Vanilla Ride (3 page)

The yard wasn’t much. The rain had stopped and windblown leaves had bunched up all over the place. There were some cars parked there, and there were some people standing next to the cars. Eight guys, to be exact. They looked pretty young. There was a fellow standing in the doorway of the trailer in Scooby Doo shorts scratching his nuts like a squirrel sorting acorns. He was young too. I didn’t see anyone I thought was Gadget, unless she had been disguised as the stray yellow dog or was in that fellow’s shorts hiding next to his nut sack.

We parked and Leonard got my .38 snub-nosed revolver out of the glove box and stuck it in his pants and pulled his shirt and windbreaker over it. I have a gun permit, as does Leonard, but that gun wasn’t on it. It wasn’t even registered. It was for nefarious deeds.

I said, “Don’t use that.”

“Hey, better to have and not need than not have and need.”

“What about me?”

“You didn’t want me to use it, but now you want to carry it? I don’t think so.”

“It’s my gun.”

“Tough shit. Use your suave and debonair fucking charm.”

We got out and started walking toward the trailer. The people in the yard rapidly divided into two camps: the scared and the nervous. Some of them got in their cars and drove away quickly. They would be the buyers. The rest started inside the trailer. They would be the drug-selling posse. The guy in the shorts let them pass, then took his position again, hand in his drawers. He looked at us like he thought he was tough enough to chew the edge off a Buck knife. I didn’t think he looked as tough as he thought. However, sometimes looks can be deceiving.

There was what passed for music coming out of the trailer. Rap, I guess, but it sounded like someone beating an active washing machine with a log chain.

I said to Leonard as we walked up, “Take it easy, play it cool.”

“Cool is my middle name,” Leonard said.

“No,” I said. “No, it isn’t.”

We were close to the front door when the man holding his balls, a black guy with pale skin and a longish Afro that made him look like a time traveler from the late sixties, early seventies, said, “Man, you two are fuckin’ my game. You didn’t come here for what we sell, I can tell.”

“Ain’t this where they’re having the revival?” Leonard said. “I been wanting Jesus in my heart, or up my ass or somethin’. Way you’re digging, is he in them Scooby shorts with you?”

“You a funny nigger,” the black man said. “You don’t know shit. Scooby is cool. What the fuck you want?”

The idea that our bad guy guarding the door was worried about our dissing Scooby amused me a bit. We had stopped about four feet from the door. The trailer was up on concrete blocks, so the guy in the doorway was standing above us. He was still playing pocket pool. By this point, my nuts would have been chafed and my hand would have been tired enough I would have had to call in re inforcements. His legs had bruises on them. I figured that would be from Marvin’s cane. Behind him, in the slight darkness, I could see movement, and the sound of the music was loud enough and bad enough that the idea of kicking someone’s ass was beginning to appeal, if for no other reason than their lack of taste.

“I don’t like being called a nigger even when a nigger calls me that,” Leonard said.

“That some kind of joke too?”

“You see me laughin’?” Leonard said.

Another man, a lanky but muscled white guy with a close-shaved scalp, appeared at the Afro guy’s shoulder, looked out, said, “You want I should take care of them?”

“I ask you shit?” the Afro man said. “You hear me ask some shit from you? Go on in there and sit your white ass down. Pet the fuckin’ dog or pat my old lady’s ass, but don’t be gettin’ in my game unless I call on you.”

“Have it your fuckin’ way,” the white guy said, and disappeared back inside the trailer.

“I’m pettin’ your gal’s ass,” the white guy called from somewhere inside.

“That was like just a fuckin’ thing to say. Don’t you do it, asshole,”
the Afro guy said, glancing inside the trailer. Then he looked back at us.

I said, “Could you ask him to turn down the music? I think I saw a bird fall out of a tree.”

He ignored me. “You cops?”

“We look like cops?” Leonard said.

“He does,” he said, pointing a finger at me.

“He’s white,” Leonard said. “All white guys look like cops.”

“I resent that,” I said.

“We ain’t cops,” Leonard said. “Now, get your hand off your bulbs, we maybe can do a little business. But you and me. No matter what the business. We ain’t shakin’ hands.”

The Afro guy didn’t pull his hand out of his shorts. His eyes narrowed. “All right, you buyin’ somethin’ or not?”

Leonard said, “You’re right. I fess up. We don’t want to buy anything. To be precise, we’re here to take somethin’. It’s Gadget we want.”

“Gadget?”

“Yep,” I said.

“You guys are nuts. Ain’t nobody around but you two, and there’s four of us and a badass dog, and you’re tellin’ me you’re takin’ my woman?”

“If you had two dogs,” Leonard said, “now that would be different.”

“There’s a dog?” I said.

The guy in the doorway shifted his nuts to the other side of his shorts and looked exasperated. “Gadget ain’t goin’ nowhere, man. She’s my hole.”

“Damn, that’s a romantic reference,” I said. “You say you got a dog in there?”

“She ain’t goin’,” the man said.

“Only if she wants to go,” I said. “And maybe even if she doesn’t want to. We’re kind of up in the air on that part… What kind of dog is it?”

“Ah,” he said, “I get it. You two from that old nigger. Her granddaddy That fuckin’ cripple.”

“Whipped your ass with a cane, didn’t he?” Leonard said. “That was some lively old cripple, wouldn’t you say? Your legs look like a fuckin’ zebra with them bruises.”

“He caught me off guard.”

“He hit you with that stick like he was dustin’ a rug, Tanedrue,” the white guy said from somewhere inside.

“You shut the fuck up,” Tanedrue said.

He turned back to us.

Leonard laughed a little. “Tanedrue? That’s your name? Your mama made that name up, didn’t she?”

“It’s African.”

“Naw it ain’t,” Leonard said. “If that don’t scream ignorant backwoods nigger, I don’t know what does. That was my name, I’d stick a sharp stick up my ass and impale myself.”

“That’s it,” Tanedrue said, and reached back into the trailer with his right hand. For a slight moment he was distracted, which of course was what we were waiting for.

Leonard moved quickly, caught Tanedrue by the feet, jerked them up and out. Tanedrue’s head smacked on the bottom of the trailer doorway and then Leonard dragged him down the metal stairs so that his head bounced on each and every one of them. I saw a bit of blood fly out from Tanedrue’s skull, then he went limp and tumbled off the stairs, his hand still in his shorts. No doubt about it, he was one tenacious ball handler.

We kept moving, straight into the trailer.

The white guy with the shaved head was the first one at the door. Leonard hit him between the eyes with a swinging elbow so hard I’m sure a distant relative in bad health in the old country crossed his eyes and died. The blow made the goon spin around and away from us. He went down on one knee and held his head, just to make sure it was still attached. While he was on his knees, his legs slightly spread, Leonard kicked him in the balls like he was making a soccer goal.

I was in right behind Leonard. As I entered, the music smacked me like a fist and the stink of the place draped over me like a blanket. Then a dog jumped at me from the shadows. It was a big, dark, growling dog and it was part of the stench. It went for my throat. I moved to the side slightly and caught the dog by the collar with one hand as its teeth snapped in the air, and saliva from the snap popped across my forehead. With the other hand, I caught its hind leg and picked it up high as I could manage. It was a heavy dog. I saw a window out of the corner of my eye, just over a stained kitchen sink. I tossed the dog at it, hard as I could. The window cracked and the dog went through it in a shower of black and tan fur and a tinkling of glass, its body doing a kind of horseshoe maneuver from the impact. The dog let out a whelp and a yip and then I heard nothing but the sound of its body striking the earth outside. There was blood and fur on the jagged glass. I suspected fleas had pulled parachute cords.

I heard Leonard say, “Come to papa,” and when I turned my head, I caught sight of Leonard holding a big bushy-headed white guy by the
back of the neck, slamming his head into the wall so hard a mirror fell off and shattered.

As I turned, a thin black guy came down the hall at a rush, clubbed me in the ribs with a right hook that nearly caused me to piss myself. I tried to kick him, but there wasn’t any room. In a reflex action he shoved out with both hands, hit me in the chest and knocked me down on top of the guy Leonard had kicked in the balls. The ball-kicked dude was resting politely on the floor whimpering like a little girl who had lost her dolly, hands between his legs.

“You hurt my dog,” said the guy who shoved me.

I rolled up and he kicked at me and I scooped my hand under his leg and grabbed his face with my other hand and used my closest leg to sweep his standing leg out from under him. He hit his head on a counter, his teeth snapped together on his tongue, and he went down, blood foaming out of his mouth. I smelled something that made me think he’d bent a biscuit in his skivvies.

I heard a shriek from the back, looked down the hall. A young, long-legged woman was running at me. She was a dark-skinned girl with a lot of processed hair, maybe some extensions, and for all I knew a recent manicure and a toe ring. She jumped on me with her legs spread and straddled me, her ankles locked around my back; she had hold of my hair with one hand and was clawing my face with the other, still shrieking.

I hit her with a right cross between the eyes and she let go, though her legs stayed hooked. She fell back on her head, then her legs came undone and they sort of melted toward the floor with the rest of her.

Leonard was still working on the big hairy guy, had him by the mane and was smashing his head into the wall, cracking the paneling. All I could tell for sure was the guy now had a very flat nose and his lips looked like fat fishing worms that were coming apart. One of his teeth was embedded in the paneling and there was blood on the wall. One more slam and a big crucifix fell and bounced on the couch and then bounced on top of the ball-kicked guy and then onto the floor.

The ball-kicked guy had gotten some juice back. Maybe the crucifix revived him. He tried to get up, made it to his hands and knees. Leonard, without letting go of the guy whose head he was bouncing, kneed the other dude in the face, knocking him back down. He winced, did a kind of push-up, tried to come up. I got him from behind, right in
the snickerdoodles again. He farted and went down and didn’t get up, either knocked out, dead, or hoping to God we thought he was. Right then he was probably wishing he had been thrown out the window with the dog. I was too. That was quite a fart.

I took a breath and put a hand on my side, then my face. I was bleeding from where the girl had scratched me.

I did a quick reconnoiter. It looked as if the trailer occupants were all pretty much Nap City. Leonard whirled the guy whose nose he had flattened around and hit him with a hard strike to the neck with the side of his hand. The guy went down. Not that he really needed that neck strike. He was going to fall anyway. Leonard kicked him once just to keep himself flexible.

I picked up the CD player on a shelf over the couch and slammed it against the wall. The CD flew out of it and I stepped on it. It felt good to have the air filled with emptiness.

That’s when the now awake Tanedrue came wobbling through the door, his hand no longer in his shorts. He reached for what he had been reaching for before, something just inside the door on top of the refrigerator. A little automatic. He got hold of it. As he brought it around, Leonard pulled my .38 and shot Tanedrue in the right thigh, just below the shorts. Tanedrue dropped the automatic, grabbed his leg, let out a yell that made my asshole pinch tight, then went down shrieking, holding his thigh, blood squirting everywhere.

“Goddamn, Leonard!”

Leonard gave me an exasperated look. “I started to let him shoot you, but I thought Brett would be mad.”

“Goddamn, Leonard.”

The guy who had bitten his tongue was closest at hand, so I grabbed his shirt by the front and pulled hard. It ripped off of his unconscious body, and I stuck it in Tanedrue’s wound. Tanedrue cussed me and struck out at me, so I hit him in the head a couple of times. “Lay down, you stupid fuck, before you bleed to death.”

“You shot me!” he said.

“Technically, he shot you,” I said, jerking my head at Leonard.

Leonard tossed my .38 on the couch, grabbed Tanedrue by the Afro and lifted him off the ground a little, slid behind him, and slipped his forearm around his neck, pushing in tight on the arteries there. He slid his choking hand into the bend of his other elbow and locked the other
hand behind Tanedrue’s head, compressed while he expanded his chest.

Tanedrue passed out quicker than an asthmatic octogenarian fucking a sheep in a stuffy hayloft.

“Now fix him,” Leonard said, letting Tanedrue drop.

“I don’t know he can be fixed.”

“It ain’t through an artery. I’m a better shot than that.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Yeah. Okay, I was lucky.”

Leonard was right. Tanedrue was hit through the meaty part of the thigh and he was losing blood from the hole in his leg, but the main artery had been missed. I tore some more of the shirt off the guy on the floor and wrapped Tanedrue’s leg as best I could, put my ear to his chest to make sure he was breathing. Leonard had used a blood choke, but sometimes they don’t come back.

“I guess that’s Gadget passed out over there,” I said.

“She wasn’t as glad to see us as I had hoped,” Leonard said. “I saw you hit her. You hit her hard. If she was wearing a Tampax, I bet you knocked it out of her ass.”