"Wow!" said Paisley Shirt.
"Wow, indeed," I said.
"But why do you call them Christmas ants?" Bad Mustache asked.
"Again, you got me. I'm no ant expert. Maybe because they were discovered around Christmastime. That's what I figure."
The lady came out with my hamburgers.
"LaBorde," said Paisley Shirt. "That's not that far from here."
"No it isn't," I said. I got up, went over to the register, and called back to them. "I wouldn't alarm myself. I'd just be alert. Watch the ground. Especially at sunset and sunrise. That's when they like to travel."
The lady took my money at the register. She said, "Those boys are so dumb, I sometimes think maybe my kids were switched at birth, and they gave me these two jackasses. All they know is what they see on the TV."
"Maybe they ought to watch the educational channel. Last night they had a great National Geographic special on bears. I tell you, it tantalized me to the point I couldn't sleep afterwards."
"I like a good nature program myself," she said.
I got my change, and started out. Paisley Shirt said, "Hey, you said there were two guys we ought to meet."
"Well," I said, "I meant you would have liked them. They're back in LaBorde. Or were. But, you know . . . the ants."
"You been jacking with us, ain't you?" said Paisley Shirt.
"There's lots of people who've ignored the facts of scientific research," I said. "All of it to their detriment. Believe what you want, it's nothing to me. It's not my job to educate the masses. I work for the Water Department. But I will say this. I'm proud of that. I don't care what anyone else thinks about the Water Department. I'm proud."
I went out to the car and got in. I shook Leonard. He came around slowly and looked at me. "Man, I sort of passed out."
"Let's go."
Leonard started the car as the brothers came out of the cafe, stood on the sidewalk and looked at us. Leonard watched them a moment, backed out and drove off.
"Trouble?" he asked.
"No. But I will say this. It's not every day you can actually step into a science-fiction episode of The Andy Griffith Show by way of Deliverance."
Chapter 7
We drove out the way we'd come, stopped off at a little roadside park we'd passed. We got out under the pearl gray sky and ate our hamburgers and drank our coffee and rested our elbows on the concrete table. It was cold and the air smelled wet. Blue-jays, bold as priests, came out of the woods and hopped around the table looking for crumbs. I don't think we left too many. We were starved.
"I could do that again," Leonard said. "Even if it did taste as if it was rubbed under someone's armpit first."
"Frankly, short of the meat being kneaded between the cheeks of a fat man's ass, I could have eaten it anyway."
"And how old were those peanut patties? Them peanuts were like gravel."
"The peanut patties aren't nearly as big a problem as the fact we still don't know where we're going to stay. Did you have an urge for two of those, by the way? The peanut patties, I mean?"
"What?"
"Nothing. Buddy, I tell you, the vibes from that town, from that cafe, it's like going back to the middle sixties, when I was marching for civil rights and getting my head cracked. Not only because I was for civil rights, but because I was white and marching for civil rights. You know, I don't know I'm brave enough to do what I did then. It was all going on now, I think I'd hide in the house."
"It is going on now, and you're not hiding in the house. You're back in the shit. You weren't special brave then, Hap. You were young and stupid and overly idealistic. You're still the last two, even if the idealistic part is slightly tainted."
"What amazes me, Leonard, is you're more of an optimist than I am. You even thought your time in Vietnam was well spent. If anyone should be bitching, it should be you. A black guy used up and thrown out. You hadn't gone to war, man, no telling what you'd have made of yourself."
"I don't blame anyone or anything for who I am or what I do. I consider myself just fine, Hap. I make my own choices, my own decisions, I sail my own ship till it crashes. Thing with you, is you actually feel guilty you're not on the cover of Time magazine. Deep down, you believe that shit Florida used to tell you about how you weren't ever gonna amount to anything or do anything. You think to be important you got to be some kind of Wall Street stockbroker or Nobel Prize winner. Listen here. You're a good man and my friend, and we're true as we know how to be to what we think is right. I don't know what else there is that matters. All that other shit is just cake decoration."
"Thanks, Leonard."
"That's all right. I didn't mean any of it."
"Now that it's established we're good people and righteous friends, we still don't have a place to stay."
"We might try the black folks. I figure the other side of town is where they hang out. They got to be around, all this field work and lumbering has to be done. They got to be there so
white folks can tell them what to do. And, of course, they need a nigger to hang now and then."
"Good thing you showed up, huh?"
Leonard looked at the sky. "You know, this weather is creepy. Last time I saw a sky like this it turned super-cold and full of ice, and bad things happened. I can still feel the pain in my leg now and then. And it was all your fault too."
"I remember. But the clouds look to me more like they're filled with rain. I think we're in for a hell of a soaking."
"We don't find a place, we could just go on back for tonight. Regroup, start over in the next day or two."
"I want to find Florida. It won't be any easier a day or two from now, even if the weather is better. And it could be worse. Seeing Grovetown, I'm a little nervous for her welfare. Florida has to be staying somewhere."
"It's logical that she'll be in the black section."
"Probably, but for protocol's sake, I think a good place to start is the Chief of Police. If she was doing research on this jail hanging, you know she talked to him. We might get something from the Chief that'll save us some steps."
And now, cruising back to Grovetown, eyes closed, listening to the tires humming, I tried to tell myself I wasn't really worried much. Tried to convince myself I didn't know Leonard so well that I could be certain he was worried too and didn't want to say anything to make me more uptight than I was. And maybe I was sensing nothing of the kind from Leonard. He had his own heartaches. Raul was gone.
But Raul wasn't dead.
Jesus. Don't let Florida be dead, and don't let that kind of bullshit get in your thinking, Hap, you jinx, you. Because if she's dead, that makes two, back to back. Then I was thinking about Florida, about her coffee-colored skin, soft as butter, the way she smiled, the white, near perfect teeth, the long smooth
legs and the way she whispered to me when we made love. And there were the more primitive thoughts as well; the ones that are as real as any other. The way she took me inside her and moved her ass and made me feel strong and masculine, and loved me until the world went away and I was centered. A nirvana where all past and present and future moments were non-existent.
Shit, that was good. I got home, I had to write that down.
That's right, Hap, clown on out. Try not to think about the fact that you thought things between you and Florida were going to be wonderful and forever. And then she was gone.
But she hadn't married Hanson. I liked to think I was part of the reason. That she loved me still.
Yeah. And now and then, I liked to believe I would live forever too, and that I wouldn't age past where I was now and the meaning of life would soon come to me, and would not disappoint me when I knew it.
Sometimes I feared I knew the meaning of life. Simplicity itself. We're born to propagate, then we die. In my case, or so it seemed, I was merely born to die.
Clear the head, Hap, ole buddy, you loser times two. No bad thoughts today. No letting a heavy gray sky hold you hostage. No memories you can't deal with. A step
at a time. Keep an even heartbeat and roll on down the road.
But then I thought of Trudy, my ex-wife, dead now for ... my God, what was it?
Four years.
Jesus.
It seemed like yesterday.
It seemed like a thousand years ago.
Blond, long-legged beauty with a smile like an angel and a misguided heart. And it had been winter then too. I nearly lost Leonard then as well, and that too had been my fault.
Okay, Trudy is dead and gone, Hap, I says to my ownself, but you don't know about Florida. You're overreacting. She's all
right. You'll find her. If not today, tomorrow. Alive. She may not be happy to see you. Might think you're a meddling sonofabitch, and you are, but when you see her, and she's okay, that's all that will matter.
She's all right, Hap, my man.
She's fine.
Fit as a fiddle.
Ripe as a peach.
A roll of thunder. A crack of lightning.
I opened my eyes and turned and looked at Leonard in the cloud-suffocated light. He looked at me briefly with no expression, his fingers flexed on the steering wheel. He turned back to his driving.
The clouds were black now, with a little spoiled milk in them. They rolled down low and came in over the highway like hell's own tumbleweeds. The windshield turned dark as early evening.
Leonard pulled on the headlights and turned on the wipers as it started to rain.
Chapter 8
Back in Grovetown, at the Chief of Police's office, a middle-aged lady with a sprayed, bleached blond hairdo high enough to house a colony of African wasps told us Chief Cantuck had gone out to investigate a fire, and she gave us directions. She eyed Leonard as if he might spring on her and rape her at any moment. She had a little aluminum Christmas tree on one corner of her desk and it was surrounded by a city of Christmas cards from well-wishers; she leaned in that direction, as if she might decide to hide behind them.
Back in the car, I said, "You made that lady nervous, Leonard. She thought you were going to try and take her on her desk."
"Wishful thinking. Actually, I wanted to fuck that hairdo she had, just in case there was something in it needed fucking. That little gap in it, right over her widow's peak, it reminded me of a butthole."
"Knowing you like I do," I said, "I hate it when someone says you aren't romantic."
We followed directions, drove out to where the Chief's car was parked beside the road, along with a rickety fire truck. The rain had temporarily subsided, but the sky was still ripe with it, and it didn't take a weatherman to see it would come again, and maybe harder.
The Chief, a fat man wearing a straw hat and boots with a khaki pants leg inside one and outside the other, watched the house burn, his hands behind his back. The rain hadn't slowed this baby down a bit. The firemen were all volunteers in regular clothing with a couple of fire hats and one Scott Pack between them—not that they needed it. They were on or around the truck and had a weak spew of water sputtering from a thick white hose. One of them got a brainstorm, got off the truck, turned on a leaky garden hose and started spewing that through a window that had been blown out by the hot pressure of the fire. He might as well have been pissing on an oil well blaze. Two other guys were eating Hostess Twinkies, one of them managing to chew with a cigarette in one corner of his mouth.
"We seem to have this thing about fire and the law lately," I said.
"That's the truth," Leonard said.
The house, which from the looks of things had never been any great shakes, was a lost cause. I'd had enough experience from Leonard's fires to know when a house was a goner, and this sonofabitch was a goner.
We got out of the car and walked over to the Chief. He noticed us out of the corner of his left eye. Rain was dripping off the brim of his hat. He had little pop eyes, like a Boston terrier, and his chin went back and low and reminded me of an iguana. He lifted his head slightly as if he was sighting us from a rock. As he did, rain splashed into his left eye and he blinked it out. Black goo, the source being the Red Man package poking out of his shirt pocket, oozed out of the corners of his mouth and slid into wrinkles that served as culverts on either side of his chin.
His belly moved when he moved, and sometimes when he didn't. Like it had a mind of its own and places it wanted to go. Worse though, even if you didn't want to look, you couldn't help but notice the bulge in his pants. He'd obviously been ruptured and was in need of a truss. His right leg looked to be sprouting a grapefruit.
Near the grapefruit, riding in a long black holster, was a .44 Western-style revolver. Chief Cantuck appeared to be in his fifties. Maybe older. A face like that, a belly like that, it was hard to tell.
"Who are you?" he said, turning to give us a full view.
"Hap Collins," I said, and we shook hands.
Leonard stuck out his hand and the Chief hesitated, then took it the way you might take hold of something dead. Leonard grabbed Chief Cantuck's hand hard and shook briskly. "Leonard Pine, Smartest Nigger in the World."
"What?" said the Chief.
"It's just a little joke of his," I said.
"Well, all right. Look here, what do y'all want? This is law and fire department business. You ain't supposed to be hanging around here."
I said, "Lady at your office, with a hair cone on her head, said we'd find you here."
"Yeah, well, say what you want and get it over with," Chief Cantuck said. "And I don't know about you, but I think that cone of hair looks pretty good."
"Appears you've lost this one," Leonard said, nodding at the house.
"Yeah, guess it does," said Cantuck. "No big loss. White trash rental. Bill Spray owns it, rents it to anyone with thirty-five dollars a month or any gal wants to grease his rope. One or both of them things, and the place is yours on a monthly basis, long as he don't have to fix nothing."
"Guess it wasn't the sort of joint attracted the Rockefellers," I said.
"No, it wasn't. But a couple hundred dollars' worth of plywood, a few two-by-fours and some tin and cardboard, Bill can throw this buddy up again and start rentin'. Too bad the renters weren't inside. I'd have liked it all right had they gotten cooked with it. I been called out here half a dozen times by the neighbors. Always fightin'. Big ole fat gal and a couple of men lived here. Those two men fight over that sow like she was goddamn Marilyn Monroe.
"Last time I was in here they had all kinds of pornography strewn about. Them magazines with women with their hands up their holes, or their asses in the air with a carrot jammed in it. Stuff like that. And it wasn't just pussy magazines. They had'm some sex toys. Them little vibrating plastic dicks with knobs on 'era, like old cucumbers. Look here."
He pointed to something in the ashes: two large batteries lying in a flesh-colored puddle the shape of a large banana.
"That's one of them plastic dicks. Just me thinking about that thing being shoved up that old whore's hole makes me kinda woozy. There's some Elvis cards, though. I kicked them aside to let them smoke out."
"Beg pardon?" I said.
"Elvis cards." He walked over a ways and kicked at something. It was a charred deck of playing cards with Elvis's picture on the back.
"The heat gets off of em, I'll probably keep those."
"Why?" Leonard asked.
"Elvis is on them."
"Ah," Leonard said.
"It ain't the kind of music you people listen to," Cantuck told him. "My wife, she thinks Elvis is God. She'll like them cards, burned or not. Now what the fuck you want?"
"We're looking for a friend of ours," I said, "and we thought
you might know something about her. Her name is Florida Grange."
"Colored gal?" Cantuck said.
"Could be her," Leonard said. "Depends on what color she was."
"You tryin' to be funny?" Cantuck said.
"I didn't say I was the Funniest Nigger in the World, I said I was the Smartest Nigger in the World."
"You're about to be t
he Most Ass-Whupped Nigger in the World."
Leonard got that look in his eye. The one he gets when he's burning the house next door or administering a serious head beating to some fool who has pushed too far.
"Come on, Leonard," I said. "Shut up, would you?"
Leonard studied Cantuck for a moment, turned and walked back to his car and got inside.
"He's just worried," I said. "You see, she's his sister."
"Yeah?" Cantuck said. "Well, I'll tell you something. I don't give a flying shit if she's his fucking Siamese twin and she left town with his left nut in her pocket. Ain't no nigger gonna be funny on me. And what the fuck you doin' hangin' around with a coon like that? We don't cotton to that shit here. I got nigger friends, but I don't associate with 'em."
"You certainly sound close, you and your nigger friends. Chief, anyone ever tell you guys you might be a little out of step? Behind the times?"
"Yeah, and we don't give a flying shit."
"You've heard of civil rights, of course?"
"Yeah, and I uphold them, they got to be upheld. That's what that gal was here about, some nigger's civil rights. Ain't my fault the stupid fuck hung himself."
"I don't care about any of that. I just want to know about Florida."
Cantuck paused, gave me a look I couldn't quite decipher. He said, "Comely nigger. I've always said I'd fuck a nigger, but wouldn't tell anybody, but that one I'd fuck and maybe brag on it a time or two. She had an ass on her."
Deep breath, Hap. He's just a stereotypical ignorant redneck. You've known them before. Nothing you say will alter their thinking. Nothing short of death will change them.
"You see," I said, "they work for me. Leonard and Florida. They're good workers, and now and then, well, me and her. Shit, Chief, after what you just said, you know what I mean."
I grinned in what I hoped was a lecherous manner.
Cantuck smiled. "My daddy used to tell me a nigger gal wasn't good for but one thing, and they were damn good at that. He was Chief here way back, and he dealt with a lot of niggers. Niger gals paid him a lot of fines in a special manner. If you know what I mean. I take after my old man in that department. I'll fuck anything that ain't nailed down and has a hole. In fact, when I was a boy, I tore the ass out of a few chickens putting the dick to 'em. Got so every time my mama found a dead chicken she'd take the belt to me, whether I did it or not. Pigs squealed at night, Mom came in my room and beat me."
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