I had no idea who was driving and for an instant I didn’t care.I sort of thought I was on my way to the river bottoms where a rusty transmission would be tied around my feet, and I would be sent down to inspect the river mud for about three minutes, then it would all be over. A year from now, maybe two, some fisherman would snag his line on what was left of me, pull up my rotting head, call in the law, and dental records would reveal I had six cavities, was dead, and that I was Hap Collins.
When I felt strong enough to flip a whole loaf of bread over by myself without verbal encouragement, I turned my head and saw the driver.
It was the cook from the cafe. He wasn’t wearing his white hat, but he still had on his stained white shirt. He said, “You might as well go on and sleep. You took a hell of a beating.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You should have seen the other guy.”
“I seen them other guys, and compared to you two, they look pretty good.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
“Then again, Draighten and Ray don’t look so good. You gave them two a righteous ass-whuppin’. Bopped some eyes and mouths and noses on them others too. Hadn’t been so many of ’em, so crowded, I think you and your friend might have done some serious whup-ass. ’Course, I only sort of saw it in passin’. I went out the back when things got goin’ good, went over to the antique shop, told ’em to call the Chief, say there was a ruckus. That’s how come ole Officer showed up.”
“Thanks.”
“’Course, Officer might not be who you want to show up. He got connections with the Klan.”
“As does Jackson Brown?”
“Yep. They tied at the hip. Mr. Jackson, he’s the Grand Cyclops or some such shit for that bunch. They don’t call themselves Klan exactly, but that’s what they are. Ole Officer, he kinda in a spot. Even for Grovetown, he got to play by some rules. You best be glad all this didn’t happen out in the woods somewhere.”
“I hear that.”
“Did, ants be eatin’ your ass right now. In town, Officer got to keep the Chief happy some. Chief not someone gonna invite me over to his house to supper, but I reckon he’s good enough, it come down to business. He ain’t gonna stand by let something like that happen on purpose.”
“That’s good to hear. Thanks again.”
“Don’t give too big a thanks. Tore the cafe up too bad, I’d have lost my job. There by the skin of my teeth anyway. Cafe ain’t like a McDonald’s chain, you know? It loses money couple, three weeks in a row, it’s gone. Damages could make it gone quicker.”
“What about Leonard? Man that was with me?”
“Back seat. Now, you talk about a beatin’, he took it. You boys lucky you in pretty good shape.”
“Rose field work. Cheap food. No sex. Makes you strong.”
“My name’s Bacon, by the way.”
“Bacon?”
“Yeah, like in slices of.”
“Your mama named you Bacon?”
“My daddy. He always liked bacon, so he named me Bacon. I don’t think he liked me near good as bacon, though. Least not the way I remember it.”
I managed to turn and look in the back seat. Leonard was stretched out there, lying on his back, and he looked awful. His face appeared to be the end result of a radiation experiment. Had I not expected him, I don’t know I would have recognized him. His smashed straw hat lay over his crotch.
“He needs a doctor,” I said.
“Gonna get one. Wouldn’t no white town doctor gonna look at him. Not after they find out Mr. Jackson Brown was the one wanted y’all beat. Reason he got that hat with him like that, wasn’t no one wanted to put his dick in his pants.”
“That’ll slay him. He thinks his dick is his best feature.”
“Caliber, he got him two sticks and tried to do it, but he couldn’t do nothing but pick it up and move it left and right. Couldn’t get it to go inside the pants, and he wasn’t gonna touch it. Me neither. So we put that hat over him.”
“Very innovative. He’s lucky he’s still got a dick. That Brown fella didn’t mind touching it. Or cutting it.”
“I don’t think he really gonna cut it off. He knows how far he can push, and he can’t push that far. Not in town. Not all them witnesses, even if most of them deny they saw anything happen. They know someone got to pay. And if it’s somethin’ that bad, a ball-cuttin’ downtown, they only gonna lie so far.”
“In other words, they won’t go to the pen for Jackson Brown?”
“That’s right. But way it stands now, Chief ain’t gonna do nothin’ to that Mr. Jackson, even he wants to. Mrs. Rainforth—”
“Is that Maude?”
“Uh huh. She gonna say what happened, and her boys gonna say, but all them other people, they ain’t gonna say, ’cause they was in on it. Them two y’all whupped up bad. They’ll take the fall for all that ruckus. ’Cause that’s what they’re paid for.”
“Where are we going, and how come?”
“You goin’ to my place, least for a bit. And the reason how come is Mrs. Rainforth done paid me to do it. Said I should take you home and take care of you awhile. She’s paying me some extra.”
“So this isn’t out of the kindness of your heart?”
“I ain’t got nothing against you. I think what happened was a shame, but I wasn’t gettin’ paid, and wasn’t gettin’ Mrs. Rainforth’s blessing on this, you’d still be out there in that alley. ’Sides, my place only a little better than the alley.”
“And how come Mrs. Rainforth is doin’ this?”
“White ladies are hard to figure. She don’t like Mr. Jackson, for one. He owns most everything in town, wants to own the cafe, and she won’t sell, and on top of that, him and her husband, Bud, they hated each other. He’s dead now, but Mr. Jackson, he ain’t one to forget, and Mrs. Rainforth, she ain’t neither. It’s not she’s suddenly grown to like niggers, but then she don’t exactly hate nobody neither. She don’t like that kinda business come down on you two.”
“What about you? She like you?”
“Shit, boy. I’m the cook. I been there so long she don’t think about me one way or the other. I’m like furniture and … Wheeee! I tell you, mister … Who are you anyway?”
“Hap. Hap Collins.”
“I tell you, Mister Hap. We got to get you out of them piss-pants. You makin’ my eyes burn.”
19
There’s no other way to describe Bacon’s home other than to say it was a real shithole. It was down in a wash and the yard was full of water. Decorating the place like yard art was a worn-out washing machine, the lid up, the drum overflowing with beer cans. Near that, like a dead companion, a refrigerator lay on its side with the door off; its interior was nasty black with moss and grime and an abandoned bird’s nest.
Out to the side of the house I could see some kind of heavy machinery and a truck under a weathered tarp. There was just enough visible that I could tell that, but not enough to identify the machinery or the make of the truck.
Bacon coasted slowly through the water, drove right up to the front porch, which sagged a little and dripped water. Worse yet, it looked like the porch was holding the house up. The house looked to have been made mostly of plywood and suspicious two-by-fours pried off a burned-out building. The roof was primarily tin and the rest was tar paper and the water ran off it in great gushes.
Bacon got out, waded to the front porch, which drooped beneath his steps, and opened the front door. He went inside for a moment, came back, opened my door, said, “You gonna have to help me with watermelon head here, Mr. Hap.”
“I’m an injured man,” I said. “Couldn’t you carry me in and leave him here?”
Bacon grinned. “You sore. You banged, but you’re all right enough. They spent their steam on your buddy.”
“Thank God,” I said. “They could have hurt me.”
I eased out of the car into ankle-deep water. I felt as if someone had wrapped me in razor wire and set me on fire with a blowtorch. I found
I couldn’t completely straighten up. Bacon opened the back door, got Leonard under the arms and pulled him forward, out of the car. “Get his feet,” Bacon said.
“I just hope that damn hat don’t fall off his dick,” I said.
It was painful, but we got Leonard inside, carried him into one of the three small rooms—a bedroom. It was actually pretty cozy in there, considering there was no heat, and it looked a hell of a lot better than the exterior. One corner of the room sported a commode and a bathtub right out in the open. Half the room had carpet in it that might have once been beige, but was now greasy brown with a flecking of black spots that wasn’t design.
“The decor,” Bacon said, “is late slave or early nigger.”
I saw what Bacon had done when he went inside. He’d gotten a paint-splattered drop cloth and put it over the bed, and we put Leonard on top of that. There was a little heater in the corner of the room, and Bacon lit that while I took off Leonard’s shoes. Bacon got a couple of army blankets out from under the bed and laid them over Leonard without removing the hat from Leonard’s crotch.
We went back to the living room. It was small with a shelf of dust-covered knickknacks, a well-worn couch, a large space heater, and a coffee table bearing an ancient television set festooned with foil-covered rabbit ears. Bacon saw me looking at it. He said, “I didn’t have to eat regular, I’d get me a satellite dish.”
“Quit running yourself down,” I said. “I hurt too much to feel sorry for you.”
“You think I’m running myself down, then you full of shit. Don’t sit on the couch there till you get out of them piss-clothes.”
“What am I gonna do, sit around in the nude?”
Bacon disappeared into the bedroom, came out with a pair of khaki pants, some dry black socks, and a plaid shirt.
“You gonna have to let it all hang. I ain’t got no clean underwear.”
I went to the bedroom, moving slow, bent over like Quasimodo, and took off my clothes. There was a full-length mirror leaning against the wall, and I looked at myself in that. My face was swollen, there was dried blood on my upper lip and over my eyes, knots the size of Ping-Pong balls swelled out of my forehead, and there were great black-and-blue bumps and bruises all over my body. Even my balls were swollen and blue. I had to hold them with the palm of my hand to keep them from hurting as I stepped into the tub and cleaned myself. It was a painful ordeal. The hot water was slow to come and cooled quickly.
I put my pants and shirt in the tub with me, ran water over them, twisted the water out best I could, draped them over the faucets. The water that ran out of the tub didn’t go down a drain, it went straight to the ground. I could feel the cool air whistling up under the house, blowing through the tub’s drain. It was a simple approach to plumbing. Easy. Efficient. And a bad idea.
I got out and dried on a suspicious-looking towel and put on the clothes Bacon had given me. The pants were too long, so I cuffed them. The shirt was big and loose and felt good on my damaged body.
I went over to the commode to take a leak. The pot’s interior was dark with urine stains. It looked as if the last time it was clean was when it came out of the box. I pissed, and the piss was full of blood.
I’d had it happen before. It does that, you take good shots to the kidneys, but it was always scary to see.
I flushed, wondered if the contents of the toilet went straight to the dirt below the house along with that of the tub, then picked up my socks and shoes, stopped by the bed and looked at Leonard.
It was all I could do not to cry, he looked so bad. I touched him gently on the shoulder, went to the living room. I sat on the couch, put the socks and shoes beside it. I said, “What about this doctor?”
“He gonna be here,” Bacon said. “Mrs. Rainforth called him. Told him we was comin’. He live on the far side of here. Probably be a few minutes. If the rain’s worse on his side, he’s flooded out, who knows?”
The third room was a kitchen, but it was a room only by definition of containing a butane stove, a refrigerator, a sink, a table with chairs, and a large lard bucket that collected water dripping from a hole in the ceiling. There was a window over the sink, but a big square of warped ply board had been nailed over that. Bacon lit the greasy cook stove and the space heater, and the house, small as it was, began to warm.
Bacon said, “You gonna be here just a little bit, then I’m gonna run you off. I don’t want no trouble with them Ku Kluxers. You want some coffee?”
“Might as well. Jesus, I don’t know when I been hurt this bad and was still able to stand. I mean, I been hurt worse, but not in this way.”
I was thinking about being shot. That had been damn serious, and scary too. Leonard had been hit worse, and he almost lost a leg. But those times were not times I liked to think about often.I had a feeling this little escapade wasn’t going to be one of my top ten on memory lane either.
“You think you hurt now, give it a couple hours, tomorrow morning,” Bacon said. “You be stiff as a young bull’s dick, only not as happy. You know that was all a setup don’t you?”
“Back at the cafe?”
“Uh huh. They layin’ for you and the other’n. Mr. Hat Over His Dick.”
“Leonard,” I said.
“They just waiting for you to be where they want you, and I guess the cafe got as good as they could get. I think Mr. Jackson, him not liking Mrs. Rainforth had somethin’ to do with it too. He don’t go to the cafe. Never. Not even for coffee. Reckon he figured he was gonna shit off the papers, he oughta do it someone else’s place. Someplace where there was plenty of folks behind him. They don’t show a little support, they could lose jobs. ’Sides, I think they really liked beatin’ on y’all.”
“They did seem jovial. I would have thought he’d have picked a more private spot.”
“He might have. But I figure, right now, he just want to run you off ’cause you askin’ too many questions. He like to sport a little for the town too, keep showin’ ’em who’s boss. Show the law don’t worry him none.”
I lay down on the couch very carefully. It was damned uncomfortable and smelled musty. I turned my head and saw the shelf of dust-covered knickknacks. I said, “You don’t look like a man likes knickknacks.”
“Can’t live without them. I had my way, I’d have a room with them and nothing else. Especially they was ceramics of little kitties or ducks.… Them’s my wife’s.”
“Where is she?”
“Dead.”
“Hell, I’m sorry.”
“I ain’t. I been meaning to sack up that shit of hers for years,throw it out, but I just ain’t had the time. Ain’t got no milk, want some sugar in yours?”
“Just black,” I said.
“Way I like my women,” he said. He brought the coffee in, said, “Sit up, man, I got to have some room. ’Sides, I got a program to watch. I like the noon news. I like to know who’s killin’ who.”
“I’m injured here.”
“Sit up anyway.”
I managed myself to a sitting position, slid down to the far end of the couch and took the coffee he was offering me. “Thanks,” I said.
“Don’t make nothing of it. I was gonna fix me some anyway.”
Bacon turned on the television, adjusted the rabbit ears for a while, did everything with them except tie them in a knot, but he didn’t get a picture. Just snow.
“Shit,” he said, and turned off the set. “Guess we got to talk.”
“Do you think Jackson Brown did it? Hung the fella in the jail?”
“Bobby Joe? If ever anybody needed hangin’, it was that sonofabitch.”
“He’s certainly popular around here. I haven’t talked to anyone liked him.”
“Nothing to like. I enjoyed puttin’ him down.”
“Come again.”
“I buried that fool. Dug the hole for him, anyway. I do back-hoe work, I’m asked. Make a little on the side, digging ditches, sewer lines, and graves. Gotta stay on top of stuff, you gonna
make ends meet.”
Now I knew what kind of machinery was under the tarp.
“Well, do you think Brown did it?”
“He may not have done it himself, but he probably behind it, ’cause I don’t think Bobby Joe hung himself. I think he con that white sonofabitch down here with that music business, thinking he gonna get big money out of him, then Bobby Joe got drunk, and didn’t think it through, decided to go for the short change. Just killed him for what he had in his wallet. Bobby Joe like that. Mean as ass rash. He might just thought it would be funny to see that peckerwood squirm. You know how they found that white man?”
“No.”
“Hung by his heels from a tree with his throat cut.”
“Damn. Taking another angle on the subject, thing we came here for, Bacon, reason we ended up takin’ this beatin’, is we’re trying to find a woman.”
“What man ain’t?”
“A certain woman. Named Florida. Good-lookin’ young black woman, came here not long back? You saw her, you’d remember her.”
“That black fox? Shoot, she here fifteen minutes, everyone knew it. Every hard dick in niggertown was after her, and the peckerwoods was watchin’ too. I was still able to trot, I’d have been after her.”
“She was interested in the Soothe case. She was here to look into it. Do you know what happened to her?”
“She a fool. Come down this side of town talking about how she wanted to maintain Bobby Joe Soothe’s legacy, like he had one. It was ole L.C. had the legacy. Bobby Joe could pick a guitar some, but he was a scum hole, and a scum hole don’t deserve no legacy, ’sides that hole I dug for ’m. If’n he’d a takin’ up preachin’, he’d have been the perfect villain. As was, he once cut up his nephew.”
“I heard that story.”
“Hear about the German shepherd?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that ain’t true. That ole dog was part collie.”
“I don’t suppose you caught the dog’s name?”
“Ralph. Tell you another one. Bobby Joe, he goin’ to one of the joints, and he stepped in some cat shit by the door. Fella owns the joint, he got all kinds of cats. Don’t really take good care of ’em none. Just lets ’em run wild. Throws a little food out the back, and well, them cats ain’t spayed, and next to a rat and rabbit, ain’t nothing likes to fuck better’n a cat. So they always makin’ baby cats. Cat shit all over that place. Bobby Joe, he did his drinkin’ there ’cause everyone was scared of him, and he liked that. He liked to go a place where people was afraid of him. Made him feel like a big dick. Anyways, he steps in this cat shit, and you know what he does?”