The Big Book of Hap and Leonard Page 25

  “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 farmhouse 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 i
t 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 remembered 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.

  Bent Twig

  When I got in from work that night, Brett, my redhead, was sitting at the kitchen table. She didn’t have a shift that week at the hospital, so I was surprised to see her up and about. It was two a.m. I had finished up being a night watchman at the dog food plant, hoping soon my buddy Leonard would be back from Michigan, where he had gone after someone in some case he had been hired out to do for our friend Marvin and the detective agency Marvin owned. We did freelance work like that from time to time.

  There was no job for me in this one, and since Leonard was without a job at all and needed the money more than I did, he hired on. I had a temporary job at the dog food plant. It was okay, but mostly boring. The most exciting thing I had done was chase some rats I had caught in the feed storage room, nibbling on some bags of dog food, stealing chow out of some hound’s mouth, so to speak. Those rats knew not to mess with me.

  I kept hoping Marvin would have something for me so I could quit, but so far, nothing. I did have that week’s paycheck from the dog food plant in my wallet, though.

  “What are you doing up?” I asked.

  “Worrying,” she said.

  I sat down at the table with her.

  “We have enough money, right?”

  “We got plenty for a change. It’s Tillie.”

  “Oh, shit,” I said.

  “It’s not like before,” Brett said. What she meant was a little of column A, a little of column B.

  Column A was where she got in with a biker club as the local poke, and got hauled off to be a prostitute, partly on purpose, as it was her profession, and partly against her will because they didn’t plan to pay her. We had rescued her from that, me, Brett, and Leonard. She had then gone off and got into a series of domestic problems over in Tyler, but those were the sort of things Brett got her out of, or at least managed to avert catastrophe for awhile. Every time Brett mentioned Tillie, it meant she would be packing a bag, putting her job on hold, and going off for a few days to straighten some stupid thing out that never should have happened in the first place. Since she was Brett’s daughter I tried to care about her. But she didn’t like me and I didn’t like her. But I did love Brett, so I tried to be supportive as possible, but Brett knew how I felt.

  “You have to go for a few days?” I asked.

  “Maybe more to it.”

  “How’s that?”

  “She’s missing.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time she took a powder for awhile. You know how she is. Goes off without a word, comes back without one, unless she needs money or a tornado got the double-wide.”

  “It’s not all her fault.”

  “Brett, baby. Don’t give me the stuff about how you weren’t a good mother.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “You were young yourself, and I don’t think you did all that bad. You had some circumstances, and you did what you could for her. She’s mostly a mess of her choosing.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But you’re not convinced.”

  “It doesn’t matter. She’s my daughter.”

  “You got me there,” I said.

  “I got a call from a friend of hers. You don’t know her. Her name is Monica, and she’s all right. I think she’s got a better head on her shoulders than Tillie. I met her when I was there last. I think she’s been a pretty good guide for my girl. Fact is, I sort of thought Tillie was getting it together, and I’ve been keeping in touch with Monica about it. She called to say they were supposed to go to a movie, a girls’ night out. Only Tillie didn’t show. Didn’t call. And now it’s three days later. Monica said when she got over being mad, she got into being worried. Says the guy Tillie lives with, that he could be the problem. He used to run whores, and Tillie could easily fall back into that life. I mean . . . well, there’s a bit of a drug problem with the guy, and Tillie, sometimes. He could have gotten tough with Tillie. He might be trying to make some money off of her, or he might have got into something bad and Tillie got dragged with him.”

  “Monica think he’s holding her at home?”

  “Maybe worse.”

  “I thought he was supposed to be all right.”

  “Me too,” she said. “But lately, not so much. At first, he was a kind of Prince Charming, an ex-druggie who was doing good, then all of a sudden he didn’t want her out of the house, didn’t want her contacting anyone. Didn’t want her seeing Monica. But Monica thinks it’s because he was choosing who he wanted Tillie to see.”

  “Prostitution,” I said.

  Brett nodded. “Yeah, it’s how those kind of guys play. Like they care about you, or they got some of the same problems they’re kicking, and the next thing Tillie knows she’s on the nose candy again and is selling her ass, and then pretty soon she’s not getting any money from the sell. He gets it all.”

  “The pimp gets it all, keeps her drugged, and keeps the money flowing in.”

  “Yeah,” Brett said. “Exactly. It’s happened to her before, and you know that, so—”

  “You’re thinking it could happen again.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I am.”

  “Course it doesn’t matter, and it may not have been planned. He may have just fallen off the wagon and grabbed her as he fell. After he got the prize he wanted, he didn’t want to share it or show it around.”

  “He liked showing her around at first, all right,” Brett said. “He liked her to dress sexy, and then if anyone looked, he was mad. She was for him, and yet he wanted to parade her and not have anyone look at the parade. Later on, he wanted to bring people to the parade. Maybe when his drug habit got bad. I don’t know. I don’t care. I just want to know she’s safe.”

  “And you want me to check it out?”

  “I want us to check it out.”

  “Let me drive back to the dog food plant and quit with prejudice first.”

  “Short notice,” Brett said.

  “I know,” I said. “But then so was this.”

  It felt odd going
off to see about something like this without Leonard. I liked having him around in these kind of circumstances. He helped strengthen my backbone. I liked to think I was already pretty firm in that area, but it never hurt to have your brother from another mother there to keep you feeling confident.

  Tillie lived just outside of Tyler, between there and Bullock, a little burg outside of the city. Tyler wasn’t up there with Dallas and Houston, but it was a big town, or small city, depending on how you liked your labels. A hundred thousand or so, with lots of traffic, illegal immigrants, and college students. The immigrants they liked to hire to get work done cheap, then use them for every scapegoat situation possible, forgetting they wouldn’t even be there to blame for what they did and for what they didn’t do if they weren’t offered the jobs in the first place.

  When we got to Tillie’s house we found two cars in the carport. Brett said, “That’s Tillie’s and Robert’s cars. Both cars are here.”

  I went over and knocked on the front door, but no one answered. It’s hard to explain, but sometimes you knock, you know someone’s inside, and other times it has a hollow feel, like you’re tapping on a sun-bleached skull, thinking a brain that isn’t inside of it anymore is going to wake up. And sometimes you’re just full of shit and whoever is inside is hiding. I remember my mother doing that from time to time when a bill collector came around. I always wondered if they knew we were inside, hiding out on paying the rent we hadn’t earned yet, but would pay, hiding out from paying a car payment, hoping they wouldn’t haul the car away.

  I went around back and knocked, but got the same lack of response. I walked around the house with Brett and we looked in windows when there was a window to look in. Most were covered with blinds or curtains, but the kitchen window at the back had the curtains pulled back, and we could see inside by cupping our hands around our faces and pressing them against the glass. There was nothing to see, though.

  Finally we went back out to my car. We leaned on the hood.