Rumble Tumble

10

We got on 59, headed north to 259, caught I-20 at Kilgore and went west toward Dallas. We skirted the roof of Dallas, hit 35, and except for a couple of pee breaks, we rode it all the way into Oklahoma.

We stopped at Ardmore about eight that evening and had dinner in a steak house. When we finished, we decided to find a place for the night and smoke on into Hootie Hoot early in the morning.

We got rooms at a cheap motel and toted the blanket-wrapped guns into the rooms with us, just in case someone decided to steal a spare out of our trunk and ended up with a bargain.

Brett and I had a small room that smelled strongly of detergent or disinfectant, but after brushing our teeth and washing our faces, we found the bed inviting and the smell less annoying. We didn’t feel like making love, which meant we were probably on our way to a solid relationship. We just slept together, cuddled up spoon style.

When we awoke the next morning it was raining lightly. We collected Leonard, had breakfast at the same cafe where we had eaten our steaks, and set out again. The rain began to fall harder, and the storm followed us all the way into Hootie Hoot, which lay about twenty-five miles outside of Oklahoma City.

When we got there, it was early afternoon and the rain had not stopped. Hootie Hoot was, as Red had said, a burg. There was a long street with old brick buildings. A theater, a cafe, a filling station, and, strangely enough, a taxi stand, with one old battered blue cab out front. I wondered where it took people. Up one side of the street and down the other?

We didn’t see any neon signs that blinked BIG JIM’S HOOTIE HOOT WHOREHOUSE, so we left town and found another cheap motel five miles out, not far from I-35. Leonard got a room next to ours. We bought some groceries at a little store across the highway, sat in Brett’s and my room laying out plans and eating store-bought ham and cheese sandwiches and Cheez Doodles.

Leonard finished his lunch, sat by the window. He held a can of Coke in one hand, held the curtain back with the other and watched the rain snap down on the parking lot. He said, “Thing is, whatever we do, we got to do it and be done with it.”

“My suggestion is we find the whorehouse and start from there,” I said.

“Now that’s a good idea,” Leonard said. “I’m glad you’re along, Hap. Me and Brett might not have thought of that.”

“Do we just go in and get her?” Brett asked.

“I don’t think that’d work so good,” I said. “Posing as a customer is probably the best way to go.”

“And you’ll have to be the customer,” Leonard said.

“You think they’ll know you’re gay?” Brett asked.

Leonard laughed. “No, but they’ll know I’m black.”

“Oh,” Brett said.

“Black or white may not matter,” Leonard said, “but this is a little burg in Oklahoma. I was in Maine, I’d be thinking the same thing. It might not matter, but on the other hand it might. My guess is this is a redneck operation.”

“Remember what Wilber said about Big Jim being nice to niggers,” I said. “That doesn’t bode well for Brother Leonard here.”

“No use getting the rednecks stirred we don’t have to,” Leonard said.

“That doesn’t sound like you,” I said.

“Older and wiser,” Leonard said.

“So you’ll go in?” Brett asked me.

“Yeah,” I said. “Thing we got to do next is find the whorehouse, and, as Leonard pointed out, maybe I ought to do the investigation work on that instead of him. They might not take kindly to a brother askin’ where the white women are.”

“Couldn’t some of the women be black?” Brett asked.

“They could,” I said, “but in redneck mentality it’s okay to screw a black woman, but it isn’t okay to have a relationship with her.”

“And it isn’t okay at all a black man screws a white woman,” Leonard said. “Weird territorial stuff.”

“And there’s another thing,” I said. “We don’t even know there’s a house of ill repute here.”

“Ill repute?” Leonard said. “Man, you been reading those Victorian novels again?”

“Red could have lied,” I said. “In fact, this is all starting to look like a big joke on us. He might not even have worked for any Big Jim. There might only be one grain of truth to the story. He knows your daughter works as a prostitute, and maybe he knows that because he was a customer.”

“The old postmarks on Till’s letters were out of Oklahoma City,” Brett said.

“Yeah,” I said, “a card mailed from here, most likely that’s where it would get stamped. But it’s all iffy.”

“I’m prepared for it not to work out,” Brett said. “But I’m more prepared to do something. It makes me feel like I’m trying.”

“I’ll start now,” I said.