Honky Tonk Samurai (Hap and Leonard)

  Ms. Buckner rambled on. She thought Leonard was good-looking for a colored man. Said she always voted against any politician if he smiled too much. She told us a lot about herself, pretty much everything there was to know except her personal laundry tips.

  “This granddaughter,” I said. “I take it you two had special feelings about one another.”

  That reeled her in a little.

  “I understood her,” she said. “I had been the black sheep of the family years before, and now she was. Modeling and journalism, any plan but marriage and being Suzy Homemaker, wasn’t something my daughter Kate understood. Maybe that was my fault. I didn’t set a good example for her. I had this stupid idea when I was younger that art trumped all things, including family. I thought I had great talent and great pride, but what I had was hubris. I still have a substantial dose of it.”

  “Oh, you don’t say?” Brett said.

  “You are a shit, aren’t you?” Ms. Buckner said.

  “Takes one to know one,” Brett said.

  “I was a bad mother, no doubt. I was always worried more about me than her. My daughter wouldn’t have anything to do with me. She treated me like gas from a calf’s ass after she left home. Not that I blamed her. She wanted things more conventional. Damn if I didn’t outlive her. Cancer got her. Self-righteous and proper and all that, praying all the time, and she ended up wired up like a spaceman and easing away in inches and shitting in a bag. I saw her right near the time she died. I thought we might at least close our ledger. Kate didn’t even know who I was. Poor thing, she looked then like I look now, and she was middle-aged. That cancer sucked the juice right out of her.

  “My granddaughter had done the right things, gone to school, got a degree. Stuff her mother ought to have been proud of. Better than what I’d done by a long shot. But Kate thought Sandy should be going to college not for a BA but instead a MRS. Didn’t matter. The degree didn’t work out, but Sandy took a job. She was like this one.” She nodded at Brett. “A pistol.”

  “How was her eyeliner?” Brett asked.

  “A little heavy, you want to know the truth. I say go big, but don’t go giant. Look like you’d like some action, but not like you’re ready to pull the train on the local football team.”

  “So she was a pistol,” I said. It was an attempt to get things back on track. I knew Brett. Once she decided she didn’t like someone, it was hard to steer her out of a path of hit and run. Or, rather, hit and back over the bleeding corpse.

  “Yep. She was indeed a pistol. Had all the chambers loaded, too, just like this one said. I liked her for that. I tried to help her here and there. I think she appreciated it. It was hard to tell. I think somewhere in there she had her own plans and thoughts, and I think she had a hard time expressing love and appreciation. I’m like that. You start showing me affection, I start waiting for the other shoe to drop, the trap to close. I don’t know how to deal with it. Enough maudlin shit. I’ve told you everything but my shoe size.”

  “Would be about a man’s ten, wouldn’t it?” Brett said.

  “That’s just mean, girl,” Lilly said to Brett. “Weight and shoe size on women is hitting below the belt.”

  “I know,” Brett said. “I thought you had it coming.”

  “I may have. It was something I would have said for sure. Look. Enough shit. I want you to find out what happened to her, and bring either her or her bones back if you can. I need to know.”

  Experience gave me a thought. I said, “Let me ask you something personal. Did you ever loan her any money, give her any money?” I asked.

  “Not exactly,” she said.

  “Let me put it another way. Did she ever take any of your money without asking?”

  “I suppose you could say that. She took some things from my safe. Some of it was money, some of it was securities, things like that.”

  “How much money?”

  “About fifty thousand dollars.”

  “Damn,” Brett said.

  “Yeah,” Ms. Buckner said. “Damn.”

  “And the securities?” I asked. “She cash them in?”

  “Forged my signature, worked her charms, I guess.”

  “You didn’t look at that a little askew?” I asked. “That seems to me to not be doing everything right. A common name for someone like that is goddamn thief.”

  “She needed the money. Like I said, she had pride. She didn’t know how to ask for it, so she took it. I think she would have paid it back. I think she meant to, anyway. Hoped she could. But then something happened. I’m guessing she got in some kind of trouble and had to have it and was afraid if I didn’t give it to her things could be really bad. Whatever those things were, she didn’t want to tell me.”

  “Sounds like to me it’s what Hap was saying,” Brett said. “She’s a thief who stole your money.”

  “Maybe,” Ms. Buckner said. “Maybe she did. I don’t care. I loved her, and I don’t love much, other than animals. I’ve had cats and dogs, and I loved them. Now I don’t have any. Outlived everything I ever loved, it appears, and who the hell wants to get up early to take a dog out to shit? At my age I’m not adding anyone or anything new to the mix. The rest of the world can go to hell. Except for Sandy. Maybe she didn’t always show good sense, even if I think she had it. I still want to find her.”

  Then she gave Brett a financial retainer and went down the stairs, doing that elephant walk with the one-tap-shoe sound. She had to struggle down the stairs in the way she struggled up. I think Brett would like to have helped her down by kicking her in the ass. I sort of wanted to give her a piggyback ride myself.

  She was salty as a bar nut, but I got to tell you, I appreciated that. I like people with a little spice, even if it gives me a bit of heartburn. I looked out the window and saw her work herself into a vanilla Mercedes and glide it out of the lot, not bothering with the exit. She drove right over the curb with a thump, and then she was on the road. The middle of it. She struggled the car along without running over anyone, though she narrowly missed a parked car and a wandering squirrel.

  She got to the end of our street, turned in front of brake-grinding and horn-screeching traffic, and maneuvered away slowly, like a blind turtle, until she was out of sight.

  6

  For someone who talks tough, I think she was all flatulence and no guts,” Brett said. “Letting her granddaughter off the hook like that.”

  “Flatulence?”

  “I was trying to class up our conversations.”

  “All right,” I said. “But you should have said ‘all flatulence and no intestines.’”

  “It’s so rare you’re right,” Brett said. “But when you are, you are.”

  We were lying in bed at home and had just finished what Ms. Buckner had called the dirty dog.

  “I think she’s tough, all right,” I said. “I just think her granddaughter, Sandy, is her soft spot.”

  “Like Leonard is yours?”

  “You and Leonard,” I said. “Though maybe I’m Leonard’s soft spot. If he was any tougher he’d be made out of leather and stuffed with nails. He should have been dead several times over, but he’s too tough to die. He’s waiting to get old so he can whip death’s ass.”

  “You’ve survived your share of bad moments,” Brett said.

  “With Leonard it was toughness, with me it was luck.”

  “He’s not always so tough.”

  “You mean lately?” I said.

  “Yeah, the stuff with John,” Brett said. “How does a gay guy stay a conservative, by the way? John’s brother is a big-ass Republican, and he’s always thumping the Bible and telling John he’s going to go to hell for being gay.”

  “Well, Leonard has been hit in the head a few times,” I said. “That could account for something. Frankly, he’s been changing his political affiliation as of late. Thinks Republicans have become assholes, so he moved to the Log Cabin Republicans.”

  “That the gay Republicans?”

  “Y
ep. But then he thought that was too much of ‘an elite’ club, so he’s become a Libertarian.”

  “Aren’t they just mean-spirited I-got-mine-and-fuck-everyone-else Republicans?”

  “A lot of them are. But they’re more like the old Republicans—least that’s the way Leonard aligns himself. Eisenhower without a heart. He fits there.”

  “Except when he doesn’t,” she said. “He can have a pretty big heart.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “He can. You vote Republican, don’t you?”

  “You’ve never asked before.”

  “No. But I’ve wondered.”

  “I don’t really have a party I like,” she said.

  “Who does?”

  “I vote mostly Democrat, though I voted for Reagan, to my regret.”

  “I don’t fit neatly with either side,” I said. “We’re all like goats if we’re honest. We find our pastures but we love to put our heads through the fence and nibble a bit of the grass on the other side. No one fits anywhere perfectly.”

  “I don’t know,” Brett said. “I can think of one place you always fit perfectly.”

  “Oh, you flatterer,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, I figured I needed to throw in a compliment so you wouldn’t worry too much about me faking an orgasm now and again.”

  “Nice,” I said. “The old lady got that on your mind?”

  “I guess. Talk about soft spots: now you have a new one. Buffy.”

  I turned my head, looked at Buffy resting on one of the doggie beds we had bought her. We had one downstairs, one at the office, and one here, upstairs in our bedroom. She had to be coaxed to come upstairs, and then when she did she stayed there until we invited her outside to go to the bathroom. She seemed frightened to ask for the outdoors, the way a dog will do, poking you with its nose, wagging its tail, and barking. We had to take her out at regular planned intervals so she wouldn’t hold it in. I felt like she’d do that until she burst.

  “Stop overfeeding her,” Brett said. “You’re acting like a southern mother.”

  “She seemed a little skinny to me,” I said.

  “Well, you got her back on track now,” Brett said.

  I pulled Brett close to me. “Off topic, but have you been wishing you hadn’t bought Marvin’s business? Nursing was at least regular.”

  “I did wake up this morning wishing I could pour shit out of a bedpan, but other than that, and the long hours and the yelling doctors and men trying to put their hands on my ass and up my skirt, I’m not missing it as much as you might think. Besides, I got a nest egg for us. I can afford time off.”

  “I don’t want your nest egg,” I said.

  “I know that. But it’s there anyway. It’s our nest egg. What’s mine is yours.”

  “I found that out just a short while ago.”

  “You did, didn’t you?”

  “You know what I miss?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Leonard, damn it.”

  “Yeah. Me, too. He’s so cute when he wants his cookies.”

  “Family couldn’t afford a lot of extras. He’d go to his uncle’s house, and Uncle Chester always had vanilla cookies and Dr Pepper on hand. I think it’s a comfort food.”

  “That explains things.”

  “Yeah. You know the hats he likes to wear?”

  “Childhood something or other?” she asked.

  “No. He’s just an asshole. I thought I should remind you of that before we became too nostalgic for him not being here.”

  “He is at that, but you can sure see the kid in him when he wants those cookies.”

  “He has eyes like Buffy’s,” I said.

  “You’re right. He really does. He was messy, ate all the cookies, drank up all the Dr Peppers, interrupted us during sex by knocking on the door, knowing full well what we were doing in here, and he stayed up and played the TV loud downstairs, left his dirty drawers on the floor between his room and the living room. Left them so I could get them washed.”

  “You made me do the wash,” I said.

  “I know, but I had to point the drawers out to you,” she said. “Shit, aren’t gays supposed to be neat and listen to show tunes?”

  “Just the ones who do,” I said.

  “Still, I miss him.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “Should I see if he wants to come back?”

  “Not on your life,” she said.

  7

  The car lot was called Frank’s Unique Used Cars. It was off the major highway that ran through the center of town, Highway 59. In the town itself the highway had a street name until it came out on the far side in a wide band of concrete heading north. The car lot was tucked in near a bank and a money-managing firm, a stone’s throw from a Burger King. It was a big lot, and the cars were in fact unique.

  I had driven by there many times and seen those fine old cars, but it just then registered with me how rare and fine they actually were and how often I had looked at them. It seemed odd for our town to have that kind of business. Most guys I knew drove pickup trucks with dogs riding in the back, tobacco spit sprayed along the side of the truck, splattered like some kind of poorly executed racing stripe. Those trucks were frequently festooned with stickers about how proud the owners were to be rednecks and how they were going to cling to their guns until they were pried from their cold dead fingers. They often had stickers with beer and whiskey labels on the trucks as well. I guess they kept a dog in back in case they needed a designated driver.

  The fancy cars were all parked out front on the lot, but you could bet they went into the huge building behind the office at night. It was a three-story building, and it looked like anything but a car lot. It had once been a fancy hotel. The bottom-floor wall had been knocked out and fixed with big aluminum doors, but the top floors were still the same, with broad windows and white shades over them. Not enough people came, so it closed down. Few years back it got a sweep-out and paint job, and its parking space became the car lot. A modern single-story office building had been built out front of the hotel, behind the display of cars, the glass reflecting the lot and anyone on it.

  Leonard and I cruised by a couple times in a beige BMW we had rented from a place in Tyler so as to look prosperous. We were checking things out. Finally Leonard pulled us into the lot. Before we went inside, Leonard said, “I’ve driven by this place often in the last few years. The cars are still the same cars.”

  “Guess it’s possible they are different cars that look like the same old cars,” I said, “but I was thinking exactly the same thing.”

  We went inside, out of the intense summer heat. The office was large, a kind of showroom, mostly glass, but with no cars on display inside. It had the kind of glass that was hard to see through from the outside, appeared dark, but inside the glass had a different effect—you could see the outside clearly. A large part of the ceiling was made of glass. You could see clouds rolling by. It was bright inside and very air-conditioned, cool as a penguin’s ass on an ice block. The sweat began to cool-dry against my skin.

  “You’d think they were selling igloos instead of cars,” Leonard said.

  In the center of the room was a big clear plastic desk. At the desk sat a golden-haired beauty of a woman with two large, round tits from the tit store, firm as rocks. She had a nose by someone other than genetics and a lot of experience looking at her own reflection in the mirror, knew how to tilt her head just right, when to let go of her smile, like she was holding back a bomb until it was right on target. She let that bomb drop when she saw me looking at her. She was a lady who knew her chickens. Leonard, of course, was not going to be impressed. He was already scouting his eyes around for a male salesman that would be the lovely lady’s equivalent, but none was visible. In fact, no one else was around but us and the blonde.

  Just for the record, when it comes to tits and noses, I’m not one of those who worry about if they’re real or not. If it doesn’t appear to have been glued on, nothing falls off during sudde
n moves, and the smile doesn’t look like a Great White gliding down on a tuna, it’s okay by me. I’m true to my baby, Brett, but I have never lied about the fact that I got this whole biology thing going on, and I like to look, and this lady was well worth looking at. I imagined Brett looked at men, too. She could appreciate a nice shape, which is what makes me wonder why she stays with me. I like to think it’s my massive pecker.

  When the blonde stood up she looked even better. The surgery work had been mostly subtle. She wore a blue western-style shirt and a dark brown cowgirl skirt that was cut short, a little longer in back than in the front. I couldn’t see her rear, but I had a feeling that dress was pressed against a butt firm as a fresh-picked apple. She had long, spray-tan legs that were lightly oiled and inviting. She wore red-and-blue cowboy boots with shiny white moons on the toes. The heels were high, even for boots, and when she walked, she knew how to do it. Had that runway-model approach. As she got closer I saw she was older than she looked from a distance. Not all her face had been sculpted. She had some corner-of-the-mouth creases, a few lines around her eyes, and a crimp on her forehead like she was about to make a decision. The lips were nice, and the cheekbones were high. I like to believe those were natural.

  Me and Leonard were dressed in our most expensive casual duds, which were so seldom worn both of us had to send a posse into our closets to find them. Our outfits smelled a little dry, like old wallpaper in a damp room. The boots she was wearing were worth more than what both of us had on, right down to socks and shoes and all that was in our wallets, including the change in my piggy bank back home. I actually have one. A pink pig. I think it’s precious.

  It was a goodly walk to where we were. As she strolled, Leonard said, “She looks like your type, and I’m going to tell Brett if you smile too much.”

  Within a few seconds she was in front of us, standing in a way she knew was killer, one leg slightly in front of the other to accentuate her legs and hips. Of course, why anyone would stand like that normally is impossible to figure, but like I said, it had the desired effect.