“I know what you mean,” Leonard said.
“Fuck you,” Jim Bob said. “You love this and you know it. Well, now, this knife-fight idea was far less appealing to me. A knife fight, even one you win, usually ends up with you cut, and maybe you only win because the other guy dies first. I don’t like knives. But that’s not to say I don’t know a thing or two about them. I been in a knife ruckus or two, but not like they were suggesting. You see, turns out these guys are fans of Jim Bowie, and not just the knife. There’s this old story that back in his time Bowie fought a knife duel in a dark room. Story being Jim had a bowie and the other guy had a common butcher knife. Bowie won, though a lot of people don’t know the part about how he was laid up with knife wounds and such for a long while. Add to this, Samson and Moses aren’t little folk, and it seems when they aren’t killing people, doing meth, they’re lifting weights. They got so many muscles, they move and it looks like gophers running under their skin.
“Still, it was a chance to walk out with my head on or go down fighting. So I’m watching Moses, looking confident and just a little bit contemptuous, using my Elvis smile on them. I have practiced that motherfucker a thousand times in front of a mirror. I know how powerful it is.
“Thing is, this hat I’m wearing, with its high crown, same kind I had then. I got a little automatic pistol clipped in there, then and now. It’s just a little homemade thing with a little silencer on it and it shoots two twenty-two rounds, and for it to do any good you got to be close and accurate. It’s what we used to call a Saturday Night Special. So this crack team of bikers that searched me and took my larger artillery didn’t no more see the gun in my hat than they noticed I got a couple of dark spots on my nuts. I mean, they searched me and left my hat on. Their stupidity that day worked in my favor. And before you worry about those dots on my nuts, it’s not cancer, just some natural markings, like a spotted pup.”
“Now we can sleep with comfort,” I said.
“So the brother, Moses, agrees, and they give us both big ole bowie knives. These were like swords, man. I think they was over twenty inches and wide as my hand, sharp enough to shave with. And into this shed we go. It was about twenty by thirty, which is small to begin with, but when you get in there and the other guy has a knife, it’s smaller yet. He got one corner, and I got the other, and as soon as they turned out the light from outside and locked the door, I took off my hat and got the gun out of the little holster in the crown, tossed the hat in his direction. I hear him yell, thinking I touched him, and I could hear him grunting and the knife slashing the air. I got down on my hands and knees, stayed against the wall, and started crawling. His grunting and such had pinpointed him for me. I was close. I tried to see if my eyes would adjust, but it was so dark in there you couldn’t find your ass with both hands.
“I bided my time, worried he’d walk up on me, bump into me, and stick that big knife in me. I had my bowie, of course, but I had stuck it in my belt at the back. What I had that gave me the edge was that tiny silenced pistol.”
“Didn’t know they could put silencers on little guns like that,” Leonard said.
“Silencer is built in,” Jim Bob said. “It don’t come off, and it doesn’t really work that well, but then again, it’s not a gun makes a lot of noise to begin with. Anyway, I’m creeping around on the floor like a cockroach with a little pistol that feels small in my hand, something I hadn’t never used on a human being and feared might not stop a mouse that had had a good breakfast. This guy is going nuts. Screaming at me, saying, ‘Say something, cocksucker. Show me how tough you are.’
“I crawled along, and damn if I didn’t run up against his legs. I might near blew a turd that was such a surprise. I had figured on where he was, but of course by the time I got that figured he had moved. I grabbed his legs, still clinging to my pistol, pushed my head forward into his knee, and took him down. He sat up, and that knife come around and I heard it whistle just over my head.
“I ran my gun up along his chest so I could put it right up close to his head, cause that little gun has to be right on you to do much good. When I had it under what I figured was his chin, I pulled the trigger. The gun coughed, and it was louder than I counted on, but it didn’t sound like gunfire. It sounded like someone letting out his breath real hard. I felt Moses stiffen and fall backwards from where he was sitting, and his head cracked on the concrete floor. I dropped the pistol and got on him and pulled the bowie and went to work. I got hold of his head, pushed it back, and cut his throat, then stabbed the living dog shit out of him. When he was still and not breathing and I was wet with his blood, I felt around till I found where that twenty-two shot went in under his chin, up and into his brain, which I figure was a lucky shot there, that dude’s brain having to be about pea size. I felt and cut around his chin with that bowie, so there wasn’t no bullet hole visible. I wiped my hands on him, felt around until I found my gun, put it back in my hat, which I also had to hunt around for.
“It was then I realized I had been cut. I don’t know how I got cut. I guess Moses still had some juice in him when I took him down and was trying to work that pistol under his chin. Anyway, I was cut in a few places, all of it superficial stuff, my manly beauty not being seriously marred. I figure the scars I got, they just give me a kind of rugged charm.”
“You are one of the most delusional fuckers I’ve ever known,” Leonard said.
Jim Bob laughed. “But there I was. Bloody and cut, and Moses lying there leaking in the dark, and I’m thinking, okay, I won.”
“You cheated,” I said.
“Wouldn’t you have?”
“Yep,” I said.
“Oh, yeah,” Leonard said. “Big-time.”
“Thing was, I had won, and they didn’t know how I won. I’m thinking, all right, when I open that door they’re going to be on me like bears on honey, and it won’t matter I won. But there was one door in that shed, and one way out, so I didn’t have no choice but to go out of it. I decide, all right, if I’m going to go out that door, I’m going to go out of it with the knife in one hand and have that dead fucking Moses by the collar with the other. And that’s what I done. I knocked on the door with the butt of the bowie. They opened it, and I come out with the knife in one hand, dragging Moses with the other. There were a few steps leading up and into that shed, and I bumped Moses’s big dead ass on every one of them, dropped him on the ground.
“I said, ‘Next.’”
“Always a step too far,” I said.
“Can’t help myself. But you know what? They let me go. Samson insisted.”
“Honor among thieves and murderers,” I said. “How refreshing.”
“Uh-huh,” Jim Bob said. “But he regretted it. One of his boys took a run at me not so long ago, and, well, as you can note by my presence, standing here upright before you, I came out all right. Since then, no trouble. But I don’t like him, and like I said, they got long memories, and that honor-among-thieves shit is only if they’re in the mood to be honorable or feel they have to appear that way at the moment. But in the middle of the night, when they’re considering on things, they frequently have a change of heart.”
“What I figure,” I said, “by the time we quit listening to you and get around to doing something, it’ll be full morning.”
“Believe me,” Jim Bob said. “There will come a time, if we don’t get killed, when you will in memory cherish moments with me like this.”
26
We came out of the trees and started down the road then, being watchful, and finally we could hear noise. Men and women laughing and cutting up. We had been using a little penlight Jim Bob was carrying to make our way, but now he shut that off. We stopped and stood in the black night awhile, not talking. We were letting our eyes adjust to the dark as much as possible.
After a few minutes we started traveling again, but it was so dark we had to stay on the road and not go back into the trees. You could hardly see a thing down there in the woods, and the
road was only slightly better. The air was full of the stench of something that had died and was decaying, and it was intense. The sound of voices swelled.
In short time we put most of the stink behind us, kept on keeping on. Then we began to hear music, faint at first, but growing louder as we moved forward, loud enough to damn near make your ears bleed. Acid rock from ages gone.
Finally the road emptied itself into a field, and in the field we could see a huge bonfire. It was so large and so bright it was as if the shadows were on fire.
There were about twelve men and twice that number of women around the fire, which appeared to be fed by railroad ties, dead wood, old car and truck tires. The group was all white. Not exactly folks known for diversity was my guess. The music was coming from some device with real power inside a mobile home near the fire, and not far off were three other mobile homes. There was plywood over spots where windows had once been.
There was a horde of bikes parked out front of the mobile home where the music was coming from, and the door to the home was open. Now and again men and women staggered out or staggered in. As I said, I had counted twelve men in the yard, and twice that many women, but with people going in and out of the home, it was hard to say how many were actually there and how many, if any, were in the other homes. Out to the left was a long row of doghouses inside metal pens. There were ten pens. I didn’t see any dogs.
Bright as it was, we decided we could enter back into the tree line that connected with the field and see quite well because of the bonfire. We slipped in among the trees—oaks, pines, and sweet gums. The air was rich with the stink of that fire, the mix of creosote and burning rubber, as well as the sweet smell of the gums and the turpentine-like bite of the pines swaying in the wind.
There was great light from the fire, but as the wind whipped it, it grew greater and flicked and flowed like levitating lava, rose up high against the sky. There were shadows and shapes of people dancing around the fire. I was reminded of the old Tarzan books—where they had dum-dums, which was a kind of wild party of apes with Tarzan himself, dancing and whirling, working themselves into a frenzy.
“Jim Bob,” I said, “I don’t know if you have enough fingers and toes to keep up with the number of folks out there, but you have enough to know there are only three of us.”
“Yeah, that puts them at a disadvantage,” Jim Bob said.
Leonard sighed. “Got to agree with Hap, Jim Bob. Those numbers bite the moose.”
“Boys, I never had in mind we were going to ride in there with guns blazing. I thought we might catch them at low tide, so to speak. Maybe only a few around, and we could sneak in there like bandits and nab Samson, get his firsthand take on the dealership, folks he’s working for. The Big Dog. That don’t look like such a good plan now, way things are set up. We can go back, get Marvin in on this, have the three back at the car tell him what they told us, and he can send some cops out here to break this shit up. I bet they find drugs and all manner of illegal stuff. I think these are the kind of boys would steal, don’t you?”
“Oh, no, I can’t imagine a nice, clean-cut group of folks like that stealing,” Leonard said.
Jim Bob said, “Yeah. You’re right. Hard to imagine.”
“We go to the law, how’s it going to go down with us riding around with our friends in the trunk and floorboard?” I asked.
“We made a citizen’s arrest. We get all these other biker turds arrested, we can get them off your backs, maybe permanently. If not, we may have to find a way to mess their shit up big-time.”
“Weren’t you the one that said we couldn’t get them all and that we had to worry about them showing up later?” I said.
“I did say that,” Jim Bob said. “But I’m feeling more optimistic now, and besides, I don’t know what else to do. There’s just no easy way to slide in there like I hoped.”
About then we heard motorcycles humming, saw headlights from them. We got down low and stayed behind the trees, saw three bikes pass on the road. They were heading toward the compound; I guess you could call it that.
Guy on the lead bike was so big he looked like a bear riding a motorized tricycle with the seat stuffed up his ass. Bearded, broad-shouldered, hulking, knees bunched up high because of his size, wearing what looked to be a leather cap. Under the cap his long, dark hair snapped in the wind. He probably weighed three hundred pounds and was at least six feet seven without the cap. I noted he had a very large scabbard on his hip in which was placed a very large knife—a bowie, most likely. Behind the bikes came an El Camino, one of those car-truck combinations, this one being one of the last in the model run, made in the eighties. A man was driving. A woman sat in the middle. Another man was on the passenger side. I was already feeling nervous, but now I felt really uncomfortable, like something with a beak and tentacles had parked itself inside my head.
When the truck passed, a couple other bikes behind that, Jim Bob said what I expected: “Big dude on the lead bike, that’s Samson.”
“You say his brother was the same size?” Leonard said.
“Moses was the baby brother. Not quite as big as Samson. But it would have been a difference mostly of who had the most change in his pocket.”
“Good thing you had that pistol,” Leonard said.
“Why I always carry it now. Experience. But a guy size of Samson and Moses, you got to place the shot just right, otherwise the bullet might bounce off.”
27
Having found out where the base camp was, all we had to do was go back to the car, take the boys in the car back to Marvin, and have the law descend on the place. That was the plan. But, as is the usual situation with anything that has to do with me and Leonard, things went wrong.
Creeping back on the road, staying close to the trees, ears cocked for bikes or cars, we were hustling along pretty good, and then those cocked ears of ours got filled with sounds.
More bikes.
We edged off the road again and hunkered down behind some trees. That dead smell was strong now, strong enough to gag a vulture. The bikes, two this time, went by on the road. When they were past, Jim Bob said, “I think we can use the penlight if we flash close to the ground. Think the Red Bitch is over there.”
Jim Bob pointed.
That was about where I thought it was, too. Me and Leonard were both pretty damn good in the woods. We had grown up living in the country and knew our way among the trees and bees, as they used to say. It was towns and cities I had the most trouble navigating.
Going along, the stench growing stronger and stronger, my gag reflex causing me to heave a little, we came to a large ditch, cut there naturally by time and runoff water. There was a little scummy water in the ditch. We could see that when Jim Bob flashed his light down there. But there was plenty of something else.
The decaying bodies of dogs. Dozens of them. Flies, startled by the light, rose up in a nauseating buzz, and the dim moonlight between the trees filled with their collected darkness, and then the flies split and the dull light came through again.
Most of the dogs were of the pit bull persuasion, full-blood or mixed. Some of the bodies were fresh, but most were not. The less fresh ones were terribly ripe, bony, and decayed.
“The motherfuckers,” Leonard said. “They fight them, then toss the dead ones in this ditch.”
“They don’t always die from the fight,” Jim Bob said. “A dog loses, they figure it’ll never be good in a fight again, so they shoot it in the head to get rid of it or just to show it who’s boss.”
“I’d like to show them who’s boss,” Leonard said. “Jesus. How can those pieces of shit think of themselves as human?”
“A monkey thinks more profoundly than those hunks of crap do,” Jim Bob said.
While we stood there, looking down on that sorry sight, our noses plugged with that dead smell, I felt the uncomfortable thought I had felt earlier when I saw the El Camino go by with its passengers. The thought started to float to the surface like a corpse
floating up from the depths of the sea. I thought again about the woman I had seen in the pickup. I had a sudden flash. At first it was just a passing flash, and then it came back and swelled into a thought that was more substantial. I said, “Goddamn it. Woman in the El Camino. It was Frank.”
“You sure?” Leonard said.
“I think so. I mean, now that I think about it, it looked like her. I saw her right off, but it didn’t register. She shouldn’t have been in the truck. She should be tucked tight at our office.”
“They found her somehow,” Jim Bob said.
“I can’t be sure,” I said.
Leonard said, “I say we get in the Bitch, roll down the windows, and drive that motherfucker right into the midst of them, shooting the shit out of the place and packing Frank up and taking her out of there.”
“Need I add it would turn out bad and not in our favor, and we might end up shooting her,” Jim Bob said. “Remember it was you guys telling me about the finger count. They are many. We are three.”
“Here’s a little something I just thought of,” I said. “What if she called them? What if she’s in cahoots? What if she’s the Big Dog?”
“There’s a thought,” Jim Bob said. “I don’t like that thought, but it’s something. She got on my side of the game pretty quick. I’ll tell you about that later.”
That’s when a roar went up from back at the camp. We were a goodly distance away, but the sound of that roar was heard clearly.
None of us said a word, didn’t discuss it, but we automatically started easing back toward the sound, which had been replaced by hooting and yelling and laughing.
When we got back where we were before, the trees near the clearing, the fire was blazing higher and it lit the place up almost as bright as day.