Vanilla Ride (12 page)

Marvin steered the boat out to the middle of the calm water, making it less calm as we went. Small, dark birds were in the willow trees across the way and the grass near the trees was tall and still green even in the brisk beginnings of winter; it grew out from beneath the trees, ran across the bank and into the lake like a green tattoo. Once we got settled and the wake of the boat had subsided, the water around us looked like a huge sheet of tin. There was the faint smell of dead fish in the air and there were a number of old logs floating on the lake’s surface. After a while one of the logs swam away.

It was an alligator, probably sneaking up on a frog. It had fooled me. I cast my line away from that direction, but watched the alligator, the way it split the water and gave the lake a darker color wherever it swam.

“I certainly got you guys in a mess,” Marvin said.

“You did,” Brett said, frowning at the little green rubber lizard she had on the end of her line for bait.

“I know, and I regret it. Thanks for having them cut Gadget loose, Hap.”

“I didn’t have them do anything special,” I said. “I just told them they wanted a deal from us she had to be cut loose.”

“It’s the only way they would have let her go,” he said.

“No problem,” I said. “How’s she doing?”

“She’s in rehab, out in Arizona. Rachel and JoAnna are with her. I convinced them, after what you two did, I couldn’t go. Had to be here to help you. But Gadget, I guess she’s doing all right. Rachel said she’s still in a kind of shock. She feels guilty going back to Tanedrue, didn’t know they would come after you and take her with them, didn’t know it was going to be like that. She doesn’t love that dead fuck anymore, sees him for what he is and what he was doing to her. Now, after all that garbage she finally sees. She’s as naive as a fresh-born baby sometimes. Said to tell you, Brett, she deserved every slap you gave her, and then some.”

“Hell, I know that,” Brett said, and cast her line. She looked cute today, in a heavy coat with a tan cap with earflaps and big cream-colored puffy boots full of warm stuffing. Her long hair was tied back in a ponytail, and it was bloodred against her back because of the way the sun was falling on it.

“The FBI sort of got us over a barrel,” I said. “That had something to do with us telling them yes, trying to better our situation. We’re not all that noble, Marvin.”

“Speak for yourself,” Leonard said. “I am one noble sonofabitch, and way special. If I weren’t so tired I’d walk on water and kick that alligator’s ass.”

“You’d have got off anyway,” Marvin said. “There would have been a trial, and a lot of time taken up, but in the end, they’d have let you three off and fined you for the shotgun. I don’t know, might have been some jail time. Witnesses, though, they were on your side. There was one fellow upset about some yard gnomes, another about some pink flamingos, but other than that it came out all right.”

“Death to gnomes and flamingos,” I said.

“Bottom line,” Marvin said, “is I know why you did it, and you can
downplay it all you want, but I know why you did it, and I won’t ever forget. Already owed you guys, now I really owe you.”

“We owed you some too,” Leonard said. “For something or another, though I kind of forget what. But after this we’ll be even. We can start running tabs on each other again.”

We fished all day in the cold, dry weather on the flat gray lake beneath the pearl-colored sky, eating the sandwiches and chips, drinking the coffee and talking a little, but not too much. I cast my line without purpose, and with no real hope of catching anything. I was fishing a wish and nothing more. I reeled my line in time after time, watching it cut the water like the thin edge of a knife. I cast and recast until the sun was falling down behind us and the sky that had been clear and pearl-colored at my back turned red as a whore’s lipstick, then was stained with purple like the insides of a plum stretched out. I reeled in my line and turned to take a good look at the sky. I thought it might be the last time I saw a sky like that, or went fishing. Might be the last day and night I saw Brett, because in the morning I was sending her away. It had been a battle, but I had convinced her. She was going out to Arizona too, to join Gadget and Rachel and JoAnna. Secretly, I think events had unnerved her. Not that she was fearful of what might happen to her—well, no more than someone should be reasonably fearful—but because she had enjoyed it all too much; there was something inside of her that had snapped. It was the same thing that had allowed her to set her ex-husband on fire and beat him with a shovel, and pistol-whip a midget. It hadn’t frightened her before, but now it had. She had seen its full face and it was gruesome. This time people had died. I didn’t question that they needed to die, but they had, and by our hands, in an explosion of blood and urine and feces, a whiff of gun smoke on the air.

I knew how she felt. Problem was, that thing inside of me had clicked loose so many times it was starting to feel normal, like the necessary lancing of a wound. I had looked into the abyss so much it was no longer just looking back at me, it had its arms around me and was puckering to kiss.

I wanted to just let it all go, do the jail time, forget about the FBI
deal. But then I thought some more about that jail time, and since I had already done prison some years back and I could remember it as if it were yesterday I didn’t want any more of that.

I cast my line toward the setting sun and the stained sky, and when I started reeling it in a fish hit. I reeled it until it was close enough for me to reach out and take hold of the line just above the fish. It was a moderate-sized perch. I loosened the hook from its mouth and gently tossed it back in the water.

We started ashore then, my fish having been the only one caught. Marvin hadn’t driven the boat far toward shore before the night overtook us, collapsed over the water and made it dark as the River Styx. When we got to the boat ramp there was no more light except a thin ray of rising moonlight that was slowly being bagged by some fast-moving clouds. The wind picked up and really turned cold. The weather had changed in a flash. Welcome to East Texas.

We used flashlights and got out at the front of the boat without stepping in the water and fastened the crank line to Marvin’s trailer, then used the automatic crank and put it in place. We drove away, along with a rumble of thunder, and soon after, out on the highway, there were thin streaks of lightning, like bright varicose veins cutting across the black sky. We drove to Marvin’s place and put the boat in the carport and closed it up, then he drove us home in his big Ford truck, and he and Leonard spent the night at our place.

We put Leonard on the couch and we got a blow-up bed for Marvin, some extra pillows for them from the closet. We weren’t supposed to have guns, but Marvin had brought a shotgun for himself and one for Leonard and he gave me and Brett handguns. We talked for a long time in the dark, sitting in the living room, then finally Brett and I went up to bed, placing the handguns on the nightstand.

Brett and I were fiery that night and at first I feared they would hear us downstairs, then after a while I didn’t care at all. When we finished, we hugged for a while, then she said, “You’re sure Jim Bob’s coming?”

“Oh yeah, he said so, so he’ll be here. Marvin arranged it. I just wish we could have found Veil. But you know how he is. Locating him is like trying to find a virgin in a whorehouse.”

“Jim Bob, he’s good.”

“Real good,” I said. “After Leonard, he’s who I would want at my back. Veil, I’d kind of like him there too.”

“He’s like that character the Shadow.”

“He is. Kind of gives me the creeps, but he’s a good one to have on your side. Wish we could have found him.”

“What about this guy Marvin knows that’s comin’? Tonto?”

“Marvin says he’s good, so I reckon he is. He’s one more, and that’s good.”

“Yeah,” she said, “that’s good.”

“Marvin said Tonto owes him a big favor. He won’t say what the favor is, but he says he’ll pay him back.”

“Not everyone pays favors back,” she said.

“Marvin said Tonto does, so I got to believe him.”

We were hugging close and I could feel Brett’s warm tears on my cheek. I said, “It’ll be all right, baby.”

“I feel bad leaving you.”

“I don’t feel bad you’re going,” I said. “It’s the right thing to do.”

“All right, then,” she said. “There’s nothing else to say, is there?”

I shook my head. “Nothing else.”

She pulled her big T-shirt that said
SHEN CHAUN, MARTIAL SCIENCE
over her head, kissed me, and rolled over and went to sleep with my hand on her hip. She could do that a lot of the time, just go down into dreamland no matter what was on her mind. Wasn’t that easy for me, not when I had plans for the next day, especially the kind of plans we had to set in motion.

The rain outside picked up. I sat up and put my pillow behind my head, against the wall, listened to the rain grow savage. Thunder shook the upstairs windows with a sound like dice being rattled in a cup. Lightning was jumping around outside. The rain made a sound like a giant snake hissing, and the roof was taking some serious shots from drops that were hitting like artillery fire.

Brett didn’t stir. She was snoring.

I looked at her for a while, taking in everything I could about her, and then I thought about what it was we had agreed to do, me and Leonard. When it was all done, it wouldn’t surprise me if what was left of my soul wouldn’t fill a thimble.

In that booger-lined room with the greasy mirror, the deal they offered us sounded easy but with all things that sound easy there is often something at the bottom of it all that makes it stink. It’s always something that begins with “All you got to do,” or “This won’t take much of your time.” That should be enough of a cue to make you throw your hands over your head and run the other way. But not us; no one ever said we learned from our mistakes, not me and Leonard. Besides, we sort of had our asses in a crack over this killing a whole bunch of people deal, and our options were thin.

The fat guy in the black suit was from the Dixie Mafia, whatever that was exactly. His name was Hirem Burnett and he was turning state’s evidence. In a nutshell he was one of the middle boys in the organization. You had your water carriers like Tanedrue and his buddies, then you had Hirem, and above his fat ass were Satan’s Angels.

That’s what Hirem called them, Satan’s Angels. They sounded like a motorcycle gang, and thing was, there was a connection to some biker gangs in Houston. Some of the guys at the top had been bikers, then prisoners in one or several of our fine institutions, mostly for drug deals and violent acts. Bunch of guys tattooing themselves in cells and doing shank hits in the rec yard, running some dirty work from prison via messengers, a few of them getting out and turning into businessmen, their tattoos hidden under long-sleeve shirts, their formerly greasy hair trimmed and spruced up; sometimes they went as far as to wear a suit and tie and not scratch their nuts in public.

Lot of them were still Aryan Nations guys at heart, worrying that a strain of black blood would make soiled whites want to throw spears and run with watermelons, piss on the Dixie flag, maybe vote Democrat and wish for socialized medicine. Still, as Conners said, they were businessmen and green was their true color, and as time had gone on, they had lost some of their interest in racial purity but none of their interest in crisp folding money

It was Hirem who told Tanedrue and his posse to hit us. And to bring in a whole bucketload of irony, now me and Leonard were going to have to do him a favor, and all because of Gadget. I rewound the bitch slapping Brett had given her in my head and enjoyed all the details I could remember. I might even have gussied up my memory some. I even quit feeling bad about punching her.

Hirem’s son, one Tim Burnett, had bucked Daddy’s ideas and had gone to college to be an environmental engineer. He didn’t want to grow up to sell dope and run pussy. He ran off with a black girl and about three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of drug money in a duffel bag. The guys at the top wanted the money back and they wanted the son to pay. The girl had to go down and not get up. They couldn’t let word get around a colored gal had taken up with one of their mid-management fellows’ sons and helped swipe a chunk of their money. Just wouldn’t do.