Captains Outrageous

19

The cops came and got us, thought we might have done it. It didn’t help that Billy had a gun on him, even if it didn’t have bullets. The police thought we were all buddies.

We were shoved into a Mexican jail with cockroaches big enough to work in an iron foundry, rats that reminded me of a roadside attraction. The guard, a tall, mustached man with a slight belly, looked like he’d nail our balls to a log and give us a knife to free ourselves.

Something about him, and the jail, didn’t give me great confidence in the Mexican judicial system. I tried to tell them about Juan Miguel, and how I thought he might have done it or had it done. They listened to me, but said nothing. I might as well have been talking to those monoliths on Easter Island.

He did manage to ask in English where the knife was.

I realized then they were looking for the murder weapon. Obviously, we hadn’t beat Beatrice to death with Billy’s revolver, nor had we used it to cut her up.

Not finding the weapon seemed in our favor. We certainly hadn’t flushed it down the commode or hid it in our ass.

I reconciled myself with that. No murder weapon. What didn’t reconcile me was that jail and those goddamn rats.

Christ, they were big.

Once, many years ago, I stopped at a little trailer parked beside the road that was painted up with exciting pictures of behemoth rats, and above the painting was a sign that read: SEE THE GIANT RATS OF SUMATRA. I couldn’t resist. I paid my money, went inside, found them to be shaved possums. I said as much to the lady who owned the exhibit. She said, “Yeah, you’re right.” No embarrassment at all.

I said, “Everyone in East Texas knows a danged possum when they see it, shaved or not.”

“I know,” she said. And that was the end of that. She didn’t offer to give my money back. She didn’t care I knew they were shaved possums. It’s like the world’s largest gopher I heard about. You pay and go in and it’s the world’s largest all right, only it’s a stone statue of a gopher and they’ve already got your money.

The rats in the jail were near as big as those possums, only they were very much card-carrying rats. They came through a hole in the wall big enough to put your fist through – up to your elbow. They came at night, scampered and sniffed and nibbled about. I assumed they’d bite. I kept both feet on my bunk, watched them in the dark.

Rats. The dark. It brought me back to thinking about Beatrice. I didn’t want to think about her, but I did. Thought about what human rats had done to her by lamplight. Slowly, methodically.

But why?

The money her father owed?

Wouldn’t they let her pay it back after the fishing trip?

Why would anyone want money that bad?

Who in the hell had her father been in dutch with anyway?

Who was Juan Miguel?

What would be the point in killing her?

Break a finger maybe. I could see that.

But she’s dead, how do they get their dough back? What’s the advantage of dead over a living person you could hound for dollars?

Did it become a matter of pride over commerce?

She had to have let them in. The door was sound. But why would she? Did she think she could reason with them? Perhaps she had part of the money. Maybe she thought she’d have it all, that Billy would cool and she would talk him into doing what she wanted. She was probably used to that. Talking men into doing what she wanted.

No answers. Just questions.

So here we were, in a Mexican jail. Me, Leonard, and an asshole. It was a horrible place. Small and tight, all three of us in a damp cell with all those rats and one horribly stained shitter between us.

You had to sit right out there in the open and take a crap. Somehow I found that the most humiliating part of it. Me working out turds that, because of the food, came out like bricks, and Billy watching.

I don’t know why he watched. Maybe he had nothing else to do. Maybe he liked to watch people shit. He certainly seemed to be watching me as I folded the thick toilet paper so I could do my duty.

After about midday of the second day, me shitting, Billy watching, I wiped my ass and rubbed the paper in Billy’s face. He tried to fight back, but he was just big and strong and had no skills. I kneed him inside his thigh and dropped him. I got hold of his hair while he was on his knees and gave him a couple of shots with a swinging elbow.

I regretted that. Got shit on my elbow. Had to wash it in the sink with a pumice soap that nearly took the skin off.

Billy lay down on the floor then, shit on his face, whining. I felt like a bully, but not so much that an hour later, when he was showing signs of recovery, I did it again.

Hit him with an elbow I mean.

Had to use the soap again. Got it off his face and on my elbow. That was starting to irritate me as well. It was like washing up with lathered gravel.

Why couldn’t he have washed his face?

That way, I hit him it would have been clean skin.

I know I wouldn’t go around with doo-doo on my face. No sir.

“Isn’t he fun to hit?” Leonard said. “I’m thinking about giving up sex just to save energy to hit him.”

“In here you’ve given up sex,” I said.

“So I can hit him lots.”

I made a vow that I’d check my watch every hour, and on the hour I was going to kick Billy’s ass. But I’d try and keep my elbow, hands, and feet off the shit on his face. That crack he had made about Beatrice’s death not being suicide was still rubbing me raw. For that matter, I didn’t know for a fact he didn’t do it. I doubted he had. Somehow it didn’t strike me as his style. He was abusive, but I doubted he was a murderer. He might kill by accident he got mad enough, bitch-slap her to death, but I doubted he’d plan anything like that. Torture. Amputation. Then bringing us over to see his handiwork. Nope. Billy wasn’t that calculating.

But he did deserve an hourly ass whipping.

However, the meanness went out of me. Billy eventually felt better, washed his face with the bad soap and stayed in the corner away from us.

Leonard, who heard me make the vow to whip his ass on the hour every hour, was a little disappointed in my caving in. He thought it was the liberal in me. But we decided, liberal or not, it was the best thing all around.

Later on, I felt a little ashamed of myself for doing what I did.

Caving in like that.

After a couple days had gone by – because in Mexico nobody gets in a hurry – they began to seriously suspect we might not have done it. The authorities allowed me to send word back to the States in the form of a phone call. I got hold of Charlie. Told him to come see what he could do, and to bring any kind of help he could bring. The Army might be a good idea.

While we sat and waited, Leonard said, “I don’t know how you do it, Hap. You’ve just got the knack.”

“What?”

“Trouble. You step in it the way kids step in mud puddles. You just can’t go around it, and when you try to jump over it, you fall in it. It’s a knack, brother.”

“Poor Beatrice,” I said.

“Yeah,” Leonard said. “Poor Beatrice. And poor Ferdinand. I wonder about him.”

We had warned the Mexican authorities that Ferdinand’s life might be in danger as well, but again they gave us the Easter Island treatment. It was the same when we told them about Billy’s friends. That was about as exciting to them as egg salad.

“If Ferdinand is alive,” I said, “you don’t think he thinks we did it, do you?”

“Naw. Hey, Billy Boy.”

Billy, who was sitting against the wall with his head hung, looked up.

“Go over there and put your goddamn nose in the corner. I’m sick of looking at you “

Billy went, stood with his nose in the corner like a child.

“When I judge fifteen minutes, I’ll let you out of the corner,” Leonard said, “but don’t you fuckin’ look at me, you hear?”

“Yeah,” Billy said.

“Change that to Yes sir, Mr. Pine, sir, or you ain’t even imagined the beating you’ll take, you piece of shit.”

“Yes sir, Mr. Pine, sir.”

“Now you’re cookin’ with gas.”

We were sitting close together on Leonard’s bunk, talking quietly. I said, “You don’t think Billy did it, do you?”

“No. I think he got thrown out the night before, just like he said. He didn’t get the lovin’ he thought he was gonna get, and the next mornin’ he was still mad, and when she didn’t answer the door, he thought you were casting your harpoon, so he got the gun and came to scare you.”

“But you scared him.”

“I did. But, if you had answered the door, you would have scared him. Maybe not as good as me, but good enough.”

Next afternoon Charlie arrived with Jim Bob Luke.

Charlie had gotten rid of the straw boater and had gone back to his porkpie. He was also wearing a Hawaiian shirt as usual.

Jim Bob is a private investigator and hog farmer out of Pasadena, Texas. A friend of Charlie’s. He saved my life once.

He was wearing a blue western shirt with silver snaps, jeans that looked as if they had seen a lifetime of rodeos, and a white hat, creased, the brim turned up sharply on both sides. He had a little feather in the hatband and a toothpick in his mouth. The hatband was made out of rattlesnake hide and it still had the head on it, but he probably could have done without it.

He came and peeked at us through the bars.

“Damned, if this ain’t the Ritz-Carlton, and you boys are uglier than I remember.”

“And you’re just as sweet as I remember,” Leonard said.

“Gettin’ lots of hog pussy, Jim Bob?” I said.

“Just if they get muddy,” Jim Bob said. “That’s the way I like it. They twist them little curly tails and it’s all I can do not to cream my jeans.”

“You’re a sick sumbitch, Jim Bob,” I said.

“I tell you,” Jim Bob said, “you boys got a way of gettin’ your dicks between the ground and a horse hoof, don’t you?”

“Hap does. And I suffer because of it.”

“Leonard, you’re a fuckup that’s got an excuse,” Jim Bob said. “Without Hap, you’d fuck up on your own. It’s just you boys’ nature. I know. I’m the same way. Damn, it smells like a goddamn fart in here.”

“They feed us a lot of beans,” I said.

Charlie hadn’t said a word. He took off his porkpie hat and slapped it on his thigh for some reason. His face wore the look of a very tired man or maybe just one who wished he had a better class of friends.

“I’ve got Veil in the other room talking,” he said.

“No shit,” I said.

“No shit,” he said.

Veil had helped Leonard once after he burned down a crack house. His defense was basically Leonard thought he was exterminating rats by destroying it. It worked. Leonard got away with a warning. If there was anyone who could legally get us out of this thing, it was Veil.

Veil wasn’t a big guy, average height, black hair gone gray, a slightly Mediterranean look, one good eye, the other covered with a black pirate patch. He had the demeanor of someone who could roll strikes in a bowling alley with his nuts.

“What’s Jim Bob doing here?” Leonard asked. “I mean, I’m glad you might have brought him along to hold my dick while I pee, but what else is he good for?”

“My hogs speak highly of me,” Jim Bob said. “Except for the ones I take to the packin’ plant. I reckon their opinion of me lowers dramatically about then.”

“We thought there might be trouble getting you out,” Charlie said, “so I brought Jim Bob. He kind of likes trouble.”

“Don’t say that,” Jim Bob said. “I don’t like trouble. I just know how to deal with it… All right, I sort of like it.”

“Well, I don’t,” I said. “Get us out of here.”

“What about him?” Charlie said, pointing at Billy.

“He’s on his own.”

“Friends he had with him seem to have bailed,” Leonard said.

“He guilty of anything?” Charlie asked.

“Birth,” Leonard said.

Jim Bob, Charlie, and Veil took a room at the hotel, and Veil did his thing. Arguing with the law via translator. I thought with Veil on the case we’d be out that afternoon, but we weren’t.

Billy, who was free to take his nose out of the wall, said, “You know, I didn’t mean to start it off so bad with you guys.”

“Sure you did,” I said.

“All right, but I’m sorry now.”

“I’m sorry I ever met you,” Leonard said.

“Likewise,” Billy said. “I’m sorry I ever came to Mexico.”

Leonard said, “I’m sorry my best friend, my brother, talked me into a fucked-up cruise, got me left in Mexico, stabbed, and then into this shit. That’s what I’m sorry of.”

“Maybe if we’d taken another cruise line,” I said.

“Look,” Billy said. “I just want to get straight with you guys. I didn’t do this to Beatrice. I wanted to fuck her, not kill her.”

“You have such a way with words,” I said.

“Yeah, well, maybe I’m not silver-tongued, but I got a few dollars. I’ll get out of this.”

“You’re so rich, how come your lawyers aren’t all over this?” I said. “I got my lawyer on it, and I’m not rich.”

“Hey, you’re a hero,” Leonard said. “Remember? You got money in the bank.”

“It’s dwindling,” I said.

“It’s my father,” Billy said. “He’s making me suffer a little. He thinks I need to learn a lesson. I know him. I know that’s what he’s doing. I called him, had to leave a message. He could maybe be out of the country, though. So, would you please call him for me if you get out first?”

“Say you’re a chickenshit cocksucker,” Leonard said. “You hear me?”

“All right. I’m a chickenshit-”

“That’s enough,” Leonard said. “I just wanted to know you’d do it. Give me the number.”

“Can we bury the hatchet?” Billy asked. “Well, maybe that’s not what I should have said, considering Beatrice.”

“Maybe not,” Leonard said. “I get your drift. Unless it turns out you had something to do with this – like we’ll ever know – consider it buried. At least as long as we’re in this jail cell.”

“Let me ask you something, Billy,” I said. “If you’re without money now, waiting on your father, what were you going to pay Beatrice with?”

“Well, I would have had to get the money from my father.”

“Would you really have done that?”

“Probably not,” he said. “Will you still call my father?”

“Sure,” I said. “We’ll call once. He’s not there, you’re shit out of luck. I’m not going to make it a career.”

“Thanks. I’ll find a way to write out the phone number for you. You know, that guy in the cowboy hat is right. It does smell like a fart in here.”

“Yeah,” Leonard said, “and I smell it best when you open your mouth.”