After the eulogies and prayers and singing and people falling over the coffin and crying whether they wanted to or not, we drove out to a little cemetery in the woods and the coffin was unloaded from an ancient black hearse with a sticker on the back bumper that read BINGO FOR GOD.
Underneath a striped tent, with the hot wind blowing, we stood next to an open grave and the ceremony went on. There was a kind of thespian quality about the whole thing. The only one who seemed to be truly upset was Leonard. He wasn’t saying anything, and he’s too macho to cry in public, but I knew him. I saw the way his hands shook, the tilt of his mouth, the hooding of his eyes.
“It’s a nice enough place to get put down,” I whispered to Leonard.
“You’re dead, you’re dead,” Leonard said. “You told me that. It’s a thing takes the edge off how you feel about your surroundings.”
“Right. Fuck Uncle Chester. Let’s talk fashion. You’ll note no one else here looks like a black fag Roy Rogers but you.”
That got a smile out of him.
During the preacher’s generic marathon tribute to Uncle Chester, I spent some time looking at a pretty black woman in a short, tight black dress standing near us. She, like Leonard, was one of the few not trying out for the Academy Awards. She didn’t look particularly sad, but she was solemn. Now and then she turned and looked at Leonard. I couldn’t tell if he noticed. A heterosexual would have noticed if there was anything romantic in her attitude or not. It can’t be helped. A heterosexual dick senses a pretty woman, no matter what the cultural and social training of its owner, and it’ll always point true north. Or maybe it’s south, now that I think about it.
The preacher finished up a prayer slightly longer than the complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica and signaled to lower the coffin.
A long lean guy with his hand on the device that lowers the coffin pushed the lever and the coffin started down, wobbled, righted itself. Someone in the audience let out a sob and went quiet. A woman in front of me, wearing a hat with everything on it but fresh fruit and a strand of barbed wire, shook and let out a wail and waved a hanky.
A moment later it was all over except for the grave diggers throwing dirt in the hole.
There was some hand-shaking and talking, and most of the crowd came over and spoke to Leonard and said how sorry they were, looked at me out of the corners of their eyes, suspicious because I was white, or maybe because they assumed I was Leonard’s lover. It was bad enough they had a relative or acquaintance who was queer, but shit, looked like he was fucking a white guy.
We were invited, not with great enthusiasm, to a gathering of friends and family, but Leonard passed, and the crowd faded out. The pretty woman in black came over and smiled at Leonard and shook his hand and said she was sorry.
“I’m Florida Grange. I was your uncle’s lawyer, Mr. Pine,” she said. “Guess I still am. You’re in the will. I’ll make it official if you’ll come by my office tomorrow. Here’s my card. And here’s the key to his house. You get that and some money.”
Leonard took the key and card and stood there looking stunned. I said, “Hello, Miss Grange, my name’s Hap Collins.”
“Hello,” she said, and shook my hand.
“You know my uncle well?” Leonard asked.
“No. Not really,” Florida Grange said, and she went away, and so did we.
3.
Uncle Chester’s house was in that part of LaBorde called the black section of town by some, nigger town by others, and the East Side by all the rest.
It was a run-down section that ten years ago had been in pretty good shape because it was on the edge of the white community before the white community moved farther west and the streets were abandoned here in favor of putting maintenance where the real money and power were, amongst the fat-cat honkies.
We drove down Comanche Street and bounced in some potholes deep enough a parachute would have been appropriate, and Leonard pulled up in a driveway spotted with pea gravel and several days’ worth of newspapers.
The house in front of the drive was one story, but large and formerly fine, gone to seed with peeling paint and a roof that had been cheaply repaired with tin and tar. The tin patches caught the sunlight and played hot beams over it and reflected them back against the crumbly bricks of a chimney and the limbs of a great oak that hung over one side of the roof and scratched it and gave the yard below an umbrella of dark shade. There was more tin around the bottom of the house, concealing a crawlspace.
A ten-foot, wisteria-covered post was driven in the ground on the other side of the house, and sticking out from the post were long nails, and the mouths of beer and soft drink bottles engulfed the nails, and many of the bottles looked to have been shot apart or banged apart by rocks and clubs. Glass was heaped at the bottom of the pole like discarded costume jewelry.
I’d seen a rig like that years ago in the yard of an old black carpenter. I didn’t know what it was then, and I didn’t know what it was now. All I could think to call it was a bottle tree.
Front of the long porch some hedges grew wild and ungroomed, like old-fashioned, Afro-style haircuts, and between the hedges some slanting stone steps met the graying boards of the porch, and standing on the boards were two black men and a young black boy.
Before we got out of the car, I said, “Relatives of yours?”
“Not that I recognize,” Leonard said.
We got out and walked up to the porch. The boy looked at us, but the men hardly noticed. The kid popped a thin rubber hose off his arm and tossed it aside, started rubbing his arm. The boy appeared confused but pleasant, as if awakening from a long, relaxed sleep.
One of the black men, a tall, muscular guy in T-shirt and slacks with a wedge of hair cut like a thin Mohawk and a hypodermic needle in his hand, said to the boy, “More candy where that come from, you got the price.”
The boy went down the steps, between me and Leonard and out into the street. Mohawk dropped the needle onto the porch. There were a couple other needles there, along with the rubber hose.
The other black guy was wearing a light blue shower cap an orange T-shirt and jeans, and was about the size of a Rose Parade float. He looked down from the porch at us like it tired him out. He said to Leonard, “Shit, if you ain’t the fucking bird of paradise.”
“And propped on a stick,” said Mohawk. “Who dresses you, brother? And you, white boy. You preachin’ somewhere?”
“I’m selling insurance,” I said. “You want some? Got a feeling you might need a little, come a few minutes.”
Mohawk smiled at me like I was one funny guy.
“What are you doing here?” Leonard asked.
“We’re standing on the motherfucking porch,” Parade Float said. “Whatchoo doin’ here?”
“I own the place.”
“Ah,” said Mohawk. “You must be that nutty Uncle Tom’s boy?”
“I’m Chester Pine’s nephew, that’s what you mean.”
“Well, hey, we was just doing a little business,” said Mohawk. “Don’t let your balls swell up.”
“This ain’t your office,” Leonard said.
Mohawk smiled. “You know, you’re right, but we was thinking of making it kind of an extension.” He came out to the edge of the porch and pointed next door. “We live over there. That’s our main office, Captain Sunshine.”
I looked. It was a large run-down house on the lot next to Chester’s place. A number of young black men came out on the long porch, stood and stared.
“That wasn’t any measles vaccination you gave that kid,” Leonard said. “How old was he? Twelve?”
“Don’t know,” said Parade Float. “We don’t send him no birthday presents. Shit, all you know, we’re free-lance doctors.”
“I think you’re free-lance assholes,” Leonard said.
“Fuck you,” Parade Float said.
“Do-gooders,” Mohawk said. “Like in the movies. That’s what you fucks are. Right?”
Leonard gav
e Mohawk a studied look. “Get off my property. Now. Otherwise, your friends next door’ll be wiping you out of your big friend’s ass here. Provided they can get what’s left of him out of that shower cap.”
“Fuck you,” Parade Float said.
“I was wondering about that cap,” I said. “You leave the water running? Go looking for a towel?”
“Fuck you,” Parade Float said again.
“You run out of your daily word allotment,” I said, “how you gonna beg us for mercy?”
“Wooo,” Mohawk said. “This little talk could lead to something.”
“Don’t make me happy prematurely,” Leonard said.
And then Leonard moved. His cane went out between Mohawk’s legs, and he popped it forward, locking one of Mohawk’s knees, and the move tossed Mohawk face-forward off the porch.
Leonard stepped aside and Mohawk hit the ground on his head. Sounded like it hurt.
That was my cue. As Parade Float stepped off the porch to get involved, I shot out a side kick and hit him on his stepping leg, square on the kneecap. He came down on his head too. He got both hands under him, started to rise, and I kicked him in the throat with about a third of what I had.
He rolled over on his back holding his throat, gurgling. The shower cap stayed in place. I never realized how tight those little buddies fit. Maybe it was just the light blue ones.
Leonard had Mohawk up now and had dropped his cane and was working Mohawk with a series of lefts and rights and knee lifts, and he wouldn’t let him fall. Mohawk’s body was jumping all over the yard, like he had a pogo stick up his ass.
“That’s enough, Leonard,” I said. “Your knuckles will swell.”
Leonard hit Mohawk a couple more under the short ribs and didn’t move in close enough to support him this time. Mohawk crumpled on the grass, made a noise like gas escaping.
Parade Float had gotten to his knees. He was still holding his throat, sputtering. I checked out the folks on the porch next door. They were just standing there. In tough postures, of course.
Leonard yelled at them. “You retards want some, come on over.”
Nobody wanted any. Which made me happy. I didn’t want to tear up my brand new J. C. Penney’s suit.
Leonard picked up his cane and looked at Parade Float, said, “I see you or your buddy here again, even see someone reminds me of you two, we’re gonna kill you.”
“Couldn’t we just mess up their hair instead?” I said.
“No,” Leonard said. “I want to kill them.”
“There you are, guys,” I said. “Death or nothing.”
Mohawk had casually crawled to the edge of the yard near the bottle tree and was trying to get up. Parade Float had it together enough now that he could get up and go over and help Mohawk to his feet. They limped and wheezed toward the house next door.
A tall black man on the porch over there yelled, “Your times are comin’, you two. It’s comin’.”
“Nice meeting you, neighbors,” Leonard said, and he got out his key and we went inside.
4.
The house was hot and filthy, the fireplace was full of trash, and there were great skeins of cobwebs all about. As we moved, dust puffed and floated in the sunlight that bled through thickly curtained windows and the place smelled sour and the smell came from a variety of things. One of them I felt certain was Uncle Chester himself. You die in a house and lay there for two days in the heat, you get a little ripe, and so do your surroundings.
I left the front door open. Not that it helped much. There wasn’t any wind stirring.
“Damn,” Leonard said. “It’s like he didn’t live here.”
Considering the aroma he’d left behind, I felt that was debatable, but I said, “He was old, Leonard. Maybe he didn’t move around much.”
“He wasn’t that old.”
“You hadn’t seen or heard from him in years. He could have been in a bad way.”
“Maybe him giving me this place was some kind of final jab in the heart. I loved this house when I was a kid. He knew that. Shit, look at it now.”
“Final days he maybe got his shit together. Decided to let bygones be bygones. Ms. Grange said he left you some money too.”
“Confederate, most likely.”
We moved on through the house. The kitchen was squalid with dirty dishes stacked in the sink and paper plates and TV dinner receptacles stuffed in the trash can. There was a pile of debris around the can, as if Chester had finally given up taking out the garbage and had started merely throwing stuff in that general direction.
Flies buzzed on patrol. On the counter, in a TV dinner tray, squirming in something green and fuzzy that might have been a partial enchilada, were maggots.
“Well,” I said. “He damn sure lived in here.”
“Shit,” Leonard said. “This ain’t no recent mess.”
“No. He worked on this one.”
Off the kitchen was a bedroom. We went in there. It was relatively neat. On the nightstand by the bed was a worn hardback copy of Thoreau’s Walden. That was Leonard’s favorite book, especially the chapter titled “Self Reliance.”
I looked around the room. One wall was mostly bookshelf. The books were behind sliding glass.
Leonard went over to the closed curtain and opened it. The window glass was dusty yellow and tracked with fly specks. The frame had bars mounted on the outside of it, and you could see the house where Mohawk, Parade Float, and the assholes stayed.
“Old man was scared,” I said.
“He wasn’t never scared of nothing,” Leonard said.
“You get older, you got to get scared. Courage is in proportion to your size and physical condition and what caliber weapon you carry. Some cases how much liquor, crack, or heroin you got in you.”
“Man, this neighborhood hadn’t never been ritzy, but it’s really gone to the fucking dogs.”
“Dogs wouldn’t have it.”
“This shit next door. I don’t get it. Crack house and anyone with a glass eye in their head could tell that’s what it is, but what’re the cops doing? Kid was getting a jolt of horse on the porch, man. Right out in front of God and everybody.”
“That’s probably a free jolt,” I said. “Horse doesn’t come cheap. Later on, they get him needing a little, they’ll tell him to try some rock. He takes that and he comes back ’cause it’s got him and it’s cheap. A kid can get rock for five dollars, even if he’s got to steal trinkets to sell.”
Leonard closed the curtain and we went out into the hallway and past the bathroom into the room next door.
“Jesus,” Leonard said.
The room was full of ceiling-high stacks of yellowed newspapers. There was a little path between the stuff. We went down that, and the path turned left and opened up. There was a chair and table in the opening with a small rotating fan and papers on it.
If you sat in the chair and looked across the table, you could see the window opposite it, and provided the curtains hadn’t been drawn shut, I figured I’d have been able to see bars and a dusty view of the crack house.
There was a ballpoint pen and a composition notebook on the desk. The notebook was open and I looked at the page. Uncle Chester had been doodling. There were a number of little rectangles and the rectangles were numbered. There were some lines drawn at the top and bottom and on the sides.
It looked as if Uncle Chester hadn’t had enough to do.
It was hot in there and the dust we’d stirred hung about in the dead air and around our heads like a veil. It choked me.
We went out of there and back into the living room, started out the front door to get some air, and that’s when we noticed that besides the lock the key worked, there were no fewer than five locks or barricades on the door frame, you wanted to use them. There were two chain locks, a dead bolt, and a metal bar that fit into slots on either side of the door, and at the bottom and top of the door were swivel catches.
“He wasn’t fucking around on security,” I sa
id.
“The assholes next door, I reckon,” Leonard said.
We stood on the porch and the air was still not moving and it was still hot, but it was a hell of a lot more comfortable than the decaying air inside the house. Another couple of hours, the temperature would be down to ninety and the wind might be stirring, and inside the house, you had all the windows open and a fan going, you might be able to breathe without a respirator.
I looked over at the crack house. No one was visible. I said, “You did all right for a fella on a cane.”
“Motherfuckers are lucky I can’t get around good as usual. Another week, I’ll be taking a dance class.”
“That post with the bottles. What the hell is it? Ornamentation?”
“It’s mojo shit. Protects you from evil spirits. Spirits supposed to go into the bottles and get trapped. Or maybe they go in and are tossed out and transformed into something safe. Don’t know for sure. I remember seeing them now and then as a kid. Hearing about them. But Uncle Chester, he never believed in that shit. He was always practical as a hangman.”
“There’s things about people you never know, Leonard. Even people close as you and me. Hell, I might listen to polka records, all you know.”
“Reckon so. Listen here, Hap. I got to see that lawyer tomorrow. Think I could get you to stay with me here tonight?”
“If I don’t want to?”
“Long walk home.”
“What I figured.”
* * *
Though we hadn’t planned on staying, we had brought a change of clothes with us, in anticipation of stopping somewhere to shed our suits so we could maybe get a bite to eat and go to a movie.
We put on the clothes and set about tidying the place up some. I drove into town proper and bought some plastic trash bags and some cleaning stuff, and when I got back, Leonard had started washing dishes in the sink.
While he did that, I pulled back all the curtains and opened all the windows and picked up the trash and bagged it and took it out to the side of the house.