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  “There’s that little stuff again,” Red said. “There’s just no peace from it.”

  18

  The inside of the church lived down to expectations. It was ripe with the smell of sweat and boiling pinto beans and something baking. It was very hot inside, and Herman shoved at the swollen door until it hung open and a shaft of sunlight fell through it and hit the dirt floor and gave the cigarette butts there a sort of royal glow, as if they were floating in God’s own butter.

  There were four long pews to the left, and the closest one had a cot mattress on it with a sheet and a pillow that drooped over the side. The edge of the mattress, where it touched the ground, was brown with dirt. There were plastic cases with perforated tops in one corner behind the pews, stacked on top of one another, and in the cases were water pans and food pans and prairie dogs and newspaper lining and piles of prairie dog shit, both fresh and dry. The dogs reared up against their clear plastic cages and took note of us.

  There was a wooden stove with a big iron pot on the top, boiling away, and the heavyset Mexican woman was stirring the contents of the pot with a long wooden spoon. She watched us with the same lack of enthusiasm she had showed us in the yard.

  To the left of the stove was a doorway so narrow you’d have to turn sideways to go through it. The door itself was open, and I could see an ominous-looking shitter in there, stained black and green with a stack of newspapers by it, and on the other side a cardboard box.

  Herman strolled over to the window with the yellow paper, pulled at the shade. It rolled up and light came in and made the place look worse.

  Another step deeper and I could smell the prairie dogs and their offal, and it wasn’t something that went with pinto beans and baked goods.

  Red looked about, took off his hat and held it in his hand as if acknowledging the dead. “Kind of let the place go, haven’t you, Herman?”

  “Reckon so,” Herman said. “People quit coming.”

  “You always gave a good sermon,” Red said.

  “Yeah, but I didn’t give it so good in Spanish and most of the Mexicans around here are Catholics anyway.”

  “The woman?” Red said. “She a working girl?”

  Herman laughed. “Girl. She hasn’t been a girl since the Mexican Revolution. She works for me. Don’t even know her name. She takes a hundred dollars a month. Comes in and cooks for me, and if she’s in the mood, sweeps the place out. She’d service me for an additional fifty dollars a month, but I’m not interested.”

  “You still preach?” Red said.

  “Just to myself,” Herman said. “I hope I can convince you and your friends to stay for supper. Don’t worry. She’s clean. The woman, I mean. And the food. The place could use some work.”

  “Perhaps a fire,” Red said.

  “Yeah, well,” Herman said, sitting down on the edge of the pew with the mattress, “I call it home. How’s about you tell me what your problem is, Red. You still doing … the work?”

  “I was, up until the other day,” Red said. “I was pulled out of it by this lady and these two gentlemen. They’ve kept me company these last few days, and let me tell you, it’s been an experience.”

  Herman was looking at the wad of bloody toilet tissue on Red’s head. “What happened to your noggin?” Herman asked.

  “Oh, the lady here took a pistol to my skull,” Red said. “And she made quite a time of it.”

  Herman stood up. Leonard said, “Sit down, Herman. You need to hear the whole story before we start hitting each other.”

  Brett pulled her pistol from under her shirt, said, “Hell, who’s hittin’?”

  “Everybody ease off and lighten up,” I said.

  Herman turned to the Mexican woman and said something quick in Spanish. She let go of the spoon, walked past us, right out the door without so much as a change of expression.

  I said, “I hope you just told her to go to the house.”

  Herman nodded. “Go on, let’s hear it.”

  “Red here says he’s done some bad stuff and you got him into it,” I said.

  “True,” Herman said. “I’ve abandoned that kind of life myself. I wish my brother would. If you’re looking for me to give you connections, I can’t.”

  “Nope,” Leonard said. “We’re looking for directions to The Farm.”

  Herman looked at Red. Red said, “Well, they said they’d kill me if I didn’t show them where The Farm was, but I didn’t know where it was, so I had to tell them about you.”

  “You’re still involved with Big Jim?” Herman asked.

  “I was,” Red said. “These three may have queered me there.” Red told Herman what had happened from when he and Wilber had put the bite on Brett for money, on up to the moment. I thought his telling was accurate, if overly long, and that goddamn steak ranchero came up again.

  Herman sat with his head down for a long while, thinking. We let him think. I looked out the door and saw the Mexican woman trudging down the road, dragging little clouds of dust behind her heels.

  “I don’t know,” Herman finally said. “This is some kind of situation. You’ve abused and humiliated my brother, and yet you ask me for help. You ask me to violate a trust, an agreement to never step foot on Bandito Supreme property again. I’d be tossing my life away.”

  “Directions will do,” Leonard said. “You can stay here and suck prairie dogs out of holes.”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” Herman said. “But then I’d be tossing your lives away.”

  “My suggestion,” Red said, “is you let them toss their lives and just save mine. They hit me a lot, you know?”

  “Yes, I see that,” Herman said.

  “It hurt,” Red said. “They’re capable of anything. I saw this one,” he indicated Leonard, “shoot Moose’s foot off. You remember Moose, don’t you?”

  “You do that?” Herman asked Leonard. “You shoot Moose’s foot off?”

  “Yep,” Leonard said. “Thought it was kind of funny actually.”

  “See,” Red said. “They have no conscience. You should have seen her pistol-whip me. I’ve never seen anyone happier.”

  “And I suppose you want me to do something about it,” Herman said.

  “It crossed my mind,” Red said.

  “In case you haven’t noticed,” Herman said, “the lady has a gun, and my guess is there are guns under the shirts of these two men, and you just finished telling me how ruthless they are.”

  “That’s right,” Leonard said. “And we’re just full of whup ass too. And we got shotguns in the trunk, we need ’em.”

  “Lots of ammunition,” I said.

  “That don’t do it,” Leonard said, “we’ll use rude language too.”

  Herman nodded, turned to Red. “We got a problem here, Red. First off, you’re my brother. I love you. But you’re a piece of shit. I used to be a piece of shit, and may still be one, but you are definitely still one.”

  “A matter of opinion,” Red said. “But the words are particularly foul coming from the mouth of my own kin, and a man of God at that.”

  “They are neither foul or not foul,” Herman said, “they’re the truth. And I haven’t been a man of God in some time now. There’s also the fact I’m fat and not nearly as tough as I used to be. Or maybe I don’t want to be tough anymore. Do you want me shot, Red?”

  “Of course not,” Red said.

  “Then relax a little.” Then to Brett: “This girl, this Tillie. She’s your daughter? I understand that right?”

  “That’s right,” Brett said. “And I want her back.”

  “She chose the life,” Red said.

  “She didn’t choose to be taken to The Farm,” Herman said. “You know what that means.”

  “I don’t see how it’s my problem,” Red said.

  “You wouldn’t,” Herman said. “I did you a great disservice, Red. Bringing you into the business. If I could undo it I would. You might have been better off with the circus.”

  “Don’t say
that,” Red said.

  “You’re saying you’ll help us?” Brett asked Herman.

  “Maybe,” Herman said. “I don’t know.”

  “We could make you,” Brett said.

  “Maybe,” Herman said. “Maybe you couldn’t. Neither pain nor death scares me much these days.”

  “I might could show you a side of pain you haven’t visited before,” Leonard said.

  Herman grinned at him. Leonard grinned back. It was great to see two sweet fellows bond.

  “We don’t want to make you do anything,” I said. “We want to find Brett’s daughter and bring her home. That’s the end of it.”

  “For you, maybe,” Herman said. “It wouldn’t be for me.”

  “You keep talkin’ like you got to really do somethin’,” Leonard said. “All you need to do is give directions. We’ll keep your brother just to make sure your memory’s good. We find what we’re looking for, we’ll let him go and he won’t even have to be involved in the ruckus.”

  “It’s not that easy,” Herman said. “It’s not like I can give you highway numbers, simple landmarks.” Herman paused for a moment. “Let’s eat. Let’s stay friendly. Let me think about it some.”

  “Eating’s okay,” Brett said, “but you got to think about it a lot. We can’t let it drag into tomorrow. I don’t know what kind of situation she’s in. I don’t know what’s happening to her, or for that matter, what may have happened to her already.”

  Herman looked at the floor, then out the door. It wasn’t the answer Brett wanted. I saw her swallow hard. She went outside and I followed her but gave her space. I leaned against the side of the church and watched Brett walk about in the yard as if she couldn’t decide on a direction. I could see the Mexican woman too. She had really made some distance. She was down the road and to the highway. I watched her cross the highway, duck and crawl through a barbed wire fence, and walk out into a plowed field. She started across the field, dragging more dust clouds behind her. After a while I could only see the dust. It was as if the woman had disappeared into a cloud of sand.

  Mexican ninjas.

  Brett walked out to her car and leaned on the hood with both hands, as if trying to push it to the center of the earth. I saw her body tremble, her head shake.

  I went over and put my arm around her shoulders and didn’t say anything. After a time her hand came up and went behind my waist. She held me and began to sob.

  Later, we had pinto beans and slightly burned cornbread and ate it off paper plates with plastic forks. We sat outside on Brett’s car. This was much better than inside the church, except when the wind blew and picked up the smell of sewage or blew dust into our food.

  I was watching Herman and Red carefully, lest Herman decide to break loose and try and shove Leonard, Brett, and me into a prairie dog hole. I was perhaps giving Herman too much attention, actually being prejudicial. Red was right. Something about him being small caused you to underestimate him. Maybe it was his way of talking. Here was a man who had strangled a woman and nailed a little girl’s hand to a boat paddle, and he consistently looked dazed and confused and about as dangerous as a wet newspaper.

  I had to remember these guys weren’t just a couple of goofballs, no matter how goofy they seemed.

  We sat so that Herman was on the hood between me and Leonard, and Red sat on the trunk with Brett, who sat far enough from him to use the gun she kept in her lap. She was very nervous, anxious, and I was hoping Red didn’t make a sudden dive to scratch his nuts or pick his nose, or he might end up with a .38 round in his teeth.

  After a bit, Red finished his meal, slid off the trunk, and came around front. He said, “Do your facilities function, brother?”

  “More or less,” Herman said. “You got to flush it twice or three times, and if it overflows there’s a plunger in there and a mop. Stinks some. It hasn’t been cleaned in, oh, two years.”

  “Goodness,” Red said.

  “And you got to wipe on newspapers and throw them in a cardboard box.”

  “Maybe I’ll just walk out in the field some,” Red said, “do it down a prairie dog hole. I have some Kleenex in my suit pocket.”

  “No,” I said. “Don’t think so. I don’t want you going that far.”

  Red looked at Herman. Herman shrugged. “There wouldn’t be a gun or anything in the house, would there?” Leonard asked.

  “I disposed of them all long ago,” Herman said.

  “I hope so,” Leonard said. “Don’t go out the back, Red.”

  “There’s no rear exit,” Herman said.

  “Then see you later,” Leonard said to Red. “Happy bowel movements.”

  “Crude,” Red said. “I’m the one being chastised here for my lifestyle, and the four of you are crude. Very crude. I can assure you, if one of us was invited to tea with the Queen of England, it wouldn’t be you two or the woman, and I am sorry to say, it wouldn’t be you either, brother.”

  Red went away then, trudging toward the church and the toilet, his head held high, his bowels contained.

  “He’s kind of prideful,” Herman said.

  “Hell,” Leonard said. “He’s just full of shit is all.”

  19

  I suppose it was midnight. I hadn’t looked at a clock in some time. I was sitting on the hood of Brett’s car with my back against the windshield. I had my hands under my shirt, on my revolver, just in case I needed to blow Herman’s brains out.

  Above me was a great and beautiful canopy of stars. They seemed different stars from East Texas stars. They were brighter and closer. They looked sharp enough to cut your hand.

  On the far side of the hood, stretched out, his feet dangling over the front of the car, was Herman. He had his hands behind his head and his eyes open. His belly heaved like a great turtle sleeping.

  Leonard was in the front seat, stretched out, catching a catnap. Red was in the back seat. Red thought Leonard was awake watching him, so when Red went to sleep, Leonard took advantage of it. Brett was in the house, lying on the dirty mattress and the pew. She had spent two hours cleaning the prairie dog cages, feeding and watering the critters. Somewhere, buried inside her, was a housewife with an apron and fuzzy house slippers. Of course, in Brett’s case, that internal woman wasn’t wearing anything but the apron and slippers, and there was a shovel, lighter fluid, a box of matches, and a revolver nearby.

  Herman spoke suddenly, “It’s strange how a man perceives things. Once, I felt nothing. Then I felt everything. Now I feel nothing again, except remorse. I can’t lose remorse.”

  “Not sure you should,” I said.

  “It’s odd. I went my way and did the things I did, and one day I began to think about my brother. I hadn’t missed him until that moment. Hadn’t thought of him at all. I was like our parents. He was just an embarrassment. Then one day I’m in Dallas. I was there to kill a man because I had been hired to kill him. He was not an important man, but he had insulted a man who had the money to have him killed, and I was the man to do it. I had gotten the job through the Bandito Supremes. They are something, Hap. Once they were nothing more than a two-bit motorcycle gang, running a few drugs, selling whores. Now, they have little to do with motorcycles. They are a large clearinghouse for disaster, and they get a slice of every disastrous pie they bake. Part of that pie went to me. Anyway, I’m in Dallas and I’m not thinking about this guy I’m going to kill at all. I had already made up my mind how to do it and make it messy the way the client wanted it, and I’m waiting for nighttime when I’m going to do it, and I see these kids playing in the park, and one of them is little and ugly and redheaded and these other kids are picking on him. Hitting him. Tossing rocks. Yelling at him. Stuff like, ‘We’d rather be dead than red on the head,’ and the kid’s running, and they’re busting him from every side, and there’s a kind of frenzy going on. I believe, down deep, in each of us, especially males, there’s a hunter-killer switch of sorts, and sometimes odd things can set it off. We still have a pack mentality, a
nd this kid was wounded, and the pack smelled blood, and they were all going for this kid, and though I can’t say he would have died from it, he would certainly have been hurt. And it wasn’t that I was particularly moved by children prior to this, but the redheaded kid pulled something inside of me, another kind of switch, and I could see my brother in this child’s place, and suddenly I’m up screaming and I chased the boys off and helped the redheaded kid up. He ran away from me as fast as he could. That was it. End of story. But something moved inside me. It felt strange, and it felt good. Where the freezer had been, there was suddenly this wave of warmth, an open oven. I had never really felt that before. I didn’t know exactly what it was. You know what I did, Hap?”

  “No.”

  “I went ahead and killed my man. Then I went home to my parents. I hadn’t seen them in years, and I shot them both with a twelve-gauge pump shotgun with remarkably smooth action. A Remington, to be exact, and if I were still in the business, it’s a tool I would highly recommend.”

  I felt the hackles move on the back of my neck. I made sure I had a good hold on the revolver under my shirt.

  “Very methodically I shot them, making sure they knew it was me doing it. I went down to Mexico and stayed there for a while, on The Farm, but the law never put anything together. The shotgun was cold. The crime was spur-of-the-moment. Nothing was taken and I moved on immediately. A fine method of operation I might suggest if you should ever suddenly decide to be a serial killer.”

  “Well, I am still trying to put a career together, so I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “They were my parents, Hap. They were Red’s parents, and they had sold him to the circus. Me, they had raised me with some kindness and respect, but I hated them. I knew when I saw that redheaded kid being chased and hurt that I hated them. It was because of Red that I hated them. They had sold him with no more hesitation than they might a pup from a litter, and they had gotten away with it. Somehow none of this had meant a thing to me before. Red had meant nothing to me, but that day I had a sort of epiphany. I sought Red out.