Mucho Mojo Read online

  MUCHO RAVES FOR MUCHO MOJO!

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  “A SPRINGLOADED PAGE-TURNER, a mean rattlesnake of a novel that rears up and sinks its fangs into you when you least expect it. Readers already familiar with Lansdale’s work won’t want to miss this one, and as for those who aren’t—where the hell have you been?”

  —F. Paul Wilson, author of The Select

  *

  “IT’S THE SNAPPY, FREQUENTLY RAUNCHY DIALOGUE that widens the eyes and provides the burst of humor. . . . When you read a novel starring Leonard Pine and Hap Collins, you spend a lot of time laughing and shaking your head. Emulating an early hero, Mark Twain, he uses crisp dialogue and humor to leaven serious topics.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  *

  “I’ve never read anything like it. Not just a fine mystery full of unexpected moves, but a better novel about black-white friendship and rural life than anything I’ve ever read. I LOVED IT, MAN, THOUGHT IT WAS A HOWL FROM BEGINNING TO END.”

  —James Crumley, author of The Mexican Tree Duck

  *

  “JOE LANSDALE IS ONE OF PUBLISHING’S BEST-KEPT SECRETS.”

  —Dallas Morning News

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  “SAVAGELY ENTERTAINING . . . TAP DANCES THROUGH TWIN MINEFIELDS OF RACE AND OFF-BEAT SEX. . . . To read this novel is to live in that terrible and exhilarating moment between the knife-cut and the pain, between the gush of blood and the deadly onset of shock.”

  —Joe Gores, author of Menaced Assassin

  *

  “THOUGHTFUL AND WITTY . . . Lansdale sneaks over philosophic points cleverly. I can’t remember a more entertaining blueprint for the way blacks and whites, gays and straights can live in friendship.”

  —Charlotte Observer

  *

  “JOE R. LANSDALE IS A BORN STORYTELLER, AND MUCHO MOJO is the story he was born to tell. This is the kind of mystery that would make Agatha Christie hide under the bed.”

  —Robert Bloch, author of Psycho

  *

  “SATISFYING . . . EXTRAORDINARILY MEMORABLE. The friendship and smart-ass patter between Hap and Leonard is so real it’s palpable. The plot is compelling. And one can practically hear the wind and taste the dust of an East Texas summer. Damn, this is good.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  *

  “A GRIPPING PLOT lays bare the East Texas mindset, unexplained murders, and raw truth about ugly secrets. A GREAT READ.”

  —Los Angeles Features Syndicate

  *

  “A CROSS BETWEEN ROBERT B. PARKER AND STEPHEN KING. . . . It gets your attention, that’s for sure.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  *

  “JOE R. LANSDALE HAS STAKED HIS CLAIM AND STRUCK PAYDIRT with his macabre tale of a serial killer in MUCHO MOJO. . . . I often found myself grinning like an idiot while reading MUCHO MOJO, thanks to Lansdale’s strange, often ribald humor.”

  —Mostly Murder

  *

  “THE PROSE IS HARD-BITTEN, THE TONE DARKLY HUMOROUS.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  *

  “NOT ONLY A TOP-DRAWER THRILLER, BUT A SOCIAL PORTRAIT OF A SOCIETY IN PAINFUL EVOLUTION. . . . There’s a touch of Harry Crews in him, a streak of Cormac McCarthy . . . Joe R. Lansdale keeps his own voice, and it’s one well worth listening to and enjoying. . . . MUCHO MOJO will make you both laugh and wince, and keep on turning the pages.”

  —Locus

  *

  “MUCHO MOJO IS SOME MAJOR MAGIC . . . as funny as all get-out . . . a story of richness of character and setting. . . . It’s not inappropriate to place it in the tradition of cross-cultural buddy novels that goes back through Huckleberry Finn. It’s that good.”

  —Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinal

  *

  “A REAL NAIL-BITING PAGE TURNER . . . [with] truly memorable characters . . . a superbly crafted and compelling murder mystery . . . a worthwhile addition to the category of the gay mystery.”

  —In Step

  *

  “LANSDALE COULD EASILY SWEEP THE AWARDS. . . . The hypnotic otherworldly setting alone is worth the read, but the lead characters are wonderfully charming. Readers can only hope the author will bring them back.”

  —Texas Monthly

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  “MORE THAN A MYSTERY, MUCHO MOJO is about friendship, family loyalty, and pride. . . . Lansdale is one of the best regional novelists around.”

  —Killing Time

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  “BRILLIANTLY EXECUTED. . . . One thing about Lansdale, he’s always exploring new directions. He’s one of America’s most gifted writers, and MUCHO MOJO proves why.”

  —Time Tunnel

  *

  “A SUPERB WORK. . . . embraces the mystery field while transcending its every convention. . . . One of the best novels of the year. . . . READ IT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE—YOU WON’T BE DISAPPOINTED.”

  —BookLovers

  *

  “Hunting Joe R. Lansdale novels has provided me with many of my most delicious moments as a book collector. . . . He is this generation’s one and only answer to Frederic Brown, Seabury Quinn, Manly Wade Wellman, H. P. Lovecraft, all those gleeful pulp gods of the 1940s. . . . He’s got a wicked streak the size of the Rio Grande and a compassionate streak at least as long. HE’S ALREADY PRODUCED THREE FLAT-OUT CLASSICS, AND HE’LL WRITE MORE.”

  —Creative Loafing

  BY JOE R. LANSDALE

  Novels

  ACT OF LOVE

  THE MAGIC WAGON

  DEAD IN THE WEST

  THE NIGHTRUNNERS

  THE DRIVE-IN: A B-Movie with Blood and Popcorn, Made in Texas

  THE DRIVE-IN II: Not Just One of Them Sequels

  COLD IN JULY

  SAVAGE SEASON

  CAPTURED BY THE ENGINES

  MUCHO MOJO

  THE TWO-BEAR MAMBO

  Juvenile

  TERROR ON THE HIGH SKIES

  Short Story Collections

  BY BIZARRE HANDS

  STORIES BY MAMA LANSDALE’S YOUNGEST BOY

  BESTSELLERS GUARANTEED

  WRITER OF THE PURPLE RAGE

  ELECTRIC GUMBO

  Anthologies (as Editor)

  BEST OF THE WEST

  NEW FRONTIERS

  RAZORED SADDLES (with Pat LoBrutto)

  DARK AT HEART (with Karen Lansdale)

  WEIRD BUSINESS (with Rick Klaw)

  Nonfiction

  THE WEST THAT WAS (with Thomas W. Knowles)

  THE WILD WEST SHOW (with Thomas W. Knowles)

  THE MYSTERIOUS PRESS

  Published by Warner Books

  A Time Warner Company

  MUCHO MOJO. Copyright © 1994 by Joe R. Lansdale. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  For information address Warner Books, 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  The Mysterious Press name and logo are registered trademarks of Warner Books, Inc.

  A Time Warner Company

  ISBN 0-7595-8387-0

  A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1994 by Mysterious Press.

  First eBook edition: May 2001

  Visit our Web site at www.iPublish.com

  Contents

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

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  10.

  11.

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  13.

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  17.

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  39.

  About the Author

  This book is dedicated with love and respect and the deepest devotion to the most imortant person in my life. My wife, Karen.

  Thanks are in order for some folks who helped see this project through: Barbara Puechner; Andrew Vachss; Neal Barrett, Jr.; David Webb; and of course, Jeff Banks. I’d also like to give a nod toward my old rose-field buddies, Sam Griffith and Larry Walters, and thank my “Aunt” Ardath as well as my karate instructor, Richard Metteauer.

  It doesn’t matter whom you are paired against; your opponent is always yourself.

  —Nakamura

  1.

  It was July and hot and I was putting out sticks and not thinking one whit about murder.

  All the other rose-field jobs are bad, the budding, the digging, but putting out sticks, that’s the job they give sinners in Hell.

  You do sticks come dead of summer. Way it works is they give you this fistful of bud wood, and you take that and sigh and turn and look down the length of the field, which goes on from where you are to some place east of China, and you gird your loins, bend over, and poke those sticks in the rows a bit apart. You don’t lift up if you don’t have to, ’cause otherwise you’ll never finish. You keep your back bent and you keep on poking, right on down that dusty row, hoping eventually it’ll play out, though it never seems to, and of course that East Texas sun, which by 10:30 A.M. is like an infected blister leaking molten pus, doesn’t help matters.

  So I was out there playing with my sticks, thinking the usual thoughts about ice tea and sweet, willing women, when the Walking Boss came up and tapped me on the shoulder.

  I thought maybe it was water break, but when I looked up he jerked a thumb toward the end of the field, said, “Hap, Leonard’s here.”

  “He can’t come to work,” I said. “Not unless he can put out sticks with his cane.”

  “Just wants to see you,” the Walking Boss said, and moved away.

  I poked in the last stick from my bundle, eased my back straight, and started down the center of the long dusty row, passing the bent, sweaty backs of the others as I went.

  I could see Leonard at the far end of the field, leaning on his cane. From that distance, he looked as if he were made of pipe cleaners and doll clothes. His raisin-black face was turned in my direction and a heat wave jumped off of it and vibrated in the bright light and dust from the field swirled momentarily in the wave and settled slowly.

  When Leonard saw I was looking in his direction, his hand flew up like a grackle taking flight.

  Vernon Lacy, my field boss, known affectionately to me as the Old Bastard though he was my age, decked out in starched white shirt, white pants, and tan pith helmet, saw me coming too. He came alongside Leonard and looked at me and made a slow and deliberate mark in his little composition book. Docking my time, of course.

  When I got to the end of the row, which only took a little less time than a trek across Egypt on a dead camel, I was dust covered and tired from trudging in the soft dirt. Leonard grinned, said, “Just wanted to know if you could loan me fifty cents.”

  “You made me walk all the way here for fifty cents, I’m gonna see I can fit that cane up your ass.”

  “Let me grease up first, will you?”

  Lacy looked over and said, “You’re docked, Collins.”

  “Go to hell,” I said.

  Lacy swallowed and walked away and didn’t look back.

  “Smooth,” Leonard said.

  “I pride myself on diplomacy. Now tell me it isn’t fifty cents you want.”

  “It isn’t fifty cents I want.”

  Leonard was still grinning, but the grin shifted slightly to one side, like a boat about to take water and sink.

  “What’s wrong, buddy?”

  “My Uncle Chester,” Leonard said. “He passed.”

  * * *

  I followed Leonard’s old Buick in my pickup, stopping long enough along the way to buy some beer and ice. When we arrived at Leonard’s place, we got an ice chest and filled it with the ice and the beer and carried it out to the front porch.

  Leonard, like myself, didn’t have air-conditioning, and the front porch was as cool a spot as we could find, unless we went down to the creek and laid in it.

  We eased into the rickety porch swing and sat the ice chest between us. While Leonard moved the swing with his good leg, I popped us a couple.

  “Happen today?” I asked.

  “They found him today. Been dead two or three days. Heart attack. They got him at the LaBorde Funeral Home, pumped full of juice.”

  Leonard sipped his beer and studied the barbed-wire fence on the opposite side of the road. “See that mockingbird on the fence post, Hap?”

  “Why? Is he trying to get my attention?”

  “He’s a fat one. You don’t see many that fat.”

  “I wonder about that all the time, Leonard. How come mockingbirds don’t normally get fat. Thought I might write a paper on it.”

  “My uncle’s favorite bird. I always thought they were ugly, but he thought they were the grandest things in the world. He used to call me his little mockingbird when I was a kid because I mocked him and everybody else. I see one, I think of him. Hokey, huh?”

  I didn’t say anything. I focused my eyes on the floorboards at the edge of the porch, watched as a hot horsefly staggered on its disease-laden legs, trying to make the little bit of shade the porch roof provided. The fly faltered and stopped. Heat-stroke, I figured.

  “I want to go to Uncle Chester’s funeral tomorrow,” Leonard said. “But I don’t know. I feel funny about it. He probably wouldn’t want me there.”

  “From what you’ve told me about Uncle Chester, spite of the fact he disowned you when he found out you were queer—”

  “Gay. We say gay now, Hap. You straights need to learn that. When we’re real drunk, we call each other fags or faggots.”

  “Whatever. I’m sure, in his own way, Chester was a good guy. You loved him. It doesn’t matter what he would have wanted. What matters is what you want. He’s dead. He’s not making decisions anymore. You want to go to the funeral and tell him ’bye because of the good things you remember about him, go on.”

  “Come with me.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry for Uncle Chester on account of what he meant to you, but I don’t know him from brown rice. Fact is, him dying, you coming around upset, and me leaving the rose fields like that, I figure I don’t have a job anymore. He screwed up my income, so why the hell would I want to go to his funeral?”

  “Because I want you to and you’re my friend and you don’t want to hurt my teeny-weeny feelings.”

  This was true.

  I didn’t like it, but I agreed. Going to a funeral seemed harmless enough.

  2.

  Funeral was the next day at three in the afternoon, so early next morning we drove to LaBorde in Leonard’s car and over to J. C. Penney’s.

  We went there to buy suits, something neither Leonard or I had owned in years. My last suit had had a Nehru collar and a peace symbol about the size of an El Dorado hubcap on a chain a little smaller than you might need to tow a butane truck.

  Leonard’s last suit had been designed by the military.

  Suits from Penney’s didn’t come with a vest and two pairs of pants anymore, least not the decent ones, and the prices were higher than I remembered. I thought perhaps we ought to go over to Kmart, see if they had something in sheen green. Something we got tired of wearing, we could use to upholster a chair.

  I ended up with a dark blue su
it and a light blue shirt and a dark blue tie. I bought black shoes, socks, and a belt. I tried the stuff on and looked at myself in the mirror. I thought I looked silly. Like a tall, biped pit bull in mourning.

  Leonard bought a dark green Western-cut suit, a canary-yellow shirt, and a tie striped up in orange and green and yellow. Shoes he got were black with pointy toes and zippers down the side. Kind of shoes you hoped they stopped making about the time the Dave Clark Five quit making records.

  “You’re gonna bury Uncle Chester,” I said. “Not take him on a Caribbean cruise. Show up in that, he might jump out of the box and throw a blanket over you.”

  “Jealousy is an ugly thing, Hap.”

  “You’re right. I wish I looked like a head-on collision between Dolly Parton and Peter Max.”

  We changed back into our clothes, and I paid up because I was the only one working these days, even if it was sporadically, and because Leonard never let me forget it was my fault his leg was messed up. He’d say stuff like, “You know I got this leg messed up on account of you,” then he’d pick something he wanted and I’d pay for it, because what he said was true. Wasn’t for him, my funeral would have come before Uncle Chester’s.

  The services were in a little community on the outskirts of LaBorde, and after we went home and hung out awhile, we put the suits on and drove over in Leonard’s wreck with no air-conditioning.

  Time we got to the Baptist church where the funeral was being held, we had sweated up good in our new suits, and the hot wind blowing on me made my hair look as if it had been combed with a bush hog. My overall appearance was of someone who had been in a fight and lost.

  I got out of the car and Leonard came around and said, “You still got the fucking tag hanging on you.”

  I lifted an arm and there was the tag, dangling from the suit sleeve. I felt like Minnie Pearl. Leonard got out his pocket knife and cut it off and we went inside the church.

  We paraded by the open coffin, and of course, Uncle Chester hadn’t missed his chance to be guest of honor. He was one ugly sonofabitch, and I figured alive he hadn’t looked much better. He wasn’t very tall, but he was wide, and being dead a few days before they found him hadn’t helped his looks any. The mortician had only succeeded in making him look a bit like a swollen Cabbage Patch Doll.