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  “Selling drugs?” I asked.

  “Herman started there, but he had graduated into a considerably broader program. Drugs. Women. Some money laundering. Getting rid of certain people. You name it and Herman was directing it or performing it. He located me at the circus, came and got me. There was a disturbance, a demand of money from Gonzolos. Herman refused. ‘Hey Rube’ was yelled, and Herman was forced to kick some butt.

  “I had never seen anything like it. He was a human buzz-saw. I did my best, but being small, and having had little experience fighting, and being accustomed to losing all my fights, I doubt my contribution was of any significance other than to find myself tangled in Herman’s feet. But he maintained his balance and survived the encounter by giving an astounding account of himself. Of course Herman was carrying a tire iron at the time, and this proved considerably to his advantage.

  “Eventually everyone wore down and those with broken bones gave up gratefully. Even Bilbo the Strong Man, who I’m sure must have suffered a hernia after taking a full kick to the groin, not to mention a thumb in the eye, gave in and even cried a little. Size and strength certainly didn’t intimidate Herman. As he told me later, no matter how big they grow, balls and eyes stay soft and a tire tool has no friends.”

  “Sounds like a motto to live by,” I said.

  Red nodded. “Herman took me with him, bought me my first tailored suit and got me laid. Also a first. There I was in my late twenties and I had never had the delights of a woman. She wasn’t the best-looking whore. A fat lady with bad skin and an ill sense of fashion, but she was fairly quick-witted for a heavy drinker. She was a native of El Paso and for forty-five dollars she serviced me from head to foot. That is still one of my fondest life experiences, even if it did take place in El Paso and in the end she vomited on my knees.”

  “Spare the details,” Brett said.

  “It isn’t my style to discuss sexual escapades, even if they were paid for. I was merely giving a general view. Herman put me to work for him. Oh, there were problems at first. My size caused some snickers among the Bandito Supremes, and Herman had to mess up a few people, but eventually I was accepted, and became good at the work. It was certainly better than riding a dog in the circus, and far better than shoveling droppings. It got so I could take care of myself quite well. Herman gave me some tips, see. And besides, as the old story goes, all men are created equal, but Samuel Colt makes some more equal. If one wants to be accurate, in my case it was Smith and Wesson that made me equal. I never cottoned to a Colt. Perhaps it’s all that cowboy legacy. I hate that business. Can’t even watch a Western on television.”

  “I think you protest too much about the cowboy stuff, shorty,” Brett said. “Way you dress, you look like a regular Stick Horse Harry to me.”

  “There you go again, that demeaning manner. Television cowboys and fashion are quite different, lady, and I use that word loosely in your case. I’ll have you know this is quite the fashion in some places.”

  “Yeah, some ranch on Mars,” Brett said.

  “So,” Leonard prompted, “your brother took you in and trained you and …”

  Red rolled the cigar to the other side of his mouth. “That’s correct. Then, one day, after a long and particularly tedious job involving the nailing of a little girl’s hand to a boat oar to show her father that business was meant involving some money he owed the Bandito Supremes for nose candy, Herman just cracked. I’m not sure why. He didn’t do the actual nailing. He held her hand and I did that, but it did him in. He ceased to look at his work as business. He saw it as something personal. Always a mistake. You have to keep the two separate.

  “He wandered off the job and disappeared for a year. No one could find him at first, but by the second year his trail was picked up and certain Bandito Supremes were assigned to talk to Herman. It wasn’t so much they were worried about his welfare, but he had taken money up front for the job, and though the mission had been completed, Herman had kept all the money to wander on. None of it went to headquarters so to speak, and not even I had been paid my share. It wasn’t the money bothered them so much, it was fear of a trend. You know, Bandito Supremes bailing out on them and going on their own. Ignoring protocol.

  “I was, of course, as you would suspect, willing to pass on my fee, but the big bosses were most unpleasant about it. I was able to slide out of working for the Bandito Supremes, and kept only a loose connection with them when I went to work for Big Jim. They were understanding. Herman having been my brother, they could understand why I might not want to continue with them, and honestly, they didn’t care that much for midgets anyway. Eventually, I lost all track of them and their work except for when it crossed Big Jim’s path.

  “In Herman’s case, they were less understanding. After he refused to pay them, they began to send hit men after him. Only problem for the Bandito Supremes was Herman was better than they were. He killed them all. I heard all of this through the grapevine, you understand. It got so it was a pride thing with the Bandito Supremes. They kept sending out these men to do Herman in, and he kept killing them, leaving a mark on them that could be identified as his signature.”

  “What kind of mark?” Leonard asked.

  “It wasn’t the best choice, but it was memorable. He took to cutting off the heads of their penises and putting them in their front right pants pocket. The police thought they had some kind of weird serial killer case. I read about it in the papers having no idea it was Herman at work. I suspected a mad Jewish rabbi. Later, as the story drifted back to me through old connections, I realized what it had been about. It was Herman’s way of thumbing his nose at those who had been sent to kill him. A sort of manhood rite.”

  “Mine’s bigger than yours?” I said.

  “Exactly,” Red said. “After three years of this, evading the cops and the Bandito Supremes, Herman began to seek out the Supremes directly, killing them on their own turf.

  “Well, this would not do, but the Supremes had no luck killing Herman off. He was like a shadow. A ghost. A blood truce was made. People cutting their hands with knives and pressing them together like adolescents. Herman paid back the money and made an apology, and all was forgotten. As long as he never had anything to do with the Bandito Supremes again. This mean he couldn’t even cross their territory without a threat of death hanging over his head. He agreed, got a job selling vacuums door-to-door, but never could move the super models, and that’s where you made your money, so he dropped out of that, and next thing I knew he was a preacher. I’ve visited him several times, and he’s tried to bring me into the fold. Though it’s tempting, and Herman certainly gives a good fiery sermon, I find money and sex with average-size women more appealing than future paradise.”

  “You said average-size women,” Brett said. “That mean you won’t fuck a midget? That what you’re sayin’? That sounds prejudicial to me. Not wanting to fuck a midget, and you being one your ownself.”

  Red refused to answer. He glared at her.

  “This brother of yours?” I asked. “Where is he?”

  “Southwest Texas. Near a little town called Seminole. But I advise you to make your presence known gradually. Preacher or not, I doubt Herman would welcome a surprise introduction.”

  “We’ll keep that in mind,” Leonard said.

  17

  When we got to Seminole Leonard steered us through a drive-through, bought some hamburgers, then we cruised out of town to the west. It was a fair enough day, with cumulus clouds riding high and giving shade. Mesquite trees stubbed the ground all about, and behind barbed wire fences there were little patches of greenery mixed with prickly pear stands and dirt the color of dried peas. Sheep, goats, and windmills dotted the land, and the world seemed bleak and sad to me. All I could think of was getting back to East Texas. Back to greenery and creeks and rivers and the sky as seen through pine tree limbs.

  After a while Red asked us to slow down, so that his memory might have time to work.

  Fina
lly, he said, “This is it. I remember now. This is it.”

  Leonard slowed, turned right, drove a great distance, came out on another highway, was directed by Red to the left, went along that way for some distance before Red said, “On the right.”

  On the right was a red windmill that had seen better days, but was still turning. There was a sign next to the road that read THE CHURCH OF THE BAPTISTS, and about an acre’s distance behind the windmill in a clearing spotted with scrubby weeds was a little church made of plyboard, green lumber, ill-fitting windows, and hope. The church was warped due to the cheap lumber, and seemed as if it were about to pucker up and explode. The windows had cracks in the glass or no panes at all, and behind the glass I could see plyboard, and in one case some kind of thick yellow paper. The north end of the church touched the ground, while the south stood on dissolving concrete blocks, as if rearing up for a peek across the vast expanse of West Texas. The cross on the roof peak was weathered gray and starting to strip; it leaned a bit to starboard.

  Out to the left was a wet-looking green slush hole that had to be the end result of a broken sewage line. Not far from that, like the husk of a great insect, lay an aluminum camper shell.

  “Seems to have gone downhill,” Red said.

  We turned down a dirt drive. Dust rose around the car in white puffs thicker than the cumulus clouds above us. We parked out front of the church and got out.

  Red was almost jovial. He coughed the dust away, started calling: “Herman! Herman Ames. It’s me, Red.”

  After a moment the front door of the church moved, then caught, then burst open. A stout Mexican woman of about thirty came out and stood on the porch in a position that made me think of a wrestler about to get down and to it.

  Red said, “Herman Ames. He here?”

  She just stared at us.

  “I don’t think she speaks English,” I said. “You got any Spanish, Brett?”

  “Just rice, but it’s back in the cabinet at home,” she said.

  “Herman,” Red said again. “Herman.”

  The woman shook her head and moved into the yard, such as it was, ambled to the side of the church and pointed to the field out back.

  “ ’erman,” she said, “ ’erman.”

  “Gracias,” I said.

  The woman tugged on the swollen door again, pulled it free, disappeared inside the church. We walked around the side of the building and started into the field.

  “Remember,” Leonard said to Red, “I’d rather not poke a gun in your neck all the time, but you do anything fancy, or Herman thinks he’s going to do anything fancy, I might have to shoot somebody and tell God he died.”

  Red grunted and we kept walking.

  The field sloped gently downward, and on the other side, in the middle of it, we saw an elderly black pickup and next to it an apparatus perched on big wheels with thick transparent hoses attached to the main body. The thing, whatever it was, looked like a visiting Martian. The hoses were stuck in the ground, and a huge bearded man who had gone to fat was standing next to the odd device, watching us come.

  “Is that him?” Brett asked.

  “That’s him,” Red said. “Porked up a lot, but that’s him,” and before we knew it, he took off running.

  The man by the apparatus recognized him, of course—aren’t that many redheaded midgets around. Red ran right up to Herman and leaped. Herman caught him, lifted him above his head.

  As we neared we could hear laughter, and Herman said, “Red, you old sonofagun.”

  “And you’re an old sonofabitch,” Red said. “Oh, forgot, Herman, you’re a man of God now.”

  “The word couldn’t be any worse than the sonofabitches themselves,” Herman said, lowering Red to the ground.

  Herman looked up as we came. He spent a little extra time looking at Brett. I didn’t blame him. She was worth it. She wore a loose blue shirt and jeans tight enough you would have thought she had Levi legs. The wind had taken hold of her thick red hair, and the way it whipped around her head she looked like a goddess. Herman may have been a man of the cloth, but right then I don’t think he was thinking about Bible verses, unless they were designed to give him strength.

  Red said, “These are, I suppose you might say, associates of mine. It’s a little complicated, actually.”

  “You in trouble, Red?” Herman asked.

  “Kinda sorta,” Red said.

  Herman shook his head. “Well, let me finish up here, then we’ll go up to the church and talk about it.”

  “What is this?” Brett asked, nodding at the apparatus.

  “Well, lady,” Herman said, “it sucks prairie dogs out of the ground.”

  “Any reason you’re doing that?” Brett asked. “You don’t stuff them, do you?”

  “No. Ranchers around here hate ’em. Always digging holes for stock to get their legs into, and to keep them from shooting and poisoning the little boogers, someone came up with this device. I bought one, modified it to suit me. Church offerings weren’t that good, so I needed a bit of a profession.”

  “Sucking prairie dogs out of the dirt is a profession?” Brett asked.

  Herman grinned. “As a matter of fact, it is.”

  “Seems to me a device like that would cost more than it was worth,” I said. “You aren’t a rancher, are you?”

  “No, but I got the dogs on my land.”

  “What you going to do with all them dogs when you get ’em?” Leonard asked.

  “Sell ’em,” Herman said.

  “Who buys them?” Red said.

  “Japanese are a big market. They pay up to five hundred dollars for the little suckers.”

  “Do they eat ’em?” Leonard asked.

  “Oh, no,” Herman said. “They make pets out of them.”

  “Hell,” Leonard said, “for five hundred dollars them little suckers ought to clean your house and turn down the sheets.”

  “Just pets,” Herman said. “There’s Yankees do the same, only they pay about half that price.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Leonard said. “Now I’ve heard of everything.”

  “Watch this,” Herman said, and flipped a switch on the device. The motor whined, there was a sound like someone clearing their nose, and suddenly, riding up the transparent hoses, speeding along like bullets, came dark shapes.

  “Wow!” Red said.

  “Yeah,” Herman said. “I think we got three of them that time.”

  “Christ,” Brett said. “Don’t that hurt them little dudes?”

  “Just ruffles their hair, lady,” Herman said. “And I doubt Our Savior enjoys his name being exploded like that for the sake of prairie dogs.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Brett said, “I was him I’d want to take a look at something like this.”

  Herman smiled, walked us around to the other side of the machine, showed us a transparent plastic cage where the dogs had been delivered. There were three all right, and they looked puzzled as all get out. I suppose I would too, I was sitting in my living room, was suddenly sucked up a hose and into a plastic container. I reckoned prairie dogs were developing a rather interesting set of stories about alien abduction.

  “Well, ain’t they the cutest little things,” Brett said. “You don’t just box ’em up and send them to Japan, do you? I mean, I can’t see a bunch of them dogs in a box with air holes cut in the sides.”

  “I sell them to a distributor,” Herman says. “He has them shipped. Big business, actually. After everyone gets their cut, I make about a hundred and fifty a dog. Most of the time. Sometimes the market’s a little less.”

  “Looks to me like you’d run out of dogs,” Leonard said.

  Herman waved his hand expansively. “This is seven hundred acres, and it’s all mine,” Herman said. “Got it for a song.”

  I looked out over the land. Bleak and gray and ugly, with splotches of mesquite. I hoped he got it for a short song. A ditty maybe.

  “Place is riddled with dogs,” Herman
said. “I farm ’em. I come out here and watch ’em some afternoons. Kind of educational, really, watching them pop out of their holes and look around. You get so you know when the babies are grown up enough to suck out of the ground. I don’t like to get no little bitty dogs. I want them to grow up. Then I’ll suck ’em up. If I was to run out of dogs here, there’s plenty of ranchers be glad to see me coming with this baby.”

  Herman detached the cage from the vacuum and slid a perforated top over it. He sat it in the bed of the pickup. The dogs rose up and pressed against the plastic and pushed their noses to it.

  The vacuum was hooked up to a little motorized device. Herman fired it up with a jerk of a cord, sort of steered it to the pickup by holding on to the back of it. At the pickup, he cut the motor back with a switch, pulled a wide piece of plyboard out of the bed of the pickup and fixed it so one end was in the truck and the other slanted to the ground. Pushing the throttle switch, steering the device with his hands, Herman guided it up the ramp and into the truck and killed the motor. He pushed the board up alongside it, said, “Y’all climb in somewhere.”

  Leonard got in front beside Herman, leaving me and Red and Brett to ride in the bed. We sat with our feet dangling over the open tailgate and Herman drove us slowly to the church, bouncing along the hard ground.

  “I don’t know why Leonard didn’t let me sit up front with Herman,” Red said.

  “I do,” I said. “We don’t want you telling your brother a line of shit before we got time to lay things out.”

  “Don’t think ’cause you’re with some family,” Brett said, “that everything is hokey-dokey. You’re still our prisoner, and we still got guns under our shirts, and I’m just dyin’ to hit you on the other side of your little punkin’ head.”