Vanilla Ride (15 page)

“You sound like I feel,” Tonto said.

“I think you’re reading your books backwards,” Leonard said.

“Again, why are you doing it then?” I asked.

“There aren’t many of us left, Hap, and I’m trying to keep you from becoming totally one of us by taking in the slack I don’t want you to handle. It’s not my job and it shouldn’t matter, but Leonard here, he can’t do it alone. You aren’t a delicate flower, my man, but there’s still something of the hopeful in you and I’d hate to see all of that get sucked out. Probably too late for the rest of us.”

“You don’t know me,” Tonto said.

“Oh, yes I do,” Jim Bob said.

Tonto didn’t argue back. Jim Bob said, “Hap, you ought to be a social worker, not a tough guy. You’re tough enough, but your heart isn’t in it. Soiled as you are, underneath the dirt there’s pretty good linen.”

“I keep telling him that,” Leonard said. “That he’s soiled, I mean. I don’t know about the linen part.”

“And you,” Jim Bob said to Leonard. “Shouldn’t you be home too? Ain’t you got you a boyfriend? You’re a little farther gone on the scale, but at least you’ve got some sense of normalcy going on, got a relationship going.”

Leonard sighed. “Actually, it’s on the fence.”

“That’s a shame.”

“Why do you really do it?” I said to Jim Bob. “I think you’re dodging the question.”

“Man, this is like getting in touch with our feelings, isn’t it?” Jim Bob said. “I told you why.”

“It isn’t about me, and you know it,” I said. “I see you only now and then. What about the rest of the time? Why do you damn near get yourself killed on a regular basis? Private gun for hire, that kind of thing. Let’s expand that question beyond you, my good man. What the fuck is wrong with all of us? And it’s got to be more than just wanting to set the world right.”

“Too many cowboy movies,” Leonard said.

“All right,” Jim Bob said. “Here it is. I do it because if I don’t I’ve got nothing but myself, and though I dearly love myself, I’m a little tired of being me right now. Sometimes I feel like I’m laughing in the dark all by my goddamn self, because I am, and what I got to show for it is a paid-off house with no one in it, not even a dog, because I’m gone too much and when I’m gone I can’t see a whole lot of reason to race back. I had a woman like you got, Hap, I’d hold on to her until the crack of goddamn doom. Can you understand that?”

“I wish life was that simple,” I said.

“I’d just like to come home and have John there,” Leonard said. The words sprang from his mouth like an escaped prisoner.

“You’ve talked to him?” Jim Bob said, pushing his hat back on his head.

“I’ve tried.”

“Leonard’s idea of talking,” I said, “is telling people how it is. Not the same thing as a true discussion. The signal of his love for John was that he climbed up in the bed and shit in it.”

“Yuck,” Jim Bob said. “I wouldn’t like that.”

“Yeah, he took it hard,” Leonard said. “I’m just not a talker about some things, you know. Not like you share-your-feelings guys.”

“So you go straight to shitting in the bed?” Jim Bob said.

“It’s a statement,” Leonard said. “And I’ll have you know, at the bottom of it all I’m a sensitive motherfucker.”

Tonto, who had been listening quietly, watching the road, said, “Hey, Leonard, were you saying you’re queer?”

“The queerest,” Leonard said. “You got a problem with that?”

“Where’s the dick go?”

“Anywhere I can put it.”

“Oh,” Tonto said. “No problem. Just curious. Hap, you’re pussy-whipped.”

“I know.”

“That’s all right,” Tonto said, his voice growing higher than before. “I wish I was pussy-whipped. What about you, Jim Bob?”

“Well, currently, I don’t have a pussy in this fight.”

“You know,” Tonto said, “I think we are bonding like some righteous cocksuckers, don’t you?”

“I assume,” said Leonard, “that you are speaking symbolically because to the best of my knowledge I am the only cocksucker present.”

“Righteous sonsabitches then,” Tonto said.

We bonded righteous sonsabitches stopped at a McDonald’s on the other side of Tyler about two hours later. We went in and got some drinks and Tonto got a couple of burgers and then he gave me the keys to the van.

“Something happens to us,” I said, “you may be a long time with Ronald McDonald.”

“This one still has a playground,” Jim Bob said, as he and Tonto took a seat in one of the plastic booths.

“Well, in that case,” I said, “you boys play pretty.”

I drove Leonard and myself over to our meeting place with the FBI. They didn’t know about Jim Bob and Tonto, which was all right. We had agreed to do what they wanted, try to find those kids and get the money back so Hirem would tell all he knew about the Dixie Mafia organization, but we hadn’t said how we were going to do what we had agreed to do and we hadn’t said with whom.

The FBI guys gave us directions to a house at Lake Tyler where they said they were keeping Hirem secluded like a rare animal on the endangered species list. Before we went out there we drove to a place nearby and stopped and used a screwdriver Tonto had given us to take off the plates and put on some others that I think he had had made special. It was a precaution. We didn’t want them to know where we got
the van or who it belonged to, so if they ran the plates, they’d come up belonging to someone Tonto made up.

Finished with the plates, we got in and drove. It had turned windy and the blue had gone out of the sky because gray clouds had come in, hiding the sun. The lake house wasn’t on the good side of the lake where there were fine homes and the grass was always freshly mown and there were nice boats docked up close to shore. It was down a precarious red clay road with ruts deeper than the ass crack of time, and the road just kept winding around the evergreens and barren oaks until it died out near the lake. Then you had to park and get out and walk across a messy clay clearing toward a cabin nestled near some pines and beneath a couple of massive cyprus trees from which moss draped like feather boas. The wind whipped the boas and it whipped at us.

It wasn’t much of a cabin. Pretty small and made of logs. The logs had been treated poorly and they were starting to rot, and the cabin leaned downhill toward the lake, which was visible like a blue patch through the boughs of the trees and the mossy boas. The porch was caved in near the steps and there was a window missing and a slab of Sheetrock had been nailed over it from the inside and the Sheetrock was obviously damp and all it would take to knock it loose was a strong cough or foul language.

When we were close up on the cabin I stopped and hollered out, “Hello, the house.”

Some time passed and then the door cracked and I heard Tenson’s voice call out, “Come on up, but you got guns, you need to lose them.”

We had already left them in the van, under the floorboards, so we walked straight to the cabin, wiped the caked clay off our shoes on a stone near the steps, and went inside. Soon as we did I saw Hirem sitting in a rickety chair at a card table, and then I saw Tenson standing in the corner with his gun drawn, dangling by his side. Hirem had lost the suit. He had on casual clothes and a light jacket. Tenson was wearing a dark shirt and jeans and sneakers.

The Mummy was still well wrapped and he stood in a spot on the other side of the room without his gun drawn. There was a humming sound in the room, and it came from small rectangular plug-in heaters on either side of the place. The coils in the heaters glowed red and there was just enough heat to make you glad you were inside instead of out.

The Mummy came over and told us to turn around and put our hands on the wall and spread our legs. We did. Leonard turned his head and looked at the Mummy, said, “You are so butch.”

“Fuck you,” the Mummy said.

“See,” Leonard said. “Told you.”

The Mummy patted us down and took away our combs and my pocketknife and Leonard’s gum.

Tenson said, “All right, relax.”

“We want our combs and I want my pocketknife back,” I said.

“Don’t forget the gum,” Leonard said.

The Mummy gave them back. There were only three chairs. Hirem was in one and the Mummy and Tenson occupied the other two. That left us leaning our backs against the wall. Tenson never put his gun up. He sat with it on his knee.

Leonard looked at the Mummy, said, “How long you got to wear that getup?”

“Too long,” the Mummy said. “I wasn’t even one of them, you dumb ass.”

“How was I to know?” Leonard said. “Wrong place, wrong time, both of us.”

The Mummy didn’t look appeased, or so I thought. Actually, you couldn’t tell much about how he looked. You mostly got what you got from him in the way he moved his eyes or his busted mouth, the way he shrugged his shoulders.

“Hirem here,” Tenson said, waving the gun like a pointer, “he’s got something to tell you, maybe will lead to his boy, but he’s not telling us. He tells you, you take the lead and go after the boy and his poke and bring the money back. FBI gets the drug money, Hirem gets his kid back, the girl doesn’t get shot, and Hirem tells us what he knows and we make all kinds of arrests and you guys go free, no trial, and everyone’s happy, or mostly. You following this scenario?”

“A few dance numbers might liven it up,” I said, “but for the most part, we’re following.”

“Now,” Tenson said, “here’s what we do. You two go outside with Hirem, and we’re gonna stand on the porch so we can see you, and you’re going to walk out a ways and Hirem is going to tell you something he won’t tell us, and that’s okay. That’s how he wants it and we can live with that. We’ll get our results. You hear what I’m saying?”

We nodded, Hirem pulled a heavy coat over his lighter one, and we went outside, across the porch and down a little trail that led into the woods. The wind was picking up and it was carrying a lot more cold with it now, and it hit us like ice picks. I tugged the collar up on my coat and put my hands in my pockets as I walked.

After we were out a ways, Hirem said, “I got to see you guys are wearing a wire or not.”

“You saw him pat us down,” I said.

“Wearing a wire for them,” he said. “They could pat you down all they liked and not find it.”

“All right,” I said and we stopped walking and I held up my arms. Hirem patted me down, then did the same to Leonard.

“Good,” he said. “Now, let’s walk a bit more.”

As we started to walk, Tenson yelled from the porch, “Don’t go too far. We start to worry you aren’t so we can see you, Hirem. And you don’t want us worried, do you?”

Hirem didn’t answer, but he turned to us, said, “They know I’m not going anywhere. I want my boy back and I’ll do what I got to do until that’s done. They just like to harass me. Hell, I came to them, wasn’t like they brought me in. They been trying to nail my ass for years. I finally had to hold the nail for them.”

“You got some idea how to find your son,” I said, “but you’re telling us, not the FBI?”

“That’s right,” Hirem said. “I don’t trust those guys. I don’t trust the law. I don’t trust my mother-in-law all that much, and she’s dead some ten years now.”

“But you trust us?” Leonard said. “Didn’t you send those bozos to kill us?”

“It was business, but I can tell about you guys, and I can trust you.”

“Say you can?” I said.

“I think I can. You’re like the old guys in the organization, you got a sense of honor.”

I didn’t believe the organization, as Hirem referred to it, ever had a sense of honor, but I listened.

“Bottom line is I like you better than them,” he said. “Let’s put it that way and call it close enough. What I think is I’m gonna get a better shot with you than them.”

“You’re the one gonna sing to them,” Leonard said. “You’re gonna tell them everything, so why not tell them this?”

“Get my kid back safe, I’ll tell them whatever they want to know. After that, it don’t matter for me. I should’ve been a barber. My daddy was a barber and he offered me into the business, but I didn’t take it.”

“There’s still time to hone up your skills,” I said. “But you do, you’ll be giving prison haircuts.”

“Listen now,” Hirem said. “I’m gonna tell you guys some things I need you to know, so you got some idea who might get in your way.”

“Sort of figured this might not just be a bring the kid home kind of thing,” Leonard said. “It never is.”

“What I know some others can figure out,” Hirem said, “and the people I worked for, they can figure better sometimes than the FBI. These feds may have our phones tapped, and they may have all kinds of law on their side, but these guys I work for, they been around awhile now, and they got people more expendable than the feds got. You hear me?”

“We’re all ears,” I said.

“First and foremost, get my boy back.”

“And the girl?” I said.

“She ain’t nothing to me,” Hirem said. “But it makes Tim feel all right to have her around, I can get over her being coated in chocolate.”

“So that’s what this is,” Leonard said, holding out his hands, looking astonished. “I just thought I was dirty, and it’s been chocolate all the while.”