Mucho Mojo

4.

The house was hot and filthy, the fireplace was full of trash, and there were great skeins of cobwebs all about. As we moved, dust puffed and floated in the sunlight that bled through thickly curtained windows and the place smelled sour and the smell came from a variety of things. One of them I felt certain was Uncle Chester himself. You die in a house and lay there for two days in the heat, you get a little ripe, and so do your surroundings.

I left the front door open. Not that it helped much. There wasn’t any wind stirring.

“Damn,” Leonard said. “It’s like he didn’t live here.”

Considering the aroma he’d left behind, I felt that was debatable, but I said, “He was old, Leonard. Maybe he didn’t move around much.”

“He wasn’t that old.”

“You hadn’t seen or heard from him in years. He could have been in a bad way.”

“Maybe him giving me this place was some kind of final jab in the heart. I loved this house when I was a kid. He knew that. Shit, look at it now.”

“Final days he maybe got his shit together. Decided to let bygones be bygones. Ms. Grange said he left you some money too.”

“Confederate, most likely.”

We moved on through the house. The kitchen was squalid with dirty dishes stacked in the sink and paper plates and TV dinner receptacles stuffed in the trash can. There was a pile of debris around the can, as if Chester had finally given up taking out the garbage and had started merely throwing stuff in that general direction.

Flies buzzed on patrol. On the counter, in a TV dinner tray, squirming in something green and fuzzy that might have been a partial enchilada, were maggots.

“Well,” I said. “He damn sure lived in here.”

“Shit,” Leonard said. “This ain’t no recent mess.”

“No. He worked on this one.”

Off the kitchen was a bedroom. We went in there. It was relatively neat. On the nightstand by the bed was a worn hardback copy of Thoreau’s Walden. That was Leonard’s favorite book, especially the chapter titled “Self Reliance.”

I looked around the room. One wall was mostly bookshelf. The books were behind sliding glass.

Leonard went over to the closed curtain and opened it. The window glass was dusty yellow and tracked with fly specks. The frame had bars mounted on the outside of it, and you could see the house where Mohawk, Parade Float, and the assholes stayed.

“Old man was scared,” I said.

“He wasn’t never scared of nothing,” Leonard said.

“You get older, you got to get scared. Courage is in proportion to your size and physical condition and what caliber weapon you carry. Some cases how much liquor, crack, or heroin you got in you.”

“Man, this neighborhood hadn’t never been ritzy, but it’s really gone to the fucking dogs.”

“Dogs wouldn’t have it.”

“This shit next door. I don’t get it. Crack house and anyone with a glass eye in their head could tell that’s what it is, but what’re the cops doing? Kid was getting a jolt of horse on the porch, man. Right out in front of God and everybody.”

“That’s probably a free jolt,” I said. “Horse doesn’t come cheap. Later on, they get him needing a little, they’ll tell him to try some rock. He takes that and he comes back ’cause it’s got him and it’s cheap. A kid can get rock for five dollars, even if he’s got to steal trinkets to sell.”

Leonard closed the curtain and we went out into the hallway and past the bathroom into the room next door.

“Jesus,” Leonard said.

The room was full of ceiling-high stacks of yellowed newspapers. There was a little path between the stuff. We went down that, and the path turned left and opened up. There was a chair and table in the opening with a small rotating fan and papers on it.

If you sat in the chair and looked across the table, you could see the window opposite it, and provided the curtains hadn’t been drawn shut, I figured I’d have been able to see bars and a dusty view of the crack house.

There was a ballpoint pen and a composition notebook on the desk. The notebook was open and I looked at the page. Uncle Chester had been doodling. There were a number of little rectangles and the rectangles were numbered. There were some lines drawn at the top and bottom and on the sides.

It looked as if Uncle Chester hadn’t had enough to do.

It was hot in there and the dust we’d stirred hung about in the dead air and around our heads like a veil. It choked me.

We went out of there and back into the living room, started out the front door to get some air, and that’s when we noticed that besides the lock the key worked, there were no fewer than five locks or barricades on the door frame, you wanted to use them. There were two chain locks, a dead bolt, and a metal bar that fit into slots on either side of the door, and at the bottom and top of the door were swivel catches.

“He wasn’t fucking around on security,” I said.

“The assholes next door, I reckon,” Leonard said.

We stood on the porch and the air was still not moving and it was still hot, but it was a hell of a lot more comfortable than the decaying air inside the house. Another couple of hours, the temperature would be down to ninety and the wind might be stirring, and inside the house, you had all the windows open and a fan going, you might be able to breathe without a respirator.

I looked over at the crack house. No one was visible. I said, “You did all right for a fella on a cane.”

“Motherfuckers are lucky I can’t get around good as usual. Another week, I’ll be taking a dance class.”

“That post with the bottles. What the hell is it? Ornamentation?”

“It’s mojo shit. Protects you from evil spirits. Spirits supposed to go into the bottles and get trapped. Or maybe they go in and are tossed out and transformed into something safe. Don’t know for sure. I remember seeing them now and then as a kid. Hearing about them. But Uncle Chester, he never believed in that shit. He was always practical as a hangman.”

“There’s things about people you never know, Leonard. Even people close as you and me. Hell, I might listen to polka records, all you know.”

“Reckon so. Listen here, Hap. I got to see that lawyer tomorrow. Think I could get you to stay with me here tonight?”

“If I don’t want to?”

“Long walk home.”

“What I figured.”

Though we hadn’t planned on staying, we had brought a change of clothes with us, in anticipation of stopping somewhere to shed our suits so we could maybe get a bite to eat and go to a movie.

We put on the clothes and set about tidying the place up some. I drove into town proper and bought some plastic trash bags and some cleaning stuff, and when I got back, Leonard had started washing dishes in the sink.

While he did that, I pulled back all the curtains and opened all the windows and picked up the trash and bagged it and took it out to the side of the house.

Time I got that done, Leonard had finished the dishes and was doing general cleaning. Sweeping, mopping, beating down cobwebs with a broom, polishing the window bars, spraying Lysol about.

“There’s roaches in here big enough to own property,” Leonard said.

“I know. One just helped me carry the trash out.”

Time we finished what we were willing to do, we were sweaty and dusty, and we took turns in the bathroom, washing up best we could. There wasn’t any hot water.

We turned on the porch light and closed the windows and locked up the joint and stuffed the trunk and backseat with garbage bags and drove off. We put the garbage in a university dumpster when no one was looking, and went to a Burger King and ate. We went to a movie after that and came back to the house solid dark, watching to see if any of our friends next door were waiting to surprise us.

Guess they were still mulling over the ass kicking earlier that day. We could see a knot full of them out on the dark front porch over there, looking at us. We picked up the newspapers in the driveway and waved at our crack house buddies and went on in the house.

Leonard gave me the bedroom and took the couch in the living room. We laid about and read newspapers for a while, then sacked out. I left the bedroom door open to keep air circulating and I raised the window and turned on the overhead fan.

From where I lay, I could turn and look out the doorway and see Leonard lying in there on his back on the couch, his arm thrown over his eyes.

“I’m sorry about your uncle,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Everybody has to go.”

“Yeah. I wish things had worked out better between us.”

“He loved you, Leonard. Otherwise he wouldn’t have left you the house.”

“I’d have liked for him to have told me he loved me. Sometimes, when I’m stupid, I feel guilty for being homosexual. Like I had some choice in how my hormones got put together. Uncle Chester found out, he treated me like I was a pervert. Like being gay means you molest children or take advantage of weaker men for sex.”

“He wasn’t any different than a lot of folks, Leonard.”

“I’ve never forced anything on anyone else, and mostly I don’t bother with sex at all. I got the problem of being attracted mostly to straight men and that doesn’t work. Lot of gay guys act gay and that bothers me.”

“That’s odd, Leonard.”

“No, that’s pretty standard with a lot of gays. I think somewhat like a woman, I guess. I want to have a relationship with a man, but somehow, gay guys don’t normally do much for me. I guess I’ve been taught they’re odd, and I’m one of them. Go figure. I tell you, nature played a fucking joke on me.”

“Ha. Ha.”

“Hap, you ever feel funny being my friend, knowing I’m gay?”

“I don’t normally think about it. I mean, you’re not exactly a gay prototype.”

“No one is.”

“I mean, I’m not aware of it much, and when I am, I guess it strikes me odd. I accept it, but don’t understand it. I don’t see gays as perverts. Some are, some aren’t, same as heterosexuals. But I am an East Texas boy and my background is Baptist-”

“I’m East Texas and Baptist background too.”

“I know. I’m just saying. Sometimes, I am aware of it. It doesn’t bother me exactly, but I’m aware of it and I feel a little confused.”

“Think you’re confused. Life would be easier, I was straight.”

“Yep, but you ain’t.”

“Damn. Wish I’d thought of that.”

“You ever watch Leave It to Beaver?”

“Yeah.”

“End of that show, way I remember it anyway, the two brothers, Wally and the Beaver, they used to share a room and have a talk before they turned out the light and went to bed. In that talk they summed up the episode you just watched, and the problems they’d gone through, and everything was capped off and solved in those last few minutes and they moved onto new stuff next week with no baggage. You know what?”

“What?”

“Life ain’t like that.”

“No, it ain’t. Good night, Wally.”

“Good night, Beave.”