“We don’t like what we see,” David said.
“That’s because you are a blind motherfucker and don’t know a couple pretty fellas when you see them,” Leonard said. “I could be on a fucking magazine, I’m so pretty. Shit. You could hang my goddamn dick in the museum of fucking modern art. Damn, Big Pile, you know you want to kiss my black ass, right where the tunnel goes down into the sweet dark depths.”
“You gag me,” David said.
“Fuck you,” Dinosaur said.
“The big man is consistent with those two words,” I said.
I didn’t know what it was about Leonard, but he brought out the double smartass in me. I figured if I was going to die, I might as well go out with a few good remarks. And with Leonard there, well, I felt I had a chance. That we had a chance.
Leonard looked at me. “Yeah. He repeats himself because it’s wishful thinking that slips out. Some of that Freudian stuff. Big white boy wants a piece of my fine, shiny, black ass I tell you, but his little ole dick dropped down there would be like tossing a noodle into a volcano.”
“Now I’m starting to get gagged,” I said.
“Ah, you’ll get over it, Hap,” Leonard said.
David said to Leonard, “You’re a goddamn dick-sucking nigger and he’s a nigger-lover.”
“Nah,” Leonard said. “I mean, yeah. I’m a dick-sucker, but me and Hap, we ain’t fucking, just hanging. Oh, I should also add, I don’t like being called a nigger, you cracker motherfucker.”
“You got some sand,” David said.
“I’m a whole goddamn beach,” Leonard said.
“What we’re thinking,” David said, “is we’re going to knock you two around until your shit mixes, until you get it through your head how things are supposed to be.”
“That a fact?” I said.
“Oh yeah,” Dinosaur said, “we’re gonna do that.”
Leonard grinned, said, “I guess you boys ought to get started. It’s already midday.”
“But the sun stays up for quite awhile,” I said.
“Yeah, there’s that,” Leonard said. “We got plenty of time to whip their asses.”
“Smartass nigger,” David said, and glanced at Dinosaur, who moved forward.
That’s when an older black man stepped out of Jack Woolens and reached in one of the barrels and pulled out an axe handle.
“I hear you peckerwoods calling my nephew a nigger?” the man said.
David bowed up a little. “We ain’t got a thing against hitting an old nigger, or a lady nigger, or kicking around a dead nigger, which is what you’re gonna be, you ancient watermelon fart.”
That’s when the old man swung the axe handle and clipped David across the jaw and made him stagger. I almost felt sorry for David. Even more so when the handle whistled again and caught him behind the neck and laid him out flat on his face on the cement.
The other three thugs froze, then seemed to come unstuck and started toward the three of us. Me and Leonard took fighting stances. That’s when Jack Woolens came out behind us, a slightly paunchy old man with thinning dark hair.
“Stop it, goddamn it,” Jack said.
They stopped, but when Dinosaur saw who it was, he said, “You old Jew bastard.”
“Old Jew bastard fought Nazis, so he isn’t afraid of your kind. You aren’t a pimple on a Nazi’s ass, but you’re made of the same kind of pus.”
This stopped them. I don’t know why, but they hesitated.
The old Jew bastard pulled an axe handle from the barrel and stepped up beside the black man. “Way I see it,” he said, “is we have axe handles, and for now, you have teeth. You see it that way, Chester?”
Chester said, “Yeah. They got some teeth right now.”
Dinosaur looked a little nervous. “We ain’t even eighteen, and that nigger hit David with an axe handle.”
“Hard as he could,” Leonard said.
“That’s against the law,” Dinosaur said. “We’re underage. Minors.”
“Sometimes, you have extenuating circumstances,” Jack Woolens said. “I once strangled a Nazi when I was in the O.S.S. Look it up, you never heard of it. It wasn’t a social group. I strangled him and went back to the farmhouse where I was hiding in Austria, and slept tight. I knocked me off a piece the next day. Young German girl who thought I was German. I can speak it. I had the chance, I’d have strangled another fucking Nazi.”
“No shit?” Chester said. “You speak German?”
It was like they forgot the thugs were there.
“Yeah, I was born in Germany.”
“No shit?”
“Yeah. I did get a little scratch when I was strangling that Nazi by the way. I don’t want to sound like I come out clean. That would be lying.”
Jack Woolens put the axe handle back in the barrel, and showed Chester a cut across his elbow by nodding at it. It was a long white line.
“Knife,” Jack said. “I had to wear a bandage for a few days.”
“That ain’t shit,” Chester said. “Cracker tried to castrate me once. I got a scar on my thigh I can show you makes that look like hen scratch. I had twenty-five stitches and had to stand when I fucked for awhile and reach under and hold my balls up so it didn’t slap my stitches. Want to see?”
“You win,” Jack said. “Keep your pants on.”
“I was moving when the cracker did that, cut me I mean,” Chester said. “Cracker didn’t turn out so well. They found his lily-white ass in the river, and there wasn’t no way of knowing how he got there. Some kind of accident like being beat to death and thrown in the river is my guess. You know, said the wrong thing to someone, tried to cut their balls off, something like that. I ain’t saying I know that to be a fact, him being dead in the Sabine River, but I’m going to start a real hard rumor about it right now.”
Jack turned back to the barrel and retrieved the axe handle, casual as if he were picking out a toothpick.
The thugs continued to stand there. As if just remembering the thugs were there, Chester thumped Dinosaur’s chest with the axe handle. “Pick up this sack of dog shit, and carry him off. Do it now, ’cause you don’t, it’ll be hard to do with broke legs. You boys carry him now, you won’t have to scoot and pull him away with your teeth, ones you got left. Gumming him might be difficult. One way or another, though, it ain’t gonna turn out spiffy for you fellows.”
Dinosaur looked at me, then Leonard, then the older men. He looked at his friends. Nobody bowed up. No smart remarks were made. Dinosaur seemed small right then. They picked up David like he was a dropped puppet, tried to get him to stand, but they might as well have been trying to teach a fish how to ride a tricycle. They had to drag him across the street and into their car.
When they got David inside, the others got in, and Dinosaur went around to the driver’s side. He shot us the finger. He said, “This ain’t over.”
“Better be,” Jack Woolens said.
Dinosaur drove his friends out of there.
“We could have handled it,” Leonard said.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Shit,” Leonard said. “We could.”
“Now they’re tough guys,” Jack said to Chester. “It’s all over, and now they’re tough.”
“We were tough enough,” Leonard said, “and we could have got tougher.”
“Leonard,” Chester said, pulling car keys out of his pocket. “Bring the car around, and don’t squeal the goddamn tires.”
“Like he can’t walk a few feet,” Jack said. “Like he’s got a lot to carry. A pair of shoes on lay-a-way he bought. He can walk.”
I looked at Leonard and he grinned at me. I loved that grin.
Chester said. “I got the lumbago.”
“Lumbago,” Jack said. “Now the lumbago he gets.”
Chester grunted, said to Leonard, “Get the car, kid.”
Leonard looked at me, smiled, and went away to get it.
Bent Twig
When I got in from work that
night, Brett, my redhead, was sitting at the kitchen table. She didn’t have a shift that week at the hospital, so I was surprised to see her up and about. It was two a.m. I had finished up being a night watchman at the dog food plant, hoping soon my buddy Leonard would be back from Michigan, where he had gone after someone in some case he had hired out to do for our friend Marvin and the detective agency Marvin owned. We did freelance work like that from time to time.
There was no job for me in this one, and since Leonard was without a job at all and needed the money more than I did, he hired on. I had a temporary job at the dog food plant. It was okay, but mostly boring. The most exciting thing I had done was chase some rats I had caught in the feed storage room, nibbling on some bags of dog food, stealing chow out of some hound’s mouth, so to speak. Those rats knew not to mess with me.
I kept hoping Marvin would have something for me so I could quit, but so far, nothing. I did have that week’s paycheck from the dog food plant in my wallet, though.
“What are you doing up?” I asked.
“Worrying,” she said.
I sat down at the table with her.
“We have enough money, right?”
“We got plenty for a change. It’s Tillie.”
“Oh, shit,” I said.
“It’s not like before,” Brett said. What she meant was a little of column A, a little of column B.
Column A was where she got in with a biker club as the local poke, and got hauled off to be a prostitute, partly on purpose, as it was her profession, and partly against her will because they didn’t plan to pay her. We had rescued her from that, me, Brett, and Leonard. She had then gone off and got into a series of domestic problems over in Tyler, but those were the sort of things Brett got her out of, or at least managed to avert catastrophe for awhile. Every time Brett mentioned Tillie, it meant she would be packing a bag, putting her job on hold, and going off for a few days to straighten some stupid thing out that never should have happened in the first place. Since she was Brett’s daughter I tried to care about her. But she didn’t like me and I didn’t like her. But I did love Brett, so I tried to be supportive as possible, but Brett knew how I felt.
“You have to go for a few days?” I asked.
“Maybe more to it.”
“How’s that?”
“She’s missing.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time she took a powder for awhile. You know how she is. Goes off without a word, comes back without one, unless she needs money or a tornado got the double-wide.”
“It’s not all her fault.”
“Brett, baby. Don’t give me the stuff about how you weren’t a good mother.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You were young yourself, and I don’t think you did all that bad. You had some circumstances, and you did what you could for her. She’s mostly a mess of her choosing.”
“Maybe.”
“But you’re not convinced.”
“It doesn’t matter. She’s my daughter.”
“You got me there,” I said.
“I got a call from a friend of hers. You don’t know her. Her name is Monica, and she’s all right. I think she’s got a better head on her shoulders than Tillie. I met her when I was there last. I think she’s been a pretty good guide for my girl. Fact is, I sort of thought Tillie was getting it together, and I’ve been keeping in touch with Monica about it. She called to say they were supposed to go to a movie, a girl’s night out. Only Tillie didn’t show. Didn’t call. And now it’s three days later. Monica said when she got over being mad, she got into being worried. Says the guy Tillie lives with, that he could be the problem. He used to run whores, and Tillie could easily fall back into that life. I mean . . . well, there’s a bit of a drug problem with the guy, and Tillie, sometimes. He could have gotten tough with Tillie. He might be trying to make some money off of her, or he might have got into something bad and Tillie got dragged with him.”
“Monica think he’s holding her at home?”
“Maybe worse.”
“I thought he was supposed to be all right.”
“Me too,” she said. “But lately, not so much. At first, he was a kind of Prince Charming, an ex-druggie who was doing good, then all of a sudden he didn’t want her out of the house, didn’t want her contacting anyone. Didn’t want her seeing Monica. But Monica thinks it’s because he was choosing who he wanted Tillie to see.”
“Prostitution,” I said.
Brett nodded. “Yeah, it’s how those kind of guys play. Like they care about you, or they got some of the same problems they’re kicking, and the next thing Tillie knows she’s on the nose candy again and is selling her ass, and then pretty soon she’s not getting any money from the sell. He gets it all.”
“The pimp gets it all, keeps her drugged, and keeps the money flowing in.”
“Yeah,” Brett said. “Exactly. It’s happened to her before, and you know that, so—”
“You’re thinking it could happen again.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I am.”
“Course it doesn’t matter, and it may not have been planned. He may have just fallen off the wagon and grabbed her as he fell. After he got the prize he wanted, he didn’t want to share it or show it around.”
“He liked showing her around at first, all right,” Brett said. “He liked her to dress sexy, and then if anyone looked, he was mad. She was for him, and yet he wanted to parade her and not have anyone look at the parade. Later on, he wanted to bring people to the parade. Maybe when his drug habit got bad. I don’t know. I don’t care. I just want to know she’s safe.”
“And you want me to check it out?”
“I want us to check it out.”
“Let me drive back to the dog food plant and quit with prejudice first.”
“Short notice,” Brett said.
“I know,” I said. “But then so was this.”
It felt odd going off to see about something like this without Leonard. I liked having him around in these kind of circumstances. He helped strengthen my backbone. I liked to think I was already pretty firm in that area, but it never hurt to have your brother from another mother there to keep you feeling confident.
Tillie lived just outside of Tyler, between there and Bullock, a little burg outside of the city. Tyler wasn’t up there with Dallas and Houston, but it was a big town, or small city, depending on how you liked your labels. A hundred thousand or so, with lots of traffic, illegal immigrants, and college students. The immigrants they liked to hire to get work done cheap, then use them for every scapegoat situation possible, forgetting they wouldn’t even be there to blame for what they did and for what they didn’t do if they weren’t offered the jobs in the first place.
When we got to Tillie’s house we found two cars in the carport. Brett said, “That’s Tillie’s and Robert’s cars. Both cars are here.”
I went over and knocked on the front door, but no one answered. It’s hard to explain, but sometimes you knock, you know someone’s inside, and other times it has a hollow feel, like you’re tapping on a sun-bleached skull, thinking a brain that isn’t inside of it anymore is going to wake up. And sometimes you’re just full of shit and whoever is inside is hiding. I remember my mother doing that from time to time when a bill collector came around. I always wondered if they knew we were inside, hiding out on paying the rent we hadn’t earned yet, but would pay, hiding out from paying a car payment, hoping they wouldn’t haul the car away.
I went around back and knocked, but got the same lack of response. I walked around the house with Brett and we looked in windows when there was a window to look in. Most were covered with blinds or curtains, but the kitchen window at the back had the curtains pulled back, and we could see inside by cupping our hands around our faces and pressing them against the glass. There was nothing to see, though.
Finally we went back out to my car. We leaned on the hood.
I said, “You want me to get inside?”
“I
don’t know,” she said. “I called the police yesterday, well, it was the sheriff ’s department, but they wouldn’t do anything.”
“Not twenty-four hours?” I said.
“Actually, it has been. Over. But the thing is, they’ve dealt with her before.” I didn’t know all the details on that, but I figured as much. Tillie tended to get in trouble, run off from time to time, so they weren’t quick on using man power to chase a sometime prostitute and drug user, and full-time pain in the ass.
“Okay,” I said. “Going to make an executive decision. I’m going to break in.”
There were houses around, but no activity, and I didn’t see anyone parting the curtains for a peek, so I got a lock-picking kit out of the glove box that I use with the agency from time to time, went around back, and got to it. I’m not that good a lockpick, and to tell the truth, it’s seldom like on TV, least for me. It always takes awhile. This door was easy though, so it only took me about five minutes, and then me and Brett were inside.
Brett called out. “Tillie. Robert. It’s Mom.”
No one answered. Her words bounced off the wall.
“Hang by the door,” I said.
I went through the house, looked in all the rooms. There was no one handy, but in the living room a chair and a coffee table were turned over, some drink of some kind spilled on the floor and gone sticky, a broken glass nearby. I went back and told Brett what I had seen.
“Maybe now we can get the law interested,” I said.
Outside, out back, I saw there was a thin trail of blood drops. I hadn’t noticed it before, but now, coming out of the house and with the sun just right, I could see it. It looked like someone had dropped rubies of assorted size in the grass. I said, “Brett, honey. Go out to the car and sit behind the wheel. Here are the keys in case you need to leave. And if you do, leave. Don’t worry about me.”
“Bullshit,” she said. “We’ll get the gun out of the glove box.”
I have a concealed carry permit, but I seldom carry the gun. Fact is, I don’t like the idea of one, but in my line of work, and I don’t just mean watchman at the dog food plant, but the other stuff sometimes requires one.
We went and got the pistol out of the glove box, an old-style revolver, and walked after the blood drops.