The Two-Bear Mambo

Joe R. Lansdale

The Two-Bear Mambo

Chapter 1

When I got over to Leonard's Christmas Eve night, he had the Kentucky Headhunters turned way up over at his place, and they were singing "The Ballad of Davy Crockett," and Leonard, in a kind of Christmas celebration, was once again setting fire to the house next door.

I wished he'd quit doing that. I'd helped him the first time, he'd done it the second time on his own, and now here I was third time out, driving up. It was going to look damn suspicious when the cops got here. Someone had already called in. Most likely the assholes in the house. I knew that because I could hear sirens.

Leonard's boyfriend, Raul, was on the front porch of Leonard's , his hands in his coat pockets, looking over at the burning and the ass-whipping that was taking place, and he was frantic, like a visiting Methodist preacher who'd just realized the head of the household had scooped up the last fried chicken leg.

I pulled my pickup into Leonard's drive, got out, went over and stood on the porch with Raul. It was cold out and our breath was frosty white. "What got this started?” I asked.

"Oh, hell, Hap, I don't know. You got to stop him before they haul his black ass to the calaboose."

"It's too late for that, they got him. Those sirens aren't for jaywalkers."

"Shit, shit, shit," Raul said. "I shouldn't never come to live with a macho queer. I should have stayed in Houston."

Raul was normally a pretty good-looking kid, but out here in the night, the house fire flickering orange lights across his face, he looked desiccated, like the victim of a giant spider. He was sort of wobbling back and forth, like a bowling pin that hadn't quite got nailed solid enough by the ball, watching Leonard drag a big black guy out of the burning house and onto the front porch over there. The guy's shirt and pants were on fire, and Leonard was kicking him off the porch and across the front yard.

I recognized the guy. Mohawk they called him, 'cause of his haircut, though, after this night, they might just call him Smoky. Mohawk and a friend of his had once jumped on me and Leonard and we'd whipped their asses. I still dreamed about it at nights when I needed something to cheer me up.

Other folks were coming out of the house through the windows and the back door, scrambling for the woods out back. None of them seemed securely on fire, but a few had been touched by flames. A short stocky woman was in the lead. She wore only a brown bathrobe and some floppy house shoes and had a wig in her right hand. Her short legs flashed when she ran and the house coat moved and her breath went out and whiffed back in cool, white bursts. The wig was slightly on fire. She and her smoking hair hat and flopping bathrobe disappeared into the woods at a run and the others followed suit, melting into the timber with her, leaving in their wake a trail of scorched clothing smoke. A moment later they had vanished as handily as a covey of quail gone to nest.

The fire truck screamed into sight, and damn near hit Mohawk after Leonard swiveled a hip into him and twisted and tossed him into the street. The fella rolled on across, banged the curbing on the other side, and the fire truck swerved and ran up on the lawn of the burning house, and Leonard had to jump for it.

One good thing, though, all that rolling had put Mohawk's fire out. You know how it goes, that old advice the fire department gives you, "stop, drop, and roll," and that's what Mohawk was doing. Thanks to Leonard.

If you took the rose-colored view, you might say Leonard was doing nothing more than saving Mohawk's worthless life.

'Course now, Leonard had gone back into the house and a short black guy with his hair on fire came out on the end of Leonard's foot, and when he hit the lawn he got up running toward Leonard's house, Leonard yelling at his back, "Run, you goddamn little nigger."

I tell you, Leonard standing on the front porch, smoke boiling out behind him, fire licking out the windows, the roof peaked with a hat of flame, it caused Leonard's face to appear as if it had been chipped from obsidian. He was like some kind of backwoods honky nightmare vision of the Devil—a nigger with a bad attitude and the power of fire. Come to think of it, the black folks in that house probably saw him as pretty devilish as well. Leonard can be irritating to most anybody when he wants to be.

I left Raul standing on the porch about the time the little guy came out on the end of Leonard's foot, walked over and into the yard where Leonard was practicing arson and ass-whipping, put my leg out and tripped the little guy as he ran by.

He got up and I slapped him down with the side of my hand and put my foot on the back of his neck and reached down and scooped up some loose dirt in the driveway and dumped it on top of his head.

It put the fire out, except for the patch of hair burning low on the back of his head, like a spark in steel wool. The rest of his skull was smoking like a dry cabbage with a cinder in it. His body gave off quite a bit of heat, and he was wiggling as if he were being cooked alive. He was making a kind of bothersome noise that was so shrill it made my buttocks crawl up my back.

"I'm burning here," he said. "I'm burning."

"It's okay," I said. "There's not much hair left."

The cops got there then. Couple of cruisers and Sergeant Charlie Blank in his unmarked job. Charlie—wearing some of Kmart's finest, including high-gloss, black genuine plastic shoes that shone brightly in the light of the house fire—got out slowly, like his pants might rip.

He paused long enough to watch one of the blue-suit cops nab Mohawk, cuff him, and slam him in the back of a cruiser, after "accidentally" bumping his head into the car door while helping him inside.

Charlie came over to me, gave me a sad look, sighed, pulled out a cigarette, stooped, lit it off the little guy's head, and said, "I'm fucking tired of this, Hap. Leonard's giving me gray hairs. What with the Chief in cahoots with the bad guys and Lieutenant Hanson acting like he's got a weight tied to his dick all the time, I can't think straight. Get your foot off that fucker's neck."

I did, and the little guy, who hadn't yet stopped whimpering, came up on his knees and slapped at the back of his neck with a yell. The fire had already gone out, giving itself up to Charlie's cigarette, but I think the slapping bit made that dude feel better

Charlie looked at him, said, "Lay down, buddy, and stay there."

The guy lay down. His head was smoking a lot less now. "You know I got to run Leonard in?” Charlie said.

"I know. I thought you didn't smoke?”

"I started. I start two or three times a year. I like to quit so I can really enjoy it when I start back. I got to run you in too."

"I didn't do anything. I was just puttin' this guy out. I threw dirt on his head."

"You got a point. The dirt could make things all right. “He said to the guy on the ground, "You think he was putting the fire out, sir?"

"Shit, man, that motherfucker tripped my black ass and knocked the dog shit out of me. I'm gonna file on his ass. I'm gonna file on everygoddamnbody."

"See there, Hap, got to run you in."

"Would it make any difference if I said when I hit him it hurt my hand?"

"I'll put that in my notes. You know, being this close to the fire, it's kinda warm. Toasty even. Very Christmas-like."

"That's Leonard," I said. "Always festive."

"The Ballad of Davy Crockett" was long gone and the Kentucky Headhunters were singing "Big Mexican Dinner."

"I keep trying to figure that song is offensive to Hispanics or not," Charlie said, "way the guy does that corny Meskin accent. You think it's offensive?"

"I don't know, ask Leonard's boyfriend, Raul. He could tell you. He's Mexican. But I can let you in on this, Leonard was using some bad language a while ago.”

"Uh oh. I'll put that in my notes too."

"He called the young man on the ground here the N word."

"That's right," said the young man on the ground. "And in the house, he called me a motherfucker too."

"Wait a minute," Charlie said. "I got a problem here. Being how Leonard's black, is that racist? I mean, me or you said it, it's racist, but it's okay a black guy uses the N word, ain't it?"

"Changing times," I said. "It's hard to keep up. If it's not racist, I think it may be politically incorrect."

"There you are," Charlie said. "That's it. Politically incorrect. I think there's some kind of fine for that."

"Man, this is some shit," said the guy on the ground. "Let me up. Someone sees me layin' here, it ain't gonna look good."

"You think we got you out here to style?” Charlie said. "Shut the fuck up. “Then to me: "Think Leonard's finished?"

"Well, the house is lit up good."

And it was. The fire peaked and popped and rose up into the night sky like a red demon, roiled and licked around the blackened frame of the house. Lumber screeched and sagged. The heat was not quite as pleasant as before. I said, "It was nice of you to stand here and wait."

"Hey," Charlie said, his face popping sweat in the firelight, "Christmas Eve."

Charlie looked at the firemen who were standing by with their hoses, and gave them a wave. They didn't exactly rush, but they went over to wash the place down, get it ready for the dozer to come in and push the burnt lumber around, make room for the dopers to bring in a new crack house.

And they would. Rumor was, the Police Chief had friends who had connections to the LaBorde dope traffic, and he liked to help them out for a little slice of the pie. Rumors like that could make a man cynical, even one of my naive and trusting nature.

When I was growing up, guy with a badge was just assumed to be honest, and the Lone Ranger didn't shoot bad guys in the head either. These days, Jesus would carry a gun, and the disciples would hold down and corn-hole their enemies.

"You think Leonard will do time for this one?” I asked.

"So far he hasn't, and I'll do what I can. A night in jail, maybe. But I keep him out of bad stuff this time, you got to make him understand he needs a new hobby. I know a hobby has done wonders for me. I used to be tense, then I got a hobby. You know, I don't get Leonard. I thought queers were into passive stuff. Like knitting and bridge."

"Don't even let him hear you say that," I said. "The passive part, I mean."

"You can bet I won't."

"I'll tell him," said the guy on the ground.

"You do," Charlie said, "And I'll stomp a mud hole in your head."

"I'm cool," said the guy on the ground.

Leonard strolled over to us then. He looked a little bushed.

"Charlie," he said.

"Howdy," Charlie said. "Okay, Leonard, you and Hap get in the cruiser . . . wait a minute. I'm gonna handcuff you together."

"Come on, Charlie," I said. "I didn't do anything, really."

"You hit this young gentleman. Put your hands out, both of you. Supposed to handcuff you with separate handcuffs, behind your back, but like I said, it's fuckin' Christmas Eve."

We were about to be handcuffed when Raul came over and took Leonard by the arm and started to cry. "Don't," Leonard said. "I can't stand all that cryin'. You're always cryin'."

"I'm fucking emotional," Raul said.

"Well, cut that cryin' shit. It makes me nervous."

"I'm crying, not you, so what are you embarrassed about?"

"It's got nothing to do with embarrassment."

"Hell," Raul said, and he tugged on Leonard's arm, but Leonard wouldn't look at him.

"Sorry, Raul," Charlie said. "You got to let him go. You want to see him, come down to the station. We got special times for asshole viewing."

"No," Raul said, letting go of Leonard's arm. "I won't be here when you get back, Leonard."

"Don't let the screen door hit you in the ass on the way out,"

Leonard said.

"You could ask me not to leave."

"I didn't ask you to leave in the first place."

Raul looked at Leonard for a moment, pushed his dark hair out of his eyes, turned and walked back to Leonard's house. He moved as if he were carrying a piano on his back.

"Shit, Leonard," I said, "Raul is just worried about you."

"Yeah, Leonard," Charlie said, "you don't always got to be an asshole."

"Man, you are one cold dude," said the guy on the ground. "I wouldn't talk to my woman that way, and she's stupid as a stick. You homos, man, y'all are chill motherfuckers."

"Shut up," said Charlie. "This ain't your business."

"Man," said the guy on the ground, "Merry fucking Christmas."

"Here," Charlie said, "hold out a hand."

He handcuffed me and Leonard together and sent us over to the unmarked. Part of the neighborhood was standing out on the curb watching the crack house burn. One old man, Mr. Trotter, stood there with his arms crossed inside a coat a grizzly bear might have worn. He was smoking a cigar. He said, "Of them three fires, this one's the best, Leonard."

"Thanks," Leonard said. "It's the practice makes the difference."

We got in the unmarked. We watched through the window as Charlie got the little guy off the ground and into an armlock and walked him toward a blue suit who came over and put the guy in handcuffs and shoved him into the back of the cruiser with Mohawk.

A handful of blue suits were combing the woods out back, and we could see one cop coming out with the bathrobed woman in tow. She was cuffed and had on her wig, which was giving off a faint trail of light gray smoke in the moonlight. She was cussing a blue streak. We could hear her with the windows rolled up. She was good at including "you fuckin' pale-dicked ass licker" into all her sentences without it sounding strained or overworked.

Leonard settled back in his seat and sighed slowly. "Shit," he said. "Raul's right. I always got to be the tough guy. I really like that fag. Really. Why have I always got to play it tough?"

"You're black and gay and inadequate sexually, and therefore find yourself doubly oppressed by white society, as well as being ill-suited emotionally for adjusting to the macho, black community that is your birthright."

"Oh yeah. That's right. I forgot."

"You also smell like a smoked ham."

Charlie slid in behind the wheel and closed the door, sharply. "We're leaving a couple of cops here to watch your house, Leonard. Make sure Raul's okay too. Least till he gets packed up and out. He said he's, and I quote, 'gone like the fucking wind,' unquote."

"All right," Leonard said. "Thanks."

"Will he really go?” I asked.

"Who's to say?” Leonard said.

Charlie cranked the car. Leonard said, "Could we stop for ice cream before we go in?"

"It's cold for ice cream," Charlie said.

"I like it anyway," Leonard said. "So, what do you say? I'm kinda depressed."

"I don't see why not," Charlie said. "Frozen yogurt all right? I'm on a diet."

"Suits me," Leonard said. "You're paying though. I don't have my wallet on me."

"I'm not paying shit," Charlie said. "You brought it up, you treat. Damn, Leonard, you're making my eyes burn."

"It's that cheap paneling in the house," Leonard said. "It goes up quick and stinks and the stink gets on you. Fucking walls are like they're made out of starter logs, which I guess is okay, seeing how I'm lighting the fire. “

"I didn't hear you say that," said Charlie.

"I got money," I said. "My treat all around."

Charlie eased away from the curb. I took a last look at the burning house. Some timbers were sagging and crashing in with an explosion of sparks and smoke. Raul was standing on Leonard's porch watching us drive by. Leonard looked in Raul's direction. Neither of them waved.

I said, "Oh, Leonard, don't let me forget. We ever get back, I got your Christmas present in the pickup."

"Yeah, well," Leonard said, "I hope it ain't HIS and HIS towels."

Chapter 2

We were in Lieutenant Hanson's office finishing off what was left of our yogurt cones, but the Lieutenant wasn't there. Considering we hadn't bought him anything, I guess that was best.

Charlie was sitting behind Hanson's desk. I was in a chair against one wall, and Leonard was in a chair against the other. We were supposed to be in a cell like Mohawk and the little guy with the burned head and the others, but we weren't. You might say we were getting special treatment. We were also getting a shadow show.

Charlie had the overhead light out and he had the desk lamp on, and he was using his fingers to throw shadows on the wall, make shapes. He did a pretty good dog and duck, but after that everything else looked like a spider.

"How about that?” Charlie said. "How's that?"

"It still looks like a spider," I said.

"I got to practice some more," Charlie said. "I got me a book now. Wife says I ought to have a hobby, so I got this. It relaxes me, but the wife thinks it ain't much. She wants me to go to the gym and work out, but this way, I can stay home and sit in the easy chair with the big light out, use the end-table light to throw a few shadows. I get tired of it, I watch a little TV. Look here, this one looks like a pussy, don't it?"

"How in hell do you get a cat out of that?” I said.

"No, a pussy. You know, a vagina. Women have 'em."

"Oh, yeah," I said. "I faintly remember."

"Look here, it does, don't it? It's kind of a dark V, ain't it?"

"It looks like a spider with its legs pulled in," Leonard said. "And don't tell me that book of yours has a section on shadow vaginas."

Charlie stuck out his middle finger and wiggled it. "This one's for you, Leonard."

A blue suit opened the door and light flooded in and the blue suit came in with it. He stopped and looked at Charlie and Charlie's hand shadow.

"What's this look like to you?” Charlie asked him.

"What?"

"The shadow, Jake, the shadow."

"Oh. I don't know. It looks like a shadow."

"Swell," Charlie said.

"Hey, listen," Jake said. "Chief ain't in—"

"Surprise, surprise," Charlie said.

"And Lieutenant Hanson's out."

"He's on his way."

"Well, we got a guy in cell three, he wants we should call his wife, tell her to tape a National Geographic special on bears. We got to do it now, he gets to catch it. It starts in fifteen minutes."

"What?” Charlie asked.

"He's gonna miss it," Jake said. " 'Cause he's gonna be here tonight. Drunk and disorderly."

"What the hell does he think we're running here?” Charlie said, not looking at Jake, but wiggling his fingers in such a way that brought him back to his shadow shape standards. A dog,

which he made a barking sound for, then a duck, which he quacked for.

"I'll tell him no," Jake said.

"I guess you will," Charlie said. "I can't believe you came to me with that shit. Wait a minute. “Charlie swiveled in the chair and looked at the cop. "A National Geographic special?"

"On bears," Jake said.

"Hell, call her. I ought to be glad it's not Charlie's Angels, some shit like that. Maybe we're getting a better class of criminal in here. Go on and do it."

"All right," Jake said, and closed the door.

"Can we go?” Leonard said.

Charlie was back to trying to make a pussy. I think.

"Go?” Charlie said. "You fuckin' me? You burned your next-door neighbor's house down. That's three times, man. First time you and Hap did it, we worked it out. Second time you did it, we worked it out. But you're gonna have to take up shadow shapes or something, Leonard. Quit this arson. We could put you behind bars so long, you got out, hair on your balls would be white."

"They're scum, Charlie," Leonard said, "and you know it."

"I went around burning houses belonged to scum, this town would mostly be a cinder."

"Bullshit," Leonard said.

In the middle of our examining another of Charlie's shadow shapes, the door opened again. It was Lieutenant Marvin Hanson this time. He was framed by the hall light behind him, and it made him look like the Golem. His black skin was all shadow and no features. He watched Charlie a second, then closed the door and turned on the light. I suddenly realized I preferred looking at him in the dark. That rugged face of his could be scary.

"Talent show's over," Hanson said. "And so's sitting behind my desk."

"Yassuh," Charlie said, and he eased out from behind the desk and took a chair and lit a cigarette.

Hanson went over and sat down behind his desk, swiveled his chair and looked at Leonard.

"Well, well," Hanson said, "If it isn't the Smartest Nigger in the World."

"Hi," Leonard said.

"That's the N word again," Charlie said to me.

"Yes," I said, "but it's two black guys talking to one another, so we've got the same problem as before. Is it racist, politically incorrect, or all in fun?"

"Ain't nothing fun about it," Hanson said. Then to Leonard: "You dumb motherfucker. I'm sick of your goddamn cavalier attitude.”

"They killed a kid last year," Leonard said.

"He took the dope on his own," Hanson said.

"He was a kid," Leonard said.

"All right, all right, one house burning is okay," Hanson said.

"But twice? Then three times? You got to respect my position here."

"Your goddamn Chief of Police has ties to the fucks who provide that house, and you know it," Leonard said.

"That's a point for Leonard," Charlie said. "He's right. You know it, I know it, the guys in the slammer know it. They know too they'll be out of here come morning. If it takes that long. They'll be suing Leonard, most likely."

"Shut up, Charlie," Hanson said.

"Yassuh, Massuh Marvin."

"That's kinda racist, isn't it?” I said to Charlie. "A white guy doing slave talk?"

"Think so?” Charlie said.

"Will you two assholes shut up?” Hanson said.

I could see "Yassuh" forming on Charlie's lips, but he decided to just wiggle them instead. Wise choice, I thought.

"What are these two fucks doing in here watching you and your fucking shadows?” Hanson said. "Why ain't they in a cell?"

"I figured they were kind of guests," Charlie said. "I mean, hell, I like 'em."

"Yeah, well, I don't," Hanson said. "Especially the Smartest Nigger in the World here. He's always doing what he wants. He doesn't think the law applies to him. He's some kind of crusader. Some kind of vigilante. Yes sir, he's the Smartest Nigger in the World."

"I don't know," said Leonard. "I hear great stuff about you and Jesse Jackson."

Hanson moved suddenly, and considering his size, it was a fast move. He grabbed the lamp on his desk and jerked it hard enough the plug came out. He threw it at Leonard, who slipped casually sideways in his chair, as if avoiding a punch. The lamp went by and hit the wall and exploded. Leonard and Hanson both stood up.

There was a beat of silence during which a lot of things could have happened, but didn't. Finally, Leonard smiled. Then Hanson smiled. Hanson and Leonard slowly sat back down. Hanson said, "Shit, my ex-wife gave me that desk lamp."

"And what a special little prize it was," I said.

"What I do when I lose a family heirloom," Charlie said, "is I

go get drunk."

"That sounds about right," Hanson said. "Boys, get your coats."

Chapter 3

Hanson said, "Can you believe that, two bears fuckin', right there on the television set?"

We were at Hanson's house watching the National Geographic special. Hanson and Charlie were drinking lots of beer. Leonard was nursing one, and I was having a Sharp's nonalcoholic beer. I'd given up drinking because I thought it was stupid and expensive and not very healthy.

Beer, however, didn't hurt Hanson's and Charlie's feelings.

Charlie said, "Actually, Marve, my man. Them bears are neither on, nor in, the set. Those bears fucking is recorded on videotape or something. Then they play it back so we can see it. You see those trees? That grass? It's spring there behind them. That means those bears could have done this fucking a year or two ago. Anytime really."

Hanson wasn't paying attention. He took another drink from his can of Schlitz, said, "Can you believe that shit? I was a kid, they wouldn't show two dogs one behind another for fear you might think one was gonna mount the other. And now, right there, in front of God and everybody, two bears doing the mambo."

"That's kind of a sexy angle too," Charlie said. “Only thing

we're missing here is a diagram showing us the inside of the girl

bear's ass, so we can see the boy bear's dick swell into a knot.

They do that, I think. Like a dog.”

Not being specialists on bear's dicks, none of us responded. We didn't want to look like fools.

The bears on the special finished up the mambo, as Hanson called it. Neither of them lit a cigarette, but they both looked fairly satiated. The camera cut to a guy in khakis. He was talking about bears as he walked. The guy came across a pile of bear shit in the woods and you'd have thought he'd found a fifty-dollar bill. He whisked that shit around with a stick and told us about the health of the bear that had left it. In fact, he told us everything about that bear but its blood type and hat size. I was impressed. I know how to track in the woods, know most of the species of trees and bushes, and can tell some basic things about critters from their stool, provided I have the urge to stir their shit around with a stick. But this guy was remarkable. It just looked like a pile of bear shit to me, but here he was seeing all kinds of stuff in it.

I wondered if you went to college to learn about bear shit.

The bear show was pretty good, but I got to admit, I burned out on it. I think decoding bear shit was about as far as my interest in bears went, and I felt uncomfortable at Hanson's house. I kept fearing Florida would come in. It was bad enough there was plenty there to remind me of her.

It wasn't any specific thing, it was the way the house looked. I'd never been in Hanson's house before. We mainly insulted each other at the police station and bad hamburger joints, but it was apparent there had been a feminine hand at work here. And not Hanson's mother.

Florida might still have her apartment, might not stay here all the time, but from the well-decorated Christmas tree to the way objects were laid out on the shelves, the house spoke as much of her as it did Hanson.

And there were little clues. For instance, I seriously doubted the books in the shelf on aerobic dancing and how to make love to a man were Hanson's, though you can't be sure about something like that.

I did observe, however, that all around Hanson's chair it looked like the city dump, but a little less organized. It was littered with cigar butts, ashes, junk food wrappers, and beer cans. When we came in through the kitchen, I noticed, while kicking a plastic bag of spoiled celery out of my path, that it appeared as if the place had been blown about by a tornado. I know I don't keep a greasy frying pan full of molding scrambled eggs upside down on the floor or leave my refrigerator door open when I'm out of the house. And most everyone agrees the floor is a bad spot for celery.

I tried not to let old-fashioned ideas about women and kitchens get into my thinking, but they did. I knew Florida. She wasn't a classic housewife type any more than she was a classic women's lib type, but she wouldn't have let the joint get like this. Even if it was confined to the kitchen and around Hanson's chair.

I couldn't imagine Hanson, slob that he was, allowing the place to get this bad either, unless his head was somewhere sad and distant.

And earlier, hadn't Charlie made some crack about Hanson going around as if a weight was tied to his dick? Then there was that lamp-throwing business. That seemed a little intense even for Hanson.

And inviting us over to his place to watch a National Geographic special? That was too nice. That wasn't the Hanson I knew. And why hadn't he mentioned Florida? Was she visiting relatives? Caroling?

I began to suspect he and Florida had broken up, and a sense of warm well-being flowed over me before it was replaced by a warmer sense of shame, because secretly, I had been hoping me and her might get back together. This was a somewhat bitter and wistful sort of thought that came and went from time to time, and truthfully, I was glad to feel it go. Hanson was an all-right guy, and Florida and I had taken our shot and it hadn't hit target. She had decided on Hanson, and I reckoned it was best all around. I knew it was over for me and her, and always would be. But I couldn't help remembering her soft honey-brown skin and the way she moaned when I gave her pleasure, the way her legs moved, the smell of her. I couldn't forget her smile and the razor sharpness of her thinking. And, of course, I couldn't forget she was kind of an asshole.

I asked about the bathroom, and Hanson pointed it out. I had to go through the bedroom to get there, and as I went, I looked at the bed. It was unmade and the covers were thrown back and it smelled of sweat and perfume. Chanel No. 5. Not Hanson's brand. He was an Old Spice man. The rest of the room looked in good shape, except there was a pile of Hanson's clothes on the floor at the right-hand side of the bed.

The bathroom was clean and orderly except for toothpaste and whisker hair in the sink. Hanson had made a kind of pig trail from the kitchen to his chair to the bed to the bathroom, leaving the rest of the joint neat and clean.

When I got back from the bathroom, Leonard was still on the couch, but he had the book that told how to make love to a man. He was turning it at an odd angle.

He said, "I didn't know you could do that."

"Maybe you can't," Charlie said. “That's man and woman stuff."

"Homosexuals are pretty smart," Leonard said. “Sometimes we improvise. “He put the book in his lap. “Figures. Me and Raul are broke up, and here's something nifty we could have tried."

"Leonard," I said, finding my Sharp's and my place on the couch. “You got to quit watching bears fuck. It gets you worked up."

Hanson cranked back his easy chair, laid his catcher's mitt hands on his chest and looked at the ceiling light. We looked with him. Nothing really important seemed to be going on up there.

"Guess I need to figure what to do with you boys," Hanson said.

"How about paper hats and whistles and we all go home?” I said.

"I don't think so,” Hanson said.

"Well, how bad could it be?” Charlie said. “You got them over at your house drinking beer and watching TV."

"What I'm gonna do," Hanson said, "is make you boys a little deal. You two go over to Grovetown and do me a little favor, and I'll find a way not to press charges. You don't, I'll find special way to press charges.”

"Hey," Leonard said, "that's blackmail. And what the hell would you want us to do in Grovetown anyway? Look for antiques?"

"No," Hanson said, "I want you to check on Florida."

"I was wondering about her," I said.

"Figured you were," Hanson said. “Deal is, she went over there to do a little lawyering, kind of. You fellas hear about that Bobby Joe Soothe problem?"

"Nope," Leonard said. “I have enough problems of my own. Me and Raul, we've had hell trying to get a lubricant we like. K-Y is highly overrated. I bet we been through twenty-five tubes of this and that.”

"I don't want to hear about it," Charlie said. “But you might check Kmart. They got all kinds of lubricant stuff there, at reasonable prices. From Vaseline to forty-weight lube oil."

"I don't think I'll be needing it now," Leonard said. “Unless I'm just gonna use a little bit of it in the palm of my hand."

"Bobby Joe Soothe," Hanson said, "was a black man had him a little accident."

"I did hear about that," I said. “On the news. Hung himself in Grovetown jail with his shoelaces. Something like that."

"Something like that," Hanson said. “There's a back story though. You see, this Bobby Joe Soothe, he was the grandson of L.C. Soothe. Heard of L.C.?"

"Hell yeah," Leonard said. “Country blues guitar. I got some of his stuff. One of those boxed set things. One of the greats. East Texas legend of the late twenties, early thirties. Kind of like Robert Johnson. Had the same story about him. That he sold his soul to the devil to play way he did. Some kind of deal where he took a piss in a fruit jar and took it to the crossroads and the devil came and drank it, then the devil peed in a jar, and L.C. drank it, then L.C. had the devil in him and the devil had his soul. After that, L.C. could play that old standard guitar like a sonofabitch. Used a pocketknife or a bottle neck for a slide."

"I can't think of nothing I'd want so bad I'd drink wee-wee out of a fruit jar," Charlie said.

"L.C. only made a few records," Leonard said, "but he was a big influence on East Texas blues men. The records are rare. I think he made some recordings on 78s, whatever the method was then, and they were never released, or lost. I don't remember the details. It's just the general stuff I know about, and I got that out of the booklet in the collection box."

"All I know," Hanson said, "is a fella from up North read an article in some music magazine about this Bobby Joe Soothe who was tryin' to build a name on his grandfather's name, and Bobby Joe said he had in his possession this recorded, but unreleased record L.C. had made. Said too he was singing some songs L.C. had left written down, but never recorded. This Bobby Joe had a bit of reputation for good blues himself, see. So this Northern fella made contact with him, made some promises of money for the record, came down here to check it out, and supposedly, Bobby Joe cut that white boy's throat, took his money, then got hauled into jail where he decided he couldn't go on and hung himself with his shoe strings."

"I thought they didn't let prisoners keep stuff like shoe strings and belts," I said.

"Not supposed to," Hanson said. “Interesting thing is, there's been more hangings and accidents and suicides of this kind in that jail in the past forty-five years than there's been accidental prisoner deaths in all the state of Texas since nineteen sixty-five. And that includes goddamn Huntsville Prison. Guess I ought to give the cracker runs the place now some credit, though. Only one hanging, the Soothe hanging, has happened in the twelve years he's been Chief in Grovetown."

"What happened to the recordings?” Leonard asked.

"No one knows," Hanson said.

"How does Florida come into this?” I asked.

"I'm gettin' to that," Hanson said. “Florida, as you know, is an ambitious gal. She decided lawyering wasn't enough. She wanted to go out and do some investigative work. Go to Grovetown, ask some questions, use her law credentials, maybe get some kind of article out of this, move herself into investigative journalism. I think she wants to be on television. She's got the looks, the voice, the brains, and the personality, so it's not a far-fetched kind of idea. She's been sort of looking around for something to tie her to a bigger gig. A journalism career. Thought if she cow-girl'd this one, she could write her own ticket."

"In other words," I said. “Florida was looking for a rat to ride, and smelled one in Grovetown?"

"Yep," Hanson said. “She went down there couple weeks ago. I told her not to, that it was dangerous. She didn't listen, and that didn't surprise me. We hadn't been doing that good anyway. We were supposed to get married, but didn't."

"Kind of thought the date for that had come and passed," I said.

"Figured you were marking your calendar," Hanson said. “Thing is though, me and her had a fight. She thought I was being a male chauvinist jerk. If being worried about someone you care about, being realistic about what can happen to them is being a jerk, then I'm a jerk. Grovetown is a scary place for black folk to go hang around and try to pry into stuff, but she went anyway."

"Florida doesn't strike me as that brave," I said. “Least not in that way. Considering my own experiences with her, I'd say she's been cautious in the past."

"She's cautious till she wants something," Hanson said.

"True," I said. “Selfishness is one of her major traits."

"She got to Grovetown," Hanson said, "cooled some, called to say she was okay, and that things between me and her had reached a wall. She called again a few days later to say she was okay, and things were going good, but she didn't give details, and she said she'd have someone come for her stuff when she gets back."

"So you're split up?” Leonard said. “Like me and Raul. It's like a disease going around."

"Guess that means you don't get to keep the aerobic book and the one on making love to a man," I said.

"Looks that way," Hanson said. “I gotta tell you. I like that gal. Really. But I gotta tell you too, and this will sound like some horseshit since I've been fuckin' her, but it was getting so our relationship was more like father and daughter, her being so much younger. Thinking so different and all."

"I don't think I like the sound of that father and daughter stuff," Charlie said. “Not with you throwing the pork to her."

"You know what I mean," Hanson said. “I think I was gonna cut it off between us. I didn't feel right. Maybe it's not just because she's so young, but because I still love my ex-wife, goddammit. You know, like that's gonna go somewhere."

This was a new wrinkle. I said, "So if you were developing a more father-daughter relationship than a romantic one, and she cut the romance off, why are you so moony? And why does your kitchen look like a tornado blew through it?”

"She spent the night with me morning before she left," Hanson said. “We had an argument. It got out of hand. I grabbed her. I'm ashamed of that, but I did. But she got right up in my face, see, and it was just reflex. I grabbed her and hurt her arm a little. It wasn't on purpose, guys, really. I'm no woman beater."

"We're all human," I said. “Everybody fucks up now and then."

"Really, I never hit a woman in my life, and I didn't hit her, but I grabbed her. She could be so infuriating. She was standing in there with the refrigerator open, looking for something for breakfast, and that's when the argument started and the door got left open. She pulled some celery out of there, hit me with it, and I grabbed her. When I realized what I'd done and let her go, she snatched up the frying pan and hit me on the shoulder with it and burned me, dropped it on the floor. I still got the egg on my pajamas. She left five minutes later and I haven't changed a thing in there since."

"Kind of a shrine, huh?” Leonard said.

"I keep telling him she'll get over it," Charlie said. “Hell, she called from Grovetown, didn't she? She knows Marve just lost his cool, and she had something to do with it. They're both to blame. A lesson was learned."

"It's not the getting back together that's bothering me," Hanson said. “I mean, not that way, you know. I'm just worried about her down there, and if I go check on her, that's just more male chauvinist stuff, and there's no reason she should report to me, and theoretically, she's out of my life, but . . ."

"Why don't you go there anyway?” Leonard said. “You could see she's all right, and if you're telling it straight, it's not like the relationship is coming back together anyway. Or that you want it to. So what's it matter she gets mad at this point?"

"I'd like to end this on a note of respect," Hanson said. “Not like I'm spying on her."

"And you think these two dimwits showing up down there ain't gonna make her suspicious?” Charlie said. ”Hell, she knows them. She knows Hap biblically."

"Thanks, Charlie," I said, "you certainly know how to defuse a tense or worrisome moment."

"It's different," Hanson said. “She sees you two, you could say Charlie told you about her, and you thought you might go down and check on her. Old times' sake."

"Oh, now I told them about her," Charlie said.

"Maybe you could act like you'd like to take her on a date, Hap. Something like that."

"That sounds convincing," Charlie said. “I can see why you been so tired all week. All the heavy thinking it took to come up with that, I'd be strained too."

"Yeah, you're right, Charlie," Hanson said. “It won't work. It was a major stupid idea. It's like I been having a sack of shit for a head lately. Idea like that sucks big time."

"I can feel a draft from it over here," Charlie said.

"Yeah," Hanson said. “Let's have some eggnog, then, Hap, Leonard, we'll take y'all back to the hoosegow."

"Grovetown," I said, "it's a place I been wanting to visit. I'd just like to go by the house, get a change of clothes, maybe a paperback to go."

"Unless, of course," Leonard said, "you'd prefer we leave tonight. Right now."

Chapter 4

It was after midnight, Christmas Day, when I took the wheel of Charlie's car and drove him over to Leonard's. Idea was, Leonard was going to get his car and follow me to Charlie's place. I'd drop Charlie and his car off, then we'd leave in Leonard's heap. Charlie was just too drunk to drive.

It had grown quite cold and it was a clear night. Kind of night I relished when I was a kid. My dad, who worked as a mechanic, or at the foundry from time to time, would go out in the yard with me and we'd throw a blanket over our shoulders and sit on the porch stoop and look at the stars. We were well out in the country then, and there were no streetlights, and with the house lights off the stars glowed in the black satin heavens like white dots of neon.

Dad was a heavy man and very tired and we didn't play ball together or do any of the classic stuff fathers and sons are supposed to do. He put in twelve-hour days and did hard manual labor, so he wasn't up for much ball chasing when he came home. But he did his best. He taught me about the woods when he had time, went to my school plays, made sure I had money for comic books, and found the time, now and then, when he should have been sleeping, to sit on the porch and point out the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, and he had names for some of the other stars I've forgotten, but they weren't the names you normally hear. They were names given the constellations by his father or grandfather, and they had known the stars as well as a seasoned truck driver knows a road map.

Dad told me stories while we looked at the stars. He had known Bonnie and Clyde. He had driven around Gladewater, Texas, with them one Fourth of July and tossed firecrackers out the windows of their automobile. At the time, he didn't know they were being pursued by every law enforcement agency in Texas.

Late one night during the depths of the Great Depression, down by the railroad track where he was hoboing, he and his friends had met Pretty Boy Floyd. He had fought bareknuckle and wrestled at county fairs for money. He knew handed-down stories of Billy the Kid, Belle Starr, Sam Bass, and Jessie James, and when he was a child, he'd seen Frank James giving a talk in a Sears store on the ills of crime. He may have yarned a little, but I liked it all anyway.

Now, the stories I heard were off the late-night news. Rapes and serial murders and child molestations. Children with guns and no imagination and less ambition. It wasn't a world my father would have understood. Last time I had seen him was a Christmas many years ago. He looked as if he'd just viewed the new world he was living in for the very first time and didn't like it and didn't want to stay. He was dead in two weeks. A heart attack and he was out of there.

When we got to Leonard's, I knew he was hoping Raul hadn't left, but Raul's Ford station wagon was gone. There were a couple of cops there, watching the place. Leonard thanked them, shooed them off, and Charlie let him.

Leonard went inside while we sat in Charlie's car with the engine running and the heater turned high. It was quite cozy. Charlie was pretty drunk, but when he spoke his words were clear, so I figured he still had a few brain cells left.

"Here's y'all's Christmas present," Charlie said. "Some advice. Don't do this thing for Hanson."

"It beats jail," I said.

"You ain't goin' to jail. You know that. Hanson ain't gonna do shit. He'll get Leonard out of this. He knows the Chief knows he knows about the crack house. Chief knows Hanson is gonna nail him one day, somehow, if he don't get rid of him first. They're just playing some kind of cat-and-mouse shit. Chief fires him, Hanson can make a big enough stink all the fumigators in LaBorde couldn't get rid of it. Chief knows he's got to get rid of Hanson, but he hasn't figured how. Gives him every shit job there is, hoping he'll get killed. But Hanson, he takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'. So, what I'm saying is, Hanson decides to get Leonard off, he'll get him off. He knows enough about where the bodies are buried to handle that."

Charlie turned to look at what was left of the house next door. A charred frame, a pile of gray ash, and a few wisps of smoke. "You know," Charlie said, "that is Leonard's best job yet."

"He likes his work. And Charlie, thanks for the advice, but odd as this sounds, Hanson's kind of a friend. Considering Florida and I once had this thing going, I think he's pretty much in need or he wouldn't ask me to get involved."

"All right," Charlie said, cracking the passenger window and getting out a cigarette. "I give you that. “He pushed in the car lighter. "But this is his problem. Not yours. He feels there's something really wrong, he ought to take care of it himself. He ought not send citizens down there to do his dirty work."

"I think he's just a little concerned is all and doesn't feel it's a legal matter."

"Grovetown is a shithole, Hap. You ought not go down there with Leonard. They don't like black folks unless they're swabbing out a toilet or sweeping a floor. That's the main reason Hanson didn't want Florida going down there. He thought it was dumb some little black gal like her going down to Honky-land. He told her so. She thought it was some kind of male chauvinist bullshit. He was just talking good sense. There's people down there don't believe civil rights is a real law. They still think everyone ought to own 'em a nigger. Let me tell you something. I spent a week in that armpit on account of my sister's husband, Arnold—may he grow like an onion with his head in the ground. He left her. He was working the lumber mill there, had this thing going with a secretary, decided one day this clippie’s pussy was all he wanted to smell, so he and her got out of Grovetown and left Sis sittin' on her ass with two kids, both of 'em in diapers. I had to go over there and get her. There were arrangements to be made. Old bills. Some things to sell. Usual shit. I sent her home and stayed to do the stuff she wasn't emotionally fit to do. I went into that town three, four times a week, and I tell you, man, it's like a time warp. Hardly any blacks come into town if they haven't got some kind of business—like buying groceries. Getting gas. Necessary stuff. And they see a white man coming they step off the sidewalk and assume a Rastus position. All teeth and bent heads. It's what's expected of them. It's what they know. They don't do that, Klan over there—or rather some offshoot of it, calls itself the Supreme Knights of the Caucasian Order, or some ridiculous handle like that—decides some black is uppity, they'll come down on 'em. Blacks in Grovetown are outflanked. Whites have all the power there. All the power."

"Lot of blacks would argue it's that way everywhere."

"And they'd be wrong. Everywhere ain't like Grovetown. They go to Grovetown, they're gonna find out things are a lot better elsewhere than they think. They're gonna find what it's like to be back in the sixties, before that Civil Rights Act. They're gonna realize things aren't near as bad as they've been. Except in Grovetown. Late as four, five years ago, a black woman was tarred and feathered by some of those Klan ass wipes. She was raped too, ten, fifteen times. Guys did that are the kind of creeps would stand up and tell you how whites and blacks ought not to be together, and whites and blacks shouldn't date, but they don't mind stealing some black pussy from some poor woman, tarring and feathering her. Hot tar, Hap. That shit is intense. That's not something anyone wants on them. She damn near died 'cause most of her pores were closed up. And then there was one other little touch. They sewed up her snatch. Sewed it up with a leather-craft needle and baling wire."

"Good God. What the hell did she do to get them down on her?"

"You'll like this. They didn't like the way she dressed. She was some young gal, nineteen, twenty at the oldest. Grew up in Grovetown, went off to the university here, went back to Grovetown for spring break, forgot how to play the game. Maybe thought times had changed. Year or two to someone that young is an eternity. Maybe she took an Afro-American course and bought a dashiki. Thought 'cause of that the whole world changed. She developed some pride, like anyone ought to. But then she went home and got that knocked out of her. Word was—and this was based on a couple of unsigned, unaddressed letters the editors of the university paper got from Grovetown— this all happened because this Klan offshoot thought she wore, as they put it, 'provocative clothing of an indecent nature,' and that the university wasn't for 'colored,' and such things as education were wasted on them. It was signed the Grand Exalted Cyclops of the Supreme Knights of the Caucasian Assholes, or whatever the fuck they are."

"They certainly sound like a progressive bunch."

"The letter denied she'd been raped, said if anything she'd been cavorting with her 'colored friends' before she was tarred and feathered, and then there was some bullshit about women in general and how they ought to stay home and raise kids and not venture into the world of men, and so forth, and that she had gotten sewn up to suggest, symbolically, that the world didn't need any more black babies."

"Sometimes you got to wonder if we're all part of the same human race."

"We aren't. Those motherfuckers are evil aliens. Got to be. Way I figure, one of those crackers came on to that gal, figured he had him a little nigger sweetie just couldn't wait to give a big white man some pussy, and when she turned him down, it pissed him off. He and some of the boys got together, caught her off some place, and he got what he wanted. And so did his friends. Used the Assholes of the Caucasian Knights as a blind. It's just plain old rape and brutality, justified with bullshit rhetoric."

"Anyone ever arrested for that?"

The cigarette lighter had popped out long ago and cooled. Charlie pushed it back in. "Nope. No one over in Grovetown seemed to know anyone in any kind of Klan-like organization. No one had seen a thing. They got away with rape and brutality. No telling what it done to that young woman. Not just physically, but emotionally."

"Do you know any nicer bedtime stories than this one, Charlie?"

"Nope. All I know is them kind. It's all I see. It's all I hear about. Don't go, Hap. It ain't for you."

"I guess Hanson figures we can take care of ourselves."

"Hell, yeah. He knows you can. You guys are dumb asses, but ain't no one ever said you were cowards. Hell, man, Leonard, that motherfucker would wade through the fires of hell with a hand bucket half full of creek water if he thought he was doing the right thing. And you, well, I ain't got you all figured out yet. But no one's so tough they can beat a town. You go over there and fuck around, don't come whining to me someone tars and feathers your ass and sews your dick to your leg. Or worse . . . Damn, I'm sick. My wife is gonna kill me I come in like this."

The lighter popped out and Charlie lit his cigarette. He turned and blew smoke through the crack in the window. He replaced the lighter and leaned back in the seat, held the cigarette tight between his knuckles.

After a moment he said, "I'm just telling you that you ought not do this thing. Hanson doesn't want to do it because he's a cop. Not his jurisdiction. And him being black, it'll look like he's stirring trouble with all this stuff going on down there about that guy hanging himself. Then you got the bit about he don't want Florida to know he's sniffing her ass. Add it up, it comes out two plus two equals shit."

"I appreciate your concern."

"You feel you just got to do it, leave Leonard here. Not only is he black, in case you haven't noticed, but he's got a smart mouth, same as you. He can't stand to let anyone think they're putting one over on him. Guys in Grovetown, they can't stand a smartass black guy. And it's not like Leonard is quiet about being queer, neither. He ain't bashful, you know what I mean?"

"I know what you mean."

"Man, you think a black guy will work their bowels, you add queer to that, toss in you and him together doing your stooge act, it's like throwing gasoline on a fire."

"Leonard wouldn't let me go by myself, even if I wanted him to. Not since Hanson asked him to go.”

"That's where Hanson fucked up," Charlie said. "He ain't thought a clear thought in damn near two weeks. He's really messed up. A week from now. A month. He'd know better'n to ask something stupid like that of either of you."

"Leonard told Hanson he'd go. Leonard says he'll do something, he'll do it, Charlie. You know that."

Charlie sighed. "I'm too drunk to argue. Let me just sum up here, Hap. You and the Smartest Nigger in the World go to Grovetown, it's askin' for trouble. But if you're goin'—" \">

He eased his ass up, got his wallet out, unlimbered it, and gave me two hundred and fifty dollars. "You'll need this."

"I don't want to take it, Charlie, but I got to."

"I know."

I put the money in my wallet, said, "I been sitting here wondering how I was going to afford this little trip. I hate to keep sucking off Leonard, and it's not like he's rich either. He sunk a lot of his inheritance into this house. Fixing it up."

"Well, that ain't really enough money. You're gonna have to dip into Leonard's jack, but as for that two hundred and fifty, don't worry about it."

"That's good of you, Charlie."

"Naw it ain't. Ain't my money. Hanson gave that to me to give to you before we left his place."

* * *

I dropped Charlie and his car off at his house and Leonard followed. We wished Charlie a Merry Christmas when he got through puking off the side of his porch, then I drove Leonard's car back to his house while Leonard sat on the passenger side, looked out the window and brooded.

"Was Raul's stuff gone?” I asked.

"Yeah. There was one box of his things in there, packed with an address label on it. Had a note asking me to mail it to him at his parents'. Said he'd pay me back. My Christmas present for him was on top of the box. Unopened.

"This your first spat?"

"We had one every goddamn day, but I guess this is the worst. We were fighting right before I burned those assholes' house down. I don't even remember what me and him were arguing about. I think that's why I beat those fucks up and burned their place down. I mean, you know, I don't like 'em, and that's the biggest reason, but shit, these days, I get worked up, I burn whatever house is there down. It lets off some tension. "

"What are you gonna do until they get a new house put up?"

"I don't know. Squeeze a rubber ball. Jerk off. "

"And what if the house gets put in there isn't a crack house next time, but some old lady who just wants to putter around her flower garden?"

"I guess I could go over there nights and pull up her roses. "

"I can see you've thought this through with options. "

Leonard tapped his temple with a finger. "Thinking all the time. " He sat for a moment, said: "That goddamn Raul. I kinda thought I was ready for him to go, but you know, I miss him. "

"Raul seemed okay to me, but it's not like I been around him much. Maybe him going away isn't so bad."

"That some kind of comment?"

"I haven't seen much of you lately either, Leonard. It's not like I know anything about y'all's relationship. See, I sort of thought you and me being like brothers, I'd get the inside scoop on things."

"Hey, you got to remember, I ain't had no loving in ages. You forget how you get when you have a woman. All you want to do is fuck."

"I guess that's normal at the beginning of any relationship. I just thought maybe you'd have brought him around. You and me, compadre, we're family. Besides, you can only screw so much, after a while, you got to maybe read a book, talk to friends."

"You got enough problems in your life doing crap work for a living, being mostly worthless without ambition, and being friends with me. Figured you didn't need me and my lover dropping by."

"You think it's like I got neighbors? And if I did, think they'd know just by looking at you? And if they did, think I'd give a fuck?"

"That's not what I mean, and you know it."

"What do you mean?"

"No matter how close we are, I think the whole thing jacks you around. You know, me fuckin' a guy."

"It's different is all. I'm not used to it. I see two guys hugging up, one of them my friend, guy I think of in a traditional way most of the time, well, I won't lie to you, it makes me uncomfortable. Not sick to my stomach or nothing, just uncomfortable. I don't visualize what you guys are doing in the privacy of your own home, not only because it's private, but shit, Leonard, I don't like to think about it. I know there isn't anything wrong with it. But I was taught one way all my life, that homos were perverts. I know now a pervert comes in hetero or homo, same as good people, but it still turns my crank backwards a little to know y'all got the same equipment to play with and you're willing to do it with each other”

"How do you think it makes me feel, see you kissin' on some old gal? That ain't natural to me, Hap. It don't matter what's supposed to be natural, my biology tells me one thing, yours tells you another."

"All right. Let's drop that. It's not like we're really in disagreement."

"You know what, Hap?"

"What?”

"I really thought this one was more than just sex. I thought me and Raul had a relationship. I thought me and him were gonna grow old together and come over to your place now and then for fried chicken and maybe borrow money, you ever got any. I really did mean to bring him around. Really. I just wanted to get stabilized. And, of course, I have. I'm by myself again."

"He could come back.”

"I doubt it. I think I saw it coming for the last two weeks. We were just too different. I was confusing sex for loving 'cause I hadn't had either in so goddamn long. You know what? He liked Gilligan’s Island. He wouldn't miss that fucker. Had books on that shit. Photos of the stars. Has a stack of videotapes full of Gilligan’s Island. He thought Bob Denver was a good actor, and I think he had this thing for the Professor. Raul's big goal in life was to get a copy of the reunion episode."

"You're right," I said. "Mark Raul off your list. He's too dumb to live. Hey, one bright note. My Christmas present. I'm gonna cheer you up when I tell you what I got you. That 'Asleep at the Wheel' album you been wanting."

"The one where they get a bunch of folks together to redo Bob Wills's stuff?"

"Yep. Got that big-tittied singer you like on it."

"Dolly Parton."

"Yep. And it's got Willie 'Can't Pay His Taxes' Nelson too. “"No shit?” "No shit."

"You said album, but you meant CD, right?” "Yep."

"Great. Guess what? That was Raul's CD player. He took it with him."

Chapter 5

That night I slept on Leonard's fold-out couch, which had acquired an assortment of potato chips, peanuts, and pretzel crumbs. I guess watching Gilligan gives you the munchies.

Leonard was up half the night, going to the bathroom, the kitchen, looking out windows, feeling blue over Raul. I lay there and watched him pad around, and thought about Grovetown. I'd heard about it being stuck in time before Charlie told me. Grovetown was like Vidor, Texas, another, and larger, and more infamous Klan stronghold. Vidor didn't even have a black in its town to hang. It was all white and proud of it. Leonard knew about Grovetown. Had some idea what he was getting into, but if he was overly concerned, neither his words or actions showed it.

I closed my eyes and remembered Florida. I could smell her hair. Feel her thigh on my finger tips. The first time we made love was in this house. In Leonard's bedroom. My God, it hadn't really been that long ago. I knew that hot summer night, when we lay in bed together, even before we made love, that I adored her. And just as surely, I knew she would break my heart. And she had.

She couldn't cope with my being white. Not having a career. Having little to no ambition. A man adrift. She said: "I like someone who gets up in the morning and has a purpose. A real purpose. I have one. I want whoever I love to have one."

And she was right. What I was about was day-to-day survival, and that was it. When I was young, I could look around corners. Now, I did well to see six inches beyond my nose.

Jesus Christ, how in hell, why in hell, do all my romances go wrong?

Next morning, not long after the sun came up and coffee had boiled, Leonard called a couple fellas he knew and asked if they could stay over at his place for a while, watch it to make sure his former neighbors didn't drop by to return the favor to his house.

An hour later, the fellas dropped in with two paper sacks full of clothes and accessories. I hadn't met these guys before. They lived in the neighborhood. They were both black and huge and appeared to be in their mid-thirties. Their heads looked as if they had been boiled and all the hair scraped off. You could have put your fingers in their eye sockets and used their noggins to bowl a few sets.

Their faces were as warm and friendly as a switchblade knife. One of them had an eye with scuz all around it, like the crusty lips of an active volcano. They looked as if on their days off they liked to sit around and wring the necks of puppies, maybe stick coat hangers up cats' asses and toast them over a fire.

I was put in the position of entertaining the fellas while Leonard filled a suitcase. They didn't strike up a discussion with me concerning Melville's flawed masterpiece Moby Dick, nor did they have anything to say about Billy Budd.

We mostly sat in silence, said a few things about the weather. The one with the scuzzy eye finally hit a note of interest. He said, "You know, ants come out this time of year if they want to. Our house is full of the little fuckers. Goddamn Christmas ants."

"No shit?” I said. "Christmas ants?"

"Yeah, there's ants in my underwear drawer," said the other one.

"It's 'cause Clinton's underwear ain't clean," said Scum Eye.

"Yeah, well what you been doing in my underwear drawer?” said Clinton. "Sniffin?"

I looked around for Leonard. Still in the back room. Probably sitting on the bed having a laugh at my expense.

"I'll tell you though," said Clinton. "Them ants are busy little shits. They ate my banana. I left it on the table, and next morning they was all over it. “He smiled. "I stuck it in the sink and drowned them. An ant can't swim for shit."

"Leonard," I said. "Man, we got to go."

Leonard came out with his suitcase, and on our way out the door he paused and gave one of the big guys some money, said, "Here's for food. But there's stuff in the pantry. I get back when I get back, if that's okay with you two."

"We ain't doin' nothin' anyway," said Clinton. "Peckerwood we used to work for had a stroke. He can't do nothin' now but sit around and look wall-eyed, drip spit on his chin. His wife fired us and everyone else over at the aluminum chair plant. They say it may go out of business 'cause his family don't want nothing to do with runnin' it. They're gonna sell it and whoever buys it will bring in a whole new crew of niggers. That's if anyone wants it."

"It wasn't any kind of job anyway," said Scum Eye. "We worked there ten years or better and didn't never get a raise. That peckerwood was so tight when he blinked his asshole turned inside out. I hope all he gets to do rest of his life is sit around in one of them lawn chairs we made, crap his pants and nest in it. "

"They are not only without jobs," I said to Leonard, "but they have an ant problem at their house."

"Christmas ants, we call them," Clinton said. "I mean, they don't just come Christmas, but we call them that."

"Well, guys," Leonard said. "You're gonna like it here. No ant problem. Christmas or otherwise. Watch TV, hang out, whatever, but make sure those chumps lived next door don't drop by."

"You don't want us to kill 'em, do you?” This from Scum Eye.

"No, Leon," Leonard said, "but I want you to discourage them. You got to kill 'em, drag 'em in the house. Law likes it that way better. Looks like breaking and entering. More clear-cut as self-defense. Frankly, I don't think they'll come around. My house got burned down, they'd know I knew who did it. And they wouldn't want me to know."

"I hear that," said Clinton.

"You guys like Gilligan’s Island?” Leonard asked.

"Uh huh," said Leon, better known to me as Scum Eye. "That's a pretty funny show. I'd like to fuck that Ginger. I bet she don't fuck black guys, though."

"It's you she wouldn't fuck," Leonard said.

Leon and Clinton grinned. Leon said, "Yeah, uh huh. I get it."

"Anyway," Leonard said, "I got a stack of Gilligan’s Island tapes, you want to see them. They're on the kitchen table."

"Raul left a treasure like that?” I said.

"It was in the box I was supposed to mail to him. Couldn't find the toaster this morning, so I opened his goddamn box. He loved that fucking toaster 'cause it could do four slices of bread at once. He liked shit like that. If it could have done six slices of bread, he'd have peed on himself. Anyway, no toaster. He must have took that in the car. But he had most of my spoon drawer in the box, and those tapes."

"That guy gone?” Leon asked.

"Raul?” Leonard said.

"One Clinton bounced around at the store," Leon said. "The other queer. No offense."

"None taken. Yeah, he's gone. He comes back, don't give him a rough time, though. I ain't mad at him. Just tell him I'll be back, if he cares. I don't figure he'll be around though."

"Can we have girls over?” Leon asked, scratching at the scum around his eye.

"As long as it doesn't get out of hand," Leonard said. "I don't want to come home to broken furniture. And guys, use a rubber, okay? And I don't mean share one between you. AIDS is goin' around."

"Using a rubber's like taking a shower in a raincoat," Clinton said. "It ain't no fun."

"Hey, it's your dick," Leonard said. "You're too stupid to take care of it, that's your problem. I hope the women are smarter. I'll call you later."

"You might start my pickup now and then, let it run awhile," I said. "This cold weather, it doesn't get run a bit, it'll freeze up. I like to circulate the antifreeze. If you'd rather just drain the radiator, go ahead. Key is on the kitchen table. Merry Christmas, guys."

Leonard got his suitcase and we went out to his car.

As Leonard was backing out of the driveway, I said, "That was goddamn surreal."

"Yep," Leonard said. "Leon and Clinton, they're Andre Breton kind of guys. They're proof positive you ought not let people shoot a few baskets with your head. Let's you and me go to Burger King and have breakfast. I feel expansive."

"Who the fuck are those guys anyway?"

"They tried to beat me up. I whupped those motherfuckers like I was dustin' a rug."

"Both of them!"

"Not at the same time. On different days. They got word I was queer, so they jumped Raul at the Community Store. Didn't really hurt him, but roughed him up. Broke his Dr Pepper bottle. Scrambled a couple of his moon pies. Just took them in their hands and twisted them up inside the plastic wrappers. Really made them hard to eat. I went down to the store after it happened and found one of them—one with the left eye looks like it's got a disease, Leon, and kicked his ass so bad they had to carry him off. Kicked that muscle in the back of his leg so hard it paralyzed it for a while."

"Old Thai boxing trick," I said.

"Yep. Later that day, his brother came over to the house with a baseball bat, started beating on the door. I went out the back way and cracked him over the head with the barrel of my shotgun. Knocked him on his black ass."

"Of course, you didn't hurt him while he was down."

"That wouldn't be right. I just kicked him a little. Until both his eyes closed. They got so they like me now. They want I should teach them some self-defense."

"Jesus," I said.

Couple hours later we were out at my house in the country. I didn't light the heaters, but I made sure the water in the faucets was still dripping, then I threw some clothes together. Leonard had brought his pipe and tobacco with him, and while I packed he filled the pipe and lit it.

"Bring a gun," he said.

"I don't like guns," I said. "Bringing one causes trouble. Guns lead to guns."

"And if the other guy brings one and you don't, it causes you trouble. It leads to you being dead."

"It's all right with you, I'll pass. I thought we were just going to find Florida. I didn't think we were planning a shootout at the O.K. Corral."

"You're a little short on reality sometimes, Hap."

"I guess you're right. I suppose you brought a gun?"

"Shotgun. Broke it down, wrapped it in plastic. Got a couple revolvers and a couple of Winchester thirty-thirtys, not dismantled. Ammunition. It's all in the trunk."

"How about the gyro copter?"

"Trunk.”

Chapter 6

On the way to Grovetown, Leonard put a Hank Williams cassette in the player and we listened to that. I never got to play what I liked. I wanted to bring some cassettes of my own, but Leonard said it was his car, so we'd listen to his music. He didn't care much for what I liked. Sixties rock and roll.

Even Hank Williams couldn't spoil the beauty of the day, however, and the truth of the matter was, I was really starting to like his music, though I wasn't willing to let Leonard know.

It was cold as an Eskimo's ass in an igloo outhouse, but it was clear and bright and the East Texas woods were dark and soothing. The pines, cold or not, held their green, except for the occasional streaks of rust-colored needles, and the oaks, though leafless, were thick and intertwining, like the bones of some unknown species stacked into an elaborate art arrangement.

We passed a gap in the woods where the pulp wooders had been. It looked like a war zone. The trees were gone for a patch of twenty to thirty acres, and there were deep ruts in the red clay, made by truck tires. Mounds of stumps and limbs had been piled up and burned, leaving ash and lumps, and in some cases huge chunks of wood that had not burned up, but had only been kissed black by fire.

One huge oak tree stump, old enough to have dated to the beginning of the century, had taken on the shape of a knotty skull, as if it were all that was left of some prehistoric animal struck by lightning. Clear cutting, gasoline, and kitchen matches had laid the dinosaurs low. Driven by greed and the need for a satellite dish, pulp wooders had turned beauty to shit, wood to paper, which in turn served to make the bills of money that paid the pulpers who slew the gods in the first place. There was sad irony in all that. Somewhere. May saplings sprout from their graves.

Just past mid-day Hank was singing, for about the fifteenth time, "Why don't you love me like you used to do," when we reached the outskirts of Grovetown. Here the trees were thick and dark and somber. Low rain clouds had formed, turning the bright cold day gray and sad as a widow's thoughts. The charcoal-colored clouds hung over the vast forest on either side of the narrow, cracked highway as if they were puffy cotton hats, leaving only a few rays of sunlight to penetrate them like polished hat pins.

I watched the woods speed by, and thought about what was out there. We were on the edge of the Big Thicket. One of the great forests of the United States, and everything opposite of what the TV and movie viewer thinks Texas is about. The pulp wooders and the lumber companies had certainly raped a lot of it, like most of East Texas, but here there was still plenty of it left. For now.

Out there, in the Thicket, there were swampy stretches, creeks and timber so compact a squirrel couldn't run through it without aid of a machete. The bottoms were brutal. Freezing black slush in the winter, steamy and mosquito-swarmed in the summer, full of fat, poisonous water moccasins, about the most unpleasant snakes in creation.

When I was a child, an uncle of mine, Benny, a man wise to the ways of the woods, had gotten lost in the Thicket for four days. He lived off puddled water and edible roots. He had been one of those contradictory fellas who loved the woods and wildlife, and yet shot everything that wasn't already stuffed, and if the light were to have glinted off the eye of a taxidermied critter, he might have shot that too. He was such a voracious hunter my dad used him as an example of how I ought not be. It was my father's contention, and it's certainly mine, that hunting is not a sport. If the animals could shoot back, then it would be a sport. It is justifiable only for food, and for no other reason. After that, it's just killing for the sake of putting a lid on what still simmers deep in our primitive hearts.

But my Uncle Benny, a big, laughing man who I liked very much, was out late one summer night hunting coons for their pelts. He followed the sounds of his dogs deep into the Thicket, then the sounds went away, and he found that the foliage overhead was so thick he could see neither moon nor stars.

Benny wore a kind of headlamp when he hunted. I don't remember what the stuff was called, carbide, I think, but there were these pellets you put in the headlamp and lit, and they made a little stinky flame that danced out from the headband and made a light. Lots of hunters used them back then.

This headlamp went out and Benny dropped his flashlight while trying to turn it on, and couldn't find it. He spent hours crawling along the ground, but he couldn't locate the flashlight, and he couldn't relight the lamp because he'd gotten his matches wet by stepping waist deep into a hole full of stagnant water.

He finally fell asleep resting against the base of a tree, and was awakened in the night by something huge crashing through the brush. Benny climbed the tree by feel, damn near putting out his eye on a thorn that was part of a wrist-thick crawling vine that was trying to choke the tree out.

In the morning, after a night of squatting on a limb, he came down and found bear tracks. This was before the black bear had been nearly exterminated from the Thicket. In fact, there were still plenty of them in those days, and wild hogs too.

The tracks circled the tree and there were scratch marks where the bear had risen up on its hind legs, perhaps hoping to bring down a treat from overhead. The bear had missed reaching Uncle Benny by less than a foot.

Benny found his flashlight, but it was useless. He had stepped on it in the night, busting out the bulb. Even though it was morning, he found there was no way to truly see the sun because the limbs tangled together overhead and the leaves and pine needles spread out like camouflaging, tinting the daylight brown and green.

All day, as he trekked blindly about, the mosquitoes rose up and over him in black kamikaze squadrons so compact they looked as if they were sheets of close-weave netting. They feasted so often on the thorn scratch over his eye, that eye eventually closed. His lips swelled up thick and tight and his face ballooned. Everywhere he went he wore those mosquitoes like a coat of chain mail.

As the day slogged on, he discovered he had also gotten into poison ivy, and it was spreading over his body, popping up pustules on his feet and hands and face, and the more he scratched, the more it spread, until even his nuts were covered in the stuff. He used to say: "Poison ivy bumps were so thick, it pushed the hair out of my balls."

He told me he hurt so bad, was so lost, so scared, so hungry and thirsty, he actually considered putting the rifle in his mouth and ending it all. Later, that wasn't an option. Crossing through a low-lying area, he discovered what appeared to be a thick covering of leaves was nothing more than slushy swamp, and in the process of grabbing on to the exposed roots of a great willow tree to save himself from drowning, he lost his rifle in the muck.

Eventually he found his way out, but not by true woodcraft. By accident. Or in his words, "By miracle.” Benny came upon a gaunt steer, a Hereford/Long Horn mix. It was staggering and its great head hung almost to the ground. It was covered in crusted mud from its hoofs to its massive horns. It had obviously been mired up somewhere, perhaps trying to escape the mosquitoes.

Uncle Benny watched it, and finally it began to move, slow but steady, and he followed the thorn-torn steer through the thicket, sometimes clinging to its mud- and shit-coated tail. He clung and followed until it arrived at the pasture it had escaped from, through a gap in the barbed wire. Uncle Benny said when that steer finally broke through the briars and limbs and the light came through the trees and showed him the bright green of the pasture, it was like the door to heaven had been opened.

When the steer reached the emerald pasture, it bellowed joyfully, staggered, fell, and never rose. Its back legs and hindquarters were swollen up as if they were made of soaked sponge, and there were wounds that gurgled pus the color of primeval sin and thick as shaving foam.

Uncle Benny figured the steer had gotten into a whole nest of moccasins, or timber rattlers, and they'd struck it repeatedly. Steer might have been out there in the Thicket for a week. The fact that it had survived as long as it had was evidence of the heartiness of the Long Horn strain that ran through it. It died where it fell.

From there Benny made his way to the highway and found his car. His hunting dogs never showed up. He went there for a week and called their names where they had gone in with him, and he drove the back roads searching, but never a sign. To the best of my knowledge, though he continued to hunt from time to time, Benny never went into the deep woods again, and the infected eye gave him trouble all his life, until at the age of sixty-five he had to have it removed and replaced with a cheap glass one.

You don't fuck with the Big Thicket.

Grovetown wasn't much. A few streets, some of them brick, and down on the square an ancient courthouse and jail, a filling station/grocery store, and the Grovetown Cafe, and a lot of antique and thrift shops. There were benches out front of most of the buildings, and you had to figure if it wasn't Christmas Day and most of those places weren't closed there'd be old men sitting there, bundled up, talking, smoking, and almost managing to spit Red Man off the curb.

The filling station/grocery was one of the few places open, and as we drove past, a tall, thirtyish, handsome, pale-faced guy in a gray shirt, heavy coat, and gimme cap stood out by one of the pumps with a water hose, washing down oil and grease in the center of one of the drives. He stared at us as we drove by, looking like a guy who might wash your windshield, check your tires and oil without having to be asked, just like in the old days. Then, on the other hand, looks could be deceiving. Guy like that might piss on your windshield and let the air out of your tires as soon as look at you.

Christ, I was beginning to think like Leonard. Everyone was a scumbag until proven otherwise.

We passed a washateria with a sign painted on the glass. It was faded, but it was defiantly readable. NO COLORED.

Leonard said, "Man, I ain't seen nothing like that since nineteen seventy. Jefferson, Texas, I think it was."

We decided we ought to get a room, least for the night until we could get the lay of the land. There were no motels in Grovetown, but there was one old hotel and a boarding house. We checked both for lodging, but they didn't have rooms for us. They claimed to be closed for Christmas. I found this hard to believe. Hotels and boarding houses don't close for holidays, and as for not having rooms, the Hotel Grovetown was so goddamn vacant of life you could almost hear rats farting behind the wainscoting.

At the boarding house, called the Grovetown Inn, there weren't more than three cars in the parking lot, but when we came in together, asked for a room, the proprietors looked at us like we were animated shit piles asking to lie down free on clean white sheets.

Outside the Grovetown Inn, Leonard filled his pipe, said, "No room at the inn, brother. Think it's that shirt you're wearin' they don't like? Personally, I've always felt blue makes you look a little scary."

We drove around awhile. Leonard said, "Have you noted there's no black section of town around here?"

"Yep. I have."

"They haven't even given us black folk a place out next to the city dump, like usual. Or maybe by a sewage plant or a nuclear reactor. I ain't even seen a black person walking around."

"Maybe it's because of the holidays. I haven't seen that many whites walking around. And guess what else? There aren't any more places to stay. We've seen it all."

"I'm hungry. Cafe's open. Let's get something to eat, then figure on what to do next."

"They'll be glad to see us there, Leonard. Why don't I keep things simple for now, get us a couple of sandwiches to go?"

"Hey, I'll tell you now, I'm not going to anyone's back door or stand in a separate line just because I got a better tan than someone else. Get that straight in your head, Hap."

"I'm just wanting things easy. What worries me about you, is I think you like confrontation too much."

"And what worries me about you, Hap, is you don't."

I pulled over in front of the cafe, started to get out. Leonard put a hand on my arm. "You're right. I'm acting like an asshole."

"No argument."

"We're here to find Florida, not have me prove what a badass I am."

"Still, no argument."

"Get us something. We'll eat in the car. I'll give a civil rights speech later. Provided I can get someone to accompany me on guitar."

"I'll just be a minute."

The Grovetown Cafe was not a place you would mistake for a French restaurant. It was overly warm and the walls were decorated with badly painted ceramic birds and squirrels, and there was some of that really bad hillbilly music you hear from time to time but can't quite believe it. It's not even AM radio pop. It only plays in ancient towns with jukeboxes that have glass cases coated gray by oily hands. It's like generic heavy metal and rap. Who listens to this stuff on purpose? It sounds like some kind of joke. The sharp little notes clung to the air and stuck to my head like prickly pear thorns. They went well with the stench of old grease from the kitchen.

I waded through grease and music and found a stool and sat down and waited. From a back booth a couple of guys stared at me. They were in their thirties, healthy-looking, but they had the attitude of men with "back problems" on workdays. It's a mysterious ailment that seems to descend on a large percentage of the redneck population. I couldn't help but think they were drawing a check from somewhere. Some kind of compensation. Maybe they were watching me nervously because they thought I was an insurance man that had caught them without their back braces.

I figured, at night, after a hard day of smoking cigarettes, swigging coffee, and cussin' the niggers and liberals, they'd buy a couple of six-packs, go home and pass out in front of the TV set after beating the wife and kids, a half-eaten bag of generic-brand potato chips clutched to their chests.

Then again, here I was judging people I didn't even know. I was starting to be just like the people I despised. They were probably a couple of nuclear physicists on vacation, stopping in here to soak up the homey atmosphere.

I had to quit judging. Quit being unfair. And I had to face what I was really worked up about. Knowing I'd probably see Florida and have all the old feelings again. And it was cold, and I didn't like it. And I had fewer future prospects than the smallpox virus. In final analysis, I had a hard-on for the world and no place to put it.

I noticed one of the physicists had turned in the booth and the other was leaning out on his side, looking not just at me, but past me. I looked where they were looking, and I could see through the plate glass window, between the fly specks, Leonard's car. He was visible behind the wheel, his head back on the seat dozing.

I began to have those prejudgment thoughts again.

I took a deep breath and let it slide. I tried to remember and paraphrase a comforting Bible verse. "Judge not others, lest ye be judged.” Something like that. I also remembered a verse my daddy told me. "You end up havin' to hit some sonofabitch, don't just hit him once, and don't just hit to get his attention."

A fiftyish lady who might have been pretty if she'd had enough energy to hold herself straighter and her hair wasn't oily and stuck to her cheeks, came out of the back wiping wet flour on her apron. "What can I get you?"

"Couple hamburgers and large coffees to go. Some potato chips."

"It's early for hamburgers," she said.

"I missed breakfast. Got any fried pies?"

"No. We sell some candy at the register. Peanut patties, Tootsie Rolls, Mounds, Snickers, Milky Way. That's it."

"All right. Couple of peanut patties."

"That nigger out there will want more'n a couple of them patties," said one of the men in the back. "A nigger likes a peanut pattie. Next to what a woman's got, and a watermelon, ain't much they like better."

"And loose shoes," said the other fella. "And a warm place to shit."

"Boys," said the woman, "you watch your language in here."

I looked at them and smiled sadly. I began to understand why so many clichés persist. Too much truth in them. I gave them a real looksee for the first time.

Big motherfuckers. Not physicists. They looked like human bookends for the Adult Western Novel shelf. Both rednecked and stupid. The one talking almost had a mustache, or maybe he just hadn't quite got shaving down yet. I wished, just once in a while, the guys wanted to harass me or whip my ass would be short. Kind of small. Weak even. In business suits. Yankees. That would make things a little more all right.

Better yet, I wished those dudes would just leave me alone. What was it about me that I was the one always stepped in the doo-doo? If I walked ten miles around a cow lot to keep the manure off my shoes, I'd manage to find a fresh heap of dog shit to put my foot in.

"Better give me a couple creams to go with that coffee," I told the lady.

"Nigger working for you?" said the other man. This one was not a bad-looking guy, but he had a tavern tumor that was threatening the buttons on his paisley shirt, and a kind of smirk like he'd been corn-holing your wife and she'd told him to tell you so.

The lady said, "Boys, y'all ought to go hang out somewhere else.” Then to me: "I'll just be a minute. You want those well-done, don't you?"

I spoke so only she could hear. "Actually, I'd like them about as quick as I can get them."

She smiled. "They don't mean no harm. They just don't like niggers."

"Ah."

Now I felt better.

I glanced out at Leonard. He was really snoozing. In fact, he might have been hibernating. Great. Here I was with the hippo twins, and the Smartest Nigger in the World was tucked in for the winter.

The boys came over and sat on stools on either side of me.

"I ain't seen you before," said Paisley Shirt.

"Well," I said, "I don't get through here much. Buy you fellas some coffee?"

"Naw," said the other one. "We've had coffee."

"Lots of it," said Paisley Shirt.

"I don't know about you," I said, "but lots of coffee makes me nervous. In fact, maybe I shouldn't have got coffee with my lunch. I've had too much this morning already."

"You look a little nervous," said Paisley Shirt. "Maybe you ought to give up coffee altogether."

"I just might," I said.

"Me and my brother," said Paisley Shirt, "we don't have trouble with coffee. We don't have trouble with beer, wine, or whiskey."

"What about Christmas ants?" I said. "You got Christmas ant trouble, I know two guys you ought to meet."

"Christmas ants?" said Bad Mustache.

The woman called from the back then. Her voice was a little halfhearted, like she was calling a dog she figured had gotten run over. "Y'all go back and sit down, now."

"We're all right, Mama," said Paisley Shirt.

"Mama?" I said.

"Uh huh," said Bad Mustache. "What's this about Christmas ants?"

"Little bastards are serious trouble where I come from," I said. "You think fire ants are hell, you get into some of them Christmas ants, well, those buggers won't never let go."

"I ain't never heard of no Christmas ants," said Paisley Shirt.

"Neither had most anybody else in LaBorde until yesterday," I said. "But you'll read about it in the papers today or tomorrow, see it on the news. They're epidemic there. Brought in from Mexico, they think. In a crate of bananas. Or a shipment of cigars. They're deadly dudes, these Christmas ants."

"Wait a minute," said Bad Mustache. "Is that like them ants in that movie where they take over this plantation and this guy—"

"Charlton Heston," I said.

"Yeah, I guess . . . you've seen it?"

"Yep," I said. "And that's exactly what I'm talking about. But that was only a picture. They couldn't show it the way it is. I tell you, LaBorde's a mess. I think the loss of life is in the hundreds. Maybe the thousands by now. The guy in the car, Doctor Pine. He's from the government. World's expert on Christmas ants. One reason he's passed out is he's been up all night battling them. He lost."

"A nigger expert?" said Paisley. "There's your goddamn problem."

"I don't know," I said. "He had some good ideas, but the ants were too entrenched. I'll be honest with you. I work for the city there. Water Department. We were the first to catch on to the epidemic. Lots of people don't give us credit. They don't think much of the Water Department, but they don't know the things we see. Alligators. Snakes. Christmas ants. You can't drown those little bastards. The Christmas ants, I mean. And you better not have a banana, or some kind of fruit in your house. They track to the stuff like a pig to corn. Anyway, what I was saying is this. I'm not going back. Dr. Pine out there wants to go back, and he can if he wants, but not me. The ants have gotten too goddamn big for this cowboy."

"They grow?" said Paisley Shirt.

I smiled. "Look, it's not a science-fiction movie. It's not like they're ten feet tall. That's bullshit. They only get about the size of a rat. Some of them do, I mean. Most of them, they're more mouse or mole size."

"Naw," said Bad Mustache. "You're pulling our dicks."

"I wouldn't think of pulling your dick," I said. "Listen here, I wouldn't have believed it either had I not been there. These ants, they don't get that big in their own environment. But they thrive here. No one knew that until this week. What they've discovered, and it's something no one would have suspected, is that the tropical weather was keeping them small. They get a little cold snap, bam, they're big as rodents. It has something to do with the way they eat and the way their metabolism deals with the natural sugars and starches in human flesh."

"Human flesh?" Bad Mustache said.

"Uh huh," I said. "It's not a horror movie where they swarm someone and eat every inch of skin off of them. But they leave bad bites. And they can cause death, and have. Like I said, in the hundreds."

"They bite you to death?" said Bad Mustache.

"I'm a little sketchy on if it's the bite or the poisons in their system that kills humans. They do take a lot of meat with them, though. Actually, you'd have to get Dr. Pine t0 explain it to you."

"Wow!" said Paisley Shirt.

"Wow, indeed," I said.

"But why do you call them Christmas ants?" Bad Mustache asked.

"Again, you got me. I'm no ant expert. Maybe because they were discovered around Christmastime. That's what I figure."

The lady came out with my hamburgers.

"LaBorde," said Paisley Shirt. "That's not that far from here."

"No it isn't," I said. I got up, went over to the register, and called back to them. "I wouldn't alarm myself. I'd just be alert. Watch the ground. Especially at sunset and sunrise. That's when they like to travel."

The lady took my money at the register. She said, "Those boys are so dumb, I sometimes think maybe my kids were switched at birth, and they gave me these two jackasses. All they know is what they see on the TV."

"Maybe they ought to watch the educational channel. Last night they had a great National Geographic special on bears. I tell you, it tantalized me to the point I couldn't sleep afterwards."

"I like a good nature program myself," she said.

I got my change, and started out. Paisley Shirt said, "Hey, you said there were two guys we ought to meet."

"Well," I said, "I meant you would have liked them. They're back in LaBorde. Or were. But, you know . . . the ants."

"You been jacking with us, ain't you?" said Paisley Shirt.

"There's lots of people who've ignored the facts of scientific research," I said. "All of it to their detriment. Believe what you want, it's nothing to me. It's not my job to educate the masses. I work for the Water Department. But I will say this. I'm proud of that. I don't care what anyone else thinks about the Water Department. I'm proud."

I went out to the car and got in. I shook Leonard. He came around slowly and looked at me. "Man, I sort of passed out."

"Let's go."

Leonard started the car as the brothers came out of the cafe, stood on the sidewalk and looked at us. Leonard watched them a moment, backed out and drove off.

"Trouble?" he asked.

"No. But I will say this. It's not every day you can actually step into a science-fiction episode of The Andy Griffith Show by way of Deliverance."

Chapter 7

We drove out the way we'd come, stopped off at a little roadside park we'd passed. We got out under the pearl gray sky and ate our hamburgers and drank our coffee and rested our elbows on the concrete table. It was cold and the air smelled wet. Blue-jays, bold as priests, came out of the woods and hopped around the table looking for crumbs. I don't think we left too many. We were starved.

"I could do that again," Leonard said. "Even if it did taste as if it was rubbed under someone's armpit first."

"Frankly, short of the meat being kneaded between the cheeks of a fat man's ass, I could have eaten it anyway."

"And how old were those peanut patties? Them peanuts were like gravel."

"The peanut patties aren't nearly as big a problem as the fact we still don't know where we're going to stay. Did you have an urge for two of those, by the way? The peanut patties, I mean?"

"What?"

"Nothing. Buddy, I tell you, the vibes from that town, from that cafe, it's like going back to the middle sixties, when I was marching for civil rights and getting my head cracked. Not only because I was for civil rights, but because I was white and marching for civil rights. You know, I don't know I'm brave enough to do what I did then. It was all going on now, I think I'd hide in the house."

"It is going on now, and you're not hiding in the house. You're back in the shit. You weren't special brave then, Hap. You were young and stupid and overly idealistic. You're still the last two, even if the idealistic part is slightly tainted."

"What amazes me, Leonard, is you're more of an optimist than I am. You even thought your time in Vietnam was well spent. If anyone should be bitching, it should be you. A black guy used up and thrown out. You hadn't gone to war, man, no telling what you'd have made of yourself."

"I don't blame anyone or anything for who I am or what I do. I consider myself just fine, Hap. I make my own choices, my own decisions, I sail my own ship till it crashes. Thing with you, is you actually feel guilty you're not on the cover of Time magazine. Deep down, you believe that shit Florida used to tell you about how you weren't ever gonna amount to anything or do anything. You think to be important you got to be some kind of Wall Street stockbroker or Nobel Prize winner. Listen here. You're a good man and my friend, and we're true as we know how to be to what we think is right. I don't know what else there is that matters. All that other shit is just cake decoration."

"Thanks, Leonard."

"That's all right. I didn't mean any of it."

"Now that it's established we're good people and righteous friends, we still don't have a place to stay."

"We might try the black folks. I figure the other side of town is where they hang out. They got to be around, all this field work and lumbering has to be done. They got to be there so

white folks can tell them what to do. And, of course, they need a nigger to hang now and then."

"Good thing you showed up, huh?"

Leonard looked at the sky. "You know, this weather is creepy. Last time I saw a sky like this it turned super-cold and full of ice, and bad things happened. I can still feel the pain in my leg now and then. And it was all your fault too."

"I remember. But the clouds look to me more like they're filled with rain. I think we're in for a hell of a soaking."

"We don't find a place, we could just go on back for tonight. Regroup, start over in the next day or two."

"I want to find Florida. It won't be any easier a day or two from now, even if the weather is better. And it could be worse. Seeing Grovetown, I'm a little nervous for her welfare. Florida has to be staying somewhere."

"It's logical that she'll be in the black section."

"Probably, but for protocol's sake, I think a good place to start is the Chief of Police. If she was doing research on this jail hanging, you know she talked to him. We might get something from the Chief that'll save us some steps."

And now, cruising back to Grovetown, eyes closed, listening to the tires humming, I tried to tell myself I wasn't really worried much. Tried to convince myself I didn't know Leonard so well that I could be certain he was worried too and didn't want to say anything to make me more uptight than I was. And maybe I was sensing nothing of the kind from Leonard. He had his own heartaches. Raul was gone.

But Raul wasn't dead.

Jesus. Don't let Florida be dead, and don't let that kind of bullshit get in your thinking, Hap, you jinx, you. Because if she's dead, that makes two, back to back. Then I was thinking about Florida, about her coffee-colored skin, soft as butter, the way she smiled, the white, near perfect teeth, the long smooth

legs and the way she whispered to me when we made love. And there were the more primitive thoughts as well; the ones that are as real as any other. The way she took me inside her and moved her ass and made me feel strong and masculine, and loved me until the world went away and I was centered. A nirvana where all past and present and future moments were non-existent.

Shit, that was good. I got home, I had to write that down.

That's right, Hap, clown on out. Try not to think about the fact that you thought things between you and Florida were going to be wonderful and forever. And then she was gone.

But she hadn't married Hanson. I liked to think I was part of the reason. That she loved me still.

Yeah. And now and then, I liked to believe I would live forever too, and that I wouldn't age past where I was now and the meaning of life would soon come to me, and would not disappoint me when I knew it.

Sometimes I feared I knew the meaning of life. Simplicity itself. We're born to propagate, then we die. In my case, or so it seemed, I was merely born to die.

Clear the head, Hap, ole buddy, you loser times two. No bad thoughts today. No letting a heavy gray sky hold you hostage. No memories you can't deal with. A step at a time. Keep an even heartbeat and roll on down the road.

But then I thought of Trudy, my ex-wife, dead now for ... my God, what was it?

Four years.

Jesus.

It seemed like yesterday.

It seemed like a thousand years ago.

Blond, long-legged beauty with a smile like an angel and a misguided heart. And it had been winter then too. I nearly lost Leonard then as well, and that too had been my fault.

Okay, Trudy is dead and gone, Hap, I says to my ownself, but you don't know about Florida. You're overreacting. She's all

right. You'll find her. If not today, tomorrow. Alive. She may not be happy to see you. Might think you're a meddling sonofabitch, and you are, but when you see her, and she's okay, that's all that will matter.

She's all right, Hap, my man.

She's fine.

Fit as a fiddle.

Ripe as a peach.

A roll of thunder. A crack of lightning.

I opened my eyes and turned and looked at Leonard in the cloud-suffocated light. He looked at me briefly with no expression, his fingers flexed on the steering wheel. He turned back to his driving.

The clouds were black now, with a little spoiled milk in them. They rolled down low and came in over the highway like hell's own tumbleweeds. The windshield turned dark as early evening.

Leonard pulled on the headlights and turned on the wipers as it started to rain.

Chapter 8

Back in Grovetown, at the Chief of Police's office, a middle-aged lady with a sprayed, bleached blond hairdo high enough to house a colony of African wasps told us Chief Cantuck had gone out to investigate a fire, and she gave us directions. She eyed Leonard as if he might spring on her and rape her at any moment. She had a little aluminum Christmas tree on one corner of her desk and it was surrounded by a city of Christmas cards from well-wishers; she leaned in that direction, as if she might decide to hide behind them.

Back in the car, I said, "You made that lady nervous, Leonard. She thought you were going to try and take her on her desk."

"Wishful thinking. Actually, I wanted to fuck that hairdo she had, just in case there was something in it needed fucking. That little gap in it, right over her widow's peak, it reminded me of a butthole."

"Knowing you like I do," I said, "I hate it when someone says you aren't romantic."

We followed directions, drove out to where the Chief's car was parked beside the road, along with a rickety fire truck. The rain had temporarily subsided, but the sky was still ripe with it, and it didn't take a weatherman to see it would come again, and maybe harder.

The Chief, a fat man wearing a straw hat and boots with a khaki pants leg inside one and outside the other, watched the house burn, his hands behind his back. The rain hadn't slowed this baby down a bit. The firemen were all volunteers in regular clothing with a couple of fire hats and one Scott Pack between them—not that they needed it. They were on or around the truck and had a weak spew of water sputtering from a thick white hose. One of them got a brainstorm, got off the truck, turned on a leaky garden hose and started spewing that through a window that had been blown out by the hot pressure of the fire. He might as well have been pissing on an oil well blaze. Two other guys were eating Hostess Twinkies, one of them managing to chew with a cigarette in one corner of his mouth.

"We seem to have this thing about fire and the law lately," I said.

"That's the truth," Leonard said.

The house, which from the looks of things had never been any great shakes, was a lost cause. I'd had enough experience from Leonard's fires to know when a house was a goner, and this sonofabitch was a goner.

We got out of the car and walked over to the Chief. He noticed us out of the corner of his left eye. Rain was dripping off the brim of his hat. He had little pop eyes, like a Boston terrier, and his chin went back and low and reminded me of an iguana. He lifted his head slightly as if he was sighting us from a rock. As he did, rain splashed into his left eye and he blinked it out. Black goo, the source being the Red Man package poking out of his shirt pocket, oozed out of the corners of his mouth and slid into wrinkles that served as culverts on either side of his chin.

His belly moved when he moved, and sometimes when he didn't. Like it had a mind of its own and places it wanted to go. Worse though, even if you didn't want to look, you couldn't help but notice the bulge in his pants. He'd obviously been ruptured and was in need of a truss. His right leg looked to be sprouting a grapefruit.

Near the grapefruit, riding in a long black holster, was a .44 Western-style revolver. Chief Cantuck appeared to be in his fifties. Maybe older. A face like that, a belly like that, it was hard to tell.

"Who are you?" he said, turning to give us a full view.

"Hap Collins," I said, and we shook hands.

Leonard stuck out his hand and the Chief hesitated, then took it the way you might take hold of something dead. Leonard grabbed Chief Cantuck's hand hard and shook briskly. "Leonard Pine, Smartest Nigger in the World."

"What?" said the Chief.

"It's just a little joke of his," I said.

"Well, all right. Look here, what do y'all want? This is law and fire department business. You ain't supposed to be hanging around here."

I said, "Lady at your office, with a hair cone on her head, said we'd find you here."

"Yeah, well, say what you want and get it over with," Chief Cantuck said. "And I don't know about you, but I think that cone of hair looks pretty good."

"Appears you've lost this one," Leonard said, nodding at the house.

"Yeah, guess it does," said Cantuck. "No big loss. White trash rental. Bill Spray owns it, rents it to anyone with thirty-five dollars a month or any gal wants to grease his rope. One or both of them things, and the place is yours on a monthly basis, long as he don't have to fix nothing."

"Guess it wasn't the sort of joint attracted the Rockefellers," I said.

"No, it wasn't. But a couple hundred dollars' worth of plywood, a few two-by-fours and some tin and cardboard, Bill can throw this buddy up again and start rentin'. Too bad the renters weren't inside. I'd have liked it all right had they gotten cooked with it. I been called out here half a dozen times by the neighbors. Always fightin'. Big ole fat gal and a couple of men lived here. Those two men fight over that sow like she was goddamn Marilyn Monroe.

"Last time I was in here they had all kinds of pornography strewn about. Them magazines with women with their hands up their holes, or their asses in the air with a carrot jammed in it. Stuff like that. And it wasn't just pussy magazines. They had'm some sex toys. Them little vibrating plastic dicks with knobs on 'era, like old cucumbers. Look here."

He pointed to something in the ashes: two large batteries lying in a flesh-colored puddle the shape of a large banana.

"That's one of them plastic dicks. Just me thinking about that thing being shoved up that old whore's hole makes me kinda woozy. There's some Elvis cards, though. I kicked them aside to let them smoke out."

"Beg pardon?" I said.

"Elvis cards." He walked over a ways and kicked at something. It was a charred deck of playing cards with Elvis's picture on the back.

"The heat gets off of em, I'll probably keep those."

"Why?" Leonard asked.

"Elvis is on them."

"Ah," Leonard said.

"It ain't the kind of music you people listen to," Cantuck told him. "My wife, she thinks Elvis is God. She'll like them cards, burned or not. Now what the fuck you want?"

"We're looking for a friend of ours," I said, "and we thought

you might know something about her. Her name is Florida Grange."

"Colored gal?" Cantuck said.

"Could be her," Leonard said. "Depends on what color she was."

"You tryin' to be funny?" Cantuck said.

"I didn't say I was the Funniest Nigger in the World, I said I was the Smartest Nigger in the World."

"You're about to be the Most Ass-Whupped Nigger in the World."

Leonard got that look in his eye. The one he gets when he's burning the house next door or administering a serious head beating to some fool who has pushed too far.

"Come on, Leonard," I said. "Shut up, would you?"

Leonard studied Cantuck for a moment, turned and walked back to his car and got inside.

"He's just worried," I said. "You see, she's his sister."

"Yeah?" Cantuck said. "Well, I'll tell you something. I don't give a flying shit if she's his fucking Siamese twin and she left town with his left nut in her pocket. Ain't no nigger gonna be funny on me. And what the fuck you doin' hangin' around with a coon like that? We don't cotton to that shit here. I got nigger friends, but I don't associate with 'em."

"You certainly sound close, you and your nigger friends. Chief, anyone ever tell you guys you might be a little out of step? Behind the times?"

"Yeah, and we don't give a flying shit."

"You've heard of civil rights, of course?"

"Yeah, and I uphold them, they got to be upheld. That's what that gal was here about, some nigger's civil rights. Ain't my fault the stupid fuck hung himself."

"I don't care about any of that. I just want to know about Florida."

Cantuck paused, gave me a look I couldn't quite decipher. He said, "Comely nigger. I've always said I'd fuck a nigger, but wouldn't tell anybody, but that one I'd fuck and maybe brag on it a time or two. She had an ass on her."

Deep breath, Hap. He's just a stereotypical ignorant redneck. You've known them before. Nothing you say will alter their thinking. Nothing short of death will change them.

"You see," I said, "they work for me. Leonard and Florida. They're good workers, and now and then, well, me and her. Shit, Chief, after what you just said, you know what I mean."

I grinned in what I hoped was a lecherous manner.

Cantuck smiled. "My daddy used to tell me a nigger gal wasn't good for but one thing, and they were damn good at that. He was Chief here way back, and he dealt with a lot of niggers. Niger gals paid him a lot of fines in a special manner. If you know what I mean. I take after my old man in that department. I'll fuck anything that ain't nailed down and has a hole. In fact, when I was a boy, I tore the ass out of a few chickens putting the dick to 'em. Got so every time my mama found a dead chicken she'd take the belt to me, whether I did it or not. Pigs squealed at night, Mom came in my room and beat me."

"No wonder you got a strained nut."

"Yeah. Well, maybe that's what happened. I do dearly love to fuck . . . My nut really look bad?"

"Well, I was you, I'd get a truss or something. Shit, man, don't that hurt?"

"Not if I turn kinda casual like."

"Not to dismiss a man's nuts too lightly, Chief, but where is Florida?"

"Hell, boy, it's gettin' cold out here. Let's you and me go sit in the car and talk."

I got in on the passenger side. There was a shotgun on a rack between myself and Cantuck. He cranked the car and turned on the heater. On the dash, and stuck all about the car, there was

every kind of charity sticker you could imagine. Muscular dystrophy. Diabetes. Cancer.

"You give to all those charities?" I asked. "Or do you just collect stickers?"

"I give," he said. "A dollar or two here and there. It ain't like I'm raking in the big bucks here, so I don't give much, but I give. I think it's something you ought to do. Christian charity. I had a son had MD. He died of it just last year. Since then, and even before, I can't stand to see nobody crippled, not even a nagger."

He sat quietly for a moment, staring at the MD sticker. "That boy of mine," he said. "Jimmy. He got so bad, only way he could get around was me totin' him. He was eleven. My youngest. Damn good age for a boy, but for him it was hell. Spittin' image of me. Good boy. Never did nothing but try and be good. Made good grades until he got so bad he just couldn't study. His body turned to jelly. Just goddamn jelly."

"I'm sorry."

"He was a good boy. He was a good boy right to the end, trying to cheer me up. Trying to smile. He died with me holding his hand. It was so little, I closed mine, you couldn't even see his. He hadn't had that shit, hell, he'd gone to college and made something of himself. God bless him."

"I truly am sorry, Chief."

"Well, don't whine about it. You didn't know him. Wasn't nothing to you. I shouldn't even have said anything to you about it ... now, this nigger gal."

"Florida."

"Yeah, Florida. She came to the jail, asked a few questions, left, and I didn't see her again, 'cept around town. Over at the filling station getting some gas in that little car of hers."

"A gray Toyota."

"That's the one. Real sporty."

"That's all you know about her?"

"That's it. I heard a few of the boys mention they'd seen her and that she dressed a little too rich, if you know what I mean, but had she been a couple shades paler, they might have taken her to church, and to a little social after."

I thought of Florida and her dresses. Mostly short. Mostly tight. I thought of the story Charlie told me. I had a sudden red-hot and angry vision of the Chief with an upholstery needle threaded with wire.

"Let me ask a couple of questions that don't have to do with Florida," I said. "This guy that hung himself in jail. Why?"

"Who's to know a nigger's mind? I wasn't even around. I was out of town."

"Lot of hangings in your little jail?"

Chief Cantuck studied me a moment. "You a reporter? The colored gal said she was doing some kind of article. Said she was a lawyer too, though I ain't sure about that."

"She was."

"If she was, then you just shit on yourself, pilgrim. She was a lawyer, then she didn't work for you, did she?"

"Well, she did law work."

"I think you're full of it, buddy."

I had been feeling superior and condescending to the old man, and he'd been baiting me all along. Dropping sugar in front of me until he got me close enough to whack with the swatter. His tone was different now. A lot less cracker. "You think you're so smart," he said. "Well, I got to tell you, you ain't that smart."

"I see that," I said.

He casually slipped the leather trigger guard off his revolver and shifted toward me in the seat, his hand resting on the butt of his pistol. A bead of sweat formed immediately on my upper lip and ran into my mouth.

"Listen here. I knew you and that smartass nigger were full of shit soon as I saw you. Ain't a word come out of your mouth that's even kin to the truth. There's nothing about you boys that fits, so I figure you're trouble. More do-gooders trying to come down here and check on our nigger trouble and make it into something it isn't. I haven't heard one do-gooder ask about the people this nigger killed. The white man this guitar plunker cut up for a few dollars."

"I didn't say anything about his guilt or innocence. I'm just asking about Florida."

"Don't take me for a fool 'cause I got swollen nuts and bad teeth and I eat too much. I'm on the dime much as you are, College Boy."

"Actually, I dropped out. And I'm way past being a boy."

"Well, you should have finished college, boy. Might have learned something. Let me tell you this, Swiftie. That little nigger came snooping around asking questions. She wanted to see if that boy was murdered. She figured the Caucasian Knights was in on it. Let me tell you something. The Knights are ripe in this town, and they're mostly nothing but a bunch of mean bastards, just like the Klan, which is really all they are, but now and then they do a good thing or two. There's folks need killin'."

"Then you're saying the Klan, or these Knights, killed the prisoner?"

"'Course I ain't. But I'm tellin' you this. The Knights take note of meddlers, and they don't worry much about a dead nigger, but they worry about the ones worry about a dead nigger. Understand me?"

"I believe I do. Your hand on that gun, is that some kind of threat?"

"Yeah," he said, taking the gun out of its holster and laying it on his knee. "It could be. And you see, sometimes, you wave one around like this ..." He waved the revolver in my direction and placed it back on his knee, "and you got your mind on something else, a gun can go off, even if you was just showin' it to a fella wanted to see it."

"That would be murder, Chief. My friend in the car wouldn't like that."

"And I wouldn't care. He might have an accident too. You and him both might end up in the ashes of that fire there, and them firemen might be settin' you on fire instead of puttin' you out. I'm not saying they would, but it could happen. I mean, shit, boy, you two look to me to be the type would like them plastic dicks and stuff. You might even have been with the white trash lives here, and say the white trash went out for some beer and left you two in the house, and you were fucking around with some kind of electric dick or something. Started a fire. I even like the idea of us finding them rubber dicks up your butts, you know, just for looks . . . But however it's played, we come up with a cooked nigger in a house where white trash lives, we could pin damn near anything on the trash lives there.

"As it is, they're gonna be leaving town, just because I'm fed up with them. They don't know it yet, but when I find them, they're gonna be leaving. And right away. It ain't like they're gonna need to pack. And if they don't want to leave, I'm gonna persuade them. I'm hoping I won't have to persuade you and maybe take them down with you to make things look nice and pretty."

"Me either," I said, and looked carefully at the gun on his knee. His fingers flexed against it, making me as nervous as a goat at a barbecue.

"Listen here, Swiftie. There's been folks worried about dead niggers before, and some of them ain't so worried now. About nothing. Get me?"

"You're coming across."

"Let me add something to that. Ain't a Klan member in this town or around it ever been convicted of shit. That sort of line your ducks up, Swiftie?"

"I believe it does."

It had started to rain again. The water ran in such thick rivulets on the windshield I couldn't see out. The car heater was too warm.

"One last thing," Cantuck said. "For the record. That gal. I didn't do a thing to her and have no reason to suspicion anyone I know did. Clear? But I wouldn't put anything past the Knights, and contrary to what you probably think, I found out they did something to someone didn't need it done, I'd come down on them."

"Sure."

"Now, you get in the car with your pet nigger, and you two go back to wherever you come from, where you and him can eat and sleep together, or whatever it is you want to do with niggers. But, fella, don't get in my way again, and don't ever let me hear you mention my balls again. It ain't polite. And lastly, I ain't never fucked a chicken in my life, but I thought it was the sort of thing you'd expect. You fuck with me, Swiftie, you better be thinking two and three moves ahead."

"What about the pigs? Did you fuck them?"

"Get out of the car, Swiftie."

When I closed Leonard's car door, Leonard said, "Learn anything?"

"Yeah, you wouldn't believe the stuff the Chief knows about the political situation in Albania."

"Yeah, but I bet that fucker don't know their major imports and exports."

"That cracker isn't as stupid as we thought, Leonard. Mean. Dangerous. Ignorant. But stupid he isn't. And subtle he isn't. In fact, his very non-subtle statements about our temporary position in his community were so clearly stated, I'd like you to crank the car right now, and leave."

Leonard looked where I was looking. The firefighters were no longer fighting the fire. They were all turned in our direction, glaring. One of them was chewing a fresh Twinkie and the sticky white innards were covering his mouth like mad dog foam.

"I think maybe they ain't never seen anyone cute as us," Leonard said.

Chief Cantuck got out of his car and walked in our direction, stopped and waited. He had his gun in his hand, held by his side.

"He thinks we're cute too," Leonard said.

"Just start and go," I said.

"I hate being buffaloed," Leonard said. "And I hate a man thinks I don't appreciate Elvis."

"Yeah, but I hate more being dead."

Leonard fumed silently, fired up his junker and started to drive. Chief Cantuck leaned down and smiled tobacco at us through Leonard's rain-beaded car window as we went by.

When I looked back over my shoulder I saw him stooped by the remains of the house, working those wet, smoking Elvis cards toward him with a stick.

Chapter 9

We drove back into town beneath a churning black sky kicked open and brightened now and then by cruel bursts of lightning. By the time we wheeled into downtown Grovetown, Leonard had on a rockin' zydeco tape even I could appreciate. Those dudes were blowing accordion music hot as devil farts through Leonard's cheap speakers, melting down the wires, making me hungry for gumbo.

We stopped at the filling station and I got out and got hold of one of the serve-yourself nozzles. Before I was allowed to put in the gas, Leonard had to finish hearing out a song on the tape player, and since his cheap system didn't play unless the motor was running, I stood outside willing and waiting with my gas nozzle cocked and ready, tapping my boot to the jump of the music.

Acquaintance of mine, Gerald Matter, who used to own a gas station in downtown LaBorde, told me once, you never load in the gas with the car motor running, or you might get a little

spark, end up with your ass on the far side of the moon. "Safety first" was Gerald's motto.

'Course, Gerald lost the station for lack of payment back in nineteen seventy-eight, but he hadn't quite gotten the gas and oil business out of his blood. He did him a stretch in prison for trying to rob a filling station in Gilmer with a sharpened butter knife. Fat lady that ran the place came over the counter after him, got him by the throat, and beat the pure-dee dog shit out of him, took his knife away. She then proceeded to carve off part of his head before she could be subdued by a handful of shocked customers waiting on their free "crystal" dish with a fill-up.

Gerald has done his time and he's out now and he might even be a little smarter. But he's grown bashful, wears hats indoors and out to hide what's missing on top of his head, though except for a flap cap he wears now and then, it doesn't do a damn thing for his absent left ear. These days Gerald has abandoned gas and oil and has a little carpet-cleaning business and likes to go to bed early.

While I waited with the nozzle, the tall, pale-faced man we had seen earlier came out in his thick coat with his cap in his hand, picked up on Clifton Chenier calling out "Eh, Petite Fille," from Leonard's tape deck, smiled, sang a verse with Clifton, jiggled a little and flop-kneed on out to the car. His long body, pasty face, and gyrations made him look like an albino grasshopper on speed.

He reached the car dancing and grinning, stopped and laughed. "Damn," he said, "give an accordion to a redneck and all he can do is play 'Home on the Range' or some goddamn polka, give it to a coonass and he'll make the music crawl up your butt and play with your kidneys."

"That's right," Leonard said. He was standing outside the driver’s door, leaning on the rooftop, listening. When the song finished, Leonard cut off the motor, and I started pumping gas.

"How're y'all," said the pale-faced man. He had a grin as infectious as syphilis.

"Good," I said. "Cold and a little damp, but good."

"Well, accordin' to the weather report, we're all gonna get colder and damper. Air is blowing ass over tea kettle down from Canada, churning like pig feet a boilin', only the air ain't warm. There's penguins would faint they knew something like this was comin'."

"Damn," I said. "That bad?"

"Let's just say them suitcases you got in back of your car there better not be filled with Hawaiian shirts and sun hats . . . hey, speakin' of pig's feet boilin'—"

"Were we?" I said.

"Well, I was," said the man. "I got some pickled ones inside that're peppered just right. Fifty cents a pig stump. You might like to try 'em. Just got 'em in. Can't keep 'em, they go so fast. Fellow I know out in the country makes 'em. Them buddies are so spicy, you eat one, you'll be able to do a push-up with your dick."

"Maybe I could use some of that," I said. "I was younger, I woke up and did a push-up with my dick without pickled pig's feet. Now, got to get enough sleep to do it, and then when I try to do it, I need sleep."

"Ain't that the shits?" he said. "Just when you get older and figure out what it's all about, what it's all about you ain't able to do."

"Say, listen," I said. "We're gonna get a couple of cans of oil too, but we're looking for someone. Main reason we stopped in here."

Leonard said, "Lady named Florida Grange."

"Oh, yeah. Nice lady. A looker too. She was around here a few days." He looked at Leonard. "You kin?"

"Nope," Leonard said.

"Boyfriend? Either of you?" He gave me a good hard look. "Though in this town, you better not say you are if you are."

"Nope," I said. "We're not boyfriends."

"She owe you money?"

"Nope."

"Y'all some kinda law?"

"Nope."

"Well then, let me say I tried serious hard and major purposeful to put the make on that little gal, but she wasn't havin' any. I think she has a thing about white guys. And not a good thing."

"Trust me," I said. "She does."

"Ah, so you tried her too?" he said.

"It didn't work out," I said. "You might say I'm an ex-boyfriend. But what we're lookin' for is to help out her current boyfriend who's worried about her. And we want to do it because we're friends of hers too. Sort of. Used to be."

"I see," the man said. "I think."

It grew very dark suddenly, then there was a crack of thunder and a sizzling race of lightning, and right after that it seemed as if a great tidal wave washed over us. The rain came down so hard it nearly knocked us flat.

"Goddamn," said the pale-faced man, putting his cap on. "There it is. Y'all come on in and we'll talk."

Leonard followed the man inside. I topped off the tank, hung up the gas nozzle, and damn near swam to the door. Inside, the store was warm and the lights were on, and the cold rain and midday darkness outside made the place seem tight and cozy.

The joint was stocked with pretty basic goods. Breads, crackers, a lunch meat cooler housing pressed ham, bologna, olive and liver loaf. There were soft drinks, peanuts, chips, that kind of stuff. Cans of oil, transmission and brake fluids. A rack of John Deere caps. A few straw cowboy hats. A cardboard display of colored plastic combs, and on the wall a dusty calendar over ten years out of date with a gorgeous, big-breasted woman in shorts and a halter top holding a wrench and smiling; the logo above her read January, and above that Snap Tight Tools.

Next to the cash register were two large jars containing yellowish brine water, and by my standards, some rather nasty looking pig's tootsies. Didn't appear to me that before they pickled them little delights they had washed the pig shit out from between the hooves, but maybe that was just a concentration of black pepper and meat gelatin.

There was a homemade oil barrel stove in the middle of the room, and there were lawn chairs and wicker-bottomed chairs pulled all around it. Near a couple chairs were two tobacco-splattered cuspidors, and the floor around them, which was covered with newspaper, was also splattered. Beneath the stove there was a large square of scarred, fire-spotted linoleum, and on it were tufts of dust bunnies, a chewing tobacco wrapper, and something that looked like blue glass or plastic that caught the electric light and pulled it in and winked it back.

There was a small stack of firewood next to the stove and there was a hatchet stuck deep in one of the logs and a gray lizard lay by the hatchet, attempting to trick us into thinking he was nothing more than a wood knot.

At the back of the store was an aluminum Christmas tree covered in lights and colored ornaments. The lights weren't on, and the angel at the top of the tree was too heavy for the little tip, so it leaned to one side, as if it were about to be cast from heaven.

Leonard paid for the gas and bought some oil, and when he got his change back, the pale-faced man said, "Y'all want some coffee?"

"You bet," Leonard said.

"I got a pot goin' in back. Sit down."

We took us a spot by the stove and sat. Leonard eyed the cuspidors and the tobacco wads, said, "Looks of this place, this ole boy talks to everybody, and for some time. He might know something nobody else does."

"And maybe just the weather report and where to get pig's feet," I said.

A moment later the man came back with two cups of coffee. He gave us a cup apiece, disappeared into the back of the store again, came back with a cup for himself and some ragged white towels. He tossed the towels at us. We used them to dry off. The station man sat his cup on the stove and took off his heavy coat and draped it over a chair near the stove, sat in another chair, put his feet up close to the heat.

"Now, you're lookin' for this gal?" he asked.

"That's right," I said.

"By the way, my name's Tim Garner."

"Glad to meet you," I said, and Leonard and I leaned forward and took turns shaking Tim's hand and giving our names. When we finished, Tim kicked back again and sipped his coffee.

"What do you mean she's missing?"

"Last time anyone's seen her we know about was here," Leonard said.

"No shit?"

"No shit," Leonard said. Outside the lightning gave the sky a workout and the flashes went all through the store. The lights faded, and the pickled pig's feet, for a fleeting instant, looked like strange body parts floating in jars in Dr. Frankenstein's lab.

"Goddamn," Tim said when the lights came back. "That was rich ... let me see. She was here a few days, but she was having trouble finding a place to stay . . . you hang out here long enough, you're gonna discover this ain't a real opened-minded place."

"Naw," I said. "Say it ain't true. A homey burg like this."

Tim smiled at me. "Yeah, well, I guess you been talkin' to the Chief, so you know he's a bastard."

"How do you know that?" Leonard asked.

"That he's a bastard, or you been talkin' to him?" Tim said.

"Either," Leonard said.

"I come into town lookin' for someone, first place I'd go is the law. Am I right?"

Leonard nodded.

"And I'll bet old Cantuck sure was glad to see you two running around together. What he thinks, he sees a black and white guy together, is one of them ought to be riding in the back of a pickup with a rake."

"You're right," I said. "He wasn't glad to see us. I got the feeling just us being alive made him nervous. We met the fire department too. Now there's a bunch of regular guys. If you're white, potbellied, and stupid. Seems like they'd bore each other to death. What in the hell can guys like that talk about when they get together?"

"Pussy," Tim said.

"Well, all right," I said. "I can see that."

Tim took hold of the hatchet, lifted the log, and with a flick of his wrist, popped it loose of the hatchet and through the open stove door.

I was going to protest, since the lizard didn't have time to bail out, but Tim's move was so unexpected and so swift there wasn't a chance. The lizard gave a little pop when it went into the blaze, went black and turned to ash on his log; the last animated bit of him was his tail, which curled up and fell off. I decided not to mention it. No use putting an accidental lizard death on someone's head.

"Cantuck's a funny guy," Tim said. "Don't underestimate him. He ain't as stupid as he looks. And for a man with a left nut that looks like a softball in his pocket, he can move pretty fast too. No. He ain't stupid. And he ain't incompetent. Not really. He kinda uses that hick image to get his edge."

"I found that out," I said, watching the last of the lizard dissolve in the stove. The critter looked like a melted chunk of gummy bears.

"He's ignorant, but he's actually fair, and pretty law-abiding," Tim said. "In an Old Testament sort of way."

"Wonder how much he abided the law when that black guy hung himself in jail?" I asked.

"That weird sonofabitch had it comin'," Tim said. "He was a murdering bastard. I prefer he hung himself to the Chief doing it—and I don't think Cantuck would do it. Couldn't have. He wasn't even in town. That Soothe sumbitch was choked and stretched and put in the hole before Cantuck got back."

"Chief wasn't here," Leonard said, "but he could have made arrangements. Being out of town would be a good cover."

"I reckon," said Tim, "but I got to tell you true, if that sorry Bobby Joe fuck got a little help from the Chief, anybody, doesn't bother me a bit. That ole boy was into all kinds of shit. And I mean all kinds. Pretty smooth talker. Could stick his dick up your ass and tell you it was a turd, and you'd believe him.

"He's lucky he lived long as he did, considering how black folks are thought of here in Grovetown. I suppose he lasted 'cause he was a scary, dangerous bastard. And he could sing a pretty good tune. And there was some legacy to him, being kin to L.C. and all.

"Not that that's worth a big goddamn around here, but I reckon there's more than a few whites would hate to admit they enjoyed it when Bobby Joe come to town Saturdays, played over there in front of the courthouse with that ole slide guitar. Fact is, Saturday is normally the day all the blacks come in. Do their shopping, what they got to do. Hang out a little. Very little. Then go home. They got their own ways on the other side of town, and Bobby Joe was smart enough to keep most of his badness over there. Lot of folks here figured if it was just—and you'll pardon the expression—nigger business, then it wasn't no business of theirs. Figured too, niggers killing each other, giving each other a hard time, that wasn't nothing to be concerned with. One less nigger was like one less cockroach."

" 'Course," Leonard said, "cockroaches can't play basketball."

"Yeah, the jump shots throw 'em. I'll tell you about Bobby I Joe, kinda guy he was. He raped his own nephew's wife, then when she told on him and the nephew tried to do something about it, he cut the nephew up to where he near died, went after j the woman. Rumor is he made her fuck his German shepherd."

"Oh, get out of here," I said.

"I'm tellin' you the story," Tim said. "I can't prove it. Haven't got photos or nothing, but I believe it. There wasn't nothing Bobby Joe wouldn't do short of a law degree."

"Man has to have some ethics," Leonard said.

"Our concern here is Florida," I said. "Only reason we're interested in Bobby Joe Soothe at all is Florida came down here to investigate things for some kind of article she wants to write about I his death."

"I know about that," said Tim. "I got that much out of her. | We talked a little when we saw each other. She was convinced Bobby Joe was innocent just because he was black and in a white jail."

"Innocent really hasn't got anything to do with it," I said. "Guilty or innocent, you're supposed to let the State of Texas do j the killing, and with a needleful of poison."

"Yeah, well, we're back to where we started," Tim said. "Like I was sayin', I don't give a shit what happened to Soothe."

"Frankly," Leonard said, "I don't give a shit, if he had it comin'. I'm not as sweet as Hap. He still has all his Roy Rogers [cap guns and stuff. But what we're concerned with is that Florida was in Grovetown, now she isn't, and she isn't home, and |we're nervous."

"You're thinking bad business descended?" Tim said.

"We're thinking it might have, or can yet," Leonard said. "We hope we're just old worried grandmas."

"I don't know I can help you beyond saying I hope you're wrong," Tim said.

"Anything different about her last time you saw her?" Leonard asked.

"Maybe she was a little tired, or nervous, but you're black and hang out here, you're gonna get a little nervous. Don't believe in time travel, just hang around here a week. Better yet, don't. "

"So, " Leonard said, "you're saying' all the white guys in town, except you, were just perched like buzzards waiting to take her down?"

"I suppose you could say that. "

"I don't doubt this town is backwards as hell, " Leonard said, "but I don't buy every white guy here is a murderous prick. Is that what you're trying to tell me? You are, I got to ask, what makes you so special? You ain't threatening me. You wanted to fuck Florida. You don't seem like you're worried that the White Knights of the Asshole will come down on you with a barrel of tar and a basket of chicken feathers for wanting to bury your toad in some black hole, you got the chance. "

"You're kinda dropping down on me pretty quick, aren't you, pal?" Tim said.

"Leonard's motto is 'Make a New Friend Every Day, ' " I said.

Tim grinned that infectious grin. "Hey, it's all right. And you got some points, fella. But let me sorta tick 'em off. First off, my dick ain't no toad. It's just as pretty as a little old skinned banana, but a hell of a lot harder. 'Specially after I've had some pickled pig's feet. Pussy ain't a black hole. If it's black pussy, white pussy, yellow pussy, or red pussy, any other color, on the inside it's all pink and it all feels like a hot mink glove on your weener. So now we got that straight.

"Next thing. This town ain't filled with Klan types. It only needs a diligent few to be members. A few more who won't participate in their shit, but are behind them, and some others that might be against them, but are afraid to say anything, and for good reason. You don't believe me, let me tell you, not that long ago they sewed a little ole black gal's thang together and got away with it."

"So we heard," I said.

"They've been known to nail black men to trees and work them over with a blowtorch. Burn off their balls. You don't hear about all that goin' on, but it does. Maybe not right here in town, but roundabouts. And maybe not recently, but recent enough, and it could get real recent anytime.

"And I can hustle a little black tail if I want. You see, it's okay a white man wants to get him a dark piece, long as he has a sense of humor about it and thinks of the piece as just nigger pussy. 'Course, this white and black thing, here in Grovetown, it don't work in reverse. Black man wants to get him a white piece, well, that's considered unnatural and punishable by death.

"All that aside, main reason I'm left alone is my daddy. The old sonofabitch is Jackson Truman Brown. I've kept my mother's name. Anyway, Daddy's Grovetown s old-time swingin' dick. He's smooth, dresses in nice suits, can talk that shit, but he's at heart a plantation owner that misses the old days when you could work a black man to death and hang him for fartin'. His daddy's daddy, my great-grandfather, was famous for hanging a black man that looked at great-grandpa's wife a little longer than great-grand thought he should have. But hanging wasn't good enough. When the fella was dead, he propped him on a post out in his fields to use as a scarecrow. Left him there for his black field hands to see till the body rotted away. In other words, he wasn't just scarin' crows. He was scarin' his slaves."

"What is it your daddy does?" I asked.

"He owns Jackson's Christmas Tree Farm and the lumber mill here. Both thriving concerns. Folks from all over Texas and the United States got to have their Christmas trees, I can tell you that. He's got these goddamn fir trees that all grow to look exactly alike. Not native trees, Yankee trees. They've been rebred, or whatever trees do to make more trees, and they can stand the Texas heat and the clay soil better than a native pine. He ships those dudes from here to Kansas City in air-conditioned trucks. And you want to work here in Grovetown, you want him to be happy with you. Because not only does he own the lumber mill and run the Christmas tree farm, he owns a lot of other things, as well as a lot of people. Black and white. Only things in this town he don't own are the cafe and the Chief, and maybe with the Chief it don't matter much. Like I said, he's honest and fair, but he and my old man share a lot of the same views."

"I notice you have an aluminum Christmas tree," Leonard said.

"Sort of speaks volumes, don't it?" Tim said.

"What about your station here?" I asked. "He own that?"

"Goddamn him, he owns that too. Loaned me the money for it—key word here is loaned, not gave, and he expects the payments, or I'll be back at the Christmas tree farm. I hate the bustard, and he knows it, and likes it. What I want most in the world is to get the money to pay him off, be a free man. Fact is, what I want most in the world is money. I admit it. Here I was, son of the richest man in town, and I was always wearing worn-out clothes with patches and carried my lunch in a fucking paper bag. Wouldn't even let me buy a lunch box like the rest of the kids. Thought it built character. What it did was it embarrassed me. I said I got older and got a chance to get money, I'd get it. The whole idea of going around poor, even owning this shitty filling station when I ought to have a good life, all the money he's got, I get itchy. Mad even.

"But I got my edge on him. See, I'm kind of an embarrassment. I actually had a couple years college in something besides business. Anthropology. Though it didn't take. I can tell you a little about North American Indians, you want, but when it comes down to it, what I know is about as useless as tits on a boar hog. Still, I'm his son, and he's insurance for me. I wanted to, I could go over there and set fire to the cafe, and he'd make it

so it was understood I was merely tryin' to warm up the place. But he wouldn't drop what I owe him on this station, and I don't pay it, he'll own the station. More coffee, fellas?"

Leonard and I declined. Tim offered us the pig's feet again, at a slightly reduced price, but we declined those as well.

"Let me ask you something," I said. "There anyplace we could rent a room for a few nights in this town?"

"I doubt it," Tim said. "I mean, I don't know."

"You don't know?" Leonard said. "Then let me ask you this. Where did Florida stay?"

Tim smiled, but the smile looked silly this time, not infectious. "Why, out at my mother's place."

Chapter 10

About noon, we bought some sandwich makings, and Tim called his mother, tried to get us a place to stay. Turned out his mother owned a few trailers she rented out, and one was avail­able.

"I like you fellas and all,” Tim said after the phone call,” but way it works, needing money like I do, you pay Mom, and you pay me a little finder's fee.”

"What's a little?" Leonard asked.

"Fifty dollars.”

"That's a little!" I said.

"It's how much it's gonna be you stay at Mom's trailer park.”

Leonard grumbled, paid the fifty in two twenties and a ten.

"Florida pay you a finder's fee?" Leonard asked.

"You betcha,” Tim said, folding his money into his wallet. ”I never claimed I was a philanthropist."

Tim decided to close up and guide us out to his mom's place. He told us he had planned to stay open Christmas Day, partly out of boredom, and out of the fact he could snag a few extra dollars by being the only place available in town to pick up gas and goods, but the weather being the way it was, that turned out to be a pipe dream.

Still, bad as it was, it had slacked some, and we took the mo­ment to get started. Tim drove an old four-wheel-drive, green, broad wheel-base pickup with gaudy tail flaps. One flap had the silhouette of a naked silver lady on it. The other would have had the same but it was ripped in half, leaving only the lady's head.

We followed in Leonard's heap, and as we drove, Leonard said,” He could have told us up front Florida had been staying with his mother.”

"I think he was just being cautious,” I said. ”Watching out for Florida. Remember, he was mum until he asked if we were kin, boyfriends, or bill collectors? I think he didn't want to bring shit down on Florida, if he could keep from it. Or maybe he was watching out for his mother. Either way, I think he was being considerate. And remember, he didn't have to tell us dick.”

"I don't like the dude.”

"Really? He seems all right. Maybe a little too self-consciously folksy, but okay.”

"A fifty-dollar finder's fee? I don't give a shit about his child­hood money problems. I give a shit about my fifty dollars he's got.”

"You are the most suspicious sonofabitch I have ever known, Leonard. He's a little overly money-conscious, and he strikes me as a would-be cock dog, but neither of those things are exactly criminal.”

"Yeah, well doesn't he make you feel kind of creepy, him talk­ing all that good ole boy bullshit?"

"Only thing creepy is how easy it is for me to do it too.”

"There's some truth.”

"Yeah. Well, what about that cockroaches can't play basket­ball thing?"

"I like that one,” Leonard said. ”But that aside, if Florida stayed out here, you got to bet this guy was sniffing her ass reg­ular like.”

"He may have wanted her, but trust me, my friend, if this gal doesn't want to put up with bullshit, she has a way of dealing with you that'll make you feel knee high to a cricket pretty quick. And maybe it takes a heterosexual to understand what I'm getting at, but this lady, young as she is, pretty as she is, she isn't any babe in the woods. Not about men, anyway. Maybe about other things, but trust me, she's got an A+ in Dealing With Men.”

"All right. There's some more truth. I saw Florida drag you around by your ying-yang some, that's for sure.”

"I ain't proud of it.”

"Nor should you be.”

One minute it was gray and damp, the heater humming, keeping us warm, the wipers thumping almost happily, and sud­denly the sky went black as night and the rain fell down in silver sheets thick as corrugated tin. The air in the car turned cool and the heater moaned as if dying of pneumonia, the wipers swiped at the rain like a drowning victim trying to tread water.

Got so bad, Tim pulled over to the side of the road and sat in his truck. We pulled up behind him and sat too, waited. It was a full forty-five minutes before the rain subsided enough for us to continue, and as we drove on, slowly, I looked out my side, watched as we crawled past an old gray clapboard building. It was long and low-built and the walls were leaning, and you could tell the floor had long since lost its battle against gravity and was lying flat on the ground, the old support blocks having shifted and sunk. Through one of the windows I could see an unlit Christmas tree tilting to port, and an unlit neon sign over the front door that was impossible to read through the slash and thrash of the rain.

"A black juke joint,” Leonard said.

"Yep,” I said.

We continued at a drag, the water splitting before us and slamming against the bottom of the car, floating us left and right. I began to understand how it must feel to be in a sub­marine.

Tim's mother's place proved to be well outside of Grovetown, down some incredibly muddy roads, deep in some bottom land that made me nervous, weather being the way it was. I didn't know much about Grovetown, but I knew the dam for Lake Nanonitche was nearby, and not too many years ago it had burst and drowned three people and waterlogged enough property to cause Grovetown and surrounding burgs to become designated as a National Disaster Area.

When we got to the trailer park, I was even more nervous. I'd never seen anything like it. The park consisted of six nasty-ass mobile homes — one a double-wide — standing on stilts damn near twelve feet off the ground with crude wooden stairways leading to their doors.

We parked and sat in Leonard's car while Tim went up to the double-wide, climbed the stairs and knocked on the door. He went inside and stayed awhile.

When he came out he was under an umbrella with an older woman who was wearing an orange raincoat and matching ga­loshes. Tim beckoned us to him. We got out in the driving rain and met them at the bottom of the stairs. The woman was sixty-ish, attractive in an "I’ve been hit by a truck" kind of way.

Tim said,” This is my mother.”

"Y'all got money?" she said.

Like son, like mother.

"We can buy lunch and have dessert if the waiters don't wear suits,” Leonard said.

Mom studied on that, said,” Come on.”

We moved through ankle-deep muddy water behind them, soaked to the bone. The woman walked with her left leg stiff, her left hand in her raincoat pocket. She leaned against Tim as if she was trying to find her sea legs.

We climbed some stairs, the woman managing it with consid­erable effort, and stood on a platform in front of a trailer door that was all bent up with an aluminum strip peeling off to one side. There was a huge splotch of blackness at the edge of the door where fire had slipped from the inside and kissed the exte­rior.

Ms. Garner put a key in the door, and when it was unlocked, Tim got hold of the edge with his fingers and tugged at it. It screeched as if alive, then we were in.

It smelled doggy dank and burnt in there. There was a carpet that looked as if it had once lined a pigpen, and the dog odor came from it. The burnt smell came from a portion of the wall next to the door. That part of the wall was absent of paneling and consisted of charred insulation. The "living room" was fur­nished with one old rickety couch mounted on cinder blocks and a chair with a cushion that dipped almost to the floor. There was one little gas heater and it was missing most of its grates, and the ones it had were busted.

The kitchen was just another part of the same room, and you could see where there had been a grease fire over the stove. The dank carpet and burnt insulation odor that tracked us from the living room blended with the stench of rancid grease coating the stove top. The fridge hummed desperately, like a dying man trying to remember a sentimental tune.

"Well,” Leonard said,” this is nice.”

"Don't like it, go to hell,” said Ms. Garner. She said that with­out so much as a change of features.

"So much for the big sell,” Leonard said. ”How much is it? Considering we'll be camping out.”

"Ten dollars a day, pay by the day. Use too much gas or elec­tricity, there'll be a charge for that. I watch the meters.”

"This place looks like you found it when it floated downriver after a fire and tornado,” Leonard said.

"It wasn't so bad six months ago,” Ms. Garner said. ”Morons moved in here were a bunch of them goddamn holier-than-thou Christians. Ones where the men wear their pants pulled up under the armpits and like green suits with white shoes. Women like to pile their hair on their head and wear ugly dresses.”

"Pentecostal,” I said.

"Morons,” Ms. Garner said.

"Did they live in here with a herd of cows?" Leonard asked.

"You're a smart one, ain't you?" Ms. Garner said.

"My dearest friends call me the Smartest Nigger in the World.”

"Yeah. Well, I believe it. What these Christian high-hairs had was a goddamn Chihuahua. One of them little ugly Mexican dogs looks like a shaved rat with a disease. Goddamned lab ex­periment material is what they are.

"Three men and three women, two kids. I charged 'em twenty dollars a day, there being so many. And they had a whole slew of Bibles and tracts and religious crap. Stupid morons.”

"Calm down, Mom,” Tim said. ”You're gonna strain yourself.”

"Don't talk to me like I'm constipated,” she said.

"Whatever,” Tim said, and shrugged his shoulders at us.

"Kids gave the dog a bath,” she said,” and get this, they put the goddamn rat in the oven to dry. Turned on the oven and put the rat in there. He got dried up all right. Little turd caught on fire, starting barking — screaming, really. A dog gets hurt enough, it can scream. Heard him all the way over in my trailer. They let him out of the oven just before he was a casserole. He run all over the place. Caught them Bibles and tracts on fire, then that crap caught the wall on fire. I threw them Christians out on their holy butts. They had to tote what was left of that mutt off in a smokin' pail. Looked kind of pathetic, even if it was a Chihuahua. Nothing but that old blackened tail stickin' out of the top of that bucket, like a burned-down lantern wick.”

"Yeeech,” Leonard said. “I'm just glad it wasn't a real dog.”

"Anyway, those irresponsibles burned up their dog and trashed my trailer. What a bunch of dipshits. I hope y'all aren't dipshits.”

"No, ma'am,” Leonard said.” Least I'm not. But I'll watch Hap for you.”

"Yeah, well don't put him in the oven,” she said. ”And if you've got any more snide remarks about the accommodations here, you can hit the road before we get started. Let me tell you something. I didn't ask to rent to either of you. My son wanted me to help out, way I did that colored gal. I'd rather do without money than put up with shit. You boys got that?"

We said we had it.

She pointed to a dark and exceptionally narrow doorway. ”Crapper's right over there. It's slow flush, so don't wipe so se­vere you cram the bowl with paper. You won't never get it down. Guess that's about it. Want the place or not?"

"We'll stay,” I said. “But might I ask, as if I didn't know, why all these trailers are on stilts?"

"About five years ago we had a hell of a rain and a flood. Down here in the bottoms, it comes a good rain, you can catch catfish in the commode. Flood washed the entire park away. For­tunately I was in town. Couple old geezers renting the far end trailer drowned like ants in a ditch.”

"That's what I was afraid of,” I said.

"That's why I had these trailers put on stilts. These are good solid posts under us.”

To prove her point she hopped heavily on her one good leg three or four times. ”See there. Doesn't even move.”

She pointed at the stove. ”Top burners work. Oven don't. Damn dog fire messed it up. You won't want to cook much no­how. Even if you cook on the top burners, stove heats up, it smells like burning Chihuahua. I don't know about you, but that would set me off my feed.”

"Yeah, ”Leonard said. ”I think that would bother me too.”

"Come on and I'll show you the bedroom. And by the way, I don't want y'all having anybody over. 'Specially gals. This ain't no brothel.”

"We don't know anybody to have over, ”Leonard said.

"Good. Come on.”

Tim looked at us, tried to grin, but couldn't quite make it. We followed Momsy into the bedroom. There was a single bed with a mattress that looked pretty dadgum bleak.

"Looks as if someone's been pissin' on it nightly,” Leonard said.

"That Chihuahua,” she said. ”Sonofabitches would rather bark and piss than fornicate and eat. That's the thing about 'em. They got no priorities. My sister had one of them little poots, and she used to jack him off once a week 'cause he was tense. Never could figure what was wrong with the sonofabitch lickin' his noodle like any other respectable dog. Fact is, more men could lick their noodle, the world would be better off. Less mess'n around. Y'all just turn the mattress.”

"I'll take the couch,” I said.

"We'll flip for it,” Leonard said.

"Hell, dog pissed on the couch too,” she said.

"Dibs on the bed then,” I said. ”I'll turn the mattress."

Chapter 11

Tim helped his mother home, and Leonard and I went into the living room and surveyed our surroundings. "Well, it's cheap enough," I said.

"Well, Smartest Peckerwood in the World, what do you ex­pect? She should be getting top dollar for this? Damn, I'm cold."

We lit the suspicious-looking gas heater in the living room, found one of an equally suspicious nature in the bedroom and lit it. We lit the top cook stove burners as well, and the old lady was right. That rancid grease heated up, that dog in the oven warmed, the place began to smell like a rendering plant.

"I don't know which is worse," Leonard said. "Being frozen or stunk to death. Flip for the bed?"

"I already called dibs. Besides, you heard her. Dog pissed on both of them, so what's the difference?"

"Difference is the couch looks like some kind of torture in­strument."

"I got dibs, man. Bed is mine."

The door scraped and squeaked, and Tim, dripping water, came inside and shoved the door shut.

"Shit," he said. "I ain't seen a rain like this since them old codgers drowned."

"That's good to know," Leonard said. "Give me a little some­thing to think about tonight while I'm trying to sleep."

"Trailers weren't on stilts then," Tim said. He went over and got up close to the little heater. "Brrrrrrrr."

"Tim," Leonard asked. "Why didn't you tell us early on Florida stayed out here at your mother's park?"

"I don't know. She seemed like a nice girl. Woman. I didn't know what you guys were up to. I had to feel you out a little. She couldn't find a place, and she mentioned it to me, and I told her about here."

"Didn't have anything to do with you hoping to drop your an­chor in her ocean, did it?" Leonard asked. "You having her out here, I mean? Handy. Kind of indebted to you?"

"I guess it did," Tim said. "Some. But I was trying to help her too."

"And pick up fifty dollars," Leonard said.

"That's right," Tim said. "Besides, how indebted is someone gonna feel staying here? This was where she stayed, you know? This trailer . . . besides, I don't need any grief, don't need the law on my back, and I didn't want to drag Mom into this. She don't need those Klan creeps on her for helping out blacks. It isn't like she was trying to be a Good Samaritan, anyway. She'd rent to anybody to make a few bucks."

"Gee, thanks," I said.

"You know what I mean," Tim said. "She wasn't making any kind of statement renting to Florida. It's not like she keeps this park up or nothing."

"No joke?" Leonard said.

"I try to help," Tim said, "but with the station and all, my own life. Hell, it's all I can do."

"You live out here too?" I asked.

"I got a place in back of the store. Once in a while I'll stay out here. It's rare Mom's got any boarders. Place like this mostly caters to a pretty desperate crowd. People come and go quick like. Lot of them are just one-nighters. Some guy renting so he can do the rodeo with some local poke. Right now, 'cept for y'all, and Mom, of course, the park is empty."

"Not to meddle," I said.

"Don't count on it," Leonard said. "Hap's got a black belt in meddlin'."

"Maybe your mom could stay at the store," I said. "This is pretty, well, bleak, isn't it?"

"She won't have it that way," Tim said. "She wants her own thing. When her and Daddy divorced, she had to go to work in the lumber mill, like one of the other wage slaves. She got caught in some machinery. She lost a leg. Has an artificial one. Her hand . . . well, it was mashed flat. Looks like a goddamn Mickey Mouse hand. No shit. Mashed flat like a cartoon hand. Only it ain't a cartoon. It's ruined. She's got where she ain't ex­actly right. Gets worse every year. But she remembers being in­dependent, and she doesn't want to lose that. Sometimes, I think that's all that holds her together, being independent."

"She sounded all right to me," I said. "Ornery. But all right."

"This is one of her good days," Tim said.

"She's damn sure got them Chihuahuas scoped out," Leonard said.

"You can't put much stock in what she says," Tim said. "She'd probably have been less upset if one of the Pentecostals had got­ten cooked by the dog."

"I can understand that," Leonard said. "Or maybe that's the Jehovah's Witnesses that bother me with the tracts and stuff, not the Pentecostals. I can't get 'em straight."

"Listen here, guys," Tim said. "I know you two and me ain't buddies or nothing. Just met you. But I got to give a little ad­vice, tell you that messin' around in this town, a black guy and a white guy. It ain't good. If something did happen to Florida, whoever done it might be willing to do it again. This thing with Florida, maybe you ought to forget it. Let the Chief handle it. He's basically fair. Let him do your lookin' for you."

"I'm not sure he'll look that hard," I said.

"All right," Tim said. "But you wake up one morning beside the road with your throat slit and Leonard hanging from a crab apple tree, and his dick cut off and in your mouth, don't say I didn't warn you."

"I don't want my dick in his mouth, cut off or attached," Leonard said.

"You should be so lucky," I said.

"All right, guys," Tim said. "Have it your way."

We gave Tim some rent money for his mother, and he went away. When he was gone, I said, "Guess we shouldn't have jacked with him. He was just concerned about us."

"Hell with him," Leonard said. "Seems to me he's awfully anx­ious for us to leave matters in the hands of that ruptured cop. I think he's just worried he might get asked some questions. And hey, Bubba, let me give you some advice. Stay the hell out of everybody's business."

"What?"

"Stuff about his mama living at the store with him. That ain't your problem."

"You're the one thinks he's a money-grubbing untrustworthy sonofabitch. So if he's a sonofabitch, maybe he hasn't thought about it."

"Just keep your mind on askin' the insulting questions that pertain to Florida, and quit trying to take the world in to raise. I think that ole woman is just the way she wants to be, and that

Tim's just embarrassed by her, and he's a selfish sonofabitch who'd take coins off her dead eyes to buy rubbers."

"Could be ... man, she's something, isn't she. That story she told, about the Chihuahua. The Pentecostals. That's horrible, don't you think? Poor dog getting burned up like that."

"Terrible," Leonard said, then pursed his lips and smiled a lit­tle. "But it's kinda funny, you don't know the dog personal like."

Chapter 12

We got our suitcases and sandwich makings out of the car, got soaked to the bone again. It had grown so dark outside, it seemed as if it ought to be bedtime.

Inside, we changed into dry clothes and sat on the floor by one of the stoves and made sandwiches of meat and bread and no fix­ings. We balanced the food on our knees and ate slowly and drank soda pops. Outside, the storm grew stronger and squealed like a pig having its throat cut.

When we finished eating we put the goods in the refrigerator, which was a filthy sucker and had a smell that refused to blend with the burnt dog, burnt wall, and pissed-on carpet. Its aroma was well sorted from the others, and equally overpowering.

The rest of the afternoon we sat by the fire with used paper­backs we had brought, and read. We were sharing some old books written by Michael Moorcock under the name Edward P. Bradbury. They were pastiches of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and they were fast and fun and pretty mindless.

Except for the odor, and the fact that over-forty-year-old bods have a little trouble sitting on the floor for an extended period of time without back aches and the legs going to sleep, it really wasn't, all things considered, too unpleasant. It had been some time since I had just settled in with a book and read, especially books like these, and my mind and emotions were just right to believe them, eager to get away from crack houses, a Chief of Po­lice with swollen balls, and a missing woman I had once loved, and maybe still did a little.

When I was a kid, I read a book like this, I became the main character, and the characters I liked were big and strong and fearless and always got the babe. I thought my life would go that way when I grew up.

It hadn't.

But for a few hours I was away from what my life hadn't been. Away from worry and reality. I was on another planet, fighting monsters with my fine, sharp sword. And I was winning.

The pleasant feeling didn't last. I finally fell out of the book and hit reality. I thought of Florida. I wondered how she was, and feared I already knew. The rain quit being pleasant. It had gone back to making me feel cold and wet and sad.

When I looked up from my book, Leonard was looking at me. He said, "Hungry?"

"Didn't we just eat?"

"About three hours ago."

We ate again, more out of boredom than anything else, then tried to read some more, but I had lost it. So had Leonard. He found a couple of blankets in the bedroom, put one over the couch itself and took the other for cover. He took the old worn cushion off the chair and tried to make a pillow out of it. He stripped down to his shorts and covered up and lay there and blew out his breath, which frosted and made a fast dissolving cloud. He said, "You know, it's kind of funny, Raul not being around. I'd grown accustomed."

"I'm sorry, man."

"Me too. I reckon, thinking on it, I was kind of a jackass."

"That's hard to imagine."

"Ain't it? How do you put up with me?"

"Guess 'cause you put up with me."

"Thing throws me is how we can be so close, and yet I can't put together a relationship. You and me, we been through thick and thin. Been mad at each other. Gotten each other into shit— Naw, now that I think about it, it's you gets me into shit."

"You're probably right," I said.

"But here we are, two guys, friends, one straight and one gay, and we get along better with each other than we do with our chosen sex partners."

"Maybe it's the sex throws a wrench in things. Soon as you start doing the two-bear mambo, like those bears on that special, it falls apart."

"I don't know, those bears looked pretty happy."

"Yeah, but way it works in nature is the male bear loads the female bear with sperm, then he heads out, leaving the female bear to raise cubs by herself."

"That's not nice."

"No, it isn't."

"A little secret, Hap. When two guys fuck, neither of them gets pregnant."

"What I mean is, sex, one way or another, complicates things. I don't know how, but it's always in one way or another the turd in the stew."

"So you want to give it up?"

"I may not have a choice, way things are going, but no, I don't want to give it up. It's been so long for me now, the bear on the National Geographic special got the right look in her eye, I'd mount up."

"So, except for determining that you'd fuck a bear, we're no

closer to solving the mystery of human and animal relations than we were five minutes ago."

"Maybe our friendship works out okay 'cause when I get tired of your shit, I go to the house till I get over it. I don't feel obli­gated to be with you, and I don't feel I'm deserting you if I go home. I have no sexual interest in you."

"That's hard to believe, being the fine specimen of gay man­hood that I am."

"I know, but it's true. I also know we get sideways with one another, tomorrow, next day, everything's gonna be okay. You'll be there if I need you."

"You know, Hap, you've never sent me a valentine."

"Fuck you."

There was really very little to do with the rest of the day, and I was tired from the night before, so I went to the bedroom and got the remaining two blankets and lay down on the bed, but the odor of dog piss was too overwhelming. I flipped the mat­tress and there was the smell of Chanel No. 5.

Florida.

My head filled with her. Soft and dark and smart and sexy. I almost coveted the dog pee side. I lay there with the blankets over me, a thin pillow beneath my head, looked at the ceiling, picked out water spots, and listened to Leonard hum Country's Greatest Hits. He did that sometimes when he couldn't sleep, hummed tunes. Maybe that's why Raul left him. That and no re­spect for Gilligan's Island.

Eventually the water spots darkened into one large shadow as the gloomy afternoon became early evening. Leonard's humming became spaced, starting to drift off.

My eyes began to fill with tears then, and I can't honestly say if the tears were for Florida or for me. I had lost her and I wanted her back, and I knew that wasn't going to happen, no matter what. I knew I should think of her and what might have happened to her, harness some new game plan for finding her, but I lay there instead and felt sorry for myself, and was angry, because some part of me was enjoying the sorrow, and maybe, just maybe, there was a bad part of me that barked and howled and said, "See what happens you leave me, baby? You die."

Oh, God, Florida.

Don't be dead.

And then somewhere between all that and the sweet and over­whelming smell of Chanel No. 5, and Leonard slow-humming "Walkin’ the Floor Over You," I dropped off.

The rain and wind beat and lashed the trailer and I could feel Florida beside me, and she was sweet with the scent of Chanel No. 5, and I reached to hold her, but couldn't. She was as insub­stantial as the shadows, and then I opened my eyes from the dream, and there she stood at the end of the bed, looking down at me. It was dark in there, but somehow I could see. I could see she was naked. She stood like some kind of harpy, her legs bent, her body leaning forward, her fine breasts swaying down, the nipples taut with the cold. Her hair glistened red with East Texas clay, and her lithe body was slick with it. Chunks of clay clung to her pubic thatch like dirt dauber nests.

Then I realized not all the red was clay. Her head had a split in it, and some of the red that ran from her mound and down the inside of her thigh wasn't slick clay at all.

I tried to get up but couldn't. She leaned farther forward and reached for me. I didn't like the way her eyes looked. They looked cold and lifeless, like those of a fish in an ice chest.

She opened her mouth, and clay fell out. She said, "Hap, you got to help me."

"I will, Florida. I will. God, we thought you were dead."

She laughed and clay sprayed from her mouth as if from a nozzle.

Then I came awake, sat bolt upright, and there was Leonard

sitting on the edge of the sagging bed. He reached out and touched my shoulder.

"It's okay, man," he said. "It's all right. Get your shit to­gether."

I sat up in bed and pushed my back to the wall. "Damn," I said. "I thought I saw Florida."

"I know. You called her name about a half-dozen times. Woke me up. You all right, buddy?"

"Yeah. What time is it?"

"I don't know. Not too late."

"God almighty, I swear, that was as real a dream as I've ever had . . . Leonard, she's dead, man. She was all covered in clay, like she'd been buried."

"She's dead because you saw her dead in a dream? That don't mean nothing."

"She's dead because she is. Way dreams work is they put to­gether what you know. She's somewhere dead and buried, and you know it."

"You don't know nothing."

"Yeah. Well tell me, what do you think?"

"All right. I think she's dead. I don't think she drove up here and just dropped off the face of the earth. No one has seen her in a while. Last stop was here. Not like there's lots of places to stay in Grovetown, so I don't think she's around. It don't look good, Hap."

"Yeah."

"Thing is, this is all just how I feel. It isn't worth anything."

"So what now?"

"We came up here to find her, and we will. Dead or alive. First thing to do though, is tomorrow morning, call Hanson or Charlie. See they've heard anything from her. She may be back in LaBorde, and if so, Hanson probably hasn't even told her we're looking for her. He's too busy making up with her, layin' pipe."

"No, Leonard. He wouldn't do that. She's like a daughter to him. Remember."

"Yeah, right. I forgot."

"Damn, isn't this one hell of a special Christmas?"

"Yeah. Merry Christmas. Listen here, Hap. I ain't been sleep­ing all that good. Cold in there and the sweet aroma of dog whiz is about to make me puke, then you yelling and all, but it's also because I been thinking."

"Careful now. Don't hurt yourself."

"Much as I hate it, we call and Hanson hasn't heard anything, I think we got to go back to the Chief. Officially report Florida missing, set him on the case."

"What would he care?"

"Guy like that, he may already know what happened to her. It's not that I think he'll find her, but he may do something gives us a lead to where she is. Or gives us an idea what hap­pened to her. We want to push him a little. Make him nervous."

"You think he's behind all this? Maybe head of the Knights of the Swollen Left Nut, or whatever they are?"

"I don't know. I'm clutching at farts, but we got to clutch at something. And speaking of that, I'm gonna go clutch at my blankets, and I'm coming back in here, and you and me are gonna share this bed."

"Oh God, Leonard, has my manly physique finally caused your hormones to bust the blood vessels to your brain?"

"No, but I'm cold, and I figure we can share our blankets and some body heat."

"You make me so hot when you talk like that."

"Hap, you tell any of my friends I shared a bed with a hetero­sexual, even if it was just to keep warm, I'll kill you. Thing like that got around, it could ruin my reputation. By the way, you wearing perfume?"

"Florida," I said. "It's in the mattress."

"Oh."

He came back with his blankets and we shared the mattress. Just before he closed his eyes, he said, "Wake me when Santa comes."

It was warmer that way, Leonard and I sharing. I slept better, deeper. But near morning I awoke from yet another dream.

This time Florida and I had been naked, sitting in lawn chairs, and we were on a little raft made of crude-cut logs, sail­ing down a dark river on a moonlit night. The moon was high in the sky and bright. When Florida turned to look at me her eyes were full of the moon. Two white orbs slick as wet bone inside dark tunnels. She said, "Come on and love me, Huck, honey."

Then we were beneath the water, cold and wet and alone. She had her arms around my neck, and she was heavy, and she was dragging me down, down, down to the bottom of the great black river, and no matter how hard I fought, she wouldn't let go.

I got up, dressed, had a soda pop and a couple slices of lunch meat, and waited for daybreak.

Chapter 13

By morning the rain had slowed, and when Leonard woke we drove into town for coffee and a real breakfast. We had plans to call Hanson.

Grovetown was starting to stir. Christmas holidays were gone, and stores were open. The cafe was hopping. Tim's filling station had two cars in the drive. One driver, a fat lady wearing a bright field of flowers on a dress constructed of enough material to parachute a Land Rover from a speeding jet, was putting gas in her car, the rain beating down on her blue-haired head with a vengeance.

At the full-service pump, behind the wheel of a gray pickup, an elderly man with a face tight as a sphincter muscle rolled his window down and coughed blue-gray cigar smoke into the rain.

Tim was filling the pickup's tank, had his head bent so that water was running off his cap. Both the fat woman and the elderly man took note of us, just in case we were planning on hijacking their vehicles. Tim looked up, saw us, gave us a wink.

We went inside the store, hung around until Tim was finished. He came in and grinned at us. "Y'all decide you want some of them pickled pig's feet after all?"

"No," I said, "but we'd like to make a call to LaBorde, if you'll let us. I can give you enough money to cover it."

"Long as you pay, you can call goddamn Australia."

Tim showed me the phone behind the counter, and allowed me some privacy. I called Hanson at home first, didn't get him. Tried the cop shop, still didn't find him. I asked for Charlie, and they put him on the line.

"It's me," I said. "Checkin' in. Seein' if Florida showed up."

"Nope," Charlie said, "and that means you haven't found her either."

"It don't look good. She's been here, but she isn't here now. We're gonna look around today, but I don't get the idea the Chief here is much worried what happened to Florida. I think you need to get some real law down here. The Rangers maybe."

"Her not being there doesn't mean anything's happened to her."

"So I keep hearing, but I got some bad vibes."

"Thing occurred to me, was what if she used this trip to go on and leave Hanson for good? You know, an easy way to keep on going. It's possible."

"Yeah. But not likely."

"I wouldn't say that. Little something I found out was she took a lot of money with her."

"What do you mean?"

"I am a paid sleuth for the public, Hap. I called a friend of mine over where Florida banks. She withdrew her savings. Thirty thousand dollars. What you think about that?"

"I don't know. I guess she could have plans to leave, but that's not like Florida. She gets tired of a situation, she just hangs it up. She doesn't sneak. Besides, she has a law practice."

"She let her apartment go too."

"That could mean she got over her rift with Hanson, was planning on moving in with him full-time. As in marriage. But something, whatever happened to her, got in the way."

"I suppose. But I still hold for her just hauling ass on out of Dodge, and right on across the Badlands."

"I hope you're right, Charlie. Anything else shaking?"

"Hanson's gone off. On a drunk, I think. I can't get him at home, hasn't been in the office this morning. It's early, but I don't think he's coming in. Was supposed to. Me and him had some stuff to do."

"What makes you think he's on a drunk?"

" 'Cause up until he asked you and Leonard for help, he was on a pretty constant drunk. I don't think he'll clean up his act just 'cause y'all are looking around."

"Not exactly a big vote of confidence from the Lieutenant. But I'll tell you something, Charlie. I don't blame him. Not about the drinking. About the lack of confidence. We're about as useful here as a spare pecker on a dead hog. We haven't seen hide nor hair of her, and investigators we are not."

"I'm covering for Hanson long as I can. But I don't know. You're around him enough these days, you kind of get the feeling his brain is coming apart."

"Alcohol is not noted for making someone smarter."

"True. I'm gonna give it up myself, soon as it kills me. Thing is, Chief gets wind Hanson's out, or on a drunk, that's another load of ammunition he's got against him. He'll be lucky to get a night job shaking doors at the Kroger."

"All this drinking has to do with Florida? Or is the drinking part of the problem with them? That shit he told us the other night sounded a little pat."

"I think he told you the truth. Stuff he said is how it is. He just left out that the drinking wasn't making matters better. He drinks 'cause he has problems, and the drink makes him have more problems. He's got a grown daughter he feels he's lost too much contact with. An ex-wife he still loves. Kind of an odd relationship with Florida. Bad work conditions. Hemorrhoids and the sauce. Tight as he is these days, you say something don't quite set with him, he'll burp a turd and fart his teeth."

"Yeah," I said. "I was remembering the lamp he threw at Leonard."

"I tell him what you've told me, I figure he'll show up down there where you are, ready to throw the town in the street, and to hell with all this checking around shit. Hell, he may not need to be told anything. He sucked enough Rebel Yell this morning, minus the Co-Cola, he could be on his way now."

"I don't think Chief Cantuck would take kindly to a black law enforcement officer with an attitude and whiskey on his breath. 'Course, could be interesting. Anything else?"

"Got a minute so I can whine and feel sorry for myself?"

"You bet."

"I'm not doing all that good either. Wife fussin' at me all the time. Can't do nothing right. She's pissed I can't fix the garage opener. She's got girlfriends whose husbands can fix anything. Hear her tell it, all them Sonofabitches do is go around with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers, turning lawn mowers and garage doors into nuclear weapons. Let's see . . . I've quit smoking again, so I'm irritable. Wife said no more poontang if I don't quit, and I got to be quit a month before I get a taste."

"That's a goddamn death sentence."

"Yeah, well you haven't been gettin' any for a serious stretch, and you're still kicking, so I reckon I'll survive."

"You through whining?"

"Not yet. Guess what? I lost my shadow picture book. I think my wife hid it. I was just getting a whooping crane down. And you know what else?"

"Hit me."

"They're closing down the goddamn Kmart."

"Naw."

"Yeah, it'll be gone in less than three weeks. Can you figure that?"

I told him I couldn't, we talked a few more seconds, and rang off. Leonard took his turn at the phone, called home, hoping Raul had shown up.

I paid Tim some money for the calls, and Leonard bought a straw cowboy hat to protect his head from the rain.

Out in the car, Leonard said, "Charlie have any news?"

"They haven't heard from Florida. Hanson is a nervous wreck, possibly gone off somewhere on a drunk. Charlie's wife won't give him any and she may have stolen his shadow book, and he's got his panties in a major twist 'cause they're closing down the Kmart. And I told him he ought to get some real law down here."

"They're closing up the Kmart?"

"Tighter than a Republican's wallet."

"You white Democrats, you get on my nerves."

"Yeah, well what I can't stand is a black man doesn't have enough sense to know not to vote Republican. Shit, man. You look like a fuckin' fool in that hat."

"Let's not talk politics, Hap. It upsets your tummy. And I look fine in hats . . . Did Charlie ask about me?"

"Nope."

"Well, shit."

"Raul back?"

"No. But Leon said the Gilligan videos are a scream."

Chapter14

We drove across the street to the Chief's office and went inside. The lady with the wasp nest hairdo was behind her desk. The little Christmas tree was still in place, surrounded by its city of cards. She eyed Leonard as carefully and frightfully as the day before. He smiled at her, slow and suggestful, like he might be thinking about how nice it would be to fondle her hair.

There was a thirtyish officer in a straw cowboy hat and a tan uniform looking in a file cabinet drawer nearby. He pretended not to notice our coming in. Leonard asked the secretary if the Chief was in, and the officer pulled a file from the drawer, slowly turned, pretended he had just noticed us, and smiled.

"Something I can do for you fellas?" he said. "I'm Officer Reynolds."

He was a big man with a big belly and little pocks-on his face. He'd pinched too much acne as a youth. His straw hat was expensive, with a rattlesnake band and a little red feather stuck in it. He had a Western-style revolver almost big as a howitzer in his holster. Three Tootsie Roll Pops stuck out of his shirt pocket next to a pen that, from the stain at the bottom of his pocket, appeared to have exploded. Belly or no belly, he looked like someone you wouldn't want to mess with, especially if he didn't like you. He had a face said he didn't like much of anything, except maybe a Tootsie Roll Pop.

Leonard took off his straw hat, said, "There. I feel smarter already."

Reynolds grinned. "Hell, I heard about you fellas."

"Yeah?" Leonard said. "I hope it was good."

"Oh no," said Reynolds. "I heard y'all was meddlers."

"Meddlers?" I said.

"Yeah," he said. "I heard you two limp dicks—sorry, ma'am."

The lady at the desk turned bright red and began to shuffle papers. Reynolds smiled at her, said, "Why don't you get some coffee, Charlene?"

Charlene opened her desk drawer, took out a cup that had some kind of cartoon on it, scuttled in one place for a moment, her shoes making a lot of noise, like a poodle with overlong toe-nails turning in a circle. Finally, she disappeared without a word from the room.

Reynolds turned back to us. He still had that nice smile. "She goes to a lot of church. Words like dick cause her consternation."

"Ah," I said.

"Consternation," Leonard said. "That's a big word for a police officer, ain't it?"

"Maybe," said Officer Reynolds, placing the file on top of the cabinet. "I also have a few nice phrases. Like 'The nigra died slowly and painfully after a methodical beating.' "

"Nigra is one of those words that always bothers me," Leonard said. "It's not quite respectful. Like 'Negro,' but the talker can't seem to go all the way and say what he or she really wants to say, which is 'nigger.' "

"I work for law enforcement," said Reynolds. "I am one third of the Grovetown Police Force. Me, the Chief, and Charlene, we're not allowed to call you a goddamn shit-eating nigger. That wouldn't be right. Sir."

"It's certainly nice to talk to a public servant," Leonard said, "but your boss, he does say nigger. We've heard him."

Reynolds didn't respond. He spent some time checking Leonard out, and Leonard checked him in return.

Reynolds was larger by a head than Leonard with wider shoulders. Big in the belly but hard-looking, with massive arms and tree trunk legs. Leonard isn't all that big, but he's got the look. One that tells anyone with half a brain that he can be dangerous. But there was a part of me that knew this Reynolds character was no lightweight either. He had the look too, like a man who had seen the elephant and seen it well, and maybe even put his arm up its ass and pulled its intestines out.

He and Leonard went toe-to-toe, I'd put my money on Leonard. But maybe because he was a sentimental favorite and I knew I'd help him.

Reynolds put his thick fingers together and pressed and popped them. He leaned against the file cabinet, still smiling, one hand resting on the butt of his revolver. His fingers looked like thick roots, his knuckles like lug bolts. He said: "I hear you two gentlemen are acting like you're some kind of law or something."

"We heard the same thing about y'all," Leonard said.

Reynolds's smile changed just enough to allow his top lip to snarl. "You think I can't arrest you for messing with a sworn-in law officer? You think I won't get tired of this and chunk your ass behind bars?"

"What's the crime?" Leonard said. "Greater wit than your own?"

Reynolds's face showed he had lost his sense of humor, but he never got to let us know how much. A door at the back of the office opened and Chief Cantuck came out. He was hatless and sweaty-looking. His nose was red and highly porous today, like maybe he'd had a little too much Christmas cheer the night before. Way he was sweating, you'd have thought it was a hundred degrees. His belly hadn't gotten any smaller, and neither had his ruptured testicle. He looked as if he might blow a major hose at any moment.

"Chief," Leonard said. "My man. How's it hanging? . . . Oh, I see."

"They think they're funny," Reynolds said.

"Hey, I've been real quiet," I said. "Leonard's the one talking."

"I've already caught their act," Cantuck said. "It wasn't any better the last time."

"You want me to lock 'em up for a while?" Reynolds said. "Just so they can hone their material?"

"No crime in being an ass," Cantuck said. "Reckon you two are here for some reason other than trying to outwit my officer or make fun of my balls?"

"Both are easy," Leonard said, "but we're here on official business."

"All right," Cantuck said. "I'll play. Come in the office."

As we followed Cantuck, Reynolds said, "By the way, nigger. I'll remember you."

Leonard paused, said without the slightest hint of anger, "In case you might forget, I'll leave my business card with the secretary."

Cantuck's office was relatively neat. His wall was covered in photographs of a boy, who from his wasted appearance and resemblance to Cantuck, without a swollen nut, had to be the son he'd told me about.

There was a middle-aged woman in some of the photos with the boy, and she looked plain and worn-out, like her daily job was the Augean Stables.

On Cantuck's desk were pictures of himself, the boy, and the wife, as well as a plastic container backed by a cardboard frame for donations to MS. It had some change in it, and a couple of bills had been rolled and stuffed inside. On the left-hand side of his desk was a can with a label that suggested you should "Give to the Handicapped," and on the other side of the desk was a can that pleaded for money for cancer research.

It was very odd, the cans and the cardboard donation container being there. I wondered who had put the money in the cardboard container. The Chief? Reynolds? Charlene? Assorted prisoners? Had Florida dropped in some coins?

Cantuck sat down behind his desk. We took chairs on the other side. Leonard placed his hat on the edge of the desk and used a finger to turn it from time to time.

Cantuck picked a picture of the boy off his desk and held it in his lap and looked at it. He put it back. From the way he moved, I could tell it was an unconscious ritual.

"Your son?" I said.

"Yeah," he said. "What do y'all want?"

"We want to make an official report," I said. "Concerning Florida Grange. We fear foul play."

"And, of course, we here in Grovetown are the culprits, just because a lot of us are segregationist?"

"She was here," I said. "She's not here now."

"So, she's shacked up with some buck somewhere. Check out the Southside of town. Ten miles out. That's the colored section."

"We were sort of hoping you'd do that," I said. "It is your job."

Cantuck studied us. He unsnapped his shirt pocket and took out a tightly rolled package of chewing tobacco. He unrolled it, opened it, pinched out a wad, put it in his mouth, started chewing. He chewed slowly, as if activating brain cells.