Savage Season

  My mechanical abilities are simple. I can air up a tire, put water in the radiator, check water in the battery, let water out of the radiator, check the oil and put it in, fill the tank with gas.

  Beyond that, I’m an automotive moron.

  I walked around a bit, hoping I’d stumble onto something familiar, but nope. I went back to the car and Leonard had the spare on, was jacking the car down.

  “Been going well?” I said.

  “Now I know why you hang around with a black guy. So in case you have a flat, you got someone can change the tire.”

  “It’s your car.”

  “Your fault I’m down here.”

  “All right, you found me out. I like me a black fella to change tires.”

  “And chauffeur.”

  “That’s right, and chauffeur. I think the ethnics should know their place.”

  “You so right, boss, and I is proud to serve you.”

  “Actually, I don’t know how to break this to you, Leonard, but I only hang out with black guys when I can’t find a Filipino.”

  “You tighten the bolts. You’re not getting out of this scot-free.”

  He put the jack in the trunk and gave me the tire iron. While I was tightening the bolts, he said, “We could go home. Not even pick up our gear. Just drive out of here and forget all this business.”

  “We could,” I said. I didn’t want to admit it, since I was the one who got us into this, but I had been thinking pretty much the same.

  “We could go to jail that money doesn’t turn out to be the kind of money Howard says it is.”

  “If there is any money.”

  “Yeah, if there is any money.”

  “But there isn’t a thing happening at the rose fields now, and I can’t think of another line of work we could go into.”

  “There’s always shit work,” Leonard said. “It isn’t like we’re some kind of professionals.”

  I finished the bolts and put the tool in the trunk, positioned the ruined tire between the oxygen tanks and the diving suits, and closed up. “I leave it to you, Leonard. Whatever you want, that’s fine by me.”

  He thought that over. “Really, any of this familiar to you?”

  “I remember part of the road we came in on,” I said. “Outside of that, I could be on Venus.”

  “That’s not encouraging.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  He thought some more, said, “Tell you what. We’ll give it, say, three days for you to start seeing if something’s familiar. You see something you recognize, we’ll go longer. We find the bridge, maybe we’ll look a few days, we still feel like it. Don’t come across the boat or signs of it pretty quick, we’ll go home.”

  “Deal,” I said.

  13

  Just before dark we drove back to Marvel Creek, stopped at Bill’s Kettle, had a hamburger, bought a six-pack of Lone Star at a cut-rate store, and started back to the Sixties Nest, as Leonard called it.

  We found ourselves following the jaundice-yellow Volvo that lived in the yard of the Sixties Nest, and we pursued it to the house and parked behind it.

  Howard got out of the car. We kept our seats and drank our beer, observed him like aliens examining an inferior species through the portal of a flying saucer.

  He was wearing slightly greasy blue work clothes with a patch over the left shirt pocket. I couldn’t tell from where I sat, but my bet was his name was stitched into the patch.

  He looked at us a moment and went into the house.

  “Looks to have been a tough day at the old job site,” I said.

  “I know it’s got to be the same with you,” Leonard said. “I can’t make up my mind. Is it him or Chub I like best?”

  “They both have a lot of charisma,” I said.

  We went inside. Paco was sitting on one of the fold-out chairs grinning his false teeth. Trudy was sitting on the couch. She had her legs and arms crossed. She looked as if she could crack walnuts with her asshole.

  An unjustified strain of guilt went through me. I felt like a husband whose wife had just found rubbers in his wallet.

  The guilt went away when Howard and Chub came into the room. Chub didn’t bother me, really. He couldn’t help being a jerk. But Howard was a self-made man in that department.

  Chub went over to the couch and sat down. Howard crossed his arms and held his ground in the middle of the room and glared at us. His eyes roved a little to his right to check out his audience; the teacher was about to make an example of us.

  I wanted desperately to knee him in the nuts.

  “I thought there was an understanding that you were working with us,” Howard said.

  “We forget to punch the clock or something?” Leonard said.

  “You don’t want any part of what we are, but you said you wanted to do a job. There were things we had to do today, like go to straight jobs.”

  Leonard looked at me. “Straight jobs, Hap?”

  “That’s what they used to call square jobs, back in the beatnik days,” I said.

  “Ah,” Leonard said.

  “Straight is, relatively speaking, a sixties term, still popular today.”

  “Ah.”

  “I’m surprised you haven’t heard it.”

  “I’ve been kind of outta step.”

  “It’s not funny,” Howard said. “Chub ran some errands for us. But you two, we had no idea where you were. There were things we needed to talk about this morning. Plans needed to be made. We were all about our business but you two.”

  “You didn’t say what Paco was doing,” I said.

  Paco grinned even wider. Poor guy. In that face, the fine white teeth made him look a little bit like a sun-dried barracuda.

  “I think he’s playing favorites,” Leonard said. “I hate that kind of thing.”

  “Paco has earned his keep in the past,” Howard said. “I haven’t seen what you two can do. But it smells like what you can do is drink beer.”

  “But can you tell how many we’ve had?” I said. “Smelling it from over there is good, but I want you to say how many we drank.”

  “And what brand,” Leonard said.

  “No use trying to talk to them when they’re like this,” Trudy said. “They’ll go on until you get tired or mad. You can’t reason with the fools.”

  “Fools?” Leonard said. “Now that’s rude.”

  “I’d as soon the two of you pack up and get out,” Howard said.

  “We’ll decide when we get out,” I said.

  “And if we stay,” Leonard said, “we still won’t report to you. You’re just some guy we don’t know, that’s all.”

  “Besides,” I said, “while you been fretting about what we been doing, we’ve been down in the bottoms looking for the Iron Bridge.”

  “And?” Chub said.

  “We didn’t find it,” I said. “We’re going to give it three days. I don’t come up with it, maybe we will get out. You can go your own way then. We won’t tell on you or anything. You’ll have our blessing.”

  “Anything look familiar?” Trudy said.

  “No,” I said, “but it’s been a long time since I been there. But I can solve all this easy. I can just ask someone. A classmate, an old-timer. It might be thought odd if one of you asked, not being from here. I can claim nostalgia, wanting to look around at the old growing-up place.”

  “I’d rather you not,” Howard said. “It’d probably work out all right, but I think if we can get through this without it being mentioned anywhere, better off we are.”

  “I agree with that,” I said. “I’m just saying what we can do if things get too difficult. I leave, and you’ll have to ask. And even if you’re told, you’ll never find anything down there. You’d need a guide. Then you’ll be tying one more person into it you don’t know.”

  “As Leonard pointed out,” Howard said, “we don’t know each other.”

  “True,” I said, “but I sense something special about you and me and Trudy. We could
be one big happy family.”

  Howard uncrossed his arms. I could see the patch on his shirt pocket. It said FLOYD.

  “You guys are pushing your luck,” Howard said.

  “Please don’t start that again,” Trudy said. “I don’t want to see Hap or Leonard hurt you, Howard.”

  Howard looked at her as if she had just sliced his nuts with a knife. “He might not be so lucky this time,” he said.

  “Luck hasn’t got a thing to do with it,” Leonard said.

  “Why don’t you guys arm wrestle?” Paco said.

  “Don’t you start in too, Paco,” Howard said. “You’re starting to sound like them. What you’ve done doesn’t hold you forever.”

  “Well,” Paco said, shaking out a cigarette, “I hate that.”

  “Floyd?” I said.

  “What?” Howard said, then it dawned on him. “It’s just a shirt.”

  “Man with no pride in his name or shirt, it’s hard to know what to think of him,” Leonard said. “He could be anybody and not even care. I’d want my own name on my shirt.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  14

  I stood on the front porch and looked out at the night.

  Everyone was in bed but me. I had turned in but the cold and my thoughts wouldn’t let me drift. I had the uncomfortable feeling that Trudy and the gang were planning something stupid. I had no idea what, and had decided to follow Paco’s advice about not knowing, but I couldn’t help but think about it. Because of that, I had got up, pulled on my shoes and coat, and gone outside to think.

  It was cold and clear and the moon and stars were bright, and their lights rested in the yard like puddles of gold and silver paint and wound through the trees like gold and silver ribbon.

  I tried to find Venus. There was a time when I knew where to look. I couldn’t remember if it was visible this time of year or not. Once things like that were important to me, and I knew some answers.

  I read in a book that primitive men could see Venus in the daytime at high noon with the naked eye. In fact, sailors as late as the 1600s could do the same, and they guided their ships by it. Now the ability was no longer needed, or desired, and modern man could not see Venus in the daytime.

  I was somehow distressed by that. Hell, I couldn’t even see the bastard at night.

  I gave up on Venus and let my mind smooth out. I absorbed the night and the moonlight and watched my breath turn white against the dark. That was about all the thinking I was willing to handle.

  I took a deep breath of chill air and went inside, tossed my coat on the gutted armchair, sat on the couch, and picked up a book Chub had left on the coffee table. It was one of those books that explained how everyone could profit from analysis. It was written by an analyst.

  Marking his place was a faded black and white snapshot. It was of a big black-haired guy, somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five, kind of handsome, with wide shoulders and a smile full of big white teeth. There was something about him that made me think of someone who had ran a few pigskins between the goalposts, and now ran a few deals past his competitors. On his right was an attractive, well-dressed blond woman who looked like she had trained to be the Queen of England, and might have been, had the job not been taken.

  Pushing his way between them, as if not really invited, was a blond kid of eleven or twelve with enough meat on him to loan to two others. He was smiling, but the smile wasn’t much. His was the face of a kid picked last for football games and told to go long, the face of a guy not really asking for a lot, and getting less.

  The kid was Chub, of course, and I felt sad looking at him. I turned the photograph over. Written on the back in a young hand was Mom and Dad and me.

  Maybe the picture meant something to him—a slice of a good moment, when he thought he’d grow up to please his parents and be something other than a fat kid. And maybe I was full of shit, and it was just a marker.

  I had just started reading the book because I was bored enough to jack off with a fistful of barbed wire and roses when the hall door opened gently and Trudy came into the room.

  She was wearing a red tee shirt and nothing else. It fit tight. Her nipples poked at the fabric like the tips of .45 casings, and it stopped high on her thighs and made her seem all legs. Her hair was tousled and she looked tired and somewhat older without her makeup. She looked good though. She smiled at me, closed the door softly, leaned against it, said, “You, too?”

  “My mind’s racing,” I said.

  She nodded at the book. “Learning anything?”

  “It’s all anal and sexual. Talk about shitting or fucking and you reveal yourself immediately.”

  “Do you, now? I was going to slip into the kitchen for some milk. Think I’ll wake Leonard up?”

  “If he were straight, you just walking by would wake him up. I’m surprised the whole house isn’t awake. Dressed like that, you ought to ring like a bell.”

  “Want some milk?”

  She always did take compliments well.

  “I’ll take some milk.”

  She brought back two small fruit jars filled with milk, handed me mine and sat down beside me. I couldn’t help but put my arm around her.

  “You really do pick at Howard,” she said.

  “I don’t like Howard. He’s a prick.”

  “He isn’t so bad.”

  “Guess not, you’re sleeping with him.”

  “I like him. I used to love him. Not like you, but I loved him.”

  “Uh-oh, here we go.” I took my arm from around her.

  “Put your arm back, silly.”

  She crossed her legs high and the tee-shirt went way up. She wasn’t wearing underwear. I put my arm around her again.

  I said, “Didn’t you forget something?”

  “Howard tossed them somewhere.”

  “That’s not what I wanted to hear.”

  “Truth.”

  “Sometimes a little white lie is better.”

  She set her glass on the coffee table and kissed me on the neck.

  “You going to go through all the men in the house tonight?” I said.

  “Is that supposed to make me mad?”

  “Yep.”

  She kissed me on the neck again. “You’re the only man in the house.”

  “Shit, Trudy.”

  “You like me saying that, don’t you?”

  “If I believed it, I’d like it more.”

  “Like you said, sometimes a little white lie is better.”

  I smiled.

  “Let’s go for a ride, Hap.”

  “Now?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You might get a little chilly, lady.”

  “Just a minute.”

  She got up and eased the door open and smiled back at me before she went into the hall. After she closed the door I thought about her going to the room she and Howard shared, tip-toeing about, looking for her panties and her clothes. I had looked through the house earlier, just to look, and their room was a small thing with a mattress on the floor and a messy pile of blankets and some Coke cans tossed about.

  At the other end of the hall Paco and Chub shared a slightly larger room. Chub slept on a saggy box frame bed in the middle of the room and Paco had a cot in a corner. The room had very little in it. A chair with clothes tossed over it and a small box of Chub’s books, all of them on subjects designed to be read at gunpoint.

  Less than five minutes later she was back. She was dressed in a blue denim work shirt, jeans, scuffed black work shoes, and a thick red and bluejacket. She looked like the best-looking lumberjill alive.

  She held up a set of keys.

  “The Volvo,” she said.

  “Will Howard mind?”

  “Of course.”

  I pulled on my coat and we went outside and got in the Volvo, Trudy behind the wheel. We backed out and the ice in the drive crackled under the tires. We drove to the highway and started toward Tyler, which was about twelve miles away. The
car heater worked slowly, and the car was as cold as a meat locker. The highway was smooth with hardly any ice. I guess road crews had been at work salting it. There were splashes of gravel for the really bad spots.

  Trudy reached for me and I slid over and leaned my head against her shoulder and she kissed my cheek. She held one arm around me as she drove and I smelled her perfume and the slightly stale wool of her coat.

  I felt good and a little foolish. There was enough of the old male culture about me that I felt positions should have been reversed. I hoped no one saw us.

  We drove like that for a long time. Finally Trudy said, “I wanted to go for this drive because I wanted to talk.”

  “About what you people have planned?”

  “You people?”

  “You know, power to the people and all that.”

  “Really have become a cynic, haven’t you? God, but I miss the old Hap Collins.”

  “Did you miss me the most while I was finishing up my prison term?”

  “You never have got past that, have you?”

  “Let’s say it’s the sort of thing that weighs on a fella’s mind.”

  “I did miss you, okay?”

  “I like the way you showed it.”

  “I never claimed to be perfect. I’m sorry it happened like that, but it did, and that’s that. I can’t undo it, so let’s leave it. And the plans we have isn’t what I wanted to talk about. I thought I might work up the courage to tell you something about myself you don’t know. Something you ought to know. For old time’s sake.”

  “What kind of something?”

  “Something pretty awful.”

  15

  “I killed Cheep,” she said.

  “Our bird?”

  “Yeah. Could you move on your side of the car while I talk about this?”

  I moved to my side of the car.

  “It’s complicated, Hap. Cheep was not only our bird, he was a symbol of our relationship.”

  “Sounds to me like you been reading Chub’s books.”

  “I been thinking is what I been doing; thinking for years. Trying to figure why I’m no good at relationships. I go into them full tilt, mean for them to work, but I can’t maintain. You were the best. I had a shot there. But I messed it up. I mess them all up. You see, I got to have my white knight. I know better. Be your own person, and a woman is a person too, and all that shit, but I got to have my white knight. And if the man I’m interested in isn’t a knight, I try to make him one. I send him on a quest, and soon as he’s no longer on the quest, I lose interest in him, and the cause I’ve sent him on. I may get interested in the cause again, but I got to have my white knight with me if I’m going to do anything. I see my knight as going out there and doing what he’s doing not only for the cause, but for me. I suppose it makes me feel loved. Important. Understand?”