Savage Season

Savage Season

By Joe R. Lansdale

Chapter 1

I was out back of the house in the big field with my good friend Leonard Pine the afternoon it started. Me with the twelve gauge and him pulling the birds.

"Pull," I said, and Leonard did, and another clay bird took to the sky and I jerked the gun up and cut it down.

"Man," Leonard said, "don't you ever miss?"

"Just on purpose."

I'd switched to clay birds in favor of the real ones a long time back. I didn't like to kill anything now, but I still enjoyed the shooting. Getting the bead on something and pulling the trigger and feeling the kick on my shoulder and watching the target blow apart had its own special satisfaction.

"Got to open another box," Leonard said. "The pigeons are all dead."

"I'll load, you shoot for a while."

"I shot twice as long as you did and I missed half those little boogers."

"I don't care. My eye's getting off anyway."

"Bullshit."

Leonard got up, brushed his big black hands on his khaki pants, and came over and took the twelve gauge. He was about to load it and I was about to load the launcher, when Trudy came around the side of the house.

We both saw her about the same time. I turned to open another box of clay birds, and Leonard turned to pick up a box of shells, and she was swinging our way in the sunlight.

"Shit," Leonard said. "Here comes trouble."

Trudy was about four years younger than me, thirty-six, but she still looked twenty-six. Had that long blond hair and legs that began at the throat—good legs that were full at the thighs and dark of skin. And she knew how to use them, had that kind of walk that worked the hips and gave her breasts that nice little bounce that'll make a man run his car off the road for a look. She had on a tight beige sweater that showed she still didn't need a bra, and a short black skirt that was the current fashion, and it made me think of the late sixties and her mini-skirt days—back when I met her and she was going to be a great artist and I was going to find some way to save the world.

Far as I knew, closest she'd gotten to art was a drafting table and dressing mannequins in store windows, and the closest I'd gotten to saving the world was my name on some petitions, for everything from recycling aluminum cans to saving the whales. I put my cans in the trash now, and I didn't know how the whales were doing.

"Watch her," Leonard said, before she was in earshot.

"I'm watching."

"You know what I mean. Don't come crying over to my place if she does it to you again. Mind what I'm saying, now."

"I know what you're saying."

"Uh-huh, and a hard dick knows no conscience."

"It isn't that way and you know it."

"Well, it's some kind of way."

Now that Trudy was closer, the midday sun full on her face, I could see she didn't quite look twenty-six. The pores in her nose were a little larger and there were crow's feet around her eyes and laugh lines at the corners of her mouth. She always had liked to laugh, and she'd laugh at anything. I remembered best how she laughed when she was happy in bed. She had a laugh then that was pretty as the song of a bird. It was the kind of thing I didn't want to remember, but the memory was there just the same, like a thorn in the back of my brain.

She smiled at us then, and I felt the January day become a little warmer. She could do that to a man, and she knew it. Liberated or not, she didn't fight that ability.

"Hello, Hap," she said.

"Hello," I said.

"Leonard," she said.

"Trudy," Leonard said.

"What're you boys up to?"

"Shooting some skeet," I said. "Want to shoot some?"

"Sure."

Leonard handed me the shotgun. "I got to go, Hap. I'll check you later. Remember what I told you, huh?"

I looked at that hard face of his, black as a prune, said, "Sure, I'll remember."

"Un-huh. See you, Trudy," and he went away then, mak­ing deep strides across the pasture toward the house where his car was parked.

"What was that all about?" Trudy said. "He seemed kind of mad."

"He doesn't like you."

"Oh yeah, I forgot."

"No you didn't."

"Okay, I didn't."

"You want to shoot first?"

"I think I'd really rather go in the house and have a cup of coffee. It's kind of chilly out here."

"You're not dressed like it's chilly."

"I've got hose on. They're warmer than you think. Just not warm enough. Besides, I haven't seen you in a while—"

"Almost two years."

"—and I wanted to look good."

"You do."

"So do you. You could gain a few pounds, but you look good."

"Well, you don't need to gain or lose an ounce. You look great."

"Jazzercise. I've got a record and I do what it says. Us older ladies have to work at it."

I smiled. "Okay, older lady. Why don't you help me gather this stuff, and we'll go on up to the house."

She sat at the kitchen table and smiled at me and made small talk. I got down the coffee and tried to keep my mind off how it used to be between us, but I wasn't any good at it.

When I had the coffee maker going, I sat at the table across from her. It was slightly warm in the kitchen from the gas heaters, and close enough I could smell the scent of her minty soap and the hint of some perfume, probably dabbed behind the ears and knees and below her belly button. That's the way she used to do it, and the thought of it made me weak.

"Still working in the rose fields?" she asked.

"We've been digging them, but not in the last few days. The man me and Leonard work for is through with that part. It'll be a few days before he'll need us for anything else."

She nodded, ran one long-nailed hand through her hair, and I saw the glint of a small, gold loop in her earlobe. I don't know what it was about that gesture, about the wink of gold, but it made me want to take her in my arms, pull her on the table and make the two-year absence of her blow away.

Instead I contented myself with a memory, one of my favorites. It was about the time we went to this dance and she had worn this zebra-striped blouse and mini-skirt. I was twenty-three and she was nineteen. The way she danced, the way she moved when she wasn't dancing, the smell of her, had made me manic with lust.

I had whispered something to her and she had laughed and we had gone out to my Chevy and driven to our favorite parking place on a pine-covered hill. I stripped her and she stripped me, and we made slow, sweet love on the motor-warm hood of my car, the moon shining down on us like a personal love-light, the cool summer breeze blowing across us like a feathered fan.

And the thing I remember best about that time, other than the act of copulation, was I had felt so goddamn strong and immortal. Old age and death were as wild and improbable as some drunken story about walking across the face of a star.

"How's... what is it? Howard?" It wasn't a thing I really wanted to ask, but it came out anyway.

"Okay. We're divorced. Have been for a year now. I don't think I'm cut out for marriage. I had you and I screwed that up, didn't I?"

"No great loss."

"I left you for Pete and Pete for Bill and Bill for Howard. None of them worked out, and neither did the ones I didn't marry along the way. None of them came close to what we had. And the kind of men that are anything like you are harder and harder to find."

The flattery was a little thick, so I didn't have anything to say to it. I checked the coffee, poured a couple of cups.

When I set hers on the table, she looked at me, and I started to say something brotherly, but it wouldn't come out.

"I've missed you, Hap," she said. "I really have."

I put my coffee cup on the table next to hers and she stood and I held her and we kissed. The earth didn't move and my heart didn't stop, but it was quite all right just the same.

Then we had our hands all over each other, and we started moving toward the bedroom, molting clothes along the way. Under the covers we danced the good, slow dance, and she let loose with that laugh I loved so much, the one as sweet and happy as the song of a bird.

And I did not care to remember then that even that most predatory of birds, the shrike, can sing.

Chapter 2

About two in the morning the phone rang. I got up, and went to the kitchen and answered it. I don't think Trudy even heard it.

It was Leonard.

"That bitch there?"

"Yeah."

"Shit. You're fucked again."

"It's different this time. I'm only getting laid. Remember what you said about a hard dick not knowing a conscience? You were right."

"Bullshit, don't give me that macho crap. I was just talking that way. You don't think like that and you know it. It's always got to be something to you. This is Leonard you're talking to here, Mr. Hap Collins, not some rose field nigger."

'Leonard, you are a rose field nigger, and so am I. Only I'm a white version."

'You know what I mean."

"What are you doing up at two in the morning minding my business?"

"Drinking, goddammit. Trying to get drunk."

"How are you doing?"

"I'd rate it about a five on a one-to-ten scale."

"Is that Hank Williams I hear in the background?"

"Not his ownself, but yes. 40 Greatest Hits, Volume 2, 'Setting the Woods On Fire.' "

"What key's he singing in?"

"You're not as funny as you think, Hap. Shit, I wish that whore wouldn't come around."

"Don't call her that."

"That's what she is. She comes around and you start acting funny."

"How funny do I get?"

"All moon-eyed and puppylike, talking about the good old days, giving me that self-righteous sixties stuff. I was there, buddy, and it was just the eighties with tie-dyed tee-shirts."

"You numb nuts, you talk about the sixties as much as I do."

"But I hated them. Shit, man, Trudy gets you all out of perspective. She gets to telling you how it was and how it ought to be now, and you get to believing her. I like you cynical. It's closer to the ground. I tell you, that bitch will say anything to get her way. She's fake as pro wrestling. She's out there on a limb, brother, and she's inviting you out there with her. When the limb cracks, you're both gonna bust your ass. Get down from the tree, Hap."

"She's all right, Leonard."

"In the sack, maybe. In the head, uh-uh."

"No, she's all right."

"Sure, and wow, the sixties, man, like neat."

"This time is different."

"And next time I shit it'll come out in sweet-smelling little squares. Goodnight, you dumb sonofabitch."

He hung up, and I went over and got a glass out of the cabinet, filled it with water, drank it, leaned my naked rear into the counter and thought about things. What I thought about mostly was how cold it was.

I went back to the bedroom to get my robe, and looked down at Trudy. There was enough moonlight that I could see her face. The blanket had fallen off of her and she was lying on her side with her arms cuddling her pillow. I could see a smooth shoulder, the shape of one fine breast and the curve of her hip. She looked so sweet and young there in the moonlight. Looked too innocent to have been the one in my bed a short time ago, grabbing her ankles, screaming and groaning, and finally singing like a bird.

But she didn't look so innocent and I wasn't stirred. I thought about waking her, but didn't. I covered her gently, got my robe off the bedpost, went back to the kitchen and filled my glass with water again, took a chair at the table across from the window and looked out. With the curtains pulled back like they were, I could see the moonlit field where Leonard and I had shot skeet, could see the line of pines beyond it, looking oddly enough like the outline of a distant mountain range.

I sat there and drank my water and thought about things, thought about Trudy and the sixties and what Leonard had said, and knew he was right. Last time she had come around and gone away, I had started on a monumental drunk that embarrassed the winos down at the highway mission, which was where Leonard found me—three months later. I had no idea where I'd gotten the money for the liquor, and I didn't know how much I'd drunk, couldn't even remember having started.

Since that time I had sworn off. Trudy, not the liquor. But now she was in my house again, in my bed, and I was thinking about her, considering all the wrong things, knowing full well I had fallen off the wagon again.

Until it had gone wrong between us (and it was a mystery to me as to when and how), our relationship had been as beautiful as a dream. And there were times when I felt it might have been just that.

We met at LaBorde University. I had made a late start due to no money and lots of hard work at the iron foundry trying to get me some. The foundry was a hot, horrible job where you wore a hard hat, watched sparks jump and heard the clang of steel pipe all day.

But it was money, and I thought it would allow me to go to college, get some kind of degree and find a way to make an easier living than my old man had; a way for me to get my slice of the American Dream.

Pretty soon I was wrapped up in the learning, though, and not for what it could get me financially. There was something in the books and lectures that went beyond the sports page and the martial arts I practiced, the color article section of the TV Guide. There was more to life than a beer with the buddies, a gold watch and a pension. It was the sixties, the time of love and peace and social upheaval— contradictions that walked side by side. Women's rights. Civil rights. The Vietnam War. I got it in my head I could do some good out there, make things better for the underprivileged. I changed my major from business to sociology and went to anti-war rallies and sang some folk songs, collected Beatles albums, and let my hair grow long.

At one rally held at a Unitarian church, I met Trudy. I looked across the heads of long, straight hair and Afros and saw her on the other side of the room talking to a pear-shaped girl in a flowered dress that belled and dragged the floor.

God, but Trudy was beautiful. Painfully young, a proto type for Eve. Long gold hair rippled to her waist and her eyes were so bright green they looked supernatural. Spangles of silver hung from her ears. She was wearing a white midi-blouse, a blue jean mini-skirt and wooden clog shoes. Beneath the midi was a flat brown stomach and a marvelous belly button, and beneath the mini were legs like God would have given his very own woman.

I got over there without running and introduced myself. We made shameless small talk, mostly stupid mumblings, some of it about the war.

Pretty soon we had our arms around each other and we were out of there. We both lived in dorms then, and as the dorm mothers were furiously against fucking, I took her to the parking place that was to become our haven, and we did what we had wanted to do since the first moment we laid eyes on one another. We generated so much electricity upon that pine-covered hill, I'm surprised we didn't cause a forest fire. I feel certain we didn't do the shocks in my old Chevy much good.

This went on for a time, and things got better and hotter. And on the night of my fondest memory, when she wore the zebra-striped outfit, we decided to rent an apartment and move in together.

We pooled our money and found a little room on the grubby side of town and lived there for two months. It got better yet, and we decided to get married. It was a simple wedding with lots of flowers and barefoot guests and a female minister younger than Trudy.

God, those were odd times. If you missed them, and you know someone who went through them, soaked it all in, and you catch them late at night, after maybe a beer or two, or the kids are all in bed and the TV's dead, and you say, "Hey, what were the sixties really like?" There's a good chance they'll say, "It was magical," or "It was special."

For a time it sure seemed that way. Peace and love seemed like more than words. We thought everyone could live in a world full of mutual respect, long hair, and cooperation. It was as if the sky had split open and God had given us a ray of light, and in its glow, wonderful things happened.

An example being the sparrow incident the night after our wedding.

We dropped the apartment and rented a small house on the edge of town. It wasn't much of a house. The ceiling in the living room was too low and the plumbing squeaked like giant mice.

Trudy turned on the back porch light and went out there to toss some potato peels, and found a sparrow sitting on the porch. It was weak and nodding and couldn't fly. She called me and I looked at it. It was a baby, and as far as I could determine, there were no wounds on it. It seemed sick.

I picked up the bird with some reluctance, because I had once been told if birds smelled the human scent on another bird they would peck it to death, and carried it into the house. I got an old shoebox and tore some newspaper up and put it in the bottom of the box and the bird on that. I got an eyedropper and used it to give the bird some cold beef bouillon.

That was the procedure from then on. First thing in the morning, and between classes, we would give the bird bouillon and clean its box and put fresh paper in the bottom. At night we stood over it and looked at it and clucked our tongues like parents worried about a sick child.

About this same time, I went to work part-time in a restaurant in LaBorde, and brought home scraps I thought the bird might eat. At first he wouldn't touch them, but after a while he ate them out of my hand. Noodles were his favorite. I suppose they were as close as he ever got to worms.

The bird got stronger. He started flying around the house.

You could open doors and windows and he wouldn't fly out. He liked it in there. He liked us. He'd light on our shoulders and our outstretched palms. He cheeped a lot, and because of that, we named him Cheep. The only time he showed distress was when we weren't wearing black. Guess because I had on a black tee-shirt and Trudy a black peasant dress the night we found him, and he bonded to black.

We were so excited about our bird, we dyed everything we owned black. On those occasions when we did buy new clothes, they were always black. That way Cheep stayed happy.

Sweet alchemy was thicker in the air than radio waves then, and it seemed especially thick around Trudy and me. We thought it would last forever.

But the best-looking apple can contain a worm.

When 1970 rolled in just a few weeks after we were married, the Vietnam War still raged on. The relatively innocent smoking of grass had been exchanged by many for pills and shit-filled needles. The wonderful, if admittedly hokey, beauty of Woodstock had to stand shoulder to shoulder with the senseless tragedy at Kent State.

Our bird continued to fly about the house, but the magic of the era was gone. A deep, dark awareness that perhaps it had never actually existed settled in; we had glimpsed some shopworn cards up the magician's sleeve, and with each passing moment, the glow of the act was dimming.

The sixties were dead. They may never have lived.

I began to feel guilty about hiding out in college with my deferment when so many were dying in Vietnam. Asking that everyone be peaceful and love one another wasn't enough. I wanted to make some statement against the war, and I didn't want to hide behind a deferment to do it. I was one of those who felt our original cause in Vietnam was just, but that it had become a political nightmare. The government we were

defending, in spite of cries of "We are a democracy," showed little evidence of being different from the one we were fighting. Our role there was as aimless as the Flying Dutchman. We took a hill, we gave it back. The American dead stacked up. Seemed to me, we ought to have known when to cut our losses.

I talked to Trudy long and hard, and it was the sort of thing she loved. Noble involvement. It lit her like a torch.

With her blessing, I decided to quit college and allow myself to be drafted. When it came time to step forward and take the induction, I would refuse. I'd go the prison route instead. That would be my statement.

This was the time of the lottery, and I was drafted almost immediately. I was disappointed my draft notice didn't say Greetings. I had always heard that it did.

I went to Dallas, took my physical, passed, and refused to go.

The army tried to give me outs. I give them that. One officer even suggested I make a break for Canada. The war had soured even his way of thinking, and he was a lifer.

But I refused to run.

It was suggested I sign as a conscientious objector, but again I refused. C.O. status meant you thought fighting for anything, even your life, was wrong. I didn't believe that. Had I been around during the fighting of World War I or II, I would have gone and done my bit. The causes were just and the wars were fought with a conclusion in mind. I was an idealist, not a coward.

So I went to Leavenworth. Trudy and some of her friends came to see me from time to time and told me "right on" and how brave I was, and it felt good to hear it. They wrote me nice letters.

But that good feeling didn't last. It didn't relax me at night when I could hear the cons snorting and coughing and crying and farting and sodomizing each other. And there were guys in there who had bludgeoned their grandmothers to death who thought it their patriotic duty to kill me for not signing up to shoot gooks. If I hadn't been a pretty tough country boy with iron foundry muscles, I might not have made it.

Trudy kept coming to see me, but her friends dropped off. She kept writing, but the friends quit. She sent me clippings in her letters that told me what was going on outside, about the causes being fought for, the ground gained, the ground lost.

Then her visits thinned, and finally stopped. Next to last letter I got from her went on about how brave I was again and compared me to a number of counterculture heroes. It said Cheep had died and had been buried in a cream corn can out back of the house, and that she had met a man named Pete who was big in the ecology movement and they had this thing going. The last letter told me that the thing she and Pete had going was now really going, and she was filing for divorce. Nothing personal. She thought I was the bravest man she knew. It was signed like all the others: Love Trudy.

I did my time. Eighteen months altogether. I had planned the day they let me out for a long time. I thought I would come out on a bright warm day with my fist held high, and Trudy would be there looking sexy and soft in a short windblown dress that would give me a good view of her long brown legs, and as the music came up, sweet but triumphant, she would run to me with those legs flashing and throw her arms around my neck and give me a kiss that would knock me silly from head to toes. Then she would load me in a car and drive us away.

But when I came out it was cold and drizzling. I had to talk a guard into calling someone to drive me to the bus station. Between paying for the car and the bus, the money I had when I went in and the money the government gave me for the non stimulating manual labor I did inside was almost gone. Needless to say, I didn't feel like raising my fist.

I went back to East Texas and found out I didn't want to help the underprivileged anymore. I realized I was one of them. I got a job in the rose fields outside of LaBorde, and that's where I met Leonard. He was a Vietnam vet and a certified hardhead. He didn't like my views on a lot of things, but he didn't hold them against me either; I gave him someone to argue with. He was a martial artist, boxing, kenpo, hapkido, and he revived my interest. When I was in high school, until the time I met Trudy, I had been heavily involved in that sort of thing. Guess I dropped it later because I didn't feel it fit my new peace and love image or something. Anyway, I had been away from it for a time. I was glad to get at it again. I got better than ever before. It helped me work out some frustrations.

After a while, Trudy started coming around, and each time she went away she left me a bigger wreck than before. Built me up with promises, then left me sudden and flat. She always found a new man who was big in some movement or another. Supporting lettuce workers or saving seals from the business end of a Louisville Slugger.

Each time she left, I told Leonard I was through with her. And each time it was a lie. But the last time, after the Great Drunk, even I believed it.

And now she was back.

All this was going around and around in my head when she came in buck naked and put her arms around my neck and bent and kissed me on the ear. The minty clean soap smell and the aroma of sex came off of her in waves. I reached up and touched her hand where it rested on my chest.

"I woke up and you were gone," she said.

"I got thirsty."

"I got horny. Come back to bed."

I stood and took her in my arms and kissed her. She was shaking from the cold. I opened my robe and stretched it around her as far as it would go and held her to me. Her hands played at my sides and rump, and finally around front where she took hold of me.

"You're pretty ruthless," I said, "treating an old man this way."

"You don't feel old, sugar."

We went back to bed, but this time she didn't let loose with the laugh I liked. She lay there when we were finished and finally eased out of bed and picked up her panties and pulled them on. I hated that. I liked the view. Covering that downy crotch of hers with panties was as vile an act as tossing a wet bath towel over the face of the Mona Lisa.

"It's cold," I said. "Come back to bed,"

"Hap, I haven't been entirely truthful with you."

"Not that you ever are. But this time, don't feel too bad. You haven't had a lot of time to lie."

She walked to the window and stood with her back to me, looking out, hugging herself. She turned slowly, her arms crossed over her breasts. "You sound pretty vindictive."

"Guess I was starting to pretend again. But you've put me back on track."

"It was always good for us, wasn't it, Hap? The sex, I mean."

"For a little while, more than the sex."

She picked up my robe where I had dropped it on the floor and put it on. She climbed on the bed, crossed her legs, and sat looking at me.

"Hap, I need your help."

"I'm tapped out for money. I got maybe fifty dollars, that's it. Fifty cents in change."

"I didn't come for money."

"But you always come for something, don't you? Long as it doesn't have anything permanent to do with me."

"I don't want to argue. It's just that I need your help. I couldn't think of anyone else to ask."

"Maybe I can."

"I want you to do it, because this time you'll profit. This time will make up for all the other times."

"Nothing can make up for those times."

"This might go a long way toward it." She put her hand on my shoulder. "Hap, my love, how would you like to make an easy two hundred thousand dollars? Tax free."

Chapter 3

Early next morning I left Trudy asleep and rattled my old green Dodge pickup over to Leonard's place. He had a little house off the same dirt road I lived off of, and he was only about five miles away.

I parked up close to the house, got out into the cold morning air, and tried the front door. It was locked. I got the key from its hiding place beneath the porch and let myself in.

There was a fire in the fireplace, though it had dwindled considerably, and the house smelled like coffee. I followed my nose to the kitchen and found the pot and poured a cup. I called Leonard's name, but he didn't answer.

I checked to see how his handiwork was coming. He was rebuilding his sink cabinet due to termite damage. He had precut boards stacked by the sink, a hammer and a bag of little facing nails and a bag of long nails for the wall boards. He'd been doing the work a bit at a time, and as usual with that kind of thing, his craftsmanship was excellent. Me, I couldn't put on a rubber without directions, then I might get it inside out.

I took the cup with me out the back way and walked down to the dog pens and the barn. The bam was an old-fashioned affair, once bright red and now rust-colored with big double doors and a hayloft. The pens were six long steel wire runs, and each held a spotted bird dog, and at the end of each run was a large dog house, built against heat or cold or terrific winds, and they had flap doors that closed off when the dogs went in or out. The dog in the pen closest to the barn was called Switch for some reason, and he was Leonard's favorite. Which is not to say Leonard wasn't crazy about all those big dumb bastards. He went hunting with them as often as he could, not so much to hunt, but to see those spotted beauties run.

I went by the pens and the dogs barked and leaped. I put my fingers through the wire as I came to each run, and the dogs licked them in turn, wagged their tails and yipped.

When I got to Switch's run, I knelt down and spent more time with him. I hated to play favorites, but hell, there was something special about Switch. There was a kind of sad nobility in his eyes, like maybe he had seen some things he'd rather not have, but was the wiser for it. Which was damn silly, of course. Even a smart bird dog is a pretty dumb variety of dog. But he did have some class. He was protective of Leonard, too, and if he didn't know you and he was loose and you were standing too close to Leonard, you had to watch yourself. He'd leap at you and try to tear your face off, without so much as a bark or a warning growl.

From the barn I could hear a steady thumping and knew Leonard was making that sound. He was regular about that sort of thing, even if the night before he had been up until two A.M. drinking.

I downed the rest of my coffee, finished petting Switch, stood up and leaned forward on the pen and looked out at the thick dark woods back there; they seemed to be expanding as the sunlight widened and redefined them. Leonard had a beautiful place here. The creek was maybe a little too close to the house and he'd steadily been losing his land to erosion, something his having trenches of gravel put in alongside the creek hadn't helped. For a while it was okay, but soon it broke down and the gravel started to wash away, and now sometimes in the summer we'd go stand out there on the bank and throw the gravel at the water and later sit on his porch scraping it and the clay out of the treads of our shoes.

When we were really in a Huck Finn mood, we'd go down to the Robin Hood Tree, a big oak in a clearing in the woods behind Leonard's house. I don't know who all that woods belonged to, but in our minds that tree belonged to us. We'd named it that a few years back, after the big tree Robin Hood held his conferences under in Sherwood Forest. We sometimes went there to talk and enjoy the woods. Occasionally Leonard brought his rifle so he could pretend to be scouting for squirrels. But we always ended up at the Robin Hood tree, sitting with our backs against it, talking until nightfall.

My place was nice but I had to admit, I preferred Leonard's to mine. I let the look of the place soothe me while I thought about what Trudy had told me last night, and tried to figure some way to convince Leonard to go in with me. Leonard hadn't been part of Trudy's thinking, but he was damn sure part of mine. I tried to tell myself it was because I liked Leonard and wanted to see him make some money, and though this was true, I knew too it was because I had come to depend on him so much. He had bailed me out of hell so many times, he had become my spirit guide through life.

Inside the barn the light was weak, but I could see Leonard working over the heavy bag he kept hanging from a rafter beneath the hayloft. He was stripped to the waist, wearing a pair of gray sweatpants, low-cut tennis shoes with white socks and a pair of worn bag gloves. His face and hard upper torso looked like wet chocolate, and when the light caught him right, the thick beads of sweat gave the impression of greasy boils covering his skin. He was snorting plumes of cold exhaust.

He had the bag rocking, pounding it with combinations and kicking the sides of it. When he hit the bag it moved a good distance and never quite came back to rest before he hit it again with another round of combinations and kicks.

I put the coffee cup on one of the two-by-fours that helped support the unadorned wall, leaned back and watched. I guess I stood there a full five minutes before he noticed me.

"Well," he said, "you look like a man who's had sex."

"And you act like a man who hasn't. That's why you got to pound that bag, to work off frustrations."

"Tell me about it. No, don't. Just makes me feel bad." He did a combination on the bag, then smiled at me. "Unlike you, I could have all the women I want."

"Go on, talk some shit."

"Could... lots of them, anyway. Ain't that the shits? They want me and I don't want them. They're lined up for me, and me the way I am."

"Maybe you should try to be another way. It's bound to beat jacking off."

"Don't think it wouldn't be easier, but it's like taking up knitting or backgammon. Doesn't work for me."

"Just saying how things could be easier."

He gave the bag a flurry, then winked at me. "You could always help me out, you know. A little relief for a friend."

"I'm not that friendly."

He flurried the bag again, caught it with his forearms and smiled at me. "Got you nervous, didn't I? Tell you a truth, ol' buddy. I like you, but you're not my type."

"That shatters me. I want to go right on out of here crying."

He hit the bag with two hard lefts, one high, one low. "Work the bag with me. I like to see a peckerwood sweat."

I slipped off my jacket and shirt, got the spare bag gloves off a nail, put them on, and went over to the bag. I made some slow, soft moves on it to get the muscles loose. It felt awkward at first, way it always does when you start. Then my muscles began to warm and loosen and I got my rhythm and I was circling and exploding into the bag whenever the mood struck me. Leonard was circling too, staying directly across from me, the bag between us, and no sooner would my flurry end than he would hit with a series from his side, and pretty soon we were making conga music with that old canvas.

When we stopped my hands ached slightly from clenching my fists, and I was beginning to breathe heavily. I took off the bag gloves, hung them up, flexed the tension out of my hands.

"You're getting soft," Leonard said, taking off his gloves. "Haven't been working out enough."

"I'm preferring my rest in my dotage."

"Want to spar some?"

"Sure."

He went over to a shelf, got down the boxing gloves and kick guards and tossed a pair of each to me. I fastened the kick guards over my tennis shoes, then pulled on the gloves. They were the kind without laces; they slid over your hands and tightened at the wrist with elastic, so you didn't need help to get them on.

We had been using the light from the open side door, but now Leonard went over and opened the big double doors and the sun flooded in and I could see dust motes rising from the barn's dirt floor like little slow tornadoes.

Leonard put on his equipment, shuffled his feet, put up his hands and made his way toward me.

"Gonna suffer, honkie."

"Hope you know a home for invalid niggers, cause you're gonna need it."

"Name-calling, huh? Racial slurs."

"Call 'em like I see 'em."

"Minute from now you aren't gonna see anything."

Then we were at it.

It was like Leonard turned into oil and flowed over me. I covered up, but the oil turned hard and the hardness hit my forearms and made them weak, hit the side of my head and ribs and made sounds on my hide like the sounds Leonard and I had made on the bag.

When I got him away from me, I said, "Won't lie to you, that was nice."

"I know," he said, and came again.

I let him think he had me. I jabbed out with a weak left and when he slipped it, I kicked with my forward foot in a roundhouse motion and caught him hard enough in the breadbasket to force his breath out. I swarmed him then, hit him with a right cross above the left eye and tried to hook him with my left, but all I got was one of his forearms. He flurried me, and he was fast, but I had his timing off now, and his blows skimmed across my face and slid on my sweaty chest and didn't really hurt me. I kicked off my back leg this time and my kick caught him in the solar plexus again and drove him back and I came off the other leg and tried the same thing and glanced his side with the ball of my foot. He backed up fast, and I went after him. He turned his back on me as if to run. Instinctively I rushed in for the kill. He swiveled on his left foot and brought himself completely around to face me and his right leg arched into an outside crescent kick and the ridge of his foot caught me on the side of the head and I went down and dirt filled my nostrils.

Suckered.

Leonard bent down. "How are you, peckerwood?"

"I been worse.... Barn's moving, though."

"You're always impatient. I set you up." He patted me on the back. "Lay there a moment."

"No other plans."

A few minutes passed and Leonard helped me up. The barn was still a little wobbly, but starting to shape up. He helped me get the gloves and kick guards off. I weaved over and put on my shirt and coat while Leonard did the same, then I got the coffee cup off the two-by-four and Leonard put his arm around me and walked me to the house.

Leonard put on a Patsy Cline album, turned it down low and started fixing breakfast. I took a seat at the kitchen table and dipped my head between my knees.

"You eaten?" he asked.

"No."

"Able to?"

"Yeah."

"Eggs and toast sound okay?"

"Fine."

He chuckled.

"White boys in distress," I said. "You love it." -

He cracked an egg in the skillet. "You're over here for a reason, Hap. You don't get up this early on Sundays. What happened, that woman leave already?"

"Nope. But I am here for a reason. An important reason." I lifted my head. Nothing was spinning.

"How important?"

"You wouldn't have to go back to the rose fields. Least not for a long time."

He stopped unwrapping the bread and looked at me.

"How long a time?"

"Quite a few years. You might start your own business. Understand you people do well with barbecue stands, stuff like that. Whatever you want."

"Barbecue sounds like work. You know us, loose shoes, tight pussy and a warm place to shit."

"Way I heard it."

"Come on, Hap, quit dicking with me. What's the deal?"

"One hundred thousand dollars for each of us."

"Shit. What we got to do, shoot someone?"

"Nope. We have to swim for it."

Chapter 4

I drove Leonard to my house and parked next to Trudy's faded green Volkswagen with the Greenpeace sticker on the bumper. We went inside and found Trudy at the kitchen table drinking coffee. She was wearing one of my shirts, and it was much too large for her. That and her tousled hair made her look girlish. Less so when she crossed her legs and looked at me. "I was worried about you. I couldn't find a note."

"Didn't leave one. Thought I'd be back sooner."

She decided to notice Leonard. "Hi, Leonard."

Leonard nodded.

"What you told me last night," I said. "I want you to tell Leonard."

Her face showed me she didn't like that. "No offense, Leonard. But that was between me and Hap. He shouldn't have said anything."

"I'm dealing him in for half my share."

"There may not be a share if you keep this up, Hap."

"That's okay, too. Find some other sucker."

"You're awfully tough in the morning."

"Controls his glands better in the daytime," Leonard said. "They tend to get overactive at night."

"I don't care for the sound of your talk, Leonard," Trudy said.

"Wasn't supposed to be music," Leonard said. "Maybe you prefer a classical Negro dialect? A little foot-shuffling?"

"Can it, both of you," I said. "This is coming off worse than I thought. I want to deal Leonard in. What's it matter? It's not costing you any more, and you'll have an extra hand. Way you talk, we could use him. He's had some diving experience, for one thing. We need that. I been in the water a few times with a suit on, but that's about it."

She turned to stare out the window at the field. My mother did that when she was exasperated with me. I almost expected Trudy to threaten me with a paddling.

She turned her coffee cup around on her saucer. The light from the window was on her face and showed some of her age.

"Sometime today," Leonard said. "After a couple minutes, pouting bores me."

She looked at us. "All right, but I don't like being railroaded this way, Hap. You should have discussed it with me first. There's enough between us you could have done that."

"I didn't ask because I knew you'd say no, and I want Leonard in. It's not anything I'm trying to put over on you. He's stood by me through some tough times, some of them your fault. I want to see him profit the way you say you want to see me profit. You don't want both of us, no problem. Deal us out."

"It's something else to explain to Howard," she said. "He wasn't keen on me asking you in, Hap."

"I've got faith you can wrap this Howard around your big toe," Leonard said, "and I don't even know the poor sap."

"You know what's wrong with you, Leonard?" Trudy said. "You're jealous. You're in love with Hap here and you're jealous of me."

"Hap's all right," Leonard said. "He's got a nice, perky ass, but he's not my type."

"You two be friends," I said. "It's easier that way."

"I'll put a lid on it," Leonard said, "but with me and her it's business associates, not friends."

"It couldn't be any other way," Trudy said.

Leonard and I sat at the table, Leonard by the wall and me across from Trudy. She glared at Leonard, then me. "One hundred thousand is a lot less than two hundred thousand, Hap. Sure you want to do this?"

"Yep, and I want him to hear the story from you. I haven't told him anything except there's some money to be made. He hears what you got to say, he may not want in."

Trudy got up, poured another cup of coffee and came back to the table. She sipped it and started her story.

"My last husband, Howard, was involved in nuclear protests. Traveled across the country speaking against nuclear reactors, leading marches against their sites. During a protest in Utah, he was responsible for cutting a fence and getting inside a compound and damaging government property. He felt that it was his responsibility as a human being—"

"No politics," Leonard said. "It affects my heart. Just the straight goods."

"All right," she said, and told it.

It was a pretty simple story. The judge made an example out of Howard. Gave him two years at my alma mater, Leavenworth, later cut it to eighteen months for good behavior. I wondered if she left Howard while he was in prison, and if he got more letters and visits than I had.

While Howard was in prison he met a man called Softboy McCall, who fancied himself a gangster. He had been in the can a while and wasn't getting out soon.

When he found out Howard was from Texas he took immediate interest in him. He was a Texan too. Waco, Texas, to be exact.

Softboy and Howard got close. Softboy told Howard what he was in for—this time, anyway. He had robbed a small East Texas bank (are there any other kind?), and the day they robbed it, it was chockful of money. More money than a bank that size ought to have, even if it was a weekend and payrolls were in.

Softboy thought it was laundered money, loot being processed through the bank by big shots. He was more certain of that later when a lesser amount than he stole was reported. Softboy claimed to have made a take just over a million.

During the robbery, there was a shootout with a guard at the bank. The police were somehow alerted, and they got there before Softboy and his two accomplices could escape, and there was more shooting. The guard and a policeman were wounded, and all three of the robbers were injured.

Still, they got to their getaway car and drove away.

Day before, the driver of the car had gone to the bottoms and found a place to hide a motorboat, and they had made for that.

Before they got to it, one of the robbers died, and when they got there, the driver went toes up. All that was left was Softboy and the money.

Softboy managed to push the car off into the water to hide it and he managed to load the money in the boat and get it going. But he didn't get far. He hit a stump or something and was thrown out.

He made it to shore, into the woods, and crawled around through the underbrush for the next three days, feverish and hallucinating. Didn't know if he was going in circles or what.

Eventually he came across a trail and followed that. Next thing he knew, he was on the highway leading to Marvel Creek. He passed out, and when he awoke he was in the Marvel Creek hospital with a policeman sitting in a chair beside his bed. Seemed some motorist had discovered him and pulled him out of the highway and called the law.

When he got better, the police tried to get him to show them where the boat had wrecked, but he couldn't.

He didn't know. He didn't even know how he and his partners had got to the boat in the first place. He hadn't been the one who stashed it, and hadn't been along when it was stashed. After the robbery, he'd been too out of his mind with pain to notice.

The police searched along the river for days, but didn't find evidence of the boat, the car, or the bodies.

Never did.

Softboy told Howard he had bad dreams about all that money underwater and the fish eating it. Said he wanted it spent, and that if Howard found it, he'd split it with him.

At this point in the story, Trudy paused and Leonard said, "Trusting sort of guy, wasn't he?"

"Suppose he thought Howard was honest enough," Trudy said. "Assumed Howard felt about him the way he felt about Howard."

"Or wanted Howard to think he felt that way." I said. "Make a guy feel wanted, he'll do things for you. Get Howard to find and coordinate the dough, and old Softboy could use it to bribe guards and prison officials. Make life a little easier in the joint. Considering his situation, it'd be a worthwhile gamble."

"Three days before they let Howard out," Trudy said, "Softboy was killed by an inmate with a knife made out of a spoon. The fight was over something silly. A dessert, I think."

"So there goes Howard's obligation to Softboy," Leonard said. "He decided to get the money, and he dealt you in, and Hap dealt me in. Well, this is all good and everything, but I see some problems here. First of all, I take it Howard's already tried to find the money. Am I right?"

Trudy nodded.

"The police have looked and Howard's looked and they've come up with nothing, so what makes anyone think we can do better?" Leonard said.

"That's where I come in," I said. "I grew up in Marvel Creek, and I know those bottoms."

"Bet a lot of folks who knew the bottoms helped the police search, and they still didn't find it," Leonard said.

"There's something else," -Trudy said. "Softboy didn't tell the police about the Iron Bridge, but he told Howard."

"The Iron Bridge?" Leonard said.

"When Hap and I married he used to talk about it some, that it was this place in the bottoms... How does it go, Hap?"

"It was an uncompleted bridge. Stuck out over a wide place in the water. Oil companies had started it back in the fifties before the oil ran out. All sorts of stories about that place. Lovers parked by it. There was a story about this guy went down there and hung himself off the bridge because of some girl, or some such thing. Said his ghost was still down there. That when the moon was right you could see him hanging from the bridge. Also there's a story about this couple went down there to park, and some men came up on them, raped the girl and tied the spare tire to the guy and threw him off in the water. Lots of stories."

Trudy said, "Softboy told Howard, last thing he remembered after the wreck was lying on the bank, looking downriver and seeing the Iron Bridge."

"Thing is," I said, "the bridge isn't on the river. It's down a narrow creek that comes off of it. Don't even know if the creek's got a name. Pretty jungle-like down there. Softboy could have been wounded so bad he got off the river without realizing it, but I figure they were never on it, just thought they were. They were on this creek all the time, and the only place that creek could have had water wide enough and deep enough for a boat is a stretch near the Iron Bridge."

"That dough would have long dissolved and washed away by now," Leonard said. "You might find some coins, but that's about it."

"Softboy and his partners were going to carry the money downriver a ways and bury it," Trudy said. "They had another car stashed a little farther on, and they thought they could get away, go back when things cooled off and recover the money. Softboy told Howard they had the money in waterproof cylinders and those were in a big aluminum cooler fastened down in the front of the boat. Chances are, the waterproof containers are still there, and so is the money."

"When was the last time you saw this bridge?" Leonard asked me.

"Eighteen, nineteen... maybe twenty years ago."

Leonard shook his head. "Hell, man, I've come to pick you up for work and you couldn't even find the shoes you took off the night before, let alone find something you haven't seen in twenty years."

"True... but my shoes didn't have a million dollars in them."

Chapter 5

When we finished talking, Trudy said she was going to take a shower and lie down for a while. After being up most of the night thinking, talking, and screwing, I needed a nap too, but I refrained. I like to think it was because I had strong character. It was, of course, because I didn't want to be anywhere alone with Trudy right then. I had a hunch she would have harsh words to say to me about Leonard, and I wasn't up to it. I didn't want her to get me near a bed, either. She could really talk in bed, and if she talked long enough and moved certain parts of her body just right, I might agree to have Leonard shot at sunset.

When I heard the shower running, I got a pen and a paper and wrote Trudy a note. Gone to Leonard's to make arrangements for leaving. Back by lunch. In case you want to come over...

And I drew her a map to Leonard's house.

Me and Leonard went over to his place and he put some clothes and a paperback of Walden in a suitcase. He got out a thin foam rubber mattress and some blankets and rolled them up in a bundle, then got his Remington .30/06 and a box of shells out of the closet. He put the suitcase, the bedroll, the rifle, and the ammunition on the couch.

"Where's your twenty-two target pistol, Leonard?"

"Put up."

"Don't you think we might need it? Maybe you know a place that's got some bazookas and hand grenades we could buy, maybe couple of land mines. Shit, what is all this? We're going to swim down and get some money, not shoot it."

"Comes to your ex-wife, I get paranoid."

"She's a pain in the ass, overly idealistic, but she isn't going to ambush us."

"I don't know what she might get us into. I think she leaps before she looks, and I don't know this Howard guy from nothing. He got pals, or are we the only fools in on this?"

"She said there were two others—idealists all. They're going to take their shares of the capitalistic banker's money and give it to a good cause."

"No shit? What cause?"

"Save the seals, I guess. Maybe the whales. Hell, I don't know. She didn't say."

"I get any money out of this, I'm gonna put it to a good cause too. Me. The seals got to fend for themselves. They don't have bills to pay."

"I hear that."

Leonard went over to the scarred fireplace mantle, got his pipe and tobacco down, and sat in the rocking chair by the fireplace. He pulled a long fireplace match out of a metal cuspidor by the hearth and put it in his lap. He packed his pipe quickly and expertly, pulled the match over the fireplace brick and lit it. He puffed and considered me.

"How did I let you talk me into this?"

"My perky ass had something to do with it. Christ, Leonard, perky ass?"

"I came up with that because I thought it would annoy Trudy."

"You being alive annoys her."

"Old Man Lacy is gonna be needing field hands in a few days, and he'll call, and I won't be here. I'll be wasting my savings trying to find a pipe dream in the Sabine River. Get back from this with no money and my tail between my legs, I might be out of a job permanently."

"There's always room for field hands. Look, we're out of that crap. I think we should go out and do something, even if it's wrong."

"And it is. That's stolen money."

"All this time has gone by, the insurance company is bound to have paid off, and if it's laundered, no sweat."

"How are we to know one way or another? It might all be marked stuff, or whatever it is they do to trace money."

"We'll take our share to Mexico. We can make some deals down there. We might have to lose a few thousand to get it changed to pesos, no questions asked, but we can do it. We can stay there awhile. The money will be worth ten times what it is here. We can buy senors for you and senoritas for me. We can get drunk on Mexican beer."

"I can't go off and leave my dogs."

"Fuck it, I'll go down there, get the money changed and mail you your half in pesos and you can get it changed to dollars.... Bring you and your goddamn dogs down there for a vacation. I'll get them some of those little Mexican dogs to date. There's some way to do business. Bank robbers do it all the time."

"You been giving this some thought. Usually Trudy comes around and you're ready to join the Peace Corps, tie yourself to a pine and save it from a chainsaw."

"Bottom's fallen out of my convictions. Trudy's got me thinking again, all right, and maybe last night she had me thinking the way she wanted, but not today."

"Like I said, Hap, it's your glands. You got more control over them in the daylight. But come sundown and you're home in bed between her legs, you might sing some different notes."

"No, she's got Howard on a string too. I can stand her coming back to me if I can fool myself for a while, but I won't sit around and let her swing from one end of the string to the other."

"I didn't think it was a string she was swinging on."

"I'm going to make some jack out of this, then slide on out."

"Won't be easy. You been a bleeding heart a long time."

"This heart's bled out. Gone dry as toast. You don't think so, hide in the bushes and watch me head for Mexico."

Leonard grinned at me. "After all I've said about you being such a sap, don't know if you suit me much this way. You make me a little nervous. You being Trudy's patsy is what makes you adorable. There's a kind of ignorant charm about it. Like having a big dumb pup around that hasn't quite learned to quit shitting off its papers."

"That's sweet, Leonard. I'll try to remember that."

We decided to take Leonard's old blue Buick instead of my pickup. Trudy could go with us if she wanted, or go ahead in her Volkswagen. Whatever suited her. We loaded Leonard's suitcase, rifle, ammo, and bedding into the Buick's trunk, then tossed in some rope and camping supplies, just in case.

"We'll need some diving equipment," Leonard said. "Dry suits, I figure. Wet suits are probably too cold in this weather, not that a dry suit is much better. They hold pockets of air and pinch you."

"You know more about this stuff than I thought."

"Just enough to get us drowned. But I do know this: cold as the water is right now, it'll deaden your brain. Though in your case, that may not be a new experience. I know this too: it's my goddamn savings we're using to rent this stuff."

"But you have my goodwill, Leonard."

"I been wanting that something furious."

"You rent this stuff, won't it blow our cover?"

"Hap, my good but dumb man. We aren't going to tell what we want it for. Just say we want the experience of a cold-water dive. They don't give a damn if we drown or turn to ice cubes, long as we pay down good, give them enough to buy new equipment if we lose it."

"Leonard, you are my hero. When I grow up I want to be just like you. Can I, huh, can I?"

"Need some black paint first, but that isn't gonna make you as pretty. And it would be nice if you were a lot less stupid. Come on. I need to call Calvin and see if he'll feed my dogs while I'm gone. Then I've got to cry over using all my money to finance this dumb idea. Stick close, now. Never know when I might say something wise."

Chapter 6

When I awoke the next morning, I could hear the wind wolf-howling through the eaves of the house and the pines out beyond the field. At night I seldom kept the heat going, due to the price of butane, and the room was cold enough to make an Eskimo shiver.

I got up and put on my robe and padded through the morning air, blowing out puffs of whiteness as I went.

I looked out the window. The trees and the ground were iced over and there were flakes of snow mixed with sleet. Quite a rarity for East Texas. Most of the time you didn't even know it was winter; generally the winters were exaggerated falls. But this year was different. The cold had blown in hard and vicious on the very day I was supposed to start toward making some money. A wiser man would have considered it an omen.

I wanted to go back to bed, but instead I struggled to the kitchen, got matches and lit all the heaters, the one in the bedroom last. Even then, with my butt backed up to the heat, I was tempted to climb under the blankets again and snuggle close to Trudy. But it might not have been any warmer under there. She certainly hadn't been warm last night. She made love like I was paying for it and she had more customers in line, some of them important. I attempted to bring her to orgasm, but it was like trying to conquer Everest in Bermuda shorts. She wasn't having any. She wanted me to rut and feel cheap and miserable, and I did. But I have no pride and came anyway. When I finished, she rolled from beneath and turned with her back to me. I put my hand on her hip, but she didn't move or say anything. I might as well have been stroking a marble tombstone.

Suddenly I felt sorry for Howard. Like me, he didn't have a chance with a gal like Trudy. Not really. She ruled us with brains and passion and her downy triangle. It was damn demeaning is what it was.

I dressed and put on my coat and went outside and looked to see if the water in my truck's radiator was frozen. It wasn't. There had been enough antifreeze in there, and I had parked it on the south side with the bumper pressed against the house and had put an old horse blanket over the hood.

I got pliers out from behind the truck seat, put the blanket under the truck from the side, crawled on top of it and worked the radiator screw loose so it would drain. This way, if I was gone for some time, I wouldn't have to worry about the cold defeating the antifreeze and blowing my ancient radiator to pieces.

I returned the blanket to the hood and found a couple rocks to put on top of it in case of high winds, then went out to the edge of my property and pried up the water cover and turned off the water valve with the pliers. I put the pliers back, went in the house and locked the windows and back door, drained the water out of the faucets, cut down the water heater, and when I heard Leonard coming, cut off the butane heaters. The air chilled immediately.

I got my gear I had packed last night and brought it into the living room and placed it by the door.

Trudy had got up and dressed during the time I was outside, and all the while I made my inside preparations, she sat on my ratty couch and looked at the wall. Didn't say a word. Didn't look to be breathing.

Leonard stepped inside, looked at Trudy, then me. "I can tell now this is gonna to be fun."

"Trudy, you taking your car?" I asked.

"I'll come for it later. I'm no good driving on ice."

"Your VW hasn't got a radiator to bust," Leonard said, "but you might want to put it in my barn just the same. There's some folks in these parts might not mind stealing a car they don't know."

"What about the diving equipment?" I asked.

"In the trunk. Went in and got it yesterday, and they weren't even open. Had to talk a blue streak and wave some extra money around to get the owner out of his house and down to the shop. You owe me a hundred bucks, Hap."

"Put it on my bill."

"Man, your credit level is way topped out.... Look, we wait a few days on this, things will be better. Ice will have blown out."

"Howard is expecting me," Trudy said. "And I have to work tomorrow."

"Work?" I said.

"You know. You go to a job you hate, and they pay you money for it. You think I'm kept, Hap? Contrary to what Leonard here wants you to think, I'm not a concubine."

Over at Leonard's place, Trudy parked the Volkswagen in the barn and Leonard made up his special dog food from three different brands, poured the contents of the feed sacks into a plastic garbage can, a little bit of each, a smidgen at a time, mixing it evenly.

While he did that, Trudy walked out to the dog pens and I followed. I felt like I ought to say something, but didn't know what. She had a way of making me feel like a jerk when I hadn't done anything. We both stood by the dog pens and waited on Leonard. We were at the end opposite Switch's run, and Trudy had her fingers poked through the wire and was scratching the nose of a dog named Cal, cooing sweet things to him. The dog was eating it up. I was eating it up secondhand. She sounded very sexy making those tender little sounds, and bless my little heart, I wanted to make love to her so bad right then I thought I'd cry.

Leonard came out of the barn and started in our direction. On his way over, he stopped, knelt down to reach his fingers through the wire of Switch's run so the dog could lick his fingers. "Get in your doghouse, boy. You gonna freeze your nuts off."

Switch was acting like a pup, wagging his tail so hard his entire body shook. I walked down to them, and forgot about Trudy. She came after me and suddenly knelt between me and Leonard and put out her hand to pet Switch the way she had Cal.

Switch, quick and silent as an arrow, leapt for her extended fingers. Leonard snatched her hand back and Switch's muzzle went against the wire. He grabbed it with his teeth, pulled, let it go with a snap. Foam flecked out of his mouth and splashed on the knee of my jeans. Trudy hadn't even had time to flinch.

Leonard let go of her hand, and Trudy stepped back. "Jesus! What's in him?"

"Protective," Leonard said. "He doesn't like anyone near me he doesn't know. That dog and men like me, probably the only males you can't twist the way you want."

"You think it's funny, don't you, Leonard?" Trudy said.

"He got your fingers, I wouldn't. Since he didn't, yeah, I think it's funny."

"You can have your old dog. I hope he freezes to death."

"Good thing I don't think you mean that, lady."

Trudy walked away quickly.

"Glad you don't like women," I said, "because you don't exactly have a way with them."

"I like women fine, just not to fuck. And I don't like that woman to do anything with. You think the dogs are gonna be cold?"

"Hell yeah. But the way you got their houses fixed up, they'll be all right. Warmer than we're going to be. Calvin comes to feed them, sees they're uncomfortable, he'll do something about it."

"Yeah... guess so."

Then we were all in the Buick, easing along with Leonard at the wheel, me in the front, leaning on the door as if contemplating a leap, and Trudy dead center of the backseat with arms and legs crossed tight as the coils of the Gordian knot.

The car leaked carbon monoxide through a hole in the floorboard and we were all a little dizzy from it. The wipers beat at the snow and ice and the near-bald tires whistled a tentative funeral march. We made it slow and easy, without much talk, into Marvel Creek about half-past noon.

Chapter 7

The town really started before the city limits. There was a line of beer joints on either side of the highway, ramshackle fire hazards with neon pretzels on their roofs and above their doorways.

Among them were two places I well remembered: The Roundup Club and the Sweet White Lilly.

Next came the long, wide river bridge and the city limits sign that read POP. 5606. Then we were on Main Street, coasting past closed businesses with boarded windows and bolted doors, service stations with oil-spotted drives and greasy-capped men with their hands on gas nozzles or leaky tires.

As we went deeper into town, it got better. Open stores and more people. But the place still looked sad. Not that it had been any budding metropolis when I lived there.

Trudy had us turn on a brick street slick as Vaseline, and we went past the bank, around a curve and past what had been a Piggly Wiggly but was now called Food Mart. I used to buy Cokes and peanut patties there, hang out with the boys and lie about all the fights I'd been in and all the tail I'd banged.

We glided past car lots and the empty spot where the Dairy Queen had stood and old Bob used to make us chocolate shakes with more water than milk in them. On down the highway we went, onto a blacktop and back into the pines, and finally down a soggy clay road that ended at a small house that was mostly weathered gray with strips of paint peeling down its sides like melted candle wax. The front porch leaned starboard and the smoking, crumbling chimney was held upright by the slanting support of ten feet of warped six-by-six. Pine sap corrosion had turned the mouth of the chimney dark as the devil's shadow.

Parked off to the right on the dead grass were a red, dented Dodge mini-van and a jaundice-yellow Volvo with a sheet of cardboard in place of the left front window. Two more letters on the end and the writing on the cardboard would have read

MONTGOMERY WARD

Leonard killed the engine, looked at me, and said, "And I thought we lived like trash."

Trudy got out of the car without saying anything and we stayed where we were. Before she was all the way up the porch steps, the door opened and a big, handsome blond guy with a slight gut, wearing jeans, a gray sweatshirt, and old hightop white tennis shoes came out. He took Trudy in his arms and kissed her in a more than cordial fashion.

"Flexible, ain't she?" Leonard said. "And you know, bubba, he's prettier than you are."

The guy who had to be Howard looked at us. He said something to Trudy and they came out to the car. We got out before they could get there and leaned on the hood and tried to look thuggy.

"This is Howard," Trudy said.

"You must be Hap," Howard said. "I've heard a lot about you."

We shook hands.

"This is Leonard," Trudy said.

It was obvious from the expression on Howard's face he was trying to picture Leonard's role in all this. "So, you gave Trudy and Hap a ride up. You ought to stay for dinner before you go back. I'm going to fix my famous spaghetti."

"He's in on it," I said.

"Ah," Howard said, and looked at Trudy.

She wouldn't let him catch her eye. "He's a good swimmer," she said. "Hap wouldn't come without him. It's like they're married or something."

"Just engaged," Leonard said. "We're still picking china."

Howard had gone mildly red-faced with irritation. "So, you swim, huh?"

"Like a goddamn eel," Leonard said.

Howard nodded, tried to keep it pleasant. "Where's your car, Trudy?"

"Leonard's. I didn't want to drive on ice."

"I see," Howard said. "What say we go in? I'm freezing."

"Go ahead," Leonard said. "I'm gonna smoke a pipeful first. Hap's gonna keep me company."

"All right," Howard said, and put his arm around Trudy as they started for the house. Howard seemed to be holding her shoulders rather tight.

They went inside and Leonard got his pipe and fixings out of his coat pocket, packed the pipe, and lit it.

"I don't know about you, Hap, but I like him. He's sweet. Warmed to me right off, don't you think?"

"I think you talk too much."

"And I could see he warmed to you too, and you to him. You both got, I don't know, a kind of glow on your faces when you first saw one another. Guess spreading the same gal does that to you."

We leaned on the hood for about five more minutes, then Leonard tapped out his tobacco and put his foot on it. "Well," he said, "what say we go on up to the house and meet the rest of the gang? Got a feeling we're gonna love them much as we do Howard."

Chapter 8

The house was sticky-warm and the air wore the smell of incense like a coat, and beneath the coat was some kind of stink.

The incense came from the upraised trunk of a small brown ceramic elephant sitting in the middle of a water-ringed coffee table. My delicate nose determined that the underlying stink most likely came from the kitchen garbage. The heat came from a big butane heater with busted grates, and from a small fireplace that needed shoveling out.

The walls were covered with faded newspaper, and the paper was ripped and peeling, and where it was completely gone you could see pocks in the wood and occasional holes stuffed with thick wads of toilet tissue.

There was a couch covered in what was left of a flowered pattern, and a big green armchair with the cloth on its arms worn down to the wood and cotton dangling out of the cushions like some strange animal that had got its guts knocked out by a speeding car.

There were also a couple of folding metal chairs with their seats polished shiny silver by hordes of shifting asses.

"All right," Leonard said. "Where's everybody?"

As if in answer, Howard came through a door. Before he closed it, I saw behind him a kitchen with a greasy cookstove, a bullet-shaped refrigerator and smoky-yellow walls that were once white.

I was right about the garbage too. With the kitchen door open the smell came into the room like a bully and started pushing the incense around. Howard closed the door, stopped in the center of the living-room and stood there looking nervous and angry, though he was trying not to let it show, and thought he was good at it. He was all dry smiles and no hand gestures—he had his hands pushed down in his pockets to keep from it, but there was tension in them and they fluttered in his pants like frightened animals trapped in sacks.

"Trudy went to tell the others," he said. "They'll want to meet you."

"Bet they aren't as excited about it as we are," Leonard said.

The door to the hallway opened and saved Howard from having to respond to that. Trudy came into the room, along with some cooler air and a fat, doughy man with a shaggy haircut that didn't go with his receding hairline. He wore a tie-dyed tee-shirt, faded jeans with ripped-out knees, and low-cut work shoes with thick white socks. Except for the haircut and clothes, he was a pretty nondescript guy. He had colorless eyes, shit-brown hair and smooth features.

But the only thing regular about the man who followed him were the clothes he wore: a black tee-shirt with pocket, blue jeans and running shoes.

The right side of his face was red and angry, obviously burn-scarred. He had a lump like a melted candle for a nose. His lips were two thin lines of purple leather. His left ear was missing and there was a knob of wart-like flesh where it had been. He was bald except for a tuft of hair over his right ear, and that ear seemed big enough and flared enough to pick up the BBC. At some point his scalp had been torn off and resewn, and a poor job had been done of it. The skin on the back of his head pouched up like a wrinkled pup tent.

Trudy said to me, "I've explained to them that you and Leonard are with us."

"Except I'm not giving my share to any whales or such," Leonard said.

Trudy didn't bite. She was learning to ignore Leonard. Things went better that way. She gestured to the doughy man, said, "This is Chub."

Chub came forward, put out his hand and I took it and we shook. "Real name is Charles," he said, "everyone calls me Chub because I'm a little pudgy."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I smiled like a jackass and Chub went on to Leonard and shook his hand, said, "Trudy just told us about her hesitation in letting you in on our plans here, and I want to assure you it had nothing to do with you being black. That isn't our way. We make our decisions on a one-to-one basis."

Leonard said, "You keep your dialogue on a three-by-five card?"

Chub grinned. "I accept that. I learned years ago, if you express what you think and feel, you're better off than if you don't."

"Chub's had analysis," the burned man said, "and he never lets us forget it."

"It's done me a world of good," Chub said. "There was a time when being the fat kid, the one who got chosen last in football, the one who didn't get the pretty girls or get asked to go riding around with the popular boys, was painful and important. It carried over into being an adult. But analysis has allowed me to move beyond that and I can accept who I am."

"Yeah, but I don't think I can," Leonard said.

"That's right," Chub said. "Express yourself. I'm not offended."

"Before he expresses himself in a way you don't want, Chub," the burned man said, "let me introduce myself. I'm Paco."

"Paco what?" Leonard said.

"Just Paco."

Paco didn't come forward to shake hands, and we didn't go to him. I stood there feeling foolish. Leonard probably felt disgusted, and with good reason. What had seemed like a good idea yesterday now seemed childish and pathetic. Reality had taken hold and I felt like a little boy who had been playing at adventurer but had just been told by Mother to put my toys away and come in to supper.

We stood that way a long time. Leonard said, "Isn't anyone gonna ask me my sign?"

Chub said, "I sense a lot of hostility in you, Leonard. I'd like to know you better, have you think of me as a friend, someone you can talk to. Being able to talk things out can really let off pressure."

"Chub," Leonard said, "that analysis shit might be all right for an airhead like you, but you come at me again with that, I'm gonna let off that pressure you're worried about."

Chub started to open his mouth, then mulled it over. His lips twitched, like the words were living things trying to push out. But he held them. Leonard looked like a man who just might let off pressure.

I felt sorry for poor Chub on one hand, but on the other he sort of asked for what he got. Kind of wore a perpetual KICK ME sign around his neck and on his ass.

"We're not getting off to the best start," Howard said. "There's no need for threats."

"He wants to talk like people talk, okay," Leonard said, "but he wants to play analyst, he can talk that trash to himself."

"We're going to work together," Howard said, "we got to coexist."

"True," Paco said, "but could be a solid punch in the teeth would do Chub some good. I'm tired of him myself." He looked over at Chub. "One word about my physical scars being a manifestation of my internal condition, or some dumb thing like that, and I'm going to promise you something similar to what Leonard promised."

Chub put his hands in his pockets and smiled to let us know he could take whatever was dished out. He was okay, you were okay.

"Violence isn't the way here," Howard said. "Let's sit down and get something to drink or smoke and talk business. We'll eat in awhile."

"That sounds right enough," Leonard said.

"Trudy," Howard said, "will you help me bring in some drinks?" Then to us, "Selection's limited. Coke, beer, some Dickie whiskey. We got a little grass, anyone wants it."

Chub didn't want anything. I went for beer. Paco and Leonard took the Dickie.

Trudy caught my eye and gave me a look that pinned my skull to the wall. Gee, what did I do? Leonard was the bigmouth. I thought I'd been pretty sweet, all things considered.

I tried smiling at her, but she wasn't going for that. She turned her back, and she and Howard went into the kitchen and closed the door.

Paco went over to Leonard, grinned and said, "By the way, big fella, what is your sign?"

"The Asshole," Leonard said.

"I'll buy that," Paco said.

Chub smiled. He smiled big. He liked himself. He and the world were at one with one another. Except he was smiling so tight the muscles in his cheeks were quivering.

In the kitchen I could hear Howard murmuring, and though I couldn't understand what he was saying, I could tell from the tone of his voice that Leonard and I had already worn out our welcome, or Leonard had worn it out for the both of us. Not that it mattered. Now that we were dealt in, they had to let us stay. Thing was, I wasn't sure there was anything to stay for.

That feeling of foolishness washed over me again, big time.

Chapter 9

After a bit, Trudy and Howard came back with our drinks, and I sat on the couch with them. Leonard got the gutted chair, and Paco and Chub pulled the folding chairs up close. Howard sipped a beer and went through the stuff Trudy had told us about the money most likely being laundered. Then he started waving his hands and working his best facial expressions; threw in a few cents about how the spirit of the sixties need not die; how the money we were going to get could be used to push the ideals of that time forward; said the survivors of that noble era need not fall by the wayside; that unlike the dinosaur our generation had been compared to, we were not in fact extinct or even on the endangered species list, we were merely hibernating like a bear, and now was the time to awake to a new and productive spring.

Although Howard pretended to be talking to both me and Leonard, it was pretty clear it was me he was trying to interest. Trudy had told him about my past, about my involvement in "the movement," and he thought he might jump-start my old battery if he could find the right words.

He couldn't.

I was curious about what they had in mind, but felt it would be a mistake to go the next step and ask. I'd open a whole new can of germs that way. Once they knew I was interested they'd try to work their virus into my bloodstream and take over, and I couldn't see any reason to go through the process.

From the way Trudy looked at me, I think she was both surprised at me and disgusted with me. I don't know if it was my lack of interest in their cause, whatever it was, or the realization she was losing control over me.

During Howard's dissertation on the sixties and what it meant to him and should mean to all of us, Chub threw in a few "right ons," but for the most part was mercifully silent. Paco yawned a lot, and Trudy tried to stare me into submission. I attempted to look pleasant but a little dense, like a dog listening to a talk on nuclear physics.

When Howard was on his third run of rephrasing what he'd already said, hoping to sneak up on my blind side, Leonard said, "Since I don't see we're talking much business, pardon me, will you? Because like the bear coming out of hibernation and feeling the first intestinal stirrings of spring, I've got to take me a big, greasy shit. When y'all get to the folk songs part, maybe I'll come back. I'm good on 'I Got a Hammer.' "

"Wrong era," I said. "We're talking Beatles and Doors here."

"I never can fit in," Leonard said, "and I try so goddamn hard."

He went in search of the bathroom.

"Your friend doesn't seem to like us much," Howard said.

"No, he doesn't," I said. "He wasn't involved in any movement during the sixties except moving out of the way of bullets, trying not to get his ass shot off in Vietnam."

Howard nodded like that explained some things. "He knows about guns, I presume?"

"Yeah, got a medal or two in Vietnam. But on the negative side he's a little weak on the social graces and Bob Dylan lyrics, and I've caught him in a few mistakes when we're discussing the ballet and the history of Marxism."

"I don't get the impression you're all that interested in reviving the spirit of the sixties, either," Howard said.

"Can't imagine why you thought I might be. Well, I can imagine, but whatever Trudy's told you about me, that's in the past. This sixties talk is embarrassing. You sound like a first-year college guy who's just gotten away from mom and dad and discovered weed and liberal politics."

"The sixties were a positive time, a good time," Howard said.

"Some of it was. Some of it wasn't. But that was the sixties. I'm happily selfish now. I'm in this for money and money alone. Besides, sounds to me like you're trying to justify theft with sixties rhetoric, and you're too goddamn secretive for my taste. You sound like more illegal stuff than I've agreed to, and I don't want to hear about it. I'm not going to prison for some idealistic rush. This idealism crap has got me nowhere but tired and broke and cut to the bone. Money I can spend, and might get away with.

"I can take it and go someplace warm with cheap whiskey and loose women." I looked at Trudy. "Women that want nothing more than hot, sticky sex down Mexico way or on some tropical island where you can run around with your ass hanging out and your dick slapping your thigh, and nobody asks you to do anything but mind your own business. You people fight the good fight, whatever it is, because you're going to have to do it without us."

Paco grinned, got out a cigarette pack, lipped a smoke and lit it with a cheap lighter.

"Don't make us breathe your bad air," Howard said.

"Screw you," Paco said. He blew smoke across the room.

Normally I'd be on Howard's side, but I enjoyed seeing him irritated. I almost asked Paco for a cigarette.

Howard sighed, looked at Trudy sadly; he was a smart, hip guy dealing with a bunch of nincompoops. What could he do?

"Anytime change is encouraged," Chub said, "there's always someone who argues for the status quo, or decides to run off and take it easy, concludes mat the best and simplest way—"

Paco reached over and slapped Chub on top of the head with his fingers.

"Damn you," Chub said. "That was childish, Paco. You're frustrated about something, you should discuss it, not resort to—"

Paco slapped Chub again, this time with the palm of his hand, said, "Shut up, will you, Chub?"

"Whose side you on, Paco?" Howard asked.

"Yeah," Chub said, rubbing his head.

"I'm not choosing up," Paco said. "I'm tired of Chub's bullshit is all. He keeps talking like he's done some things. Hell, leave Hap alone. He isn't interested. Let him and Leonard do their job, then let's do what we're gonna do. They couldn't care less. If they want it that way, let's leave it that way. You guys are starting to sound like evangelists, and I hate those fuckers."

"Amen." It was Leonard back from the bathroom.

"You look refreshed," I said. "Hope you struck some matches."

"About four. It was a championship shit."

"I can see this isn't going anywhere," Chub said. "So I think I'll withdraw until we're willing to converse sensibly."

"Telling it like we see it," Leonard said. "Isn't that what you like, Chubby?"

"I don't need this," Chub said. He got up and went through the hallway door.

"I hate it when he leaves the room," Leonard said. "He makes things so damn bright when he's around. But since he's gone, I'm going outside to smoke."

"Thanks for not cluttering up the air," Howard said, and he looked at Paco.

Paco put a smile on his ugly face and kept smoking.

Leonard said, "It's not your air I'm worried about. It's mine. This place has a rot smell under all that fucking incense. Smelled enough of that in Vietnam. The rot and the incense."

Leonard went outside.

"Think I'll join him," Paco said, and he got up and went out and closed the door.

"Me too," I said, and got up and started after Paco.

"Hap," Trudy said. "We got to talk."

God had spoken. "Do we?" I said.

"I told you you shouldn't have done this," Howard said to Trudy.

"You don't know everything," Trudy said, and stood up.

"I know this," Howard said. "I know this isn't a good idea at all. You're thinking maybe with some other part of your body."

"That's rich, coming from you," Trudy said. "I've seen how you think."

"How you make me think."

"Children," I said. "Let's not fight."

Howard stood up, held his beer in my direction. "I got something to say to you, big shot."

"Say it, then," I said. "While I'm used to the drone of your voice. I'd rather not get acclimated again."

"You think you can come in here and run things," he said, "be a goddamn comedian. But you're wrong."

"I'm not trying to run anything. I just don't want to be ran."

"We got some scruples here. Idealism may strike you as dumb, or sissy, or childish, or nostalgic, but there's more to it than that. There's more to us than that."

"I'm sure history will be kind to you," I said. "Howard gave his stolen money to the whales. He was a good guy. Hap gave his to wine and heat and women. He was a bad guy. Leonard bought all the Hank Williams originals he could find. He was a bad guy."

"What's with the whales?" Howard said. "No one's said a thing about any whales."

"Shut up," Trudy said. "You're drunk."

"Only had a beer," he said.

"The smell of rubbing alcohol makes you silly," she said.

"Look, Howard," I said, "I'm not trying to cause any trouble here. You think maybe I'm trying to take Trudy—"

"She's her own person," Howard said.

"Yeah, but you don't like the fact that I've been fucking her again, do you?"

"Hap," Trudy said. "Don't."

"You know I have," I said. "You think she came over to my place and merely talked some business? We banged each other till our eyes bugged out."

"Like Howard said, Hap, he doesn't own me. And neither do you."

"And I'm damn proud of it," I said.

What Howard thought he knew, he was now certain he knew. In theory it was okay, but in actuality it got under his skin like a chigger.

"It doesn't matter," Howard said, but his voice lacked conviction. "She's a grown woman. I've got no strings on her."

"But she's got them on you," I said. "And I should know. They used to go all the way through me and fasten to the bones. I got maybe a few still tied in me. Enough that I'm acting horsey here when I shouldn't, and it's making you do the same."

"I'm saying you're not coming in here and changing what we believe, what we're going to do. That's all. I'm not saying anything about me and Trudy or you and Trudy."

"I think you're saying plenty about just that. You open your mouth and your heart and dick talk over you. Like I said, I'm one to know."

"You don't know anything," Howard said. "You and that other guy, you think you know all there is to know, but you don't know a thing."

"Let's leave it," I said. "I don't want to hear any more. So it isn't the whales. Do what you got to do for people and animals and nuclear disarmament, and give my regards to the boys in Leavenworth."

"To hell with you, pilgrim," Howard said. He moved around the coffee table, staggered slightly. That bit of alcohol really had got to him. Or maybe it was the capper to some he drank earlier. Had I been in his place, knowing Trudy was supposed to be with me but was off with one of her ex-husbands for a few days, I'd have took to drinking too. At one point I had.

He came around the coffee table and put his hand out and pushed me hard in the chest, but he made the mistake of not pulling back fast enough, and I put my hand over the back of his, trapped it to my chest and bent forward. It sent Howard to his knees. It was a playground trick, but heck, he started it.

"Stop it, Hap," Trudy said. "Let him go."

I let him go. Trudy bent down and put an arm around him and tried to hoist him up. He shrugged her off, got up on his own.

He pointed a finger at me, but he wasn't standing as close as before. "Try that when I haven't been drinking."

"Okay," I said.

"Hell, listen to me," he said. "I'm playing your macho game now. I'm not getting pulled into this. I'm gonna lie down. I've had all this foolishness I want."

Without wobbling too much, he went through the hallway door and out of sight. Maybe he and Chub had their own special place to sulk back there. Some old sixties records to play.

"Happy?" Trudy said.

"Semi."

Chapter 10

I awoke to the sound of a bird and the embrace of the cold. The voice of the bird was pathetic, and the cold was criminal.

I was on the back porch of the little house, and it had once been screened in, and in a sense still was, but to make it a kind of room, cardboard had been tacked all around on the inside of the screen in a couple of layers. It might have worked okay summers, but winters, especially this winter, it wasn't much.

I wondered whose idea it was to fix the porch this way. The landlord or its erstwhile renters? I voted on the renters. A landlord who'd let people live in this shit box didn't strike me as the type to bother with even cardboard siding.

Originally Leonard and I had been in the kitchen, sleeping on the floor. The cookstove, with the oven door open, heated up the small room perfectly. But I awoke in the middle of the night bathed in sweat, finding it hard to breathe. I opened the door that led out to the back porch and that helped some, but the air in the kitchen was still poisonous with butane. I toed Leonard awake and told him I was going out to the porch, and if he didn't want to spend tomorrow in Marvel Creek Funeral Home, he might want to do the same.

Now I was lying under some ice-crusted blankets, inside an old sleeping bag. The bag was on top of some broken down cardboard boxes (probably the remains of the interior decorating scheme), and the seams on the cardboard had worked through the bag and into my back. I was still in my clothes. My socks felt damp from yesterday's sweat. My body felt stiff as wire.

I rolled over, and sitting in the kitchen doorway with a blanket over his shoulders, shivering, looking at me in what can only be called an unpleasant manner, was Leonard. His breath was snorting out of his mouth and nostrils in white puffs and his eyes were narrow.

He said, "I've let you talk me into some shit before, Hap, but this one is the king of all the dumb things. These fuckers are seriously balled up. Ought to have my ass kicked, and be proud of it."

"Good morning."

"Chub is really in orbit, and Howard is so full of what Trudy's filled him with, he doesn't know if he needs to shit or throw up."

"Don't you have something unpleasant to say about Paco? You wouldn't want to leave anybody out."

"He confuses me. He doesn't seem like part of this. He's got his feet on the ground."

"You're just sweet on him because he went out on the porch and had a smoke with you."

"Yeah, that's it."

"They're kind of silly, Leonard, but they've got good intentions. Without people like these sillies, blacks would still be drinking at water fountains that said colored and they'd be going around back of a restaurant to get their food through a little slot."

"Now you're talking like the fat guy."

"He's a clown, but his heart's in the right place."

"Tell me about women's rights now. Toss in something about how the gays used to be more oppressed before people like these, people like you, came along. Tell me how you people ended the war."

"All true."

"Then why in hell didn't you go for what they wanted you to go for yesterday? They were fishing with every kind of bait they had."

"I guess it's their posture. That holier than thou attitude that smacks more of a performance than anything else."

"I thought you said it was heartfelt."

I hate being caught in a contradiction. "Have you ever thought about fucking yourself, Leonard?"

"Constantly. Want to have a relationship with a good man, figure I'd be prime pick. But my dick's about a half-inch too short to get the job done. I like to feel it all the way up in my liver."

"You through jacking with me now?"

"Almost. All I got to say is you can't be a professional bleeding heart. Yeah, things are better for blacks and women and gays, but it was the blacks and women and gays that did it, not fuck-ups like this bunch. Whites and straights came along to give help, all right, after the blacks said 'enough' and got their heads busted, and it's the same for the gays and the women. The whites and straights, they control things, and they could have changed it anytime."

"Not all us whites and straights are in a position of power, or haven't you noticed?"

"Let's save this for next time we're on Meet The Nation or something."

"Gladly. I'm too cold to argue, and if I got up from here to kick your ass my foot would break off."

"Or I'd break it off for you. Now that's settled, let's get out of here before the World Savers get up."

Leonard looked at his watch. "It's six o'clock and I'm hungry. Paco said there's a pretty good place for breakfast in town."

"Maybe they got something here we could fix."

"Nothing in the fridge but a bag of uncooked spaghetti and three beers. Cabinets are mostly empty, except for some roaches."

We left without disturbing anyone, went out to Leonard's car, and it cranked after a scary moment of the starter Bendix clicking. As we drove away, I thought of Trudy and Howard in bed together and felt like Howard must have felt when she was with me.

Depressed.

I thought of them lying there, her waking up, giving herself to him before she got cleaned up and went off to work (wherever she worked) and he went to his job (if he had one). Then I imagined them coming home from a hard day, planning to steal money that was already stolen to use for some noble cause. Ozzie and Harriet of the sixties set.

I liked it. It was sweet. They were a great couple with high ideals.

I hoped it was so cold back there her vagina was frozen shut.

Sue me. I've got a juvenile streak.

Chapter 11

We drove in and found a little cafe called Bill's Kettle, the place Paco recommended. It hadn't been there when I was growing up. Back then that spot had been a magazine and cigar store. The lady who ran it used to let me read comics off the rack and not buy them. I was the only one she let do that.

The building the cafe was in, though it had to be considerably younger than the one the magazine store had occupied, looked much older. It appeared to be held up with nothing more than the smoke and grease from the kitchen. The huge plate glass was so grimy you could hardly see movement behind it. Someone had made an attempt to wipe it clean on the outside but hadn't bothered rinsing the soap; it looked like the end result of a Halloween prank.

The inside looked no better. The floors were scuffed and dirty and tables had been poorly wiped. There were two men at one table eating. They eyed us and nodded as we came in. In the back a young man sat staring into space, sipping coffee.

There was a fat blond woman in thinning green stretch pants at the counter. She gave us a quick glance and went back to her coffee and cigarette, said something to the thin, oily-headed man behind the counter. He managed a laugh, like a leukemia patient trying to be cheery.

We sat and kept our arms off the table. The fat blond woman got down off the stool and came over with menus. Pretty sneaky, the help blending in with the clientele that way.

We ordered, and about the time our meal arrived, Paco came in. He had on faded khakis and a blue baseball cap today. The cap hid some of the ugliness of his head. No one stared; they all worked at not doing that, and you could tell.

He saw us, smiled, and the smile was nice; the only part of him that wasn't ruined.

He came over and Leonard made room and Paco sat down beside him. We went through the casual greeting bullshit you go through, and the waitress shrugged off the stool and came over with her cigarette in her mouth and asked around it for Paco's order, then went away.

"She didn't even bother with a menu," Leonard said.

"I always get the same thing," Paco said. "Pancakes. Her asking me is simply a ritual."

Surprise. The food was great. I was wiping up the last of my eggs with a piece of toast when Paco smiled at me and said, "Place looks like a toilet, but what comes out of the kitchen could pass for ambrosia. They got someone back there knows what cooking is all about."

When Paco's order came and he finished eating, I said, "How do you live, you and the guys? Trudy the only one working?"

"I don't get too many indoor jobs with this face," Paco said. "Nobody in a store wants to look at me all day. I do some jobs here and there. Move across country doing different things, farm and yard work mostly. Sometimes things that aren't legal or aren't quite legal. Right now, you could say I'm between jobs.

"Trudy works at the Dairy Palace east of town. She doles out hamburgers. I'll tell you now. Don't eat there. The food's for shit.

"Howard's got a job at a gas station. Pumps gas, changes tires, fixes flats, runs the wrecker service. He's getting in good with the owner so he can get use of the wrecker. Told the guy that way his wife—Trudy's going as his wife—won't have to pick him up. He thinks they're gonna let him have the wrecker soon and we can use it to pull the boat out some afternoon."

"If there is a boat," Leonard said.

"I don't let myself think any other way," Paco said. "There's a boat."

"You got Trudy's kind of dedication," I said.

"I don't know she's so dedicated," Paco said. "She wants to be, but I don't know she is. I don't know her like Howard knows her, or maybe you know her, but I know her type. I've heard her talk about you two, and I've heard Howard talk, and I see how burned out you are, Hap, and I got to draw some conclusions. I think she's a quitter. She likes to get all the sticks and tinder for the fire, likes to light it, but doesn't want to be there when it starts to smoke too much and get too hot. By then, she's out of there, gathering new sticks, starting new fires, then she's away from that one before it gets going good. Leaves someone else to mind the blaze, lets them take the heat and smoke and get all burned up. She's got a knack for picking guys who'll martyr for her, ones who think she's gonna come back and burn up with them."

"I been trying to tell this clown that for years," Leonard said. "I know a goddamn succubus when I see one."

"What about you, Paco?" I asked. "What's your story? You just dedicated to their cause, or what?"

"Me, I'm not dedicated at all. Except to myself. I'm just looking to score as big as I can."

"I hear that," Leonard said. "But what are you doing with these bozos?"

"I'm a bozo too. Or have been. I'm just not dedicated anymore. I'm like a big truck with momentum and no brakes, the gearshift knob off in my hand, going downhill on a narrow grade. I want to stop but can't. I got to ride things out. Either go over the side or make it to the bottom of the grade and coast out smooth and easy, hope I don't wreck."

"Chub?" I asked.

"He was born with money. He hung around with ill-contents. It gave him a club. He's still eighteen or twenty in his head. Never really gets up against the hub, just likes to think he does. Always been a weekend rebel, but he's gone and got married to getting this money. He wants to use it to fight some injustice. Anyway, folks back home in Houston disowned him, but not before they gave him a bundle they thought he'd use on becoming a doctor. Over the years, he's spent most of it on good causes, got some in the bank here to live on. He's got degrees aplenty. Knows medicine, even though he never became a doctor. Wouldn't go the final business because he thought that was becoming part of the establishment. He's got idealism like nerds got religion or Star Trek."

"I still don't have you figured in all this," I said.

"Maybe when I see that money I won't do what they think. But I don't see any cause to rock the boat until we got the boat. We work together, we might can bring that money up. They think I got other plans, they might fade on me. It's not like I can go to the police and complain I been welched on. Besides, if I could, I wouldn't. I got some problems there already."

"Suppose you're going to tell us about it?" Leonard said.

"We're gonna break the law together, so why not?" Paco got out a cigarette and lighter and lit up. He looked around. The fat blond waitress was gone from the counter—somewhere in the back, most likely. The fella behind the cash register was leaning on it, looking out that grimy glass. We were the only customers left in the place.

Paco said, "I got a record. It's the sixties' fault. Well, my fault and the sixties with it, but it's no fun blaming yourself even if you think you're guilty. So I'm gonna say it's the sixties' fault and you can know better if you want.

"But when it was '68 I graduated and went off to the University of Texas, and things were heated up good, what with the war and all. Back then I had a face. I wasn't a Greek god or nothing, but I wasn't so bad. Now I scare crows at a hundred yards. But the face was all right, and I guess I was all right too. Full of lies about life and all, like we all were then. But I started figuring out some things. Came to the conclusion what we been told about things, about life, is just talk. You act a certain way to gain a certain thing, and that's all there is to it. I know that now, but then, I was full of love and peace and end the war, civil rights and women's rights. Thought I could make everyone look at these things and see that's the way it ought to be, that it would hit them like a thunderbolt from Zeus.

"I got a feeling you know what I'm saying, Hap. I know a disfranchised sixties guy when I see one."

"You pegged him right," Leonard said.

"Silence in the gallery," I said.

"So, anyway, I'm off to college, and I'm Mr. Big Shot. I'm gonna do some things. I know how the world works and I'm gonna rip off the lid and let everyone look inside and see the gears, and once they do, it's all gonna go smooth. We'll put a little oil in there, but once the machinery of a thing is understood, there goes the mystery. Everyone can live together and love one another, no sweat.

"But when I finally got the lid off, looked down there, I saw the machinery was a lot more complex than I originally thought. You couldn't glance at it and see how it worked. I had to go down in the machine and study it, become a mechanic. Change some things around so it was simple. I figured I could do that. Figured when I came up out of the machine, it would be smooth and well oiled and would run the way it was supposed to. Without prejudice and wars and sexism. People would be kind to animals, loan their tools, and locks would come off doors."

I nodded. "Peace, brother."

"You got it. So I decided to team up with these other mechanics. People who had the right ideas, you know, wanted to get down in that machinery with me, do some work. This machinery analogy was theirs, and they started calling themselves the Mechanics. You don't hear much about them some reason or another, but they were active as ants."

"I heard of them," I said. "Started out getting people to register to vote. Pushing the ideas of a democracy, then they splintered. The ones that continued to call themselves the Mechanics were kind of like the radical branch that split off from the Students for a Democratic Society and called themselves the Weathermen."

"You got it. The splinters all died out pretty quick without their original leader. He was a charismatic kind of guy. Had come into the group as one of the Indians, but in no time was chief. A few of the Indians split, tried to form their own tribes, but the diehards stayed with him. And it took him to hold things together, keep the Mechanics on track.

"So the Mechanics got their monkey wrenches and went to work. Said to hell with this democratic society shit, the answers are in the street. You got to wreck some things to get them built up new and different. We went underground. Got guns, started hitting anyplace we thought didn't jive with human rights or supported the war in Vietnam. There were lots of targets. We bombed a few ROTC buildings throughout the state. Moved on to other states. Traveled all over and didn't get caught. We were a different kind of criminal than the FBI had dealt with before. Smart people with a smart leader. We had a cause, and there's no one more dangerous than the zealot, and we were that in spades."

"How many of you were there?" Leonard asked.

"Twelve at first. Took in a few more here and there off college campuses. Did some sneaky recruiting. We had been students, so we knew where to go to talk to the right people— people with a similar political mind. We hooked them in, fed them radicalism like pudding. The leader of the Mechanics was especially good at talking that shit. Thought he was one of life's poets, one enlightened sonofabitch. Didn't hurt either that back then every college kid wanted to be Che Guevara.

"We were good at what we did. Knew how to forge documents, make new identities. Worked what jobs we could get, spent very little, moved often. Stayed near college campuses mostly; all kinds of free stuff you can get at the bigger ones. Play it right and live simple, you can do well mostly on the labors of others. And that struck us as right. We saw ourselves as ripping off a capitalistic society."

I had been sitting there trying to remember a name, and suddenly it came to me. "Gabriel Lane," I said. "That's who the leader of the Mechanics was. Goddamn! That's you, isn't it, Paco?"

"Long ago. I'm Paco now, and Paco I'll be till they find me somewhere dead in a cheap motel and cart me off to a pauper's grave."

"I think you guys were fucked up," Leonard said. "Doing what you did."

"Our hearts were in the right place, but we got caught up, and pretty soon our hearts shifted. An innocent bystander dies when we bomb some capitalistic bank, some ROTC building, boy that's tough, we hated it, but hey, it happens. The end justifies the means. We'd blow you up for peace and love."

"General consensus is you're dead," I said. "You were supposed to have gotten killed in an explosion, if I remember right."

"I may look blown up," Paco said, "but here I am. Talking and smoking and making your morning bright and gay."

"I'm gay," Leonard said, "but I don't know about the day and what you're doing for it."

"Gay?" Paco said. "You saying what I think you're saying?"

"I fuck men," Leonard said. "Does that clear it up for you?"

"I believe it does."

"You say people died because of what you were doing?" I said.

"That's right," Paco said. "Toward the end we lost some of our own. Cops—or the pigs, as they were popularly referred to then—cornered four of the Mechanics in a house in Chicago. I was out at the time. Making a gun trade. Had two of the group with me. I forget what the rest were doing. But the bottom line is the cops got wind of where we were, hit the house, and killed four of us. Bobbie Remart among them. She was a top radical at that time. On the FBI list right under me. She was kind of my lieutenant. My lover too. After that, things went from being political to being personal."

"You got to feel bad about that shit," Leonard said. "I mean, I killed gooks in Nam, and I was supposed to kill them. Thought I was fighting for my country, doing what was necessary. Still feel that way. But I hate I had to do it. But you guys ... I don't know."

"You don't look to me like somebody who could do that kind of thing," I said.

"You kidding," Paco said. "I look like death warmed over . . . but I know what you mean. Listen here. You been around, you should know better. Can't judge things by what you see. Look at something long enough, and it'll start to look like something else. Watch me long enough, you might see something you don't see now. Whatever, there won't be any of the old me to look at. That's a guarantee.

"Back then, I thought what we were doing was right. Like you thought what you were doing was right in Nam, Leonard. Felt we were patriots. Least until what happened to Bobbie, After that, I was like something taxidermied that moved. Right and wrong were words. I couldn't see the line of difference anymore, couldn't tell if I was crossing it or not. For me, that line has long been gone and nothing's going to bring it back.

"Anyway, what happened was we were hiding out in this house in Chicago, and I had the Mechanics building a bomb to blow something or another to hell, and I was supervising. I was the one taught them how to build bombs, see, and I wanted to be sure they knew I was still the big daddy. Sasha was the one actually working on it, and the rest of the group were gofering for her. Way they were treating her was making me a little jealous. Sasha was strong-willed and kind of new to us, and the Mechanics weren't turning to me quite as often as before. She was starting to get some of my thunder. I wanted to make sure she knew her place, you know. I looked over her shoulder, and she was doing all right, working safe, but like I said, I had to be big daddy, and I said something to her about how she needed to work smoother, and she didn't take to it. She was the only one had my number. Knew my ego. Knew how fucked up I was over Bobbie's death. She planned to take things over. I could tell that. She could have done it too. Still had the cause in her. She knew my days as leader were numbered, that I was burned out, just doing by rote. She wouldn't take shit from me. She turned around and started telling me what I could do with my advice, got her mind off what it ought to have been on. Must have let the wrong wires touch. Next thing I knew, the world was bright and hot, full of stone and glass, and I was rolling around in rubble. Ego and explosion had kicked my ass.

"I awoke outside, down in a pit, the house all around me, ears ringing, cold air cooling me down. Somehow the blast had brought the whole place down, and by a goddamn miracle, maybe because Sasha was in front of me, the explosion had thrown me away, caught me on fire, but not burned me up or blown me up.

"I found I could walk. I wandered off, lived under a porch for three or four days, and the people owned the house never knew I was there. When my ears quit ringing, I could hear them come and go and I could hear their TV playing. A dog came under there and slept with me. That's what I did most of the time. Slept. And hurt. Hurt something awful. It was cold then, right at winter, nothing like the way it is here today, but cold. That blast had burned me so bad the weather felt good at the same time it made me shiver and feel sick. It being cold might have been what saved me, I don't know.

"When I got strong enough, I got out of there at night, staggered to a phone booth, busted the phone box open, made it work without any money. Give me a bobby pin, and I can hotwire a jet. I called a man sympathetic to our cause, and he came to get me. When he saw me he gagged and threw up.

"I must have been a sight, all right. Skin burned off, top of my head open. Dirt embedded in my face. An ear gone.

Looked like walking, breathing hamburger meat. Way this guy acted when he saw me, I wished the bomb had done me in. Wish that now.

"To shorten it up, he got me out of there and took me to Chub, Chub didn't have what he needed to take care of a case like me. He'd mostly handled gunshots for us before, and those only minor, but here I was with my head wide open, burned over most of my body, and him with just the basic stuff. He did the best he could, I give him that. He kept me there till I was better. Guess I ought to figure I owe him. But I don't. I don't even like the fat fuck. He fixed me up, and I gave him a cause. I consider us even. In fact, from that day on, it didn't take much for me to consider myself even with just about everybody and everything.

"Chub made arrangements for me to stay with some other Movement people. One of them was Howard. He was living in Austin at the time, and I wanted to go back to Texas and rest, get involved again when I felt better. Or so I said, but I knew it was over. The whole dumb dream was through.

"For the next year or so, I went from one sympathizer to the next, being taken care of, passed around like some kind of exotic pet, one of the last of a dying species. The noble, wounded hero who gave his face for the cause.

"Then one by one there wasn't anyplace for me to stay. Harboring a fugitive from the old days was no longer romantic; flirting with the law and danger was no longer fun. People had to take their kids to soccer games and work in the PTA. The really radical people were getting caught. The Weathermen were out of it by then. And that explosion had killed all the Mechanics but me.

"Oh, there were a few die-hards throughout the country that would put me up, but they liked to talk the talk and not walk the walk. On the whole, I was old, bad news. The bullshit times were over. That was it for Gabriel Lane."

"So you're hiding from the law?" Leonard said.

"Not exactly, but I don't want any truck with them. I figure if the FBI thinks I'm alive they're not saying. There was such a mess and mixture of bodies there, they had to have decided it got us all. But I'm not one to take chances."

Paco reached into his mouth, took out his top teeth and put them on the table. So much for his fine smile; it was a fake. The gap where the teeth had been made him look truly horrible.

"Explosion got the real ones. Chub made these for me," Paco said. "Fat bastard knows about medicine, both human and animal, and he knows dentistry. You got to give him that. I've had these teeth, what, twenty years maybe."

He put the teeth back, fastened them to the back molars. "I bummed some, read about me in a few books and magazines, about my death and all, found that what we had done really hadn't amounted to a hill of beans. We blew up some places, killed a few folks, and I've got no face."

"How come you're with Howard and Chub?" I asked.

"The money. Howard got in touch with me. Thinks now that he's been in prison he's learned some things, that he's an intellectual tough guy out to do some good. Ready to revive the sixties. Power to the people and all that shit. Thinks he's gonna get this money and make some changes.

"But he decides he needs help to do it, and he calls around to some people he knows that know me, and they catch me next time I pass through. And that's no easy feat, cause I go my own schedule. Work till a job plays out or I play out. Anyway, I get the word Howard has something I might want to get in on, something that would do some good. Like the old days. Money was mentioned and I got interested.

"Course, it's really Trudy behind all this. I can see that. I know her type. She hears about this money from Howard, maybe one night after he's put the pork to her, and they're lying there thinking sweet thoughts, reliving the sixties like they do, and she gets an idea about it. Next thing you know, Howard's looking me up, believing it's all his idea. He gets in touch with Chub cause he knows him too. We may not be much, but we're all he's got left from the sixties.

"I listen and figure a way to score. Can't do this town-to-town shit labor rest of my life, so I'm in. But not for any goddamn cause."

"And now," Leonard said, "here we all are."

"All right, goddammit," I said. "I bite. What's their plan for the money?"

Paco grinned his false teeth at me. "Trust me. Stay out of it. Take the money, like I'm going to take the money, and go on. I promise you, you'll be a hell of a lot happier."

Chapter 12

Next day the weather cleared up some. It didn't go warm, but part of the meanness went out of it. It was cold with no new ice and no high winds. The sky was flat as slate and the color of chipped flint. Leonard and I took his car down to the bottoms to see what we could see. I wanted to locate the Iron Bridge, find that money, get on with things; go away from this weird winter and Trudy, talk of the sixties and Paco's failed revolution.

Although the house where we were staying was at the edge of the woods, it wasn't the part of Marvel Creek legitimately called the bottoms. The bottoms was lowland with lots of trees, water, and wildlife, and it didn't start where it used to. Civilization had smashed the edges of it flat, rolled blacktop and concrete over it, sprouted little white wood houses and a few made of two-story brick and solar glass. Barbecue cookers sat in yards like Martians, waiting till the chill thawed out and summer came on and they could have fires in their guts again. Satellite dishes pulled in movies and bad talk shows from among the stars, and dogs, too cold to bark, too cold to chase cars, looked out from beneath porches and the doors of doghouses and watched us drive past.

Beyond all that, the bottoms were still there. They started farther out from town now, but they still existed. They were nothing like the Everglades of Florida or the greater swamps of Louisiana. Not nearly as many miles as either of those, but they were made up of plenty of great forest and deep water, and they were beautiful, dark and mysterious—a wonder in one eye, a terror in the other.

So we drove on down until the blacktop played out and the houses became sparse and more shacklike and looked to have been set down in their spots by Dorothy's tornado. The roads went to red clay and the odor of the bottoms came into the car even with the windows rolled up: wet dirt, rotting vegetation, a whiff of fish from the dirty Sabine, the stench of something dead on its way to the soil.

Winter was not the prettiest time for the bottoms. Compared to spring it was denuded. The evergreens stayed dressed up, but a lot of the other trees, oaks for instance, went in shirtsleeves. Spring was when the bottoms put on its coat and decorated itself with berries and bright birds that flitted from tree to tree like out of season, renegade Christmas ornaments. Leaves would be thick and green then, vines would coil like miles of thin anacondas up every tree in sight, foam over the ground, and hide the snakes. Considering how thick the vegetation would be in the spring, how many snakes there would be, this bad old winter might come to some good after all. Like making me and Leonard some money.

Still, winter or not, the place was formidable. When I was growing up in Marvel Creek, folks used to say, you hang out down there long enough something bad will happen.

Perhaps. But some good things happened too. I caught fish out of the Sabine and swam naked with Rosa Mae Flood.

When I was sixteen, seventeen and eighteen, I parked my car down there and made a motel of my backseat. Made love not only to Rosa Mae, but to other fine girls I remember fondly. Girls who made me feel like a man, and I hope I made feel, at least temporarily, like women.

The clay roads turned to shit as we went, and we had to go slow and easy, and finally Leonard said, "We oughta have something better for down here. Four-wheel drive maybe. We're gonna get stuck."

"Well, we can always go back to town and buy a couple. One for me and one for you. Could get them in matching colors even."

"Just saying we could use it is all."

"We won't get stuck, Leonard. We're the kings of the world. We do what we want, when we want."

"Right."

We eased on and I tried to make out landmarks, but there weren't any. Everything had changed. I had the sudden sick feeling that I had no more idea where the Iron Bridge was than Trudy and the gang. I wondered if anyone knew where it was anymore. All I remembered was that it was not on the river proper, but off of it, and deep down in the bottoms at a place that looked like something out of a Tarzan movie.

"You got some idea where you're going?" Leonard said.

"Of course," I said. "You know me. I never been lost, just—"

"A little bewildered. Save it, okay? I can tell. You got no idea where we are."

"It'll come back to me."

We went on down that main clay road and turned off on a few smaller ones that dead-ended against trees or the edge of the river. Some of the roads were so narrow we had to back our way out. Sometimes we had to back a long ways. Leonard loved that. He knew more foul words than I thought he knew, and I thought he knew plenty.

About high noon we were dipping down over a hill on the main road and there was a sudden sound like strained bowels letting loose, and the car started to slide right.

A blowout.

Leonard tried to turn in the direction of the skid, but the skid didn't care. The ice on those clay roads would not be denied. The right rear fender struck a sweetgum with a solid whack and my seat belt harness snatched at me and pulled me snug.

We got out.

The car wasn't banged too badly. I said, "I think it's an improvement."

"Remind me to knock a dent in your old truck when we get back, you like it so much."

"While you're changing the tire, I'm gonna look around. Looks kind of familiar around here."

"Now the place looks familiar. Got a tire to change, and you know the place like the back of your hand."

"I merely said it looks familiar. I'll be back."

"When?"

"About the time I figure you've got the tire changed."

It didn't look familiar to me at all, but hey, I hate changing tires and tires hate me. I know from all the bruised knuckles I've gotten over the years, all the quick moves I've acquired from avoiding slipping jacks.

My mechanical abilities are simple. I can air up a tire, put water in the radiator, check water in the battery, let water out of the radiator, check the oil and put it in, fill the tank with gas.

Beyond that, I'm an automotive moron.

I walked around a bit, hoping I'd stumble onto something familiar, but nope. I went back to the car and Leonard had the spare on, was jacking the car down.

"Been going well?" I said.

"Now I know why you hang around with a black guy. So in case you have a flat, you got someone can change the tire."

"It's your car."

"Your fault I'm down here."

"All right, you found me out. I like me a black fella to change tires."

"And chauffeur."

"That's right, and chauffeur. I think the ethnics should know their place."

"You so right, boss, and I is proud to serve you."

"Actually, I don't know how to break this to you, Leonard, but I only hang out with black guys when I can't find a Filipino."

"You tighten the bolts. You're not getting out of this scot-free."

He put the jack in the trunk and gave me the tire iron. While I was tightening the bolts, he said, "We could go home. Not even pick up our gear. Just drive out of here and forget all this business."

"We could," I said. I didn't want to admit it, since I was the one who got us into this, but I had been thinking pretty much the same.

"We could go to jail that money doesn't turn out to be the kind of money Howard says it is."

"If there is any money."

"Yeah, if there is any money."

"But there isn't a thing happening at the rose fields now, and I can't think of another line of work we could go into."

"There's always shit work," Leonard said. "It isn't like we're some kind of professionals."

I finished the bolts and put the tool in the trunk, positioned the ruined tire between the oxygen tanks and the diving suits, and closed up. "I leave it to you, Leonard. Whatever you want, that's fine by me."

He thought that over. "Really, any of this familiar to you?"

"I remember part of the road we came in on," I said. "Outside of that, I could be on Venus."

"That's not encouraging."

"No, it isn't."

He thought some more, said, "Tell you what. We'll give it, say, three days for you to start seeing if something's familiar. You see something you recognize, we'll go longer. We find the bridge, maybe we'll look a few days, we still feel like it. Don't come across the boat or signs of it pretty quick, we'll go home."

"Deal," I said.

Chapter 13

Just before dark we drove back to Marvel Creek, stopped at Bill's Kettle, had a hamburger, bought a six-pack of Lone Star at a cut-rate store, and started back to the Sixties Nest, as Leonard called it.

We found ourselves following the jaundice-yellow Volvo that lived in the yard of the Sixties Nest, and we pursued it to the house and parked behind it.

Howard got out of the car. We kept our seats and drank our beer, observed him like aliens examining an inferior species through the portal of a flying saucer.

He was wearing slightly greasy blue work clothes with a patch over the left shirt pocket. I couldn't tell from where I sat, but my bet was his name was stitched into the patch.

He looked at us a moment and went into the house.

"Looks to have been a tough day at the old job site," I said.

"I know it's got to be the same with you," Leonard said. "I can't make up my mind. Is it him or Chub I like best?"

"They both have a lot of charisma," I said.

We went inside. Paco was sitting on one of the fold-out chairs grinning his false teeth. Trudy was sitting on the couch. She had her legs and arms crossed. She looked as if she could crack walnuts with her asshole.

An unjustified strain of guilt went through me. I felt like a husband whose wife had just found rubbers in his wallet.

The guilt went away when Howard and Chub came into the room. Chub didn't bother me, really. He couldn't help being a jerk. But Howard was a self-made man in that department.

Chub went over to the couch and sat down. Howard crossed his arms and held his ground in the middle of the room and glared at us. His eyes roved a little to his right to check out his audience; the teacher was about to make an example of us.

I wanted desperately to knee him in the nuts.

"I thought there was an understanding that you were working with us," Howard said.

"We forget to punch the clock or something?" Leonard said.

"You don't want any part of what we are, but you said you wanted to do a job. There were things we had to do today, like go to straight jobs."

Leonard looked at me. "Straight jobs, Hap?"

"That's what they used to call square jobs, back in the beatnik days," I said.

"Ah," Leonard said.

''Straight is, relatively speaking, a sixties term, still popular today."

"Ah."

"I'm surprised you haven't heard it."

"I've been kind of outta step."

"It's not funny," Howard said. "Chub ran some errands for us. But you two, we had no idea where you were. There were things we needed to talk about this morning. Plans needed to be made. We were all about our business but you two."

"You didn't say what Paco was doing," I said.

Paco grinned even wider. Poor guy. In that face, the fine white teeth made him look a little bit like a sun-dried barracuda.

"I think he's playing favorites," Leonard said. "I hate that kind of thing."

"Paco has earned his keep in the past," Howard said. "I haven't seen what you two can do. But it smells like what you can do is drink beer."

"But can you tell how many we've had?" I said. "Smelling it from over there is good, but I want you to say how many we drank."

"And what brand," Leonard said.

"No use trying to talk to them when they're like this," Trudy said. "They'll go on until you get tired or mad. You can't reason with the fools."

"Fools?" Leonard said. "Now that's rude."

"I'd as soon the two of you pack up and get out," Howard said.

"We'll decide when we get out," I said.

"And if we stay," Leonard said, "we still won't report to you. You're just some guy we don't know, that's all."

"Besides," I said, "while you been fretting about what we been doing, we've been down in the bottoms looking for the Iron Bridge."

"And?" Chub said.

"We didn't find it," I said. "We're going to give it three days. I don't come up with it, maybe we will get out. You can go your own way then. We won't tell on you or anything. You'll have our blessing."

"Anything look familiar?" Trudy asked.

"No," I said, "but it's been a long time since I been there. But I can solve all this easy. I can just ask someone. A classmate, an old-timer. It might be thought odd if one of you asked, not being from here. I can claim nostalgia, wanting to look around at the old growing-up place."

"I'd rather you not," Howard said. "It'd probably work out all right, but I think if we can get through this without it being mentioned anywhere, better off we are."

"I agree with that," I said. "I'm just saying what we can do if things get too difficult. I leave, and you'll have to ask. And even if you're told, you'll never find anything down there. You'd need a guide. Then you'll be tying one more person into it you don't know."

"As Leonard pointed out," Howard said, "we don't know each other.''

"True," I said, "but I sense something special about you and me and Trudy. We could be one big happy family."

Howard uncrossed his arms. I could see the patch on his shirt pocket. It said FLOYD.

"You guys are pushing your luck," Howard said.

"Please don't start that again," Trudy said. "I don't want to see Hap or Leonard hurt you, Howard."

Howard looked at her as if she had just sliced his nuts with a knife. "He might not be so lucky this time," he said.

"Luck hasn't got a thing to do with it," Leonard said.

"Why don't you guys arm wrestle?" Paco said.

"Don't you start in too, Paco," Howard said. "You're starting to sound like them. What you've done doesn't hold you forever."

"Well," Paco said, shaking out a cigarette, "I hate that."

"Floyd?" I said.

"What?" Howard said, then it dawned on him. "It's just a shirt."

"Man with no pride in his name or shirt, it's hard to know what to think of him," Leonard said. "He could be anybody and not even care. I'd want my own name on my shirt."

"Me too," I said.

Chapter 14

I stood on the front porch and looked out at the night.

Everyone was in bed but me. I had turned in but the cold and my thoughts wouldn't let me drift. I had the uncomfortable feeling that Trudy and the gang were planning something stupid. I had no idea what, and had decided to follow Paco's advice about not knowing, but I couldn't help but think about it. Because of that, I had got up, pulled on my shoes and coat, and gone outside to think.

It was cold and clear and the moon and stars were bright, and their lights rested in the yard like puddles of gold and silver paint and wound through the trees like gold and silver ribbon.

I tried to find Venus. There was a time when I knew where to look. I couldn't remember if it was visible this time of year or not. Once things like that were important to me, and I knew some answers.

I read in a book that primitive men could see Venus in the daytime at high noon with the naked eye. In fact, sailors as late as the 1600s could do the same, and they guided their ships by it. Now the ability was no longer needed, or desired, and modern man could not see Venus in the daytime.

I was somehow distressed by that. Hell, I couldn't even see the bastard at night.

I gave up on Venus and let my mind smooth out. I absorbed the night and the moonlight and watched my breath turn white against the dark. That was about all the thinking I was willing to handle.

I took a deep breath of chill air and went inside, tossed my coat on the gutted armchair, sat on the couch, and picked up a book Chub had left on the coffee table. It was one of those books that explained how everyone could profit from analysis. It was written by an analyst.

Marking his place was a faded black and white snapshot. It was of a big black-haired guy, somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five, kind of handsome, with wide shoulders and a smile full of big white teeth. There was something about him that made me think of someone who had ran a few pigskins between the goalposts, and now ran a few deals past his competitors. On his right was an attractive, well-dressed blond woman who looked like she had been trained to be the Queen of England, and might have been, had the job not been taken.

Pushing his way between them, as if not really invited, was a blond kid of eleven or twelve with enough meat on him to loan to two others. He was smiling, but the smile wasn't much. His was the face of a kid picked last for football games and told to go long, the face of a guy not really asking for a lot, and getting less.

The kid was Chub, of course, and I felt sad looking at him. I turned the photograph over. Written on the back in a young hand was Mom and Dad and me.

Maybe the picture meant something to him—a slice of a good moment, when he thought he'd grow up to please his parents and be something other than a fat kid. And maybe I was full of shit, and it was just a marker.

I had just started reading the book because I was bored enough to jack off with a fistful of barbed wire and roses when the hall door opened gently and Trudy came into the room.

She was wearing a red tee-shirt and nothing else. It fit tight. Her nipples poked at the fabric like the tips of .45 casings, and it stopped high on her thighs and made her seem all legs. Her hair was tousled and she looked tired and somewhat older without her makeup. She looked good though. She smiled at me, closed the door softly, leaned against it, said, "You too?"

"My mind's racing," I said.

She nodded at the book. "Learning anything?"

"It's all anal and sexual. Talk about shitting or fucking and you reveal yourself immediately."

"Do you, now? I was going to slip into the kitchen for some milk. Think I'll wake Leonard up?"

"If he were straight, you just walking by would wake him up. I'm surprised the whole house isn't awake. Dressed like that, you ought to ring like a bell."

"Want some milk?"

She always did take compliments well.

"I'll take some milk."

She brought back two small fruit jars half filled with milk, handed me mine and sat down beside me. I couldn't help but put my arm around her.

"You really do pick at Howard," she said.

"I don't like Howard. He's a prick."

"He isn't so bad."

"Guess not, you're sleeping with him."

"I like him. I used to love him. Not like you, but I loved him."

"Uh-oh, here we go." I took my arm from around her.

"Put your arm back, silly."

She crossed her legs high and the tee-shirt went way up. She wasn't wearing underwear. I put my arm around her again.

I said, "Didn't you forget something?"

"Howard tossed them somewhere."

"That's not what I wanted to hear."

"Truth."

"Sometimes a little white lie is better."

She set her glass on the coffee table and kissed me on the neck.

"You going to go through all the men in the house tonight?" I said.

"Is that supposed to make me mad?"

"Yep."

She kissed me on the neck again. "You're the only man in the house."

"Shit, Trudy."

"You like me saying that, don't you?"

' 'If I believed it, I'd like it more."

"Like you said, sometimes a little white lie is better."

I smiled.

"Let's go for a ride, Hap."

"Now?"

"Uh-huh."

"You might get a little chilly, lady."

"Just a minute."

She got up and eased the door open and smiled back at me before she went into the hall. After she closed the door I thought about her going to the room she and Howard shared, tiptoeing about, looking for her panties and her clothes. I had looked through the house earlier, just to look, and their room was a small thing with a mattress on the floor and a messy pile of blankets and some Coke cans tossed about.

At the other end of the hall Paco and Chub shared a slightly larger room. Chub slept on a saggy box frame bed in the middle of the room and Paco had a cot in a corner. The room had very little in it. A chair with clothes tossed over it and a small box of Chub's books, all of them on subjects designed to be read at gunpoint.

Less than five minutes later she was back. She was dressed in a blue denim work shirt, jeans, scuffed black work shoes, and a thick red and black jacket. She looked like the best-looking lumberjill alive.

She held up a set of keys.

"The Volvo," she said.

"Will Howard mind?"

"Of course."

I pulled on my coat and we went outside and got in the Volvo, Trudy behind the wheel. We backed out and the ice in the drive cracked under the tires. We drove to the highway and started toward Tyler, which was about twelve miles away. The car heater worked slowly, and the car was as cold as a meat locker. The highway was smooth with hardly any ice. I guess road crews had been at work salting it, There were splashes of gravel for the really bad spots.

Trudy reached for me and I slid over and leaned my head against her shoulder and she kissed my cheek. She held one arm around me as she drove and I smelled her perfume and the slightly stale wool of her coat.

I felt good and a little foolish. There was enough of the old male culture about me that I felt positions should have been reversed. I hoped no one saw us.

We drove like that for a long time. Finally Trudy said, "I wanted to go for this drive because I wanted to talk."

"About what you people have planned?"

"You people?"

"You know, power to the people and all that."

"Really have become a cynic, haven't you? God, but I miss the old Hap Collins."

"Did you miss me the most while I was finishing up my prison term?"

"You never have got past that, have you?"

"Let's say it's the sort of thing that weighs on a fella's mind."

"I did miss you, okay?"

"I like the way you showed it."

"I never claimed to be perfect. I'm sorry it happened like that, but it did, and that's that. I can't undo it, so let's leave it. And the plans we have isn't what I wanted to talk about. I thought I might work up the courage to tell you something about myself you don't know. Something you ought to know. For old time's sake."

"What kind of something?"

"Something pretty awful."

Chapter 15

"I killed Cheep," she said.

"Our bird?"

"Yeah. Could you move on your side of the car while I talk about this?"

I moved to my side of the car.

"It's complicated, Hap. Cheep was not only our bird, he was a symbol of our relationship."

"Sounds to me like you been reading Chub's books."

"I been thinking is what I been doing; thinking for years. Trying to figure why I'm no good at relationships. I go into them full tilt, mean for them to work, but I can't maintain. You were the best. I had a shot there. But I messed it up. I mess them all up. You see, I got to have my white knight. I know better. Be your own person, and a woman is a person too, and all that shit, but I got to have my white knight. And if the man I'm interested in isn't a knight, I try to make him one. I send him on a quest, and soon as he's no longer on the quest, or is dealing with the consequences of the quest, I lose interest in him, and the cause I've sent him on. I may get interested in the cause again, but I got to have my white knight with me if I'm going to do anything. I see my knight as going out there and doing what he's doing not only for the cause, but for me. I suppose it makes me feel loved. Important. Understand?"

"What's this got to do with Cheep?"

"I'm coming to that. But when the cause really takes the knight—in your case prison—I feel cheated. Like it's not for me anymore. Things come apart. I want to start over, get a new knight. But I couldn't do that with you because of Cheep. Just a bird, I know, but he made me feel tied to you. Other things wouldn't do it, the cause, the love we shared, but the bird was a living reminder. He wouldn't fly away. Depended on me completely. And I couldn't just leave him. He wouldn't have lasted any time in the wild, and in fact would have suffered. But I didn't want to start life anew with him. He reminded me I was a failure at things. Relationships, what have you.

"So I filled the bathtub with water and took Cheep and held him under till he drowned. It didn't take long. He didn't suffer. But I still think about it. I carry that goddamn bird's ghost on my soul like a weight.

"But when I did it I felt good. Not that Cheep was dead, but that I had made a strong decision without anyone's help, or without me leading someone else into doing what I wanted. It should have been a turning point. But I didn't really understand why I did what I did at the time. I knew I wanted to be free of something, but I wasn't sure what. You were my first major love, but on a smaller scale, with boys in high school, couple in college, I had already established a kind of pattern. Building someone up so they could be special, and since they were special, and they loved me, it made me special. Against all odds, we two… that sort of thing. You see, killing Cheep was killing a symbol."

"Cheep might disagree."

"But the sense of freedom didn't last. I fell back into my old ways. I found a new knight and let him lead, and when he led away from me, I went knight hunting again, and again. I understand all that now. What I'm saying, Hap, is that I'm ready to kill a bird again. This time, the bird is the old me. I'm going to drown that bird and be a new person. Someone who believes in herself. In idealism for its sake. Not as a symbol of worth, or love. I want to be a woman who doesn't need a man to put out front and pretend he's leading and suffering for me, his fair-haired damsel. Don't have to say, 'Look at my man go.' I can go. Come hook or crook, I can see things through."

"Jesus Christ, Trudy. You been doing some major rationalizing here is what you been doing. You're not learning to be independent. You're realizing how selfish you've always been is all, and you're justifying it with some bullshit self-analysis, like Chub would do."

"Think what you want."

We were silent for a time.

"This thing you're going to see through," I said. "It sounds serious."

"Let's say I'm serious. I'd like to have you with us, but I don't need you the way I used to need you. I don't need Howard either."

"Don't need us, how come you got us?"

"I want your help. But I don't have to have it. Not the old way, as my knight. All I want is to believe in something so strong, that belief and my own inner conviction carry me. Like those monks who set fire to themselves to protest the Vietnam War. I want to have that kind of dedication."

"They had dedication, all right. But they also got burned up."

"It's all gone bad out there, Hap. Worse than the sixties, because now no one cares. Someone's got to do something, even if what they do is nothing more than stirring the soup. We could start people thinking. They're all so apathetic. So what if the ozone layer is being eaten away by pollutants in aerosol cans? So what if people are starving on our city streets? Why have government funding for AIDS? It's a disease for queers, right? People don't even vote anymore, because they know it's all a lie, Hap."

"Don't forget the destruction of the seals," I said. "The whales? The sparrows like Cheep?"

"I did what I had to do, Hap. It was a terrible thing, but sometimes you have to do terrible things so you can make progress. Sometimes you do something terrible so some good will come of it."

"Trudy, you got to grow up sometime. You can't take the world in to raise. No one can."

"I feel sorry for you, Hap. You got nothing left inside to hold the dark away."

When we got to Tyler, Trudy turned around and we started back.

I said, "You seem to be avoiding telling me exactly what it is you have planned."

"I thought I'd tell you tonight, Hap. But I've decided not to. You might try and mess it up out of spite."

"I may disagree with you, but I'm not spiteful."

"You might be. You've changed. Could be I don't know you good as I thought. I wanted you with us, but I think now you should do your job and take things as they come to you."

We didn't cuddle and kiss anymore. We didn't even talk. Trudy turned on the radio. It was an all-sixties station. Percy Sledge sang "When a Man Loves a Woman," followed by the Turtles singing "She Only Wants to Be With Me." Good stuff, wrong moment. It was depressing.

We got back to the Sixties Nest, and I was about to get out when she reached across and put her hand on my thigh.

"You couldn't have changed that much, Hap. You were so… noble."

I put my hand on hers, suddenly wondered if this hand was the one that had held Cheep under. I wondered what else that hand was capable of. I took hold of it and put it on the seat between us.

"Watch it, that's knight talk… You've changed too, Trudy. You may have the willpower and dedication you always wanted, but I think maybe you lost something in the process."

"I see it as a gain."

"Whatever. I think for you and me, there's been too much blood under the bridge."

I got out of the Volvo and went in ahead of her, went to the back porch and took off my coat, socks and shoes, rolled up in my bedding.

I heard Trudy come in and go through the hall door, then I didn't hear her anymore.

I lay there listening to Leonard snore and tried to force myself to sleep for a few hours, but I'd go in and out, and when I came out I would remember bad dreams.

Dreams that ought to have been funny, but weren't. Like this soft, feminine hand holding me by the throat, pushing me down into a tub of water. My mouth was open and I had a beak instead of lips and I was blowing bubbles.

Then I was floating face down in the water, my back covered with feathers, the water in the tub red as blood.

Chapter 16

Next morning I waited in my sleeping bag until Trudy and Howard were off to work. I didn't want to look either of them in the eye. Didn't want to see the look of disappointment she would give me, the look of pain Howard would have. He probably woke up in the middle of the night, found her gone, and thought we were out banging one another silly until the wee hours of the morning.

I think Trudy would have wanted him to think that. I wish that was what had happened. I wish I had never learned the truth about Cheep.

Someone had bought a few groceries the day before, so Leonard pan-toasted a couple slices of bread and we spread them with butter and had some bad leftover coffee the texture of syrup.

Outside the day was cold, but still clear. We drove to the bottoms and began our game plan.

What we did was simple. We drove down the main bottom road until we saw a cutoff we thought the car could handle, and we took it.

Sometimes the cutoffs circled back to the main road, or met up with another little road.

When a road dead-ended at the woods or river, or was just too muddy to drive, we got out of the car and walked awhile, hoping I'd see something familiar that would lead to a tributary or creek or some little outflow of water that might be the home of the Iron Bridge.

Mostly we walked and Leonard cussed the brush and rotten logs we stepped over. I think he did it to irritate me. I'd never known the woods to bother him before. I think he wanted to remind me he thought this whole thing was stupid and he was humoring me.

I tried to ignore him and listen to the cries of the birds and the splashing sounds coming from the river. Those sounds made me think of great fishing days and channel cats, catfish they called the trout of the Sabine. Gunmetal gray, lean and graceful with pointed heads and wide, forked tails. And there were the bigger cats that swam along the bottom of the river or laid up between the huge roots of water-based trees. Some called them bottom cats and others called them flatheads. They were big, brownish rascals, sometimes fifteen feet long, weighing up to a hundred pounds, narrow-tailed, with a wide head and a mouth big enough to suck up a child. And there were stories that they had.

Certainly there were gars in there that had bitten children and pulled swimming dogs under for their afternoon meals. They didn't call the big ones alligator gar for nothing. Six feet long, lean and vicious, they were the barracudas of fresh water, beasts with an angry racial memories of lost prehistoric seas.

And now and then, there was the real McCoy, the alligator. I had never known them to be plentiful along this stretch of the Sabine, and growing up I had seen only one in the river, and that one from a distance. Another I had seen big and complete, lying dead in the back of a fisherman's pickup out front of Coogen's Feed Store.

To the best of my knowledge, they were hibernating. Hoped so. Rare or not, it only took one to punch your ticket. They weren't the sort of critters minded eating a man in a dry suit, oxygen tanks and all.

Definitely the cottonmouth water moccasins, the meanest snakes in the United States, were hibernating, and that was a relief. Winter, even one bad as this one, was not without its charms.

We scouted around like this until noon, then drove into town, bought some bread, sandwich meat and beers, drove back and found a little road that terminated at the riverbank, sat on the hood of the car and had lunch.

We didn't talk much. We watched the brown water roll by and spread out in a dirty foam where the river widened down to our left. "In the spring it would be great to come here and fish," I said.

"Yeah," Leonard said.

Another half hour went by.

"Guess we ought to get back at it," I said, totaling a beer.

"Yeah."

We walked along the edge of the bank and the wind picked up and brought a damp chill off the water; the sky had gone gray as a cinder block.

We went until the bank became nothing more than mud and gravel and was hard to keep our footing on. We were about to turn back when I saw a great tree split wide from lightning, its blackened halves lying one on the bank, the other partially in the water.

I studied it.

"That used to be a big tree," I said.

"Good, Kemosabe. Pale Face no miss fucking thing. Him know big trees from small trees. Pale Face one smart sumbitch."

"It used to have an old tire swing hung from a chain. The swing was over the river."

"You're saying you remember something?"

"We'd bail out of it into the water, then climb up and do it again."

"We're near the Iron Bridge?"

"No, I just remember the tree and the swing."

"But it's a landmark to help you find the bridge?"

"Probably not. I remember the tree, but can't put it into relationship with the Iron Bridge. I know we used to come here is all. The Iron Bridge is on the side of the river we're on, though. Bridge goes partway over a creek that shoots off the river on this side. The tree helped me remember that."

"That's something," Leonard said. "You remember that much, means we can spend all our time looking on this bank."

"It's not real close to the river, as I recall. It's down this creek I'm thinking about, and quite a ways."

"Meaning the creek you can't find?"

"That's the one."

"So, Dan'l, what do we do now?"

"Anymore beers?"

"Nope."

"Guess we keep looking."

Chapter 17

Back to work we went, driving those back roads and excuses for roads, and it was late afternoon, maybe two hours before dark, when we drove around this curve and I happened to look out and see this rusty metal pole, and, bam, there was an explosion in my memory centers. At first I couldn't place what had exploded, but around the curve we went, and the debris from the explosion rose to the top of my memory and began to tumble into something identifiable and I said more calmly than I felt, "Stop the car."

"You're smiling," Leonard said. "You got something, right?"

"Turn around."

He had to drive a ways before we could find a wide enough place to get the car turned, and when we got back to the curve and the pole, I had him pull over. We got out, and I took a look. My smile got bigger.

"When we used to come down here this pole had a metal sign on it," I said. "Probably rusted off the bolts and's under all these leaves and pine needles, a few years of dirt. Sign said something about this piece of land belonging to some oil company or another. I don't remember exactly. But by the time we started going here, there were bullet holes in the sign and it was no longer valid. The oil company had long since lost its lease on the place, and it had reverted back to the county, or the State of Texas, or whoever owns it. But the little road for trucks and equipment was still here, worn down and grown up some, but still usable."

"It's not here now," Leonard said.

I looked where I remembered the little road being. The trees were scanty there, relatively young. In spots there were patches of dirt mixed with old hauled-in gravel, and neither trees or weeds had found support there. If you studied hard enough, you could see where the little narrow road had wound itself down into the woods toward the water.

"I think this was the road Softboy and his boys took after robbing the bank," I said. "They made all these pretty good plans, but the dumb suckers saw water and assumed they put their boat next to the Sabine."

"But it was the broad part of the creek that flows under the Iron Bridge?"

"Yep."

We pushed limbs aside, stepped through the browning winter grass, and followed the faint curves of the old road. When we came to water, we were at a spot as wide and deep as the Sabine at its best. It was easy to see how someone who didn't know the river could mistake this for it.

"If they had a car down here and ran it off in the water," Leonard said, "reckon Softboy would have done it right here, don't you think?"

"Yeah, but it might not be there now. Over the years, with floods and swellings, even something the size and weight of a car could move, if only an inch or a foot at a time."

"Thank you, Mr. Wizard."

We went walking along the bank. The undergrowth turned thick and grew out to the water. There was little room for footing. Sometimes we hung on to limbs and roots and dangled out over the creek, pulled ourselves along the steep bank like that until we found ground again. It was tough work, and even cold as it was we worked up a lather.

The creek eventually turned narrow, just wide enough and deep enough for a boat to go on. I recalled it widened again at the bridge, then, not far beyond that, narrowed enough to jump across, and went like that a long ways.

We got past all the undergrowth and came to the second widening of the creek. There was plenty of bank to stand on now. The water was dark and spotted with stumps and lily pads. Great trees leaned out from the shoreline and spread branches over the water thick as macramé, dripped vines and moss. Past all that, where the water was less dark and less riddled with stumps, was the Iron Bridge.

Half a bridge, really—what was built before the money played out. It sagged, and was covered with vines and moss. The metal, where it was visible, had gone red-brown with rust.

"Why would they build here?" Leonard said. "Back a ways they could have thrown a bridge across in an afternoon."

"They were going to widen all this, entire Sabine and its tributaries, I think. Make one gigantic river out of it. They had, as the Baptist preachers say, grandiose plans. Thought they'd be getting so much oil they'd be using river barges. Tools and machinery coming from the northern end of the river, oil in barrels heading South. But it played out before they got started good. There're abandoned wells all through these woods.

"You know," Leonard said, "I'm a wee bit excited. If there's a car down there, just might be a boat with money in it. Finding the car would be a way of checking. We got an hour before dark. What do you think?"

"Now's as good a time as any," I said.

We went back to the car and opened the trunk. The tanks were well packed in foam rubber so they wouldn't bang together and blow us to hell. And they could. They were highly explosive.

Leonard got in the backseat first and took off his clothes. He had this tube of grease for bonding the dry suit to the flesh, and he rubbed the grease all over his body and pulled on the suit. He got out of the car and put on the tanks and mask.

Then it was my turn.

I hated the grease part.

We put our clothes in the trunk, got a fifty foot coil of thin rope out of there, and went down to the water carrying our flippers.

Leonard fastened the rope to his belt and went in first, and I fed the rope out to him, keeping just enough slack in it.

After a few minutes, he came out of the water and shook. He took the regulator out of his mouth and pulled his mask up. His face looked gray.

"No car?" I asked.

"Fuck the car," he said. "Goddamn." He sat down on the shore and took in some deep breaths and shook. His teeth chattered.

"Chilly, huh?"

"Whoever called these bastards dry suits had to be kidding. I got water all inside, and it's cold, buddy boy, I will assure you. My balls are the size of grapes."

"Before you went in, or after?"

"Funny. Look, it's deeper there than you think."

"I remember it as deep," I said. "Used to fish and swim here."

"There's a mild suck hole too."

"That I don't remember."

"It isn't bad, but it could trick you. It's about where I came up. Damn, I'm freezing."

"I won't be down long."

"Not telling me nothing I don't know. You think it's cold up here, this is the tropics compared to that water. And it's dark. So dark, you'll come up and it'll seem like the goddamn world's bright enough to be on fire."

"If you had listened in your science classes, Leonard, instead of beating your meat under your desk, you would know that it takes more energy to warm a square inch of cold water than it does a square inch of cold air. And absence of light makes it dark."

"Just listen, smartass. You're gonna feel numb at first, little confused. Think you're getting too disoriented, don't wait till you're so messed up you don't know what you're doing, come up, or yank on the rope and I'll help you up. I'm not jacking with you, Hap. Water like that will screw you around. Play some serious tricks on you."

"Gotcha."

I put the rope through my belt and tied it loosely in case it got tangled. Leonard took hold of the other end but kept his seat.

I pulled the mask down, put the regulator in my mouth, pulled on my flippers, and eased under the water.

It didn't hit me for a second, but when it did I felt a wave of blackness and paralysis all over. The cold went right through the suit like some kind of freeze ray. It was a feeling like you have when you get something cold on the wrong tooth, only it was my entire body.

It was all I could do to make myself breathe the oxygen.

The wave of blackness passed, though, and I could feel something like cold bug feet creeping through my dry suit; it was water seeping in, of course.

I got organized best I could and swam down deeper. I could feel Leonard letting out the rope.

I couldn't have gone far before I touched bottom, but it seemed to take forever. My head, heart and lungs felt pregnant with ice. I couldn't see anything. It was muddy from all the rain and overflow from melting ice. I crawled along the bottom like a crab.

I wanted to swim to the surface, but somehow couldn't make myself do it. It took all my concentration to breathe from the respirator, keep in mind where I was, what I was doing, and that air and daylight were not too far above my head.

It came to me eventually that I was looking for a car. That struck me as funny. A car in the river. Cars belonged on the highway. I had a car once. I had a truck now, but I had a car once. Leonard had a car. Lots of people had cars. Or did cars have people? It was an interesting thing to think about. If I'd had a pad and pencil, maybe I'd have taken a note to consider that later. No, I couldn't see well enough to take a note, and paper wouldn't do so good down here. I'd have to remember about the cars and sort it out later.

I felt a tug, as if wires were attached to me. I couldn't figure it.

Leonard pulling the rope?

No. That was the other direction.

Did I have another rope on me?

No, I didn't think so.

The suck hole. I was near that and it was pulling at me.

Had to think. Okay. Underwater. Got oxygen. Cold as the tip of a penguin's dick. Looking for a car. Honk, honk.

The suck hole was pulling at me. My arms were weak, and I didn't feel as if I could swim. I went with the suction. It wasn't bad, but it was enough to pull me. It seemed important that I do something, but I couldn't think what it was.

Then the river bottom went away and there was water and tugging. I was over the suck hole. I had swam over and into suck holes and out again in my time, but I wasn't this cold then. Beer would keep good in this water, but you'd want to drink it in a warm place. In front of a big fireplace would be nice. Maybe something to eat with it. I really preferred my beer with food.

Something was keeping me from going down.

The rope. It had gone taut. Leonard had me. Seemed to me that was supposed to be good, but I couldn't be sure.

But wait a minute. I was in the suck hole and my feet were touching something.

This wasn't a very deep suck hole. I wondered how wide it was. Maybe I could put a picnic table down here and have that beer and a sandwich on it. But I'd have to wait until summer. Wait a second. You can't drink beer underwater. Sure can't eat a sandwich. It would get flimsy. And taste like the water. The water was dirty, too.

It was so goddamn dark. Had I been down here so long it was night?

What were my feet touching?

The rope was tugging at me. Leonard was pulling me up.

Hold on here. I didn't ask to be pulled up. I'm thinking down here, goddammit.

I got hold of the belt and unfastened it and let it go. The rope wasn't pulling me anymore.

I bent forward and touched with my hands what my feet had been standing on. It was something flexible. I got hold of it with both hands and held on to it and my feet floated straight up. What I was holding came loose and I began to float up.

Let's see, did I want to float up?

Now something had me, had me hard. I wanted to fight against it, but I was holding this thing in my hands and I didn't want to lose it.

Why didn't I want to lose it? I could let it go and fight back.

I thought about that, but by the time I decided to let go I was on the surface and Leonard had his arm under my chin and was pulling me toward shore. The sun was very bright. It wasn't so cold. I could see trees and sky between their limbs. My hands felt numb. I was still holding my prize. I thought I should let it go. All I had to do was have my brain tell my fingers, 'Let go, you sumbitches.'

I let go. I was lying on my back. What I let go of was on my chest. A monster bent over me. No, Leonard. He pulled back his mask. He took the respirator out of his mouth. He was calling my name, but it sounded as if it were coming from far away. He was calling someone else too. A person named Shadhad. No, wait a moment. That was shithead. Could he mean me?

"Answer me, shithead. Are you all right?"

"I think so," I said.

"You took off the belt and the rope."

"Did I?"

"You did."

"Couldn't think clear."

"The water, smartass. I told you. Too cold. We haven't got top equipment here and we don't really know what we're doing . . . You're okay?"

"Uh-huh. But you can forget finding any car down there."

"That right?" He picked something off my chest, wiped it with his hand a couple of times and held it in front of my eyes.

It was a rusty license plate.

* * *

We took off the swim gear and used some Kleenex from the glove box to get the grease off of us, then we dressed and drove into scenic downtown Marvel Creek. We had a couple of Lone Stars and a hamburger at Bill's Kettle. Afterwards, we splurged and had chocolate pie and coffee.

When we finished, Leonard said, "Course, it could be some other car."

"How many cars are gonna end up in the middle of a creek like that? And that suck hole is wide enough and deep enough to hold a car during floods and water risings over the years, and when the river gets low, bet that spot's covered with enough water to keep the car out of sight."

"What we got is a license plate, though, not a car."

"It was hooked to a car. It came off because it was rusted."

"You know, the boat could really be out there. And with a little luck, the money."

"Lot of luck. By the way, did I thank you for saving me?"

"Not nearly enough. More humility on your part would be good. I went down there without a rope and pulled you up at great risk of my own life."

"How great a risk do you think?"

"Real great. I fought the suck hole and the cold and you. I can't think of anyone braver."

"Or more modest."

We went on like that until we were tired, then we found we didn't want to drive back to the Sixties Nest. Didn't want to sleep on a cold back porch with butane in our snouts. We got some beer and some cheap wine and rented a room at a rundown motel and stayed up most of the night telling lies and a few sad truths that we hoped the other would think were lies.

Leonard talked about his grandmother, and how fine she was, how he loved her, then talked about his dad, who beat him until he was fourteen and he turned on the old man and kicked his ass, and the old man went away and never came back and his mother died of diabetes and shattered dreams. A stint in the army seemed all right to him. He didn't talk about Vietnam. He skipped that part, and of course I'd heard it all before and he knew it, but a drunk doesn't care about what's been said before, he cares about now and how he feels, dragging that stuff up is like putting on a good old blues song you've heard a hundred times. You know the words, but it still does you good.

He moved on to other things. Sad history became glad lies. He talked about his dogs, about this one—long gone to her reward, of course—that was smart as Lassie. Could jump through hoops and run for help. Another glass of wine and he might have told me how she could drive a car and smoke a cigar, maybe work a couple calculus problems.

But it didn't get that far. He got limp and paused too long and I told him how I'd lost some plans. About how the future that was now was not the future I'd wanted. He listened good, like he always did, and what I said was all right. He was with me on that, knew this line of patter, nodded knowingly in all the right places, way I had with his much-heard story about his good grandmother and his runaway father and his dead mother. Then I told him about Trudy and Cheep, sneaked it in like an inside curve ball. I was looking for a little sympathy there. Figured I deserved it.

"You dick," Leonard said, "I told you that bitch was poison. Paco told you. Everyone knows what she is but the guys in love with her. Maybe I wasn't queer I'd love her too. But from my perspective, she's just a bitch with some patter, and you're an A-one jackass that can't tell a hard-on from true, sweet love. Goodnight."

The thing I like best about Leonard is his sensitivity. Tell you one thing, though, I'd listened to his last goddamn dog story cum lie. He could tell it to the bushes.

Next morning, dull-eyed and slick-tailed, we drove out to the Sixties Nest, ready to deliver our news.

Chapter 18

After we told them what we found, it took two days to get everything together, make a few plans. They gathered up chainsaws and axes and brush knives and an aluminum boat, and somehow Howard talked his boss into letting him borrow the wrecker for a Sunday afternoon.

His boss must have found him considerably more charming than Leonard and I did. At my worst, I wouldn't have pissed on him had he been on fire, and at my best, I would have stomped the flames out.

So we went down there on a cold-as-hell Sunday, the sky all funny-looking and threatening rain, and we took the tools and cut a path for the wrecker to get down to the creek bank. It wasn't much of a path, but by cutting a tree now and then and chopping out some undergrowth, the wrecker, one of those big things with monster tires, was able to get through. We put out a few fishing poles here and there as a disguise, but I thought that was damn silly. Anyone came along and saw all the work we'd done to get that wrecker in, saw our wet suits, and believed we were just dropping a few lines off cane poles was going to have to be a lot dumber than a stone.

Still, that's what we did. All of us but Paco. He was gone as he often was, and nobody offered an explanation, and I couldn't have cared less.

I girded my loins and prepared to put on the dry suit. I didn't want to go back down there, but I knew if I didn't, Leonard would, and I couldn't let him do it just because I was a chickenshit. Not that I hadn't considered it. He offered, and it was tempting, but I made it clear the first round was my baby. My dad always said that if something scared you, thing to do was to face it head-on. Saved yourself a lot of sleepless nights that way. Course, it was an attitude that might get you killed. I wondered if dear old Dad had considered that possibility.

I rubbed myself down with the grease and pulled on the suit and took hold of the wrecker's hook and cable and went down to the edge of the water.

Leonard came over, said, "Sure you want to do this?"

"Course not."

"But you're gonna?"

"Yep."

"Get in any kind of trouble, I'll come get you."

"How you going to know if I'm in trouble?"

"I won't let you stay down long, oxygen tanks or not. You don't come up pretty quick, I'll go down there and get your ass."

"I know that's your favorite part, Leonard, but bring the rest of me up with it.''

"Deal."

I pulled the mask down and Howard let out some slack on the cable. I went into the water, swam directly toward the suck hole. It obliged by dragging at me, and I went with it. It was as dark as before down there, and just as cold, and I had to work not to get tangled in the cable. A mild feeling of panic moved over me, but I put my mind on my business and swam with the current. It wasn't as bad this time. I could feel the pressure of the cold against me, but I must have gotten myself greased better this time or my suit put on tighter, because no water was seeping in.

When I was in the suck hole, I turned with my feet up and felt to see what had given up the license plate. It sure felt like a car bumper. I ran my gloved hands over it some more. Yes sir, what we had here was a genuine automobile. I got the hook attached by feel, hoped it was secure, grabbed the cable, and followed it up rapidly. I took only a few seconds, but when I broke the surface, I felt as if I had been down forever.

Howard got the winch going. It whined and pulled taut, paused, started whining again. Before long our catch broke the surface. I couldn't tell what color it had once been, because it had long since adopted the gray and green of the creek bottom's mud and mold. The rear window was mostly busted out, and what glass was there was flimsy-looking, as if it were not glass at all, but crinkled plastic. The tires looked like black chamois rags wrapped around the wheels. The windows were down, to help it sink no doubt, and water and mud the texture of a sick man's shit rushed out of them.

When it was on the bank, we gathered around it.

"It's a car," Howard said, "but is it the right car?"

"Softboy said he had some partners," I said. "Check for bones."

Time and fish would have long since taken care of any bodies in the car. Bones might have washed off or been carried away by larger fish, but if the car had gone into that suck hole and lodged there early on, just maybe they had been preserved. And if not, there might be some other evidence there that would tie the car to Softboy.

The doors wouldn't open, so Howard got a bar and went to work. When he popped them, mud oozed out. Trudy and Howard got shovels and started scraping. It wasn't too long before Howard found a skull. It was caked with mud and slime. He wiped it on his sleeve until we could see that it had a large hole in the left side and a smaller one in the right.

Trudy dug around in the backseat until she came up with another mud-covered skull. She brought it out on her shovel and Howard took hold of it and scrubbed it with his sleeve. This one had a small hole in the forehead, and at the back, one the size of a fist.

"I got a feeling Softboy lied about his partners," Leonard said. "Those are close-up shots. Small one's the entry wound, big one's the exit. I think he finished them himself. Money'll make you do things."

"He didn't seem that way," Howard said.

"Well, things aren't always what they seem," Leonard said.

"One thing, though," Howard said. "He told the truth about the car. And you know what that could mean."

We had the fever then. I tried to figure where Softboy might have wrecked the boat, and decided the best thing to do was to check both sides of the bridge in the deeper water, see What we could come up with. Leonard and I took turns going in. It was surprisingly deep on either side of the bridge and I thought maybe they had dredged there, preparing to dig the great waterway that never happened.

We swam along the bottom, and at first we panicked at everything we touched. Some of it was the usual garbage: cans and bottles and plastic containers that had once housed soaps or colas, all manner of crap that belonged at the dump and not in the water. Sometimes there were big things and we hooked the winch cable to them and Howard hauled them out. There were a number of fifty-five-gallon drums full of who knows what, and tires and wheels, the occasional transmission or lawn mower, and of course the ever popular irregular-shaped rock.

No boats. No pieces of boat.

I was less fearful of the water now, and I tried to keep that in mind. Overconfidence is the way to give your soul to the devil an inch at a time. The dry suit was pinching me some. Water was starring to seep in, and I could really feel the cold. We dove and we dove, and by late afternoon I was exhausted.

We had found neither money nor boat nor boat pieces, and Leonard and I came out of the water and out of our drippy suits and dressed in our clothes for a little warmth and a break. Paco showed up with sandwiches and coffee, and he and Howard went off down the bank to talk about something or another.

The money fever was fading. I thought about how long ago the boat had gone down, and all that could have happened to it over the years, and a mild depression moved in. If it had broken up when it wrecked, it might have gradually been carried away, and the money with it. It could have long since made the sea.

Trudy had been ignoring me. She was about her business of sorting through the junk we'd pulled up, hoping to find some overlooked fragment that might resemble a boat. I couldn't help but watch her, way she moved was tantalizing.

There was this mound of dirt and vines and scraggly growth not far from the water's edge, and she took a break and went to lean on it, and the way she leaned, with her pelvis thrust forward, put a pain in both my heart and my groin. And I think she damn well knew it.

She shifted her hips without looking at me, making it seem pretty natural, but not quite, and suddenly she moved away from the mound and put her hand to the small of her back and rubbed, then reached out and rubbed at what had poked her. "This looks like a bone," she said to no one in particular.

I went over and could see the edge of something poking through the mound of dirt. It looked more like a rock to me, but even if it was a woolly mammoth bone, I wasn't greatly in the mood for paleontology. I felt she had used it as an excuse to get me over there so she could persecute me with her presence.

She ignored me and began to dig around the edges of the thing and pretty soon it was clear what it was, and it was considerably more exciting than a rock or bone.

It was the blade to a boat propeller.

She looked toward the bank where Howard and Paco were standing, staring out at the water.

She said, "There's something here."

Howard and Paco came over. Leonard and Chub showed up.

Howard looked at what was there, said, "Oh man, that means—"

"Means it's a boat propeller," Leonard said. "But not necessarily the boat propeller."

"How would a boat get up here?" Chub said.

"Water might have put it here and receded," I said. "Since no one would have looked for the boat down here, it might have been sitting here, slowly gathering dirt over it."

"Or," Paco said, "what we may have here is a propeller blade and a mound of dirt. But one thing's certain. There's a boat in there, we're not going to talk it out."

Shovels came out then, and we were on that mound of dirt like worms on a corpse. Howard and Paco and Leonard on one side, me and Chub on the other, Trudy with a trowel working at the propeller. Chub was so frenzied he nearly whacked me twice with his shovel handle, and he nipped my ankle with the shovel blade once. I had to threaten to do him damage to make him watch what he was doing. But we were all a little frenzied, and when Trudy uncovered a large hunk of outboard motor, even more so. We dug and we dug and the sun went down and the cold became colder, but I wasn't aware of it until I paused to relax and felt the sweat cooling on my face. The cold air cut at the rims and insides of my nostrils and sliced down my throat and hissed in my lungs and made them throb like a wound.

But I kept digging.

At some point Howard turned the wrecker toward us and pulled on the highbeams so we could see. We started digging even faster. We came to some thick twists of roots and we got the axe and Leonard elected himself Paul Bunyan. He cut at them with hard, precise strokes and the roots flew up and out, and we went back to digging. Finally Howard's shovel hit something that sounded unlike root or rock. He dropped his shovel and dipped his hands into the dirt and came out with the crumpled top of an aluminum cooler.

We all paused and looked at it. There in the cold highbeams and the splotchy moonlight, it had as much majesty as a silver shield. "Could be, could be," Howard said, and then we were digging again, really digging. The mole population of the world couldn't have been any busier. Wooden fragments that might have been boat pieces were found next. They were as crumbly as artificial fireplace logs.

Then Howard's shovel hit something else. He lifted out a long aluminum canister cracked in the middle. We all looked at it. I felt as if I had suddenly been filled with molten lava, that a little ice had gone out of my soul. Lost years were on the verge of being regained. Possibilities went through me, grew heads like a Hydra. The fact that this money might be partially mine for the taking, that it was stolen and illegal, filled me simultaneously with ecstasy and guilt, like I'd have felt if my mother had ever caught me jacking off to a girlfriend's picture.

Howard tried to loosen the lid, but couldn't. He finally resorted to bending it at the break to work it apart. He managed that and wads of something dark fell out of it. Trudy was suddenly there with a flashlight and Howard grabbed what had come out of the canister and squeezed it between his fingers and cussed.

I took hold of it too. It was paper, probably the money; it was black and the texture of wet tissue. Another year or so, it might make good garden mulch.

"There's supposed to be several containers," Trudy said. "They can't all be broken."

"Yes they can," Leonard said.

His words were anvils dropping on our heads. I felt a little dizzy and empty, as if hungry, but there wasn't any food that was going to fill this gap. The boat and the canister had given us a moment full of dreams, and now those dreams threatened to grow wings and fly south and die among the bones of all our dreams.

Yeah, that money could make up for a lot of missed ambitions, but without it we were nothing more than a batch of losers, standing cold and silly, empty-handed on the muddy bank of an unnamed creek.

We went back to digging and sifted through some more wood and some metal and plastic and some chunks of glass. Eventually we came up with another canister. This one wasn't broken open. Howard got a screwdriver and a wrench and with shaking hands went to work on the lid, popped it off.

Inside was some money. It was in a plastic bag, in bundles, and looked in good shape. Howard tore open the bag and the money fell out. Trudy grabbed it, unfolded it, dropped to her knees, starting counting.

I could hear her breathing, all of us breathing. We were puffing out white, cold smoke, chugging like little trains trying to make a last bad hill.

It took a long time to count that money, longer than I would have imagined, and we all stood there watching those bills go off that wad and out of her hands and onto the ground, and after what seemed enough time for continents to sink beneath the waves and new ones to rise up out of the sea on the shoulders of volcanic eruption and for new life-forms to come into existence, she said, "A hundred thousand."

With the sharp voice of greed, Howard said, "There's got to be more than that."

We went at it again, and before long uncovered another canister. Again the money was counted—this time we all took some of it and made little piles—and what we had in this one was just short of two hundred thousand. All of it was in good shape. We dug till we found two more canisters. Both held money. One had a few damaged bills on top, but the bulk of it was okay. We leveled the mound. No more money.

We counted what was there, added it together. We had just over four hundred thousand. Trudy took the money and rolled it into tight little rolls and put it back in the bags and wrapped the bags firmly with some tape she had and put the spoils in the two best canisters.

"That's a lot less than a million," Howard said.

Though it looked as if my dream was going to be a smaller one than I had hoped for, I was glad to have anything. In fact, I felt a little giddy. I looked at Leonard. He nodded. I said, "Seems to me this is a good tax-free haul. Might be another canister or two in the water, but personally I've had it. This could be all there ever was. Talk about money is like talk about fish. Both grow in the telling."

"Me and Hap," Leonard said, "we'll take our share now. I want to get back to my dogs and Hap wants to get on down to Mexico."

Howard looked at Paco, then Chub and Trudy. "Now, huh?"

"That's right," I said.

"Well," Howard said, "just a minute." He stepped back and opened his coat and reached inside and pulled out something and pointed it at us. Even with his back to the headlights and there being only an occasional snatch of moonlight through the trees, I could see well enough to make a fairly accurate guess at what he was holding.

A flat little automatic.

Chapter 19

Turned out they all had guns. When Howard pulled his, they produced theirs. It was pretty disconcerting, all those people standing there holding cheap automatics.

Howard drove the wrecker. Trudy drove the mini-van. Chub drove Leonard's car and Paco hung over the front seat and pointed a .32 automatic at us. The bottoms raced by us in black bands and twists of oak fingers and pines shaped like dunce hats. The moon crept through it all and faded in and out with the rolling of the clouds.

I didn't look at Leonard. I could sense he wanted me to, but I didn't want to see that well-deserved I-told-you-so look.

"You guys are some kidders," I said to Paco. "I thought they wanted the money for a cause and you just wanted the money. Turns out you're really in this together, and you all just want the money."

"No," Chub said. "Not true. We have a purpose. Thing is, we require it all. We thought there would be more and we could give you some. But little as there is, we can't afford it.

We made a pact that if there wasn't enough for our needs, we'd have to appropriate your share."

"It's needed for a buy," Paco said.

"Drugs?" I said.

"Guns," Chub said.

"Guess you're going to give them to some South American revolutionaries to fight their capitalistic oppressors," I said. "Something like that."

"Something like that," Chub said. "Only we're not giving them to anyone. We're the revolutionaries."

"Oh shit," I said.

"Great," Leonard said. "Bozo the clown and his clown buddies with guns. Probably gonna have live ammunition too."

"We need all the money," Chub said, "because the weapons we're buying are state of the art. Right, Paco?"

"Sure," Paco said.

"Paco said if we found this money, he had connections and he could get to them right away. People he's worked with before. Right, Paco?"

"Right."

"He's been checking with them all along, in case we got the money. He's got them to quote us some prices. We theorized that we'd need quite a lot of them and plenty of ammunition, and we'd need money for when we went underground, so we could make payoffs, buy food, supplies, that sort of thing. Enough for us to get established before we started robbing banks."

"Banks?" Leonard said. "You're going to rob banks?"

"Not for the money. Of course, we'd have to have some of it to finance things. But we'll give a lot of it to supporters of politically correct causes."

"Politically correct," Leonard said. "I love that."

"We didn't really intend to cheat you, but with so little money there, and our plans being as ambitious as they are, we had to. It's nothing malicious or personal, it's a matter of priorities."

"Ah," Leonard said. "I see. For a moment there, I just thought we were getting fucked."

"We're going to have to keep you awhile," Chub said. "Until we make the buy and go underground. Let you loose now, you might spill the beans. We don't want anyone knowing about us just yet. Soon everyone will be aware of us, and we'll be glad for it."

"I wouldn't tell a soul," Leonard said. "Think I want the world to know I got snookered by you goofs? Some revolutionaries you're gonna make. You couldn't find your shifters with both hands."

"Paco's done this sort of thing before," Chub said.

"Yeah," Leonard said, "and all he got out of it was a burned-up head."

"Fooled you, didn't we?" Paco said.

"I'm afraid you did," I said.

"We have to do something," Chub said. "This country is rapidly going the way of fascism. The spirit of the sixties can't be lost—"

"Christ," Paco said. "I'm going to join the fucking capitalists you don't shut up."

Chapter 20

Another cold night, but not as cold as it had been at the Sixties Nest. The heat worked well here and there was some of it in every room, and the rooms were slightly larger and better-looking, much less depressing. Logs crackled pleasantly in the living room fireplace. Still, it wasn't comfortable. We'd slept sitting in armchairs, and to add insult to injury we were in Leonard's house, Howard and Trudy having spent the night in Leonard's bed, except when they took their turn sitting on the couch with their guns, watching us, looking as if at any moment a great Shootout was inevitable.

They had taken their watch together about midnight. I could see the clock on the fireplace mantel, could hear the bastard tick the minutes away as if dropping water on my head. Paco was sleeping somewhere in the kitchen and Chub was wrapped in blankets on the floor near the fireplace.

For lovers, Trudy and Howard didn't look at each other much. They sat on the couch at opposite ends. There didn't seem to be any electricity between them. They had become, at least in their minds, hard-nosed professionals in the last twenty-four hours.

They had all changed. With us prisoners, our captors had taken on an unconscious swagger. Maybe they hadn't wanted this to happen, us being out of step with their plans, but since it had, they were eating it up. It gave them reason to tote their guns. They were having a taste of revolutionary foreplay. Orgasm was anticipated.

I nodded in and out, watching Trudy and Howard watching me and Leonard, and came completely awake and reasonably rested to the sound of Chub groaning. Trudy was toeing him awake. "Your turn," she said. "There's coffee. Don't go back to sleep."

"Don't talk to me like a kid," Chub said. Coming awake like that, he'd momentarily forgotten the lessons of analysis. How he wasn't bothered by anything.

"They got no respect for you because you're fat," Leonard said.

I looked at Leonard. I hadn't noticed him coming awake, and he had awakened as grumpy and sarcastic as ever. No wonder he didn't have any lovers. Who'd want to wake up to Groucho Marx every morning?

"You get thick," Leonard continued, "everyone treats you like you're a talking pork chop."

"You don't bother me," Chub said. I doubted that. Earlier, before he bedded down, during one of my awake moments, I had seen him standing near the living room window, examining his reflection in the dark glass, and I could tell from the way his shoulders slumped that what he saw was not what he wanted to see. He got up, washed his face at the kitchen sink, drank a cup of coffee, got his gun from under his pillow, and took to the couch.

"We're going for a walk," Trudy told him.

"Outside?" Chub said.

"No," Howard said. "We thought we'd circle the fucking couch."

"Just asking. It's cold out there."

"Say it is?" Howard said.

"You're all jumpy," Chub said. "Come on, we're in this together." Chub's face wore the same sad look it had in that photo of him as a kid. He so desperately wanted to be treated like an equal, he couldn't help but act inferior.

Howard took a deep breath. "Yeah, well listen, we get back, we'll help you take them for a bathroom break."

"I got a big dick," Leonard said, "but it don't take but me to hold it while I piss."

"We wouldn't want you to be lonely," Howard said.

"What if we got to pee now?" Leonard said.

"Hold it," Howard said.

"Is a number two, a doodie, any different?" Leonard asked.