“I think they have trouble catching them,” I said.
Professor let a sagging grin hang on his face. I liked that grin only a little better than the ventriloquist-dummy version.
“And I don’t use that kind of language. That’s what’s wrong with the world today. Not enough standards. I think we need to return to standards, courtesy, decent language, and a kind separation of races.”
“You talk about keeping people in their place due to race, but you’re worried about someone saying ‘fuck’?” I said.
“Forget it,” Professor said. “This will go nowhere.”
“I got a question for you,” Leonard said. “What you doing here with George at the junkyard? You work here?”
“I’m sort of an adviser,” Professor said. “I was up at his house getting a drink, saw you fellows. I sometimes use the forklift to poke cars into the crusher for him. I enjoy the work.”
“Do the twins hold your coat while you do that?” Leonard asked.
“If I want them to, but I’m not wearing a coat.”
“In hot weather, maybe they sweat for you,” Leonard said.
“If I ask them to.”
“On what do you advise?” I said.
“Race relations, you might say.”
“You need an adviser for that?” Leonard said.
“Also, I own a piece of the junkyard. Own a piece of a number of businesses in town. Completely own some of them. I make my living through investments. I advise on how to run successful businesses, here and elsewhere. I try to lay out nonviolent plans for a return to segregation. If I own a place, or a part of it, I have more power and can make recommendations.”
“Like separate water fountains,” I said.
“Heavens, no,” Professor said. “That’s ridiculous. Recommendations on how to actually live apart in harmony.”
“Now that we’ve got your philosophy, can we ask you something else?” I said.
“Of course,” he said. He was so congenial I wanted to punch him in the mouth.
“What did you know of Jackie Mulhaney, also called Jackrabbit?”
“She was with George for a while,” Professor said. “He found it uncomfortable that she crossed racial lines, as he should. She was all right, though. Beautiful woman. But he did the right thing. As I said, there have to be boundaries. She was too smart for him as well. Is that all, gentlemen?”
I nodded. “Suppose it is.”
“You have quite a knot on your head there, Mr. Collins.”
“I do indeed,” I said.
“Might want to put some ice on that,” he said, then turned and walked briskly in the direction of the crushing machine, which we could hear hungrily munching on cars, making them squeak and scream.
14
Professor creeped me out more than George,” I said.
“I hear that,” Leonard said. “It’s just the same old thing wearing a clean set of clothes, speaking in a polite voice. Guy like that, he’s got more of an agenda than he’s letting on.”
“I have a feeling, you scratch Professor deep enough, you get George.”
“And you send George to school and give him a haircut and a good bath, you get Professor, provided George could work his way through third grade first.”
“Yep,” I said. “Professor has got this insane mission to go back in time to Jim Crow days.”
“Like I said last night, Hap. Just when you think the river is flowing nice and clean, along comes the sewage. I still believe in the American dream, but I also got to admit that the honey has a lot of flies on it.”
“You can pick out the flies if you got the patience.”
“I don’t have it. And how about those fucking twins, man? They really creeped me out.”
“They’re like the walking dead,” I said.
“But they ain’t got as good a personality.”
While I drove, Leonard called our buddy Chief Marvin Hanson in LaBorde, gave him Ace’s license plate, asked him if he could run it for us, find a home location.
Leonard got off the phone, said, “He’s going to do it, hit us back later. Said he had real police work to do first. How dare he?”
“Very rude,” I said.
I looked in my rearview mirror. There was a black pickup behind us. For a moment, I thought it was Ace, but it was a truck in far better condition.
“You know,” I said, “that pickup started following us pretty quick after we left the junkyard. I thought it might be coincidence, but I’m beginning to wonder.”
“Do some turns,” Leonard said.
I took a side road, then another, cruised through a neighborhood of old but nice houses, took another turn, hit Main Street, and drove down it all the way out to the Sabine River Bridge in the direction of Tyler.
The truck stayed with us.
I drove over the bridge and kept going, right on out of Marvel Creek. The truck crossed the bridge behind us, but when I looked in my rearview mirror, it was turning around.
“I think we were just ran out of town,” I said.
“No, we left of our own free will. Separate but equal. I’m going to draw a line between these seats, Hap. You stay over there, and I’ll stay over here.”
“It’s my car. You’ll walk.”
“Yeah, massa, I done forgot that. Maybe I shine yo’ shoes or lick yo’ ass, Massa Hap, and won’t be no need to set me ’side the road.”
“We’ll see how you act,” I said.
“You know how I might act?”
“How?”
“Spending about twenty minutes kicking your ass up under your ears.”
“Better bring yourself a picnic lunch and a thermos of coffee, ’cause it’s going to take you more than twenty minutes.”
“Shit, all I got to do is hit you with a chair.”
“Don’t mention a chair,” I said. “The word makes my head hurt.”
15
Leonard’s cell rang.
“Yeah. Sure. Let me write that down.”
He got his pad and pen and scribbled.
“Thanks. We owe you one. Yeah. You’re right. We’ve kind of got a long list of owes. Catch up to you later.”
“Marvin, I assume.”
“Yeah. I got Ace’s address, his place of work too.”
“That was actually pretty quick,” I said.
“Technology,” Leonard said. “Next thing is we’re going to have cameras up our ass.”
“They call that a colonoscopy, and that wouldn’t be a recording I’d like to see,” I said. “We got nothing more to say to Ace right now, though, do we?”
“Guess not, but let’s locate Ace’s crib in case we need that information for later, see where he works.”
This meant we had to go back to the far side of Marvel Creek. I turned the car around and crossed the bridge again.
We found his house on a dirt road with three or four other houses nearby. The house was small and weathered and looked about three years from needing to be held up with a sturdy stick. It looked like some places Leonard and I had lived in once upon a time. These days we were more prosperous.
We didn’t try to visit. Figured he was at work anyway, and right then we had nothing new to ask, but knowing where he hung out seemed like something we might need later.
As we drove away, I realized the black pickup was with us again. It had probably joined us not long after we came back through Marvel Creek on our way to locate Ace’s house. I had been so focused on the address, I hadn’t noticed it right away.
I told Leonard they were back.
“I’m tired of this shit,” Leonard said.
He opened the glove box and got out the little automatic I kept in there. It was small caliber and could probably knock over a cardboard target if a high wind was helping.
We were still out in the country and were now far away from the little grouping of houses. There was only the blacktop road we were on and the trees on either side of it. We did pass a pasture with a few cows
in it. None of them waved.
“Pull it over, and let’s get this done with,” Leonard said.
“Might be best to wait until we’re around more people,” I said. “They might be less inclined to shoot us.”
“I don’t give a shit, pull over.”
I gave a shit, but I pulled over. Truth to tell, I was tired of them too.
I found a spread of gravel beside the road that had a concrete picnic table with benches attached, and next to it was a historical marker. I pulled over and got out, and so did Leonard.
I reached back inside the car and took a sawed-off ball bat out from under the front seat, held it against my leg, and walked to the back of my car. Leonard had the little handgun in his front pocket, his shirttail over it.
The two guys got out. They were big guys. One was a little fat and walked with a limp, held his head to one side. He had scraggly brown hair and a scragglier mustache. He came toward me carrying an ax handle, and then he slowed down, and a smile cut across his face.
“Hap Collins, you old fucker,” he said.
“Jimmy Hems,” I said.
“You remember Lou here, don’t you?” he said, and he jerked a thumb at his companion.
Lou looked a lot like Jimmy, only not as fat and minus the limp and the head held to one side. They both had the same hair-and-mustache stylist. Lou was Jimmy’s younger brother.
“Hi, Lou,” I said.
Lou nodded.
“You lose the head goes on that ax handle?” I said to Jimmy.
“Naw, not at all.” He tossed the ax handle to the side of the road. “Lou, pack your shit up.”
That’s when I saw Lou had brass knuckles on his fists. He took them off and put one set in his right pants pocket, the other set in his left.
“What the fuck is this?” Leonard said.
“You don’t remember me, do you, Leonard?” Jimmy said.
“Nope.”
“You whipped my ass down by the river once at a tire-fire fight.”
“Remember the fights, don’t remember you,” Leonard said.
“You knocked me out.”
“I’ve knocked a lot of people out,” Leonard said.
Jimmy smiled at Leonard, turned to me. “Listen here, Hap. I got this problem, and I think we ought to discuss it.”
“I’m not a psychiatrist, Jimmy,” I said. “Even a town like Marvel Creek might have a therapist in it. You could maybe trade some chickens for therapy. Didn’t your family used to raise them?”
“I’m all out of chickens, Hap. Look, let’s cut the cute shit. Let’s talk.”
“Where?” I said. “Coffee shop?”
“Picnic table seems private enough,” he said.
Jimmy and Lou were nearer the back of my car now, having come up on little cat feet, like the poet said. They were standing a couple of yards from us. Leonard and I were leaning against the trunk of my car. Leonard had his hand in his pocket. I held my friend the sawed-off ball bat in front of me, the heavy end resting in the palm of one hand. I patted it now and again, just as a reminder.
“You remember that time at the Dairy Bob when Bob run them fellows out of there for acting fools, and they set a car on fire out back, thought it was Bob’s?” Jimmy said.
“I do. Burned down their own cousin’s car instead, as I recall. He had a car similar to Bob’s and had parked there while he and some friends went riding around in someone else’s car. If I could remember who all was in that car, or was supposed to be, it would take a real burden off of me, Jimmy.”
“I know, doesn’t matter,” Jimmy said. “You remember the cousin who owned the car, Taylor Atkins?”
“A little,” I said. “Thought it didn’t matter.”
“Taylor found out it was his cousins done it, burned it down to the fucking frame, and he and some of his buddies took his cousins down to the river bottoms and beat the dog shit out of ’em.”
“I remember the story,” I said.
“Taylor was close to his cousins, more like brothers, but he didn’t have money to replace his car, so he had to have some satisfaction out of it, even if what they did was an accident, mistaken car identity. Main one involved with starting the fire, Phil, you remember Phil Atkins? Well, he lost an eye over that. I think Taylor hit him with a plank or something.”
“I heard a bottle.”
“Whatever, an eye was lost. They were a year out of high school, still hanging around Marvel Creek, scraping by, and you know what? They’d still be here if it weren’t for prison. They live there now. They got a comfortable regimen. Taylor killed somebody, and the rest of them are in for this and that. All of the cousins, two or three of the friends. They got some serious stretches to do, and Taylor won’t be coming out under his own power.”
“You seem to have lost the point to your story,” I said. “If there was one.”
“So, Phil loses an eye, and it wasn’t personal,” Jimmy said.
“The hell it wasn’t,” I said.
“Okay. It was personal in that the cousins couldn’t pay for the car, but they were still cousins, and they went on and got along together after that, even married sisters. Not their own, but another family with sisters. They’re divorced now, and of course, the cousins are all in the hoosegow.”
“Listen, Jimmy,” I said, “you got some moral to this story you’re trying to get across, I kind of wish it would show up. I’m starting to feel the effects of old age here.”
“You and me, we were friends in high school—”
“We knew each other,” I said. “We got along because we didn’t know each other enough not to get along.”
“That’s right. We got along. Well, the cousins got along too, but there had to be retribution for that car, and it was a point of honor, even if in the end, all was forgiven.”
“Is this shoe ever going to drop?” Leonard said.
“What I’m saying is Taylor didn’t want to do what he did, but he had to make sure he kept his honor intact. That’s what it was all about. What we got here isn’t exactly the same situation, but it’s something like it. We got hired to follow you, didn’t we, Lou?”
Lou nodded.
“We are supposed to see that you leave town and help you leave if you don’t choose to do it on your own. Thought you were gone for a bit there, and nothing needed doing, and I was happy about that, and then damn if you didn’t come back. Saw you again, followed you out here, and now, here we are.”
“Yep, here we are.”
“Wait a minute,” Leonard said. “So that story you told is a kind of fucking parable about you doing the honorable thing, keeping your word, but you don’t have to if we leave? My suggestion to you is work up another story that’s more on point. But what I’m getting here from that fucked-up story, and believe me, it’s like a crow sorting through cow shit to find a corn kernel, you’re saying you been hired by someone to check us up and light us up if need be. Could the asshole hired you be George, or Professor Asshole?”
“Professor,” Jimmy said. “Pays good wages for little jobs. It’s a living.”
“Let’s sit at the picnic table,” I said. “Your story kind of wore me out.”
Jimmy said, “I got some beer in a cooler of ice in the back of the truck. Want one?”
“No, thanks,” I said.
“I’ll have one,” Leonard said.
“Lou, get this man a beer.”
“I’ll walk with you, just in case one of the beers shoots bullets,” Leonard said.
When Leonard and Lou came back, Leonard was carrying a beer. Lou was carrying two. I could see water dripping off their hands from reaching into the cooler. Lou gave Jimmy a beer, kept one for himself.
I put the shortened ball bat on the back of the car trunk and we all walked over to the picnic table and sat down, but before Leonard sat, he took the gun out of his pocket and laid it on the table next to his beer.
“Do you need that?” Jimmy said.
“I don’t know yet,” Leon
ard said.
The rain of the night before had left dampness in the trees, and being close to them we could feel the humidity. The heat oozed out of the greenery and made us sticky as sugar doughnuts. A light, almost transparent mist floated a few inches above a run of water near the trees, and the mist clung between the trees like a fallen cloud. I could see insects wiggling in the water.
“I want you to understand, fellows, that I don’t cotton to Professor’s beliefs,” Jimmy said. “I cotton to his money. Lou here, he’s on the fence.”
Lou nodded.
“Has he got something in his throat?” I said.
“Ah, that’s right. You didn’t really know Lou.”
“I didn’t really know you,” I said.
“Lou doesn’t talk much,” Jimmy said. “Bottom line is this. I don’t care one way or the other what the truth is, what someone’s beliefs are, if I’m getting paid to do a thing. And I’m getting paid.”
“Does your job have to come with a lecture?” I said. “Because I’m starting to get bored.”
“Always a smart mouth,” Jimmy said. “Even in school.”
“How would you know?” I said. “We didn’t hang.”
“Reputation, Hap, reputation. You had one. But listen here, man. I’m trying to reach what we might call a goddamn fucking compromise, and I’m trying to get there for your own good, the both of you, and maybe mine and Lou’s good. Shit can go sideways for any of us, so I want to avoid conflict.”
“That’s big of you,” Leonard said.
“Professor, he’s a solid sort, just has some, well, how do we say it, old-style beliefs in a fresh package. I don’t know how much he believes his own bullshit or how much he’s just playing to a certain type, but the thing is, from time to time he needs someone to help him out on certain matters. And the matter he wants help with is he wants you and Leonard to leave town.”
“Does his wanting us to leave have anything to do with Jackie Mulhaney?” I asked.
“It may, it might not. I didn’t ask. Don’t care.”
“Did you know Jackie?”
“Who didn’t? She was pretty wild, and maybe a little crazy. But beyond that, I know very little, like she had been with George, and this black guy…can’t remember his name.”