Vanilla Ride

  She was dressed in jeans and sneakers and had on a big sweater and a sweater cap that her hair stuck out from under like a flaming waterfall. The bus depot had very few people in it, and we sat down on a bench. A bus depot is one of the loneliest places in the world, and it doesn’t help when the bench you’re perched on is near the restrooms and they stink of recent trips, and when people walk out, the tile, dampened by urine and bad flushes, makes a sound like someone pulling duct tape off a hairy dog’s ass.

  We sat for a while, the sun rising higher and eating away at what was left of the darkness, and then we heard a bus come and they called it over the speaker. It was Brett’s ride. I walked her out. There were others getting on, and we stepped back and let them. She had a small bag with her. It had a few clothes and her toiletries in it, a book and some magazines. She set it down by her feet like a trained pet.

  “Well,” she said, “don’t get yourself killed.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Promise? For me?”

  “Hell, I promise for me and you.”

  “Cross your heart?”

  “Big-time,” I said, and crossed my heart.

  “Make sure Leonard doesn’t get killed either.”

  “You got it.”

  “I guess you can kind of watch out for Jim Bob and Tonto.”

  “All right.”

  “It’s hard to know about Tonto, isn’t it?”

  “So far,” I said.

  “He’ll always be hard to know. I can promise you that. You all have screws missing, all of you, but he’s like an empty parts house. It’s not just the screws that are gone, but all manner of stuff.”

  “I think you’re right,” I said.

  “Marvin, he’ll be all right at home, won’t he?”

  “Sure. Wherever he ends up, he’ll be okay.”

  I wasn’t sure of that, and she knew I wasn’t sure, but it was a little game we were playing. I saw a tear in her eye and I took hold of her and we held each other, and finally we kissed, and she took up her bag and gave me a smile and started to get on the bus. I patted her butt. She said, “Why, thank you.”

  I laughed and she got on the bus.

  I stood there until I saw her take her seat, and then I still couldn’t go, so I stood there until she turned to smile at me. She looked as if she was about to bust out crying, which was exactly how I felt. I watched until the bus started to move and she lifted a hand, and I waved back. Then with a turn of the corner and a fart of exhaust, the bus and Brett were gone, on their way out to Arizona.

  It was solid daylight when I drove over to the cop shop and went inside and asked for Drake. I was lucky. He was in. The dispatcher picked up a line and Drake appeared and gave me a not-so-friendly drag of the hand, indicating I should follow him.

  We went along the hall and passed the booger-lined room with the greasy mirror, turned into another room with a long table and some chairs and a counter with a pot of coffee brewing and a couple boxes of doughnuts holding court next to them.

  Drake went over and picked up the pot of coffee and poured some into a Styrofoam cup, asked if I wanted any. I looked at the coffee. It was thick and very dark, like sewer sludge.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  Drake got a couple of doughnuts out of one of the boxes and put them on a napkin. He didn’t ask me if I wanted a doughnut. He went over to the table and set the doughnut-laden napkin on the table and set the coffee beside it, then put his ass in a chair and crossed his legs. I sat across from him.

  “You know,” he said, “I’m the unluckiest man in the world. I wasn’t supposed to be working this shift. I wasn’t working it, I wouldn’t have you.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I thought you and me, there was a kind of spark, you know.”

  “No spark,” he said. “What do you want?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “These FBI guys, this all on the up-and-up?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, they gonna keep their part of the bargain if we help them out?”

  “I assume the ‘we’ you refer to is you and Leonard, ’cause it sure isn’t me and it definitely isn’t the department. We got nothing to do with this.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I mean.”

  “I have no idea what they’ll do,” he said, sipping coffee, pausing to bite into a doughnut. “The FBI, they do their thing and we do ours. Unfortunately, sometimes the things clash.”

  “Just like sex.”

  “No. There’s no fun in it. Not even a little bit. All I can say is Hirem knows all manner of stuff the FBI would love to know, and it’s stuff worth them knowing, but I got no love for them FBI boys. They come in here like we’re dog mess on the bottom of their shoes, like they’re the goddamn ghosts of J. Edgar Hoover hisself.”

  “If they were the ghosts of Hoover,” I said, “they’d be wearing dresses.”

  “What?”

  “He was supposed to be a transvestite. You know, transvestites put on dresses. I think he was gay too.”

  “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “Oh yeah. Big-time.”

  “Huh? I’ll be damned.”

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “You’re sure about that dresses thing?”

  “That’s the story. I’m not sure about anything.”

  “I’ll be damned. Hadn’t heard that.”

  I let him contemplate. He said, “You know, considering how Hoover was, the way these guys act, that’s kind of funny.”

  “Yep. But about the FBI guys …”

  Drake shrugged. “What I can tell you is, if they’re wanting you to do something like this, it’s more than an ask. It’s a kind of push, and it might be a lot nastier than you think. It might be worse than a trial and a jury. But if you’ve come to me to know more about them, more about what they want, you’re in the wrong place. I understand you defended yourself, you and Leonard and Brett. But I can’t feel good about citizens doing what you done and all you get is a slap on the wrist. I don’t buy you were just driving around armed to the teeth and they came out of nowhere and decided to kill you.”

  “It was still self-defense.”

  “I guess it was, but some of them were shot in the back of the head.”

  “They were shooting at me, and I didn’t want them to get up again,” I said. “Shooting them in the back of the head was a way to assure that.”

  “I still don’t like it, and I don’t like the idea of Hirem getting a light sentence by getting you guys to do something I’m pretty sure is against the law but is done in the name of the law. I know that’s the game, but it’s a game that stinks and I don’t have to like it.”

  I sat there for a moment and said nothing.

  “I don’t know what you thought I could tell you,” Drake said.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I guess I was looking for some reassurance.”

  Drake shook his head. “Can’t offer you any. You might call your mother, you want that.”

  “She’s dead,” I said.

  “There you go, shit out of luck. All I know is these guys want to help Hirem’s son out and get some money back, and I got no idea what you’ll have to do to make that happen. I don’t know what they’re asking, and I don’t want to know. I’m just a simple cop, one level above working parking tickets and jaywalkers. I come in here and do my job and see some nasty stuff I’d rather not see, then I got to go home to the family and act like it don’t bother me and that I didn’t bring it home with me. Like there’s nothing more I’d like to do than have a picnic or go to a movie. But all the time I’m thinking about murders and dope deals and some penny-ante shit too, and I can’t ever let it go. Not really. I’m making love to the wife, I remember having to deal with some rape, or a rape and murder, and that doesn’t exactly make me hard as the Rock of Gibraltar, and then I got to fake an orgasm and act like things are cool. ’Cause I tell her what’s on my mind, that’s worse. We aren’t exactly Houston
here, but we got our crime and it’s a lot more consistent than you think, and there’s plenty for me to handle without having to think about you and the FBI. So, again, for you, I got nothing. Not even a doughnut, so quit eyeing them. About all I can give you, and I do it reluctantly, is my most sincere heartfelt go fuck yourself. I got absolutely no sympathy for you or Leonard. You’re always into something, and I’m sick of it. Around here, they call you the Disaster Twins, and the way I look at it, you keep coming up with crap on your shoes it’s because you keep steppin’ where you ought to not be steppin’. I don’t care if down deep in your hearts you have good intentions and you’re after the same bad guys I’m after. It is not your job, and I don’t give a damn if you and Leonard are fucking Francis of Assisi in your souls, I am goddamn sick of all of it.”

  I sat for a moment not saying anything. Drake gnawed at a doughnut like he was biting my throat out.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m glad we had this time together, and thanks for nothing.” I got up and went out.

  27

  Tonto’s black van was nicer inside than it looked on the outside and it was very large and souped up under the hood and had big wide tires with tread deep enough to lose a quarter in. I wasn’t one of those guys who could talk about cars or fix them up or identify everything on the road. I had always been practical about cars. I wanted them to start and drive me around, get me where I was going and start up when I left. It was considered a Southern failing not to know this kind of thing, the insides of cars, all their clicks and sparks and little growls. All the men I knew who were car buffs, and that was most, looked at me as if not knowing about cars was the equal to not knowing about sunrise and sunset. So when Tonto told me about his van and what it had under the hood and what it could do, I forgot it faster than I forgot the combination to my old high school locker. But I remember this: Tonto claimed his van could run a Corvette down and bitch-slap it, which seemed a little much to me, but it did hum down the road with a sound like a hive of bees. The scenery tossed past us in a blur and we zipped past cars like they were nailed down. I had to admit it was some machine. In that van I felt like one of the Scooby Doo gang. I was probably Scooby himself. A big dumb dog without a dick.

  The van had three rows of really comfortable seats and a place in the back to put some luggage and gear, and under the floor carpets and beneath sliding floorboards were secret compartments where we put our weapons, except for the ones we were carrying, which in my and Leonard’s case was nothing more than a pocketknife (me) and a pack of gum (Leonard) and we both had combs. Mine was green, Leonard’s was black. Tonto still had his good-buddy .45s under his armpits, and Jim Bob had a snub-nosed .38 holstered at the small of his back and a clasp knife clipped inside his front pocket and a nut sack packed tight with testosterone.

  Marvin had stayed at my house with a shotgun and a cup of coffee. His job was to watch the home front, keep close to the phone in case we needed something he could provide. We gave him directions to where we were going to meet up with the FBI and Hirem, and from there our plan was to keep him informed as we went, because we didn’t know what our plan really was, not yet. With Marvin at the house, we always had a home base. It was a good idea, I thought, and a way to keep him a part of things since he couldn’t do much else with that bum leg.

  The day was clear and cold and the sky had turned a bright polished blue and the sun was a yellow blaze hanging at the ten o’clock position. I was sitting in the passenger seat, Tonto drove, behind me was Jim Bob, and next to him was Leonard. Tonto had a CD cranked up, and we listened to Jerry Lee Lewis’s greatest hits as he tooled us along, nodding his head to the music like a bobblehead doll.

  When the CD played out, and before he could put in another, I said to Tonto, “That your real name?”

  He didn’t turn to look at me, said, “Nope.”

  “Guess you don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Nope.”

  “Hokeydoke.”

  I leaned back in the seat and Jim Bob said, “Hap, I had a woman like the one you got, I’d just go to court and take the jail time. You could get your ass killed, and what for?”

  “I could ask you a similar question. You could get your ass killed and your hog farm would go to hell,” I said.

  “Sold all the hogs, and they wouldn’t hold a candle to Brett.”

  “Okay, we agree on that. Brett is better than hogs, and you could get yourself killed easy as any of us.”

  “Yeah, you’re right about that, though I always assume I’m going to come out on top and it’s the other guy who’ll wind up with the stick in his ass. But you know, lately I’m starting to think maybe it could go the other way. It’s a new kind of feeling and I’m not too fond of it. I never feel like I really belong anywhere. I think a lot about a line in a Frank O’Hara poem that goes ‘I’m always tying up and then deciding to depart.’ Story of my life.”

  “You read poetry?” Leonard said.

  “Just when I’m tired of masturbating,” Jim Bob said. “My reading poetry shock you?”

  “That you can read shocks me,” Leonard said.

  “So, if you can read and have a way to while away the hours, why are you doing this?” I asked.

  “We got a kind of connection,” Jim Bob said. “We’re part of a rare kind of club.”

  “That right?”

  “Yeah,” Jim Bob said. “It’s made up of guys who think the world ought to work smooth and people ought to treat each other right, and when they don’t we go out there and try and fix things and every time we do, we change us into them, and yet we keep hoping and we keep trying and maybe one day we’ll realize we’ll never get it right and we’ll just give in. I don’t know. I sound like a tired philosopher.”

  “You sound like I feel,” Tonto said.

  “I think you’re reading your books backwards,” Leonard said.

  “Again, why are you doing it then?” I asked.

  “There aren’t many of us left, Hap, and I’m trying to keep you from becoming totally one of us by taking in the slack I don’t want you to handle. It’s not my job and it shouldn’t matter, but Leonard here, he can’t do it alone. You aren’t a delicate flower, my man, but there’s still something of the hopeful in you and I’d hate to see all of that get sucked out. Probably too late for the rest of us.”

  “You don’t know me,” Tonto said.

  “Oh, yes I do,” Jim Bob said.

  Tonto didn’t argue back. Jim Bob said, “Hap, you ought to be a social worker, not a tough guy. You’re tough enough, but your heart isn’t in it. Soiled as you are, underneath the dirt there’s pretty good linen.”

  “I keep telling him that,” Leonard said. “That he’s soiled, I mean. I don’t know about the linen part.”

  “And you,” Jim Bob said to Leonard. “Shouldn’t you be home too? Ain’t you got you a boyfriend? You’re a little farther gone on the scale, but at least you’ve got some sense of normalcy going on, got a relationship going.”

  Leonard sighed. “Actually, it’s on the fence.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “Why do you really do it?” I said to Jim Bob. “I think you’re dodging the question.”

  “Man, this is like getting in touch with our feelings, isn’t it?” Jim Bob said. “I told you why.”

  “It isn’t about me, and you know it,” I said. “I see you only now and then. What about the rest of the time? Why do you damn near get yourself killed on a regular basis? Private gun for hire, that kind of thing. Let’s expand that question beyond you, my good man. What the fuck is wrong with all of us? And it’s got to be more than just wanting to set the world right.”

  “Too many cowboy movies,” Leonard said.

  “All right,” Jim Bob said. “Here it is. I do it because if I don’t I’ve got nothing but myself, and though I dearly love myself, I’m a little tired of being me right now. Sometimes I feel like I’m laughing in the dark all by my goddamn self, because I am, and what I got to sh
ow for it is a paid-off house with no one in it, not even a dog, because I’m gone too much and when I’m gone I can’t see a whole lot of reason to race back. I had a woman like you got, Hap, I’d hold on to her until the crack of goddamn doom. Can you understand that?”

  “I wish life was that simple,” I said.

  “I’d just like to come home and have John there,” Leonard said. The words sprang from his mouth like an escaped prisoner.

  “You’ve talked to him?” Jim Bob said, pushing his hat back on his head.

  “I’ve tried.”

  “Leonard’s idea of talking,” I said, “is telling people how it is. Not the same thing as a true discussion. The signal of his love for John was that he climbed up in the bed and shit in it.”

  “Yuck,” Jim Bob said. “I wouldn’t like that.”

  “Yeah, he took it hard,” Leonard said. “I’m just not a talker about some things, you know. Not like you share-your-feelings guys.”

  “So you go straight to shitting in the bed?” Jim Bob said.

  “It’s a statement,” Leonard said. “And I’ll have you know, at the bottom of it all I’m a sensitive motherfucker.”

  Tonto, who had been listening quietly, watching the road, said, “Hey, Leonard, were you saying you’re queer?”

  “The queerest,” Leonard said. “You got a problem with that?”

  “Where’s the dick go?”

  “Anywhere I can put it.”

  “Oh,” Tonto said. “No problem. Just curious. Hap, you’re pussy-whipped.”

  “I know.”