Jackrabbit Smile Read online

  Brett opened the desk drawer, pulled out a couple of yellow-paper tablets and slid them across the desk, gave them a pen apiece.

  They took the tablets and started writing. We all sat in silence while they did. The only sounds in the room were the ball-point pens scratching on paper.

  When they finished, they slid the tablets and pens back. Brett picked up Judith’s tablet, and I picked up Thomas’s. I had a pang of sadness when I saw he’d misspelled every other word and couldn’t write a sentence that was a complete thought. He had some ideas he wanted to express, and they were pretty much the same thing he had said before, about Jackie maybe being dishonorable for running with colored. He spelled “honor” as “oner.” I felt sorry for him right then. I wished I had never said a harsh word to him or her. I felt like a bully, picking on a mentally deficient mark.

  It was a feeling I knew would soon pass. Sometimes there are people who deserve to be treated like assholes. I know I’ve had it coming more than once.

  “How about Jackie’s father?” Brett asked. “What’s his story?”

  “Sebastian. His name’s on there. I pretty much raised the kids alone,” Judith said. “He went another way, lost his religion, joined the Presbyterians or some such.”

  “Also Christians,” I said.

  “Not according to the Bible,” Judith said. It was as if she were trying to explain to us that red wasn’t green. It was obvious to her.

  “Tomayto, tomahto,” Leonard said.

  “The true word of the Lord will be known to those who wish to accept it,” Judith said. “Presbyterians are infidels.”

  “Tomayto, tomahto,” Leonard said again.

  “So he doesn’t have any connection to the children?” Brett said.

  “He let them go a long time ago, and we let him go. He said he had to search for his feelings or some such. Started preaching false doctrine. He had some odd ideas about dying and about how he wanted to die. I don’t really talk about that ’cause I don’t understand it much.”

  “Where does he live?” Brett said.

  “Marvel Creek,” Judith said, “but you don’t need to talk to him. He doesn’t know a thing about the children after Thomas was twelve and Jackrabbit was thirteen. Didn’t deal with them at all. Besides, we don’t really know where he lives over there.”

  “Christianity sure holds the family together, don’t it?” Leonard said.

  I saw Thomas move as if he might get out of the chair, which was exactly what Leonard wanted. He gave Leonard a hard look that melted fast as a snowflake on a hot stove, and he suddenly found more comfort in the chair than before, located a spot on the window behind Brett and concentrated on that. My guess was being here with us was his idea of hell turned true.

  After a few more questions from Brett, they gave her a fistful of money that was mostly ones and fives and would cover about two days’ work. They promised more just as soon as Thomas got paid over at the chicken plant, a place where I had worked briefly. I didn’t tell him we had the same alma mater.

  They got up and left. Brett picked up Judith’s tablet and stared at it.

  “There goes the fucking Madonna on earth and one of her little fucking shit-ass scamps,” Leonard said.

  “Truth is, I feel sorry for them,” Brett said.

  “Me too,” I said. “For a minute.”

  5

  For lunch, we went to an El Salvadorean place that had only been open a short time and had been built inside of what was once a tire-and-lube business. They had rickety tables and rickety chairs and really good food there. The tires had long been vacated, in case you were curious, and I presumed there was no lube business going on in any manner, shape, or form.

  I had my favorite meal, jalapeños and cheese wrapped in grilled bacon with a side of rice and charro beans and a chicken tamale wrapped in a plantain husk, along with plantain chips for the table. Brett had chicken quesadillas, and Leonard had an enchilada about the size of a pontoon boat. I don’t know what the people at the table near us had, but they seemed to be enjoying it.

  “The father,” Brett said. “They didn’t say much about him, but I think we ought to start there, find out who he is. He’s in the same town where Jackie disappeared. That’s quite a coincidence. He could be hiding her. She could have gone there looking for him, and in fact, that makes a lot of sense.”

  “Their dislike of him kind of shuts off their thinking,” I said.

  “I don’t believe they had a lot of thinking to shut off,” Leonard said. “I’m surprised they got the brain cells to remind their bodies to breathe.”

  “Our dislike of them might shut off our thinking, now that I consider it,” I said.

  “Sucks to be them,” Leonard said. “But, yeah, dear old Dad might have seen Jackrabbit last. For all we know she’s living in Marvel Creek selling antiques, is married to a Klan Grand Wizard, and has four kids and a pet goat, all with bodies covered in tattoos and their own nine-millimeter pistols, including the goat.”

  “Goats prefer something lighter,” I said. “Maybe a twenty-five-caliber. Goes with their outfit.”

  “Boys, that’s enough,” Brett said. “What I’m thinking is you and Leonard go to Marvel Creek. I’ll see if I can find some of the others on this list. Chance comes in this afternoon, and I’ll get her to help me. The Internet ought to be for something other than me looking up photos of men with huge dicks.”

  “Zing,” Leonard said.

  I ignored both of them.

  “Well, we got his name, so we can get started,” Leonard said. “Sebastian Mulhaney. What a name.”

  “Beats Jackrabbit,” I said. “Drop us off at my car, hon, and we’ll go. You can make phone calls and find addresses. Me and Leonard are people persons.”

  “You, maybe. Leonard, not so much,” Brett said. “And I’m not that sure about you.”

  “This is true,” Leonard said. “Nobody likes me and I don’t like nobody. I hope they all get ants in their ass.”

  6

  I rolled us into Marvel Creek about three o’clock in the afternoon on a warm day with a dry wind blowing. Way to the west, clouds were brewing like darkened beer suds, bundling up raindrops, rolling them slowly in our direction.

  I grew up in Marvel Creek. Before I was born it had been a rough but thriving oil town, back in the thirties, then it became a rough played-out oil town in the fifties. It was made up of the descendants of oil-field trash, as they sometimes called themselves, thugs, prostitutes, pimps and gamblers, a few lucky oil tycoons. Back then, unless you were one of the lucky ones who struck it rich and stayed rich, it was a town where broken dreams got even more broken and crawled off to die in the river bottoms.

  You were on the poor end of things, the blue-collar end of things, you saw stuff the better-off folks didn’t see and sometimes refused to admit existed. Things the cops didn’t always report and were actually sometimes responsible for. Black bodies, wrapped in chains, slipped off into the muddy Sabine; women and wives who wore black eyes so often they might have been part raccoon. Fights and bad deeds, enough to fill a thousand books, things done in the dark, and on the river, and in the deep green woods, even deeper back then, before lumber mills became pulp-wood serial killers and ravaged trees in the name of progress and the almighty dollar.

  That muddy brown river winds along at one end of town, crawling under a long bridge, pushing mud and snakes and fish and debris all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. I spent a lot of time along that river and on it in rowboats and motorboats and even inner tubes. Once, long ago when we were young, me and Leonard even found a sunken boat out there with bodies in it.

  Another time my ex-wife got us into some bad business searching for treasure in the river. We found the treasure, but in the end, it brought more pain than satisfaction.

  Back then, when you crossed the bridge on your way out, you came to Hell’s Half Mile, a line of honky-tonks full of drunken patrons trying to wash down poverty, bad marriages, and gone-to-hell ch
ildren. Whores worked there, taking customers to little trailers out back. There was no family night.

  Knives and guns came out on many occasions, mostly on Saturday nights. The altercation might have to do with some whore’s attentions or with patrons’ differing political views or their disagreements on the finer points of religion (“Love thy neighbor” with a load of lead or a sharp knife), but mostly it had to do with bottled-up rage from being poor and knowing full well there had to be something better than a life of hard work, hot nights, and empty bottles, and knowing too that if there was, you weren’t going to get a taste of it. Mix it all with alcohol, and it was like trying to blend fire with gasoline.

  In time, to the delight of churchgoing women and to the disappointment of beer drinkers and whoremongers, the tonks went out of business. The whores and the pimps and the shooters and knife fighters went with them or ended up on the school board, and the former patrons drank at home. The old buildings were burned down for the insurance money or turned weather-beaten and vacant.

  Not so many people ran the river and the woods like before. A great used-book store had grown up in the town. It nearly took up an entire block, giving way on one corner to a Mexican restaurant. The restaurant’s site had been a bank when I was a kid. The town was now known for antiques. It had become respectable.

  Respectable place or not, driving around it always made me tremble a bit, like the past was blowing a cold wind over my heart. Always got the impression that the old world I had known was still out there, just one bloody scratch below the surface, and all it took was the right incantation to release it.

  Or merely the arrival of good ole us, Hap and Leonard.

  7

  Brett sent to my phone the address she found for Jackrabbit’s daddy. We put the address into the GPS and drove over there.

  To our surprise, it was a church. When I was young it had been a theater. I had watched many a movie there, had seen cowboys and Indians ride, vampires suck blood, monsters jump out of the shadows, and I had seen crime shows, musicals, and stories of romance. Those days were gone.

  There were white crosses painted on the old glass doors, the ticket booth had a wooden barrier over the ticket slot, and the door that led into the booth from inside the theater was now a solid piece of wall. Where garish movie posters had once filled frames on either side of the outside theater archway were now posters of a different sort of garishness, one with Jesus on the cross. The crown of thorns on his forehead had thorns the size of tenpenny nails stuck into his flesh, causing blood to leak down his face and drip over his lips. Beneath Jesus, a Roman soldier who looked a lot like John Wayne was holding a spear and was looking up at him on the cross with an expression of either satisfaction, boredom, or wonder. Maybe they were discussing the weather.

  “Hey, you’re going to get wet up there,” says the soldier.

  “Hell, don’t I know it,” says Jesus back.

  On the other side of the building, there was a less dramatic poster with Jesus standing on a high place looking up to the heavens. People sat on the ground near him, looking where he was looking, and there were sheep and lambs looking up as well, unaware that they might soon be decorating a plate with some fig jelly.

  We pulled on the front door, but it was locked, so we went around back, down an alley composed of cracked bricks, and found a door there that was wide open.

  “It’s not breaking and entering if the door is open,” Leonard said.

  “Way I heard it,” I said.

  For a moment we stood there, considering, then finally went inside. It was deep dark in there and I used the flashlight on my phone to guide us down a space where odds and ends had been kept, and were still kept, but now those odds and ends were not movie-related. There were hymnbooks and Bibles, some of them quite ragged, and a number of cardboard boxes containing who knew what.

  After a few moments, the hallway terminated at a door, one of those you push against. We pushed and came into the theater itself. It was lit up as bright as a visit to the sun, and it was cold with air-conditioning, the way a theater ought to be. I turned off my phone light.

  The old theater seats were still there, but they had been reupholstered, and the carpet between the seats no longer sucked at your shoes due to sticky soda spills. It was bright red again and soft.

  There was a guy on his knee, leaning into an aisle seat, his head out of sight. An elbow appeared from time to time, moving back and forth. We heard a soft clicking sound.

  “Hello, the theater,” Leonard said.

  The man stopped doing what he was doing and came to his feet. He had a staple gun in his hand.

  “Sorry to barge in,” I said. “The door was open.”

  “Quite all right,” the man said. “I opened it to bring some stuff in, forgot to close it.”

  The man was about six five, broad-shouldered, with a bit of belly that anyone with any sense and experience would know wouldn’t slow him down if he decided to pull your head off and shit down your neck. He had a well-trimmed black beard and longish black hair that fell down his neck and over his ears. I guess he was about my age, give or take a year or two.

  We walked up to him.

  “Can I help you gentlemen?” he said.

  “Hope so,” I said, and stuck out my hand. He placed the stapler on the closest theater seat, shook my hand, then shook Leonard’s.

  “I was stapling upholstery on some of the seats.”

  “I used to come here to watch movies,” I said.

  “Ah, me too,” he said. “Wait a minute. Aren’t you Hap Collins?”

  “I am.”

  “You remember me?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Gary Jamesway.”

  “You played football. I think you were a year behind me.”

  “It was baseball, and I wasn’t very good at it.”

  “Not the way I remember it,” I said. I had never really kept up with baseball, but there was talk about Jamesway all the time. I remembered it now. Yeah. Baseball, not football. “You went pro, right?”

  “I was okay when we played who we played in high school. Graduated, got a chance with the Astros, but it turned out that against someone who could really throw, I couldn’t hit, and against someone who could really hit, I couldn’t catch, and I couldn’t run fast enough to match anybody. I was a high-school whiz and a professional dud. I warmed a bench for a couple of seasons, then they let me go, and I was glad of it. Haven’t picked up a baseball since.”

  “At least you got to the show,” Leonard said.

  “Yeah,” Jamesway said, “there was that.”

  “You’re not actually who we’re looking for,” I said, “but glad to see you.”

  “Who are you looking for?”

  I told him.

  “Oh my, Sebastian. May the Lord watch over his confused and tortured soul.”

  “I’m thinking Sebastian’s story isn’t a happy one,” Leonard said.

  “Might say it has a weird ending.”

  “I thought he lived here,” I said. “Or preached here.”

  “He did, once. I own the place now. I’m the preacher. Actually, I was the preacher a year before he left. He stopped showing up to preach, and when I started, I lost most of his flock, but in a short time I got a new one. It’s growing all the time. New people are coming in. The things he taught, they couldn’t stand the bright of the light.”

  “That so,” Leonard said.

  “Some years back I came here and heard him preach, and I didn’t like him. Stayed after one of his sermons and talked to him about, how shall I say, being more Christ-like and less Joshua-like, since being Christians, we weren’t supposed to be worshipping the old ways, but the new ways of Jesus. You see, he talked the Old Testament and tossed in lizard men from time to time.”

  “Say what?” Leonard said.

  “He and a large portion of his flock were what you might call conspiracy theorists. They didn’t require proof, only a need they wanted to fulf
ill. Something in their lives that was more interesting than braces on their kids’ teeth, nursing a hangover, or paying bills while navigating a changing world. They weren’t up to it. But if they could believe lizard men were out there, messing everything up for the rest of us, they could have a satisfying creepy feeling that was preferable to an unsatisfying feeling of boredom and routine and unimportance.”

  “His wife said he was a Presbyterian,” I said.

  “Hardly,” Jamesway said, and laughed.

  “So you told him he was full of it,” I said, “and that lizard men had yet to show up, and he said, ‘How about you preach?’”

  “He was starting to fall apart. Had a lot of hate and disappointment in him. Didn’t really seem to care about much at that point. He surprised me by offering me a chance to give a sermon the next Sunday. I didn’t know it then, but he was looking for a way to get out of his responsibilities, and I came at the right time. His crowd was not my crowd. They left, and I stayed, and Sebastian stayed. But in the back. Drinking most of the time. Then a young woman came around for a while, and then she stopped coming, and he went away. Short time after that they found his remains in Davy Crockett National Forest. A hiker came across it. His corpse was in bad shape, but they could tell his chest had been split open, his ribs separated with a hammer. His heart and some other organs were missing, and they didn’t think it was decay or animals that got to them.”

  “Damn lizard men,” Leonard said.

  Jamesway smiled.

  “The grave he was in was deep and wide, but it had eroded. He had that wound in his chest and a jump rope around his neck. They concluded he was strangled with that, which considering they found it wrapped around his neck a couple of times doesn’t sound like great police deduction to me. A cocker spaniel could have figured that out. He had his hands in the pockets of his pants, like he was relaxing. The bones of his hands, actually. Like he’d stuck them in there and held them there while he was strangled.”