Rumble Tumble

11

By the time I drove Brett’s car back to Hootie Hoot, the rain had slacked and the little town looked better than before. It hadn’t suddenly grown in size and had a Wal-Mart SuperCenter built out to the side, but it was shiny and nostalgic-looking.

It made me think of one of the cozy little towns my mom and dad had lived in briefly while my father worked as a mechanic for an oil and gas company. It was very Andy of Mayberry. Clean and simple, where everyone knew one another, and maybe minded each other’s business too much, but where most of that business would be about little more than a secret apple pie recipe. And, of course, the location of the local whorehouse.

I pulled in at the taxi stand and got out. The stand wasn’t much of a place. A little building made of brick that might at one time have been some sort of store, or maybe even an old jail.

Inside, slouched down in a plastic chair next to a card table, was an older man with a three-day growth of tobacco-specked gray beard. His feet were stretched out, resting in another chair. A TV, festooned with rabbit ears wearing aluminum foil accessories, was perched on a little stand next to the wall. The TV was playing only static. But that was all right, the man in the chair was asleep.

There was a dusty calendar on the wall above the TV. It bore a winter scene with snow-covered trees and a sled and two kids in coats, wool hats, and fat mittens. The calendar read December 1988.

There was a small refrigerator in one corner of the room, and I could hear it humming, as if to entertain itself. It was a sound that made you sleepy.

There was a stack of worn paperback Westerns on one corner of the card table. One of them was open and turned facedown.

Next to the book was a cold-drink bottle full of tobacco spit with a fly on the bottle lip and one inside too stupid to find its way out. It kept buzzing around, hitting the glass, but it never went up to the opening. The sky was the limit, but it was too dumb to know.

Finally the fly, pissed off, flew down and sat on a tobacco chunk in the bottom of the bottle, floated there on its nasty little island amidst an ocean of brown spit. It beat its wings a moment, as if to pass the time. Eventually, it stopped doing even that. Just sat there, confused, surprised, a real loser.

I sympathized.

The fly on the bottle lip, fed up with the ignorance of its comrade, flew off.

I stood watching the man for a while, trying to stare in such a way that his primitive brain would pick up my signals. I was attempting to activate that supposedly dormant sixth sense we all possess but so seldom use.

Either he didn’t have a sixth sense or I was missing mine. He didn’t move.

I knocked on the table.

The man opened his eyes and looked at me. “What do you want?”

“Well, I’m at a taxi stand. Say I wanted a taxi?”

“What for?”

“To go someplace.”

“What I mean,” said the old man, dropping his feet from the chair and sliding them under the table, “where would you be going?”

“That’s a good question. And I have an answer.”

“Yeah, well, good. Take this chair and sit in it while you tell me.”

I pulled the chair around in front of the table and looked at the fella. He appeared to be very tired, and maybe not as old as I had first thought, but certainly no spring chicken.

“Let me tell you something,” he said, “this here is a taxi stand, but I don’t really do much taxiing. I take Old Lady McCullers into Oklahoma City twicet a week and do some shoppin’ for her. I got a few more customers I do similar things for, though they ain’t as excitin’ as she is. She has a gas problem. I have to drive with the windows down all the way there. She don’t even say excuse me or nothing. I look back at her in the rearview, she’s lookin’ at me like I cut ’em.”

“So what you’re saying is you drive gaseous old ladies around, but you won’t drive me?”

He leaned and looked past me, through the glass, at Brett’s car. “We gonna hook up your car and pull it?”

“Yeah, well, that would be a problem, wouldn’t it?”

“What you really want?”

“Oh, just curious about a little taxi stand like this. In a town like this.”

“Nothing else to do on a rainy day, so you just drive off I-35, come in here to talk to some local color?”

“Something like that.”

“I think you’re full of shit, mister.”

“Well, I could use your rest room, you got one.”

“Right back there, and don’t make a mess of it. I don’t normally allow customers back there.”

“Maybe you ought to,” I said. “That way they won’t fart in your taxi all the way to Oklahoma City.”

He laughed a little. “You might have a case there,” he said.

I went to the rest room, took a leak, washed my face, studied it in the mirror. It looked as tired as Mr. Taxi Stand’s. I went back and took my chair.

“Haven’t had enough charm for one day?” he asked. “Here, let me give you the five-cent story. Hootie Hoot used to not have I-35 out there. That was long ago. Used to be three, four little towns around here next to us. They weren’t real big, but they were bigger than we were. With one taxi I had a little business. Enough I could take care of my family. Towns around us died, and this one’s dead and don’t know it.

“You drive down the road a piece there, take a right first real road you come to, and you’ll go through a burg used to be three times this size, but it ain’t nothing now but empty buildings with the store glass knocked out by vandals. I hang on here ’cause I ain’t got nothing else to do. Wife died. Kid got married and lives in Tulsa. Me, I got a little war pension and a few bucks now and then from the farting lady and a few others, and it’s all I need. And I got a feeling you didn’t come in here ’cause you needed no taxi. I got a feeling you didn’t come in here ’cause you were curious how come Hootie Hoot’s got one.”

“You could be right. By the way, what’s with the town’s name? Hootie Hoot?”

“I’ve heard about twenty stories,” he said. “Not one of ’em worth a shit and none of them interesting enough for me to repeat, and I don’t think you really care one way or the other.”

I nodded. “All right,” I said. “I got a real reason. I thought as a taxi driver you might could help me with something. I’m looking for a place. A house of prostitution.”

“Ah,” the man said. “I should have known that. I’m losing my snap. It’s just I don’t get many drop-ins for that. Mostly they know where they’re goin’. How come you don’t?”

I studied him. There was a lot more going on behind those slow brown eyes than waiting for the Channel Nine weather report.

“I was just told it was here in Hootie Hoot.”

“Ah hah. Where you from?”

“LaBorde, Texas.”

“Ah. Texas. You drove all the way from Texas to Hootie Hoot, Oklahoma, for a good time at a whorehouse? What’s the deal? They don’t make pussy in Texas no more?”

“I wanted to be real private.”

“I don’t think you wanted to be hundreds of miles private. I think you, sir, may still be full of shit. Even if you did go to the john.”

I considered for a moment, took a flyer. “All right. I’m going to tell you straight.”

“That’s good.”

“I came here because the woman I care about has a daughter who’s a prostitute and she wants out, and a guy told us this is were she is. Me and her, and a friend of mine, we come here to find her and take her home.”

“So you ain’t after pussy?”

“No. Well, I mean, not that way.”

“You want this gal from the whorehouse?”

“If she’s there. I don’t even know she’s there. I don’t even know there’s a whorehouse.”

“You don’t know much, do you, boy?”

“Frankly, I don’t.”

The old man rummaged around in his shirt pocket and came out with a nasty-looking hunk of a chaw. He chewed off a bite and worked it around in his jaw and studied me for a while. He got up and turned off the television set. He went over to the little refrigerator and got out a soft drink and twisted the top off, said, “Want a CoCola?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That would be nice.”

He pushed the drink toward me and I took it. He picked up the soft drink bottle with the fly in it and spat down the bottle neck, splashing the fly off its island and into the nasty brown ocean. He shook the bottle and watched the fly go under.

We sat that way for a while, me sipping a Coke, and him chewing and spitting into his bottle, shaking that fly around in the spit. He said, “You found this whorehouse, what were you going to do?”

“I told you that.”

“But you didn’t say how. Let me tell you somethin’. This house you’re lookin’ for, it exists. It’s down the road a piece. There’s busloads come to that house. It’s out in the sticks ’cause it don’t bust up no big laws out here. That’s the way they like it around here. They want stuff like pussy shacks out of sight and out of mind. There’s people drive from Oklahoma City just to drop their goodies there. There’s conventioneers hit that place on the way to Oklahoma City and back from. It’s busy. And it’s not a casual kind of place neither. Least it ain’t if you really know how to look around.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“The guys run that place, they ain’t just big thugs, they got guns. They’re not going to take kindly you takin’ one of their whores. I think they might twist your arm behind your back, make you yell calf rope, then break your arm off and stick it up your ass. Then they might shoot you and bury you under a rosebush somewheres.”

“That’s what my buddy thinks,” I said. “And I’m starting to believe it. The view seems to have a consensus of opinion.”

“But you’re going in anyway?”

“Yes.”

“This ain’t no daughter of yours?”

“No.”

“This woman whose daughter it is ain’t your wife?”

I shook my head.

“This gal ain’t no stepdaughter?”

“Nope.”

The old man shook his head. “I hate them pimpin’ sonsabitches. I ain’t got nothing against pussy, and I reckon some gal wants to sell it, that’s her business, but this place ain’t so cut-and-dried. I think a gal wants to leave, they don’t just let her leave. I think she wants to go, they ought to let her go. It ain’t the pussy sellin’ bothers me, it’s the lack of free will.”

“I take it this place has been here a while?”

“Many, many years. Used to be run by a madam named Lilly Filigree, and I think most of the girls there chose to be there then, and from what I know, she treated ’em good. When I was a young man I went up to there myself, rode a little tail up the canyon oncet or twicet. But now, last ten years or so, it’s just business. All business, and it ain’t the girls’ business.”

“Anyone ever tried to close the place down?”

“Oh yeah, back when there were enough people in this town to fill a church, a bunch of self-righteous old biddies tried to shut it down. Mostly ’cause their men were up there getting their ashes hauled now and then.”

“They didn’t have any luck?”

“Sheriff, he kind of slapped the madam’s wrist now and then. Ran some of the girls in around election time. But it didn’t mean nothin’. But it’s not that way now. Not just a bunch of ladies makin’ a buck for a fuck. Folks run that show, they ain’t sweet. Used to be a colored lady up there ran it. She came after Filigree. She was as mean as a goddamn crocodile. Seen her a few times in town. Always wore this big old sack dress.”

“A muumuu,” I said.

“You say so. She went away and there was a cowboy midget and a big bastard runnin’ it. Midget liked to come to town so people would look at him. Strutted around like a banty rooster. Right proud of himself, he was.”

I thought about Red and his expensive Western-cut suits. I thought about the lady in the muumuu, resting in a box at the bottom of some lake in Arkansas. Maybe still in the muumuu, shit-stained as it was.

Taxi Man spat into the soft drink bottle, said, “Figured that midget and ole bigin’ was runnin’ things. Then they were gone too and there’s a fellow up there now scares me just to see him come into town and sit in the barbershop. He don’t even pretend he does anything other than sell pussy. But hell, there ain’t nobody ’round here cares. This ain’t where he gets his action. It’s them conventioneers and such pay his bills.”

“I see.”

“No you don’t. You go up there and fuck around, and that monster gets hold of you, they gonna find you in some rock quarry with a .44 slug behind the ear.”

“Cheery scenario,” I said.

“Not really.”

“Any chance you’re going to tell me where this place is?”

“All right,” he said. He produced a stubby pencil from his pocket, wet it with his tongue, used it to draw a map on the fly page under the title of one of the paperback books. I thanked him, took the book, put it in my back pocket.

“Had any balls, I’d go with you,” he said.

“It’s not your problem.”

“Things like this ought to be everyone’s problem.”

“I guess.”

“Maybe if I was younger.”

“Sure.”

I started out the door and he called out, “Hey, boy, you watch your ass.”

“Thanks,” I said.