“I guess. You think he’ll get life, or a needle full of shit?”
“I pray for the needle. I’d like to be there to push the plunger in the fucker, or maybe just forget the dope and jab him to death with the needle.”
“The thing that worries me about you, Leonard, is you have such a hard time getting in touch with your true feelings.”
“Yeah, I’m gonna get me an analyst can help me out on that. Tell me why I’m queer, too. They like stuff like that. He’ll want to know if I dream about my daddy’s dick. Hell, maybe I’m lucky, shrink’ll be some blond stud that’s queer himself.”
“Hope springs eternal.”
“Listen, man, you worry too much about the psychology of things. That stuff’s just head voodoo. It don’t mean a thing. You took all the psychiatric and psychology degrees in the world, balanced that paper against the truth, there wouldn’t be enough there to wipe a baby’s ass on.”
“Maybe. But it figures with Fitzgerald, if the stuff Hiram says was true, and I think it was, but Hiram, I don’t know.”
“You want everything to come up neat, Hap. That’s bullshit. What Hiram said about Fitzgerald is probably true, what he said about himself is probably bullshit. What you’re doing, is still blaming yourself for not figuring Hiram sooner.”
“I should have seen it. Shit, everything was there. Boxes of flags in Hiram’s van, and each of the bodies had been wrapped in cloth, and he had quoted that piece out of Psalms. Add to that the fact he was here every year at the time of the murders, knew the Reverend and had a history with him. Toss in the religious connection, the way he’d acted that night I handed him Ivan, all drugged and dying, the way he looked at the kid like I’d given him a gift from God. The thought of that, knowing what I know now, gives me chills.”
“Monday morning quarterbacking. I’ve heard it all, Hap, and frankly, I’m tired of it. Look, amigo, I don’t blame myself. You shouldn’t blame yourself. Hiram was cool, and Fitzgerald, hell, he was ripe for the part and was guilty too. We had our eyes on him and couldn’t see the whole of it. That flag shit, hell, who would have thought of that? Only way it would come together is the way it did. You found the flag and the kid. But the thing is, another kid didn’t go down. We got ’em all. I’m gonna feel sorry for anyone, it’s T.J., rotting away in some state institution. Not that I’d want the fucker on the street, but in his case, I got a tear or two for him.”
“I don’t see any.”
“I cry on the inside. And I hope every day the poor bastard will die in his sleep. He ain’t nothing for this world. Shit, Fitzgerald told T.J. his own dick was a snake, he’d have believed it. Cut it off and tied it in a knot had Fitzgerald wanted him to.”
“No doubt about that.”
“Actually, thing that cheers me at night is thinking of that motherfucker falling down that well. I wish I could have been close enough to hear his bones break.”
“Your humanity overwhelms me, Leonard.”
“Now forget Hiram, the whole mess. Set your hook. Personally, I put my next bait on the hook, I’m gonna pretend I’m putting the needle in Hiram’s eye. . . . Come on man, let’s catch at least a couple perch. I’d like fish for dinner.”
“You know what it is, Leonard?”
“No, but I’m gonna find out.”
“It’s the fact they were the same, and yet, they were different.”
“Hiram and Fitzgerald?”
“Yeah. I mean, Hiram says they were the same, but what do you think?”
“Same thing I thought yesterday. They’re both better off dead, and when Hiram goes and makes it a duo, I’ll buy a party hat and a noisemaker. But since you just got to talk about it, let me give you my last word, brother. Fitzgerald, if Hiram can be believed—and like you, I believe this part—got jacked around early on, right? What did you call him?”
“Psychotic.”
“Right. And Hiram, he was a psychopath. No matter what story he tells about how he and Fitzgerald were turned into what they were. I don’t buy it. Least not in Hiram’s case.”
I remembered the story Hiram told, or at least I remembered it as best Hanson would tell it to me later. Hiram told the law and the psychiatrists he couldn’t help himself; he’d been made that way. Said when he was a boy he spent time with Fitz, and Fitz’s father raped not only his son, but him as well. This, he said, was why the old man killed his wife. Not that he thought she might be sleeping around. That was just the bullshit he told me to distance himself from Fitzgerald. The old man’s wife caught the elder Fitzgerald in the act with him and Fitz. Hiram said they watched the old man murder her and wrap her in a flag from the church. Then he made them help load the body in his car, go to the Hampstead house with him, watch him dispose of her by candlelight, all the while telling them it was the will of God. Words confirmed by the image on the wall, the water-spot face of Christ.
Hiram said the old man told him he ever said a word, he’d do the same to MeMaw, so Hiram had been quiet all those years. But the memory wouldn’t go away, and he’d wake up at night and see the blood and think of it oozing through that flag. He’d envision the water spot on the wall and smell the fresh dirt beneath the house, and he’d feel angry. He developed an urge to light fires and make little animals suffer. He did both on the sly.
When he was a grown man, animals weren’t enough. And he and Fitzgerald, scarred by the same crime at the same time, found a linking between them. The murders began. They felt they were doing the will of God, getting rid of those sad cases, those admonitions. Or so said Hiram.
“You see, man,” Leonard said, “Hiram was lying. He understood the reasons Fitzgerald was the way he was too well to be operating by them himself. It had been Fitzgerald who had believed in what he was doing; he was the one with the psychotic delusions that he was doing God’s work as given him to do by his daddy. But you can’t let Fitzgerald off the hook either. He made a choice. And there was something else, man. He had those porno mags same as Hiram, and the sex with the kids, they can say that was part of the pattern, but it all sounds like a power trip to me, plain and simple. But let’s give Fitzgerald a little room and say it isn’t all his fault. Not much room, but enough to turn around in, and then let’s go on to Hiram.
“Hiram, he got a bad break for a kid too, but hell, that wasn’t his environment. He’d got over it in time, dealt with it, told eventually, he’d wanted to. But he liked the killing from the start, was born with a wire twisted and a piston loose. I bet he was doing them animals in before he ever got butt-fucked and in on that murder. With Hiram, it was like dropping ole Br’er Rabbit in the briar patch. He was born and bred for it, same as some dogs come out bad and others come out good, and they come from the same stock. MeMaw was good people, but that didn’t mean the genes didn’t come together in Hiram crooked somewhere. Got the wrong combination.”
“Then in a way,” I said, “that means he couldn’t help it.”
“Bad dogs can’t help but bite either. I’ve seen ’em born vicious and just get worse as they got older, no matter how good you treated ’em. They can’t help it, but I couldn’t help putting a bullet through their heads either. You don’t bite me, or try to bite me but once. . . . Shit, Hap, some things just are. Hiram was a predator from birth, and he enjoyed feeding Fitzgerald’s religious frenzy, so in turn he could feed his own needs. Think about what they found in Tyler.”
When Hiram’s home was checked into, the police in Tyler found souvenirs, more souvenirs than could have come from those dead boys under the Hampstead place. It looked as if once a year in LaBorde hadn’t been enough for Hiram. In time, if he talked more, the Tyler police felt certain they’d clear up a lot of local cases involving missing children.
“No telling how many kids Hiram’s nailed,” Leonard said. “Here, in Tyler, on his route. He had the perfect job for his little hobby. And he’d kept right on doing it until he was stopped or the grave got him.”
“I know,” I said. “I guess there’s a p
art of me thinks somewhere along the line everyone could have been saved. Maybe not come out perfect, but not come out a monster either.”
“Hap, my man, there is evil in the world. True evil. It doesn’t twirl its mustache and it doesn’t wear black and it doesn’t slink and it doesn’t come in any one color or sex. Sometimes evil comes from good places, like MeMaw, and sometimes it can wear all kinds of good faces and talk good as anyone can talk, but it’s just a face and it’s just talk. Evil’s real, man. Same as good.”
“And what about T.J.? How does he fit into your theory?”
“I don’t care if he fits at all, Hap. Now shut up and fish.”
I baited my hook and did just that, but I never could get my mind right. I kept thinking about it all, wondering if the kid we’d saved would have a chance now, or if he’d just go right back to the street. I wondered if at this very moment he might be sticking a shot of horse into his arm.
We didn’t catch any fish. Leonard was pissed. His mouth was set for a finny friend. We stopped off at Kroger’s on the way home and went in there to buy a fish to fry. They were all out. We got some fish sticks and took them home and baked them in the oven.
* * *
Later that month, on a cool night with the sky black and the stars bright, I moved away from Uncle Chester’s. The work on the house was completed, except for painting, and Leonard decided to live there at least until spring. At that time, I was supposed to move back and help paint the place, then he’d put it up for sale.
But for me, for now, I wanted away from there and the remains of the drug house next door, MeMaw’s house, the woods out back, and the Hampstead place. I felt it all closing in on me at night, as if the houses, the remains of the drug house, were living things that could reach out and touch me.
I suppose, believing that way in some primitive part of my mind, I should have believed Uncle Chester’s bottle tree could protect me, but it had become easier to believe the evil than the good.
Me and Leonard had a big dinner that night, and after dinner I shook hands with him, put my stuff in the back of the pickup, and we stood around outside and listened to the wind in the bottle tree. It was a cool wind. It was an agreeable night.
“You be true, Hap.”
“Don’t be surprised you don’t hear from me for a week,” I said.
“All right.”
“Don’t be surprised you hear from me tomorrow.”
He smiled at me. “Drive careful, man.”
I hugged him and drove away from there, started home, but didn’t make it. I went out Highway 7 instead. I drove on out to the scenic overlook and went up there and parked. I got out and lay on the hood of the truck with my back to the windshield and looked at the sky. It was a beautiful night and the stars were as clear and bright as a young girl’s eyes. Beautiful like that time Florida and I had come up here. It was hard remembering exactly who I had been then. I felt older now and the world seemed sadder, and it was as if everything I had ever learned was ultimately pointless. When I had lain here with Florida beside me that night, not so long ago—but in another way, a million years past—she told me we could see Forever. And we could. But Forever then was a wonderful place, full of mystery and hope and eternity.
Tonight, I could still see Forever, but Forever was nothing to see.
JOE R. LANSDALE, native of East Texas, is the winner of the British Fantasy Award, the American Mystery Award, and four Bram Stoker Awards from the Horror Writers of America.
Joe R. Lansdale, Mucho Mojo
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