I said, “You know this isn’t going to be a walk in the park?”
“Yes. I know.”
“We’re not going to drive up there and say ‘We’ve come to get Tillie. Sleepover is finished.’ It’s not that easy.”
“I know.”
“It could turn ugly.”
“I understand that. I’m not askin’ you …”
“You are and you aren’t,” I said. “We’ve been over that. I’m not saying I won’t go. I’ve already said I would. All I’m doing is warning you. We go up there, it could still turn out bad for Tillie.”
“You think, as is, it’s going to get better?”
“No, I don’t. I guess I’m actually telling you what you can expect for yourself. It might be best you stay here, let me go.”
“I wouldn’t let you go by yourself.”
“Leonard and I would go.”
“You don’t know he’ll go.”
“Yes, I do. But if he didn’t, couldn’t, I’d still go. And this is more something me and him can handle.”
“You’re sure?”
“No. But it sounds good.”
Brett turned her glass of ice tea around and around in her hand, said, “I can’t let you go by yourself. You go, with or without Leonard, I go too.”
“What about your job?” I asked.
“What about yours?”
“I can leave it. It’s not like I wasn’t looking for a job when I found that one.”
“I can get off too.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. It might make my supervisor’s butt hole suck wind, but I’ve got some more vacation time coming. I need to get off, I can.”
“All right,” I said. “But you got to consider some things. These guys, they probably knew Tillie, all right. They may have worked for this Big Jim, but we don’t know they’re telling the exact truth.”
“I guess I have some doubts, them driving all the way down here for five hundred dollars.”
“Actually, I buy that,” I said. “Scum like that, they’ll do anything for a buck. They’ve probably robbed and looted every damn thing they could on their way down here. They figured since they were en route to Mexico, they might as well stop by and pick up five hundred bucks from you. We don’t even know for sure Tillie wants you to come get her, or that she told them to ask for five hundred dollars. They may just know you’re her mother, and nothing else. This could all be some story they made up. A grain of truth here and there, like a couple of whole corn kernels that have passed through the bowels on their way to becoming shit.”
“That’s metaphorical talk for you think they could be lying a lot. Right?”
“Right.”
Somehow we drifted toward the bedroom, and it was very cool in there, and the sheets were soft and sweet-smelling and Brett was warm and even sweeter, and I kissed her lips, then her breasts, pausing to roll my tongue around and over her hard nipples. I ran my tongue down the length of her long legs, and kissed where she had shaved herself, then I kissed everything else there was to kiss, rolled her on her stomach, moved her legs apart, and entered her.
Brett had the CD going, playing The Best of Percy Sledge—which means anything he ever sang. The song was “When a Man Loves a Woman,” and the way he sang made time stop. We made love for a long time, and eventually I had no idea which song was playing, and finally, when we finished, both of us satiated, I was somehow startled to realize we lay hugging each other in silence.
After a while, Brett said, “Now, that was some fuck.”
“Yeah,” I said, “and next time, I’m going to put my whole thing in.”
“Yeah, right,” Brett said. “What I meant to say, was that was some fuck, considering what you have to work with, and I don’t mean me, pardner.”
“Oh ho.”
“Ho ho.”
“Ho, ho, ho.”
“Oh, ho, ho, ho.”
We lay there for a while, kissing. Brett said, “You know, what we been talking about. About you and me.”
“Me moving in?”
“Yeah. I still want that. But right now, I don’t know we should. I don’t know how things are—”
“I understand.”
“—and Tillie, we go get her, well, I may need to keep her here, and with you and me trying to work things out together right now, I don’t know.”
“I understand.”
“Well, don’t understand too goddamn quick, mister. I want to do it, but maybe right now isn’t good. It could put a strain on all of us that we don’t need at the moment.”
“It’ll be all right.”
“I love you, Hap.”
“And I love you.”
“It’s okay we wait?”
“Sure.”
“Want to stroke the bald beaver again?”
“Will it bite?”
“Absolutely.”
We made love again. Less passionate this time, but satisfying nonetheless, then we lay with pillows propped behind our heads and Brett got the remote off the nightstand and turned the television on.
We lay there and watched some stupid talk show with a pig that was supposed to play a harmonica. The pig seemed bored. His owner held the harmonica, and the pig, a red neckerchief tied around its throat, tried to be cooperative and made a halfhearted attempt to blow into it. He could make a noise, but I wouldn’t call it music. The pig’s owner claimed it was taps.
Frankly, unless the sonofabitch can hit more than one note, I’m not that impressed with harmonica-playing pigs. In fact, way I feel these days, I don’t know one could actually play taps, or even “The Star Spangled Banner,” would excite me much.
We lay there holding each other, watching this pig, and finally some other program even more bland, then nothing. We fell asleep in each other’s arms, the TV going, and when we awoke in the late afternoon a famous talk show host was trying to help some whitebread woman in a five-hundred-dollar dress sell a book she’d written on the power of love; about how all we had to do to make things right was just believe in love and it would fill the air.
Pollution fills the air, honey, you believe in it or not. Love takes more work than that. And unlike pollution, sometimes love goes away.
6
When I got back to Leonard’s place my car windshield was caked with bugs. I used the hose and an old rag to clean it, but it wasn’t a much better job than I had done on Brett’s car at the filling station. Just call me Greasy Bill.
After I had been struggling for a while, Leonard came out of the house with a squeegee and gave it to me. I assumed he had been watching me through the window and had become frustrated. I used the squeegee and the hose and finally got the windshield clean. All the while I was doing this, I was glancing at Leonard out of the corner of my eye. I could see he was in a foul mood. He had that pouty mouth with the wrinkled forehead he gets when he’s ready to jump your ass. Not the look where his eyes are on fire and you know someone is going to get mauled or maybe die, but the one tells you he’s pissed and ready to let you know.
I tried some polite conversation about the bugs and the weather. Pointed at a couple of interesting birds I saw on fence posts, but Leonard wasn’t having any of that. I tried a clever slide into talking about Brett and her daughter, but he wasn’t having any of that either.
He said, “Before we talk any outside shit, we’re gonna talk some inside shit. I mean mine and your shit. Come on.”
I followed him into the house. He said, “Sit down right there and wait a minute.”
I sat on the couch. He left the room. A moment later he returned. He was carrying a roll of toilet paper and a toilet paper roller. “I’m gonna show you a little trick, here, Hap. You see, when you use the last piece of shit paper on your nasty ass, you take the roller post, that’s this thing here, long and hard, unlike your dick, I’m sure. And you take this long and hard thing, the dick we’ll call it, so it’ll be something you can understand, and we take this dick, and we put it in
the hole in the toilet paper tube.
“And in keeping with your mental faculties, we will call this hole in the toilet paper tube the pussy. So you take the dick, put it in the pussy, then, finished, you realize that the dick is sticking in the pussy and out the asshole, which is what we’ll call the other side of the tube. You take each end of the dick, ’cause somehow it got broken off, okay, and you take each end of the dick and slip it into the little notches that hold it on to the wall in the bathroom. This way, you got a new roll of crap paper on a stick. That simple enough for you, Hap?”
“Good grief, Leonard. Don’t have a cow.”
“Yeah. Well there ain’t nothing like taking a big ole greasy crap and having to duck-walk over to the cabinet to get another roll while you got a goddamn hunk of turd hanging out of your ass. You ought to try it some time.”
“Not my sport.”
“Let me ask you something, Hap. Who you think’s been puttin’ the paper on the goddamn roller?”
“Elves?”
“No. Let me ask you something else, Hap. Can you now, after instruction, put the dick in the pussy?”
“What if the paper tube has a headache?”
“Don’t push me, Hap. I’m not finished here. Pay attention.”
Leonard put the roller and paper on his easy chair. He opened the closet door and pulled out a broom. He got down on his knees by the couch, said, “Lift your feet.”
I did. He swiped the broom under there and came out with a pair of formerly white, now gray, jockey shorts, festooned in cobwebs, bearing a couple of dead roaches like stickpins.
“These ain’t mine,” Leonard said. “These here are your ole nasty drawers. You’ve had them under there since you first moved in here. I go to clean today, and what do I see?”
“The toilet paper elves?”
“Your shitty drawers.”
“My guess is, same elves been putting that paper on the roller have been fucking around with my underwear.”
He stuck the broom and underwear in my face. “Got a shit stain in the seat. Your trademark.”
“Careful, you could put an eye out with them drawers.”
“These are yours, Hap.”
“How the hell would you know? You check out my shorts every night? Could be one of your old boyfriend’s.”
“They ain’t no old boyfriend’s, ’cause I don’t mess with men don’t wipe their ass good, and they ain’t mine, ’cause I don’t take off my drawers in the living room and kick’m under the couch. That’s a Hap Collins trademark. That and pissin’ around the toilet, not just in it. You go in that bathroom, stand by the crapper, that goddamn rotten-ass piss on the floor will suck your shoes off and dissolve them.”
“Well, you ought to clean more often, that way there wouldn’t be underwear under the couch, or pee-pee on the bathroom floor.”
“Hap, you’re askin’ for it, man.”
“Way I see it, those elves can put a roll of paper on a stick, they ought to be able to get underwear out from under couches and wipe around the base of the commode, and you and I could just hang easy.”
“You are asking for it, man. Let me question you some-thin’ else: when’s the last time you cleaned anything in this house? We’re gonna have to have a come-to-Jesus meetin’ on that, my friend. And you ate the last vanilla cookie. Those are mine, Hap. Mine.”
“I apologize. We were all out of steak. And if you think you’re blue now, I’m going to throw more color on you. Me and Brett, we’re not moving in together.”
Leonard lowered the underwear onto the floor and tossed the broom down. “Ah, hell. Y’all have a fight?”
“No.”
Leonard picked up the roller and paper and sat down in the chair and held them in his lap while I explained.
When I was finished, he put the roller and paper on the floor and walked over to the shabby fireplace and plucked one of his pipes from the pipe rack on the mantel, grabbed his bag of tobacco, unrolled it, and filled his pipe. He picked up a box of matches, returned to his chair, and studied me a moment.
“What you’re sayin’,” he said, kicking back in his easy chair and sticking the pipe into the corner of his mouth, “is, in a nutshell, this gal, this Tillie, decides to be a whore, then times get hard and she’s ready to quit and they won’t let her quit?”
“That’s it.”
“She think whoring had a retirement plan?”
“I don’t think she thought at all.”
“I don’t even know this girl, Hap. There’s lots of whores out there. Why, if I decided to save one, would I pick this one?”
“Because she’s Brett’s daughter.”
“I don’t know Brett that well. I mean, I like her, but I don’t know her that well. You know this isn’t going to be an easy thing. Just drive up there and knock on the door and help this whore carry her suitcase out to the car.”
“Exactly what I told Brett.”
“You’re going, I go or not, aren’t you?”
“You bet. So’s Brett. She insisted.”
“This Brett, she’s got you by the ying-yang.”
“The ying-yang. The balls. The heart. She’s got me, man. And she’s not asking me to do this. I’m volunteering.”
“Oh, she’s asking all right. I know you, a good-lookin’ woman comes along and plays the right tune, you dance.”
“All right, let’s say she’s asking. I love her. Why shouldn’t she ask? Who else is she going to ask? I’ve done more for people I didn’t care about as much, so why shouldn’t I do it?”
“Because you might get your ass shot off. And considering you got one of them little narrow white asses, you can’t spare much.”
“You got enough for both of us.”
Leonard let that one go by. He pulled a match, lit his pipe and puffed. “I reckon we get this over with, and Brett has time to settle stuff with her daughter, then maybe she’ll take you in.”
“That’s the plan.”
“We get this done, then maybe a short time after, I can get rid of you.”
“That’s possible.”
Leonard nodded. “What we’re going to need first is a few guns. I think for something like this, we’re gonna need a few unmarked guns. I got a shotgun fills that bill, but we could use some other stuff.”
“You’re always with the guns.”
“What do they shoot at us with when we do stuff like this, straws full of spit wads?”
“No.”
“What then?”
“All right, I’ll say it. Guns. Happy?”
“Yep. Now, we’re gonna need guns. Correctomondo?”
“I suppose.”
“I know you don’t like the gun talk, Hap, but you know well as I do, at some point those people up there, they’re who I think they are, they’re gonna point guns at us. And the guns are gonna be loaded, and when they pull the trigger our heads are gonna go away. Unless we shoot first or intimidate their asses into not shooting at all. Maybe that way, we don’t have to shoot. We throw the whore in the car, then drive like bastards.”
“It’s not my plan to go up there with guns blazing. I don’t work like that.”
“I know. I just said as much. We take it easy if the easy way is there. But it isn’t, we got to go the hard way, then we got to be prepared. There’s this guy I know, he can help us.”
I thought awhile. Anytime talk of guns comes up, I get nervous. I don’t like them. I was about the best goddamn shot with a rifle or handgun you ever saw, but I still didn’t like them. I own one, and I still don’t like them. I knew there were times when they were necessary, and it was better to have one and not need it than to not have one and need it, but goddammit, I still don’t like them.
I sighed. “This guy you know. When can we see him?”
“I’ve mentioned him before. Haskel. You don’t call him. You don’t plan. You just go over to his place and be real careful.”
7
This guy Leonard knew sold cold guns w
as named Haskel Ward. He lived down in the river bottoms about fifty miles from where we lived, not far from the Louisiana border. I had never been to Haskel’s, but I knew where he lived and a little about him from hearing Leonard talk. Not that he had a lot to say about Haskel, but the name had come up, and what little he did say about him was not endearing.
Next morning, on our way to Haskel’s, we drove through town in Leonard’s new Dodge Ram, which was a treat he had given himself when he sold his house. We stopped at a fast-food place and had one of those breakfasts that has so much cholesterol in it the damn thing comes with a vein pump. After breakfast, I found a pay phone and called Brett.
“I’m off work for a couple of weeks, Hap,” she said. “That way, we go get Till, I can have some time with her before I go back to work.”
“That’s good.”
“I’m packing a few things now.”
“That’s good too. Keep it light. But we’re not going today.”
“We’re not?”
“Leonard and I have to pick up a few things.”
“What kind of things?”
“Just be patient. I know you want to go right away, but we go, we got to be prepared.”
“In what way? Packing a lunch?”
“Guns. Cold guns.”
“Cold?”
“They aren’t registered. They can’t be easily traced.”
“Oh. When are we going then?”
“My guess is we get the guns today, take care of some last-minute business the next day, then we go.”
“Then maybe I should work tomorrow.”
“If you can, you should. Don’t plan on leaving until day after tomorrow. It’s best when you do something like this you don’t run off with your fly down and your dick hanging out. Or in your case, a tit.”
“Not out of my fly though. I’m not that droopy yet.”
“Darling, you aren’t droopy at all.”
“And most of the time you aren’t either.”
“I’ll call you tonight.”
By midday it was humid as a monkey’s armpit down in the bottoms where the trees grew close together and right up next to the road. The moss and vines hung from the trees like alien spiderwebs and the birds were thick and colorful and loud and fluttered about like living Christmas ornaments.