The Two-Bear Mambo

"You gonna fill out the papers for a missing person?" he said around the tobacco.

"Yeah," I said.

"I doubt you need to," he said.

"You saying we fill it out you won't look?" Leonard asked.

"No. I'm saying I doubt you need to. She'll turn up. My guess is she's oiling some coon's pole out niggertown."

"Careful now," Leonard said. "Words like that, you might hurt my feelings."

"Shit," Cantuck said. "I wouldn't want that. Let me put it to you straight, numb nuts. You fill out a report, that gives me work to do. Well, I don't want work to do. Not when I think it's bullshit work. But no matter what you may think, you fill out that report, I'll look for her. I'll find her if she needs finding. I'm just a small-town cop, and as you both know, not very smart and I got a ruptured turnip. But I got a job here. The law says it includes whites and colored. I don't have nothing against colored. You being an exception, Smartest Nigger in the World . . . that is how you introduced yourself, isn't it?"

"That's right," Leonard said. "But when it comes out of your mouth, it stinks. My name's Leonard. Leonard Pine."

"What you want . . . Leonard ... is me to respect you because you're black," Cantuck said. "Not because you're worth a shit. You want me to be polite and sweet when all you've done, the both of you, from the first moment I've seen you, is come on with an attitude. An attitude that says: We're better than you. We're smarter than you. We're a couple of hip-hop guys ... I believe that's a term they use, isn't it?"

"Close enough," Leonard said. "But not around my house."

"Not once," Cantuck said, "have you treated me with the respect deserving of any human being, or someone of authority. Yet, you expect me to be all sugar and syrup and suck your dick."

"You did sort of threaten us," I said. "You even pulled your gun on me. That seems to have faded from your memory."

"I don't deny it. But you fucked with me, treated me stupid, then wanted me to give you a hand job and smile. I don't think your mamas would be proud of the way you two have conducted yourselves."

To tell the truth, neither did I.

"There was that talk about the fire department and being burned up with white trash and a nigger," I said. "Remember that?"

"I wanted you scared, out of here, before somethin' happened we'd both be sorry for. You two being sorry while it was happening, and me after I heard about it—for about five or ten minutes, anyway. You see, it's not bad enough I got you two pencil dicks, I got the Texas Rangers now."

"Texas Rangers?" I said, and thought I looked pretty innocent. Charlie damn sure wasn't fucking around. He'd gotten on the horn the minute I hung up.

"This nig hung himself here," Cantuck said. "Word's got around it ain't no suicide. Maybe that was your gal, Florida did that, got "em stirred. Maybe it was you. But about five minutes ago I got the call. They're sending in some Ranger dick to look things over. Show our not-so-smart three-person police force how the horse ate the apple. I don't like it. I don't like you. I wish you were both home. I wish your daddies had pulled out right before comin'. That way, the two of you wouldn't be nothing to me or nobody else."

We sat for a moment. I said, "Can we fill out the missing person report now?"

"When you do, why don't you head back to where you come from. Find someone else to insult and make fun of. I can't help my balls, boys, and I can't help that I believe the Bible insists that blacks and whites not intermingle, outside of work and a few laughs together."

"Shit," Leonard said, "you and me ain't been laughing none at I all."

"Bottom line is," Cantuck said, "when I'm not worked up, I'm not so bad. And I can do my job. You leave, I won't be worked up. She's around here, I'll find her. She's gone somewhere, I might find that out. Black and white ain't gonna have anything to do with that."

We sat in silence for a moment. Cantuck reached down be-j hind his desk, came up with a stained coffee can. He spat a stream of tobacco into it, put the can back. Some of the juice ran over his bottom lip and down his chin. He wiped it away with his sleeve. He looked at his sleeve. "Bad habit," he said. "Wife hates it. My boy used to call it slime. Let's get a report for you to I fill out. And Smartest Nigger?"

"Yassuh, Massa, Chief," Leonard said.

"Stay away from Officer Reynolds. He's not a nice man like ] me. And don't forget your hat."

Cantuck stood up and we stood up with him. Cantuck said, I "Before you boys go, would you mind dropping a coin or so in these charities? I try to support them, get others to do like-I wise."

We were blank for a moment, then slowly Leonard opened his I wallet, took out a dollar bill and rolled it tight and pushed it I through the slot of the MD container. I did the same.

We went into the office where the secretary once again sat behind her desk. The Chief followed us out. Reynolds wasn't there. Cantuck had Charlene give us a missing person's report. I filled it out and gave it back.

Cantuck picked it up the moment I laid it down. "All right . . . Mr. Hap Collins," he said, reading my name off the report. "Me and this investigation are open for business."

He went back to his office and closed the door.

Charlene looked at the closed door, looked at Leonard.

"Like the hair," Leonard told her.

Chapter 15

When we left Cantuck's office, we saw Officer Reynolds standing in the hallway near the exit, adjusting a plastic rain cover on his straw hat. He turned and looked at us. He carefully withdrew a Tootsie Roll Pop from his shirt pocket, unwrapped it, and tossed the wrapper on the floor. He stuck the pop in his mouth, winked at us, went out into the rain.

I said, "Think you could take him, you had to?"

"I don't know," Leonard said. "I don't know the both of us with clubs could take him. But the trick is, we don't let him know we think that."

"Frankly, I don't think it matters what we think."

"Know what? I sorta think he's cute."

"Oh, shit."

"I'm not kidding, Hap. I like the way he sucks that Tootsie Roll."

"He's a thug."

"I didn't say I liked him. I just wouldn't kick him out of bed for eating crackers. Tootsie Roll Pops either."

"Jesus, Leonard. He wouldn't get in bed with you unless it was to tie you to it and set it on fire."

"Wow. Really think so?"

Leonard chuckled. I picked up the Tootsie Roll wrapper and put it in the trash container by the door. Leonard put on his hat and we went outside.

We got drenched going out to the car. Leonard cranked the engine, turned on the heater.

"I feel kinda bad about Cantuck," I said. "I wanted us to push him, see if he knew more than he was letting on, but I feel kinda mean-spirited."

"Hell," Leonard said. "I did all the pushing."

"Making fun of a man's balls is pretty low, you know?"

"I admit I feel a little bit like a horse's ass myself. All those pictures of his kid, weird shit with the charities. I feel sorry for him. What did you tell me the boy died of?"

"Muscular dystrophy."

"Yeah, well, just because he loved his son and likes charities, doesn't mean he isn't a worthless dick."

I could feel my wet jacket sticking to Leonard's upholstery. The heater was slow to work. My stomach grumbled from hunger and need of coffee.

I said, "I hate to sound like you, but just because he's a dick doesn't mean he's a real villain."

"Jesus," Leonard said, "you're right. I'm starting to sound like a knee-jerk liberal asshole. I been around you too long."

"When I was growing up, Leonard—"

"Oh, Christ, another parable."

"Listen. My dad had the worst rhetoric you ever heard. He could get so worked up over 'the niggers,' he would vibrate."

"I've known people in my family to be the same way about whites."

"Yeah, but you know, one time I went down to my dad's garage, and there were a bunch of little black kids there, laugh­ing, and my dad was giving them five-dollar bills. Apiece. It wasn't like we had lots of money, and when the kids were gone, I said, 'Dad, what are you doing?,' and he said, 'I was afraid they might be hungry.'

"Dad hated the black race, but liked them as individuals. He hated some as individuals too, but you get my point."

"I do."

"I'm not defending his racism. I detest it. I think that's one reason I hate it so much, my old man being that way, and other­wise being just the kind of man I wanted to be."

"Just because your old man was a good man, does that mean Cantuck is? It's hard to believe he'd go out of his way to worry about some black girl that might have gotten killed."

"You knew my daddy, it would be hard to believe he would give five dollars apiece to a handful of black kids too."

"We're not dealing with your daddy, though. This Cantuck, we know nothing about him. Say he wouldn't do anything to hurt Florida, he's still convinced she's out shacking up. Blacks are all a bunch of animals to him. He figures all we want to do is eat and fuck."

"That's all I want to do."

"Maybe that's all anyone wants to do. As for the Chief, he might not swerve to hit an animal, but he still knows he's dodg­ing one. And when it comes to blacks, well, he might not go out of his way to do one harm, but he wouldn't expect anything of them but the most basic of animal behavior. Like being shacked up somewhere."

"So, we don't know any more than we knew when we went in."

"We know he's got an officer that isn't a nice person. Even _B Cantuck says so. And I know this. I'm one hungry sonofabitch. I say we go over to the cafe and get breakfast."

"You know how that'll go."

"We came here to be maggots in the shit. Squirm around, see if we can find what we want. What better way to stir the shit than to jump right in."

"I like the more casual approach. One where I don't have to get doo-doo on me."

"You sit here and be casual. I'm hungry, I'm wet, and I'm cold. The cafe is bound to be warm, and they've got coffee. I'll bring you some."

"We really ought to go over to the black section of town. Ask around there."

"We will."

"What's wrong with now?"

"You're stalling, Hap."

"Just as long as I can."

Leonard cut the engine, put his hand on the door handle, turned and looked at me.

"Oh, all right," I said. "What's a few stitches among friends?"

Chapter 16

Leonard was right. The cafe was warm. It was also crowded. The brothers who I had warned about the ants were there, and their mother, of course. There were also a lot of burly types, and old men. The blue-haired woman I had seen at Tim's filling station was also there. She was sitting with an elderly man who, from the look on his face, appeared to be dealing with some sort of digestion problem.

I could see a gray-haired black cook through the order window at the back. He had on a white cook's hat, a stained white shirt, and lots of sweat. He hadn't been working Christmas Day when I was here. He didn't wave as we came in. Neither did anyone else. The mother of the sweet boys who I had spoken with on Christmas smiled at me, the sort you give someone you know probably has a short time to live. Or maybe she just loved me and my little friend.

The cook looked at Leonard, shook his head, went to furiously scraping at something out of our sight.

We went over to a couple of stools at the end of the counter, sat down in front of a rack holding salt and pepper shakers, a bottle of ketchup and a bottle of Tabasco sauce.

There was a plump middle-aged man sitting next to Leonard. He was smoking a cigar. He blew out smoke, rolled up the newspaper he was reading, put it under his arm, picked up his coffee cup, found a seat beside another man in a booth at the back.

"Did I fart?" Leonard said.

The smiling woman came over. She looked nervous. "Would you gentlemen like something to go?"

This, of course, was the better idea, and I'll be honest, I was scared, all those fuckers looking at us, licking their chops, but I'd seen too many cowboy movies, and a cowboy doesn't run.

Of course, a movie cowboy usually has a stand-in.

"No," I said. "We'd like something to stay. I want flapjacks and eggs and biscuits and coffee. My buddy here will have the same."

"I will?" Leonard asked.

"You will," I said.

Leonard tipped his hat at the lady. "I will," he said.

The woman looked at us sadly and went away.

The brothers came over and stood by me, one on either side. The one with the bad mustache smiled, said, "There ain't no Christmas ants, are there?"

"No, son, guess there aren't," I said.

"You lied to us?"

"Yes, I did."

"That was a good one," Bad Mustache said. He grinned at me, then he and his brother moved to the rear of the cafe and took a booth together.

The door opened, let in the cold wind. We turned toward a voice saying: "You boys passing through?"

The voice belonged to a man in a gray waterproof topcoat and an expensive gray cowboy hat over which was attached a clear plastic rain cover. He eased off the topcoat, shook the rain from it onto the floor, hung it on a peg by the door, put his hat on another peg.

He looked to be in his sixties. He was the only man in the place wearing a suit. It was a nice, dark gray suit, expensive in a J.C. Penney's best sort of way. He had gray hair, perfectly combed, not mussed by his hat. It was held in place with enough hair spray to make an evangelist proud. He wore a bright red tie. It was tacked with a gold horseshoe to a crisp white shirt. He had on gray lizard-skin cowboy boots. He had a muscular build, with a slight paunch. His skin was very pale. He looked very proud of himself.

On one side of Gray Suit was a rather sizable gentleman who looked as if he could snap a baseball bat over his knee. I affectionately thought of him as Bear.

On the other side of Gray Suit was an even larger gentleman with enormous shoulders, a big belly, and a very wide ass. He looked as if he'd enjoy jerking a knot in a gorilla's dick on his worst day. I affectionately dubbed him Elephant.

"What'd you say?" Leonard asked Gray Suit.

Gray Suit grinned. He had a very precious deep dimple in his right cheek. I think he liked that dimple. I think he thought it got him lots of pussy. I wished I had a dimple. I wished I had all my hair. I wished the gray in my hair looked as cool as the gray in his hair. I wished I'd stayed home. I wouldn't have minded some pussy either.

Gray Suit kept right on smiling. "I said, are you two passing through?"

Before we could answer, he went over to a booth, and the men sitting there got up casually, with their plates and coffee, and found another seat. Gray Suit slid in against the wall. Bear sat in the seat beside him. Elephant took a seat across the table from Bear. The rain outside came down hard and consistent. Good sleeping weather.

Leonard said, "Naw, we ain't passing through. Actually, we was sorta thinking of moving here."

"And for what reason?" Gray Suit said.

"We were thinking of opening up a little Afro-American Cultural Center. That's a black thing, see. Hap here would be working for me."

"I does right," I said, "sometimes, Mr. Leonard, he lets me takes off a little early on Friday afternoon and he give me a fifty-cent tip."

Gray Suit smiled, said to the lady behind the counter, "Maude. I'd like some coffee. The boys here would like some too. Keep it coming."

Maude gave Gray Suit a look that could have raised tumors. Gray Suit acted as if he hadn't noticed. He turned his attention back to Leonard, said: "You know, when I was a little boy, right here in Grovetown, we used to have traveling minstrel shows." He paused and looked at Leonard. "You know what those are, boy?"

"I ain't wearing no knee pants," Leonard said. "Don't call me boy. Don't call my friend here boy neither."

"All right," Gray Suit said. "Man. Isn't that what you people prefer? Man?"

"Man's nice," Leonard said. "Man sound good to you, Hap?"

"I like it," I said. "Even if I'm not a 'you people.' "

"When I was a little boy," Gray Suit started, then paused to poke a cigarette into his mouth. Bear whisked out a little box of kitchen matches, struck one on the bottom of his shoe, offered it to Gray Suit. Gray Suit held Bear's hand, touched the match to his cigarette, puffed. Bear dropped the match on the floor.

Maude said, "Pick that up."

No one picked up the match. No one seemed to notice she'd spoken.

"What I remember fondly," Gray Suit continued, "was white folks doing colored minstrel shows. They wore blackface. Shoe polish. Big white lips. They did some jokes. And they were real funny. You know," he pointed the cigarette at Leonard, "you remind me of them minstrel folks, but you're not in blackface. Least I don't think so. And you know what? I think you're real funny. That makes me nostalgic. I like that. I like having you here. I didn't realize how much I'd missed being around funny niggers. And what I got here is not just some white man in blackface playing nigger, I got the real thing. I got me a genuine, born-of-black-hole nigger."

"Don't talk like that," Maude said, coming out from behind the counter with a pot of coffee. She put the pot on their table. "You're in my place, don't talk like that."

"It's all right, Maude," Gray Suit said. "It's just men talkin'. Ain't that right, nigger?"

Leonard didn't answer. He just tipped back his straw hat, sat there, patient.

Gray Suit turned his coffee cup upright and poured coffee. Maude rubbed her hands together, clasped her fingers, pulled, let go and went back behind the counter. I could hear her breathing behind us. Nervous, short breaths; kind I'd have been breathing had I not been holding my breath.

"I tell you, buck," Gray Suit said, "you look to me like someone who was bred of good stock. You know, that's why there's so many of your people can play basketball and football well. We white folks bred you. Got the biggest dumbest nigger bucks we could find, put them with some big ole black mammy could take about a ten-inch dick big around as a man's wrist, and that ole buck, well, he was the kind would mount a cow if our grandaddies told him to—and most likely if they didn't—and he'd bang that black bitch till she couldn't take no more. Then maybe our granddaddies would have a pony or a jackass do her, just to get a little spice in the stock. And through all that planning, down through generations of nigger kennelin', we ended up with solid, strong-lookin' niggers like yourself. And just as an added note, I got to tell you, I've always been partial to a nagger in a straw hat."

Most everyone in the place laughed. Even the blue-haired lady laughed. When the laughter died—

"Mama said don't talk that way in here!"

I turned and looked. It was Bad Mustache. His bubba was beside him. They were out of their booth, standing. The other brother said, "That's enough! Mama said that's enough."

"Billy, you and Caliber just relax," Bear said. "No one wants you hurt. Y'all sit down and have some coffee."

Billy and Caliber didn't move.

Leonard said, "Well, that certainly explains some things about us black folk, don't it?"

"Oh yeah," said Gray Suit, and he laughed a little, and the others laughed.

When the laughter slowed, Leonard said, "You know, every one of us, when you think about it, just missed about this much," Leonard held up his hand and made a C with his thumb and forefinger, "being a turd. Every one of us. I mean, there's only about this much space between one hole and the other. And we all missed the shithole by this much." Leonard lowered his hand, looked at Gray Suit and smiled, "Except you, mister. You made it. Your mama shit a turd, put a suit on it, and named it you."

Gray Suit turned red as a sun-ripe tomato. Bear started out of the booth then, but before he could shoot the distance, a blast of cold air blew through the cafe, and Officer Reynolds came in with it. He was sucking another Tootsie Roll Pop.

Everything stopped. Reynolds looked around. He eyed Bear, halfway out of the booth. Bear slid back into his place. Gray Suit raised up so Reynolds could see him, said, "Willie, it's me."

Reynolds pulled the Tootsie Roll Pop from his mouth, held it, said, "Yes sir." He turned to the woman behind the counter, said, "Maude, you got that breakfast?" He looked right at us. "To go?"

Maude glanced around, as if on the lookout for a miracle, sighed, went to the kitchen, came back with a greasy brown sack. She gave it to Reynolds.

Reynolds said, "Certainly glad I didn't see no unpleasantness here. Wouldn't want that. Chief wouldn't want that. I seen something like that, didn't do anything about it, he'd fire me. I don't like the idea of being fired. I like my little check. But, say I leave, how the hell am I gonna stop something gets going?" He looked at Leonard. "Any idea how I could do that?"

"There was," Leonard said, "you'd find a way around it."

Officer Reynolds smiled, put his Tootsie Roll Pop back in his mouth, went out with another blast of cold December air.

Bear stood up, arms crossed on his chest. Elephant stood up, opened and closed his hands—very large hands, and leathery. Probably got that way from strangling children. He was maybe six-six, and his shoulders were even wider than I first thought. So was his ass; even front on, you could tell that hunk of meat was enormous.

"You boys don't get in no fights now," Maude said. "This here is my cafe, and I don't want no fights. They were just leaving." She leaned over the counter, touched me on the shoulder. "You were just leaving, right?"

I was agreeable to this, but before I could say anything, Gray Suit said, "That's right, they were just leaving, but not under their own power."

"This ain't no cowboy movie saloon," said Maude. "This is my place."

"Mama said that's enough." It was Caliber. He and Billy were easing slowly to the front of the cafe. No one was paying them much attention, however. They were watching to see if Leonard and I were going to shit our pants. I don't know about Leonard, but I felt a rumble in my tummy.

I began to grope for a graceful way out. Even a not so graceful one, but Leonard, as is often the case, closed the door.

"Before we get on with the butt-whippin'," he said, sliding slowly off his stool, turning his body slightly to the side. "I got one question for the big guy." Leonard gestured to Elephant. "Man, tell me true. Is that your ass following you around, or are you pullin' a trailer?"

Chapter 17

Elephant was a step closer than Bear, and no sooner had Leonard finished his remark than he stepped with his right foot and threw a hot haymaker at Leonard's head. It was such a wide and uncalculated blow, Leonard could have eaten a plate of eggs and biscuits and half a cup of coffee before it got there.

Leonard stepped in and blocked with his left hand and hit Elephant on his left temple with the edge of his right hand; hit him hard enough Elephant's greasy black hair flew up like a frightened monkey springing for cover.

Before the hair settled, Leonard captured Elephant's punching arm, swung under it, pushed against the big bastard's elbow and drove his head forward into the lunch counter, smacking Elephant’s noggin into it with a noise akin to the crack of doom.

Leonard grabbed Elephant's hair, jerked his head up, brought it down into the counter again, let him go. What was left of Elephant’s face smashed into a bar stool. Some of his cheek turned red and greasy and slid to the right of the stool while the rest of him fell left. I tell you, it was enough to make me lose my breakfast, had I eaten any.

All of this took no time at all.

Bear was on me then. I had already reached back and got hold of the ketchup bottle, and I swung it. It was still in the rack with the salt and pepper and Tabasco, and the bottle and the rack caught Bear alongside the head solid enough the ketchup exploded. Wads of red went all over Bear and across the cafe and onto Gray Suit's coat.

Gray Suit said, "Goddamn!"

The world froze. We were like prehistoric flies in amber, but one look at the fine citizens of Grovetown, and I could sense a sort of fire building inside them. Nothing like a nigger smacking a white man to stir a bunch of crackers, and a white man taking a black man's side didn't cheer them much either. The first was like being made to eat shit. The second was like making them eat it and smile.

I dropped what was left of the ketchup bottle and the rack. It hit the floor with a sound so sharp we all jumped. Then things went still again. I couldn't take it anymore. I said, "Well, you assholes gonna do it, or what?"

"Don't y'all do it," Caliber said. "You leave 'em be. You do it, you're gonna pay damages. You're gonna pay lawsuits."

Gray Suit said, "Git 'em! Kill the sonsabitches!"

And the mass of them came unstuck in time and space, rushed fast and hard, and I swung an elbow and saw someone's teeth fly, then I got hit on the right side of the jaw and a floating rib ceased to float, and I got my fingers in one guy's face and raked his eyes, side-kicked his knee out from under him, then someone was on my back and I was swinging my elbows, trying to throw him, but someone had me around the waist, and I couldn't get the torque, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Leonard dot a fat fucker's eyes with a rapid left, right, then kick another fatty between the legs solid enough to lift him. He back-elbowed an old guy, who spat his tobacco onto the back of Leonard's head, then Leonard was swarmed. He went down beneath a pile of writhing, punching bodies, his teeth clamped on some dude's ear, his hat beneath another's feet.

I saw Caliber launch a punch at someone, but he caught a solid one to the side of the head and went down. I saw Billy grabbing men and jerking them away from me and Leonard, but it was like trying to bail out the ocean. Gray Suit was standing up in the booth looking down on the action like Xerxes watching the last defenders of Thermopylae go down. He had a fresh unlit cigarette in his mouth.

Bodies were pressing me so tight I was using nothing but elbows, leg stomps, head-butts, and knees, but it was useless. I started falling. I was being hit so hard and often my face felt as if it were exploding. I came down hard on my back, and above me were thrashing legs and bleeding, hateful faces; the fat guys, the old men, the blue-haired lady.

Their fists and shoes tumbled down on me like an avalanche. My balls took a few shots. I wondered if Chief Cantuck and I might be able to get matching trusses. Maybe he could wear his nut to the right, I could wear mine to the left. We could walk side by side. Kind of a balance thing.

The lights of the cafe went dark, then bright again, but I was seeing them through a sheen of blood, and it was my blood.

Too much pain.

My last vision before darkness was the blue-haired hag's shoe coming at me, accurately aimed at my head.

When I awoke, I was in great pain and I was wet and getting wetter and I was shaking from the cold. I realized too I had pissed myself and there was vomit on the front of my shirt and jacket. I was up against an alley wall, out back of the cafe most likely, and it was raining hard, and my mouth tasted of copper and one of my eyes was nearly swollen shut. One of my teeth felt loose. My kidneys hurt. My ribs hurt. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to think. I feared if I moved too rapidly an arm or a leg might fall off.

I could hear grunting and I turned my head, carefully, just to make sure it didn't bowl a strike. The alley was full of people from the cafe, and the alley was full of rain.

Two fat guys, one with a couple of black eyes, the other with a wide split in his lip, had a mostly unconscious Leonard held up between them. His knees were bent and his legs were flared out behind him, the tops of his boots dragged the ground. His head was about the size of a medicine ball, and his lips and nose and eyes blended together in a knobby topography of swollen flesh. His breath steamed from his mouth and turned into little white clouds that faded to nothing.

The blue-haired lady was in front of him. She said, "Hold him up better."

She tried to kick Leonard in the balls, but the alley was wet, and she slipped and fell on her ass. The crowd moved toward the woman, and two men pulled her to her feet. When the crowd moved, I saw that Billy and Caliber were lying in the alley too. They looked to have taken a pretty good beating. Their mother was between them. Her hair was plastered to her head like seaweed to a rock. She was screaming her boys were hurt and wouldn't somebody do something, but nobody did. She squatted next to Billy and held his head in her lap, screamed, "Stop it! Stop it! Now! Stop it!"

Billy's hand came up and touched her hair. He said something, not very loud, then his hand went down again. He got the hand under him and pushed to a sitting position and scooted his back against the alley wall. He didn't look as if he cared much about what was happening now, long as it wasn't happening to him.

Maude rose suddenly, pushed through the crowd and went inside the cafe.

The blue-haired lady had a solid stance now. She kicked Leonard firm in the nuts with a football style kick. Leonard let out a burst of air, it puffed white and went wide and far, like a blast from a dragon. He sagged between the two men even more. The old lady said: "Niggers is what's wrong with this country."

I tried to get up, but couldn't. I fell over on my side and watched the alley wall lean at me. I turned my head toward Leonard, saw that Blue Hair had been replaced by Gray Suit. The rain had pushed his evangelist do apart and it had fallen into his face. I noticed, pushed down like that, he had been covering a half-dollar-sized bald spot at the back of his head. Good. I was glad he had a bald spot. I really didn't like this guy.

He had ketchup on his suit and the rain had spread it into rusty patches all over his jacket. His white shirt looked as if it were spotted with blood. He said, "Hold him," and the two guys picked Leonard up higher and held him firm, and Gray Suit began to work on him. Pounding him in the stomach, once in the jaw, but that hurt Gray Suit's hand. He jerked it back, said "Damn," and kicked Leonard in the shin. Then the leg. Leonard's bad leg.

Gray Suit reached in his pants pocket and got out a large pocketknife, pinched a blade open.

I tried to crawl toward Leonard, but I wasn't making any time at all. I felt like a slug nailed to the ground. I felt like I was in a car and it had skidded off the road, and everything had gone slow motion, and I could see a telephone pole coming through the windshield and there wasn't a thing I could do about it.

Gray Suit said, "Way you tame a nigger . . . way you make em good, is just like you do a rambunctious stallion. You got to severely lower their testosterone level. All that ball juice just leads a nigger to trouble."

The men in the crowd laughed. One came forward, got hold of Leonard's zipper and pulled it down, reached in his pants and pulled out Leonard's equipment.

"No," I said. "Don't," but my words sounded like coughs.

Gray Suit turned, looked at me. He showed me that pretty dimple. It looked so deep now you'd have thought it ought to have a winch and bucket perched over it. He said, "Well, the nigger lover's come around. I cut this nigger's boo-doodles off, I'm gonna put 'em in your pocket, boy."

Gray Suit came forward and grabbed Leonard's testicles and lifted them and reached with the knife, and a gunshot split the air.

It was Maude. She had a pistol in one hand, a Winchester in the other, tucked under her armpit.

"You ain't gonna do this. Not in my place. Not out back of my place." Maude fired a shot with the revolver and made a trash can jump. She pointed the revolver and the rifle at Gray Suit, who still held Leonard's balls and the knife. She said, "Jackson Brown, you cut that nigger, you touch one of my boys, you come for me or that fella on the ground over there, any of you make a move to do that kinda business, I'm gonna blow what little brains you got out of the back of your head. And I'll do it too. Don't think I won't. Now all you cretins get on your horses and ride."

Gray Suit said, "You're gonna bring yourself some serious grief, Maude."

"You don't own my place yet, Jackson. You don't threaten me. You hear? Let go of that nigger's rocks."

So this was Tim's father. Jackson Truman Brown, the Lord of Grovetown. Standing in a wet alley with a pocketknife in one hand, Leonard's balls in the other.

Gently, the Lord unhanded Leonard's gonads, folded up his knife and put it away. Way he did it, you'd have thought he just used it to clean his fingernails. The two fatties dropped Leonard on his face. He hit so hard he cut a fart, then lay still.

A siren whooped once, went quiet. I turned to see the Chief's car at the mouth of the alley. Officer Reynolds was driving. He got out of the car and strolled up the alley, sucking his last Toot-see Roll Pop. "That's enough," he said. "All y'all go home."

"Draighten and Ray are on the floor in the restaurant," one of the fatties said. "These fellas hurt 'em bad."

"Yeah," Reynolds said. "Well, haul 'em off. Get 'em a doctor, they need it. I want all y'all out of here. Now."

"Officer," Jackson Brown said, "you don't want to get too carried away."

Officer Reynolds studied Brown for a few seconds. His face took on a pleasant look. "You know how it is, Mr. Brown. Think about it a minute. The position I'm in."

Brown took the minute offered and considered. "There'll be another time," he said.

"That may be," Officer Reynolds said. "Maude, put them guns up before you shoot yourself or wound that nigger. We wouldn't want something to happen to that nigger. Niggers are special, you ought to know that. Government protects 'em, like some kind of goddamn endangered species." He looked at me. "And nigger lovers are special too. Damn precious, in fact."

Maude lowered the guns. Caliber limped over and took the Winchester from her, then the revolver. Billy turned so he could use the wall to get up, clawed his way to his feet. He and Caliber looked rough. But not as rough as Leonard. I figured I didn't look too pretty myself.

The crowd began to break up. Brown looked at me, creased his dimple, said, "You boys weren't tough as you thought, were you?"

It took me a couple of deep breaths to say it: "Could be. But all I can say for you is, you certainly handled Leonard's nuts like a natural."

Brown glared, turned, paused long enough to look Maude over good, nodded at her, then went through the back door of the cafe and out of sight. The others had already gone, and now there was only Maude, her sons, me, Leonard, and good ole Officer Reynolds.

"That nigger don't look so smart now," Reynolds said. "Neither do you. You want to say something smart?" I was on my knees, using my hands for support. Officer Reynolds came and stood over me. "I said, you want to say something smart?"

"No," I said.

"Good. Now, get your nigger. Put his dick back in his drawers, zip him up, then you and him get out of Grovetown, and when you get home, find you some pretty stationery, purple or pink would be nice, and write me a thank-you card for not letting them folks kill you. Write Maude one too. And you keep your nigger and your nigger-lovin' ass out of Grovetown, Texas. Only thing I regret in all this is not gettin' to try your nigger. I think he might have thought he could take me. I'd like to have shown him he couldn't."

Officer Reynolds went down the alley, opened his car door and turned. "Billy. Caliber. Y'all see them guns get put up."

"Yes sir," Caliber said.

I lay down, slowly, the side of my face resting against the freezing, wet alley floor. My face was so hot from injury, it actually felt good. The rain felt good. My eyes, heavy as stones, began to close.

I heard Officer Reynolds drive away.

Chapter 18

The oaks and pines and hickory trees that grew close to the road were dark with rain. Visible through the boughs, when there was any visibility at all, was a grim, gray sky. The sound of windshield wipers beating back and forth, the vibration of tires on cement, seemed at first to be the rhythm of striking fists and feet on flesh.

For an instant, I thought I was in the midst of another beating. I hurt so bad, I figured I couldn't distinguish the pain of the old beating from the new.

It took me a moment to realize I was in a car, an old blue Ford Fairlane, and that it was not night but late morning, and that the beating was over, and not long over. My face was turned toward the door and my forehead was resting on the rain-beaded passenger glass of the front seat. I could feel cold air leaking in around the window and hitting my feverish face, and it felt good. I smelled like dried urine.

I had no idea who was driving and for an instant I didn't care. I sort of thought I was on my way to the river bottoms where a rusty transmission would be tied around my feet, and I would be sent down to inspect the river mud for about three minutes, then it would all be over. A year from now, maybe two, some fisherman would snag his line on what was left of me, pull up my rotting head, call in the law, and dental records would reveal I had six cavities, was dead, and that I was Hap Collins.

When I felt strong enough to flip a whole loaf of bread over by myself without verbal encouragement, I turned my head and saw the driver.

It was the cook from the cafe. He wasn't wearing his white hat, but he still had on his stained white shirt. He said, "You might as well go on and sleep. You took a hell of a beating."

"Yeah," I said. "You should have seen the other guy."

"I seen them other guys, and compared to you two, they look pretty good."

"That's what I was afraid of."

"Then again, Draighten and Ray don't look so good. You gave them two a righteous ass-whuppin'. Bopped some eyes and mouths and noses on them others too. Hadn't been so many of 'em, so crowded, I think you and your friend might have done some serious whup-ass. 'Course, I only sort of saw it in passin'. I went out the back when things got goin' good, went over to the antique shop, told 'em to call the Chief, say there was a ruckus. That's how come ole Officer showed up."

"Thanks."

" 'Course, Officer might not be who you want to show up. He got connections with the Klan."

"As does Jackson Brown?"

"Yep. They tied at the hip. Mr. Jackson, he's the Grand Cyclops or some such shit for that bunch. They don't call themselves Klan exactly, but that's what they are. Ole Officer, he kinda in a spot. Even for Grovetown, he got to play by some rules. You best be glad all this didn't happen out in the woods somewhere."

"I hear that."

"Did, ants be eatin' your ass right now. In town, Officer got to keep the Chief happy some. Chief not someone gonna invite me over to his house to supper, but I reckon he's good enough, it come down to business. He ain't gonna stand by let something like that happen on purpose."

"That's good to hear. Thanks again."

"Don't give too big a thanks. Tore the cafe up too bad, I'd have lost my job. There by the skin of my teeth anyway. Cafe ain't like a McDonald's chain, you know? It loses money couple, three weeks in a row, it's gone. Damages could make it gone quicker."

"What about Leonard? Man that was with me?"

"Back seat. Now, you talk about a beatin', he took it. You boys lucky you in pretty good shape."

"Rose field work. Cheap food. No sex. Makes you strong."

"My name's Bacon, by the way."

"Bacon?"

"Yeah, like in slices of."

"Your mama named you Bacon?"

"My daddy. He always liked bacon, so he named me Bacon. I don't think he liked me near good as bacon, though. Least not the way I remember it."

I managed to turn and look in the back seat. Leonard was stretched out there, lying on his back, and he looked awful. His face appeared to be the end result of a radiation experiment. Had I not expected him, I don't know I would have recognized him. His smashed straw hat lay over his crotch.

"He needs a doctor," I said. !

"Gonna get one. Wouldn't no white town doctor gonna look at him. Not after they find out Mr. Jackson Brown was the one wanted y'all beat. Reason he got that hat with him like that, wasn't no one wanted to put his dick in his pants."

"That'll slay him. He thinks his dick is his best feature."

"Caliber, he got him two sticks and tried to do it, but he couldn't do nothing but pick it up and move it left and right. Couldn't get it to go inside the pants, and he wasn't gonna touch it. Me neither. So we put that hat over him."

"Very innovative. He's lucky he's still got a dick. That Brown fella didn't mind touching it. Or cutting it."

"I don't think he really gonna cut it off. He knows how far he can push, and he can't push that far. Not in town. Not all them witnesses, even if most of them deny they saw anything happen. They know someone got to pay. And if it's somethin' that bad, a ball-cuttin' downtown, they only gonna lie so far."

"In other words, they won't go to the pen for Jackson Brown?"

"That's right. But way it stands now, Chief ain't gonna do nothin' to that Mr. Jackson, even he wants to. Mrs. Rainforth—"

"Is that Maude?"

"Uh huh. She gonna say what happened, and her boys gonna say, but all them other people, they ain't gonna say, 'cause they was in on it. Them two y'all whupped up bad. They'll take the fall for all that ruckus. 'Cause that's what they're paid for."

"Where are we going, and how come?"

"You goin' to my place, least for a bit. And the reason how come is Mrs. Rainforth done paid me to do it. Said I should take you home and take care of you awhile. She's paying me some extra."

"So this isn't out of the kindness of your heart?"

"I ain't got nothing against you. I think what happened was a shame, but I wasn't gettin' paid, and wasn't gettin' Mrs. Rainforth's blessing on this, you'd still be out there in that alley. ‘Sides, my place only a little better than the alley."

“And how come Mrs. Rainforth is doin' this?"

“White ladies are hard to figure. She don't like Mr. Jackson, for one. He owns most everything in town, wants to own the cafe, and she won't sell, and on top of that, him and her husband, Bud, they hated each other. He's dead now, but Mr. Jackson, he ain't one to forget, and Mrs. Rainforth, she ain't neither. It's not she's suddenly grown to like niggers, but then she don't exactly hate nobody neither. She don't like that kinda business come down on you two."

"What about you? She like you?"

"Shit, boy. I'm the cook. I been there so long she don't think about me one way or the other. I'm like furniture and . . . Wheeee! I tell you, mister . . . Who are you anyway?"

"Hap. Hap Collins."

"I tell you, Mister Hap. We got to get you out of them piss-pants. You makin' my eyes burn."

Chapter 19

There's no other way to describe Bacon's home other than to say it was a real shithole. It was down in a wash and the yard was full of water. Decorating the place like yard art was a worn-out washing machine, the lid up, the drum overflowing with beer cans. Near that, like a dead companion, a refrigerator lay on its side with the door off; its interior was nasty black with moss and grime and an abandoned bird's nest.

Out to the side of the house I could see some kind of heavy machinery and a truck under a weathered tarp. There was just enough visible that I could tell that, but not enough to identify the machinery or the make of the truck.

Bacon coasted slowly through the water, drove right up to the front porch, which sagged a little and dripped water. Worse yet, it looked like the porch was holding the house up. The house looked to have been made mostly of plywood and suspicious two-by-fours pried off a burned-out building. The roof was primarily tin and the rest was tar paper and the water ran off it in great gushes.

Bacon got out, waded to the front porch, which drooped beneath his steps, and opened the front door. He went inside for a moment, came back, opened my door, said, "You gonna have to help me with watermelon head here, Mr. Hap."

"I'm an injured man," I said. "Couldn't you carry me in and leave him here?"

Bacon grinned. "You sore. You banged, but you're all right enough. They spent their steam on your buddy."

"Thank God," I said. "They could have hurt me."

I eased out of the car into ankle-deep water. I felt as if someone had wrapped me in razor wire and set me on fire with a blowtorch. I found I couldn't completely straighten up. Bacon opened the back door, got Leonard under the arms and pulled him forward, out of the car. "Get his feet," Bacon said.

"I just hope that damn hat don't fall off his dick," I said.

It was painful, but we got Leonard inside, carried him into one of the three small rooms—a bedroom. It was actually pretty cozy in there, considering there was no heat, and it looked a hell of a lot better than the exterior. One corner of the room sported a commode and a bathtub right out in the open. Half the room had carpet in it that might have once been beige, but was now greasy brown with a flecking of black spots that wasn't design.

"The decor," Bacon said, "is late slave or early nigger."

I saw what Bacon had done when he went inside. He'd gotten a paint-splattered drop cloth and put it over the bed, and we put Leonard on top of that. There was a little heater in the corner of the room, and Bacon lit that while I took off Leonard's shoes. Bacon got a couple of army blankets out from under the bed and laid them over Leonard without removing the hat from Leonard's crotch.

We went back to the living room. It was small with a shelf of dust-covered knickknacks, a well-worn couch, a large space heater, and a coffee table bearing an ancient television set festooned with foil-covered rabbit ears. Bacon saw me looking at it. He said, "I didn't have to eat regular, I'd get me a satellite dish."

"Quit running yourself down," I said. "I hurt too much to feel sorry for you."

"You think I'm running myself down, then you full of shit. Don't sit on the couch there till you get out of them piss-clothes."

"What am I gonna do, sit around in the nude?"

Bacon disappeared into the bedroom, came out with a pair of khaki pants, some dry black socks, and a plaid shirt.

"You gonna have to let it all hang. I ain't got no clean underwear."

I went to the bedroom, moving slow, bent over like Quasimodo, and took off my clothes. There was a full-length mirror leaning against the wall, and I looked at myself in that. My face was swollen, there was dried blood on my upper lip and over my eyes, knots the size of Ping-Pong balls swelled out of my forehead, and there were great black-and-blue bumps and bruises all over my body. Even my balls were swollen and blue. I had to hold them with the palm of my hand to keep them from hurting as I stepped into the tub and cleaned myself. It was a painful ordeal. The hot water was slow to come and cooled quickly.

I put my pants and shirt in the tub with me, ran water over them, twisted the water out best I could, draped them over the faucets. The water that ran out of the tub didn't go down a drain, it went straight to the ground. I could feel the cool air whistling up under the house, blowing through the tub's drain. It was a simple approach to plumbing. Easy. Efficient. And a bad idea.

I got out and dried on a suspicious-looking towel and put on the clothes Bacon had given me. The pants were too long, so I cuffed them. The shirt was big and loose and felt good on my damaged body.

I went over to the commode to take a leak. The pot's interior was dark with urine stains. It looked as if the last time it was clean was when it came out of the box. I pissed, and the piss was full of blood.

I'd had it happen before. It does that, you take good shots to the kidneys, but it was always scary to see.

I flushed, wondered if the contents of the toilet went straight to the dirt below the house along with that of the tub, then picked up my socks and shoes, stopped by the bed and looked at Leonard.

It was all I could do not to cry, he looked so bad. I touched him gently on the shoulder, went to the living room. I sat on the couch, put the socks and shoes beside it. I said, "What about this doctor?"

"He gonna be here," Bacon said. "Mrs. Rainforth called him. Told him we was comin'. He live on the far side of here. Probably be a few minutes. If the rain's worse on his side, he's flooded out, who knows?"

The third room was a kitchen, but it was a room only by definition of containing a butane stove, a refrigerator, a sink, a table with chairs, and a large lard bucket that collected water dripping from a hole in the ceiling. There was a window over the sink, but a big square of warped plyboard had been nailed over that. Bacon lit the greasy cook stove and the space heater, and the house, small as it was, began to warm.

Bacon said, "You gonna be here just a little bit, then I'm gonna run you off. I don't want no trouble with them Ku Kluxers. You want some coffee?"

"Might as well. Jesus, I don't know when I been hurt this bad id was still able to stand. I mean, I been hurt worse, but not in this way. "

I was thinking about being shot. That had been damn serious, and scary too. Leonard had been hit worse, and he almost lost a leg. But those times were not times I liked to think about often.

I had a feeling this little escapade wasn't going to be one of my top ten on memory lane either.

"You think you hurt now, give it a couple hours, tomorrow morning," Bacon said. "You be stiff as a young bull's dick, only not as happy. You know that was all a setup don't you?"

"Back at the cafe?"

"Uh huh. They layin' for you and the other'n. Mr. Hat Over His Dick."

"Leonard," I said.

"They just waiting for you to be where they want you, and I guess the cafe got as good as they could get. I think Mr. Jackson, him not liking Mrs. Rainforth had somethin' to do with it too. He don't go to the cafe. Never. Not even for coffee. Reckon he figured he was gonna shit off the papers, he oughta do it someone else's place. Someplace where there was plenty of folks behind him. They don't show a little support, they could lose jobs. 'Sides, I think they really liked beatin' on y'all."

"They did seem jovial. I would have thought he'd have picked a more private spot."

"He might have. But I figure, right now, he just want to run you off 'cause you askin' too many questions. He like to sport a little for the town too, keep showin' 'em who's boss. Show the law don't worry him none."

I lay down on the couch very carefully. It was damned uncomfortable and smelled musty. I turned my head and saw the shelf of dust-covered knickknacks. I said, "You don't look like a man likes knickknacks."

"Can't live without them. I had my way, I'd have a room with them and nothing else. Especially they was ceramics of little kitties or ducks. . . . Them's my wife's."

"Where is she?"

"Dead."

"Hell, I'm sorry."

"I ain't. I been meaning to sack up that shit of hers for years, throw it out, but I just ain't had the time. Ain't got no milk, want some sugar in yours?"

"Just black," I said.

"Way I like my women," he said. He brought the coffee in, said, "Sit up, man, I got to have some room. Sides, I got a program to watch. I like the noon news. I like to know who's killin' who."

"I'm injured here."

"Sit up anyway."

I managed myself to a sitting position, slid down to the far end of the couch and took the coffee he was offering me. "Thanks," I said.

"Don't make nothing of it. I was gonna fix me some anyway."

Bacon turned on the television, adjusted the rabbit ears for a while, did everything with them except tie them in a knot, but he didn't get a picture. Just snow.

"Shit," he said, and turned off the set. "Guess we got to talk."

"Do you think Jackson Brown did it? Hung the fella in the jail?"

"Bobby Joe? If ever anybody needed hangin', it was that sonofabitch."

"He's certainly popular around here. I haven't talked to anyone liked him."

"Nothing to like. I enjoyed puttin' him down."

"Come again."

"I buried that fool. Dug the hole for him, anyway. I do back-hoe work, I'm asked. Make a little on the side, digging ditches, sewer lines, and graves. Gotta stay on top of stuff, you gonna make ends meet."

Now I knew what kind of machinery was under the tarp.

"Well, do you think Brown did it?"

"He may not have done it himself, but he probably behind it, 'cause I don't think Bobby Joe hung himself. I think he con that white sonofabitch down here with that music business, thinking he gonna get big money out of him, then Bobby Joe got drunk, and didn't think it through, decided to go for the short change. Just killed him for what he had in his wallet. Bobby Joe like that. Mean as ass rash. He might just thought it would be funny to see that peckerwood squirm. You know how they found that white man?"

"No."

"Hung by his heels from a tree with his throat cut."

"Damn. Taking another angle on the subject, thing we came here for, Bacon, reason we ended up takin' this beatin', is we're trying to find a woman."

"What man ain't?"

"A certain woman. Named Florida. Good-lookin' young black woman, came here not long back? You saw her, you'd remember her."

"That black fox? Shoot, she here fifteen minutes, everyone knew it. Every hard dick in niggertown was after her, and the peckerwoods was watchin' too. I was still able to trot, I'd have been after her."

"She was interested in the Soothe case. She was here to look into it. Do you know what happened to her?"

"She a fool. Come down this side of town talking about how she wanted to maintain Bobby Joe Soothe's legacy, like he had one. It was ole L.C. had the legacy. Bobby Joe could pick a guitar some, but he was a scum hole, and a scum hole don't deserve no legacy, 'sides that hole I dug for 'm. If'n he'd a takin' up preachin', he'd have been the perfect villain. As was, he once cut up his nephew."

"I heard that story."

"Hear about the German shepherd?"

"Yeah."

"Well, that ain't true. That ole dog was part collie."

"I don't suppose you caught the dog's name?"

"Ralph. Tell you another one. Bobby Joe, he goin' to one of the joints, and he stepped in some cat shit by the door. Fella owns the joint, he got all kinds of cats. Don't really take good care of 'em none. Just lets 'em run wild. Throws a little food out the back, and well, them cats ain't spayed, and next to a rat and rabbit, ain't nothing likes to fuck better'n a cat. So they always makin' baby cats. Cat shit all over that place. Bobby Joe, he did his drinkin' there 'cause everyone was scared of him, and he liked that. He liked to go a place where people was afraid of him. Made him feel like a big dick. Anyways, he steps in this cat shit, and you know what he does?"

"I can't even begin to guess."

"He goes in and gets him a beer mug, and he scoops up some cat crap with it, then he comes in and makes the owner buy himself a beer. You know, take money out of his own pocket and put it in the register."

"Least he gets the money back," I said.

"That's right. Who says life ain't fair. Well, Bobby Joe makes this owner, Tiny Joe Timpson, called that 'cause he's big as a bear standing on a block of wood, makes this guy pour that beer on top of the cat shit, and drink it. And Bobby Joe, he ain't no big guy. Ain't no midget, but ain't no big guy either. That Tiny, he done killed six folks this year. Caught two of 'em breakin' in the place, killed two others 'cause he was fuckin' around with their wives and they caught on, and done killed two women. One of 'em 'cause she got mad Tiny was keepin' her husband down at the bar all hours of the night. She complained and words got tossed, then Tiny shot her. Called it self-defense. Can-tuck, he looked into it, but wasn't no one contradicted Tiny. Said she tried to kill him with a beer mug."

"What about the other woman?"

"She was asleep in the driveway, and he backed over her."

"She pass out there?"

"Yeah, right after Tiny hit her in the head with a Coke bottle."

"Cantuck didn't do nothing?"

"He tried, but black folks, they keep things to themselves, and the white folks, they let 'em. But you can see the kind of guy Tiny is, and this Bobby Joe, he makes Tiny drink this beer with the cat shit in it."

"Man, I don't think that'll catch on."

"Tiny made sure it didn't. Next day, he got his shotgun, and he shot all them cats, and when he run out of shells he beat the rest of 'em to death. He wouldn't even hang a picture of a cat in his place now. That cat shit, it's always right there in the back of his throat."

"I wasn't under the impression Florida was here to find out about his legacy. She was planning to write some kind of article on him."

"Heard some of the guys say somethin' about that, but I don't know about it. She liked to hang over at the roadhouse, talk to people about Bobby Joe like he was some kind of star. She wanted to buy his guitar, music tapes, stuff like that. She had the money for it and she told anyone would listen to her she did. Them boys over there, they was tellin' her all that shit about how L.C. and Bobby Joe sold their souls to the devil at the crossroads and drank the devil's piss and such to play guitar, and she was eatin' it up."

"I don't understand why she'd talk to just anyone about buying Soothe's stuff."

"'Cause she couldn't find none of L.C. s or Bobby Joe's stuff on her own, and his relatives didn't have nothin' of his, didn't want nothing to do with him. They were scared of him. Hell, he used to rape his own sister. They say a female dog run across the yard, he'd chase it down, fuck it and kill it. They wasn't no sorrier sonofabitch than Bobby Joe. He born bad, man. All that legacy stuff started 'cause Bobby Joe did a little playin' around Tyler, and someone on some magazine or paper or somethin' interviewed him, and he told all these stories about how he had L.C.'s stuff, and he talked that voodoo jive, said he had some unpublished songs L.C. had written out, and he had a couple songs on tape was recorded way back but never put on record."

"Did he?"

"Not that I know of. Not that anyone I know knew of."

"You're sayin' Florida was fishing?"

"And she was offering money for information. Lots of money. Them roadhouse lizards, about half of 'em ain't worth a shit. They'd tell her anything she want to hear they think they might make'm a dollar or get 'em some pussy. And it piss me off when anyone try to make somethin' special out of that nigger. He was sorry, just plain sorry. He meet that white boy at a roadhouse here. I seen 'em there. I was drinking a beer and watching 'em, and ole Bobby Joe had that white boy eating out his hand. Talkin' that music shit, playing like he some kind of jive nigger, and that ole white boy, he just shakin' his head like he was talkin' to some kind of god. He was talkin' to the devil, that's who he was talkin' to. They left together in that white boy's car, and wasn't more'n a couple hours after that, they found that peckerwood with his throat cut, hanging from a tree just off the highway, right by the goddamn road led up to Bobby Joe's house. Bobby Joe smart in one way, but in another he just a drunk field hand with a bad temper. He didn't think no farther than the length of his dick or the deep of his thirst. That's the way he was, and that's all there was to it.

"All that voodoo shit didn't do him no good when that Officer Reynolds show up. After ole Officer find out about that dead white boy, he went over to the roadhouse, asked around, and me and some others told him we'd seen Bobby Joe and the white boy together, seen 'em leave together, and when ole shitass Officer kick Bobby Joe's door off the hinges, there's that drunk fuck sittin' at the table with that peckerwood's watch and wallet, countin' the money. Bobby Joe tried to fight that big cop with his guitar, and Officer just tore that all to hell, then ole Officer stomped the stuffin' out Bobby Joe, opened that boy's mouth, made him bite the edge of the table, then slammed him in the back of the head with his forearm, knocked out all of his front teeth."

"I believe that's police brutality."

"Way the law works here. You don't fuck with the white law. 'Course, Bobby Joe had it comin'. Law or anyone couldn't have done nothin' to that jackass would have bothered me."

"How do you know it happened like that?"

"Filipine told me."

"Filipine?"

"That's what we call fella lives down the road here. His mama black, but his father was one of them Filipinos. He went with Officer to show him where Bobby Joe lived. He probably didn't have no choice but to go. Didn't want to go, ole Officer would have kicked his ass up around his ears."

I thought about all that, realized suddenly why Florida had withdrawn her money from the bank. She was a woman with a plan. A bigger one than I had first thought. She saw herself not only as some sort of crusader, but as someone who was going to preserve a heritage, and maybe get some notoriety in the process. She had envisioned Bobby Joe as some kind of Robert Johnson. Magazine articles. A book. TV movies. That would be her approach. Florida was one ambitious rascal. She'd most likely given up her apartment with plans to live here, near her subject matter.

I heard a car splashing through the water outside and became, to put it mildly, tense.

Bacon got up, went to the window, pulled back the curtain and looked out. "Doctor," he said.

The doctor came in wet and old, bald-headed and grumpy. The black skin on his forehead was deeply wrinkled, the wrinkles sagged like worn-out Venetian blinds. The water beaded on his gray slicker like blisters on a rhino's hide. He had a bag in his hand, not a little black bag, but a big red plastic bag, as if he'd just come from shopping at a toy store. He sat the bag down, took off the slicker and dropped it on the floor and the water pooled beneath it.

"What the fuck you doin' to my floor?" Bacon asked.

The doctor looked the place over, then looked at Bacon. "Say what?"

"Yeah, well, all right," Bacon said.

The doctor picked up his bag, and Bacon led him back to where Leonard lay. A moment later Bacon came from the bedroom and shut the door, said, "He always was a dickhead. But he's a good doctor. Only lost a few dogs he's worked on, and they'd been hit real bad by cars. He do all right with horses too. He's had a lot of cats die on him, but I never did give a shit about the outcome of cats."

"He's a veterinarian?"

"He do a little side work, it comes up. Only real black doctor lives fifty miles away, and I'll tell you now, in this rain, this being Grovetown, he wouldn't have come."

"Great. A vet."

Twenty minutes went by and the doctor came out of the bedroom with his big red plastic bag and sighed.

"How bad is he?" I asked.

"Looks hell of a lot worse than he is. Took a good beatin', but folks doin' it didn't do too special a job, all things considered. He's a tough sonofabitch, and he'll be all right. I worked on a hog like that once. Some kids climbed in a pen with a bunch of hogs, took baseball bats to 'em, but this old boar took a good beatin', got one of the kids down and ate part of his face 'fore the kid could get out of the pen."

"So he'll be all right?"

"Not tomorrow, but he'll heal. Don't seem to have no real internal injuries, which surprises me." "He knows something about covering up, going with the flow," I said. "Experience."

"I put his dick in his pants, by the way."

"That's good," Bacon said. "Me and him wouldn't do it."

"I wore gloves," the doctor said. "Well, let me look you over, whitey. Take off them duds."

I could hardly rise off the couch. In fact, I couldn't. Bacon got hold of me and lifted me up. He smelled of fried foods and sweat. My muscles ached deeply and I felt ill to my stomach. Standing was the most painful thing I'd ever done next to paying taxes. I gingerly unbuttoned my shirt and the doctor helped me take it off. My skin had turned purple and black and green where I had taken shots from fists and feet. The lump on the side of my head hurt the worst.

The doctor poked and prodded, felt and looked. He said, "That one there, that's a shoe caught you."

"Reckon so," I said. "Can't say as I was takin' notes."

"Take off your pants."

I did. My balls were the color of plums going to rot and were doubled in size.

"You better get you some underwear," the doctor said. "These dudes swinging will make you see elephants."

"I hear that," I said. "They aren't ruined are they?"

"No. They'll heal. Ought to get you some Epsom salts, put it in the tub with hot water and soak for an hour or so every day." He looked at my head. "This is really the worse shot you got. You have any memory loss?"

"I don't remember."

"Ha. Ha," the doc said. Nobody had a sense of humor anymore.

"Bacon, you watch him. He shows trouble remembering, repeating of phrases, then . . . well, I don't know. Give him a couple of aspirins, keep him awake."

"Shit, man, he ain't my problem. I don't even know this guy.

He go to sleep and die, it ain't my fault. He die, it won't be on my head. I'll sleep like a lawyer. It wasn't me got him into this. Him and ole Swole Head in there is the one's crapped in their nest, not me."

"Well, that's between you and him," said the doc. "He ain't none of my problem neither."

"Sure I am," I said. "You're a man of medicine."

"Just counts on animals. Someone found I was checkin' on you, they'd take my license. 'Sides, you seem all right to me." He poked me in the ribs with his finger. "That hurt?"

"Hell yeah."

"Good. I'm through. You gonna live. Just stay out of trouble for a while. I tell you, both you boys, you the luckiest fellas I've seen. Ain't neither one of you look like much, but you're both tough as a roadhouse steak. The one in there, his head wasn't like that before the beatin' was it?"

"No."

"Then he's tough, not just ugly. Y'all be all right. That's sixty dollars apiece."

"Apiece?" I said. "What do you charge dogs?"

"I don't charge them nothin', but their owners pay me sixty dollars apiece for a lookover like this."

"We get anything for pain?"

"My sympathies and Bacon's aspirin. I can't be dolin' out medicine. I'm a vet."

"Hell," I said, and gave him some of the money Charlie had given me.

About ten P.M. the rain slacked. I hadn't moved much from my position on the couch, and that had been a mistake. I was very stiff now. Bacon fixed some fried egg sandwiches and finally got the TV to work. He found an old black-and-white movie about gangsters, interspersed with long stupid commercials, and we watched it. When we finished the sandwiches, Bacon said,

"You want some whiskey? I likes a little jolt or two before bedtime."

"I gave up drinking anything but nonalcoholic beer."

"You a drunk?"

"Nope. Just felt it wasn't healthy."

"I'm gonna take me a little jolt. All that pain and such, you might want you a little."

"Oh, all right, what the hell, just a shot."

He poured us both some in plastic glasses and gave me a handful of aspirin. I took the aspirin and we sipped and watched the movie. I finished off my whiskey and began to nod. The gangsters were taking another gangster for a ride when I lost track of the plot. Next thing I knew it was morning.

Chapter 20

I tried to get up and go pee, but it wasn't as easy as I would have hoped. It was a job just to get my legs over the side of the couch.

I saw Bacon in the kitchen, sleeping on a cot with a blanket pulled over him. I finally got up and old-man-stepped to the bedroom/bathroom, pissed and checked on Leonard. He opened his eyes and looked at me.

"I got to go," he said.

I pulled back the covers, discovered he had been dressed by the doctor in some of Bacon's old clothes. Helping him took about twenty minutes from bed to toilet. I wasn't all that brisk myself. Leonard took a leak and looked in the mirror. "Oh, my God," he said. "I look like the Elephant Man." I led him back to bed. We were doing better, it only took ten minutes to get back.

"I feel awful," he said. "Where are we?"

I filled him in.

"Bacon? His name is Bacon?"

"Yeah, and he's grumpy. The doctor, you remember him?"

"Not really."

"He was grumpy too. And he's a vet, not a real doctor."

"That figures."

"Everybody is grumpy in Grovetown. I want to go home."

"Me too. Hap?"

"Yeah."

"This Bacon, he can't hear me, can he?"

"No."

"Then I got to tell you, just between you and me, I was really scared. I mean really. I don't know I could face any of them guys again. I'd wet myself."

"You already have."

"Oh yeah."

"And I forgot to tell you, you cut a big fart when you fell down in the alley. I was really embarrassed for you. And they messed up your hat too."

"I looked good in that hat."

"No, you didn't."

"I been whipped before, but not like that," Leonard said. "I've never been humiliated that way. I've strapped three and four fuckers at a time. So have you. Like the assholes next door. The crack house. I whipped them like they were nothing."

"In this case, we were vastly outnumbered, the space was small, we did not have the element of surprise, we're older today than we were yesterday, and to be just goddamn honest, Leonard, those bastards, young and old and female, were about as tough and determined as any I've fought, and they came on like a tidal wave. Under the circumstances we did pretty good, and the fact that we're mostly bushed and stove up and not broken and killed is due to the fact that we have some manly skills in the art of self-defense."

"I figure we just lucked out."

"Actually, me too."

"I really want to go home. For the first time, I really want to give up. Why'd you have to tell me about the fart and the dick part? The pissin' on myself was bad enough."

"I didn't think you'd want it coming from someone else. And besides, misery loves company."

"We were certainly cocky before all this, weren't we?"

"You were. I wasn't."

"Now I don't know if I want to shit or wind my watch."

We sat for a while, not saying anything. I said, "You hear the joke about the lonesome cowpokes."

"Ah, Hap, not now."

"Just to cheer you up."

"You can't tell a joke for shit, Hap."

"You see, there was this cowboy town, and this guy rides in—"

"Hap, please."

"—and he goes to the bar, and he has a few drinks—"

"You're going to do this anyway, aren't you?"

"—and after he gets pretty lubricated, he says to the bar­tender, 'Where are all the gals? Hell, I ain't had a woman in six months.' "

"Is this going to be sexist?"

"Probably."

"Well, all right, go ahead, even if it's the wrong sex for me."

"We can change it to a gay cowboy. The line is now, 'I ain't had a man's ass in six months.' We have to take for granted that this is sort of a progressive cowboy bar, okay?"

"Just get it over with."

"So, the bartender says, 'Hell, there ain't no gals . . . guys.' You know, Leonard, for this one to work it has to be gals."

"Okay. Whatever."

"The bartender says, 'There ain't no gals, but we got some­thing we do for that little problem.' Cowboy says, 'Yeah, what's that?' And the bartender says, 'Show 'em, boys.' So the boys take the cowboy out back of the saloon, and there's this watermelon patch."

"I see this coming."

"No you don't. They take him over to the fence and he looks at the watermelons growing there, says, 'I don't get it,' and one of the cowboys says, 'We just cut us a plug out of one of these melons, and on a hot night like this, we fuck it, and it feels damn good.' "

"This is disgusting, Hap. Go on."

"So the cowboy, he's, to put it mildly, shocked, but as we have established he hasn't had any in six months, so he climbs over the fence, looks around, sees him a fine-lookin' melon, one of those striped rattlesnake melons, and damn if he don't actually feel a little something for it. A stirrin'. He picks it up, takes out his pocketknife, starts to cut him out a plug, when suddenly all the cowboys gasp and fall back. He turns, looks at them. Says, 'Hey, what's wrong?'

" 'Why stranger,' one of 'em says, 'you're playin' with fire. That's Johnny Ringo's girl.' "

A long moment of silence, then Leonard sighed. "Oh God. It's worse than I thought. That's tasteless. Which is okay. But it's not funny."

"Is too."

"No, it isn't. Hap?"

"Yeah."

"You know what?"

"Yeah. One way or the other, we got to finish what we started."

Leonard wasn't much fun. He hadn't liked my joke and fell asleep while I was talking to him. I went back to the living room. Bacon was up. He had put the cot away. He was wearing boxer shorts with flowers on them, a stained T-shirt, and old brown slippers. He was standing by the stove. He said, "Want a scrambled egg, somethin?"

"Egg is fine."

"How about two and some biscuits?"

"All right."

I went into the kitchen and sat at the table. It was warm in the kitchen. Bacon had slept with the oven lit and the oven door open. He took a can of biscuits out of the fridge and whacked it on the edge of the counter, plucked the biscuits out and snapped them into a greased pan. He paused to scratch his ass, went back to his business. I tried to keep an eye on which biscuits he han­dled after the ass scratching, so I could locate them in the pan.

He put the pan in the oven, closed the door, went to cracking eggs. "You feel any better?"

"A mite. More than I ever expected."

"You're lucky the couple guys knew how to really throw punches were the ones y'all took out right at first. They can do some damage, them two. See 'em again, won't be so easy. They weren't expecting all that Jap stuff."

"Korean, actually. Hapkido."

"All the same to me. See 'em again, they gonna come on hard, if they don't shoot you."

"I don't want to see them again. I want to go home."

"There's an idea. You damn sure ain't stayin' here. You look well enough to me to stay somewheres else, and I wish you would. I don't want no more troubles than I got."

Bacon cracked eggs in a bowl, poured some milk from a car­ton into the bowl and started whipping them up. He poured the results in a lightly oiled frying pan, stirred them as they cooked.

A moment later the food was on plates. He pulled the biscuits out of the oven, sat the pan on the counter. "Your buddy want to eat?"

"I'd appreciate it if you'd make the trip to go ask him."

"You don't move them muscles, much as they hurt, you're just gonna get stiffer'n shit."

I sighed, made my way to the bedroom. Leonard was asleep. By the time I got back Bacon was through eating. Half the bis­cuits were gone. There wasn't any margarine left for the biscuits, just a greasy wrapper, and the eggs on my plate were cool.

I eyed the biscuit pan. Two of the biscuits were the ones Bacon had handled after scratching his ass. I ate the others, and the eggs.

"What happened on the movie last night?" I asked. "I fell asleep."

"These two guys, they got roughed up, so they decide to go back and do the guys in did it to 'em. They got killed."

"Did not," I said.

"You're right. They went home and lived happily ever after, and the guy they was stayin' with 'fore they did got him some peace and goddamn quiet and died with a hard-on."

"Did not."

"I got to go to work. There's Epsom salts by the tub, you want to soak."

"Bacon?"

"Yeah."

"Thanks for letting me sleep on the couch, taking the cot and all."

"Don't keep expectin' it. I didn't get paid that much. I don't reckon no one knows where you are right now, but give it a few days, it'll get out. Word always gets out."

I got out my wallet and gave Bacon a twenty. I said, "For food."

"Thanks," he said.

"I'd appreciate it if you'd get some vanilla cookies. Leonard likes vanilla cookies a lot."

"Vanilla cookies," Bacon said, and left for work.

Chapter 21

Around five o'clock that afternoon the rain stopped. I was at the window looking at the sky, the dark line of trees below it and the highway beyond the water-covered yard. The sky looked strange. All red and swollen, as if it were bleeding behind transparent skin. The highway was red with sunlight and glistened H like a fresh-licked strawberry freeze pop. As I watched, a car splashed into view, turned off the highway onto where the drive would have been had it not been covered by water.

It was Bacon's old wreck. Two cars pulled in behind him. I felt my innards churn, then saw one of the cars was Leonard's and Tim was driving. The windshield had been knocked out on the passenger's side and black plastic had been stretched across it and held there with gray tape. The driver's side still had glass, but it was fractured and webbed.

The other car was the Chief's car, and Cantuck was by himself. Bacon got out with a grocery sack in his arms, stood by his car in the ankle-deep water with his head hung, as if he had just been forced to give all the dogs at the pound a blow job; then write a favorable report on it.

I let the curtain drop, went to check on Leonard. He was awake. I propped him up, told him who was out there, then we heard the front door open. I went into the living room, leaving the bedroom door wide so Leonard could look out and hear.

Tim managed to come inside first. He looked tired and vacant-eyed. He needed a shave. He didn't quite look at me. He sort of smiled out of the corner of his mouth. I figured I wasn't much to look at.

Bacon eased inside carrying his dripping shoes and socks in one hand, the grocery sack in the other. He sat the sack on the television, reached inside, got out a bag of vanilla cookies, tossed them at me. "Little goin'-away present."

I caught the cookies, let them dangle by my side.

Cantuck was standing in the open doorway, carefully scraping mud off his boots with the bottom of the door frame. He finished and closed the door. His right cheek was stuffed with chewing tobacco and his ruptured nut looked extra lumpy today, as if it might burst open at any moment giving birth to deformed twins. When he spoke, flecks of dark tobacco juice jumped from his mouth and onto his lips.

"Where's the Smartest Nigger in the World?"

"In the bedroom. Right now, he's the Most Swole Up Nigger in the World."

Cantuck didn't look in the direction of the open bedroom door. He said to me, "You boys know a fella named Charlie? Cop in LaBorde?"

"Charlie Blank?" I said.

"That's the boy," Cantuck said. "He called up the office. Said to tell you boys to come on home. Said to say a fella you know, a colored cop named Marvin Hanson was in a coma." <

"A coma?"

"Got drunk, wrecked his car on the way here last night. Got caught in the rainstorm, run off the road and didn't have on a seat belt. Hit a tree. Jolt shot him through the windshield, bounced his coconut off a limb after he went through a barbed wire fence."

"Oh shit," Leonard said.

"This Charlie, he said you'd want to know, and to tell you to come home. I told him I'd pack your bags for you. And I have."

"We went by the trailer and got your stuff," Tim said. He stood with his hands in his pockets, as if he might reach down far enough to find a crawl space into which to pull himself. "Leonard's car, the window's busted out of it."

"I saw," I said.

"Goddammit," Leonard said.

"Don't know who did it," Tim said. "They cut up the upholstery too, broke the tape player and all the tapes."

"Hank Williams too?" Leonard asked.

"I don't know," Tim said, looking toward the bedroom. "I reckon. They put all the pieces in the glove box. They slashed all your tires. I replaced them. Bill's in the glove box with the tapes. I know it's a bad time, but I got to remind you, I need my money."

"You'll get it," I said. "How bad is Hanson?"

"A coma's bad," Cantuck said. "You know all I know."

"How'd you know we were here?" I asked.

"I told them," Tim said.

"And how did you know?" I said.

"Maude told me. I went over to apologize for the way my father acted. Or rather to distance myself from the old bastard. Got a little carpenter work too, fixing what y'all wrecked. I can use the money. I said I was a friend, she told me how bad you two were hurt, where you were. I told the Chief, offered to bring out your car."

"Great," I said. "And I guess Officer Reynolds knows where we are too?"

"No," Cantuck said. "I didn't tell him. There's places where me and him don't see eye-to-eye."

"Only because he's taller," I said.

Cantuck grinned at me. "You really don't know me, son. Not even a bit. Hey, Bacon, where can I spit this shit?"

Bacon disappeared into the kitchen. I heard him scrounging around in the garbage. I sat down on the couch. I was past standing up. Bacon came back with an empty corn can. Cantuck took it, spat a cancerous wad of chewing tobacco into it, sat the can on top of the television next to Bacon's grocery sack.

Bacon said, "You was gonna have to leave anyway, Mister Hap."

"Before you head out," Chief Cantuck said, "let me give you a little report. . . . Bacon, got any coffee?"

"Yes sir."

"Make us some."

"Yes sir."

I watched sadly as the old black man shuffled into the kitchen. He had gained ten years and lost twenty points off his IQ the moment Cantuck arrived.

The Chief took hold of a rickety chair, straddled it carefully, adjusted his nut, said: "On this gal."

"Florida," I said.

"Yeah, well, you boys may be right. I think maybe she might be in trouble. Or beyond it."

"No shit," Leonard called out.

"There's stuff don't add up," Cantuck said. "Tim, give me that spit can."

Tim, with a scrunched face, picked the can off the television set and handed it to Cantuck by holding it with thumb and forefinger. Cantuck put the can in front of him on the chair, peeled back his coat, pulled a pack of Beech-Nut from his shirt pocket. He carefully unfolded the pack and opened it. The smell of the tobacco was fresh and sweet, like syrup on pancakes. Too bad it didn't taste that way.

Cantuck poked tobacco into his mouth as if packing a cannon. He worked his mouth a little, wiped spittle on his sleeve and said, "There's some kind of tie-in in all this. Bobby Joe's death, this Florida gal missing."

"So we're not quite the assholes you thought," I said.

"No, you're assholes all right," Cantuck said, "you're just a little smarter than I expected."

I could hear Leonard moving in bed, trying to find a better listening position.

"This mornin' a Texas Ranger came down with the County Sheriff, Tad Griffin. They had a fella with 'em. Some kind of coroner, or dead body expert, whatever them sonofabitches are."

"Forensics," Tim said.

"That's it," Cantuck said. "They come to dig up that dead nigra. Bobby Joe. Wanted to see if he'd hung himself or someone hung him. They got ways of tellin'. Did you know that?"

"All I know I get from the movies," I said.

"They look at the marks on his neck, the strangle marks, and they can somehow tell if he did it himself or had help. Or so they claim. I'm not sure they really know shit."

Cantuck paused, poked two fingers into his mouth to line his chewing tobacco up right, then wiped the fingers on his pants.

"I'll bite," I said. "Was he hung, or did he commit suicide?"

"Don't know," Cantuck said.

"When will you know?" I said.

"No idea, because they didn't find the body," Cantuck said.

"What?"

"I put him down," Bacon said. "You was there."

"I know," Cantuck said. "Went out there, dug where he was supposed to be, and he wasn't there. Wasn't nothing there, unless you want to count earthworms. Big old bastards. Make good fishing bait."

"You're sure he was in the coffin to begin with?" I asked.

"He was there," Cantuck said. "I went out and supervised the burial. Bobby Joe's family wouldn't have nothing to do with him. Thought he had the taint of the devil on him. Was a voodoo person, they said. I was at the undertaker's when they closed him up in his box, and I was there with a Baptist reverend when they put him down in the colored pauper's field. Bacon dug the original hole. I watched him dig it."

"Colored?" Leonard called out. "You can't be consistent, can you, Chief? Are we niggers, colored, or nigras?"

"Take your pick," Cantuck said.

"Just as long as you don't use a term like People of Color," Leonard said.

"Don't worry," Cantuck said. "I won't."

"You mean someone stole the body?" I said.

"Unless it turned into a worm and crawled off. Coffin, body. Gone. Bobby Joe wasn't embalmed 'cause wasn't nobody paying for it, so whoever took the body had'm a pretty ripe job."

"Any ideas who might have stolen it?" I asked.

"Few," Cantuck said, changing his tobacco to the opposite cheek. "Could be kids fuckin' around, some of that Satanist shit."

"Oh, come on, Chief," I said.

"Didn't say it was," Cantuck said. "Said it could be. It could be other things. Folks might not want him buried out there near a loved one."

"I know one family was real upset about it," Bacon said. "They was upset enough, they could have moved him."

"Who would that be?" I asked.

"Mrs. Bella Burk's folks," Bacon said.

Cantuck nodded, picked up from there. "They come to me about it. Wasn't nothing I could do. Burks didn't want Bobby Joe laid down near their mama on account of him into black magic, not being baptized and all. Her people covered her grave with crucifixes, charms. They may have decided that wasn't enough, dug him up and disposed of the body. They did, I wouldn't hold it against them."

"And if they didn't," I said, "what's that leave?"

"What you might suspect," Cantuck said. "What you been thinking all along. Someone got rid of the body so there's no evidence Bobby Joe didn't commit suicide. If he didn't."

"That's the case," I said, "him not committing suicide, someone might think your office could be involved. He didn't hang himself, that points a finger at you, doesn't it?"

"It do," Cantuck said. "In fact, they're thinkin' along that line right now. Sheriff and Ranger told me that right out. Frankly, I'm startin' to think that boy was hung."

"While you were away, of course," I said.

"Yeah, while I was away. I was there, he wouldn't have been hung. He might have lived to have gotten the needle, but I wouldn't allowed nothing like that. I keep tellin' you that."

"That's right," I said. "I thought I'd heard it before."

"Man does a crime like that, sets it up way Bobby Joe did, had that stupid Yankee come down here with money to buy stuff didn't exist . . . Well, the Yankee was stupid, but his only crime was being stupid, and legally, that ain't no crime. Bobby Joe could have had that Yankee's money without killin' anyone. Could have conned that city fuck and come out good, but Bobby Joe thought it was too much fun to kill him. Maybe 'cause he was white. Maybe 'cause Bobby Joe was drunk. Maybe 'cause he just wanted to."

"Sounds more like it," Tim said.

"But there wasn't no excuse to gut him like a hog, do him the way he did," Cantuck said. "Even if he was a Yankee. I got nothin' but contempt for Bobby Joe."

"You and everybody else," Tim said.

"But," Cantuck continued, "he was in my jail, and I put a prisoner in my jail, he's supposed to be safe. People work for me are supposed to make sure he's safe. They don't, and I find out they didn't, then I'm gonna want to see they get a trip to the death house, get that needleful of shit in the dead man's place. I don't allow that kind of shit."

"Does Reynolds know you don't allow that kind of shit?" I said.

"I reminded him this mornin' after that body come up missin', and I told him if he had his fingers in any of this, well, I was gonna see they got cut off."

"How'd he take that?" I asked.

Cantuck paused. "Nervous. I thought he looked a little nervous when we went out to the gravesite, for that matter. And damn relieved when the body wasn't there."

"So, you think Reynolds was surprised it wasn't there?" I said.

"I don't think nothing."

"Meaning, he didn't move the body," Leonard said.

"Meaning nothing," Cantuck said. "I'm sayin' he looked nervous, then relieved. That could mean somethin', and it could mean diggin' up corpses don't give him a hard-on. Then, knowing he wasn't going to have to see a dead body after all, it cheered him up. I'll tell you, seeing a body don't give me no hard-on neither, so I can understand that. Fact is, ain't nothin' gives me a hard-on anymore."

"Not even chickens?" I said.

"Not even chickens," Cantuck said. "But I don't know, I look at them little pin feathers around a chicken's butthole long enough, maybe I'd heat up."

"Still," I said, "you're suspicious, aren't you?"

"Maybe."

"You went far enough to talk to Reynolds about it," I said.

"I did it to see if the water rippled or splashed. It might have rippled a little, but it didn't splash. Then again, Reynolds ain't easy to read, and if I had my druthers I wouldn't work with him. 'Sides, he's fuckin' ray secretary, and she's a married woman. I don't like a man workin' on a married, and I don't much care the woman don't mind givin' it up. She's got kids and a good husband. I had concrete evidence I'd fire 'em. And her a big churchgoer. You say shit, she acts like you just gave her a mouthful, and I know she's fuckin' that big sonofabitch every goddamn chance she gets. Can't prove it, but I know it."

"You sound jealous," Tim said.

"I am a little. I don't feel good about that, but I guess I am. I've thought about her some myself. I'd like to get my fingers in that hairdo. But I'm a married man, and a married man ain't supposed to do stuff like that, so I don't. Bible said it was okay to go around pokin' any hole you wanted, I might look at it different, but it don't say that." · "

"Nice of you to tell us all about your office problems," I said. "Come in here and shit all over your deputy."

"Yeah," Leonard yelled. "That's damn white of you."

"Can't help myself," Cantuck said. "I just plain don't like Reynolds. I don't like my secretary either."

"You don't like them, fire them," I said.

"Not that easy. Charlene needs the job. She's got them kids. And Reynolds, I didn't hire him in the first place. Town pushed him on me. Actually, Brown pushed him on me through the Mayor. That's the way politics are played, so I ended up taking him on. He's good enough at what he does, but he ain't all that fair about things. He's crafty, but he lets personal get in the way."

"You think Brown has Reynolds in his pocket?" I asked.

"Not his front pocket, right next to his dick, but his hip pocket maybe. Mainly Reynolds is just Reynolds. He does what he wants 'cause he wants to, and a lot of what he wants ain't all that good."

"Certainly nice of you to drop by and tell us all this, Chief," I said. "Why?"

Cantuck considered a moment. He laid his hands on the back of the chair and leaned back. As he did, a shaft of red sunlight poked through the curtain and landed on his left eye. He jerked his head from the light and leaned forward again, said, "Reckon I should have taken this colored gal's missin' more serious."

"And maybe you want us to feel so warm toward you we'll go home and forget all this mess. Just leave it to you. Trust you to do what's right."

"Could be," Cantuck said.

Bacon brought coffee in, two cups at a time. One for himself. He stood by the television and sipped his.

"What about all those guys jumped us?" I asked.

"Your word against theirs," Cantuck said. "Draighten and Ray say they got into it with you two on their own. Claim there wasn't no one else involved but them, and it was just y'all caused the ruckus."

"You believe that?" I said.

"Don't matter what I believe. We get through sortin' it all out, it'll come down to you two fought them two, and it'll be your word, and Maude's and her boys against all them other folks who saw it and say it didn't happen way you say it did."

"What if we press charges?"

"They'll press charges back."

"So what's next?"

"We put your asses in your car and send you home."

Chapter 22

Leonard and I decided to wear our own clothes. Tim went out to Leonard's car and brought in our suitcases, then asked Bacon to drive him home. Bacon left with Tim, and I went into the bedroom and closed the door and changed clothes and helped Leonard dress. While I held him under the arm and he painfully slipped into his pants, he said, "You think the Chief is telling it the way it is?"

"I don't know," I said. I helped Leonard sit on the side of the bed, then folded up the clothes Bacon had given us and placed them on a chair.

I helped him into a shirt. He buttoned it slowly. He didn't look at me when he said, "I'm glad we're going home."

"Me too."

"There was a time when I thought I couldn't be broken, but I don't know now. I hear a sound, I get tense. I hear it twice, I damn near shit myself. I think it's that bunch coming down on me, all of them, and I figure right now, if I was solid and sound and they came, I might just ball up like a baby and let them have me."

"You wouldn't, Leonard. It's not in you."

"I wouldn't have thought that just a day or so ago, but I think now I've just been lucky."

"No one survives all you've been through and calls themselves lucky. Your problem is you've lost your boyfriend, taken a damn good beating, and everybody saw your dick. Not to mention you cut a fart and pissed on yourself."

"Thanks for reminding me."

"Trust me. You'll get over it."

"You comin' back here, Hap?"

"Come on, Leonard, let's go."

"Hap?"

"I don't know."

The Chief and I loaded Leonard into the back seat of the car with a blanket we borrowed from Bacon, and as a last thought, the Chief gave us his thermos. I took it inside and the Chief came in behind me. I poured what was left of Bacon's coffee into the thermos.

I said, "You wouldn't happen to have some sandwiches, would you, Chief?"

"You boys hit the road, and don't come back," he said. "You were fortunate this time. I see you again, and you get to stay at the jail a while. Like maybe till I retire."

"Been nice visiting your little town, Chief."

I took the thermos and went out to the car, the Chief walking behind me.

The sky was dark again. All the red had bled out. The Chief said, "You start now, you won't get home late, and you might beat the storm. It's coming, but it'll be at your back, you don't fuck around. You've got a full tank of gas, courtesy of me, and you got hot coffee and I don't want the thermos back. I don’t want anything that'll have to do with me seeing you again. Comprende?"

"But we will get a Christmas card from you next year, won't we?"

"Sit out by the mailbox and wait on it. And, son, Happy New Year."

I opened the car door and tossed the thermos inside. A pillow had been laid across the ripped-up driver's seat, and I put my ass on that and started the car and turned on the lights.

As I backed out of the drive, the Chief lifted his fingers and waved bye-bye.

I drove until I reached the highway, then pulled over beside the road.

"What's up?" Leonard said.

"One minute," I said.

I got out and paused to look at the sky. It was dark all over, but behind us there was a greater wad of blackness, like soot-stained cotton, and it was balling and twisting and tumbling our way. The wind was cold and wet and smelled of lightning.

I opened the trunk of the car, got a handgun and the strapped Winchester and made sure they were loaded, brought them around, laid them in the front seat as I climbed behind the wheel.

"Thought you didn't like guns," Leonard said.

"Today, I'm trying to be more open and friendly toward them.”

"Let me have one for back here," he said. "As a pacifier."

I gave him the revolver and he put it in his waistband. I patted the stock of the Winchester on the seat beside me, said, "Good boy. Stay. Good boy."

As I drove, the sky grew black as the bottom of an ancient outhouse. The trees alongside the highway became little more than an outline and appeared to be sketched from charcoal. The storm behind us was rolling faster than I was, and I could feel it as it descended on us like a heavy, alien cloud. Rain splashed the windshield and the tires began to sing in the water; a nasty little song that hinted of blown tires, skidding machinery, and twisting metal.

It had been hard enough to see with the cracked windshield, but now, with the rain coming down the way it was, it was damn near impossible. I slowed, leaned forward, tried to make out the yellow line so I could hold the car steady. I really should have pulled over, but I didn't want to. Not until I had us and Grovetown many miles apart.

Another few miles and I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw lights. Then behind those lights, others. The lights were moving toward us pretty fast, much too fast for common sense in weather like this.

I watched the lights in the rearview mirror when I wasn't struggling to hold Leonard's junker on the road, and they were closing with a determined pace. I felt my bowels weaken, then the car was filled with the light. A big dark pickup was riding right on our bumper, so close, at a glance you might have thought I was towing it. The truck fell back, charged forward, fell back, broke around us and passed.

I glanced at the truck as it went around me. It was big and black and souped-up and rode on oversized tires that splattered the water on the highway with power and grace. You got the feeling that goddamn truck could ride on the surface of a lake. The windows were tinted and it had grown quite dark, so I couldn't see anyone inside. The pickup glided around us quickly, then way ahead, and I watched as its taillights bounced out of sight.

I glanced in the rearview mirror, saw the other set of lights moving forward, and there were lights behind those lights. I looked at Leonard. He was lying on his side, looking at me. He said, "Trouble?"

"I don't know."

I dipped Leonard's junker down into a drop in the road and a fog thick as the wool on a sheep's back clouded over the windshield. I inched forward and out of the rise, and at the top of it the fog thinned, and directly in front of me, pulled crossways across the highway, was the big black pickup, the lights poking toward the woods and a marshy pond festooned with dried weeds and cattails. There wasn't even a half lane between the nose of the truck and the marsh.

Behind me one set of lights rushed forward like a falling pair of meteors, rode my bumper. The other set filled the passing lane.

I wasn't going backwards, and I couldn't go forward. I thought about ramming the truck, but figured I tried that I'd move the truck all right, but what was left of me and Leonard wouldn't have been enough to pack a gnat's ass.

I decided I had only one avenue, and that was to swing wide left in front of one set of lights, try and race around the pickup, glance a blow off of it, get back on some free and straight highway.

Temporary fix. I managed that, then I could gun Leonard's junker all the way up to sixty, if the radiator didn't blow out through the hood or the tires didn't pop. That would keep us ahead of that souped-up truck for almost ten seconds.

One cliff at a time.

"Hang on, buddy!" I yelled at Leonard, and tried to put my foot through the floor. The car didn't exactly leap, but it surged a little. I saw the driver's-side door open on the pickup and a man wearing a white sheetlike outfit and a hood stepped onto the highway. He had a shotgun in his hands and he lifted it at me.

I jerked the wheel to the left as the air exploded with a sound like thunder, but it was shotgun thunder. Pellets tore through the black plastic side of the windshield and carried it away. I heard Leonard cuss and I cussed, then I was going around the front end of the truck, hitting gravel. There was a noise like a cherry bomb going off, and less than a second later I knew the left front tire had blown. The car made a weave, and I tried to turn in the direction of the skid, but couldn't figure out which way it was skidding, then—

—we were airborne. Went way up and out toward the marsh and the car hit the water and the water parted and came up high and washed through the windshield and cattails leaped out and away and the car rode up as if it might coast the water, then went down again, dipped its nose slightly forward. Water lapped through the windshield, over the dash and sloshed my legs.

Leonard said, "Go for it, Hap. Get out of here."

I climbed over the back seat and grabbed Leonard, tried to open a door. Couldn't. Water pressure.

"Let me go, Hap."

The car dipped forward again and more water came in, and Leonard said, "On second thought, drag my ass out of here."

"We're going through the windshield," I said.

Leonard helped all he could, and I got him tugged over the seat, into the front seat, which was half filled with water. I got hold of the rifle, which had fallen onto the floorboard, and used it to knock out what was left of the flimsy windshield, flung the strap over my head and shoulder as the car took a nosedive.

I got Leonard by the coat collar, pulled him straight through the windshield, and we went down, down into that cold, dark murk, and for a moment I couldn't figure if I was trying to break the surface or diving for the bottom, then realized the truth, pushed off from the car with my feet and changed direction, fought the tug of the sinking car.

I pulled at Leonard, but couldn't get much movement. He was too heavy and not able to do much. I actually considered letting him go, then tightened my grip and decided it was both or nothing. The darkness above me bloomed with light, and I broke the surface, yanked Leonard up behind me.

Leonard's head from the mouth up was all that came out of the water, and he bobbed like a cork. We gasped for air. The rain pounded on us. It was still dark, darker than before, in fact, jet as night and the air had a stench to it. Rotting vegetation, fish, mud. It was a strong, almost overwhelming reek activated by the blowing wind and the rain.

I readjusted my grip on Leonard, started to swim toward shore, then there was a crack and the water jumped like a frog leaping.

I glanced at the highway, the source of the lights, realized the lights were the headlamps of the pickup and the two cars that had been behind us. They had parked in such a way to use their head beams as spotlights. I realized too that someone had just tried to clip me with a thirty-ought-six.

There were several white-gowned and hooded shapes near the lights, and they had rifles pointed at us. Then that damn shotgun roared and the water popped all around us and a pellet went into my cheek, and almost simultaneously the sinking car created a delayed suction, and we were pulled back down into the depths.

Chapter 23

Only I hadn't realized the depths weren't that deep.

We hadn't dropped far below the water when my feet hit the back of the car, which was nose down in the muddy bottom. I pushed off and swam laterally, got into a tangle of weeds and vines, panicked, nearly lost the rifle, floundered and split the surface.

As I bobbed above the water, gasping at the cold, throat-searing air, clinging to Leonard, I decided if I was gonna die I wanted a bullet in the head, not water in my lungs. Even though I was a decent enough swimmer, the idea of drowning terrified me, and it seemed nearly drowning was something that happened to me on a regular basis. Leonard once said if there was two feet of water within a hundred miles of me I'd find some way to fall nose forward into it. And probably take him with me.

We had come up in a thicket of dried weeds and cattails, and nobody had ventilated our skulls. It was starting to rain harder, and the rain came down in chilled pills and moved the water around us. I could see the car lights through the weeds, and they were hazy from the rain, and I could see the hooded assholes moving down close to the bank, looking around, chattering like squirrels. I realized they couldn't see us, at least for the moment.

They were fanning out to our left and right, around the marshy pond, and the pond wasn't all that big. I knew pretty soon they'd spot us, and when they did, it would be as easy for them as shooting decoy ducks.

My cheek stung where the pellet had gone in, and I was already a mess to begin with. My legs hurt from treading and I was so cold, my balls felt as if they had crawled up inside me for warmth.

But one good thing, I wasn't thinking nearly as much about all the pain the beating had given me. I was too concerned with freezing, drowning, not getting my head scattered like a rotten pumpkin. Just like they say, every cloud has a silver lining.

Leonard looked weak as a pup with distemper. He couldn't really tread. I was holding him up and it was about to do me in. I tightened my grip on his collar, pushed backwards with my legs, silently as possible, backstroked and dragged Leonard with me. It was a hard go, and I was swallowing that foul water and I almost decided to lose the rifle to make going easier, then thought better of it.

The weeds around me parted and rustled and I heard a voice out near the highway, then there were a couple of shots. They popped next to Leonard's head, and I looked at him. He was all right, just spitting water.

"Hang in there, buddy," I said. "They can't see us, just the weeds moving. They're taking pot shots."

He shook his head a little, cocked an eyebrow. "Ain't this somethin' for the scrapbook?"

I kicked on back, and pretty soon my feet were touching the bottom. I pushed up, rolled over and scuttled onto shore behind a blind of weeds and cane and cattails, dragging Leonard with me. When I had him on shore, I found I couldn't make my hand let go of his jacket; it was cold and cramped. I had to use my other hand to free it, work the fingers, press my thumb into the center of my palm and squeeze, try to bring my paw back to life.

I took a gander at Leonard. He lay on his back, shivering. He turned his head toward me. His teeth chattered. He said, "Hap, that goddamn Cantuck. He set this up. He sold us down the shit river. And I'm mad. Real mad."

I reached out, patted his shoulder. I thought that's right, Leonard. Get mad. Real goddamn mad, 'cause right now, that's all we got.

"Still got the revolver?" I asked.

He pushed his wet coat aside and lifted his shirt. The revolver was still in his waistband. He pulled it free and poured water out of the barrel.

"All right," I said. I looked behind us, trying to take in our position. The roots of great willows and oaks grew down from the bank behind us and wound their way into the water and knotted near our feet. Some of the roots were wrist-thick, and some of the thicker ones came down from where the bank was higher than where we lay. Above all this, falling down on the water like a blot of ink, was the great darkness of the woods. I was glad for that, but not ecstatic. Darkness cannot deflect bullets. A shotgun can clean out darkness as easy as light.

Out through the weeds I could see their car lights. Shadows, like goblins, moved in front of the lights. To our left I could hear someone tromping along the marshy water's edge, someone about as sneaky as a bull rhino on its way to mate.

Leonard very softly said, "Use the rifle. You know how you can shoot, Hap. I know you don't want to hurt nobody, but you know how you can shoot."

I squatted and hooked Leonard under the arms and got back in the water with him, pulled him toward where the roots were thickest. When I got him there, I whispered, "I can't pull you on shore far enough, get you hid in time for them not to see us. I go by myself, I can make it faster and I can get their attention and pull them away from here. Stay hid. No arguments."

"Hap. Use the rifle."

I shoved Leonard through a split in the roots, and the roots and the muddy overhang and the darkness from the trees and the blackness of his skin concealed him well.

We squeezed hands and I pushed away from him, scooped mud from the marshy bottom and rubbed it on my face and the backs of my hands as I went. I got hold of roots and pulled myself out of the water, crouched and tried to go along the edge of the bank quietly where there were some reeds and trees for camouflage.

But I wasn't as quiet as I hoped. I sloshed as I moved and my shoes made sucking sounds. I slung the rifle off my shoulder, backed into the woods about even of where Leonard hid in the roots just below the bank. I got positioned just as around a row of high reeds came a big bulky shape in a muddy white outfit and hood. The goblin was armed with a shotgun.

I thought, if you're trying to be sneaky, you dumb sonofabitch, you need to lose that Kluxer suit. It stands out like a white tent in a bombing raid.

He came along crouched. As he neared I felt sick and weak and scared. I could have shot him in the head effortless. He wasn't expecting me to have a gun, and he didn't know where I was. Maybe he thought I had drowned or was somewhere in the water. Maybe he thought he found me, killing me would be easy as stomping an ant on a piece of stale bread.

I waited on him, keeping an eye and ear out for others and not seeing or hearing them. When he was alongside me, I stepped out from the shadows of the trees quick-like and brought the Winchester stock around and hit him hard as I could in the side of the head. He had seen me move a second sooner than I hoped, so he reacted enough that the blow was a glancing blow and didn't knock him out, but it was still a good hit and he lost his peaked hood. It flew into the water, and in that instant, even in the dark, I could see it was the big bastard from the cafe that I had called Bear. Ray, his name was.

He stumbled toward the bank and the mud crumbled beneath his big feet, and one leg went off the edge of the bank so hard the other leg was forced to bend quickly to try to hold his weight. It couldn't. I heard his knee snap. The big bastard screamed, fell into the water, still clutching the shotgun. He floundered and splashed and started to yell, but suddenly the yell was cut, and I knew he had fallen near Leonard and Leonard had reached out and got him. Probably had that goddamn choke hold on him he did so well. Leonard could go either way with it. He wanted, he could end your life by strangling you, or he could use another version, shut off the blood supply to the brain. You'd be out quick that way and not wake up too soon, if ever, and you'd never know you'd been got, because it didn't take any strength to make either choke work, just skill and determination.

I slipped back into the woods and went along the trees, clinging to the shadows. The lights through the reeds and cattails seemed to die at the trees, and when I looked back at the marsh the lights made the water look dark blue, as if it had been dyed, and the rain moved the blue and it was oddly mesmerizing and beautiful.

I found an oak with a fork in it, slung the rifle over my shoulder, climbed up and eased onto a big limb that went way out to where I had a good clear look at the marsh and the highway beyond. The leaves were all gone off the oak, but the limb was thick and there were two big limbs jutting out from it like a Y and there were some little limbs too, and I figured they'd hide me pretty good if someone wasn't expecting me to be ten feet up.

I hooked my legs around the big branch and rested an elbow in the Y and sighted down the barrel. I knew even in the dark, if I wanted to, I could shoot clean across the marsh and give a frog a hemorrhoidectomy. No brag. Just fact.

There was one hooded figure over by the truck, waiting, using the rifle to lean on. He was probably there to make sure someone didn't come along and run the hell over the cars and the truck. I slung water out of the rifle barrel, hoped it would still shoot, then lined his head up in the sights. I figured I splattered his brains all over the place, the rest of them, wherever they were, might opt to head to the house, but I couldn't do it. It would have been an easy shot for me, but I couldn't do it.

Then I saw lights on the highway and the hooded man by the truck turned and looked in that direction, and I wondered, what you gonna do now, Bubba? How you gonna move the truck and two cars? How you going to explain this? Then, I thought, oh shit, he might not explain anything. He might just start shooting. He might decide not to leave witnesses.

The car came into view and slowed, and I could see now that it was Chief Cantuck's patrol car, and I thought, you double-talkin', big-balled sonofabitch. You set us up. You got us on the road, then you had us followed out, knowing our old wreck wasn't going to make much time. Had us followed because we were on to the fact that you hung that guy in jail or had it done, and you didn't want us to spread the word. That's why we hadn't been charged. That's why the snow job.

Cantuck stopped the car and got out. Across the marsh, floating on the night air, I heard him say: "You might as well go on and throw that rifle down, Leroy. I know who you are and know them other two cars, and I ain't gonna let you go on with things."

"It's a nigger," Leroy said, "an out-of-town nigger. And he's got that nigger lover with him."

"Put the gun down," Cantuck said, and I saw his hand go to where his holster hung.

I thought, now wait a minute, what's this? Then I saw to the left of the pond one of the Kluxers was sneaking around some reeds, and he squatted with his rifle across his knees, thinking he was hid. I saw to the right of the marsh that another Kluxer, or whatever those bastards called themselves, was easing up on that side. He slid into the woods behind a tree. I knew as soon as I saw him, even under that wet sheet, that it was Elephant. He was big and had an ass that poked out behind like . . . well, what Leonard had said. Like he was pulling a trailer.

"Throw down the gun," I heard Cantuck say.

The man at the truck said, "Can't do that, Chief. Can't go back with you. None of us can."

"I think you oughta," Cantuck said, and at that same moment the man by the truck used the toe of his shoe to kick the stock of the rifle up, tried to catch and pull it under his arm for action, like he'd seen in some cowboy movie, but Cantuck had seen the same movie. He drew his pistol and shot Leroy through the head and I thought I saw a shadow jump across the front of Leroy's hood but realized it was blood, then Leroy was down, on his back, his heels pushing at the highway, pushing so hard he went up under the truck about a foot and lay still, legs spread, knees up, as if accepting a lover.

Another shot cut through the night, and I realized too late it was the man at the left of the pond. He stood up and fired and the shot hit the outside driver's mirror on Cantuck's car and glass leaped from it and Cantuck let out a yell and jerked his head so hard his hat flew off. He stumbled back, grabbed his eye and fell down. The Kluxer fired again, hit the back of the car, near where Cantuck lay writhing, holding his eye.

I repositioned the rifle, sighted the shooter, and fired. My shot hit where I meant for it to hit. The peaked hood. It ripped it off his head, knocked it back and away.

The de-hooded shooter couldn't quite place where my shot had come from. He shuffled left and right, and across the pond I heard Elephant yell, "Goddamn, Kevin, you shot Cantuck."

Kevin, a middle-aged dark-haired man, was crouched, twisting left and right, trying to locate me. He said, "Shut up. That last shot was at me."

Elephant yelled, "What?"

"Shut up," Kevin yelled back, and I got a bead on the stock of his rifle, fired, knocked the gun back into him. He dove for the dirt and I put up a line of fire around him, snapping three shots near his head, making the dirt fly. He lay facedown, the rifle in one outstretched hand, the rain pounding down on him. He didn't look like he had any intention of moving.

While I was so engaged, Elephant came up from his side and located me. He fired a shot that shattered the limb I was resting my rifle on, and though the slug missed me, the sudden impact caused me to lose my balance and fall out of the tree. As I hit, the Winchester bounced away from me and fell into the wet leaves.

I was going to make for it when I heard the cocking of a rifle, looked around, saw Elephant standing just inside the line of trees. He had me in his sights. The hood was wetly plastered to his face, and I could see the outline of his nose and mouth beneath the material, clinging to him like wet baking dough.

He reached up and swept the hood off his head. He was grinning at me. "You nigger-lovin' piece of shit. I'm sending you to the devil."

I was still on one knee, waiting for the end, when suddenly there was a roar and a flash of red light. Elephant seemed to take a football kick at the sky with his right leg, only the leg was twisted funny and it went out longer than a leg ought to. The kick pulled his ass out from under him, and he came down with a scream that made my spine knot up.

Behind him, lying on the shore, looking as if he had just crawled through hell with the lights off, was Leonard. He was lying on the ground, holding Bear's shotgun.

I ran over to where Elephant was screaming and got hold of his rifle. I nodded at Leonard, said, "Stay low," moved back into the woods, out of the line of fire, scouted for Kevin. He wasn't where he had been. I glanced across the marsh, saw him making for one of the cars. ,

I got a little higher ground, and watched him run. He got in one of the cars and backed it around quickly. I jerked up Elephant’s rifle, took out one of the headlights, but Kevin kept turning about. I fired and took out a tire, but he kept going, blubbering along the wet highway on the rim.

I collected my Winchester and went to examine Elephant. His right leg was all but gone, cut off at the knee except for a few strings of muscle and flesh. He was screaming and howling like a dog with ground glass in his belly.

I went past him, on down to Leonard. Leonard was starting to lose his grip, slide back into the water. I tugged him to higher ground, said, "Where's the other one?"

"If he didn't drown," Leonard said, "he's still down there stuck between roots. I choked him out. Bound him up with my belt."

I took Elephant's rifle and the shotgun and tossed them in the water near the bank. I slung the Winchester off my shoulder.

"I wanted to kill him, Hap, but I didn't because I knew it would disappoint you. Same with the other fuck."

"Killed either one of them, you'd have been justified," I said. "And to hell with me being disappointed. Cantuck's here. He's been hit."

"I heard," Leonard said. "Guess I was wrong about him."

I left Leonard on the bank with the Winchester, went back to Elephant. I got hold of the white sheet he was wearing, pulled it over his head while he screamed and cussed me. I said, "You can let me tie up this leg, what's left of it, or you can try and give me shit and bleed to death."

He didn't answer, just screamed and groaned, but he lay back and I used the sheet to tie off his leg above the wound. The sheet turned red immediately.

I went back to Leonard. Leonard said, "How is he?"

"You may have killed him anyway," I said. "He's bleeding like a leaky water hose. I got to get to Cantuck's radio, call in some help."

"I don't think he's got any help back where he's from," Leonard said.

"Then we've got to do different."

I went down in the water and found Bear, his arms bound behind his back with a belt that was looped around a root. He had slipped down into the marsh so far it was washing under his nose. He was still unconscious. I unfastened the belt, got hold of him and pulled him out of there. On shore, I ripped off his white tunic, tore it up, tied his arms behind his back, bent his legs up and tied them to his wrists.

Leonard grunted and groaned as I helped him to his feet. But his sounds were pretty well muffled by Elephant screaming and rolling about in the wet leaves. He hadn't stopped that for a moment.

Leonard nodded toward Elephant. "He Draighten or Ray?"

"Can't say as I care," I said.

Elephant stopped rolling. Just lay there, shivering, holding his hands above his chest like a dog lying on its back with its paws up.

We started for the highway.

Chapter 24

When we finally made it to Cantuck, he was on his feet. He leaning against the side of his car, his gun in one hand, his other hand over his eye. Blood was running from under his n, through his fingers, and the rain was washing it away as it came. Still, the blood had managed to stain his khaki jacket and had dripped onto his pants.

He said, "I got glass in my eye." We're going for a doctor," I said.

Go to LaBorde," he said. "You don't want to go back way we le. There's no hospital fifty miles beyond Grovetown."

“There's an asshole in a bad way out there in the woods," I said. "He doesn't get a doctor soon, he'll die. He's one of the guys jumped us in the cafe. One with a big ass. There's another out there tied."

Draighten," Cantuck said, then sagged to his knees and began to pant. Hang in, Cantuck."

I opened the back door of the car, assisted Leonard inside, got Cantuck up and helped him. He was wobbly and heavy, and I was so weak from injuries, the swimming, the fighting, that now, with the adrenaline gone, I was feeling more sore than ever and sick to my stomach.

I put Cantuck in the front passenger seat, stumbled to the pickup, got hold of the dead man Cantuck called Leroy, boosted him on my shoulder, thumped him into the bed of his truck.

The keys were in the pickup. I started it, backed it off the highway, tossed the keys underneath it, staggered to the car they'd left. The keys weren't in it, but it was unlocked. I put it in neutral, went to the rear, gathered my resources, pushed it toward the marsh. It nose-dived into the edge of the water where it was shallow and stuck its tail in the air.

I climbed into Cantuck's car, felt so weak suddenly I had to put my head on the steering wheel, let it rest there for a moment. I said, "Chief, you got to call help for those bastards."

I removed the microphone from the rack and gave it to Cantuck. He mumbled through a call to a LaBorde emergency crew, gave them the location.

I couldn't wait for them to arrive. I was too sick and scared that the bastard who had driven away on the bad tire would come back, or reinforcements would arrive. Cantuck was bad off with that glass in his eye, and Leonard had gone deathly quiet. I looked back at him. His eyes were closed. He was breathing badly.

I cranked the car, flipped on the heater, pulled on the lights, took a deep breath, pulled onto the highway. The rain was still coming down and the sky was black as midnight, but Cantuck's motor was better than Leonard's had been, and so were the tires, and that was some kind of comfort.

I wondered about Draighten and Ray, but I didn't wonder too much. I couldn't. It wasn't my fault. I didn't want any of this to go the way it had, but there wasn't any undoing it. I told myself if it bothers you don't think about it. Think about the road, the yellow line in the headlights. Hold this thing in the lane and don't pass out. You pass out, it's all over. Hold on, and don't pass out.

Cantuck fumbled the microphone into place, leaned back with his hand still over his eye. In the green light from the dash his face was streaked with blood and some of the blood had dried and it looked like a big birthmark.

"The eye's gone black," Cantuck said.

"It's all right," I said, as if it really were.

The rain pummeled so hard the wipers were near useless. My breath was dry and hot and my body jerked with nervous tension.

And so it went, the seconds crawling along, me looking through that windshield at the rain and the stormy darkness, watching and listening to those pathetic wipers working so hard and doing so little.

Rain on the windshield. Rain on the glass.

When I awoke, I felt as if I were still behind the wheel of Cantuck's car, but I was in bed and three weeks had gone by. It was still raining and had pretty much rained the full three weeks. Lakes were swollen, rivers were overflowing, some areas were flooded out, and the news said the dam near Grovetown looked ready to go.

I was lying in bed looking at the window glass, watching rain bead onto it, beginning to realize that's what I was doing and that's why there were no windshield wipers; I was lying in bed, shaking off the last bad vibes of a dream.

It wasn't the first time I'd dreamed I was in Cantuck's car. Ever since that night, especially that first of two nights in the hospital, I'd had a series of dreams and none of them were very comforting. For a time, before all this Grovetown business, I was having a recurring dream about screwing this beautiful Mexican woman I had seen in a magazine. I guess I was dreaming about her then to get Florida out of my head. I had animated her in my mind and made her ravenous for my root. I was such a stud in my dreams she couldn't get enough. I liked the way she screamed and grunted and called me baby in that sweet high Spanish. Even if in the end she was nothing more than a paper memory in my head, a pillow in my arms.

But after the stuff in Grovetown that dream went away and I couldn't call it up any more than I could whistle down a 747 and cause it to light on a high line. If I tried to call it up the Mexican lovely would not stay static. She went to pieces like fog. In her place I had the other dreams.

One was of Florida wandering about. She was a cross between a zombie and a ghost. I was always walking along a highway, a road, or in the woods, and I'd see her up ahead, not looking at me, just crossing in front of me, wearing one of her short dresses with high heels, going into the cover of the trees, and I'd run after her. Only when I got to where she had gone into the woods she wasn't there, and I couldn't find her.

I dreamed too of the marsh that night, and of Draighten screaming and his leg all gone to pieces. I found out a short time later he had died before the emergency crew made it. Bled to death. He deserved what he got, but I couldn't get him out of my mind. Somewhere he had people who loved him and he'd loved them back and he'd had plans and thoughts just like everyone else. Meaner thoughts, but thoughts.

Had Leonard not shot him, I'd have been the one six feet down in the ground and Draighten would be lying in bed, maybe watching a little wrestling on television or pulling his pud. It was something strange to consider.

The part about him being alive and wanting to watch wrestling. Not the part about him pulling his pud. I tried not to think about that; it was too horrible to visualize.

I was thinking about pulling my pud, when the rain picked up and I began to feel cold, even under my blankets. I got out of bed, pulled a robe over my naked self, picked up the .38 revolver from the nightstand where I kept it all the time now, and made for the bathroom.

I brushed my teeth, looked at the wound the shotgun pellet had given my cheek. It wasn't much. It was healing nicely, but it looked as if it would leave a small puckered scar. The doctor had put medicine on it and a Band-Aid, and I'd been doctoring it at home, but I had begun to suspect a stitch had been needed.

Then again, wasn't like it was going to ruin my native good looks. If I'd had any, that crowd at the Grovetown Cafe had rearranged them. I did look better than a week ago, though. Both eyes seemed to be lined up—sort of—and the bruises had changed from the color of eggplant to a sort of raw spinach green.

I picked the gun off the sink, toted it with me around the house while I lit the butane heaters, then fixed myself a little breakfast of cereal and coffee and sat at the kitchen table with my friend the .38 snub-nose revolver and stared out the window at the rain coming down. My yard looked a lot like Bacon's yard, without the refrigerator and the washer. There was a dead squirrel out there, though, and I'd been thinking about moving it. Another week or two, however, I figured it'd be pretty much dissolved. I thought I could hold out.

My days had been like this for two weeks. A little coffee and cereal in the morning, the dead squirrel watch, worrying about how I was going to pay my hospital bills, then a morning movie if I could find one worth watching. All this hinged, of course, on how often I was asked to come in and see the cops. They insisted I drop by for talks.

They held meetings in LaBorde, since it was the county seat, and the law was a Texas Ranger and some detectives from somewhere, and then Charlie, who was kind of a moderator. I even saw Cantuck a few times, going out as I came in, a big swathe of gauze over his eye, always wearing a cheap black suit that offered plenty of room for his balls. He'd smile and say, "Hap," but keep right on walking. I even saw Jackson Brown once. He was dressed in a bright blue suit, a white cowboy hat with a beaded band, and shiny black cowboy boots. We passed right by each other. He was walking with a thin, attractive woman with tall blond hair and an empty look to her eyes. He smiled at me as he passed, said, "Tell the nigger Jackson says hey."

It was tempting to see if I could turn his head completely around on his neck, but I didn't. I just walked on.

The cops liked to talk. They liked for me to talk. They loved hearing my story. Separately, they talked to Leonard too. They liked his story. We told it so much, I thought maybe we ought to work out a dance routine, so if we ever told it together, maybe we could do a few steps in concert.

But for now the cops seemed through with me. I had gone a few days without seeing their smiling faces, and I wanted it to stay that way. Without them, I could maintain my mind-numbing routine.

After the movie every morning there was lunch, usually a sandwich, or more cereal and coffee, then I'd go out on the front porch bundled up in a coat with my revolver and sit in my glider and listen to the rain until the cold got too much. Then it was back inside where I'd strip off and get under the covers again, and with my revolver on the nightstand, I'd crack open the book I was currently reading.

As I sat that morning with breakfast, I kept thinking in time I wouldn't feel the need to carry the gun with me everywhere I went, to sleep with it nearby, feeling greater comfort in it than I might a woman. But that beating I had taken with Leonard, and that night at the marsh with the Kluxers, had changed me and I wasn't sure there was any going back. I wasn't sure I could be Hap Collins the way Hap Collins used to be. I was still him, but I wasn't him, and I didn't know who I was or who else to be.

I thought about giving Leonard a call, but feared Raul would answer the phone. I'd heard he'd come back, and for some reason I didn't like the little sonofabitch anymore, though I wasn't sure I'd liked him in the first place. Fact was, all told, I had spent little more than an hour with him, so my opinion was bullshit anyway.

I was jealous. I had been Leonard's friend longer than Raul had been his lover, and when they split up and Leonard and I got together again and went to Grovetown, even with all that had happened, at least we'd had each other, and it was like old times. There had been that special warmth between us, that understanding, that lack of explaining, and now Raul was back and I had a robe to wear, a gun to tote, and my dick to jerk. I wished with all the blackness of my heart right then that Raul was forcing Leonard to watch the Gilligan's Island reunion episode, which I understood he'd finally acquired. I wondered whose dick he'd sucked to get it.

Goddamn, Hap, don't think like that. That's homophobic. That's evil. Just not nice.

No, hell, it isn't any of those things but the last. It's not nice. You're just mad so you're thinking mean and you better not keep thinking that way or you will be mean.

Why in hell had Raul come back anyway? I asked myself, and self answered: Because he heard Leonard was hurt and needed him, and he came back and things were all right now in their relationship. They were close again, and that was good.

Sure. Sure it was. It was good. Liver was good, if you closed your eyes and rinsed your mouth and ate ice cream afterwards.

Shit, don't think like that, Hap. You're being an asshole. Leonard's got his right to happiness, even if his boyfriend is as shallow as a saucer and likes Gilligan's Island. Who are you to stand in the way of Leonard's love life? Friendship isn't about that. It's about being happy your friend is happy. That's the true nature of friendship.

I sat and wondered if I could think of any more folksy homilies, but nothing came to me.

Me and my gun got us a cup of coffee and went into the living room and turned on the television and surfed the channels until we found an Audie Murphy Western.

The movie was coming to the end when I heard a car, got hold of the gun and took a timid peek out the window.

It was Charlie driving up. He got out, wearing a beige belted raincoat and a porkpie hat with a plastic cover on it. He was holding a black umbrella over his head, tiptoeing toward my door through puddles of water like a schoolgirl trying not to get her stockings wet.

I cut the television, stuffed the gun beneath a couch cushion, hoped Charlie would have good news about Hanson. Hell, good news about anything.

Chapter 25

I opened the door before he was on the porch. He smiled at me, closed the umbrella, leaned it against the porch wall and shook hands with me. "I see the squirrel's still hanging around."

"Yeah," I said. "He likes it here. I call him Bob. He calls me Mr. Collins."

Charlie took off his hat, removed the cover and draped it over the handle of the umbrella. He put his hat back on, took off the raincoat and stretched it over my glider. All of this was done very slow and precise.

When he came inside he tossed his hat on the couch, took off his cheap sports coat, hung it over the back of a chair, sat down beside his hat and smiled in that pleasant manner he has, loosened his threadbare tie, crossed his legs, wiggled a Kmart shoe.

"Are those shoes real plastic, Charlie?"

"You betcha. I don't stand for imitations."

"And that hat, isn't that like Mike Hammer wears?"

"I certainly hope so."

"Want some coffee?"

"You betcha."

I fixed us both a cup, sat back in my chair and stretched my feet out.

"Christ, Hap," Charlie said. "Put on some drawers, or cross your legs different. I don't want to look at your balls."

"That's not why you came out?"

"Come on, man."

I went and pulled on some faded jeans, but kept the robe on. I came back, recovered my coffee. Charlie was in the kitchen, pouring himself another cup. He went through the cabinets and found the bag of vanilla cookies I keep on hand for Leonard. He opened them, brought them into the living room, put the bag on the couch next to his hat and began eating the cookies.

"Want one?" he asked.

"Only if you're sure you don't mind."

"Not at all."

He held the bag out and I took one, dunked it in my coffee and ate it. Charlie said, "Nobody eats these with as much pleasure as Leonard."

"You're right."

"I like to watch him eat them," Charlie said. "He gets that look that cartoon dog used to get when he was given a dog biscuit. You know, the one hugged himself and floated up and then floated down, he was so happy. What was that fuckin' dog on? Quickdraw McGraw?"

"I think so," I said. "How's Hanson, Charlie?"

"Same."

"I think I'll go by and see him."

"Go by, or don't. He won't know one way or another. You come in there butt-naked with a feather up your ass, or dressed in your Sunday Go to Meetin's, it's all the same to him."

"What do the doctors say now?"

"Not much more than before, only they're less optimistic."

"I didn't know they were ever optimistic."

"You hear them now, you'll think before they were goddamn foolish with optimism."

"Shit."

"Yeah. Shit. Another week, they think he can go home. Might as well, he can hold down a bed there good as he can at the hospital. They'll send some tubes and pee-bags with him when he goes. Maybe, on good days, he can be used for a doorstop. Just roll him up to the door to hold it open."

"Who'll take care of him?"

"He's going home to Rachel."

"His ex-wife?"

"Yeah. Go figure. It was her idea. She and her daughter are gonna take care of him."

"I thought Rachel had a boyfriend or something."

Charlie made a patting motion at his shirt pocket, like he was looking for cigarettes, didn't find any, put his hand back in the vanilla cookie bag and pulled out a wafer. He waved it at me, said, "Did. And the boyfriend wasn't keen on the idea, but she sent him packing. Believe that? Hanson and Rachel. They haven't lived together since I don't know when, and now she's gonna take him home and empty his pee and make sure he's got gruel in his food tubes, washrag his balls and wipe his ass. I don't get it."

"Me neither. Must be the daughter's influence."

"Maybe so. Tell you something else, Kmart is all but gone. Another week, won't be nothing there but an empty building and the parking lot."

"So, that's why you came. You want to hold a little memorial service or something?"

"What I come to say is you and Leonard are in pretty good shape." '

"We going to court?"

"Only to testify against folks. I don't think you'll get much backlash. It'd just make those fuckers look stupid. Ray Pierce, one you call Bear, he finally broke down and named Kevin Reiley as the other Klan man, which is of course who Cantuck said it was all the time. You know, I don't think that Cantuck is such a bad guy, you get to know him."

"Good. What about Brown? Pierce name him?"

"No. There was enough business there for us to bring him in for questioning, but we didn't nail him. And I wanted to, believe me. He's a smug sonofabitch. White trash with money and a business degree. They're like roaches, guys like that. They're hard to get rid of, hard to kill . . . oh, and Pierce didn't name that officer—"

"Reynolds."

"—yeah, him. He didn't name him either. He claims they did it on their own. One of them supposedly saw your car go by when you took the Grovetown turnoff toward LaBorde. He told the others, they got their sheets and came after you."

"So, there's nothing to prove anybody else had anything to do with what happened?"

"That's right."

"I don't believe it. I got a feeling that whole nest of Klan as holes knew where we'd be, and not by seeing us go in that direction. I think Brown was involved, and those boys aren't talking 'cause he's paying them not to talk, and maybe he's giving them a little something to worry about besides jail. Like what might happen to their families."

"There's nothing to prove you were set up, is what I'm saying. But the Klan not only found you and Leonard, they found that black fella helped y'all out. He got his the next night."

"Oh no, Bacon? I hadn't heard."

"I didn't think you needed to before. You were dealing with enough. Handful of Klan members went out to his house and jumped him. Tarred and feathered him, locked him in his car trunk, drove him down to the river bottoms, tossed the keys and left him there. He'd have died of exposure if the trunk had been any good, but it wasn't and he was able to kick it loose, hot-wire the car and get out of there. They say he was hurt pretty bad. He was in a hospital over in Longview couple days."

"Ah, hell. He was scared to death they were going to catch up with him on account of us, and they did. How'd the Klan find out?"

Charlie shrugged. "Maybe Cantuck can tell you, or the Ranger on the case. I don't know they know. Can't say. Damn, I wish I had a cigarette. I think about smoking now and then, you know, sneaking one, but my wife, she smells it on me. I don't care I do it outside in a high wind, little gets on my jacket, in my hair. She smells it."

"And no pussy."

"Yeah. I been thinking about striking up a relationship with the cat. Is that some kind of incest or something?"

"Bestiality."

"Well, I tell you, I'm tired of whackin' off. Funny thing is, you know you're not gonna get any, it's all you think about. Pussy. Pussy. Pussy. When I used to get it now and then, not knowing when, but figurin' I would, I didn't whack off near as much. You whack off a lot?"

"Just once or twice a day. Would you like to know about my bowel movements?"

"Naw, I was just interested if you whack off. Some of the guys at the station, they think it's odd if you whack off. They all say they quit that shit when they were fifteen, or when they started gettin' pussy."

"Everybody whacks off. I don't care what they say, they whack off. Maybe if they're poking someone every night they don't, but when they're not, they whack off. But on a less serious note, about me and Leonard not going to court. You sure? We're okay?"

"Looks like it. I can't guarantee anything. Not really. But Cantuck spoke for you again, said you and Leonard didn't have any choice but to do what you did, tells how you saved him, drove the car through a storm, all that shit. You know the story. Same one he's been telling. You'll talk some more to the law, but I figure you're all right."

"That's good. How's Cantuck?"

"Well, his eye didn't grow back. He's still blind, and he's got a patch. He looks like a pirate turned pig farmer turned small-town cop. He's taking it well enough, I guess. Oh, you or Leonard will have to pay a little fine for having those guns you used. Hidden weapons. I talked to the Highway boys. They agreed to let the rest of the guns in Leonard's trunk get lost so it wouldn't look like you were loaded up and spoiling for a fight. That damn near caused you trouble, all them guns, but Cantuck stood up for you again. He can talk a pretty good line of shit, he wants to. Even if he does refer to Leonard as 'a good nigra.' "

"That's high praise from Cantuck," I said. "Will Leonard get his guns back?"

"Don't try to skin your rabbit and keep it as a pet too, Hap. They agreed to lose 'em, not oil 'em and give 'em back to you with ammunition. Be glad you're not paying big fines and doing a little time. This is serious shit, killing a fella."

"Leonard didn't mean for Draighten to die. He had, he'd have shot his head off from the start. It's not that he gave a shit, frankly, but he didn't kill him outright 'cause he didn't want to hurt my feelings. In the long run, it was self-defense, plain and simple."

"That's why you're not doing time, you and him. This is Texas, after all. And you did save an officer of the law from being killed, and you got him to safety and a doctor. Shit, Hap, you and Leonard, you're goddamn heroes."

"I'm so glad."

"I finish up here, I'm going to drive over and tell Leonard how things are."

"You could call him from here."

"Yeah, but it's an excuse to see him. And I thought you might want to go."

"I don't know."

"You and his boyfriend don't get along, do you?"

"I think it's me that doesn't get along."

"It was that way with me and Florida. I liked her, but the moment she and Hanson got together, well, things weren't so good between me and Marve. She had a way of looking at him out of the corner of her eye, making him nervous. I tried real hard not to say shit or fuck or talk about my wife not giving me pussy when I was around her, but I don't think I could ever do right."

"Some women are just born spoilsports."

"Hell, I don't know. Marve might feel . . . might have felt that way about my wife and just didn't say nothin'. Hard to say. Relationships are funny stuff. I tell you though, I took a peek up Florida's dress a few times. Couldn't help myself. She was something else."

"I think maybe it was your cultured manners got on her nerves, Charlie. She just hadn't been around so much class before."

"There you go. You got any cigarettes? Cigars? Pipe? I might even chew, you got some Beech-Nut or somethin'."

"Nope. I gave my pipe up. Now I do a cigar couple times a year. This isn't one of those times, so I don't have any. Besides, you don't need it. You're doing good. You smoke, you won't get any from the wife."

"Yeah, okay."

"Do a few shadow figures, keep your mind occupied."

"I do shadows pretty good now, but I've had to quit for a while. I got strained fingers."

"Get out of here."

"No, really. Kind of a carpal tunnel thing from twistin' my hands and fingers around."

I finished off my coffee, asked what I had to ask. "Since we were speaking of Florida in the past tense ..."

"I guess I shouldn't talk that way about her. About looking up her dress and all, not getting along with her. I know how you feel about her, Hap. And she was Hanson's lady and all. I shouldn't talk like that."

"She was here right now, I'd try to look up her dress too. She wore dresses designed for that, and I think she knew it. She'd never admit it, but she knew it."

Charlie nodded. "We don't know anything we didn't know before. Ranger went in there, checked around some, and knows what we know. She was there, then wasn't. Evidence is thin."

"What about the juke joints? No one had anything to say there?"

"Sure, they did. We think of some things, Hap. You see, we do this for a living."

"I didn't mean to offend you."

"I've kept up with this case, even though it isn't mine. Know what I'm sayin'?"

"Sure."

"Florida went in there, tried to see this Soothe as some kind of martyr, and what he was was an asshole. No one disagrees on that. His own folks didn't have nothing to do with him. Everybody was glad he got dead and wasn't nothing more to worry about. Those recordings, the songs written down. That was just his line of shit. No one believes there were any recordings, written songs. None of that stuff. So no one much cared what happened to the guy. Except Florida. And I figure her trying to find out about what happened to Soothe, she maybe put her nose where it didn't belong, and got it pinched. But good. Same stuff you and Leonard think. Nothing new."

"Well, someone cared about Soothe. Or was worried about him. His body was stolen."

"Ranger, Highway boys, think it was voodoo shit."

"Voodoo is primarily charm stuff, mixed with a little Christianity. East Texas cops love to think devil worshippers or movie-style voodoo business is going on in the backwoods. It makes them feel their job is a little more important, less boring if they're dealing with El Diablo."

"Yeah, I see that. I could use a little voodoo now and then. This old-fashioned crime, drugs, spouse abuse, good ole boy murders are wearing me out. As for Soothe, all I know is the body's gone and there's no evidence where it might be. Florida, she was sure this Cantuck had Soothe murdered. A racist thing. I don't think that stands up so good. I think Cantuck done that, he wouldn't have been trying to keep you from getting killed. This Officer Reynolds, I don't know nothin' about him."

"He's some piece of work is what he is, but I can't prove he did anything. He might not be any worse than Cantuck, who seems to be all right on some days. I sort of like it better like the old movies, where you could tell who the villain was because they wore black and twirled their mustache. What's never been explained to me, Charlie, is how Cantuck knew me and Leonard were in trouble."

"Instinct."

"Saying he had a hot flash sheet-heads were trying to kill us, so he saddled up Trigger and came after us?"

"Way he tells it, he packed you up, sent you on your way, got to feeling guilty 'cause the two of you weren't in that good a shape, decided he ought to make you park Leonard's junker and take you into LaBorde. So, he went to catch up with you. I believe him. I think he's a fart on the surface, but underneath he smells a little better, just sometimes he's got to settle down long enough for the sweetness to surface."

"So right in the middle of a rerun of The Beverly Hillbillies he decided he was an asshole and ought to come out and check on us?"

"He never got home. Drove to the office, got to thinking about it from there, came after you."

"And in the meantime, Big Butt Draighten and his buddies just happened to spot us and come after us?"

"Yeah."

"Kind of coincidental, isn't it?"

"Life's full of 'em, but I don't see this as coincidence. Those shitters saw you, followed you out, and Cantuck, not being a bad guy, got to feeling like a turd, came to check on you. Everything comes together. It's not that wild."

"What about Bacon?"

"Like I said, I don't know. But them finding out Bacon helped you might not be that hard. People see things, people talk."

Charlie went into the kitchen to fill his coffee cup. He stood at the counter and drank it. I went in there and sat at the kitchen table with my empty cup. He got the coffee pot and poured me what was left.

"Going with me to Leonard's?" he asked.

"Not this time," I said. "I'll call him later. Maybe I'll drive over there."

"Sure. You know, he's healing up fast. Moving around pretty good. 'Cept for his leg. You should go by and see him."

"I will."

Charlie sipped the last of his coffee, put the cup in the sink, said, "Sometimes, under stress, guys close as skin and bone can feel a kind of, I don't know, postpartum-style depression."

"Neither Leonard nor I have recently given birth, Charlie."

"Postpartum Scary Event Syndrome."

"What?"

"I just made that up. Say something bad happens to a couple guys and they survive it, and these guys are real close, and danger makes them even closer. Am I goin' too fast?"

"I think I can manage, if I concentrate real hard."

"This scary business is over, these two guys, they kind of divorce each other, find reasons not to be together, blame each other, outside sources, 'cause when the two them get together, they connect with a bad memory."

"You trying to say something about me and Leonard, Char¬lie?"

"I'm sayin' maybe you and Leonard have seen something in each other or yourselves you didn't know was there. It's like them movie star marriages."

"Now there's a jump."

"Woman marries some guy wants to be an actor, big star. She knows him when he's down and out, crying at night 'cause he can't make it in the industry, or maybe he can't get a hard-on he's so depressed. She knows he cuts big ones in the toilet and fills their little two-room apartment with shit stink, and they can't even afford the goddamn matches that need to be struck to burn out the smell. Then, this guy, who wipes his butt just like everyone else, he hits the big time. Feels he's got to get rid of the old wife on account of she knew him when he wasn't quite so glamorous. Now he's got the big house and a shitter in a room about the size of the old apartment, got some blowers, de-stinkers, whatever that stuff is, and he's able to separate himself from some of the human problems. Stays hard all the time 'cause he's got nothing but big-tittied young blondes coming in and out of his bed trying to see who best can grease his sausage. Everyone tells him he's wonderful, a goddamn god. So he don't want someone around who's seen him at his worst, his most human, knows what he knows—that he ain't no god. He's just a regular guy and no better than anyone else."

"I've known Leonard for years, and I know his shit stinks. I've been with him through thick and thin and neither one of us has hit the big time, so we don't have to worry about that angle. I'm just worn down, that's all. I don't feel like visiting. Fact is, I'm sort of waiting on you to leave."

"Sure you haven't got some kind of tobacco?"

"I'm sure."

Charlie nodded, scratched his temple, looked at some dandruff under his fingernail, wiped it on his pants and leaned against the sink. "Let me see now," he said. "I had some kind of point. Oh yeah. Thing is, instead of the big time, two of you thought you were invincible."

"I never said that I was invincible."

"No, but you thought it. Leonard did anyway, and I think you thought he was invincible on some level. Could take anything and come out on top. And when the two of you are together, well, you're like the biggest dogs in the junkyard. But you ain't. You're just two dogs and there's always someone bigger, smarter, and meaner."

"I owe you for this session?"

"First session's free. Maybe you've seen little shadows, chinks in your and Leonard's armor, and you don't like it. It's nothing to be ashamed of. No one is anything better than human. Just some humans are better humans than others, but the best humans are still just human. In the end, we all end up like that squirrel out there."

"Save it for the Rotary, man."

"Sometimes you got to look shadows in the eye, or see if they've got eyes. You don't, they flutter around you from then on."

"You're hittin' all over the place, and isn't any of it on target."

"Keep a gun around at night, Hap? I don't mean in the house, I mean close by. You do that, man? Something you're constantly aware of, this gun?"

"Hell no. Why would I?"

"It's just I saw one stuffed under the couch cushion. You got to not get in such a hurry, you hide somethin', Hap. Got to take your time and do it right."

"You don't know everything, Charlie."

"Yeah, you're right, I'm an asshole. I know this though, you throw a shovelful of dirt over that squirrel, when the rain stops and the wind's blowin', he won't stink so much."

There was a sudden hard wave of rain. It washed over the house in a torrent, sounded goddamn spooky. Charlie looked at the ceiling, as if he might actually see the rain pounding the roof, said, "God, it keeps coming and no end in sight. Think this rain'll ever stop?"

I shook my head. "No, Charlie. I don't."

Chapter 26

I didn't call Leonard after Charlie left. I didn't call him all that day, and didn't call him the next either. I sat with my gun and went through my routine. I thought about what Charlie had said and got real mad, then realized he was closer to the truth than I wanted to believe.

It wasn't Raul that was between me and Leonard, it was us. We had not only recognized that we were not invincible, we had experienced real fear, and we each knew the other was frightened. It wasn't the first time. We've always been honest about being scared, but this time it was beyond fear in the normal way. It was helplessness. Not being anywhere near in control.

Goddamn Charlie and his Kmart shoes and his shadow fingers and his wife who wouldn't give him pussy. Goddamn everything about that sonofabitch.

Four mornings after Charlie came to visit, I went into the kitchen, purposely without my gun, took the phone off the wall, sat down at the table with it and dialed Leonard's number.

Raul answered. I asked for Leonard.

"Hap," Leonard said when he came on the line. "Good to hear from you, man."

"Have you been as fucked up as me?"

"I don't know how fucked up you've been, but I've been fucked up. Come over for lunch."

"I been wanting to see you, but ... I haven't been . . . you know?"

"Yeah. Come over."

I heard Raul say in the background, "We got plans, Lenny. Remember?"

"Come on over," Leonard said.

Eleven that morning, the rain still coming down, the sky atwist with savage storm, I got all the money I had in the cookie jar—about fifty dollars—and left out of there with my revolver stuffed in the glove box of my truck. I drove to town and the hospital, went in without my revolver, found where Hanson was. I rode the elevator up, pushed open the door to his room.

It smelled bad in there. That creepy hospital smell that's somewhere between disinfectant, illness, and that funky food they serve. The two days I had been in had been bad enough, but poor Hanson. Jesus.

Hanson was hooked up like a spaceman, bristling with tubes and wires. His bed was cranked up slightly toward a television that was going, and on the other side of the bed, sitting in a chair, was a young black woman. She was lean and attractive, looked to be in her late twenties. I assumed she was his daughter, JoAnna. She lifted her head, gave a little smile.

"Hello," she said. Her voice was soft, but it had a little gravel in it. I didn't know if that was the nature of her voice, or the nature of her mood. I went on in and introduced myself. She half stood, reached across the bed, shook my hand and gave her name and relation. She was, as I thought, JoAnna.

Hanson had his eyes closed and was breathing heavily. He didn't know I was there, or that the TV was going, or that ducks quacked and dogs barked. His head was bandaged thickly and he'd lost a lot of weight and looked easily twenty years older. Had I not known it was Hanson, I wouldn't have recognized him.

"How is he?" I asked. It was stupid, but I just didn't know anything else to say.

"Not good. We're taking him home though."

"That ought to help."

"Yeah."

"I was here . . . this way, I'd want to go home."

"Yeah."

"He leaving soon?"

"Tomorrow. If the doctor says okay. They can't do anything for him here. I think they want him out, make room for another patient. I guess they're right. He's not going to get better, someone else might." -

"Well, you never know. Some people, they get in a bad way like this, they come out of it. He's tough. He could do it."

"Yeah. I guess."

I looked at the television. It was a Gunsmoke rerun. An old one, when Dennis Weaver played Chester. I kept looking at it, 'cause I couldn't look at Hanson, and JoAnna's face, so sad, so brave, made me ache. Not just for Hanson, but for myself, Leonard, everybody.

"You live in LaBorde?" I asked.

"Tyler."

"What do you do there?"

"Teach school."

"Yeah, well, you take care."

"Sure. Thanks for coming in, Mr. Collins."

I looked at the television. "I've seen this one."

"Yeah. I never watched Westerns. Daddy loved them."

"Yeah, well, me too. You take care, now."

"I will."

"You need anything I can help with, you tell Charlie and he'll get in touch with me. Hap Collins."

"Yes sir.”

"Just Hap."

"Okay, Hap”

"Bye.”

"Bye."

Yeah, call ole Hap, he was sure a helper, a big fixer. I went out of there and along the hall and the smell of the hospital was stronger than ever.

I drove over to Leonard's. The crack house had not been replaced. It was just a black spot splattered by rain.

I knocked on the door and Leonard answered. He was wearing a heavy coat and his face was puffy and marked with bruises and some stitches the vet should have put in but wouldn't, but the LaBorde doctor had.

He looked better though. He walked pretty well. He said, "You ole bastard," and threw open the screen and we hugged. We hugged hard and long, patting each other on the back.

"I've missed you," he said.

"Man, I feel like a fruit, hugging a fruit."

Leonard laughed. "Come in, buddy."

I came in. Raul looked at me, tried to smile, but he wasn't glad to see me. He was also wearing a coat, which surprised me. The house was warm. Leonard didn't pay Raul any mind. He said, "I'm cooking out back, come on."

"In the rain?”

"Nope. Come on. Leave your coat on."

Leonard limped a little as he went. I followed through the kitchen, onto the back porch, or where it used to be. There was a big screened-in porch now with a concrete floor. The rain was blasting on the roof and some of it was blowing through the screen. It was cold out there. In the middle of the porch was a cooker and it was smoking with hamburgers and hot dogs.

"This is nice," I said. "I didn't know this was here."

"I started it before we went to Grovetown, before all this goddammit rain started. You spent the night here, I meant to show it to you. But my mind wasn't on it and you didn't go out the back way, so it never got mentioned. What do you think? Needs some touches yet, but I like it. It'll be nice in the summer. Wire's thick enough to keep the big bugs out. Skeeters'll get in though. They can get through anything."

"That's the truth. What about the two guys with the bowling ball heads?”

"Clinton and Leon. Guess they're all right. They were here while I was in the hospital. Those fellas are all right, provided you don't have to spend more than thirty minutes at a stretch with them."

"So no trouble while you were gone."

"Leon sat on the commode and it fell through the floor with him. I talked to him on the phone at the hospital. He and Clinton got some lumber and fixed the flooring. It was old and rotten under there. Only complaint Leon had was that when he fell through the commode overturned and he got shit on him."

Raul came out. He had his hands in his pockets and looked cold. He said, "I told Leonard this wasn't cookout weather, even on the porch, but he wouldn't listen. You don't listen to me, do you, Lenny?"

"Nope," Leonard said, and smiled.

"He doesn't listen to anybody but you, Hap. He listens to you."

"Raul," Leonard warned.

"Oh yeah, I don't want to embarrass you in front of Hap. Anybody but him."

"Let's don't start," Leonard said.

Raul turned and went back inside.

I said, "I shouldn't have come."

"Yeah, you should. Here, help me carry this stuff in."

We ate in the kitchen. Raul joined us, but he wasn't exactly talky. When Leonard paused to go to the facilities, I said, "Raul, I didn't mean to cause trouble.”

"I know," he said. "It's not you. It's me and him. It's lots of things."

Leonard came back. He said to me: "I think I know why you came, Hap."

"I missed you."

“Besides that. We're going back to Grovetown, aren't we?"

"I've got to. I can't keep doing like I'm doing. I'm sleeping with a goddamn revolver, Leonard. You know me. Does that sound like me?"

"I sleep with a shotgun nearby

"But that sounds like you.”

Leonard studied my face for a moment, said, "I cry at night. I just break down crying. Does that sound like me?"

"Are vanilla cookies involved?" I said. "I can see you crying over cookies. By the way, Charlie ate the ones I keep at the house for you."

"That shit," Leonard said. "He was over here the other day, and I thought I smelled vanilla cookies on his breath. He said he'd just come from your place."

A little time floated by. Leonard said, "I get these dreams too. Mostly about that crowd of people, kickin' and hittin' on me."

"Me too," I said. "And some others."

"I wake up, I think I'm still there," Leonard said.

"I tell him to let it go," Raul said. "But he won't. I know he can't forget what happened, but he won't let go that he's done something wrong. I don't get it."

"I don't think I've done anything wrong," Leonard said. "I just don't like feeling like I'm feeling. It's like my guts have been ripped out. What's wrong is I can't just let it lay."

"It's over with," Raul said. "You did all you could. You've got this tough-guy image. It's out of date. We fags, we don't have to do that. It's not in our makeup."

"What's in my makeup is in my makeup," Leonard said. "I'm a man. I got balls. So do you. I like balls. I like your balls, but I'm still a man and I got to feel like a man. Maybe I'm some kind of anomaly or something. I don't know. I don't get it. But I like a man acts like a man without thinking it's being a bully. I can't explain it to him, Hap. Can you?"

"You know I can't," I said.

"Saying I'm too stupid to understand?" Raul said.

"No," I said. "It's just a way of living your life, and I personally don't know it's better than any other, it's just all we know."

"I don't get it," Raul said. "Why all this macho?"

"When I say act like a man," Leonard said, "I mean act honorably and with courage. Macho has been turned into a bad word by turds who act like beasts, not men."

"You acted with honor and courage," Raul said. "Look where it got you. There's nothing left for you to do. You're not cops. Or heroes. You're just a couple of fellas, and Lenny, you're my fella. I want to know you're here so I can hold you nights. Is that so wrong?"

"No," Leonard said. "But I got to go back. I turn my head now, every time someone looks tough or calls me nigger, or queer, I'm gonna turn my head. Get so I'll turn my head if I think a mechanic's bill's too high. I ain't no worm."

"I don't get it," Raul said. "Really, I don't."

"I know," Leonard said. "Sometimes, I think it's just me and Hap gets it. Maybe Charlie. And Hanson. Bless him."

"I want to go tomorrow," I said. "I don't want to plan way ahead. I want to do it quick."

"I'll be ready," Leonard said.

"We have plans for tomorrow," Raul said. He looked at me. "We had plans today."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Don't say you're sorry, Hap," Leonard said. "Listen here, Raul. I'll make it up to you. But plans to go and do something, and me and Hap doing this, it's different. It's important. It's not just made-up shit."

"That's nice," Raul said.

"You know what I mean," Leonard said.

"No, I don't," Raul said.

"Yeah," Leonard said. "Guess you don't. Hap, come by and get me tomorrow morning."

"You go, and I'll leave for good," Raul said. "You got to decide if this stupid honor of yours—and him—are more important than me."

"It's got nothing to do with what's the most important," Leonard said.

"You go, I'll go, and this time I won't come back. I don't care they hurt you real bad, I won't come back. They kill you, I won't be there to see you buried. You go, I'm gone."

Leonard turned and studied Raul. I hated it when Leonard looked that way. It was damn scary, and considering the look was intensified by swelling, bruises, and stitches, well, I just didn't like it.

"All right," Leonard said. "I've known you for a short time, Raul. I like you. I like fuckin' you. I hate your taste in movies, TV, and books. You got good taste in men, and that's it. I might even love you, but I know I love Hap, and me and him ain't even fuckin', and if that isn't real love, I don't know what is."

"Very poetic," Raul said.

"I been living with who I am and what I believe longer than I've lived with you, much longer than you've ever given thought to who you are. You might be somebody deep down—"

"Leonard," I said.

"Shut up, Hap. You might be somebody deep down, Raul, but all you want to see in yourself and me and anyone else is surface. Me and Hap, we got history and we got connection. You can make of that what you want. And let me tell you somethin'. You hit the door this time, you damn well better not come back. I get killed, I wouldn't want you at my funeral. You're there, I'd want Hap to throw you out."

"He'll be dead too," Raul said. "You'll both be dead."

Raul got up and left the room. It was awfully quiet for about twenty seconds. Eventually, we could hear Raul moving about in the other room.

"What's that noise?" I asked.

"The ironing board. He gets upset, he sets it up, irons clothes."

We sat for another twenty seconds or so. The clock in the kitchen ticked loudly. The ironing board squeaked louder and louder. Leonard said, "Think maybe we could have a double funeral, and Charlie could throw him out?"

"Sorry, man. I think he'll get over it."

"He will or he won't, but you don't be sorry, Hap."

I got up. I pulled on my coat. "This is going to sound funny, Leonard. But is everything okay between us?"

"It always has been."

"I'll see you tomorrow."

"Bright and early," Leonard said.

Chapter 27

Next morning, on the way to Leonard's, I tried to remember the first time I'd seen Florida, tried to figure if I was still in love with her, or just had my feelings hurt because she chose Hanson over me. Had I lost a love or a battle? Both?

Was I searching for her by going back to Grovetown, or searching for something of myself ? Both?

I just loved it when I got all Zen and shit.

I pulled up in Leonard's drive, got out in the rain and went to the door. He opened it before I could knock. He had a twelve-gauge shotgun with him, a backpack and a sleeping bag bound up in a waterproof wrapper.

"Good to see you still got a bazooka left," I said.

"I got another one in the house, and a handgun in my coat pocket, you want it."

"I brought my snub-nose. I don't like that I brought it, but I did. I get away from it too long these days, it's like I left my dick in the other room."

"You see, your manhood is tied up in your weapons, Hap. The revolver is a phallic symbol for your repressed manhood. Your impotence."

"For the first time in my life, I believe that.”

We loaded his stuff in the back of the pickup. I had my stuff there too and had fixed a tarp over it to keep out the rain. By the time we had Leonard's stuff under there, we were both soaked.

Leonard slid his shotgun into the gun rack above the seat; a baseball bat already resided in the top slot. It was a bat I'd taken off a thug once who thought he was going to break my knees, but he forgot to quit talking before he started hitting, so I'd taken it away from him, broken his nose, and kept the bat. I usually kept it in the house, but I was glad to have it now. It made me feel slightly more comfortable. Leonard's shotgun added to the comfort, as did the snub-nose in the glove box and the truck's heater.

I backed out and we started up the street. I said, "Raul all right?"

"Well, we didn't sing 'The Sound of Music' together in the shower this morning, so I don't think we're all that rosy. We've really done that, you know?"

"Showered together?"

"That and sang 'The Sound of Music' We do it quite well, actually."

"Raul still leaving?"

"I don't know. I don't want him to. I told him if he did, to call the bowling ball head brothers to watch the place. Hell, I can't figure Raul. He's all mopey and shit. Today is the anniversary of when we met, and he wanted us to go out to dinner, go to a movie, do some serious fucking. I wanted us to do that too, but I didn't want it getting in the way of me killing somebody."

"Easy, now."

"I'm gonna do what I gotta do."

"I'm not sure we got to do that."

"Let me say this, Hap, then I'll shut up. I meant what I said yesterday. We got to do this thing because of who we are, or who we want to keep being. Whatever degree it takes, we got to go to that degree. You believe that?"

"I'm not going to kill anyone. On purpose. I'm going to find out about Florida, and if I can hook Brown up with that, and what happened to us, that'll make me extra happy."

"I don't think we can undo a beating, Hap. But I got to go back there and face that town. Find Florida. Someone gets in the way of either, I might have to put a hole in them. And by the way, I packed us a nice sack lunch for later. It's in my pack."

"Bullets and lunch," I said. "You think of everything."

"Bottom line is this, Bubba. It's you and me. Anything and everything else fucks up, it's you and me. We're gonna see each other through this, do what we got to do if the sun comes up or don't. And that's the long and the short of it."

"That's the truth," I said.

"Still," he said, "I hope Raul don't leave."

I don't remember much about the drive that morning, just the rain and the scenery being a blurry yellow line in front of my face, a few twists of dried forests, glimpses of swollen creeks and ponds. We drove by where we had gone off in the marsh, and the both of us looked, our heads turning in that direction at the same time. The marsh had expanded. The water was coming over the highway and the woods were swollen with it.

Leonard said, "They pulled my car out of there.”

"I know.”

"Guess what?"

"It won't run."

"The insurance ain't given me but two hundred dollars for it. Guess they think I can stick that up my ass and drive around on it."

"Personally, I don't think it's much of a loss. It was about one notch above a ten-speed, and that's because it had a roof on it."

A few more miles down the road we started kicking around game plans for what we were going to do when we got to Grove-town, but the plans didn't amount to anything. It consisted primarily of eating the sack lunch Leonard had brought.

Leonard and I were about as far from sleuths as you could get. We didn't know much besides instinct, and so far that had gotten our asses whipped, got us half drowned, shot at, in trouble with the law, and Leonard had screwed up his relationship with Raul, and we still hadn't found Florida.

We ended up driving out to see Bacon. The yard was missing some of its beer cans—washed away most likely—and the house was still a shithole, but someone had helped it along by kicking out one of the porch posts. The porch roof leaned to one side like a rake's hat. NIGGER had been spray-painted in big black letters underneath one of the windows and the window was knocked out and cardboard had been put in its place. The cardboard had taken in so much rain it was puffy and bent back and you could see into the house, and what you saw was darkness. Out to the side, the tarp had been torn off the backhoe by either wind or maliciousness. The machine was a faded yellow and it looked as if it hadn't been cleaned since used last. It was on a wheeled platform attached to an ancient but powerful-looking gray Dodge truck.

We went up on the porch, shook the rain off like dogs, and knocked. After a while a curtain moved, then the door cracked open. There was a new chain across the door. Bright and shiny. Sticking above it was a double-barrel shotgun and the shadow of a face.

"Get the hell out of here," Bacon said.

"It's us," I said.

"I know who the hell it is. Get on."

"We just want to ask a few questions."

"Not of me. Get on out of here, or I'm gonna blow your ass off. It wasn't for you, I'd be all right."

"Just a moment of your time," Leonard said. "Then we'll leave."

"I've given you all the time you're gonna get."

"It's important," I said.

"It was important last time, and look where it got me."

"Come on, Bacon," Leonard said. "Just a moment."

The door slammed. The chain rattled. The door was flung open and we went inside. Water was pouring from the kitchen roof into a big pan on the floor and the pan was full and the water was running over, running over the swollen linoleum. Wind was blowing rain through the gaps in the window with the cardboard over it, and it had been going on so long a few of the floorboards were warped.

Bacon stood in the middle of the room in his jockey shorts. He had the shotgun in his right hand and he had both arms flung wide. His scalded skin drooped over a sagging rib cage. His flesh was splotched from forehead to foot with great pink patches of rawness. It looked as if big chunks of hide had been pulled off by squid suckers.

"That tar took my meat off," he said. "You hear me! They tarred me 'cause I helped y'all. They meant for me to die. I ain't safe, now. You come around, I sure ain't safe."

"Jesus, Bacon," I said. "I'm so sorry."

"That's you white folk. You're always so sorry. So goddamn sorry. Jesus, Bacon, I'm sorry. So sorry. Well, that helps, Mr. Hap. I'm all right now."

"Let's go," I said.

"Not yet," Leonard said. "I'm sorry what happened to you, Bacon. I don't feel so good myself, and it was whites did it to me, but Hap ain't one of 'em."

"He's the one got me hurt," Bacon said. He threw the shotgun on the couch, sat down carefully. You could actually hear the skin crack when he sat. Blood beaded around some of the splotches and began to run.

Bacon's voice was venomous. "Every time I move, feel my skin crack, I think of Mr. Hap, here. I had to soak in kerosene to get that tar and feathers off. It peeled, took skin with it. Both my nuts, they're solid pink. They're ripped right down to the meat. Ain't a place on them ain't scalded by tar, burned by kerosene. I ain't slept a whole night since it happened on account of the pain and knowing they're comin' back to finish me, 'cause they will. I know they will. I'm gonna have to move off somewhere. I can't stay here. I don't know where to go, but I can't stay here . . . y'all go on."

"In a moment," Leonard said.

"You ain't nothing but an Uncle Tom, nigger-fella," Bacon said.

"It's a good thing you're old and splotched like a hound," Leonard said, "or I'd have to fix your teeth."

"Yeah, threaten me 'cause you can whip me. You couldn't whip all them others."

I heard Leonard take a deep breath, blow it out slowly through his nose.

I said, "It's all right, Leonard. Let's go."

"Not yet," Leonard said. "Bacon, they came after you day after some of them came after us. Like you, we were lucky. We want to get even. We want to find who put them up to this, and we want to find out what happened to Florida."

"Fuck Florida!" Bacon yelled and half came off the couch and screamed with pain. "Oh, God," he said, and collapsed into the worn-out cushions. "That bitch, she showed up in town, she upset the balance. Things was bad before she come, but we all knew how things was played. She come around, shakin' that pretty ass, she got things messed up. She's as much to blame for what happened to me as Mr. Hap."

We gave Bacon a moment to stew in his rancor. We listened to water pound the roof of the house, listened to it run onto the floor in the kitchen, listened to it blow past the cardboard patching in the window. Leonard said, "We're gonna do this with or without you, but we're gonna do it, and you might help us do it better. Did you recognize any of the men took you out of here, tarred and feathered you?"

"No."

"Come on, Bacon," Leonard said.

"No! I said NO! Are you deaf?"

"Just tell me if this is right," Leonard said. "You left here ahead of us, went into town, came home, and next night they came out and got you."

Bacon didn't say anything, but he didn't argue either.

"They came out and got you 'cause someone let on we were here, that you helped us," Leonard said. "Who?"

"I don't know," Bacon said. "Cantuck, maybe. It could have been him. I don't think so, but it could have been. Maybe Mrs. Rainforth, she could have said something wrong. Mr. Tim might have. It ain't no tellin'. Please go. Please. They see you here . . ."

"They're not gonna see us," Leonard said.

"They gonna find out," Bacon said. "Somehow, they'll find 3ut. They found out last time, didn't they?"

"Sorry, Bacon," I said. "Really."

"Yeah," he said. "Okay. You're sorry. Just go on, now."

It was strange and painful driving into Grovetown. It's impossible to describe the feelings that went through me as we came co the city-limits sign, and soon to the square. The square was fairly deep in water. You could pass through it, but the water was swift and it made me nervous. Once, when I was younger, I was following a pickup truck out of a hayfield where I had been working, and we'd had to stop working because a tremendous and unbelievable rain had fallen out of the sky. It was like someone had dumped an ocean on East Texas. But I was with my boss, who had given me a ride to the field, and he was taking me home, and we got behind this pickup, and we came to a bridge and the water was just too much for the hard dry ground. It had been too hot for too long, and when it finally did rain, it wasn't absorbed. It was swelling, and water was already over the bridge, though it wasn't deep. I think had we come to the bridge first, we would have tried to drive over it too, but the pickup in front of us tried it. The water hit the pickup like a battering ram, carried it into the bridge railing and the railing broke and the truck went over. There was nothing we could do. One instant man and truck were there, the next they were gone. The water carried the truck away and under, and it was three days later when the water went down that they found him. He was still in the truck, what was left of a cigar clamped between his teeth. That's how fast he'd gone over and drowned.

It had taught me a lesson about the power of water, and I had respected it ever since. I knew what it could do, and I was haunted by it. By the deeps. By the shallows. By water.

Across the way I could see the Grovetown Cafe. Water was lapping over the curbing, threatening to enter the place. In my head I could see inside it and I could visualize all those angry people, falling down on us like cut timbers.

We decided to start at Cantuck's office, but we couldn't get to it. The water was too high over there to park. We parked at Tim's filling station, and walked over. I tell you, outside of the truck I was a nervous wreck. I knew it wasn't wise, especially going into Cantuck's office, but I wouldn't go without the snub-nose and Leonard wouldn't go without his pistol. We hid them in our coats.

Water was seeping under the door and into the lobby when we arrived. The carpet smelled like a damp sheepdog. We were both breathing harder than either of us really should have been. Perspiration was boiling out from under my arms almost as fast as the rain was coming down. Leonard's limp was more pronounced. He had gotten the original injury saving my life, and he'd healed up good, having only occasional trouble with it, but the beating we had taken had done his leg some bad business again, reactivated the old pain.

"You all right?" I asked.

"Unless you want to have a sack race, I'm all right."

The secretary had taken down her Christmas cards and tree. She wasn't glad to see us. Reynolds was out, which was, of course, a major disappointment.

Cantuck must have heard us come in, because he came to the door of his office with a jaw full of chewing tobacco. He looked a lot less friendly than when I used to see him leaving the police station in LaBorde.

"All right," he said. "Come in."

We went into his office. Cantuck sat down, picked his spit can off the desk and pushed his chew into it with his tongue.

"We just thought we'd drop in and say hi," Leonard said, taking a chair. When he sat, water pooled beneath him. '

Cantuck sighed. He rolled his one good eye to the left, then the right, perhaps looking for sanctuary. I got a dollar out of my wallet and forced it into one of the cans on his desk. He eyed that, said, "You're not thinking you're softening me up with that, are you?"

I sat down. Cantuck said, "If ever there were a couple of idiots, it's you two."

"But we're your idiots," I said.

Cantuck rubbed the back of his neck and ran a hand through his hair. "You know, you could cause some problems showin' up here. I could have you run out of town. I could lock you up."

"But you wouldn't do that," I said. "Because we're your idiots."

"Don't think 'cause you got me to a hospital I owe you some favors," Cantuck said.

"We'd never capitalize on a thing like that," Leonard said. "But we did save your life."

"I'd have been all right," Cantuck said.

"You'd have bled to death," Leonard said.

"You didn't do shit," Cantuck said. "You were in the back seat, passed out."

"Hap saved us both," Leonard said. "So you owe him."

Cantuck clasped his hands together, leaned his elbows on his desk, pushed his face against his hands. He said, "What is it you want? You want to know Brown is guilty? I can't tell you. Being how he's the Exalted Cyclops of the Klan here—or whatever they're calling themselves these days—I figure he had to have known something. No one's pinning him to it because he wasn't there, and the boys are keeping the Klan pledge of silence. Now you know what I know, unless you don't know we're having some serious bad weather here and I think I'm going to send everyone home, along with myself, before we drown."

"What about Reynolds?" I said. "He involved?"

"He's a worthless piece of shit," Cantuck said, "and I figure he'll get my job. Brown starts enough grassroots unrest, makes people feel their jobs at the lumber mill, the Christmas tree farm are in jeopardy, the Mayor might see his way to appoint Reynolds. I don't know. Maybe I want that. I'm tired of all this shit. I got one eye, a swollen nut, and more grief than I need. I been thinking about opening an antique store."

"Lots of guys with one eye and a swollen nut do that," Leonard said.

Cantuck actually grinned at him.

"We don't want any trouble," I said. "We just think we might find a lead somewhere. Something to help us figure what happened to Florida."

"Oh yeah?" Cantuck said. "Couple of detectives, just like on the TV, huh? Seen some Matlock, have you? A few Perry Mason reruns. That's good, and it's good of you two to offer your vast experience in our hour of need. Way I've seen you guys operate, I don't think you could find your dick with both hands, let alone figure out who did what to who and why."

"I just want who," I said. "I don't give a damn about why."

"And that's why you'll never figure the who," Cantuck said. "It's the why that counts."

"The why in this case is damn easy," I said. "A black man killed a white man and a black woman started messing with it."

The Chief's door opened then. I turned in my chair. It was Reynolds. He had a plastic hat cover over his hat and the water beaded on it like balls of Vaseline. From his feet to his knees was soaked. "Well," he said. "My little buddies."

Leonard stood up as if to confront Reynolds.

"Man, you look rough," Reynolds said. "What happened? Get beat up in a cafe?"

"Don't think because a roomful of people whipped my ass, you can," Leonard said.

"I don't have to think nothing," Reynolds said. "

"Get started on me," Leonard said, "hope you brought yourself a sack lunch, 'cause you gonna be here all night."

Reynolds finally decided to notice me. "What about you, shit-head? You want me after I finish him?"

"Naw," I said. "Actually, just seeing how tough you are is making my bowels loose. Besides, Leonard gets through with you, what's left for me?"

"That's enough," Cantuck said.

"Chief," Leonard said. "All I ask is you give us fifteen minutes. Anywhere you say. Me and him, assholes and elbows."

"You heard me," Cantuck said, "put the brakes on." He stood up from his desk and leaned his hands on it. "Reynolds. You still work for me, and you knock on my fuckin' door, you want to come in. And, I'll tell you another little thing . . . close the door."

Reynolds, who was still holding the knob in his hand, gently closed it. Cantuck said, "Quit fuckin' my secretary. She has a family."

Reynolds turned beet red. "Chief, I—"

"Just shut up," Cantuck said. "Now what the fuck did you want anyway?"

"Charlene told me they was in here," Reynolds said. "I wanted to know why."

"They come to donate a dollar to one of my charity cans," Cantuck said. "Now pack your ass on out of here. I thought it was your business, I'd leave you a note or somethin'. Go on."

Reynolds went out and started to close the door. Cantuck said, "Tell Charlene to go on home. And you go on too—but not with her. And just in case you might feel you want to talk to someone about these boys being here. Someone like Brown. Don't do it. Something happens to these pieces of shit, it might make me feel bad on account of they put money in my charity cans. Are you readin' me here, son?"

"Chief—"

"The answer's 'yes sir,' " Cantuck said.

"Yes sir," Reynolds said.

"Now go on," Cantuck said. "Day's too bad to hang out here. Word is the dam's leakin' like a goddamn sieve. Next thing you know, we'll be digging bass out of our asses. Now get."

Reynolds went out and closed the door.

"You really don't like him, do you, Chief," Leonard said.

"Nope, I don't."

I said, "Thanks, Chief."

"Don't thank me," he said. "I don't want you here neither."

"You say that," Leonard said, "but you don't mean it."

"Oh yes I do," Cantuck said.

"This sort of rejection from authority figures," Leonard said, "it's exactly what makes a fellow go bad. I read that in a book somewheres."

Chapter 28

Cantuck told us to go home, but he didn't make it an official order, so we waded over to Tim's station and went inside. He was sitting behind the counter with his feet up. When he saw us come in, his eyebrows went up.

"Sort of thought I'd seen the last of you two," he said.

"You almost did," I said. I looked at the pig's feet in the jar on the counter. It looked like the same pig's feet as before. I said, "Thought you sold lots of those?"

"I lied," Tim said. "I try to sell them to the out-of-towners. What do you boys want? I mean, is this safe for you?"

"Can we sit?" Leonard asked.

"Sure," Tim said. "Go ahead. I'll get us a little coffee."

He went and got the coffee. Leonard and I sat in the same chairs we had sat in before and Tim's long coat hung on the same chair where it had hung before. I put my hand in my pocket and fondled my .38, lovingly. We listened to the rain on the roof.

When I felt sure no one was about to charge through the door in a white sheet, I looked around the store, at the new pile of wood beside the stove—without a lizard this time—the crap under the barrel stove, the shiny blue something there, the dust bunnies, and the tobacco wrapper.

Everything seemed just the way it had that Christmas we had come into Grovetown, except the aluminum Christmas tree was gone. It was hard to believe it had been nearly a month. A bit of wind rustled through the place as Tim came in with coffee. It blew dust bunnies across the floor and into the corners.

When we had our coffee and Tim was seated, Leonard said, "You think your dad was behind what was done to us?"

Tim thought a moment. "Maybe he didn't have it done, but the ones done it done it 'cause he wanted it done I bet on that. But why are you guys back?"

"We're stupid," I said.

"I believe that," Tim said.

"What about Reynolds?" Leonard said. "He behind any of this?"

"Christ, boys, I don't know. Why the third degree?"

"Sorry," Leonard said. "We're just a little down on our social skills today."

"And nervous," I said.

"I bet," Tim said. "Hell, boys, I'm glad enough to see you, but I think you ought to leave this to out-of-town law if you're thinking of doing something yourself."

"We don't know what we're thinking," I said. "We still haven't found Florida."

"She could still be okay," Tim said. "Run off somewhere for some reason we haven't got a clue. And I tell you. I'm thinking of leaving out of here myself, for a while. That old Grovetown dam, they say it's pretty creaky, all this rain. It's got more water in it now than last time, and when it broke that time it was bad news. I want Mama out of where she is, but I haven't been able to budge her. That dam breaks, her trailer park'll be the first place to get it. There's already places out there under four or five feet of water just from the seepage. Half the town has left already. Won't come back until the rain stops or the water goes down."

"That's to our advantage," I said.

"You two are fools," Tim said. "This time, someone might succeed at what they tried last time."

"And you don't want to be in the middle of it?" Leonard said.

"Damn right," Tim said. "You heard what they did to Bacon."

"Yeah," I said. "But if it's your father behind all this, you said yourself you've got immunity."