Mucho Mojo

Leonard and I squatted down and looked more closely. The night was bright and we could see well. We also knew what we were seeing. Put us in a city and we couldn’t hail a taxi, but we’d both grown up in the woods and had learned to hunt and track when we were head high to a squirrel dog’s balls, so we could read sign. Animal sign, or human sign. A paw print or a tire track, it was all the same to us.

  We got up and went across the grass and the mowed hay field. Another couple days and the hay stubs and the grass would spring back up completely, and there wouldn’t be any trail to see. Not unless you knew to look for it.

  It didn’t take an expert in nanotechnology to figure where the ruts were leading. They played out at the lip of the pond, and there were deeper tracks in the bank where the vehicle had gone over. There were a couple of hardback books in the mud by the water, and the moon rode on the pond’s brown surface like a bright saucer. I could smell the pond, and it smelled of mud and fish and recent rain. A night bird called from a tree in the distance and something splashed in the water and rippled it, turned the floating moon wavy.

  Leonard eased down the bank and got hold of one of the books and came back up with it.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “The Old Man and the Sea.”

  “No. How to Repair Your Fireplace.”

  “Bound to have been a big run on that one,” I said.

  I looked at the pond, then looked at Leonard. He said, “I’d go in, but I got a problem with my leg.”

  “I thought it was well.”

  “Sometimes it gives me trouble.”

  “Like now?”

  “Right.”

  “That figures. Look, we know it’s there.”

  “For all we know, he run an old tractor off in there, or some drunk came through the cattle guard and run out here in the pond thinking it was a parking lot.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I unbuttoned my shirt and tossed it to Leonard, stood on one foot and took off a shoe and sock, switched feet, and repeated the process. I pulled off my pants and underwear. I folded the underwear and pants together and tossed them to Leonard and put the socks in the shoes.

  “Aren’t you embarrassed undressing in front of a queer?” Leonard said. “All you know, I might be sizing up your butthole.”

  “Just call me a tease.”

  I slipped down the bank and started to go in the water.

  Leonard said: “Hap, be careful, man. We haven’t finished that flooring yet.”

  * * *

  The water was warm on top, but three feet below it was cold. The bank sloped out and was slick. I went in feet first and slid down and under. The water flowed over me, and I looked up and could see the moonlight shining through the murk.

  Going down the bank like that I had stupidly stirred up the mud, and a cloud of it, like ink from a squid, caught up with me, surged over me and frightened me. For a moment I was in complete darkness, then the mud thinned and I went down deeper, feeling for the van I knew was there.

  The water, though less muddy down deep, was darker. I wondered what ever had possessed me to do this. We should have called the cops, let them look. I should never have promised Leonard I’d help him out in this matter. I should have finished college and gotten a real job. I wondered how long Florida would remember me if I drowned.

  The pond was not deep, and soon I could reach down and touch bottom with my hands and feet. I crawled along like that a little ways, stirring mud, raised up and swam forward, felt myself starting to need air.

  I rose up swiftly in the blackness and hit my head sharply on something solid and nearly let go of what breath I still had; it was as if the water above me had turned to stone. I swam left and hit a wall and something from the wall leapt out and touched me and I kicked out with my feet and pushed backward into another wall, and things jumped off it and touched me too. I clutched at them and they came apart in my hands.

  My lungs were starting to burn, and I couldn’t go up, and I couldn’t go left or right. I pivoted and swam forward and hit a low barrier and reached above it and touched something soft. I grabbed at it, held with one hand, and my other hand touched something else.

  Suddenly I realized where I was and what I was touching.

  The back doors of the bookmobile must have been loose and popped open when the van went over. That would explain the books on the bank; they had bounced out when the vehicle went into the water, and due to the way the bank was sloped, the van had landed at a slant with its rear end up, and I had accidentally swum inside. The walls I had hit were the sides of the bookmobile, and the things that had jumped off the walls were books.

  What my right hand was touching now was a steering wheel. That’s what had cued me. Tactile memory reaction. Common sense, something I seemed short on these days, told me what my left hand was most likely touching. A water-ballooned corpse. I made myself reach around and feel along what I thought to be the face. I couldn’t tell much about features, nose, jawbone, the like. The flesh was too swollen. After a few seconds, I’d had enough. I jerked my hand away from the corpse but held to the steering wheel with the other.

  I was beginning to pass out from need of air. Black spots swirled inside my head. It was hard to remember not to try and breathe.

  I pulled myself over the seat and reached between the corpse and the steering wheel to where the driver’s window ought to be. It was open. I yanked myself through and shot up, surfacing like a dolphin at a marine show. The moonlight jumped on me. The air was sharp, and I took in deep breaths that seared my lungs.

  I swam to the bank where Leonard stood watching. He leaned out and gave me a hand and pulled me up. I coughed and shivered, said, “Next time, you go in.”

  “The van down there?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And I believe Illium Moon is too.”

  21.

  “I think we should go to the police,” I said. “Talk to Hanson.”

  “Not yet,” Leonard said. “Let me think on it.”

  My shirt was still damp from dressing while wet, but it felt comfortable in the close heat. I smelled faintly of pond water. We were back over on the East Side, at a little, smoky black juke joint called the Congo Bongo Club, having a beer. Well, Leonard was having a beer. I was having a nonalcoholic beer. The place served them, but they seemed embarrassed about it. The bartender, who was also the waiter, kinda slunk over and put it on the table like a patient giving a pretty nurse a urine specimen.

  The lights in the joint were not too good. Most of what light there was came from red-and-blue neon beer signs at the bar and the blue-white glow from the jukebox. In fact, it was so dark in the back of the place you could have pulled your dick out and put on a rubber and no one would have known it. It wasn’t the kind of place had a no-smoking section either. The cigarette and cigar smoke was thick enough to set a beer glass on.

  The joint smacked of fire hazard. If there was a rear exit, you probably had to go through a back office to get to it. A fire started here, the office was locked, and the front door got blocked, you could kiss your charred ass good-bye. The music on the juke was great, however. John Lee Hooker.

  We were trying to figure our next move. Or Leonard was figuring our next move. I was wondering what the cops did to you if they found out you had discovered a body in a pond and went away and didn’t tell them. I was certain dire consequences hovered above the question. I had already spent some time in prison, and I didn’t want another stretch. I wasn’t even crazy about a small fine.

  “There’s things here don’t jive right,” Leonard said, “but I can’t put my finger on the problem.”

  In the glow of the jukebox, I saw a big black man eye-balling us from a table across the way, throwing back beer like water. Actually, he was eyeballing me, as carefully as a birdwatcher might a rare yellow-throated two-peckered brush warbler. I suddenly realized just how white my skin was. Maybe we’d have done better to have picked up a six-pack at a convenience store.

  I didn’t say anythin
g to Leonard, as the faintest hint of intimidation made his dick hard, but I kept my eye on the guy.

  We shouldn’t have gone in the Congo Bongo anyway. In my old age it seemed I was becoming less wise and cautious. It was supposed to be the other way around. Maybe, after forty, a kind of self-destruct button kicks in.

  “I don’t know for a fact there was a body in the van,” I said, blinking away tobacco smoke. “It just seems likely, because it damn sure didn’t feel like a bundle of books I was touching. Question is, if it is a body, and it is Illium, why is he in the pond?”

  “Bad driving?”

  “That’s not high on my list. Seriously, Leonard.”

  “Suicide?”

  “Actually, I thought of that one. Don’t get pissed, but let me throw out a theory, OK?”

  “Toss it.”

  “Say your uncle and Illium met and took to one another like flies to shit, discovered they had something in common. They liked little kids, and not to pet on the head.”

  “I see this coming.”

  “Say your uncle did kill the child under his flooring. Killed him somewhere else and brought him back to the house.”

  “To play with?”

  “I’m trying to be delicate here.”

  “That don’t mean you ain’t thinking it.”

  “Illium and Uncle Chester find they both like this kind of thing, and Uncle Chester likes to show Illium what he’s got in the trunk under the floorboards, and they share a few magazines, and let’s say when your uncle dies, Illium begins to feel guilty. . . . No, let’s say lonely. I mean, this isn’t a club. You can’t go to Child Molesters United and find a bunch of guys like you.”

  “Way I understand it, it ain’t as hard as you think.”

  “So Illium misses your uncle. Gets tired of looking at the kid fuck magazines by himself, just sitting around in the house, waxing his well rope—”

  “So he gets all dewy eyed, puts his box of pornography on the couch, and his kid’s clothes, possibly acquired from murders he’s committed, or my uncle’s murders if Illium was just a fantasizer, and he says, ‘Good-bye, cruel world’ to his box of toys, jumps in the bookmobile, runs off in the pond and drowns himself.”

  “It’s a theory.”

  “It sucks, Hap. It sucks the big ole donkey dick. I don’t buy any of it. And what’s with the coupons? And you know that book I picked up on the bank? It had a mark in it that’s in the copy of Dracula Uncle Chester gave me. A black circle with a red heart on the inside.”

  “It’s my turn to say that’s nothing. They were friends. Makes sense Illium marked the books he loaned that way, and your uncle got one.”

  “Yeah, and my uncle left me a safety-deposit box containing a book with that inside, and some coupons, so maybe it means more than it seems like it ought to. The coupons seemed nuts until we found those coupons at Illium’s, now I’m beginning to think Uncle Chester was trying to tell me something.”

  “And he left you a painting,” I said.

  “Yeah, and there’s that,” Leonard said. “And if he was trying to tell me something, why didn’t he just write it down and explain it? Or get in touch with me and tell me? Why the code business? What’s it all mean?”

  “I’m afraid Hanson’s right,” I said. “This is starting to sound like Agatha Christie shit, and I don’t know from puzzles. They make my head hurt.”

  “Reckon we need Miss Marple?”

  “Could be she’s coming over right now,” I said.

  The big black guy who’d been watching strolled over to our table. Well, not exactly strolled. He listed a little. He’d had just the right amount of beer. I sized him up, looking for striking zones just in case it wasn’t his intention to discuss politics or summer fashion.

  He stopped at our table, said to Leonard, “What the fuck you doin’ in here with this honkie, brother? You trying to get a job promotion? This ain’t no honkie place.”

  Leonard leaned over the table, said, “He’s talking about you.”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “Yeah,” Leonard said. “You see, honkie is a very derogatory black term for whites,” Leonard said to me. “You see, stuff like peckerwood, ofay, and honkie, it’s very insulting. It’s like whites calling us nigger or coon or jungle bunny.”

  “No shit?” I said.

  The big black guy glared at me, said, “You ain’t never heard honkie before, motherfucker?”

  “He’s sheltered,” Leonard said. Then to me: “Motherfucker, Hap, is a common term meaning you fuck your mother. Even if you don’t fuck your mother, folks say it anyway if they’re mad at you or want to make you mad. It’s designed to be derogatory.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “You cocksuckers best quit fuckin’ with me!” the big black guy said.

  “Cocksucker,” Leonard said to me, “is a common term—”

  “Cut it out, you motherfuckers!”

  A lot of folks were looking at us now, wondering how much blood would be involved. The jukebox wrapped up its tune and the air went silent with the threat of murder.

  The bartender said over the bar, softly, “Clemmon, ease off, these fellas just come in for a drink.”

  “I ease off I want to ease off,” said the big black guy.

  I glanced out of the corner of my eye at the front door. About twenty steps. Five, if you were leaping.

  “Hey, buddy,” I said, showing more confidence than I felt, “I’m not bothering you.”

  “You come down here and slum with the niggers, is what bothers me,” said the big black man. “You white pieces of shit always lookin’ down your noses at us. Come in here, smart-mouth me. It’s gonna get you hurt. I bet you think I’m on food stamps.”

  “I hadn’t thought about it,” I said.

  “Well, I ain’t. I own my own business.”

  “Congratulations,” I said, “but I’m warning you, go on about your business. ’Cause you fuck with me, tomorrow your relatives will be splitting up your belongings.”

  “What’s that mean?” the big man said. “What the fuck you talkin’ about?”

  “He’s threatening to kick your ass plumb to death,” said someone at a nearby table.

  “Appreciate that translation,” I said.

  “You’re welcome,” said the man at the table.

  It finally registered with the big black guy that he was being insulted, and the game was over. He reached for me.

  I batted his hand to the inside with my palm and raised out of my seat and hooked my other arm behind his head and dropped down quick with all my weight, brought his head into the edge of the table, sharply. The bottles on the table jumped and fell over. I slammed the guy behind the neck with my forearm and he came down and met my knee and rolled over on the floor and made a sound like he might get up, but didn’t. He lay there in a ball and tried to look comfortable. I was glad he was drunk.

  Leonard stood up. A lot of folks were standing up. I heard the click of a knife opening nearby. I picked a fallen bottle off the table and held it by the neck. Some of its contents ran out and splashed on my shoe. I reached in my pocket with my free hand and got some money and put it on the table. I wished I was wearing a wide-brimmed black hat and a serape. A damp shirt and pants would have to do, though.

  The bartender said very softly, “Go ’head on and leave, boys.”

  I turned and looked at him. He was a little jet-black man wearing a white shirt with black bow tie. The neon throbbed colors on his shirt. He was holding a sawed-off pump shotgun, gauge of twelve. He wasn’t holding it tensely, just showing it off. If he’d thought it through, he’d probably loaded it with slugs. You let down on it, you cleaned out fewer innocent customers that way.

  “We were just leaving,” I said.

  “I thought you was,” he said. “Don’t forget the tip.”

  22.

  When we got back to Leonard’s place, Florida’s car was parked in the drive and she was on the porch sitting in the glider. It was a b
right-enough night I could see she was wearing some kind of cartoon character T-shirt, blue jean short-shorts and big wooden shoes that reminded me of miniature pontoons. She looked cute as a new puppy.

  Next door there was the usual activity of drug selling, and I could hear Mohawk’s, alias Strip’s, alias Melton’s, voice above everyone else’s. When Melton got excited, his vocal cords achieved a kind of shrill quality, like something oily was trying to crawl up his ass and he was liking it.

  “Not a real good place for a lady to hang out this time of night,” I said to Florida.

  “They think I’m inside, I bet.”

  The way the glider was positioned, the shadows, that was possible, but I still didn’t think it was a good idea. Guys like the ones next door knew we were gone, saw her car over here, they might decide to investigate.

  “You’ll promise me you won’t do this again, though, won’t you?” I said.

  “I promise,” she said.

  “Want to come in?” Leonard asked her.

  “No,” she said, “I’m going to steal Hap from you. I’m taking him on a picnic.”

  “Picnic?” I said. “This time of night?”

  “I been waiting since dark,” she said. “I’m hungry. And I don’t care if you just ate dinner, we’re picnicking, and you will eat. I made the stuff myself.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” Florida said to Leonard, “stealing Hap off and not inviting you, but—”

  “That’s all right,” Leonard said, hanging his head and pretending to be sad. “I have a TV dinner, meatloaf, I think, and they’re having a Three’s Company rerun marathon on channel nine. I wouldn’t want to miss that. And right before it, there’s an hour of The Brady Bunch.”

  Florida giggled sweetly and Leonard raised his head and smiled.

  I said to Leonard, “We’ll talk later.”

  “I want to sleep on a few things anyway,” Leonard said.

  “Pretty mysterious, you two,” Florida said.

  “That’s us,” Leonard said, “The Mysterious Duo.”

  I got in the car with Florida and she drove us out Highway 7 East. I reached in the back for the picnic basket, an official wicker one with handle, and she said, “Uh-uh.”