Rumble Tumble

31

The field across the road was frozen and the ice on the dead grass was very pretty in the moonlight. It was mid-December and Leonard and I were sitting on his front porch looking across the road through barbed wire out where forty acres of cleared land lay. It was a hay field, but for some reason none of it had been baled that year. Bad hay maybe. Perhaps the owner died.

We sat on Leonard’s front porch in the porch swing and drank hot chocolate. Bob, Leonard’s son the armadillo, was curled up on the edge of the porch, staring out at the night, perhaps thinking about gunfire and shattering dillo shells, relatives gone to that great armadillo den in the sky, or perhaps he was seeing the leering face of Haskel. I wondered if it would matter to Bob if he knew I had given an anonymous tip to the FBI about Haskel’s location and vocation. Maybe for armadillos, unlike humans, the past was the past, gone away, completely forgotten.

Whatever, Bob had it cushy now. He followed Leonard about and Leonard shared his vanilla cookies with him more frequently than he did me.

I shifted in the porch swing for more comfort. My right thigh still gave me trouble, and my shoulder was a little stiff. I hadn’t gone to the doctor for any of it. Not even blood. I had stayed in bed for a couple of weeks eating steaks and drinking some godawful tonic Leonard made me take. I think I got well so I wouldn’t have to drink that tonic.

Brett came out to see me from time to time. I had only actually talked to Tillie once since the events, and all she had said was hi.

We read in the papers about the wrecked plane and the one body found. Bill’s. The papers called it a real-life mystery. We had no idea what Big Jim had done with Herman’s and Red’s corpses, but my guess was they were feeding a mesquite bush in the desert somewhere. Bill’s death was attributed to bad flying, and someone believed, or wanted to believe, he had crawled free of the wreckage and died.

Of course, Bill hadn’t had a pilot’s license, and it had been Irvin’s plane. Or at least the one he was using. No future newspaper articles followed. No policeman came tapping at our door.

I think the truth of the matter was the authorities knew who Bill was, had dealt with him before, and didn’t give a shit he was gone, just as long as he was out of their hair.

But Bill hadn’t been so bad. I thought about how Bill had called that old man uncle, had given him money, bought him beer and cigarettes. I wondered how Irvin had answered to the old man for Bill’s death. Or if he had.

I said, “It’s funny way it is. I haven’t even seen Brett but a few times since October. We only been to bed once. On my birthday. And it wasn’t too good, you want to know. I think I’d rather have had a pair of socks or a billfold.”

“Maybe you’re taking it too personal.”

“The bad pussy?”

“How she’s treating you, you moron.”

“I don’t want to say it, but I got to say it. I feel I sort of did something for her I wouldn’t have done for nobody but you. And now she’s got Tillie back, I’m like last year’s used Kotex.”

“Tillie needs a lot of attention,” Leonard said.

And she did need attention. She was in drug rehab, but she was back to hooking. This time out of LaBorde’s two main hotels when they didn’t catch her and run her off. Then she’d go to Tyler for a while to hook up with some of the church crowd there, bang them silly.

“You think she’s really going to change?” I asked.

“Nope,” Leonard said. “I could have told you that from the start. She wanted out of what she was in, but she’s not a new person. It could happen I guess, but I wouldn’t tie a rubber band around my dick till it did. Do that, your whang will fall off.”

“You knew from the start it would turn out like this, didn’t you?”

“You didn’t do what you did for Tillie, Hap, you did it for Brett. This has got nothing to do with Tillie, far as I’m concerned. Brett for that matter. I did it for you.”

“I hate I asked. I hate you had to do it.”

“I hate it. But it doesn’t matter Brett isn’t having anything to do with you now.”

“I didn’t say she wasn’t having anything to do with me.”

“Whatever. That doesn’t change things. I did it for you and you did it for her because you thought you should do it. We’ve done it. It’s over. What do you want, to be cheered? Have a little parade or something?”

“That would be nice,” I said.

“Well, you ain’t gonna get it.”

“I killed people, Leonard.”

“You knew that could happen.”

“There were a couple of women back there. I didn’t mean for them to die.”

“I don’t know they had much of a life, Hap.”

“And that makes it okay?”

“No, but you think them being women makes anything any different? It makes it done. War’s hell. You think shit like this is without consequences, man?”

I pushed against the porch with my foot and the swing moved back and forth for a while. I said, “Would you have strangled Wilber if Jim had let you?”

“In a heartbeat. I’m glad I didn’t have to, but I certainly would have. I even liked the idea at the time.”

“What about Bill?”

“What about him? He took a chance for money and it didn’t work out. I didn’t make him do it. He wasn’t lied to or convinced. He didn’t care, long as he made money. He shouldn’t have gone along.”

“Well, maybe, but the one bothers me is Herman. Red a little. Herman had turned. Really. He risked his neck and he helped us get Tillie back.”

“Yeah, he did. But you know what, Hap? I’m an asshole about it. Guy like that, he’d done enough evil in his time, there weren’t enough candles for him to light, enough Hail Marys for him to say. He did all right by us, but he wasn’t someone I saw as a future poker buddy anyway. As for Red, he could talk up a good steak ranchero, but he should have died at birth.”

“How do you sleep at night, Leonard?”

“I sleep like always. Good. I don’t even have Nam flashbacks. I went to do a job I believed in, and I did it. You didn’t believe in it, you didn’t go. Do you have nightmares about not going?”

“Of course not.”

“You would have; had you not done the thing you believed in. It wouldn’t have been the same kind of nightmares, but it would have been something. If not a dream, something hollow. That’s the way I’d have felt had I let you do that business without me. So, far as I’m concerned, I did what was right. Period.”

“And Big Jim gets away scot-free.”

“Looks that way. It happens, man. The world don’t shake out fair all the time.”

“Gets right down to it, I guess it’s just you and me, brother.”

“Give Brett time.”

I nodded.

“I’m going to bed, Hap. Good night.”

Leonard stood, gave me a pat on the shoulder, and snapped his fingers at Bob. Bob got up and trotted after him into the house. I’d never seen anything like that. I didn’t think armadillos could be domesticated.

“You keep that big armored rat out of the living room,” I said. “I don’t want him trying to get on the couch with me.”

“He thinks it’s his couch,” Leonard said, and went inside the house.

I sat for a while, nursing chocolate that had gone cold in my cup. The moonlight moved over the field of frozen hay and made it look metallic and sharp. I pulled a deep breath of cold air into my chest and let it out. It felt and tasted like the air that night in the desert some three months, some ten centuries ago.

I thought about the gunfire and the smell of blood and smoke, the strange and horrible passion that had come over me during that time. I think I feared guns and violence because they were so much a part of me. Perhaps no one is more aware of and is enticed by and frightened of violence than the man whose brain is a bomb.

I remembered what Herman had said about the blackness of space, the nothingness between the stars, about the stars being nothing more than dying light.

Bad line of thought, I decided.

I drank the rest of the chocolate, shook out my cup, and went inside.