The Two-Bear Mambo

“Well, Smartest Peckerwood in the World, what do you expect? She should be getting top dollar for this? Damn, I’m cold.”

  We lit the suspicious-looking gas heater in the living room, found one of an equally suspicious nature in the bedroom and lit it. We lit the top cook stove burners as well, and the old lady was right. That rancid grease heated up, that dog in the oven warmed, the place began to smell like a rendering plant.

  “I don’t know which is worse,” Leonard said. “Being frozen or stunk to death. Flip for the bed?”

  “I already called dibs. Besides, you heard her. Dog pissed on both of them, so what’s the difference?”

  “Difference is the couch looks like some kind of torture instrument.”

  “I got dibs, man. Bed is mine.”

  The door scraped and squeaked, and Tim, dripping water, came inside and shoved the door shut.

  “Shit,” he said. “I ain’t seen a rain like this since them old codgers drowned.”

  “That’s good to know,” Leonard said. “Give me a little something to think about tonight while I’m trying to sleep.”

  “Trailers weren’t on stilts then,” Tim said. He went over and got up close to the little heater. “Brrrrrrrr.”

  “Tim,” Leonard asked. “Why didn’t you tell us early on Florida stayed out here at your mother’s park?”

  “I don’t know. She seemed like a nice girl. Woman. I didn’t know what you guys were up to. I had to feel you out a little. She couldn’t find a place, and she mentioned it to me, and I told her about here.”

  “Didn’t have anything to do with you hoping to drop your anchor in her ocean, did it?” Leonard asked. “You having her out here, I mean? Handy. Kind of indebted to you?”

  “I guess it did,” Tim said. “Some. But I was trying to help her too.”

  “And pick up fifty dollars,” Leonard said.

  “That’s right,” Tim said. “Besides, how indebted is someone gonna feel staying here? This was where she stayed, you know? This trailer … besides, I don’t need any grief, don’t need the law on my back, and I didn’t want to drag Mom into this. She don’t need those Klan creeps on her for helping out blacks. It isn’t like she was trying to be a Good Samaritan, anyway. She’d rent to anybody to make a few bucks.”

  “Gee, thanks,” I said.

  “You know what I mean,” Tim said. “She wasn’t making any kind of statement renting to Florida. It’s not like she keeps this park up or nothing.”

  “No joke?” Leonard said.

  “I try to help,” Tim said, “but with the station and all, my own life. Hell, it’s all I can do.”

  “You live out here too?” I asked.

  “I got a place in back of the store. Once in a while I’ll stay out here. It’s rare Mom’s got any boarders. Place like this mostly caters to a pretty desperate crowd. People come and go quick like. Lot of them are just one-nighters. Some guy renting so he can do the rodeo with some local poke. Right now, ’cept for y’all, and Mom, of course, the park is empty.”

  “Not to meddle,” I said.

  “Don’t count on it,” Leonard said. “Hap’s got a black belt in meddlin’.”

  “Maybe your mom could stay at the store,” I said. “This is pretty, well, bleak, isn’t it?”

  “She won’t have it that way,” Tim said. “She wants her own thing. When her and Daddy divorced, she had to go to work in the lumber mill, like one of the other wage slaves. She got caught in some machinery. She lost a leg. Has an artificial one. Her hand … well, it was mashed flat. Looks like a goddamn Mickey Mouse hand. No shit. Mashed flat like a cartoon hand. Only it ain’t a cartoon. It’s ruined. She’s got where she ain’t exactly right. Gets worse every year. But she remembers being independent, and she doesn’t want to lose that. Sometimes, I think that’s all that holds her together, being independent.”

  “She sounded all right to me,” I said. “Ornery. But all right.”

  “This is one of her good days,” Tim said.

  “She’s damn sure got them Chihuahuas scoped out,” Leonard said.

  “You can’t put much stock in what she says,” Tim said. “She’d probably have been less upset if one of the Pentecostals had gotten cooked by the dog.”

  “I can understand that,” Leonard said. “Or maybe that’s the Jehovah’s Witnesses that bother me with the tracts and stuff, not the Pentecostals. I can’t get ’em straight.”

  “Listen here, guys,” Tim said. “I know you two and me ain’t buddies or nothing. Just met you. But I got to give a little advice, tell you that messin’ around in this town, a black guy and a white guy. It ain’t good. If something did happen to Florida, whoever done it might be willing to do it again. This thing with Florida, maybe you ought to forget it. Let the Chief handle it. He’s basically fair. Let him do your lookin’ for you.”

  “I’m not sure he’ll look that hard,” I said.

  “All right,” Tim said. “But you wake up one morning beside the road with your throat slit and Leonard hanging from a crab apple tree, and his dick cut off and in your mouth, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “I don’t want my dick in his mouth, cut off or attached,” Leonard said.

  “You should be so lucky,” I said.

  “All right, guys,” Tim said. “Have it your way.”

  We gave Tim some rent money for his mother, and he went away. When he was gone, I said, “Guess we shouldn’t have jacked with him. He was just concerned about us.”

  “Hell with him,” Leonard said. “Seems to me he’s awfully anxious for us to leave matters in the hands of that ruptured cop. I think he’s just worried he might get asked some questions. And hey, Bubba, let me give you some advice. Stay the hell out of everybody’s business.”

  “What?”

  “Stuff about his mama living at the store with him. That ain’t your problem.”

  “You’re the one thinks he’s a money-grubbing untrustworthy sonofabitch. So if he’s a sonofabitch, maybe he hasn’t thought about it.”

  “Just keep your mind on askin’ the insulting questions that pertain to Florida, and quit trying to take the world in to raise. I think that ole woman is just the way she wants to be, and that Tim’s just embarrassed by her, and he’s a selfish sonofabitch who’d take coins off her dead eyes to buy rubbers.”

  “Could be … man, she’s something, isn’t she. That story she told, about the Chihuahua. The Pentecostals. That’s horrible, don’t you think? Poor dog getting burned up like that.”

  “Terrible,” Leonard said, then pursed his lips and smiled a little. “But it’s kinda funny, you don’t know the dog personal like.”

  12

  We got our suitcases and sandwich makings out of the car, got soaked to the bone again. It had grown so dark outside, it seemed as if it ought to be bedtime.

  Inside, we changed into dry clothes and sat on the floor by one of the stoves and made sandwiches of meat and bread and no fixings. We balanced the food on our knees and ate slowly and drank soda pops. Outside, the storm grew stronger and squealed like a pig having its throat cut.

  When we finished eating we put the goods in the refrigerator, which was a filthy sucker and had a smell that refused to blend with the burnt dog, burnt wall, and pissed-on carpet. Its aroma was well sorted from the others, and equally overpowering.

  The rest of the afternoon we sat by the fire with used paperbacks we had brought, and read. We were sharing some old books written by Michael Moorcock under the name Edward P. Bradbury. They were pastiches of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and they were fast and fun and pretty mindless.

  Except for the odor, and the fact that over-forty-year-old bods have a little trouble sitting on the floor for an extended period of time without back aches and the legs going to sleep, it really wasn’t, all things considered, too unpleasant. It had been some time since I had just settled in with a book and read, especially books like these, and my mind and emotions were just right to believe them, eager to get away from crack houses, a
Chief of Police with swollen balls, and a missing woman I had once loved, and maybe still did a little.

  When I was a kid, I read a book like this, I became the main character, and the characters I liked were big and strong and fearless and always got the babe. I thought my life would go that way when I grew up.

  It hadn’t.

  But for a few hours I was away from what my life hadn’t been. Away from worry and reality. I was on another planet, fighting monsters with my fine, sharp sword. And I was winning.

  The pleasant feeling didn’t last. I finally fell out of the book and hit reality. I thought of Florida. I wondered how she was, and feared I already knew. The rain quit being pleasant. It had gone back to making me feel cold and wet and sad.

  When I looked up from my book, Leonard was looking at me. He said, “Hungry?”

  “Didn’t we just eat?”

  “About three hours ago.”

  We ate again, more out of boredom than anything else, then tried to read some more, but I had lost it. So had Leonard. He found a couple of blankets in the bedroom, put one over the couch itself and took the other for cover. He took the old worn cushion off the chair and tried to make a pillow out of it. He stripped down to his shorts and covered up and lay there and blew out his breath, which frosted and made a fast dissolving cloud. He said, “You know, it’s kind of funny, Raul not being around. I’d grown accustomed.”

  “I’m sorry, man.”

  “Me too. I reckon, thinking on it, I was kind of a jackass.”

  “That’s hard to imagine.”

  “Ain’t it? How do you put up with me?”

  “Guess ’cause you put up with me.”

  “Thing throws me is how we can be so close, and yet I can’t put together a relationship. You and me, we been through thick and thin. Been mad at each other. Gotten each other into shit—Naw, now that I think about it, it’s you gets me into shit.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said.

  “But here we are, two guys, friends, one straight and one gay, and we get along better with each other than we do with our chosen sex partners.”

  “Maybe it’s the sex throws a wrench in things. Soon as you start doing the two-bear mambo, like those bears on that special, it falls apart.”

  “I don’t know, those bears looked pretty happy.”

  “Yeah, but way it works in nature is the male bear loads the female bear with sperm, then he heads out, leaving the female bear to raise cubs by herself.”

  “That’s not nice.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “A little secret, Hap. When two guys fuck, neither of them gets pregnant.”

  “What I mean is, sex, one way or another, complicates things. I don’t know how, but it’s always in one way or another the turd in the stew.”

  “So you want to give it up?”

  “I may not have a choice, way things are going, but no, I don’t want to give it up. It’s been so long for me now, the bear on the National Geographic special got the right look in her eye, I’d mount up.”

  “So, except for determining that you’d fuck a bear, we’re no closer to solving the mystery of human and animal relations than we were five minutes ago.”

  “Maybe our friendship works out okay ’cause when I get tired of your shit, I go to the house till I get over it. I don’t feel obligated to be with you, and I don’t feel I’m deserting you if I go home. I have no sexual interest in you.”

  “That’s hard to believe, being the fine specimen of gay manhood that I am.”

  “I know, but it’s true. I also know we get sideways with one another, tomorrow, next day, everything’s gonna be okay. You’ll be there if I need you.”

  “You know, Hap, you’ve never sent me a valentine.”

  “Fuck you.”

  There was really very little to do with the rest of the day, and I was tired from the night before, so I went to the bedroom and got the remaining two blankets and lay down on the bed, but the odor of dog piss was too overwhelming. I flipped the mattress and there was the smell of Chanel No. 5.

  Florida.

  My head filled with her. Soft and dark and smart and sexy. I almost coveted the dog pee side. I lay there with the blankets over me, a thin pillow beneath my head, looked at the ceiling, picked out water spots, and listened to Leonard hum Country’s Greatest Hits. He did that sometimes when he couldn’t sleep, hummed tunes. Maybe that’s why Raul left him. That and no respect for Gilligan’s Island.

  Eventually the water spots darkened into one large shadow as the gloomy afternoon became early evening. Leonard’s humming became spaced, starting to drift off.

  My eyes began to fill with tears then, and I can’t honestly say if the tears were for Florida or for me. I had lost her and I wanted her back, and I knew that wasn’t going to happen, no matter what. I knew I should think of her and what might have happened to her, harness some new game plan for finding her, but I lay there instead and felt sorry for myself, and was angry, because some part of me was enjoying the sorrow, and maybe, just maybe, there was a bad part of me that barked and howled and said, “See what happens you leave me, baby? You die.”

  Oh, God, Florida.

  Don’t be dead.

  And then somewhere between all that and the sweet arid overwhelming smell of Chanel No. 5, and Leonard slow-humming “Walkin’ the Floor Over You,” I dropped off.

  The rain and wind beat and lashed the trailer and I could feel Florida beside me, and she was sweet with the scent of Chanel No. 5, and I reached to hold her, but couldn’t. She was as insubstantial as the shadows, and then I opened my eyes from the dream, and there she stood at the end of the bed, looking down at me. It was dark in there, but somehow I could see. I could see she was naked. She stood like some kind of harpy, her legs bent, her body leaning forward, her fine breasts swaying down, the nipples taut with the cold. Her hair glistened red with East Texas clay, and her lithe body was slick with it. Chunks of clay clung to her pubic thatch like dirt dauber nests.

  Then I realized not all the red was clay. Her head had a split in it, and some of the red that ran from her mound and down the inside of her thigh wasn’t slick clay at all.

  I tried to get up but couldn’t. She leaned farther forward and reached for me. I didn’t like the way her eyes looked. They looked cold and lifeless, like those of a fish in an ice chest.

  She opened her mouth, and clay fell out. She said, “Hap, you got to help me.”

  “I will, Florida. I will. God, we thought you were dead.”

  She laughed and clay sprayed from her mouth as if from a nozzle.

  Then I came awake, sat bolt upright, and there was Leonard sitting on the edge of the sagging bed. He reached out and touched my shoulder.

  “It’s okay, man,” he said. “It’s all right. Get your shit together.”

  I sat up in bed and pushed my back to the wall. “Damn,” I said. “I thought I saw Florida.”

  “I know. You called her name about a half-dozen times. Woke me up. You all right, buddy?”

  “Yeah. What time is it?”

  “I don’t know. Not too late.”

  “God almighty, I swear, that was as real a dream as I’ve ever had … Leonard, she’s dead, man. She was all covered in clay, like she’d been buried.”

  “She’s dead because you saw her dead in a dream? That don’t mean nothing.”

  “She’s dead because she is. Way dreams work is they put together what you know. She’s somewhere dead and buried, and you know it.”

  “You don’t know nothing.”

  “Yeah. Well tell me, what do you think?”

  “All right. I think she’s dead. I don’t think she drove up here and just dropped off the face of the earth. No one has seen her in a while. Last stop was here. Not like there’s lots of places to stay in Grovetown, so I don’t think she’s around. It don’t look good, Hap.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Thing is, this is all just how I feel. It isn’t worth anythi
ng.”

  “So what now?”

  “We came up here to find her, and we will. Dead or alive. First thing to do though, is tomorrow morning, call Hanson or Charlie. See they’ve heard anything from her. She may be back in LaBorde, and if so, Hanson probably hasn’t even told her we’re looking for her. He’s too busy making up with her, layin’ pipe.”

  “No, Leonard. He wouldn’t do that. She’s like a daughter to him. Remember.”

  “Yeah, right. I forgot.”

  “Damn, isn’t this one hell of a special Christmas?”

  “Yeah. Merry Christmas. Listen here, Hap. I ain’t been sleeping all that good. Cold in there and the sweet aroma of dog whiz is about to make me puke, then you yelling and all, but it’s also because I been thinking.”

  “Careful now. Don’t hurt yourself.”

  “Much as I hate it, we call and Hanson hasn’t heard anything, I think we got to go back to the Chief. Officially report Florida missing, set him on the case.”

  “What would he care?”

  “Guy like that, he may already know what happened to her. It’s not that I think he’ll find her, but he may do something gives us a lead to where she is. Or gives us an idea what happened to her. We want to push him a little. Make him nervous.”

  “You think he’s behind all this? Maybe head of the Knights of the Swollen Left Nut, or whatever they are?”

  “I don’t know. I’m clutching at farts, but we got to clutch at something. And speaking of that, I’m gonna go clutch at my blankets, and I’m coming back in here, and you and me are gonna share this bed.”

  “Oh God, Leonard, has my manly physique finally caused your hormones to bust the blood vessels to your brain?”

  “No, but I’m cold, and I figure we can share our blankets and some body heat.”

  “You make me so hot when you talk like that.”

  “Hap, you tell any of my friends I shared a bed with a heterosexual, even if it was just to keep warm, I’ll kill you. Thing like that got around, it could ruin my reputation. By the way, you wearing perfume?”

  “Florida,” I said. “It’s in the mattress.”

  “Oh.”