Out in Leonard’s truck, Leonard said, “Now I know why you take a long hot shower every mornin’ you come home from work.”
Back at Leonard’s I packed a suitcase, went into town to see Brett. I took her out to dinner on some of my money, told her our plans, then we went back to her place, sat on the couch and shared a nonalcoholic beer.
I told her about Haskel and the guns, about Leonard and the armadillo. I showed her the notepad with Leonard’s and my names on it I had taken from Haskel.
I took the pad over to her sink and set fire to it. We talked while it burned on the porcelain. When it was finally all gone, I flushed the ashes down the drain and turned on the garbage disposal. Brett got us another beer, and we sat on the couch and passed it back and forth.
“What time tomorrow?” Brett asked.
“Leonard will be by about nine. We’ll leave his truck here, load our guns and suitcases into your car, and start out.”
“I’m a little scared,” Brett said.
“I can understand that, but there’s no need for melodrama. What we’ll do is follow the address the midget gave us, see we can find Tillie, and if we can, we’ll take her home. I don’t think there’ll be any real trouble.”
“You’re saying that to make me feel good.”
“I really don’t think there will be any real trouble, but like I said before, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. But, it’ll be okay. We might have to pop somebody’s nose, but that’ll be the extent of it.”
“Promise?”
“No. I’m not that stupid.”
Brett packed her suitcase, then we got naked and went to bed. The hair on Brett’s mound, as we who read erotica like to call it, had begun to grow back. Mounting her was kind of scratchy, but being incredibly tough, I went ahead with the screwing anyway. Real men don’t whine over scratchy female pubic hair. We just get on with it.
Fact is, I was so tough, I made love to her three or four times.
Consequently, when the alarm went off at eight the next morning, I felt like six pounds of runny shit that had passed through a goose and been washed down-country by a flash flood. Brett opened one eye, looked grim, said, “Oh, dick.”
“Not right this moment,” I said. “He’s tired.”
Brett whacked me. “That doesn’t even interest me. I love you, but right now I could maybe marry anyone got me a cup of coffee.”
I didn’t get her a cup of coffee.
She didn’t get me one.
We lay there for another ten minutes. “All right,” I said. “On the double, we get up.”
We got up, but not quite on the double. We showered together, made love in the stall, then showered again. By the time we’d dried off, brushed our teeth, and dressed, Leonard had arrived.
We gathered our suitcases, locked the place, and met him outside. We loaded the guns, which Leonard had wrapped in blankets, into Brett’s trunk, tossed the suitcases on the back seat. Brett let Leonard drive. She sat between us on the front seat and we started out.
“See your son anymore?” I asked Leonard.
“He rooted up the place last night. He was sleeping peacefully under the porch this morning. I’ve decided to name him Bob.”
“That certainly took some strain,” Brett said.
“I get enough strain without trying to cleverly name an armadillo,” Leonard said.
We stopped at Burger King, bought some breakfast and lots of coffee, then headed for Oklahoma, minding the speed limit, minding our manners, minding our business, praying for hope, expecting rain.
10
We got on 59, headed north to 259, caught I-20 at Kilgore and went west toward Dallas. We skirted the roof of Dallas, hit 35, and except for a couple of pee breaks, we rode it all the way into Oklahoma.
We stopped at Ardmore about eight that evening and had dinner in a steak house. When we finished, we decided to find a place for the night and smoke on into Hootie Hoot early in the morning.
We got rooms at a cheap motel and toted the blanket-wrapped guns into the rooms with us, just in case someone decided to steal a spare out of our trunk and ended up with a bargain.
Brett and I had a small room that smelled strongly of detergent or disinfectant, but after brushing our teeth and washing our faces, we found the bed inviting and the smell less annoying. We didn’t feel like making love, which meant we were probably on our way to a solid relationship. We just slept together, cuddled up spoon style.
When we awoke the next morning it was raining lightly. We collected Leonard, had breakfast at the same cafe where we had eaten our steaks, and set out again. The rain began to fall harder, and the storm followed us all the way into Hootie Hoot, which lay about twenty-five miles outside of Oklahoma City.
When we got there, it was early afternoon and the rain had not stopped. Hootie Hoot was, as Red had said, a burg. There was a long street with old brick buildings. A theater, a cafe, a filling station, and, strangely enough, a taxi stand, with one old battered blue cab out front. I wondered where it took people. Up one side of the street and down the other?
We didn’t see any neon signs that blinked BIG JIM’S HOOTIE HOOT WHOREHOUSE, so we left town and found another cheap motel five miles out, not far from I-35. Leonard got a room next to ours. We bought some groceries at a little store across the highway, sat in Brett’s and my room laying out plans and eating store-bought ham and cheese sandwiches and Cheez Doodles.
Leonard finished his lunch, sat by the window. He held a can of Coke in one hand, held the curtain back with the other and watched the rain snap down on the parking lot. He said, “Thing is, whatever we do, we got to do it and be done with it.”
“My suggestion is we find the whorehouse and start from there,” I said.
“Now that’s a good idea,” Leonard said. “I’m glad you’re along, Hap. Me and Brett might not have thought of that.”
“Do we just go in and get her?” Brett asked.
“I don’t think that’d work so good,” I said. “Posing as a customer is probably the best way to go.”
“And you’ll have to be the customer,” Leonard said.
“You think they’ll know you’re gay?” Brett asked.
Leonard laughed. “No, but they’ll know I’m black.”
“Oh,” Brett said.
“Black or white may not matter,” Leonard said, “but this is a little burg in Oklahoma. I was in Maine, I’d be thinking the same thing. It might not matter, but on the other hand it might. My guess is this is a redneck operation.”
“Remember what Wilber said about Big Jim being nice to niggers,” I said. “That doesn’t bode well for Brother Leonard here.”
“No use getting the rednecks stirred we don’t have to,” Leonard said.
“That doesn’t sound like you,” I said.
“Older and wiser,” Leonard said.
“So you’ll go in?” Brett asked me.
“Yeah,” I said. “Thing we got to do next is find the whorehouse, and, as Leonard pointed out, maybe I ought to do the investigation work on that instead of him. They might not take kindly to a brother askin’ where the white women are.”
“Couldn’t some of the women be black?” Brett asked.
“They could,” I said, “but in redneck mentality it’s okay to screw a black woman, but it isn’t okay to have a relationship with her.”
“And it isn’t okay at all a black man screws a white woman,” Leonard said. “Weird territorial stuff.”
“And there’s another thing,” I said. “We don’t even know there’s a house of ill repute here.”
“Ill repute?” Leonard said. “Man, you been reading those Victorian novels again?”
“Red could have lied,” I said. “In fact, this is all starting to look like a big joke on us. He might not even have worked for any Big Jim. There might only be one grain of truth to the story. He knows your daughter works as a prostitute, and maybe he knows that because he was a customer.”
“Th
e old postmarks on Till’s letters were out of Oklahoma City,” Brett said.
“Yeah,” I said, “a card mailed from here, most likely that’s where it would get stamped. But it’s all iffy.”
“I’m prepared for it not to work out,” Brett said. “But I’m more prepared to do something. It makes me feel like I’m trying.”
“I’ll start now,” I said.
11
By the time I drove Brett’s car back to Hootie Hoot, the rain had slacked and the little town looked better than before. It hadn’t suddenly grown in size and had a Wal-Mart SuperCenter built out to the side, but it was shiny and nostalgic-looking.
It made me think of one of the cozy little towns my mom and dad had lived in briefly while my father worked as a mechanic for an oil and gas company. It was very Andy of Mayberry. Clean and simple, where everyone knew one another, and maybe minded each other’s business too much, but where most of that business would be about little more than a secret apple pie recipe. And, of course, the location of the local whorehouse.
I pulled in at the taxi stand and got out. The stand wasn’t much of a place. A little building made of brick that might at one time have been some sort of store, or maybe even an old jail.
Inside, slouched down in a plastic chair next to a card table, was an older man with a three-day growth of tobacco-specked gray beard. His feet were stretched out, resting in another chair. A TV, festooned with rabbit ears wearing aluminum foil accessories, was perched on a little stand next to the wall. The TV was playing only static. But that was all right, the man in the chair was asleep.
There was a dusty calendar on the wall above the TV. It bore a winter scene with snow-covered trees and a sled and two kids in coats, wool hats, and fat mittens. The calendar read December 1988.
There was a small refrigerator in one corner of the room, and I could hear it humming, as if to entertain itself. It was a sound that made you sleepy.
There was a stack of worn paperback Westerns on one corner of the card table. One of them was open and turned facedown.
Next to the book was a cold-drink bottle full of tobacco spit with a fly on the bottle lip and one inside too stupid to find its way out. It kept buzzing around, hitting the glass, but it never went up to the opening. The sky was the limit, but it was too dumb to know.
Finally the fly, pissed off, flew down and sat on a tobacco chunk in the bottom of the bottle, floated there on its nasty little island amidst an ocean of brown spit. It beat its wings a moment, as if to pass the time. Eventually, it stopped doing even that. Just sat there, confused, surprised, a real loser.
I sympathized.
The fly on the bottle lip, fed up with the ignorance of its comrade, flew off.
I stood watching the man for a while, trying to stare in such a way that his primitive brain would pick up my signals. I was attempting to activate that supposedly dormant sixth sense we all possess but so seldom use.
Either he didn’t have a sixth sense or I was missing mine. He didn’t move.
I knocked on the table.
The man opened his eyes and looked at me. “What do you want?”
“Well, I’m at a taxi stand. Say I wanted a taxi?”
“What for?”
“To go someplace.”
“What I mean,” said the old man, dropping his feet from the chair and sliding them under the table, “where would you be going?”
“That’s a good question. And I have an answer.”
“Yeah, well, good. Take this chair and sit in it while you tell me.”
I pulled the chair around in front of the table and looked at the fella. He appeared to be very tired, and maybe not as old as I had first thought, but certainly no spring chicken.
“Let me tell you something,” he said, “this here is a taxi stand, but I don’t really do much taxiing. I take Old Lady McCullers into Oklahoma City twicet a week and do some shoppin’ for her. I got a few more customers I do similar things for, though they ain’t as excitin’ as she is. She has a gas problem. I have to drive with the windows down all the way there. She don’t even say excuse me or nothing. I look back at her in the rearview, she’s lookin’ at me like I cut ’em.”
“So what you’re saying is you drive gaseous old ladies around, but you won’t drive me?”
He leaned and looked past me, through the glass, at Brett’s car. “We gonna hook up your car and pull it?”
“Yeah, well, that would be a problem, wouldn’t it?”
“What you really want?”
“Oh, just curious about a little taxi stand like this. In a town like this.”
“Nothing else to do on a rainy day, so you just drive off I-35, come in here to talk to some local color?”
“Something like that.”
“I think you’re full of shit, mister.”
“Well, I could use your rest room, you got one.”
“Right back there, and don’t make a mess of it. I don’t normally allow customers back there.”
“Maybe you ought to,” I said. “That way they won’t fart in your taxi all the way to Oklahoma City.”
He laughed a little. “You might have a case there,” he said.
I went to the rest room, took a leak, washed my face, studied it in the mirror. It looked as tired as Mr. Taxi Stand’s. I went back and took my chair.
“Haven’t had enough charm for one day?” he asked. “Here, let me give you the five-cent story. Hootie Hoot used to not have I-35 out there. That was long ago. Used to be three, four little towns around here next to us. They weren’t real big, but they were bigger than we were. With one taxi I had a little business. Enough I could take care of my family. Towns around us died, and this one’s dead and don’t know it.
“You drive down the road a piece there, take a right first real road you come to, and you’ll go through a burg used to be three times this size, but it ain’t nothing now but empty buildings with the store glass knocked out by vandals. I hang on here ’cause I ain’t got nothing else to do. Wife died. Kid got married and lives in Tulsa. Me, I got a little war pension and a few bucks now and then from the farting lady and a few others, and it’s all I need. And I got a feeling you didn’t come in here ’cause you needed no taxi. I got a feeling you didn’t come in here ’cause you were curious how come Hootie Hoot’s got one.”
“You could be right. By the way, what’s with the town’s name? Hootie Hoot?”
“I’ve heard about twenty stories,” he said. “Not one of ’em worth a shit and none of them interesting enough for me to repeat, and I don’t think you really care one way or the other.”
I nodded. “All right,” I said. “I got a real reason. I thought as a taxi driver you might could help me with something. I’m looking for a place. A house of prostitution.”
“Ah,” the man said. “I should have known that. I’m losing my snap. It’s just I don’t get many drop-ins for that. Mostly they know where they’re goin’. How come you don’t?”
I studied him. There was a lot more going on behind those slow brown eyes than waiting for the Channel Nine weather report.
“I was just told it was here in Hootie Hoot.”
“Ah hah. Where you from?”
“LaBorde, Texas.”
“Ah. Texas. You drove all the way from Texas to Hootie Hoot, Oklahoma, for a good time at a whorehouse? What’s the deal? They don’t make pussy in Texas no more?”
“I wanted to be real private.”
“I don’t think you wanted to be hundreds of miles private. I think you, sir, may still be full of shit. Even if you did go to the john.”
I considered for a moment, took a flyer. “All right. I’m going to tell you straight.”
“That’s good.”
“I came here because the woman I care about has a daughter who’s a prostitute and she wants out, and a guy told us this is were she is. Me and her, and a friend of mine, we come here to find her and take her home.”
“So you ain’t after puss
y?”
“No. Well, I mean, not that way.”
“You want this gal from the whorehouse?”
“If she’s there. I don’t even know she’s there. I don’t even know there’s a whorehouse.”
“You don’t know much, do you, boy?”
“Frankly, I don’t.”
The old man rummaged around in his shirt pocket and came out with a nasty-looking hunk of a chaw. He chewed off a bite and worked it around in his jaw and studied me for a while. He got up and turned off the television set. He went over to the little refrigerator and got out a soft drink and twisted the top off, said, “Want a CoCola?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That would be nice.”
He pushed the drink toward me and I took it. He picked up the soft drink bottle with the fly in it and spat down the bottle neck, splashing the fly off its island and into the nasty brown ocean. He shook the bottle and watched the fly go under.
We sat that way for a while, me sipping a Coke, and him chewing and spitting into his bottle, shaking that fly around in the spit. He said, “You found this whorehouse, what were you going to do?”
“I told you that.”
“But you didn’t say how. Let me tell you somethin’. This house you’re lookin’ for, it exists. It’s down the road a piece. There’s busloads come to that house. It’s out in the sticks ’cause it don’t bust up no big laws out here. That’s the way they like it around here. They want stuff like pussy shacks out of sight and out of mind. There’s people drive from Oklahoma City just to drop their goodies there. There’s conventioneers hit that place on the way to Oklahoma City and back from. It’s busy. And it’s not a casual kind of place neither. Least it ain’t if you really know how to look around.”
“I’m not sure I follow you.”
“The guys run that place, they ain’t just big thugs, they got guns. They’re not going to take kindly you takin’ one of their whores. I think they might twist your arm behind your back, make you yell calf rope, then break your arm off and stick it up your ass. Then they might shoot you and bury you under a rosebush somewheres.”