Bad Chili cap-4 Read online

  “I don’t care if he’s playing with himself over there, I’m tired of him following us around. It makes me nervous.”

  As if he had heard us, the car began to roll. It went out of the Kroger lot and onto the street and headed north.

  “Shall we chase it?” Leonard said.

  “What?” I said. “And miss this meat loaf?… What the fuck we eatin’ here for?”

  “It’s cheap and all we can afford,” Leonard said.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Pass the hot sauce.”

  After lunch we came up with an idea. It may not have been the best in the world, but it was an idea, and when we had one, we liked to grab on to it and hold it tight, ’cause we might not have another.

  We stopped at a gas station, filled up, and headed south for Houston. It was almost a three-hour drive, and then we got lost, so we spent five hours from LaBorde to the store I had written down on my list, East Side Video.

  East Side Video was in an okay section of town and it had lots of videos. We looked around the store for a while, then went over to the fellow behind the counter. He was in his late twenties, with longish red hair done up in corn rows. He looked up at us. He had a pimple on his chin like a volcano. It had such a puss head on it you wanted to hit it with something.

  “Help you?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’re looking for a special kind of movie.”

  “What kind?” he asked.

  “Well, I don’t see it on the shelves. It’s… a little different.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “You mean in-and-out stuff? We got that, but we don’t put it out next to Mickey Mouse.”

  “It’s under the counter, then?” Leonard said.

  “Yeah. We got some stuff you can look at.”

  “What we’re really looking for is a little different from that,” I said.

  “How different?”

  “Real different,” Leonard said. “We were told you had some tapes, some stuff like they make in Japan.”

  The guy pursed his lips. “Yeah? Who told you this?”

  “Some guy,” Leonard said.

  The counter man nodded. “We got some tapes we sell that are a little different.”

  “One we’re interested in… well… it’s got queers getting the shit kicked out them,” Leonard said.

  The redhead grinned. “Yeah. Some people think they’re real. They look real ’cause they’re so sloppy. Yeah, we got that. It’s not common knowledge, but we got it. We sell ’em. Not good quality. I mean, it ain’t gonna be Ole Yeller, know what I’m sayin’?”

  “Sell a lot of them?”

  “No,” said the counter man, “but at a hundred dollars a pop, we don’t have to sell a lot. Come to think of it, I guess we do a pretty good business with it.”

  “Against the law?” Leonard asked.

  “Why you ask?”

  “Just wondering,” Leonard said. “And if it is, maybe we got to think twice about buying it.”

  “Technically it’s covered by the First Amendment. ’Cause it ain’t real. Just looks real. But there’s folks don’t like the idea, so we keep it under the counter.”

  “We seen the one our friend had,” Leonard said. “It looked real.”

  “’Tween you and me,” the counter man said, “it might be real. But the people make ’em claim they ain’t. They get cornered, they say they bought them from a video enthusiast and they’re just showin’ what someone took a video of. Kind of like reporting the news. You know, like that fellow few years ago did the video of executions. We got that one here, you want it.”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  “These queer kick videos, I figure what the hell, one more queer with a black eye ain’t nothing to me. I’d kick one of the little faggots myself, make him suck my dick I wanted it sucked, though I ain’t so sure I’d want a queer’s lips on my tootie-toot, know what I’m sayin’? AIDS and all. Fucker might bite me.”

  I could sense Leonard’s tension. This guy kept it up, he was gonna wake up with a shelf full of videos shoved up his ass.

  “All right,” I said. “We’ll take one. If it’s one thing we like to see, it’s a queer get his.”

  The kid reached under the counter and brought out a tape in a cheap box with a photocopied cover that read: KICKIN’ FAIRIES.

  “Nice title,” I said.

  “Yeah, they ain’t real original,” the kid said. “But I seen this one, and I tell you, if it’s set up, it’s set up good. It looks real as a car wreck.”

  I peeled a hundred dollars out of my wallet, just like I had it to spare. I put it on the counter.

  The kid took the money and shoved the video at me and said, “No receipt on this stuff. No returns. We don’t buy this shit back. We can run off another one cheaper than we can fuck with that.”

  “I.R.S. might not like you not keeping records on this stuff,” Leonard said.

  “I.R.S. might not know,” the kid said.

  We drove into the nightfall, cruised mostly silent back to LaBorde, the video on the seat between us.

  18

  I won’t describe the video we bought in great detail. We watched it when we got back to Leonard’s place. It gave me nightmares. Like the kid said, if it was set up, then it was a horribly beautiful setup.

  In this one some thugs in the park, presumably the same cowardly thugs from the first video, still wearing their bar codes across their faces, took a brick and knocked a young man’s teeth out and made him suck them, bloody mouth and all. Then they kicked his ass and left him lying in the dirt. If it was special effects, it was damn good special effects. But considering the way the rest of the video looked, I doubted there was anything artificial about it.

  “Do we show this to Charlie?” I said.

  “Not yet,” Leonard said.

  “Why not? I don’t like the idea of this thing being in my house.”

  “We’ll put it inside the couch at my old place, with the rest of the stuff.”

  “I don’t like that either.”

  I took the video out of the machine and put it back in its box.

  “I never thought I’d live to see such a thing as this,” I said. “I can’t believe it. What in the hell has happened to everyone? Every time I turn around, I’m amazed at how little I know about human nature. About anything, for that matter. But this…”

  “Whatever it is,” Leonard said, “I’m tired of it being given names and excuses. Guy sells drugs, it’s because his grandma died. Poor kids sell drugs, it’s because they’re poor. Guy goes off his rocker, kills someone, it’s because he eats Twinkies and the sugar gave him a rush. I reckon sometimes it is those things, but you know what? I don’t give a shit. I think a person ought to be responsible for being an asshole. Used to, person had to be responsible, had to pay the price, there was less of this shit then.”

  “There’re more people now, Leonard. More pressures.”

  “There are more assholes,” Leonard said, “and it ain’t got a damn thing to do with pressure. Or say it does. So what? You ain’t been pressured, man?”

  “Leonard, you yourself are talking about going out and eliminating some people. What’s the difference?”

  “Difference is, I’m responsible for my actions. I ain’t gonna say I got a bad hotdog and it gave me a bellyache and that made me do it. I’m gonna do it ’cause I want to do it, and I got my eyes wide open going in, and if I can do it and get away with it I will. As for you, I only want you to go so far. I don’t want to be responsible for your actions.”

  “It would be hard for me not to help you,” I said.

  “I know,” Leonard said.

  “What about Charlie?”

  “Wait a bit.”

  “How long?”

  “A bit. I want to see we can find some things on our own. We solve it, we got things laid out so the chief can’t tuck it under his ass, then we show it to Charlie and maybe I don’t have to empty my box of shotgun shells.”

  A day later
I started looking for honest work. The dough I had made offshore had been damn good, but at the rate it was going, it wouldn’t be long before I had nothing more than an empty palm and a flapping wallet.

  I went first to the aluminum-chair factory, but just walking in the door made my stomach hurt. Factories and foundries, and I’ve worked in both, were my idea of hell on earth. I stood there a moment smelling machinery oil and listening to the thud of the machines at work, watching people shuffle about as if they were pushing great boulders up a hill, and I went out of there.

  I went to a local feed company for a try. The foreman told me quite frankly, “We mostly just hire niggers and wetbacks ’cause they work cheap.”

  “I work cheap,” I said.

  “Yeah, but the way we work someone, we wouldn’t do that to a white man.”

  “Well, that’s certainly white of you,” I said.

  “Yeah, ain’t it,” he said.

  I left that cocksucker to it, drove all over town, tried a lot of places, but there wasn’t much available, and what was available wasn’t worth having. I put in some applications. One that looked promising was a job at the chicken plant, being a security guard. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but at my age exactly what I wanted I couldn’t get and what I could get I didn’t want.

  I began to think of the rose fields again, where I always found work, but decided against it. That hot sun, that dust up the nose, I just didn’t think I could go back to it. It was a young man’s job on his way to somewhere, a foolish man’s job on his way to nowhere, or the last job a man could get.

  It was a pretty sad situation. Here I was in my mid-forties and no real job, no retirement fund, dog-turd insurance, and a squirrel bite on the arm.

  After a day of unsuccessful job hunting, I drove over to Brett’s and took her to dinner at a kind of home-cooking joint, then we went back to her place, went to bed and made love, which was a damn sight better than looking for a job or working in the aluminum-chair plant. Though, considering most anything is, that isn’t giving Brett the sort of compliment she deserves.

  As we lay in bed, we began to talk. We talked about all kinds of things, and gradually we got around to me and my life and I told her about my job search, and how I had never really settled into anything, jobwise, that mattered. I told her about Leonard, that he was black and gay and that he and I were as close as brothers. Probably closer.

  “Wow!” she said. “I’ve never really known any black people, you know, close up. Friend-like. Way you say you guys are.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “You know, I was one of them kind always thought that line about ‘some of my best friends are niggers’ made a certain sense. I didn’t mean nothing by it, I was just ignorant as a fuckin’ post. Later on, I was all for civil rights, and I went out of my way to treat the blacks in school like they were my friends. Condescending is what I was. In other words, I was actually a blue-collar redneck trying to come across like a middle-class stiff ass trying to show those poor niggers what a liberal I was. So I haven’t really hung around that many blacks.”

  “You didn’t mention the gay part.”

  “Yeah, there’s that, too. I always kind of thought of gays as perverts growing up. I never hung around any. Maybe it’s high time I gave it a try. This Leonard, he’s your brother, I reckon he ought to be mine too.”

  “You couldn’t have said anything better.”

  “Great,” she said. “I get to be the first in my family to hang around with niggers and queers.”

  I laughed at her.

  “’Course,” she said, “my family background was the kind of folks thought you touched a black person’s hand you could get cut, like sharkskin can cut you. I grew up thinking all blacks did was fuck, which seems like a fairly legitimate pursuit, actually.”

  “I like it.”

  “Yeah. It passes the time. My daddy, he was the kind of guy thought miniature golf ought to be Olympic sports, called blacks darkies when he wasn’t calling them ‘shines’ or ‘niggers.’ My mother, who was a kind of liberal for where we lived, called them ‘nigras’ or ‘coloreds’ and thought they ought to have the right to vote but should have their own toilets and water fountains. Later on, after civil rights, she never did like the idea of going into a filling station and thinking a black ass had been on the crapper ahead of her. So, you see, I’ve had some hurdles to overcome.”

  “Well, your old man might have been a racist, but I’ll tell you, when it comes to miniature golf as an Olympic sport, he might have been on to something. It’s a hell of a lot more entertaining than skating.”

  Brett grinned. “Give us a kiss.”

  I did. And another.

  “Now,” she said, “make love to me and try to have it last longer this time.”

  “Thanks for considering my ego.”

  “Not at all,” she said, shifting herself under the covers to accommodate me. “You know where the hole is, don’t you?”

  “I’m a little bit limp right now,” I said.

  “Hey, baby, it’s not the meat, it’s the motion. We’ll make it happen if we have to poke it in there with a stick.”

  “Oh, that’s stimulating.”

  We didn’t have to resort to the stick.

  And Brett was right.

  It wasn’t the meat. It was the motion.

  19

  Along nightfall, when Brett was off to work, I drove home happy and satisfied. Feeling that, in spite of things, life was coming together. I went inside, and as I reached for the light switch the ceiling fell on me and the floor jumped up and hit me in the face. Next thing I knew there was pain in my side and I was rolling into more pain, then hands had me and I was pulled up and a big shadow came out of the greater shadows of the house and kneed me in the groin, dropped me to the ground. Then the knee found my chin and gave me a little merry-go-round trip. Someone behind me put his forearm around my neck and squeezed and lifted. I was as good as hung.

  “Howdy,” said the big shadow.

  All three shadows dragged me outside. They were not shadows in the pale moonlight, but men, and one of them was a very big man, the man in the video, the man who belonged to the feet that had made the tracks around Leonard’s back door. Had to be. Guy like that, you could take his shoe and a boat paddle and shoot the Colorado rapids. He was the man Leonard called Big Man Mountain, the professional wrestler.

  The other two were economy-sized enough. They were not easy to see there in the moonlight, but one had a pale face that appeared to have exploded from the inside. The acne scars on his skin held the shadow, made the grooves in his flesh look like whiplashes.

  The other was a stocky black man with close-cropped hair and a forehead that shone brightly in the light of the moon. He had breath as sweet as a bean fart.

  Big Man Mountain pushed me down on my face, and the other two helped pull my arms behind me. They tied my wrists together with something that felt like wire, hauled me up and pulled me out back of my house.

  There was a ’64 Chevy Impala parked there, probably black, but it was hard to tell in the dark. It might have been blue or green or any dark color.

  I felt like a goddamn idiot. I had walked right into it. I hadn’t expected a thing. I had been too euphoric. They had driven over and parked their car behind my place, gone in through the back or broken out a window, and they had waited on either side of the door for me. The big guy, he had probably waited in the kitchen. I had walked straight into bad business, stupid as a duck flying over a blind.

  The two smaller thugs put me in the backseat between them. The giant forced his frame behind the wheel, fired up the Chevy. A car passed us as we headed out of my driveway; its lights were bright and Big Man cussed them. We drove on down my little road, on out to a full-fledged four-lane, and away we rolled. Down the dark highway, away from town, out into deeper darkness where the highway lost its lanes and narrowed, where the trees hung thick like tar-baby fingers over the road.

 
; Way on out we drove, heading toward Louisiana, which lay sixty miles away. I sat there and thought about what I could do, but it didn’t add up to much. My hands were behind my back and I was between two guys who looked as if the last sentimental thought they’d had was watching a puppy go under their car wheel and hoping the little motherfucker didn’t pop their expensive tires.

  We rode on, the windows down, the wind blowing in cool and wet with the smell of swampy water. It ruffled our hair, dampened our faces. Cars passed us. Cars came up behind us. I wanted to stick my head out the window and yell, but I figured I did that, I was a goner for sure. I tried to stay alert, looking for possibilities. I had a feeling possibilities were somewhere other than Texas that night.

  We went halfway to Louisiana, veered to the right down a red-clay byway, cruised into deeper darkness where the land turned swampy and the shadows grew great, and the head beams were the only light you could see.

  Way out we drove. Way out.

  “I don’t guess this is a surprise party?” I said.

  “Oh,” said the black man on my left, “don’t know. Might call it that.”

  “You surprised so far, ain’t you?” said the man with the pocks. He put a cigarette in his mouth and lit it and tossed the match out the window.

  “We kinda good at surprises,” said the black guy. “Fact is, I thought you ’bout as surprised as anybody I ever surprised. And I surprised me a few.”

  “Shut up,” Big Man Mountain said.

  I wasn’t sure who he was talking to, me or the other guys, but we all went silent and the car cruised on and the wind was choked thick with the smell of damp earth. Sort that fills a grave.

  Car lights swung in behind us, and for an instant they gave me an unreasonable hope. Then the lights moved to the side and the dark shape of the car passed us.

  On we drove, into an even deeper wooded blackness where the trees dipped low and the vines hung loose, dripping down and scraping across the car like the wet hair of a drowned corpse, and finally there was just this little dirt driveway in a small clearing, and in the clearing was a shack. I reckoned it was some old hunting shack, probably abandoned, or owned by an out-of-towner, and Big Man and his buddies had taken it over. We parked and the two guys in the back helped me get out by encouraging me with a couple of sharp blows to the ribs.