Mucho Mojo

22.

When we got back to Leonard’s place, Florida’s car was parked in the drive and she was on the porch sitting in the glider. It was a bright-enough night I could see she was wearing some kind of cartoon character T-shirt, blue jean short-shorts and big wooden shoes that reminded me of miniature pontoons. She looked cute as a new puppy.

Next door there was the usual activity of drug selling, and I could hear Mohawk’s, alias Strip’s, alias Melton’s, voice above everyone else’s. When Melton got excited, his vocal cords achieved a kind of shrill quality, like something oily was trying to crawl up his ass and he was liking it.

“Not a real good place for a lady to hang out this time of night,” I said to Florida.

“They think I’m inside, I bet.”

The way the glider was positioned, the shadows, that was possible, but I still didn’t think it was a good idea. Guys like the ones next door knew we were gone, saw her car over here, they might decide to investigate.

“You’ll promise me you won’t do this again, though, won’t you?” I said.

“I promise,” she said.

“Want to come in?” Leonard asked her.

“No,” she said, “I’m going to steal Hap from you. I’m taking him on a picnic.”

“Picnic?” I said. “This time of night?”

“I been waiting since dark,” she said. “I’m hungry. And I don’t care if you just ate dinner, we’re picnicking, and you will eat. I made the stuff myself.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“I don’t mean to be rude,” Florida said to Leonard, “stealing Hap off and not inviting you, but-”

“That’s all right,” Leonard said, hanging his head and pretending to be sad. “I have a TV dinner, meatloaf, I think, and they’re having a Three’s Company rerun marathon on channel nine. I wouldn’t want to miss that. And right before it, there’s an hour of The Brady Bunch.”

Florida giggled sweetly and Leonard raised his head and smiled.

I said to Leonard, “We’ll talk later.”

“I want to sleep on a few things anyway,” Leonard said.

“Pretty mysterious, you two,” Florida said.

“That’s us,” Leonard said, “The Mysterious Duo.”

I got in the car with Florida and she drove us out Highway 7 East. I reached in the back for the picnic basket, an official wicker one with handle, and she said, “Uh-uh.”

“I just wanted to know what we were having on this picnic,” I said.

“It’s a surprise. You find out as you eat it. But I bet you can guess what dessert is.”

“Is it chocolate colored and sweet and shaped like a taco and you keep it in a warm place?”

“My God,” she said, “The Amazing Kreskin. Come over here and ride bitch, big boy.”

I slid over next to her and she smelled sweet and delectable. She said, “What’s that cologne, Hap? Frog and Pond?”

I slid away from her. “Do I smell that bad?”

“Get back over here,” she said. “Always did like a man smelled faintly of frog. Maybe you’ll tell me how you came by that aroma?”

“Maybe,” I said, and slid back and kissed her softly on the neck.

We continued until we came to a turnoff that announced a Scenic Overlook. The idea of an overlook in East Texas, especially if you’ve ever been to Colorado, someplace with mountains, is pretty funny. What it means here is a high hill, and not all that high.

We drove up there, and at the top were a couple of concrete picnic tables, a chained-down metal trash receptacle, and a whitewashed chain that ran between thick white posts that designated the area.

We got out of the car, and I carried the basket over to a table. Florida put her arm around me, and we walked to the chain barrier and looked down. You fell, you’d go almost six feet before you were in a pasture. Not exactly scary or breathtaking. But the deal was this: Here, on this hill, you looked straight out, there was a big V in the usual line of trees, and you could see a long ways, and the trees in the distance, especially now at night, looked like blue and purple mountains, and above those trees, the stars were like glitter being poured into a funnel. Directly overhead, it was so clear the stars seemed close enough to snag with a butterfly net. The air was invigorating.

The depression I was feeling after the rush of adrenaline from discovering the body in the van and the brief bar fight was subsiding.

“This is nice,” I said.

“Yes, it is,” she said, and hugged me tighter. “You can see forever itself from here.”

“You come here a lot?”

“Now and then. An old boyfriend in high school showed it to me.”

“Never mind. I’d rather not hear it.”

“He was an astronomer-to-be,” she said. “He was interested in the stars.”

“Right,” I said.

“Well, he did have a theory or two on black holes.”

“Ha. Ha.”

She laughed. “I’ve never been here when someone else was. Not yet. I’ve always had it to myself.”

“Good,” I said.

A shooting star flamed across the sky and snuffed out. We oohed and aahed it.

Damn, what a day. A nude swim. A dead body. A bar fight, and now a picnic with a beautiful woman, and a shooting star. What next? A UFO encounter?

The picnic basket contained barbecued chicken, egg salad and ham and cheese sandwiches on wheat bread, and sweet pickles and hot peppers and chips and potato salad.

“That’s a lot of food,” I said.

“Figured an old guy like you might need to recharge himself later.”

“Honey, I look at you, I don’t need any jumper cables.”

We put the food on paper plates and ate and drank sweet tea out of a large thermos. There was another thermos with coffee; when we finished eating, I reached for it, but Florida stopped me. She said, “After dessert.”

She stood up and took off her shorts and she wasn’t wearing panties. She put the shorts on the picnic table. She slipped off her shirt and she wasn’t wearing a bra.

“You saving on laundry?” I said.

She put the shirt with the shorts. She moved up close to where I sat on the stone picnic bench, and I kissed her belly button. She pushed away from me and smiled and gathered her clothes and walked back to the car. She looked funny and sexy wearing nothing but those big shoes. She opened the back door and sat on the seat with her legs outside and unfastened her shoes and put them on the floorboard. She crossed her legs and looked at me. “Do I have to write you a letter?” she said.

“Don’t even need to send a telegram,” I said, and I got up and went over there.

Later, we dressed and had coffee while we lay on the hood of the car, our backs against the windshield. We must have seen a half-dozen shooting stars.

“This was a nice surprise,” I said. “I especially liked the part where you shucked your shorts.”

“Glad you liked it, but could I say – without intent to hurt your fragile male ego, because I enjoyed myself very much – you seem a little distracted?”

“I’ve had a big day.”

“Hap, I’ve been thinking, and I got to tell you, what I said the other night-”

“That’s all right. I was pushing.”

“What I mean is, I really don’t have the right to judge you. You are who you are, and that’s a pretty good thing. I shouldn’t try and make you something else.”

“You made some good points. I am coasting.”

“I suppose another thing is we haven’t had time to know each other that well. One day I see you and you’re this grungy guy, and the next day I see you you’re on top of the house sucking in your stomach-”

“You noticed that?”

“Sure. And then we’re in the sack, and I like you. I like you a lot, and I don’t really know who you are.”

“What do you want to know?”

“You don’t know me either. Not really. Let me tell you something about myself. Something to clear the air a little. I’m laying on you how ambitious I am, right? Telling you what a ball of fire I am, and what a wet ball of twine you are. So let me be honest. I’m not living up to my ambitions either.”

“Maybe no one does.”

“It was my plan to be a serious criminal lawyer. I wanted to try murder cases. I wanted to specialize in cases dealing with blacks, helping them get fair trials in a white world. The whole nine yards. But I’ve settled for divorce work and a little ambulance chasing. I’ve been in that shitty office of mine for three years, and half the time my clients don’t pay me, or if I get a percentage of something, it’s not a percentage of much, and I haven’t made one bit of real difference in the world, and I thought I’d make oodles.”

“Everyone starts somewhere, Florida. Hell, you’re young. You’ll build into a bigger career.”

“I’ve got to be willing to do that, though. You see, I found out most of the people I was dealing with, defending, white or black, were guilty. If they weren’t guilty of the crime they were up for, they were guilty of two others they got off from. Most of them were guilty as hell.”

“That could have just been your experience so far. There’re bound to be innocent people who need you.”

“Yes, but I was trying to get guilty people off. Trying to find loopholes. And I’m disillusioned with people. Not just the crooks I’ve dealt with, people in general. Not long ago there was a murder near here, over in Mud Creek. A husband lost it and shot his wife and two kids and even the dog.”

“I remember.”

“People talked about the crime for a month or so. A lawyer friend of mine was assigned to the case. She proved the murderer was insane. She told me people asked her about the case all the time, and you know what she said their most common question was about what happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“What kind of dog was it? Yeah. What kind of dog? Like the people didn’t matter. But if it was a cute dog, then we’re talking tragedy. How could someone think that way?”

“You’re running idealism up against reality, Florida. It happens to everyone eventually. But don’t think the two aren’t compatible. I’ve been through that myself.”

“Point is, I’ve lost a lot of my ambition this last year or so, and just that stupid thing about the dog had a lot to do with it. What I’m saying, Hap, is who am I to cast the first stone? And another thing. You’re right. I am nervous about being seen with you because you’re white-”

“You never denied that.”

“But that’s not an excuse. I’m going to change.”

“Hot damn, you’re gonna take me to a movie.”

“Yeah, but you have to wear gloves and a bag over your head.”

“It’s a start.”

“I don’t think of myself as prejudiced, but when I was a little girl we lived briefly up North. My mother had gone up there to stay with relatives. She left my father for a time, and she thought, up there, out of the South, she had a chance to do something without skin color mattering. That was in New Jersey. Well, there wasn’t much more in the way of jobs there, and the relatives we were staying with were living in a white section of town and had been for a couple of months, and one morning we woke up with snow on the ground and a cross burning in the yard. Burned into the yard with gasoline was the word nigger. We moved back here, and the relatives moved out of that neighborhood and into a black one, and the whole idea of sanctuary, that there was somewhere you could go where there wasn’t any prejudice, any racial hatred, was gone.

“It made an impression, Hap. I don’t blame all whites for the stupidity of those people who put up that cross and burned those words into my relatives’ lawn, but it left something here,” she touched her heart, “that has to do with me and white skin. I’m smart enough to know it’s a knee-jerk response at times, and I fight against it, but it’s there, and what really makes me mad is, late at night, sometimes I wake up bitter. Memories like that don’t go away easy.”

“So now you don’t trust whites, and you don’t care to be seen with them – romantically, anyway?”

“It makes me feel dirty. I even feel a little inferior a lot of the time. Like I should be grateful I’m doing what I’m doing, and that I’m doing good for a little colored girl from East Texas. I know better intellectually, but emotionally, I feel maybe I am a nigger. That I’m second-best. I fight against it all the time.”

“Do you feel dirty right now?”

“No. You don’t make me feel that way. In this setting. But we went out in public, the old feelings would come back. I’m not saying I’m not willing to fight them. I’m being honest. But they’ll come back. And maybe that’s OK, as long as I confront them. All right. I’ve showed you my dirty laundry. Told you stuff I’ve never told anybody. Now, tell me something about yourself. Help me learn who you are.”

“I’m a guy who hopes he can show you there’s more to white guys than someone who just wants in your pants. More to this white guy, anyway. I don’t deny that getting in your pants is on my mind. I look at you and biology takes over, and I’m enjoying the sexual aspect of our relationship, but I want more. I’m not going to push you on the matter, but I want you to know that.

“OK. Enough on that. Let’s see. What else? I’m a college dropout. I was a draft resister during the Vietnam War, and I’m proud of it. I stood up for something and didn’t wimp out. Didn’t run off to Canada. Didn’t get religion. ’Course, there was a down side. I went to prison for refusing to step forward at the induction ceremony. I did eighteen months. Let’s see. What else? I was married. The woman made a fool out of me, even after we were divorced. She was like catnip to me. She waved her butt and I followed. She nearly got me and Leonard killed once.”

“What?”

“I’m only going to talk so much about this right now. Later, maybe I’ll have more to say. But the gist of it, without being too specific, is I let her pull us into something I should have known better about. A way to make quick money, easy. Only it wasn’t easy. Leonard knew it was a dumb idea and he told me so, but I was headstrong, and he went along with it anyway, because of me. Ended up my ex-wife, Trudy, got killed and I got injured, and Leonard got his leg hurt bad. He was lucky it healed up the way it did. They thought for a while he’d lose it.”

“My God, Hap… That explains those scars you’ve got?”

“Some of ’em. So, I’m an ex-con and I nearly caused my friend to lose his leg because I couldn’t keep my dick in my pants.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“You’re right. I’m giving myself too much credit. It wasn’t my dick leading me around. It was some foolish vision of true love. I used to believe in that. Sometimes I still do. Maybe that’s what sapped my ambition, there not being any true love. Though to be honest, before Leonard got hurt, I wasn’t exactly a ball of fire either.

“Trudy and prison could be blamed, but I guess finally, you always got to blame yourself. I let my idealism get stepped on, and I began to think it was a sham, that there never was anything to it, because nothing ever changed. But I’ve come out on the other side, now. I’m not ambitious, but I’m not lost either. I’ve got my faith back in humanity, and it’s people like you that do it.

“There’s bad stuff out there, but you look around, there’s good too. I’m not saying I’m ready to wear flowers in my hair and tell everyone to just love one another, but I do think things can be better than they are, and that each of us, in his or her own way, can have something to do with making it better. I also like blueberry ice cream, fluffy bunny rabbits, stuffed animals, especially teddy bears, and cute shoes, if they don’t fit too tight.”

“You silly ass,” Florida said.

“Oh, one more thing. Earlier today, I found a dead body in a pond.”