Vanilla Ride (2 page)

I turned to Marvin. “So what exactly is the deal?”

“Well, he whipped up on her and I went over and caught him pulling into his place and he got out and I beat him a little bit with my cane. It wore me out and it didn’t do my cane any good and I scuffed up a good pair of shoes. I had to get a new cane and have the shoes shined. That ain’t a quarter no more. White boys are doing it now, by the way. They like at least five dollars.”

“Inflation,” Leonard said.

“How old is the boyfriend?” I asked.

“Twenty-five or so,” Marvin said. “I don’t know exactly. Old enough to be a better person than he is. Old enough for me to kill him and drop his body in a hole somewhere.”

“So you beat him with your cane, and now you want… what?” I said. “Sounds like to me you took care of the problem, gave him an attitude adjustment. Did you leave the old cane up his ass and you want us to fetch it?”

“Deal is,” Marvin said, “he didn’t like it much, that beating, and he has friends he can go to. And my leg, it’s just getting good, but it’s not
that good. I can whip one ass easy enough, but multiple asses, not so sure. And I’m only up for one ass at a time, maybe once a week during certain hours after lunch and well before sunset when the stars are aligned just right… I was lucky I caught him alone, without his posse.”

“Call me foolish,” I said, “but since you used to be a cop, did it occur to you that you might want to call the law and maybe have them go over there and do the domestic violence thing?”

“Therein lays the Shakespearean rub,” Marvin said.

“That sounds like something I’d like on my middle leg,” Leonard said.

“You see, my granddaughter, Julia, we call her Gadget, this guy she’s with, he’s kind of a drug dealer.”

“Kind of?” I asked.

“Okay,” Marvin said. “Absolutely he is. And if the law gets involved, well, she could get involved.”

“I’m not loving this at all, Leonard.”

“I was being facetious.”

I turned to Marvin. Fearing I already knew the answer, I asked, “Why would she get involved if the law got involved?”

“Because she is selling grass out of their trailer, and they, as I said, are drug dealers. As for the law, they are in the drug dealer’s pocket, in there with the lint and the pocket change. So it could really turn out bad.”

“I probably should know this already,” I said, “but what about Gadget’s father? Maybe he can do something.”

Marvin shook his head. “No reason you should know. I don’t make a point of talking about him much. He ran off when she was a fetus, and now her mother is at her wits’ end.”

“So what you need from us is…?” I asked.

“I need someone to do some serious ass whipping, and bring her home. If you can get by without the ass whipping and just bring her home, that’ll do. But I’d like to think there will be an ass whipping. Not meaning her ass, of course.”

“What if she doesn’t want to come home?”

“I think she will. I think she would have the other day, but at the last minute she didn’t. I’m not up to snuff. I burned myself out and didn’t have any energy left, so I had to let her go. There wasn’t anything I
could do. I bluffed my way out to the car and got out of there. But you two, you can do it. You can bring her home.”

I studied on this a moment, looked at Leonard. He gave me a small nod. I said, “We’ll do it, but she doesn’t want to come home, I don’t know what to tell you. That’s the case, we bring her back, she’ll just run off again.”

“I understand that,” Marvin said. “But I saw something in her eyes before she got pulled away. She wanted to come home. I’m not sure she knows it outright, but I could tell.”

“I don’t trust things you see in people’s eyes,” I said. “You might be seeing your own reflection.”

“Me neither,” Leonard said, “but I’d sure like to whip that guy’s ass. We could make it a weekly tradition.”

“You mentioned that he has a posse,” I said.

“He does. My catching him alone … I understand that’s rare.”

“How many?”

“From my sources, I hear four, sometimes less, sometimes more. But generally, four. They stay in a trailer out in the woods. That’s where I caught him. I wasn’t using my head. Had they been there with him, my picture would probably be on a milk carton, people out beating the bushes, digging up anything looked like a grave. I don’t think they’re all that rough-and-tumble, but I don’t want you to think they can’t be dangerous they catch you just right.”

“Who are your sources, far as the size of his posse goes?”

“Formerly bad people gone straight. Or so they say. They may still be bad people. But I trust them on their head count.”

“Four is a lot,” I said.

“Hey,” Marvin said, “you two against a trailer full of scum, that’s not fair to the scum.”

“Don’t blow me, Marvin,” I said.

“I wouldn’t think of it. But you show up in that robe and bunny slippers, you’re bound to have them licked. They’ll laugh themselves to death.”

“You’re kind of nasty for a man wanting a favor,” I said.

Marvin grinned at me, then his face let loose of the smile and his eyes narrowed. “Look. I need your help. I’m asking … Hell, I’m begging a little, just not so that you can tell, all right?”

“This guy, what’s his name?”

“Oddly enough, I don’t know. I know where he lives. He has one of those sixties-style Afros, maybe not as big as the really big ones, but you know, out there, Jimi Hendrix like. But I can put you right at his trailer.”

I looked at Leonard. He gave me a nod.

I said, “We’ll scope it out. See what we can do.”

The place where Gadget was selling grass and her boyfriend was selling meaner drugs when he wasn’t using Gadget for a racquetball was not in LaBorde but just outside a nearby town called No Enterprise, where the law was two fat guys in a used cop car with so-so tires. They took the town’s cop checks, but they didn’t do much for it, except maybe catch a speeder now and then, maybe talk some gal into a blow job to get a pass on a ticket. The real money was in crooked enterprise. Or so Marvin told us. And Marvin isn’t often wrong about stuff like that. He was a cop for years. First in Houston, then in LaBorde. He said he knew about those guys and told us about them, and I took his word to be as true as the turning of the earth.

We drove over to No Enterprise in my pickup. The truck is one of those Dodges with a backseat and four doors and a short bed. I had recently traded for it and it ran good.

It was raining and it was a cool day, especially for early fall. Just the night before we had been sitting in my yard in shirtsleeves, and now it was cool enough to wish for excess hair on your chest. As for women, I don’t know exactly what they’d wish for. Probably a nice coat and a pair of shoes. I know Brett liked coats and shoes, especially shoes. She had enough in the closet to shoe a couple of monster-size centipedes, as long as they liked their footwear to come from Payless, Wal-Mart or Target. Equating women with shoes might be an old sexist cliché, but it didn’t change the fact Brett had a lot of shoes.

What Leonard and I had were some windbreakers. Mine was blue. Leonard’s was beige. We made a point of making sure we weren’t wearing
the same colors. It’s hard to be convincing as tough guys when you’re wearing matching outfits.

We had the address from Marvin, and of course the thing to do was not to just drive right up on the place, as that would be foolish and dangerous, but, since the two of us together sometimes can only manage the IQ level of a ground squirrel, that’s exactly what we were going to do. We tried to come up with some nifty sophisticated plan on the way over, but we kept getting distracted and singing along with the CD player. We had to listen to Leonard’s music. If I didn’t want to, he pouted. He can pout big-time. Since we were in my truck and it was my CD player, I should have chosen some of the music. I wanted to play Amy Winehouse. He didn’t.

Anyway, we drove over there singing to Kasey Lansdale’s
Back of My Smile
CD, some Hank Williams, and a bit of Ernest Tubb. All good stuff. Then we listened to Patsy Cline. Neither of us had the balls to sing along with Patsy. That just isn’t done. By the time we were five miles outside of No Enterprise it occurred to us that we had yet to concoct some kind of strategy, so we stopped off in town at Big Burger, a local place that served food and was also a filling station with an open garage. Inside the garage was a lube rack and a lonely-looking guy in blue khakis sitting on an old-fashioned Coke crate turned on edge. He was reading without fear of insult a sex book titled in bold letters
Poontang Palace
. The book was probably older than the reader, and considering the size of the town he probably read more books than he lubed transmissions.

Inside, they took our order and a lanky guy in an apron brought it to the little table where we sat, placed the hamburger plates on the plastic checkered tablecloth, and went away. They made a good hamburger and some French fries that tasted as if they had been put out on the drainboard and pissed on the night before and left to dry. We both bought potato chips as a replacement and pondered how a place could make such good hamburgers and such shitty fries. What kind of cook could fry a burger and couldn’t dip some French fries in a deep fryer without screwing them up?

At that moment it seemed like a question equal to “why are we here?” We came closer to solving the French fry enigma than coming up with any kind of plan to deal with our problem concerning Gadget and her keepers.

“We’re just going to rough him up, aren’t we?” I said.

“He hit Gadget.”

“We don’t really know Gadget.”

“She’s Marvin’s granddaughter, isn’t she?”

“She is.”

“All I need to know, Hap, ole buddy.”

“So, we punch him in the head a little and we take Gadget with us.”

“We can punch him lots of places. He’s got friends, we got to punch them too.”

“Okay, so we punch him and anyone else gets in our way, and we punch them all kinds of places, and then we take Gadget.”

“Always been the plan, far as I’m concerned.”

“And if she doesn’t want to go?” I asked.

“We could take her.”

“That wouldn’t be smart, and it wouldn’t be any good. You know that. We told Marvin that.”

“You told him,” Leonard said, sipped his coffee and looked out the window at cars going by on the highway.

“But you know it’s true,” I said.

“Yeah, I know it. But I don’t like bastards like this guy and I don’t like what he’s done to the granddaughter…. Ever notice how many cars are red these days? That used to be bad luck, a red car.”

“No. I haven’t noticed. We don’t know this guy has done anything. She might be making him do it.”

“Making him do it? Sayin’, ‘How’s about hittin’ me upside the head’? That what she’s doin’?”

“I don’t mean she deserves it. I mean it may be some kind of sexual ritual. He punches her in the eye, then she sucks his dick. Then she punches him in the eye, and he goes for the taco. Then they start all over again.”

“That what you think?”

“No.”

“Just like to hear yourself talk, don’t you, Hap?”

“Pretty much,” I said.

“So we’re back to roughing his ass up and seeing she wants to go with us.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much it,” I said. “That is the plan. I mean, why do something smart and safe and well coordinated, when we can just drive up on them and start throwing knuckles.”

“Sometimes it works.”

“Sometimes it does. And sometimes we get our asses kicked around.”

“I know,” Leonard said. “I’ve seen it happen. But that ain’t often, is it?”

“Once is too goddamn often.”

“Point taken. Chocolate pie?”

We finished off our lunch with chocolate pie and more coffee, considered having another slice and another cup but talked ourselves out of it, reminded by the fact that we had a job to do, a promise to keep, and we didn’t want to do it toting too much weight in our bellies.

Outside I took a peek in the garage. The reader was still sitting on the upturned Coke crate, engrossed in his book. I sort of hoped no one would want a tire changed or a manifold replaced. I’d hate to think such intense concentration might be broken. A car backfired out on the highway. The dedicated reader didn’t move. He didn’t bat an eye. I guess he was at the good part, where someone was about to put the arrow in the target.

Leonard came over and stood by me, said, “Come on, doofus. I been standing out by the truck waiting. Let’s roll.”

Following Marvin’s directions over to the place, we listened to some more music and sang along some more, this time with Willie Nelson. I thought I did a pretty good “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” Leonard didn’t think so. We sang “In the Jailhouse Now,” which I thought might be a form of prophecy, considering what we were about to do.

Where we were going was kind of a peckerwood suburb, which was pretty much a clutch of fall-defoliated trees, some evergreen pines, a listing mobile home, and a dog hunched to drop a load in what passed
for a yard. The dog was medium-sized, dirty yellow, and looked like the last meal he’d eaten was what he was dropping. He was working so hard at dropping those turds, his eyes were damn near crossed, had the kind of concentration that made you consider he might be close to figuring out the problems of string theory. He didn’t look owned. Had the look of a freelance dog. Maybe there was something to be said for that.