“We been down the road a piece,” I said, “and we don’t know what we’re looking for.”
“He has that van, one with the books, parked out ’side the house,” the man said. “It’s white. And there’s piles of that old sorry-ass lumber and things under tarps there. You didn’t see that, you just didn’t go down a good enough piece.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Good luck with Community Action, and I hope you find your teeth.”
“You do,” Leonard said, “what you gonna do with them?”
“Rench ’em off and use ’em,” the man said.
“That’s what I figured,” Leonard said.
“I’d do more than rinse them,” I said. “You ought to use a little Clorox to kill germs, then rinse ’em in alcohol and then water.”
“I don’t go in for that nonsense,” the man said. “I ain’t never seen a germ, and I ain’t never been sick a day in my life.”
“Okeydoke,” I said.
We left him there, poking his shovel around in the sewage. In the car, Leonard said, “I know it’s an ugly thing to say, him being ignorant as a post and all, but maybe, luck’s with the world, that shiftless sonofabitch will die in his sleep tonight. He ain’t doing nothing but makin’ turds.”
“Yeah,” I said, “and his teeth are in them.”
20.
Red fingers of sunlight were all that remained of the day, and they clawed at the trees on the horizon. By the time we found the place described to us by the man with no front teeth, the sunset was still bleeding, but in the east the full moon was out and clearly visible and the color of fresh coconut.
The man with no front teeth was right. We had not gone far enough. Illium Moon’s place was a small cottage-style house set off the road. We recognized it by the tarp-covered stacks we presumed to be lumber and by a mailbox across from it with MOON painted on it in black letters.
To get to the house you had to go through an open gap in a barbed-wire fence and over a cattle guard and down a muddy-white sand drive. The house was white with a blue roof and shutters, and beside it was a little open carport that sheltered a very clean-looking ’65 white Ford. The yard was impeccable. Out to the far side of the house were several neat stacks of something with huge gray-green tarps pulled over them. No bookmobile was visible.
We parked by one of the stacks and got out. I took hold of the edge of the tarp closest to me and pulled it back. Underneath was lumber on treated pine pallets. The lumber on the pallets was used lumber, as the man with no teeth had said, but it was good lumber and free of nails.
We knocked on the front door and waited, and no one answered. We walked around the house and didn’t see anyone. Out back we walked a ways into a large, recently mowed pasture. The pasture smelled sweet, like a fruit drink. Off to the far left was a small, weathered-gray barn. From where we stood we could see a little brown-water pond with a big oak growing by it, and behind it, a long dark line of pine trees. The leaking sunlight visible above the trees was like a fading flare.
As we walked out to the barn, grasshoppers leaped ahead of us. The barn door was partially open and we went inside and called Illium’s name, but no one answered. Inside it was stuffy hot, and there was a tractor and some equipment and a few bales of low-quality hay. I was uncertain how much land Illium Moon owned, but I didn’t get the impression he ran livestock. Most likely he had a little cash crop of hay, and that was it.
Behind the tractor were two small piles under tarps. I looked under one. Stacks of newspapers on pallets. Under the others were neatly stacked cardboard boxes, and in the boxes were aluminum cans and plastic bottles. A few things clicked around inside my head like Morse code, but they didn’t click long, and I couldn’t decipher it.
We walked back to the house and stood on the front porch.
“No bookmobile,” I said, “and no Illium.”
“Let’s leave a note,” Leonard said. “Tell him I’m Chester’s nephew, see if he’ll get in touch.”
Leonard went out to his car and got a pad and a pencil. He came back and leaned the pad against the front door and started to write. The front door swung open under the pressure.
“Open sesame,” Leonard said.
I peeked inside. It was a very neat house. The living room furniture wasn’t new, but it was well cared for. The white walls looked to have been painted a short time ago. There was no carpet, but there were some colorful throw rugs. The blue-and-brown couch had plastic protection sleeves over the arms. There was a cardboard box on the couch.
I called out, “Illium.”
No answer.
“He ought to lock up,” I said.
“Maybe he couldn’t lock up,” Leonard said.
I let that lay, and Leonard went in the house, and I went with him.
“We could get our ass in a crack for this,” I said, but we kept right on looking.
We went through the house. Illium’s kitchen was even neater than MeMaw’s place and smelled of some sort of minty disinfectant. The bedroom was very tidy and the bed was made. The bathroom was neat except for the tub. It had a sandy ring around it and there were little hunks of damp hay. We went back to the living room.
I looked in the box on the couch. There were magazines in the box. I saw immediately by the cover of the magazine on top that it was the same sort of magazine we had found in Uncle Chester’s trunk. I picked it up. There were more magazines of the same ilk underneath. Unlike the magazines in Uncle Chester’s trunk, these magazines weren’t as aged. They looked as if they might have been damp once, but they were in pretty good condition. I said, “Uh-oh.”
Leonard was looking at them too. He said, “Yeah, uh-oh.”
Under the magazines was a pile of clothes. Pants. Shirts. Underwear. All little boys’ clothes.
“A bigger uh-oh,” I said.
“I don’t know,” Leonard said. “We come by and Illium ain’t here and he’s left the door unlocked and he’s got him a box of kiddie porn sitting right here on the couch with kids’ clothes. Seems awful damn convenient.”
“Nothing says he couldn’t be stupid.”
We put the stuff back like it was and went out and closed the door. I used my shirttail to wipe the door knob and wondered what all I’d touched in the house besides the magazines.
“Let’s look in the carport,” Leonard said.
We looked in the old Ford first. Nothing there.
“Must be doing the bookmobile route,” I said. I turned then, and in the corner of the carport, on shelves, were a number of large jars, and in the jars there were little cuts of paper, and even though I wasn’t close to them, I guessed what they were right away.
Leonard saw what I saw. He went over and got one of the jars and twisted the lid off and pulled some of the pieces from the jar and held a handful out for me to look at.
I’d guessed right. Coupons.
Leonard replaced the coupons and screwed the lid on the jar. “While we’re snooping,” he said, “why don’t we look under those tarps?”
We checked under all the tarps. Under some was lumber, and under others were mechanical parts of all kinds, everything from plumbing to automotive. Illium seemed to be a neat pack rat. Maybe he used the stuff to fix up his house and car, tried to be neighborly to folks like No Front Teeth down the road by sharing his goods.
And in his spare time he cut hay and sold it and worked at the church and free-lance drove the bookmobile, and in the evenings, after a hard day of public service, he read child pornography with a young boy’s underwear stretched over his head. It could happen.
We walked back to Leonard’s car and leaned on the front of it and we crossed our arms and watched the sky grow darker and the moon grow brighter. Stars were popping out. In the distance, the pond sucked up the moonlight and turned the water the color of creamed coffee.
“What the hell is it with the coupons?” Leonard said. “First, I thought Uncle Chester had gotten to be a nut shy a pecan pie, but now I’m wondering. This guy’s got the same
thing going.”
“Hate to bring it up,” I said, “but another stretch of coincidence is kiddie porn showing up here as well as your uncle’s. And there’s the fact they knew each other, and were good friends. Lots of circumstantial evidence. It’s beginning to look bad for a certain good friend’s relative, and I say that with all due respect.”
Leonard was quiet for a time. He said, “Doesn’t matter. I believe in Uncle Chester. He didn’t kill anyone, not a kid anyway. Someone fucked with him, he might have killed them, but a kid, no way. And he wasn’t reading kiddie fuck lit. There’s an answer to all this, I don’t care how it looks.”
I hoped so, for Leonard’s sake. I glanced down at the ground and watched the moonlight silver the rainwater collected in a set of deep tire ruts in front of us, ruts from the bookmobile, I figured.
Where was the bookmobile? Where was Illium? Did moss really only grow on the north side of trees, and why did the Houston Oilers keep losing football games?
I took a careful look at the ruts. They ran on out across the grass and hay field. The grass and hay was pushed down, but starting to straighten slowly. That meant the grass had not been pushed down too long ago, but with the rain beating for a couple of days, it probably hadn’t had the chance to pop back up. It would have taken this warm day and this much time for it to come back to its former position. Those tracks had been made three days, four days before.
I said, “Look here.”
Leonard and I squatted down and looked more closely. The night was bright and we could see well. We also knew what we were seeing. Put us in a city and we couldn’t hail a taxi, but we’d both grown up in the woods and had learned to hunt and track when we were head high to a squirrel dog’s balls, so we could read sign. Animal sign, or human sign. A paw print or a tire track, it was all the same to us.
We got up and went across the grass and the mowed hay field. Another couple days and the hay stubs and the grass would spring back up completely, and there wouldn’t be any trail to see. Not unless you knew to look for it.
It didn’t take an expert in nanotechnology to figure where the ruts were leading. They played out at the lip of the pond, and there were deeper tracks in the bank where the vehicle had gone over. There were a couple of hardback books in the mud by the water, and the moon rode on the pond’s brown surface like a bright saucer. I could smell the pond, and it smelled of mud and fish and recent rain. A night bird called from a tree in the distance and something splashed in the water and rippled it, turned the floating moon wavy.
Leonard eased down the bank and got hold of one of the books and came back up with it.
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “ The Old Man and the Sea.”
“No. How to Repair Your Fireplace.”
“Bound to have been a big run on that one,” I said.
I looked at the pond, then looked at Leonard. He said, “I’d go in, but I got a problem with my leg.”
“I thought it was well.”
“Sometimes it gives me trouble.”
“Like now?”
“Right.”
“That figures. Look, we know it’s there.”
“For all we know, he run an old tractor off in there, or some drunk came through the cattle guard and run out here in the pond thinking it was a parking lot.”
“Sure,” I said.
I unbuttoned my shirt and tossed it to Leonard, stood on one foot and took off a shoe and sock, switched feet, and repeated the process. I pulled off my pants and underwear. I folded the underwear and pants together and tossed them to Leonard and put the socks in the shoes.
“Aren’t you embarrassed undressing in front of a queer?” Leonard said. “All you know, I might be sizing up your butthole.”
“Just call me a tease.”
I slipped down the bank and started to go in the water.
Leonard said: “Hap, be careful, man. We haven’t finished that flooring yet.”
The water was warm on top, but three feet below it was cold. The bank sloped out and was slick. I went in feet first and slid down and under. The water flowed over me, and I looked up and could see the moonlight shining through the murk.
Going down the bank like that I had stupidly stirred up the mud, and a cloud of it, like ink from a squid, caught up with me, surged over me and frightened me. For a moment I was in complete darkness, then the mud thinned and I went down deeper, feeling for the van I knew was there.
The water, though less muddy down deep, was darker. I wondered what ever had possessed me to do this. We should have called the cops, let them look. I should never have promised Leonard I’d help him out in this matter. I should have finished college and gotten a real job. I wondered how long Florida would remember me if I drowned.
The pond was not deep, and soon I could reach down and touch bottom with my hands and feet. I crawled along like that a little ways, stirring mud, raised up and swam forward, felt myself starting to need air.
I rose up swiftly in the blackness and hit my head sharply on something solid and nearly let go of what breath I still had; it was as if the water above me had turned to stone. I swam left and hit a wall and something from the wall leapt out and touched me and I kicked out with my feet and pushed backward into another wall, and things jumped off it and touched me too. I clutched at them and they came apart in my hands.
My lungs were starting to burn, and I couldn’t go up, and I couldn’t go left or right. I pivoted and swam forward and hit a low barrier and reached above it and touched something soft. I grabbed at it, held with one hand, and my other hand touched something else.
Suddenly I realized where I was and what I was touching.
The back doors of the bookmobile must have been loose and popped open when the van went over. That would explain the books on the bank; they had bounced out when the vehicle went into the water, and due to the way the bank was sloped, the van had landed at a slant with its rear end up, and I had accidentally swum inside. The walls I had hit were the sides of the bookmobile, and the things that had jumped off the walls were books.
What my right hand was touching now was a steering wheel. That’s what had cued me. Tactile memory reaction. Common sense, something I seemed short on these days, told me what my left hand was most likely touching. A water-ballooned corpse. I made myself reach around and feel along what I thought to be the face. I couldn’t tell much about features, nose, jawbone, the like. The flesh was too swollen. After a few seconds, I’d had enough. I jerked my hand away from the corpse but held to the steering wheel with the other.
I was beginning to pass out from need of air. Black spots swirled inside my head. It was hard to remember not to try and breathe.
I pulled myself over the seat and reached between the corpse and the steering wheel to where the driver’s window ought to be. It was open. I yanked myself through and shot up, surfacing like a dolphin at a marine show. The moonlight jumped on me. The air was sharp, and I took in deep breaths that seared my lungs.
I swam to the bank where Leonard stood watching. He leaned out and gave me a hand and pulled me up. I coughed and shivered, said, “Next time, you go in.”
“The van down there?”
“Yeah,” I said. “And I believe Illium Moon is too.”
21.
“I think we should go to the police,” I said. “Talk to Hanson.”
“Not yet,” Leonard said. “Let me think on it.”
My shirt was still damp from dressing while wet, but it felt comfortable in the close heat. I smelled faintly of pond water. We were back over on the East Side, at a little, smoky black juke joint called the Congo Bongo Club, having a beer. Well, Leonard was having a beer. I was having a nonalcoholic beer. The place served them, but they seemed embarrassed about it. The bartender, who was also the waiter, kinda slunk over and put it on the table like a patient giving a pretty nurse a urine specimen.
The lights in the joint were not too good. Most of what light there was came from red-and-blue neon beer
signs at the bar and the blue-white glow from the jukebox. In fact, it was so dark in the back of the place you could have pulled your dick out and put on a rubber and no one would have known it. It wasn’t the kind of place had a no-smoking section either. The cigarette and cigar smoke was thick enough to set a beer glass on.
The joint smacked of fire hazard. If there was a rear exit, you probably had to go through a back office to get to it. A fire started here, the office was locked, and the front door got blocked, you could kiss your charred ass good-bye. The music on the juke was great, however. John Lee Hooker.
We were trying to figure our next move. Or Leonard was figuring our next move. I was wondering what the cops did to you if they found out you had discovered a body in a pond and went away and didn’t tell them. I was certain dire consequences hovered above the question. I had already spent some time in prison, and I didn’t want another stretch. I wasn’t even crazy about a small fine.
“There’s things here don’t jive right,” Leonard said, “but I can’t put my finger on the problem.”
In the glow of the jukebox, I saw a big black man eye-balling us from a table across the way, throwing back beer like water. Actually, he was eyeballing me, as carefully as a birdwatcher might a rare yellow-throated two-peckered brush warbler. I suddenly realized just how white my skin was. Maybe we’d have done better to have picked up a six-pack at a convenience store.
I didn’t say anything to Leonard, as the faintest hint of intimidation made his dick hard, but I kept my eye on the guy.
We shouldn’t have gone in the Congo Bongo anyway. In my old age it seemed I was becoming less wise and cautious. It was supposed to be the other way around. Maybe, after forty, a kind of self-destruct button kicks in.
“I don’t know for a fact there was a body in the van,” I said, blinking away tobacco smoke. “It just seems likely, because it damn sure didn’t feel like a bundle of books I was touching. Question is, if it is a body, and it is Illium, why is he in the pond?”
“Bad driving?”
Mucho Mojo cap-2 Page 11