“Yeah,” I said.
“Clinton is gonna be seriously fucked up.”
“Yeah.”
“Poor Ella.”
“Yep,” Leonard said. “Poor Ella. Know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think the worst is over.”
“You’re talkin’ about our lives,” I said. “Seems to me you’re being foolishly optimistic. Every time we turn around, we’re openin’ up a can of worms.”
Leonard clapped me on the shoulder. “It’s all right, man. We’re both gonna be all right. Big Man had a falling-out with Pierre, took care of Pierre, so Pierre’s no longer a problem. Big Man won’t have any interest in us now. It’s just a matter of time before the law runs him aground. Guy looks like that can’t hide forever. As for King, well, we turn in the tapes to Charlie, and let Charlie sort stuff out. We’ve done all we can do.”
“Reckon so,” I said.
“You know, today’s been different.”
“That’s an understatement.”
“No, I mean it’s been me keepin’ you from goin’ off half-cocked. Usually, it’s the other way around.”
“That’s what’s bothering me,” I said. “I came within an inch of killing a man for no reason other than anger and suspicion. One squeeze of the trigger, I’d have been no better than Big Man, Pierre, or the rest.”
“On your worst day, you’re better than all of them,” Leonard said. “You’d killed King, it wouldn’t have hurt my feelin’s.”
“Leonard, sometimes you scare me.”
Jim Bob went inside to pay for the gas.
I said, “He doesn’t seem particularly perturbed, does he?”
“I have a feeling that weird fuck has seen more bodies and strange shit than we have, Hap.”
“All I know is I feel like my life has been poisoned. I come home from a shitty job, get bit by a rabid squirrel, find out my insurance policy sucks the dog dick and my best friend is accused of murder.”
Leonard nodded. “I know. One day I’m living with this guy I love, next thing I know he’s run off with a grease ball, then Raul’s killed, and I find out he was a grease ball himself. It’s pretty disconcerting. I thought I could choose my men better than that.”
“Considering my fuck-ups with women, I can’t say much,” I said.
“You’re right,” Leonard said. “You can’t.”
“I think Brett might be different. I want to believe she is. I want to believe I’m different. That I’ve changed. That I’m not quite so stupid.”
“Well,” Leonard said, “Brett strikes me as one hell of a lady. As for you, howsabout we not hope for too much?”
30
Couple days later, as reinforcement, I phoned Charlie and told him most of what I knew, holding very little back. The cops had already been to Pierre’s and had found the videos. There were videos without face bars on them as well, so most of the people involved in the sorry business could be identified.
“I want to thank you and Leonard for the stuff you stuck in my mailbox, Hap.”
“What stuff?”
Charlie laughed. “All right. Play it that way. But some helpful sonofabitch put two videos and a notebook full of coded phone numbers in there. One video is about grease, the other is about sex and violence.”
“Does it help any?”
“Doesn’t hurt. Fact is, this is one time where an entire ring of assholes is gonna get nailed. A few of the bikers involved won’t get pinned, ’cause there ain’t enough proof, but there’s a string of video-store owners right now whose assholes are suckin’ wind. I hate to give you any fuckin’ credit, but you and Leonard can be proud of yourselves on this one.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but at what price?”
“At the price had to be paid,” Charlie said. “You could have done better. You should have had the law in on it, but the law wasn’t worth a shit on this one. You did all right, Hap. You and Leonard and Jim Bob. There’s anyone ought to feel bad, it’s the law.”
“Long as you don’t,” I said. “Your hands were tied.”
“I ought not to have let them been tied,” Charlie said. “I don’t know I’m thinkin’ clear as I ought to be.”
“Can you keep mention of me and Leonard out of this?”
“Yeah. We can use Jim Bob a little. He don’t mind and it won’t hurt him like it might hurt you. He was hired to do a job, you see, even if being a private detective don’t exactly make everything he did legal.”
“Maybe you could drop the two boys in the cabin,” I said.
“We found them fellas,” Charlie said. “One I thought I knew I did know. The other one’s got a record long as the other. Scumbags, both. We’re gonna blame it on Pierre. That way Jim Bob isn’t put on the spot, and neither are you.”
“Pierre wasn’t the kind to do his own handiwork,” I said.
“Maybe, but we’re gonna make it look like he was.”
“That’s not very nice,” I said.
“No,” Charlie said, “and it ain’t even legal.”
“What about Jim Bob?” I said. “Haven’t seen him since the day we found Pierre with a length of fence up his ass. He didn’t say ’bye or kiss my ass, he dropped us off and was gone.”
“That’s his way. Saw too many Lone Ranger movies when he was a kid. He’s gone back to Pasadena. His job was finished. He can tell his client the stalk-and-rape ring is busted and he can go back to farmin’ hogs and waitin’ for the next job.”
“What about Hanson?”
“I been over to see him, Hap. He’s doin’ pretty goddamn good. Amazing, actually. He gets better, I’ll tell him all this shit. He’d want to know.”
“What about Big Man Mountain?”
“Still hasn’t turned up. He took off in Pierre’s red Mercedes.”
“That ought to show up.”
“My guess is he dumped it right away, caught a bus to someplace hot and dry.”
“Right now, Texas is hot and dry.”
“Drier yet. Mexico.”
“I don’t know I should ask, but how about the wife?”
“We’re separated, Hap. I think maybe it won’t work out, know what I’m sayin’?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s seein’ this fuckin’ insurance guy kind of regular-like. Did I tell you he smokes?”
“Yeah.”
“Sonofabitch,” Charlie said.
“I hear that,” I said.
* * *
Ella was buried the next day. I went to the funeral with Brett. Day after that, Leon was put down. Leonard and I got together, made a deal to pay for his funeral. Doing that tapped me out, but it didn’t matter.
It was a hot day with a hot wind and the striped funeral tent rustled as the preacher talked a hot wind of his own. Leon got as good a sendoff as a launch party for the dead can be, considering, as is often the case, the minister who preached the sermon didn’t know him from creamed corn.
Later, when me and Leonard and Brett walked with Clinton out to his car, he said, “Wouldn’t none of that stuff preacher said about Leon true.”
“It’s just the way it’s done,” Brett said.
“Yeah,” Clinton said, “well, they ought to do it some other kinda way. They made Leon all out to be this suit-type man. Shit, I’m gonna miss my bro.”
“I’m sorry, Clinton,” I said. “It’s sort of my fault.”
“More like mine since I asked you and Leon to help out,” Leonard said.
“And mine,” Brett said. “He was helping me.”
“No, it ain’t y’all no kind of way,” Clinton said. “It’s that sonofabitch killed him’s fault. Me and Leon, we knew what we was gettin’ into. You folks hang tough.”
Clinton, trying to hold his head up and stay solid, climbed in his car and clattered away.
“I got to tell you,” Brett said. “I first met those two, I thought they were just a couple of ignorant thugs. I think now they’re better than most of the educated peo
ple I know.”
“Leon and Clinton,” Leonard said, “they invented grit. I’m gonna miss ole Scum Eye. He was a stand-up guy.”
Brett took us both by the arms. “So are you two guys,” she said. And with her holding our arms, we walked down to my pickup and drove away from the hot wind and the striped funeral tent, the headstones rising up sad and white and gray.
* * *
Next few days weren’t so bad. Things started to sort themselves out. I got a job at a club, bouncing. The pay wasn’t much, but I figured I could do it for a week or two until I found something else. Only thing was, I didn’t start for a couple of days, and I was dead broke.
Brett soothed that. She managed to take some time off from work, even if she didn’t have it coming. We spent a lot of time together, at her place and mine, getting to know each other better, and from my end I certainly liked what I had come to know.
Brett coming out to my house changed the place. She couldn’t stand the way I did things, so she did it her way, and I liked her way better. The dishes were cleaner and neater and the house smelled better. The gym-sock stink in the bathroom was gone and the mold was off the shower curtain.
’Course, Brett made me do all the work to get the place in shipshape condition, and she was one hell of a D.I. I figured next thing coming was I’d have little wooden plaques with slogans on them hanging over the kitchen sink and the bathroom shitter.
On a hot Sunday morning, two weeks after all hell had gone down, the sky began to darken and threaten rain. By eleven A.M. the heat was dissipating and the air turned cool. I got up and opened all the windows. In the distance, in the dark clouds, lightning bolts hopped and squirmed as if mating.
Brett and I had spent a large portion of the morning in bed, making love, and now we were in the kitchen. Brett was wearing one of my T-shirts, and she sure did it more justice than I could have, especially since that was all she was wearing. I liked to watch her move, leaning over the sink, messing with pots and pans, trying to find something in the cabinet worth fixing for lunch.
I was in deck shoes, torn jeans and a black T-shirt so faded it looked the color of ancient cigarette ash. I washed my hands and surveyed the interior of the refrigerator. It was as lonesome in there as Custer on the Little Big Horn.
“Hap,” Brett said, “even I can’t make a meal out of this stuff, and I can toast shit and bricks and make you happy. This calls for severe action. I’m gonna go to town and buy some grub.”
“I’d offer you money, but I don’t have any.”
“Hell, I know that.”
“I’ll pay you back when I get my first check.”
“You can buy me a meal.”
Brett darted into the bedroom, pulled on a dress and shoes, bounced out of there with my truck keys. I stood on the porch and waved. She wasn’t gone thirty seconds before I took notice of the sky. It had changed. The air was neither cool nor hot. I felt as if I was in the middle of a bowl, and the sky, which had gone green, was gradually descending on me. I knew the signs. Tornado.
I wished I had noticed before Brett drove away. Now there was nothing I could do but stand there in the eerie silence, wondering if it would happen, wondering if she would be okay. A car on the road is not a good place to be during a tornado.
I watched to see if a funnel might be forming. The clouds were nervous, though not as nervous as me. They rolled and twisted and at times I fancied I could see them dipping down like the bottom part of a blackened snow cone, but in the next moment it looked like nothing more than a wispy black cloud.
I decided to pour myself a cup of coffee, sit on the front porch and keep an eye on things. Weather turned sour and the sky skipped down, I was going to make a run for the bathroom and my tub, supposedly one of the safest places you could be during a tornado, if for no other reason than the plumbing is rooted deep into the ground. But of course there was really no safe place to be during a tornado, unless it was someplace where the tornado wasn’t.
Before I got back to the front porch, the rain came, blowing hard, and there was a sudden blast of hail so ferocious I couldn’t stay on the porch. Sitting there was like being a victim of a biblical stoning.
I rushed inside, shaking the rain off of me, listening to it blow at a slant under the porch and slam the wall. A chunk of ice literally the size of a baseball crashed through the window behind the couch, flew over it, slammed against the floor and bounced and hit a chair in the kitchen, thudded back into the living room, rolled to the middle of the floor.
I turned to look at the broken window. Rain and smaller chunks of hail were slamming against it now, and I heard another glass go in the bedroom. It was eerie, the wind blowing that way, pushing the hail straight before it. If this wasn’t a tornado, it would damn sure do until the real thing showed up.
I was thinking about pouring another cup of coffee and nesting in the bathtub with a flashlight and a book and one ear cocked for wind. Anything to get my mind off the storm and Brett being in it. But I didn’t do that. I guess it was people like me that waited until the last minute and were taken away by the wind. Instead I went to the side window of my living room and glanced out. Trees were bending way too far, and I saw lightning leap out of the sky and smack one like an insolent teenager, knocking pine bark and needles a-flying.
When I turned around the back door jumped away from the wall with an explosion of busted lock, and I thought, goddamn, the twister’s got me, but then I saw it was a human tornado.
Big Man Mountain. He came quickly into the room. He was wearing jeans and a filthy white T-shirt and his clod-hopper boots. He was soaked with rain and it ran off of him in great rivulets and pooled quickly at his feet. He looked like hell. He was pale as Casper the Ghost.
I thought about my gun, back in my bedroom in the nightstand drawer, and I started to run for it, but Big Man came through the open kitchen and into the living room at a rush. I braced myself to fight, but he leaped up and twisted and shot out both feet and hit me with a drop-kick that flung me across the room and into the front door with a sound like someone dropping a dead blowfish on the dock. It hurt like a sonofabitch. I tried to get up but didn’t have any wind in me. Big Man had hold of me and lifted me over his head as if I were a sack of flour, tossed me back onto the floor. I tried to curl my body and duck my chin, roll with the fall, but it still hurt like hell.
Next thing I knew, Big Man had me by the head and was yanking me around and whirling me onto the couch. I came to a sitting position and shot out my foot as he came at me, scored a good one on his chin. He went back and I came up and he swung and I went under and struck out with a knee that caught him in the thigh, and it was a good shot, right on that point in the thigh that makes you wish it was someone else’s leg, even your mother’s. I whipped my arm around and hammered him in the kidneys, slid in behind him, tried to grab him in a stranglehold. But this wasn’t smart. That was his game.
Big Man grabbed my arm, bent forward suddenly, and I found myself flying. I landed on the couch again, facedown. I tried to get up but took a kick in the ass, right above the blow hole, right there on the tip of the spinal cord. I went out, and when I awoke I was in hell.
I was on the couch, sitting. My feet were tied with a twisted coat hanger and my wrists were bound behind my back with what I figured was the same. At my back the wind and small pellets of ice whirled through the broken glass and smacked the back of my head, neck, and shoulders. The couch was soaked with cold rain.
Big Man had pulled a chair up in front of the couch and he was looking at me. To his right he had placed another chair. On the chair, from my cabinets and closets, were a variety of items. Straightened coat hangers, a butcher knife, a corkscrew, pliers, and an ice pick. There was also a glass of water and a bottle of aspirin.
Big Man had taken his shirt off, and he was a massive hunk, with a big solid belly and a hairy chest and arms that looked like knotted ship cables. On his right lower arm was a large festered wound. His face was oily
and covered with sweat beads the size of his own knuckles, which were considerably larger than diesel truck lug bolts. He was holding his head up with difficulty. His breathing was bad. His face had gone from pale to blue, but not as blue as his lips. His eyes were scummy around the edges and the whites were no longer whites, but reds. In his left hand he held a Swiss Army knife open to the spoon.
“I was thinking of your eyes,” he said. “I thought they might be a good place to start. But I’m having second thoughts. I say let you see what there is to see until the very last.”
“There’s no reason to do this, Big Man,” I said. “It’s all over. You did Pierre in yourself. What’s the point?”
Big Man smiled at me. His teeth appeared not to have been cleaned in ages. They were yellow, with brown roots that were probably from chewing tobacco.
“The point is completion,” Big Man said. “No one believes in completion anymore. I do. I finish what I start. I was paid to do you in, get a video and a book, and now I’m here to do just that. I could have done the nigger, but you worked out better. I been hiding in the woods. You’re easier to get to here. You, the nigger, the cunt, it don’t matter, long as I come up with what I set out to come up with. The book. The video.”
“It’s over, Big Man.”
Big Man shook his head. “No. The other night was left undone, Mr. Collins, but as you can see, here we are again.”
“You did your job, man. Pierre isn’t here to pay you anymore. You’re not obligated.”
“He hired me. He didn’t pay me. I had to extract some vengeance for that. I took a little money from him, a few items I could sell. Nothing that drastically exceeded what was owed me for the job I had done so far. He wanted to not pay me because I didn’t get the video and the book. He wasn’t giving me enough time. Jesus, you know, Collins, I feel like shit.”
“Big Man. Listen. The notebook, the videos. The cops have them.”
“You said that before.”
“And I lied, but this time it’s true. It’s all over. I wasn’t trying to blackmail anyone. That wasn’t my purpose.”