think I understood all that,” Hanson said. “But . . . Christ, I’m with Leonard, put your teeth back in.”

  Doc Warren ignored him, sipped his coffee. He sounded like a pig at the trough, way his loose lips flopped.

  “Hap gets an A in Psychology 101,” Charlie said, “but so what?”

  “Yeah, well,” Warren said, “lots of folks think Freud was full of shit. Not everyone who’s seen bad stuff as a child responds by becoming bad. Maybe this psychology stuff is all horseshit, and whoever is doing this just likes doing it. Which brings us to the fearful question that there may in fact be real evil in the world. No one likes that idea. Everything has to have cause and effect, and maybe it does. But why do some people respond to evil with evil, while others do not?”

  “Personally,” Leonard said, “I don’t give a shit. I’ve always believed in evil, and I don’t need religion to believe it. I just want this guy. And I want you to put your fuckin’ teeth in, Doc.”