Vanilla Ride

  The ball-kicked guy had gotten some juice back. Maybe the crucifix revived him. He tried to get up, made it to his hands and knees. Leonard, without letting go of the guy whose head he was bouncing, kneed the other dude in the face, knocking him back down. He winced, did a kind of push-up, tried to come up. I got him from behind, right in the snickerdoodles again. He farted and went down and didn’t get up, either knocked out, dead, or hoping to God we thought he was. Right then he was probably wishing he had been thrown out the window with the dog. I was too. That was quite a fart.

  I took a breath and put a hand on my side, then my face. I was bleeding from where the girl had scratched me.

  I did a quick reconnoiter. It looked as if the trailer occupants were all pretty much Nap City. Leonard whirled the guy whose nose he had flattened around and hit him with a hard strike to the neck with the side of his hand. The guy went down. Not that he really needed that neck strike. He was going to fall anyway. Leonard kicked him once just to keep himself flexible.

  I picked up the CD player on a shelf over the couch and slammed it against the wall. The CD flew out of it and I stepped on it. It felt good to have the air filled with emptiness.

  That’s when the now awake Tanedrue came wobbling through the door, his hand no longer in his shorts. He reached for what he had been reaching for before, something just inside the door on top of the refrigerator. A little automatic. He got hold of it. As he brought it around, Leonard pulled my .38 and shot Tanedrue in the right thigh, just below the shorts. Tanedrue dropped the automatic, grabbed his leg, let out a yell that made my asshole pinch tight, then went down shrieking, holding his thigh, blood squirting everywhere.

  “Goddamn, Leonard!”

  Leonard gave me an exasperated look. “I started to let him shoot you, but I thought Brett would be mad.”

  “Goddamn, Leonard.”

  The guy who had bitten his tongue was closest at hand, so I grabbed his shirt by the front and pulled hard. It ripped off of his unconscious body, and I stuck it in Tanedrue’s wound. Tanedrue cussed me and struck out at me, so I hit him in the head a couple of times. “Lay down, you stupid fuck, before you bleed to death.”

  “You shot me!” he said.

  “Technically, he shot you,” I said, jerking my head at Leonard.

  Leonard tossed my .38 on the couch, grabbed Tanedrue by the Afro and lifted him off the ground a little, slid behind him, and slipped his forearm around his neck, pushing in tight on the arteries there. He slid his choking hand into the bend of his other elbow and locked the other hand behind Tanedrue’s head, compressed while he expanded his chest.

  Tanedrue passed out quicker than an asthmatic octogenarian fucking a sheep in a stuffy hayloft.

  “Now fix him,” Leonard said, letting Tanedrue drop.

  “I don’t know he can be fixed.”

  “It ain’t through an artery. I’m a better shot than that.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Yeah. Okay, I was lucky.”

  Leonard was right. Tanedrue was hit through the meaty part of the thigh and he was losing blood from the hole in his leg, but the main artery had been missed. I tore some more of the shirt off the guy on the floor and wrapped Tanedrue’s leg as best I could, put my ear to his chest to make sure he was breathing. Leonard had used a blood choke, but sometimes they don’t come back.

  “I guess that’s Gadget passed out over there,” I said.

  “She wasn’t as glad to see us as I had hoped,” Leonard said. “I saw you hit her. You hit her hard. If she was wearing a Tampax, I bet you knocked it out of her ass.”

  “She rearranged my looks a little,” I said, touching the scratches on my face.

  “You look like an old-fashioned German duelist.”

  I picked up Tanedrue’s automatic and went to the back of the trailer, just in case someone was hiding back there with a shotgun and a machete. There was no one else left. On a chest of drawers in front of a mirror there were some bags of white powder that I didn’t mistake for self-rising flour. There were some boxes of baby laxative there too, for cutting the stuff. On the floor were empty cheese cracker boxes, lots of wrappers for sweets and empty soft drink cans and bottles and a near-empty jar of peanut butter with the lid off. There was a box of half-eaten Cracker Jack. That would be the property of the health nut of the bunch. What remained of the peanut butter had turned dark as dried dog shit. And there was plenty of that to go around too. Dog shit in the corner, on the floor by the bed, at the edge of the dresser. There was a footprint in that pile. Not mine. This footprint was bare. There were some other piles that someone had thoughtfully covered with paper towels. Whoever did that was probably considered prissy. A fat roach crawled out of the peanut butter jar and scuttled under the bed.

  Taped to the mirror on the dresser were birthday cards, an old Christmas card. They said “To Tanedrue” and were signed “Mom.” I felt a little sick looking at those, had to wonder how his mom felt about how her boy had turned out. For that matter, if my mother was alive, how would she have felt about me, hitting people and throwing dogs out windows? It wasn’t a line of thought I wanted to linger on.

  When I looked up, I noticed the walls of the trailer were moving. I had seen it before in white trash housing and poor black folk shacks. Cockroaches. They were so thick in the walls they made the paneling flex like it was breathing. Yuck.

  I went back to where Leonard was slapping Tanedrue briskly on the cheeks to either bring him awake or give his cheeks a touch of color.

  “Wake up, nigger,” Leonard said.

  “They got some real bad stuff back there,” I said. “And perhaps, as a nod to political correctness, I should note, for your own good, that you’re using the N word.”

  “I’ve been busy with words and slapping in here,” Leonard said. “I’ve done run out on the cocksucker word, and I wore out motherfucker, and sonofabitch seems so lame, so I’m going for the gold … Ah, Sleeping Beauty awakes.”

  7

  Tanedrue woke up. We were squatting down beside him. Leonard said, “Every time I think of Gadget’s grandpa beating your ass with a cane, I get a kind of warm feeling all over. In fact, my dick gets hard.”

  Tanedrue said, “I’m bleeding to death.”

  “You ain’t bleeding to death, dumb ass,” Leonard said. “Not yet, anyway. It got the fat part of your leg, went all the way through. Bleeding has mostly stopped because Hap, who is like goddamn Florence Nightingale with a pecker, stuck your buddy’s shirt in the bullet hole and stopped the bleeding. Course, you might want to worry about blood poisoning from the dye in the shirt, that would be my concern. Oh yeah, and the bullet.”

  “You could have shot my balls off.”

  “You’d have to have some first,” I said.

  Tanedrue was sitting on the floor with his legs stuck out, his back against the refrigerator, looking around. “You fucked everybody up, you done killed them.”

  “No,” Leonard said, “nobody’s dead. The fucked-up part is right, probably a concussion here and there, so I’d wake them up pretty quick. Word is on concussions… you shouldn’t sleep. Do that, sometimes you don’t wake up, and what a shame that would be. Think of the loss to art, science, and literature. Oh, and the big guy there, with all the hair. He may not have a real profile anymore, so photo shots of him might be best from the front, him wearing a bag over his head, standing somewhat at a distance.”

  “They could die,” Tanedrue said. “You might have hurt them real bad. And me, I don’t feel so good either.”

  “Boy, that’s a shame,” Leonard said. “Considering you were going to shoot us, you fuckin’ asshole! Pour some monkey blood on it and shut up. Now listen here: Leave Gadget alone. Stay away from her. And if you have a day where you think maybe we’ve forgotten about you and you decide to bother her again, that’s the day we kneecap you, asshole, and then I’m gonna put your ass in an ant bed after I stuff it full of Gummi Bears, and then I’m gonna set your head on fire, and
then I’m gonna get mad. Savvy?”

  “Gummi Bears?” I said.

  Tanedrue was almost crying, but he was still defiant. “You don’t know what you’re up against, nigger.”

  About that time the guy whose shirt I had torn off woke and tried to sit up. I said, “Lay back down, ball sweat.”

  He lay down and closed his eyes and stretched his arms out at his sides with the palms down and was quiet as a dead mouse.

  “Now,” Leonard said, standing, “we’ll be taking Gadget with us, and before I go, I want to leave you with one more piece of wisdom.”

  Leonard kicked Tanedrue in the head, hard, knocking his noggin back against the refrigerator. Without knowing it was going to come out of my mouth, I said, “Ouch.”

  “You get my drift, dick cheese?” Leonard said.

  Tanedrue nodded, blood dripping from his mouth, his hand held to the side of his head.

  “Say it,” Leonard said.

  “I got you,” Tanedrue said.

  “That’s good. And you know, this place … you ought to get some nice curtains, a little better lighting, one of those de-stinkers that plug into the ’lectric socket, a friendlier goddamn dog. This joint is fuckin’ depressin’.”

  “You ought to see the dog shit in the back room,” I said. “It’s not a pretty sight.”

  “Clean that up too,” Leonard said. “Goddamn dog don’t want to see that, wonder he hasn’t committed dog-acide. Better yet, set fire to this whole place and start over.”

  “Your little white powder in the back,” I said. “I’m gonna have to get rid of it.”

  I put Tanedrue’s automatic in my waistband without blowing my dick off, went back to the bedroom. I could hear Tanedrue calling out, “Don’t do it, man. There’s people gonna be mad and they’re so bad they make you two look like weenies. I ain’t jerkin’ you. Come on, man. We can work some kind of deal.”

  I heard Leonard give Tanedrue a whack and then the guy went silent.

  I got the bags one at a time and took them to the bathroom and used my pocketknife to cut them open and flush the contents down the toilet, which was a nasty little number with a dark ring inside the bowl that wasn’t some kind of design.

  I could hear Tanedrue groan every time he heard the toilet flush. I kept at it until I was finished. I took a leak and washed my hands and came back and stood over him. Leonard was squatting beside him.

  I said, “All down the crapper. Thousands of dollars’ worth of blow.”

  “You’re gonna wish you hadn’t done that,” Tanedrue said. “Them guys we work for, they ain’t got no sense of humor.”

  “That may be,” Leonard said. “But a fashion tip. Them Scooby shorts, on a grown man, they aren’t that cool. Trust me.” Leonard sniffed at the air, looked at the guy on the floor without a shirt, wrinkled up his nose. “And maybe you ought to wipe that fucker’s ass.”

  I looked down at Gadget. She was lying on her back, breathing deeply. She was wearing a tank top that barely kept her unfettered breasts in check and a pair of shorts that were cut so high and were so tight, if she yawned the damn things would have sucked up her ass. She was not bad to look at, though her eyes had dark circles like a raccoon’s around them. I had only hit her once, so I figured Tanedrue or one of his brethren had done the bulk of the knocking. My shot had given her a knot in the center of her forehead about the size of a turnip, so I too could be proud.

  I got the .38, leaned over, and picked her up and threw her over my shoulder. She was very light, maybe a hundred and ten pounds. That’s great, Hap, you just punched out a little girl about half your weight.

  I carried Gadget out to the truck and we looked around for their dog, just in case he was vengeful. But he was either on the other side of the trailer in a heap or had run off to join the circus. I hoped the latter. I liked dogs. I put Gadget in the backseat and Leonard got in the front and I drove us out of there. As we went, I saw the other dog, the yellow one, sitting beside the road. He turned his head to watch as we drove by.

  Leonard turned to me, said, “Now, see. That worked out fine.”

  “I hate you,” I said.

  8

  Leonard leaned back and looked over the seat at Gadget. He said, “She looks like some kind of angel got caught up in a fan.”

  “I hit her,” I said.

  “And boy did she have it coming.”

  “I feel like a bully.”

  “You had to do it.”

  “I still don’t like it.”

  “Had she been wearing a nose ring, would you have felt better?”

  “Just a bit,” I said. “I really hate those things. Seriously tattooed arms would have helped too.”

  Leonard grinned and shook his head. “You worry too much about things that are done, my brother. She’s taken beatings for no reason and you punched her because you wanted to keep your eyes in your head and get her away from those boneheads. Give yourself some slack.”

  “Hitting women is not on my list of gentlemanly activities.”

  “Well, whipping people’s asses and throwing their dog out the window might not be on the list either.”

  “Yeah … well… At least I didn’t shoot anyone.”

  “That’s right, point that out, put it all on me. But unlike you, I don’t feel guilty… Listen, man. You did what you had to do. And now we got to do something else. The .38 and dickhead’s automatic.”

  We drove down some back trails and stopped by a little run of water that was just off the road and flowed out into the woods. The road was pretty messy and I figured if it rained harder it would be difficult to get down it, and even more difficult to get back out.

  Climbing out of the truck, Leonard got some gloves from the toolbox fastened to the bed and wiped the .38 clean and threw it into the woods, into the shallow water there. He took the automatic and did the same.

  We got back in the truck and I got back on the main road. “They find that stuff,” Leonard said, “it don’t mean a thing. We didn’t own the automatic. And your .38 was as cold as the cunt between a dead nun’s legs … Hey, Gadget. She’s coming to.”

  Gadget sat up in the back and I watched her in the rearview mirror. She had a hand to her head. Right where I had hit her. “You hit me,” she said.

  “Right between the eyes,” I said.

  “He feels bad about it,” Leonard said.

  “That don’t mean a damn thing to me. My head hurts.”

  “He did it with love,” Leonard said.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Then it struck her. “Ah, I know … My grandpa’s friends. Hank and Larry.”

  “Hap and Leonard,” Leonard said. “I’m Leonard, and he’s Hap. You can remember the names because he’s a white guy and I’m a black guy.”

  “I can see that… I know who you are.”

  “Yeah, but can you remember which of us is which,” Leonard said. “Black guy, Leonard. White guy, Hap.”

  “Why did you do it?” she said.

  “Your grandpa asked us to,” I said. “And he’s a friend, and we remember when you were a baby and everyone thought you were going to grow up to be worth something.”

  “That don’t mean nothin’,” she said. “I don’t even remember you guys.”

  “In truth, you may not mean all that much to us,” Leonard said, “but Marvin, he means a lot. Come on, gal. What the hell you doin’? We know you got raised better than that.”

  “You don’t know nothin’.”

  “We know that,” I said. “We know you weren’t raised to bang drug dealers in a trailer with roaches in the walls and dog shit and a near empty jar of cheap peanut butter on the floor.”

  “Don’t forget the cocaine,” Leonard said.

  “That too,” I said.

  “And a criminal dog,” Leonard said. “That pup y’all got, he has done gone over to the dark side.”

  Gadget took a deep breath, narrowed her eyes. “I remember Grandpa said you two thought you were funny.”


  9

  As we arrived in No Enterprise it started to rain heavy and the sky took on a hazy green look like nature had vomited into the heavens. The wind hit the truck hard enough to move it. Looking at the town through wet swaths made by the wipers, it was even more depressing, a weak hope thrown together with brick and glass. Someone thought the railroad would come through there many years ago, and it didn’t. What was left now was nothing more than a hope and a dream.

  The rain was running deep in the streets and in the gutters. My gas gauge pinged. We drove back to the place where we had eaten and parked under the overhang where the fuel pumps were. Leonard got out and began putting gas in the truck. The rain pounded on the overhang. The water splashed all around us. It was pretty dark for the time of day. I glanced at Leonard standing by the pump working the gas nozzle. He gave me a weak salute. I shot him the finger. He shot me the finger back. I never said we were mature.

  I looked back at Gadget.

  “How’d you get that name, Gadget?” I said. “I used to know, but I forgot.”

  She was slow with the answer. “I liked fixing things when I was a girl. I had a knack … Look, Grandpa shouldn’t have asked you to do this. This isn’t good for me or anyone. Other day, when he hit Tanedrue with the cane—”

  “Hold up,” I said. “How many times did he hit him? I just got to know.”

  “A lot. He did it quick. I thought Tanedrue was going to shoot him. I begged him not to.”

  “Your boyfriend sounds like aces. Goddamn, I bet you’re proud.”

  “You got to take me back, Leonard—”

  “I’m Hap.”

  “Whatever. Or let me out here, and I can call someone.”