All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky

48

A while later an ambulance sped up with its siren on and two men jumped out and opened the back and rolled out a stretcher, headed for where Bad Tiger lay.

They picked him up and turned him over gently, put him on the stretcher. One of the men carrying him, said, “Well, he’s ate his last pickle.”

A man in the crowd pointed at Strangler.

“He was shooting at that guy, the one without a shirt, and he backed into the ride while he was doing it.”

“Not our department,” said one of the ambulance men.

They put him in the ambulance and drove away. No siren, moving slowly. No one in a hurry now.

We walked with Strangler to his trailer. Inside, he put the false bottom in the trunk, replaced the barbells and all the rest back inside, and closed the lid. He sat on the couch and looked at Timmy. Timmy looked smaller than I remembered.

After a while, the cops came, two of them. They knocked on the door politely, and when I let them in they looked at the body on the floor, then at us. One of the cops was thin with a sweet face. The other was a stocky cop who looked like he ate bullets for breakfast and cannons for dinner. For supper, maybe the cannonballs.

Jane was wrapping Strangler’s side. There was already a bandage on his chest.

She said, “I reckon both bullets are still in him.”

“He looks spry for two bullets,” said the stocky cop.

“Yeah, well,” Jane said, “he is naturally spry.”

The cops walked over and looked at Strangler.

“Someone called a doctor,” said the thin cop. “He’s on his way.”

“I’m all right,” Strangler said. “It wasn’t much of a gun.”

“You could still use a doctor, ” Jane said.

“You know,” said the stocky cop, “we got a body on the floor, we got another one thrown through a popcorn stand, twisted up like a Boy Scout knot, but we ain’t got no explanation.”

“He tried to rob Strangler,” Jane said.

“Who are you?” the cop said.

“A fan. I run his fan club. He doesn’t know it yet, but we just started one. We came here to tell him that, and that’s how we got mixed up in all this mess. We’re from Oklahoma.”

“Oklahoma?” the stocky cop said.

“Yeah, state just above Texas,” Jane said.

The thin cop grinned. The stocky cop said, “Yeah, girlie, I know where it is. But why did you come all the way from Oklahoma?”

“We are all fans of Strangler,” she said. “Right?”

She looked at us when she said that.

Tony nodded.

I nodded.

“Fans?” said the stout cop.

“Big fans,” Jane said.

“So you heard of Strangler here, and you come all the way down from Oklahoma to tell him you’re starting a fan club?”

“Well,” Jane said, resting a hand on Strangler’s shoulder, “it’s a little more complicated than that. We didn’t like the weather, the drought, the sand, the grasshoppers, the starving rabbits, the centipedes everywhere, the scorpions, and did I mention the dust?”

“You did,” said the stocky cop. “You’re a little smarty, ain’t you?”

“I like to think so,” Jane said.

“That’s not what I meant,” said the cop.

“All I’m saying, sir, is we’ve had a hard time, and we were very excited to be here, to finally tell our hero about the fan club. And frankly, we were looking for a job with the carnival. Strangler has quite a following in Oklahoma and the South. East Texas especially. We thought a fan club would be nice. And we thought a quarter per membership could add up.”

“So it was a way to make money?” said the thin cop.

“Money,” Jane said, “and a way to honor our hero. We just came to tell him. We wanted his blessing. Course, I’ll be honest with you. With or without it, we were going to form the fan club anyway.”

“So, fan club aside,” said the stocky cop. “How’d all this happen?”

“Simple,” Jane said.

“Don’t you talk?” the stocky cop said to Strangler.

“Yeah, but she’s explaining real good,” Strangler said.

“As fate would have it,” Jane said, “we tracked Strangler down, came by to tell him about our plans, and those two dreadful men, they tried to rob him. The man that crashed the popcorn stand, he shot that man on the floor there over some argument. We don’t even really understand what he was mad about, do we?”

This was directed at all of us.

Tony shook his head.

I shook mine.

Strangler said, “Yeah, it was kind of confusing.”

“My take,” Jane said, “if you want it, is they come to rob poor Strangler here, they didn’t want to share it with one another. You know the story. No honor among thieves. My guess is they were already feuding over something and it got carried into their work, so to speak. It came to a head right here.”

“Why would they want to rob you any more than anyone else here?”

“I don’t know,” Strangler said. “I don’t have anything.”

“He’s famous,” Jane said. “Fame draws good and it draws bad. They were bad.”

“I’ll say,” said the cop.

“They thought he had money,” Jane said. “Just because he’s a famous fighter, they thought he had some real dough. But, alas. He does most of what he does for the love of it. Right, Strangler?”

“Right,” Strangler said.

“For the love of it, huh?” said the stocky cop.

“You know who that was?” said the thin cop. “The one that ate the popcorn stand? That was Bad Tiger.”

“The gangster?” Jane said. “Oh my. And who’s that on the floor, Dillinger?”

“Timmy Durango,” said the stocky cop. “He goes by other names, but that’s his real one. He’s bad as any of them. It was Bad Tiger, though, that was the brains.”

“He ain’t got any now,” said the thin cop, “unless you want to gather them up and put them in a popcorn bag.”

“Crime doesn’t pay,” Jane said. “And that’s just the long and the short of the matter, don’t you think?”

“You really do talk a lot,” the stocky cop said to Jane.

“It’s a gift,” she said.