Mucho Mojo

21.

“I think we should go to the police,” I said. “Talk to Hanson.”

“Not yet,” Leonard said. “Let me think on it.”

My shirt was still damp from dressing while wet, but it felt comfortable in the close heat. I smelled faintly of pond water. We were back over on the East Side, at a little, smoky black juke joint called the Congo Bongo Club, having a beer. Well, Leonard was having a beer. I was having a nonalcoholic beer. The place served them, but they seemed embarrassed about it. The bartender, who was also the waiter, kinda slunk over and put it on the table like a patient giving a pretty nurse a urine specimen.

The lights in the joint were not too good. Most of what light there was came from red-and-blue neon beer signs at the bar and the blue-white glow from the jukebox. In fact, it was so dark in the back of the place you could have pulled your dick out and put on a rubber and no one would have known it. It wasn’t the kind of place had a no-smoking section either. The cigarette and cigar smoke was thick enough to set a beer glass on.

The joint smacked of fire hazard. If there was a rear exit, you probably had to go through a back office to get to it. A fire started here, the office was locked, and the front door got blocked, you could kiss your charred ass good-bye. The music on the juke was great, however. John Lee Hooker.

We were trying to figure our next move. Or Leonard was figuring our next move. I was wondering what the cops did to you if they found out you had discovered a body in a pond and went away and didn’t tell them. I was certain dire consequences hovered above the question. I had already spent some time in prison, and I didn’t want another stretch. I wasn’t even crazy about a small fine.

“There’s things here don’t jive right,” Leonard said, “but I can’t put my finger on the problem.”

In the glow of the jukebox, I saw a big black man eye-balling us from a table across the way, throwing back beer like water. Actually, he was eyeballing me, as carefully as a birdwatcher might a rare yellow-throated two-peckered brush warbler. I suddenly realized just how white my skin was. Maybe we’d have done better to have picked up a six-pack at a convenience store.

I didn’t say anything to Leonard, as the faintest hint of intimidation made his dick hard, but I kept my eye on the guy.

We shouldn’t have gone in the Congo Bongo anyway. In my old age it seemed I was becoming less wise and cautious. It was supposed to be the other way around. Maybe, after forty, a kind of self-destruct button kicks in.

“I don’t know for a fact there was a body in the van,” I said, blinking away tobacco smoke. “It just seems likely, because it damn sure didn’t feel like a bundle of books I was touching. Question is, if it is a body, and it is Illium, why is he in the pond?”

“Bad driving?”

“That’s not high on my list. Seriously, Leonard.”

“Suicide?”

“Actually, I thought of that one. Don’t get pissed, but let me throw out a theory, OK?”

“Toss it.”

“Say your uncle and Illium met and took to one another like flies to shit, discovered they had something in common. They liked little kids, and not to pet on the head.”

“I see this coming.”

“Say your uncle did kill the child under his flooring. Killed him somewhere else and brought him back to the house.”

“To play with?”

“I’m trying to be delicate here.”

“That don’t mean you ain’t thinking it.”

“Illium and Uncle Chester find they both like this kind of thing, and Uncle Chester likes to show Illium what he’s got in the trunk under the floorboards, and they share a few magazines, and let’s say when your uncle dies, Illium begins to feel guilty… No, let’s say lonely. I mean, this isn’t a club. You can’t go to Child Molesters United and find a bunch of guys like you.”

“Way I understand it, it ain’t as hard as you think.”

“So Illium misses your uncle. Gets tired of looking at the kid fuck magazines by himself, just sitting around in the house, waxing his well rope-”

“So he gets all dewy eyed, puts his box of pornography on the couch, and his kid’s clothes, possibly acquired from murders he’s committed, or my uncle’s murders if Illium was just a fantasizer, and he says, ‘Good-bye, cruel world’ to his box of toys, jumps in the bookmobile, runs off in the pond and drowns himself.”

“It’s a theory.”

“It sucks, Hap. It sucks the big ole donkey dick. I don’t buy any of it. And what’s with the coupons? And you know that book I picked up on the bank? It had a mark in it that’s in the copy of Dracula Uncle Chester gave me. A black circle with a red heart on the inside.”

“It’s my turn to say that’s nothing. They were friends. Makes sense Illium marked the books he loaned that way, and your uncle got one.”

“Yeah, and my uncle left me a safety-deposit box containing a book with that inside, and some coupons, so maybe it means more than it seems like it ought to. The coupons seemed nuts until we found those coupons at Illium’s, now I’m beginning to think Uncle Chester was trying to tell me something.”

“And he left you a painting,” I said.

“Yeah, and there’s that,” Leonard said. “And if he was trying to tell me something, why didn’t he just write it down and explain it? Or get in touch with me and tell me? Why the code business? What’s it all mean?”

“I’m afraid Hanson’s right,” I said. “This is starting to sound like Agatha Christie shit, and I don’t know from puzzles. They make my head hurt.”

“Reckon we need Miss Marple?”

“Could be she’s coming over right now,” I said.

The big black guy who’d been watching strolled over to our table. Well, not exactly strolled. He listed a little. He’d had just the right amount of beer. I sized him up, looking for striking zones just in case it wasn’t his intention to discuss politics or summer fashion.

He stopped at our table, said to Leonard, “What the fuck you doin’ in here with this honkie, brother? You trying to get a job promotion? This ain’t no honkie place.”

Leonard leaned over the table, said, “He’s talking about you.”

“Yeah?” I said.

“Yeah,” Leonard said. “You see, honkie is a very derogatory black term for whites,” Leonard said to me. “You see, stuff like peckerwood, ofay, and honkie, it’s very insulting. It’s like whites calling us nigger or coon or jungle bunny.”

“No shit?” I said.

The big black guy glared at me, said, “You ain’t never heard honkie before, motherfucker?”

“He’s sheltered,” Leonard said. Then to me: “ Motherfucker, Hap, is a common term meaning you fuck your mother. Even if you don’t fuck your mother, folks say it anyway if they’re mad at you or want to make you mad. It’s designed to be derogatory.”

“I see,” I said.

“You cocksuckers best quit fuckin’ with me!” the big black guy said.

“ Cocksucker,” Leonard said to me, “is a common term-”

“Cut it out, you motherfuckers!”

A lot of folks were looking at us now, wondering how much blood would be involved. The jukebox wrapped up its tune and the air went silent with the threat of murder.

The bartender said over the bar, softly, “Clemmon, ease off, these fellas just come in for a drink.”

“I ease off I want to ease off,” said the big black guy.

I glanced out of the corner of my eye at the front door. About twenty steps. Five, if you were leaping.

“Hey, buddy,” I said, showing more confidence than I felt, “I’m not bothering you.”

“You come down here and slum with the niggers, is what bothers me,” said the big black man. “You white pieces of shit always lookin’ down your noses at us. Come in here, smart-mouth me. It’s gonna get you hurt. I bet you think I’m on food stamps.”

“I hadn’t thought about it,” I said.

“Well, I ain’t. I own my own business.”

“Congratulations,” I said, “but I’m warning you, go on about your business. ’Cause you fuck with me, tomorrow your relatives will be splitting up your belongings.”

“What’s that mean?” the big man said. “What the fuck you talkin’ about?”

“He’s threatening to kick your ass plumb to death,” said someone at a nearby table.

“Appreciate that translation,” I said.

“You’re welcome,” said the man at the table.

It finally registered with the big black guy that he was being insulted, and the game was over. He reached for me.

I batted his hand to the inside with my palm and raised out of my seat and hooked my other arm behind his head and dropped down quick with all my weight, brought his head into the edge of the table, sharply. The bottles on the table jumped and fell over. I slammed the guy behind the neck with my forearm and he came down and met my knee and rolled over on the floor and made a sound like he might get up, but didn’t. He lay there in a ball and tried to look comfortable. I was glad he was drunk.

Leonard stood up. A lot of folks were standing up. I heard the click of a knife opening nearby. I picked a fallen bottle off the table and held it by the neck. Some of its contents ran out and splashed on my shoe. I reached in my pocket with my free hand and got some money and put it on the table. I wished I was wearing a wide-brimmed black hat and a serape. A damp shirt and pants would have to do, though.

The bartender said very softly, “Go ’head on and leave, boys.”

I turned and looked at him. He was a little jet-black man wearing a white shirt with black bow tie. The neon throbbed colors on his shirt. He was holding a sawed-off pump shotgun, gauge of twelve. He wasn’t holding it tensely, just showing it off. If he’d thought it through, he’d probably loaded it with slugs. You let down on it, you cleaned out fewer innocent customers that way.

“We were just leaving,” I said.

“I thought you was,” he said. “Don’t forget the tip.”