Hap and Leonard Ride Again Page 10

  This went on for awhile, and now and then they’d follow me to work, but they never did anything. I had a ball bat in my car, and they knew that, because I let them see it by holding it up once while driving, knowing they could see it from their Mustang, as they were so close on my ass. What I feared is they’d hold up a gun or guns in response, but that didn’t happen. Everyone wasn’t shooting everybody back then.

  This went on through the semester, and then the spring came, and one day I went downtown to buy some blue jeans and a union shirt. The old white union shirts had become popular. Everyone was dying them, or tie-dying them, and I guess I didn’t want to be left out. What we had there in Marvel Creek was a kind of general store named Jack Woolens, and that’s where I went to buy the shirt, couple pairs of jeans, and maybe what we called desert boots, which were tan, low-cut, comfortable shoes. I thought I had enough to afford it all. I was thinking on that, figuring I could skip one pair of pants if I had to, and I’d have enough for sure that way to get the shirt, shoes, and one pair of Lee Riders.

  My hair had grown longer, and I had to comb it behind my ears at school and push it up off my forehead into a pompadour so I didn’t get sent home. A bunch of us were wearing our hair longer, and there was even talk of a sit-in to protest how we were hassled by the principal, but I was the only one that showed up for the event. I ended up wandering around in the hall for a few minutes and went back to the lunchroom and had some Jell-O before going to math class. I had it washed and combed out this day, and it was bouncing loosely as I walked. I thought I was as cool as a razor edge in winter time.

  I parked my junker and was walking along the sidewalk, almost to Jack Woolens. I could see the wooden barrels setting out front—one had walking canes in it and brooms, the other had axe and hoe handles.

  As I came along the sidewalk, I saw Leonard coming toward me. He saw me and smiled. We hadn’t seen each other in a while, but when I saw him I knew I had missed him. He was like a stray dog that wandered in and out of my life, and I felt like when we were together that something missing was fulfilled. It was an odd combo, him being a homo and me being straight, him being black and me being white, and him being more redneck than I was. He didn’t like my long hair and had told me, and I didn’t like that he thought we needed a conservative president. He was a stray dog I liked, and I decided right then and there I wanted to keep him, even if he might bite. He probably thought I was the stray dog. I doubt he worried about my bite, however. He came down the sidewalk with one hand in his pants pocket, the other swinging by his side.

  That’s when David and Dinosaur, and the other two thugs, got out of the Mustang parked across the street, having spotted me and caught me without my ball bat. They came across the street, almost skipping.

  They got to me before Leonard.

  They came up on the curb and managed their way around me in a half circle. The door to Jack Woolens was at my back. It was open. It was a cool day and air-conditioning wasn’t as common then, so it was left that way to let in the breeze as well as too many flies.

  “Gotcha now,” David said.

  “Gotcha what?” Leonard said, as he came up the sidewalk, both hands swinging by his sides now.

  “You’re the other one we want to see,” said Dinosaur. “You and the girl, here.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That bites. You see, Leonard, they’re calling me a girl because my hair is long.”

  “It is too long,” Leonard said.

  “They are really pushing the wit, calling me a girl, noticing I have long hair. These guys, they ought to be on Johnny Carson.”

  “Fuck you,” Dinosaur said.

  “You’re looking for us, well, you done found us,” Leonard said.

  “That’s right,” I said. “You have.”

  “We don’t like what we see,” David said.

  “That’s because you are a blind motherfucker and don’t know a couple pretty fellas when you see them,” Leonard said. “I could be on a fucking magazine, I’m so pretty. Shit. You could hang my goddamn dick in the museum of fucking modern art. Damn, Big Pile, you know you want to kiss my black ass, right where the tunnel goes down into the sweet dark depths.”

  “You gag me,” David said.

  “Fuck you,” Dinosaur said.

  “The big man is consistent with those two words,” I said.

  I didn’t know what it was about Leonard, but he brought out the double smartass in me. I figured if I was going to die, I might as well go out with a few good remarks. And with Leonard there, well, I felt I had a chance. That we had a chance.

  Leonard looked at me. “Yeah. He repeats himself because it’s wishful thinking that slips out. Some of that Freudian stuff. Big white boy wants a piece of my fine, shiny, black ass I tell you, but his little ole dick dropped down there would be like tossing a noodle into a volcano.”

  “Now I’m starting to get gagged,” I said.

  “Ah, you’ll get over it, Hap,” Leonard said.

  David said to Leonard, “You’re a goddamn dick-sucking nigger and he’s a nigger-lover.”

  “Nah,” Leonard said. “I mean, yeah. I’m a dick-sucker, but me and Hap, we ain’t fucking, just hanging. Oh, I should also add, I don’t like being called a nigger, you cracker motherfucker.”

  “You got some sand,” David said.

  “I’m a whole goddamn beach,” Leonard said.

  “What we’re thinking,” David said, “is we’re going to knock you two around until your shit mixes, until you get it through your head how things are supposed to be.”

  “That a fact?” I said.

  “Oh yeah,” Dinosaur said, “we’re gonna do that.”

  Leonard grinned, said, “I guess you boys ought to get started. It’s already midday.”

  “But the sun stays up for quite awhile,” I said.

  “Yeah, there’s that,” Leonard said. “We got plenty of time to whip their asses.”

  “Smartass nigger,” David said, and glanced at Dinosaur, who moved forward.

  That’s when an older black man stepped out of Jack Woolens and reached in one of the barrels and pulled out an axe handle.

  “I hear you peckerwoods calling my nephew a nigger?” the man said.

  David bowed up a little. “We ain’t got a thing against hitting an old nigger, or a lady nigger, or kicking around a dead nigger, which is what you’re gonna be, you ancient watermelon fart.”

  That’s when the old man swung the axe handle and clipped David across the jaw and made him stagger. I almost felt sorry for David. Even more so when the handle whistled again and caught him behind the neck and laid him out flat on his face on the cement.

  The other three thugs froze, then seemed to come unstuck and started toward the three of us. Me and Leonard took fighting stances. That’s when Jack Woolens came out behind us, a slightly paunchy old man with thinning dark hair.

  “Stop it, goddamn it,” Jack said.

  They stopped, but when Dinosaur saw who it was, he said, “You old Jew bastard.”

  “Old Jew bastard fought Nazis, so he isn’t afraid of your kind. You aren’t a pimple on a Nazi’s ass, but you’re made of the same kind of pus.”

  This stopped them. I don’t know why, but they hesitated.

  The old Jew bastard pulled an axe handle from the barrel and stepped up beside the black man. “Way I see it,” he said, “is we have axe handles, and for now, you have teeth. You see it that way, Chester?”

  Chester said, “Yeah. They got some teeth right now.”

  Dinosaur looked a little nervous. “We ain’t even eighteen, and that nigger hit David with an axe handle.”

  “Hard as he could,” Leonard said.

  “That’s against the law,” Dinosaur said. “We’re underage. Minors.”

  “Sometimes, you have extenuating circumstances,” Jack Woolens said. “I once strangled a Nazi when I was in the O.S.S. Look it up, you never heard of it. It wasn’t a social group. I strangled him and went back to the f
armhouse where I was hiding in Austria, and slept tight. I knocked me off a piece the next day. Young German girl who thought I was German. I can speak it. I had the chance, I’d have strangled another fucking Nazi.”

  “No shit?” Chester said. “You speak German?”

  It was like they forgot the thugs were there.

  “Yeah, I was born in Germany.”

  “No shit?”

  “Yeah. I did get a little scratch when I was strangling that Nazi by the way. I don’t want to sound like I come out clean. That would be lying.”

  Jack Woolens put the axe handle back in the barrel, and showed Chester a cut across his elbow by nodding at it. It was a long white line.

  “Knife,” Jack said. “I had to wear a bandage for a few days.”

  “That ain’t shit,” Chester said. “Cracker tried to castrate me once. I got a scar on my thigh I can show you makes that look like hen scratch. I had twenty-five stitches and had to stand when I fucked for awhile and reach under and hold my balls up so it didn’t slap my stitches. Want to see?”

  “You win,” Jack said. “Keep your pants on.”

  “I was moving when the cracker did that, cut me I mean,” Chester said. “Cracker didn’t turn out so well. They found his lily-white ass in the river, and there wasn’t no way of knowing how he got there. Some kind of accident like being beat to death and thrown in the river is my guess. You know, said the wrong thing to someone, tried to cut their balls off, something like that. I ain’t saying I know that to be a fact, him being dead in the Sabine River, but I’m going to start a real hard rumor about it right now.”

  Jack turned back to the barrel and retrieved the axe handle, casual as if he were picking out a toothpick.

  The thugs continued to stand there. As if just remembering they were there, Chester thumped Dinosaur’s chest with the axe handle. “Pick up this sack of dog shit, and carry him off. Do it now, ’cause you don’t, it’ll be hard to do with broke legs. You boys carry him now, you won’t have to scoot and pull him away with your teeth, ones you got left. Gumming him might be difficult. One way or another, though, it ain’t gonna turn out spiffy for you fellows.”

  Dinosaur looked at me, then Leonard, then the older men. He looked at his friends. Nobody bowed up. No smart remarks were made. Dinosaur seemed small right then. They picked up David like he was a dropped puppet, tried to get him to stand, but they might as well have been trying to teach a fish how to ride a tricycle. They had to drag him across the street and into their car.

  When they got David inside, the others got in, and Dinosaur went around to the driver’s side. He shot us the finger. He said, “This ain’t over.”

  “Better be,” Jack Woolens said.

  Dinosaur drove his friends out of there.

  “We could have handled it,” Leonard said.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Shit,” Leonard said. “We could.”

  “Now they’re tough guys,” Jack said to Chester. “It’s all over, and now they’re tough.”

  “We were tough enough,” Leonard said, “and we could have got tougher.”

  “Leonard,” Chester said, pulling car keys out of his pocket. “Bring the car around, and don’t squeal the goddamn tires.”

  “Like he can’t walk a few feet,” Jack said. “Like he’s got a lot to carry. A pair of shoes on lay-a-way he bought. He can walk.”

  I looked at Leonard and he grinned at me. I loved that grin.

  Chester said. “I got the lumbago.”

  “Lumbago,” Jack said. “Now the lumbago he gets.”

  Chester grunted, said to Leonard, “Get the car, kid.”

  Leonard looked at me, smiled, and went away to get it.

  The Oak and the Pond

  At one time there was a great oak tree behind the house where Leonard was living then, and the oak was deep in the woods, and it was one of the last of the great oaks. It stood tall and thick and ancient. It had great limbs you could crawl up on and stretch out on and sleep without real fear of rolling off.

  We called it the Robin Hood tree, like the great tree where Robin and his merry band of men gathered to talk and feast. I also thought of it as the Tarzan tree, imagined how you could build a treehouse on its massive limbs and have plenty of room to live with a lithe, blonde Jane and do more than call elephants and swing on vines.

  Leonard and I would meet at the oak, me having hiked through the woods from my place. My place wasn’t all that far if you came by wooded path, then broke off the path and took a deer trail, and finally a winding trace through a series of tall blackjack oaks until you arrived at Fisherman’s Creek. Across the creek the trees thinned in number but not in magnificence. There were sweet gums and hickory trees, and of course pines.

  The Robin Hood tree was the granddaddy of them all. The oak rose higher and spread its limbs wider than all the others. Its bark was healthy and dark, and in the spring its leaves were green as Ireland. To stand beneath it when it rained was a miracle, because the limbs were so thick and the leaves so plush that during the spring, and much of the summer, if not the fall when the leaves were brown and yellow and falling, you would hardly get wet. When it stormed the limbs shook like angry soldiers rattling their weapons, but the limbs didn’t break, just old dead leaves and little branches dribbled down. The soil beneath the oak was thick and dark with many years of dropped and composted leaves. There were acorns on the ground, and sometimes when you came to the tree, squirrels were beneath it, rare black squirrels that made this part of the woods their home. They were in the tree too, chattering and fussing as you arrived.

  Leonard and I met there many mornings, usually having a breakfast of boiled eggs we had brought in sacks, drinking coffee from our thermoses, carrying fishing gear and small coolers with our lunches in them.

  We would sometimes sit there beneath the tree and talk, and finally we would go away from there, carrying our coolers, through the trees, and then along the creek line to where the pond was. It was a big pond, and at one point in time there had been a house near it. Now the house was a pile of gray lumber and rusty nails and a few bricks that showed where the fireplace had been. Beyond that was a clapboard barn that still stood, the great wide doors gone, probably taken for lumber for someone’s project. Trees crowded it, and one sweet gum had grown up and under the roof and was pushing it loose on one side.

  The pond had been dug maybe fifty years before and had been filled with fish, and we were fishing their descendants. There was a boat down there, one we had tediously carried there along the creek bank, and we left it for when we wanted to fish. No one bothered it, because no one came there anymore but us. The land was owned by someone up North who had mostly forgotten about it. The pond was always muddy, but the fish were thick. We caught them and generally threw them back, unless they were good-sized enough and fat. Then they went home with us and became our supper.

  We fished there with cane poles, not rods and reels. It wasn’t a place for rods and reels. It was a place for fishing in an old and simple way. We put lines on the poles, sinkers, corks, hooks, and bait, usually worms. Out in the boat we would dangle lines and watch the fish jump, the dragonflies dip down on the water, see the shadows of birds flying over, now and again there was the sight of a leaping frog or a wiggling water moccasin. Turtle heads rose like periscopes, then fell beneath the water with a delicate splash and a small ripple.

  In the spring it was cool for a long time, and in the summer it grew hot, but with wide-brimmed hats on, we still fished, and we lazed, and sometimes we talked, softly, fearing we might frighten the fish. We talked about all manner of things we believed in, and how we differed from one another. I told Leonard about my women, and he told me about his men. We talked about brotherhood without speaking of it directly. I told bad jokes and Leonard grumbled.

  When Leonard moved from the house next to the woods, and I later moved from where I lived, we lost that spot.

  Some years later the people up North remembere
d the land, and they brought in pulp crews and cut the woods down, even the great and ancient oak, which must have fought the saws with its old, hard wood. But the saws won, and it tumbled down and was coated in gasoline and set on fire. They didn’t even bother to make it into lumber. The land where it stood was a black spot for a long time.

  They planted rows and rows of soft lumber pines to be cut and replanted every fifteen or twenty years a crop. People claim there are more trees now than before, but they are wrong. Once you could drive all through East Texas and there were trees as far as you could see, and not just pines either. The trees grew close to the roads and covered them in shadow. You don’t have to go out in the woods and count trees one by one to know that the statements being made about there being more trees than ever before is a bald-faced lie. The pines they planted where the oak grew didn’t shield you from rain or rattle in the wind the way the Robin Hood tree did.

  Eventually, they filled in the pond, killing the fish. They dammed up the creek and made another, larger pond farther up, but it lacked charm, and finally scummed over. Nothing lived in it.

  A company that raised chickens for a supermarket chain bought the land, and a series of long, commercial chicken houses took the place of the original pond and the woods that had surrounded it, even the pulp trees, which they also cut down and didn’t replant. Now there is a wide gravel road that leads out of where the trees once grew, on to the highway. It’s odd. Looking down that gravel road, you can see the highway so easy. It seemed farther away in the years before the road was there and the trees were cut.

  Leonard wouldn’t even look in the direction of the old place when we drove by. I look, but I don’t like what I see. The rain still falls and the wind still blows, but the oak and the pond are gone.

  The Boy Who Became Invisible

  A comic book script based on the story of the same name

  Note to artist: East Texas is not West Texas. No mountains. No deserts. No sand dunes. It’s a place of great pines and plentiful water in the form of creeks and rivers and man-made lakes. So do not think Texas of the movies, as East Texas is much closer in appearance to Louisiana and Arkansas. But most of the story takes place in a school and a schoolyard, places where that isn’t a concern. Jesse’s home should be on a wooded lot, and it isn’t so small as it is old.