We rode down the red-clay road with the air-conditioner on and the windows rolled tight, and the lovebugs, dense as back home, swarmed the truck from all sides and splattered against it like kamikazes.
Eventually the little red road played out at a dead end where a clapboard house three shades below gray stood amongst tall grass, a broken tricycle, an ancient Ford truck on blocks, an old wrecker with an oily winch. There were three young kids in the yard, two boys and a girl who looked as if they might bathe if they were pushed into a creek at gunpoint, held under with a foot, and beat with soap.
There was a chinaberry tree off to the right, and we parked under that next to a rusted outboard motor and a very old carcass that may have once been a possum. We got out of the truck and the kids came over. I thought they were going to sniff us like dogs. They looked to be about eight, ten, and twelve under all that dirt, the boys being the oldest.
Leonard said, “Aren’t y’all supposed to be in school?”
The oldest said, “We’re off today.”
The girl said, “We don’t go much. Daddy said we’re gonna start getting home schoolin’.”
In what? I thought. Collecting dirt?
“Haskel around?” Leonard asked.
“He’s out to the barn,” the oldest said.
“Could you go get him?” I asked.
The older boy studied me. “Well, I reckon.”
“I mean, if it wouldn’t hurt you,” I said.
“I don’t reckon it’ll hurt none. Y’all stay right here. Pa don’t cotton to folks wandering around here much.”
“Probably afraid they’ll step on a nail,” I said. “Or trip over a car part. Or maybe step in a possum.”
The kid went away then, but not like he was in a hurry. Way he walked with his head down, you might have thought he was cataloguing worms and insects in his path.
The remaining two kids stared at us. The little boy looked to have caught a good shot in the forehead at one time, maybe with a stick or a rock. He had a crease there, like you might iron into a pair of trousers. The little girl had black greasy hair with lovebugs in it, patches of dirt on her face that gave her a spotted pup appearance, and slimy trails from her nose to her upper lip.
I tried to make small talk with the kids, but they didn’t exactly warm to me. They didn’t seem annoyed either. Sort of ambivalent, as if they had both just gotten over a lobotomy operation and were still weak from it.
Fifteen minutes later the oldest boy came strolling up. He said, “Pa’s comin’. He told me tell y’all you better not be sellin’ nothin’.”
“We’re buyin’,” I said. “’Course, if he wants a good set of encyclopedias, we might can fix him up.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” said the older boy. Then added proudly: “He don’t read much.”
I looked up then. Coming around the far side of the house was a man I assumed was Haskel. Even from a distance, you could see he was about as clean and cuddly as a steaming pile of diseased dog shit. He had on a pair of faded overalls with no shirt, and was spitting a nasty brown stream of what I hoped was tobacco.
He walked briskly, and as he neared I could see he wore a pair of loafers without socks, and the arms that swung by his sides were big and gnarly, as if they had been broken several times and the bones had healed improperly.
When Haskel was still out of earshot, Leonard said, “Let me do the talking.”
Haskel walked up, wiped his hands on his overalls and put them in his pockets. I could see his right hand had hold of something bulky in his overall pocket. I assumed it wasn’t his dick.
Haskel looked at us carefully. He had a bumpy face that made you nervous. He said to Leonard, “I reckon I know you, don’t I?”
“You have a good memory,” Leonard said.
“Double-barrel shotgun, sawed off,” Haskel said. “Some ten year ago.”
“More like fifteen.”
“More like twelve, now that I think about it. I ain’t as good with colored faces.”
“We all look alike, huh?”
“Far as I’m concerned, everybody looks alike, but coloreds look more alike. I hope you ain’t working for the law now.”
“Why would I?”
“Sometimes it happens. It’s not something I like. I tend to become angry something like that goes on.”
“Don’t try and scare us,” Leonard said. “It isn’t necessary.”
“There’s lots of fellas weren’t scared that aren’t scared even now, but they ain’t happy neither. They got dirt in their faces and they lay nearby.”
“The garden?” I said.
“What?” Haskel said.
“You know, the garden,” I said. “For fertilizer.”
“You could talk yourself to death,” Haskel said.
Leonard said, “Listen here, Haskel, that gun in your pocket, it’ll only get one of us. Maybe. Then the other one will clean your clock.”
I jerked a thumb at Leonard and said to Haskel, “Be sure you shoot him so I’m the one does the clock cleaning.”
“You might find my clock hands harder to wind than you think, boys,” Haskel said, then noticed his children standing around. The little girl had her mouth open and was picking her nose. The other two boys were watching Haskel as if waiting for him to offer them their medication.
“You goddamn kids run along to the house now,” Haskel said. “Go squirrel huntin’. Fish. Make yourself useful. Don’t make me tell you twicet. And get your fuckin’ finger out of your nose, Sherilee.”
The goddamn kids evaporated, though Sherilee kept her fuckin’ finger in its probing position. Maybe it was latched there.
Haskel said, “Little shits.”
“You always greet people want to do business with you like this?” Leonard said.
“I’m cautious,” Haskel said. “You can’t be too goddamn cautious these days. Consider what happened to those folks in Waco.”
“You mean the religious nuts who were abusing their children?” I asked. “You know what I think, except for those poor children and the government folks, fuck ’em. Far as I’m concerned the only thing wrong with that operation was the government folks were stupid and the folks inside the compound were even more stupid. I figure you’re that stupid, you ought not be in the gene pool.”
“You’re awful uppity for a man who’s come to see me,” Haskel said.
“How you know I’m not here to give you a Jehovah Witness tract?” I said.
Haskel turned to Leonard: “What can I do you for this time, colored fella?”
“Leonard’s the name.”
“I don’t like to get too personal,” Haskel said. “Fact is, I’ll tell you right now, I don’t shake hands. Now. Later. On the deal. Anything. I don’t like being touched. I ain’t one for having fingers run through my curly hair, you know what I mean.”
“And it’s such lovely hair,” I said. “Very gritty.”
“What?” Haskel said.
“Forget it,” Leonard said. “Don’t pay him any mind.”
“I tell you what,” Haskel said, “you two jerk-offs get back in that there truck and haul on out of here. I don’t like you much.”
“We’re not here to be friends,” Leonard said. “Hap here, he got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. Had to get rolling before he had his coffee and jerked his dick. But you don’t like us, that’s okay. You can like our money.”
“Yeah, well,” Haskel said, giving me a beady eyeball, “now we got that out of the way, you know what I sell, so let’s get on with it.”
“We need some cold pieces,” Leonard said. “And not so old you load them with a ramrod and a powder horn.”
Haskel was all business now. It was like we’d never had a disagreeable moment. “Heavy work?”
“Hard to say. We don’t want machine guns, stuff like that. Simple, effective stuff. Probably close-range. One long-range weapon might be good. Maybe two.”
“Cowboy style?”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“Stuff like that, it doesn’t come cheap.”
“Let’s see what you got, then talk prices.”
“All right,” Haskel said, then nodded toward me and asked Leonard: “This guy, he gonna have anything to say about this?”
“Jes when Massa Leonard say it okay to talk,” I said.
“He jokin’?” Haskel said.
“Yeah,” Leonard said. “He does that all the time. He thinks he’s funny.”
“Well, he ain’t. In fact, I’ve already had about enough of him. Come on.”
As we followed Haskel, Leonard cut his eyes toward me. I gave him a big juicy smile. It was nice to put Leonard on the receiving end of bullshit for a change. Guy like this Haskel, I couldn’t help myself. Then again, it was me and Leonard buying from him, so what did that make us? Thinking about that, some of the humor went out of my spirit and my feet began to drag.
We went around the house, past some leaning sheds and a pen with hogs in it. The hogs came up to the fence and stuck their noses through and sniffed. The wind was picking up their scent, and I’ll tell you, it was healthy.
Down past the pens and the outhouse, which had a unique and memorable aroma all its own, we entered a path in the woods, and after a while we came to a clearing, and in the clearing was a huge well-cared-for barn. Out to the right of the clearing were a number of stinking armadillo carcasses; nothing was left but the decaying shells and the ants and flies they housed.
There was a mound of dirt beyond that, and I could see something on top of the mounds, in a row, about two feet apart, but I couldn’t make out what it was.
Inside, the barn was air-conditioned. Haskel flipped a switch and the lights came on and showed boxes and racks of guns and the smell of gun oil was strong and sweet, and there was the stench of gunpowder too, and it was acrid and biting to the nostrils. In the back you could see a kind of gun range with bags of sand and bales of hay and targets.
“Run everything on a generator,” Haskel said. “Got to keep it a certain temperature for the stuff I carry. Not too cold. Not too hot. There’s shit in here, weather got wrong, it’d go off and blow our asses all the way to Mineola. Maybe out in the goddamned Gulf.”
“I don’t like to travel that far unless I got plane tickets and a steward in my lap,” Leonard said.
Haskel cut an eye toward Leonard. “You mean stewardess, don’t you?”
“I don’t think so,” Leonard said, and let Haskel churn that one over. Haskel didn’t seem to come to any decision. Maybe he’d look up the word “steward” in the dictionary after we left and think about it some and be real upset. I hoped so.
I was amazed at all the guns and ammo and the boxes that surely contained more of the same. On racks were things like rocket launchers and grenades and knives. I personally don’t like the idea of someone as stupid as Haskel with guns. Actually, I didn’t like the idea of anyone with guns. Me especially. It was one thing to own a handgun, a hunting rifle, but to have enough weapons to give the United States Army a fight went beyond desire for liberty and went over into plain ole anarchy. Pretty soon we would decide liberty also included the right to own our own personal backyard nuclear device. That goes with our right to bear arms, doesn’t it? Maybe Haskel could sell us a nuke and we could use it to turn Tillie’s new pimp into a mushroom cloud. That would teach him.
Haskel raised an arm and pointed around the expanse of the barn. “This has got to be the best goddamn store of weapons in East Texas. Maybe Texas. What I’m sayin’ to you is, had I not done business with you before, colored fella—”
“Leonard,” Leonard said.
“—I wouldn’t be doing business with you now. If anything goes wrong, and things come back on me, and I get my dick in the wood chipper over selling you guns, I got connections, and these connections, they wouldn’t like to find out you fucked me. You did that to me, even if I’m in a jail cell, some night you go to bed, you won’t wake up. There’s people I know will see to it.”
“Wow,” Leonard said, “I just had a little tingle all the way to the end of my big black toes. What about you, Hap?”
“My toes aren’t black, but I think I felt a tingle.”
Haskel said, “What I want you to do is go over to that table there, write your name on the pad, and I want you to show me your driver’s license so I know you got the same name you put down. You got other identification, I want to see it. That way, something goes wrong, cops come down on my head, I got your name and identification. We all go down together.”
“Last time I was here you just had guns in the trunk of your car,” Leonard said.
“Business is good,” Haskel said. “That Waco thing, the Oklahoma bombing. That’s good for business.”
We went over to the desk, got out our driver’s licenses and let Haskel look at them. Neither of us had credit cards to show, but we both had ancient Social Security cards and we let him look at those. He carefully wrote down our license and card numbers and we signed the notepad.
I felt creeped by all that. Cops, FBI agents raided this place, there was my name, my address. Not only was I fucked, but so was Leonard. Once again, I had dragged him into the shit.
When we finished, Haskel went away for a moment, came back with an armload of weapons. He put them on a bare table by the door. He picked up one of them, a double-barreled shotgun.
“Apologies to you, colored fella, but they call this a nigger spreader.”
“How nice,” Leonard said.
“Twelve-gauge Remington double-barrel. Short barrels, not sawed but specially altered by yours truly. Short-range, hair triggers. Let this fucker go in a filling station shitter, it’ll kill everyone in there, wipe their asses and flush the commode. Interested?”
“How much?” I asked.
“Eight hundred dollars.”
“Goddamn!” Leonard said. “Sonofabitch better not just wipe asses, it better come on over to my house and suck my dick.”
“It might do it,” Haskel said, “but this baby sucks your dick, you won’t like it. Shit, colored fella—”
“Leonard.”
“—you was expectin’ illegal cold guns to come at Kmart prices?”
“We were hoping,” Leonard said. “I don’t suppose that price includes ammunition?”
“It don’t, but I’ll throw in a box of shells.”
“Two boxes of shells, and shave a hundred dollars off and you got a deal,” Leonard said.
“Sold,” Haskel said, and put the shotgun on the table and picked up a rifle. It was one of two. “My design. You want to cowboy, you get to cowboy.” Haskel tossed the gun to me and I caught it.
It was a Winchester-style rifle, mid-length, with a loop cock and two barrels, over and under. “Unique,” I said.
“Yeah,” Haskel said. “I call it the Haskel ’cause I made the sonofabitch myself. Got a general Winchester design, and I put that loop cock in there ’cause it’s easy and fast to handle. I always liked the old Rifleman show. He had one like that. John Wayne used a loop cock in the movies too. The shotgun idea I got from another show I used to watch. Shotgun Slade.”
I turned the rifle over in my hands. I may not like them, but I know a good one when I see it.
Haskel said, “That baby holds twelve .44 cartridges, and underneath it has a shotgun shell. It’s activated by that second trigger. It clicks back once, then sets, and you click it again. It’s a twenty-gauge. It hasn’t got the room-cleaning power of that Remington, but you get one man in your sight, let loose on him, and he’ll be cool in the summer and cold in the winter.
“The top barrel is accurate, and it’ll shoot a goodly distance. More than that middle-measure barrel will lead you to believe.”
Haskel picked up the other rifle of the same design and tossed it to Leonard. “I’ll even throw in a box of shells per rifle,” Haskel said.
“Yeah,” Leonard said, “but how much are the rifles?”
“A
thousand apiece.”
“Shit,” Leonard said. “Maybe we ought to get a powder horn and a ramrod and a Hawking reproduction.”
“I’ve got ’em,” Haskel said. “Look, you take both, I’ll make ’em eight hundred apiece. I’m actually selling these bastards at discount prices.”
“Seven hundred apiece,” Leonard said.
“Seven-fifty,” Haskel said.
“Oh, all right,” Leonard said, but you got to throw in one of those pistols.”
Haskel looked down at the table. He had brought out three handguns. He picked up one of the snub-nose .38s and weighed it in his hands as if he could tell its worth that way.
“All right,” he said. “But no shells with it.”
“How much are the shells?” Leonard asked.
“Sixty dollars.”
“For a box of .38s?”
“For twenty shells. They’re all dum-dums.”
“No thanks,” Leonard said. “Plain ole .38s will do. We want to be prepared, but we’re not trying to take on the Republican Guard.”
“All right. Anything else?”
“Shit, Leonard,” I said. “We don’t need all this stuff. Lose the shotgun and one of the rifles.”
“You never know,” Leonard said. “Give us three handguns, provided they aren’t a thousand a pop and my balls on a platter.”
“You can keep your balls,” Haskel said, “but the pistols, they’re seven-fifty apiece.”
“Jesus,” Leonard said. “You have these cut out of you, or what? That’s dear.”
“Take ’em all, get a discount.”
“How much?”
“Fifty dollars.”
“Fifty dollars! Jesus Christ, you’re really giving us the Jesse James.”
“These prices are bargain-basement, man.”
“Whose basement?”
“All right, I’ll cut you a hundred on the deal. Throw in a box of shells.”
Leonard sighed. He looked at me. I said, “I tell you, we don’t need all this stuff. I’m a man of peace.”