Hap and Leonard: Blood and Lemonade Page 3

  I gave it to him without hesitation and he held it cradled in his arms. He was comfortable with it. I had an idea he knew how to use it quite well.

  I took off my shirt and threw it on the ground and stepped up where the two had been fighting. Charlie had half crawled, half stumbled off, and fell down not too far from the tire fire, near the other two. The black fighter was starting a collection.

  Kilgore tossed the axe handle aside, and started pulling his tee-shirt over his head. He came down and stood across from me and smiled. He figured it was going to be easy. I figured he might be right. I have been known to shoot off my mouth and regret it later.

  “I know you’re gonna take him, white boy,” the black fighter said. “I know you will.”

  I didn’t say it aloud, but I thought: That makes one of us.

  Roger gave me a bit of advice. “Keep your left up, Hap.”

  “Thanks,” I said. But like the black fighter, I fought power side out. I had learned that from my dad who not only taught me boxing and wrestling fundamentals, but had taught me some self-defense. The rest of what I had learned so far came from the Judo and Hapkido I had learned at the Tyler, Texas YMCA.

  “You ain’t got to fight him for me,” the black fighter said. “I just wanted to see you’d do it or not. I can whip him same as the others.”

  “You’ve fought three,” I said, “I think it’s only fair you have a little break between.”

  “That’s awfully white of you . . . What is it? Happy?”

  “Hap,” I said. “Hap Collins. My friends just call me He Who Has A Massive Dick.”

  He laughed a little, then said, “I’m Leonard. Leonard Pine.”

  “Shut up, you fuckers” said Kilgore. “Let’s get on with it.”

  “He’s crowing for you to give him his ass beating,” Leonard said.

  I was glad Leonard was confident.

  Leonard moved back and Kilgore moved down, and the crowd above eased down closer, and I saw that one of the boys who had walked away earlier was walking back with a revolver. Leonard yelled up at him, “Put that on the ground right now, or I shoot your kneecap off and piss down your throat. I mean it, motherfucker.”

  Leonard lifted the shotgun. I feared he might mean it.

  The fellow bent over and gently laid the gun down.

  Leonard said, “Now walk away, chief.”

  Chief walked away. He joined the others and sat at the top of the rise and looked embarrassed.

  Me and Kilgore started to move then. And there was something I couldn’t explain. Something in me that was always there, a kind of fire, a burning anger, the source of which I had no idea. It was always there in the background, and though I didn’t hunt because I didn’t want to kill, the primal urge was there, but it had shifted from animals to bullies and assholes and no goods. I could feel that anger warming my muscles.

  Kilgore said, “I’m going to kick your ass, and then you, nigger, you’re next. I’m gonna knock the black off of you.”

  Leonard pointed at himself. “Okay, which nigger? Me or the other one?”

  “I put Collins down, then it’s you two darkies. One at a time, or both together. Count on it.”

  Leonard laughed. “Shit, you couldn’t roll me over if I was dead, let alone whip my ass.”

  Roger didn’t say anything. He just held tight to his rifle.

  Me and Kilgore moved in a circle, and then we moved together, and then Kilgore threw a haymaker from the pits of hell. It brought with it fire and brimstone and lots of power, but it was slow. It was like watching a big truck with no gas being pushed up hill by weak men with hernias.

  I leaned back. The punch passed. I stepped in and made a short, front right-handed hook to the side of his jaw. I heard a terrible sound that made me wince. I knew it was bone cracking. Kilgore went down in the dirt and the dirt flew up and made a little cloud that drifted quickly back to earth.

  Kilgore didn’t get up.

  “Son-of-a-bitch,” Leonard said. “You are the man, goddamnit.”

  “Took me a little longer than I anticipated,” I said. “But I been sick.”

  Leonard laughed out loud. “You are something, white boy, something.”

  “I know,” I said, trying not to show how surprised I was that I had been so successful so quickly. My hand hurt though.

  “Anyone else want some of my boy here?” Leonard yelled up. “Anyone. I got money. I’ll lay that money out right now.”

  No one wanted any of his boy.

  Leonard said, “Alright then. I’m gonna expect all the debts to be paid up. I put down three of your fuckers, and you put down none of me.”

  “I forgot to bet on myself,” I said.

  “You did,” Roger said. “You just hurt your knuckles for nothing.”

  I sucked on the blood across my knuckles.

  “Shit, it was worth it,” I said.

  Leonard had gone up the hill with my shotgun to collect the bets. He stopped and picked up the revolver that had been dropped and brought it back with him and tossed it in the Sabine.

  “Shit, man,” said the boy who had dropped it. “That’s my old man’s.”

  “He’s gets it back,” Leonard said, “he’s gonna have to be Aquaman.”

  “Now everybody go home,” I said. “Oh, and come down here and get your guys, or we’ll dump them in the river.”

  A few of the guys came down and picked up the two Leonard had knocked out, and one guy helped Charlie stagger up the hill. I looked over at Kilgore. Leonard was standing over him pissing in his face.

  “The white don’t wash off,” Leonard said.

  “You know it don’t,” I heard Roger say.

  “That’s a surprise to me,” Leonard said. “I always thought it was paint.”

  In a few minutes the fighters were loaded up, including piss-face Kilgore, and at the top of the hill, the guy whose gun Leonard had thrown in the water, said, “I’ll get you at school, Collins.”

  “Sure. Meet you on the playground.”

  He went over to his car and got inside with a girl, drove away, following a procession of cars, on up and out of the bottoms.

  Leonard came over and stuck out his hand. I shook it.

  “That was some punch,” he said. “Took me longer with these guys.”

  “I watched you move,” I said. “You did alright. Hell, you put down three.”

  “I did, didn’t I?”

  “I held my rifle and looked confident,” Roger said.

  “You did indeed.” I said.

  “That white boy threatened you,” Roger said. “That’s Robbie Wayne. He’s supposed to be bad.”

  “He didn’t offer to fight,” I said. “He’s not so bad. He could have had his moment now, but he decided to save it for later. He’s a blow hard. He won’t bother me.”

  “I wasn’t worried about you,” Roger said. “I was thinking about me.”

  “Shit. Call on Hap here, he’ll hit so hard he won’t wake up until next July. You know you broke that boy’s jaw, don’t you?”

  “I hope so,” I said.

  “Man,” Leonard said. “You’re alright.”

  “Thanks,” I said, buttoning up my shirt.

  Leonard gave me my shotgun. He said, “Hey, take some of this money I won. You ought to.”

  “I don’t want it,” I said. “You keep it.”

  “They have fights here regularly,” Leonard said. “I had a bunch of black guys coming, but they all faded out at the last minute. I should have gone home, I guess. But I sure wanted to hit somebody. You know the Klan used to whip blacks out here in front of the saw mill? I heard they hung one or two out here by the river. Guy named Mose for one, but there might have been others.”

  “I’ve heard that,” I said.

  “I got my car hid back a piece, off a little road,” Leonard said. “I was afraid what they might do to it after I knocked them around.”

  “Confident, aren’t you?” Roger said.

  “H
ell, yeah,” Leonard said. “So long you two. And a special so long to you Hap Collins. I hope we cross paths again.”

  “It could happen,” I said.

  Leonard started up and over the rise. He didn’t show any sign of exhaustion. Way he moved you would have thought he’d just gotten out of bed after a long night’s good rest.

  “He was a cat, wasn’t he?” Roger said.

  “I’ll say,” I said.

  “You two seem a lot alike.”

  “I know,” I said. “I knew that right off.”

  I looked to see where Leonard was going. He walked along the edge of the saw mill and melted into the woods.

  3.

  Not Our Kind

  We got up and turned on the lights and sparred a little more, but we were pretty worn by then, so we didn’t last long.

  “Want to get an ice cream cone,” I said. “We could go through the drive through at Dairy Queen.”

  “You and the goddamn ice cream,” Leonard said. “You could drop a few pounds, you know?”

  “I could also enjoy a very nice chocolate cone, and you, a vanilla.”

  “Damn,” Leonard said. “Vanilla is my kryptonite. They made vanilla pussy I could quit being queer.”

  “No you couldn’t.”

  We locked up and I drove us to Dairy Queen. It was full dark now and there were quite a few cars on the LaBorde streets. More than usual, I thought, but the ebb and flow of traffic in a small city, or a big town, is sometimes hard to figure. I was beginning to think it was getting too big for me. Everywhere you looked there were people. Our house was on a nice lot, but there were still close neighbors and the traffic on our division street had increased of late. Brett and I had talked about it, but the house we had now we had almost paid off and the idea of moving was a chore.

  Leonard said, “I remember when us just being together, a black guy and white guy in East Texas, was a big deal.”

  “Yeah, everyone would do a double take.”

  “I used to see black and white couples together, I’d do a double take,” Leonard said. “It was so unusual then.”

  “Especially if there appeared to be anything romantic about it.”

  “Yeah, interracial couples didn’t show up in public much,” Leonard said. “Mostly because they didn’t want to get their asses beat, or maybe even killed.”

  “Sometimes I think things are bad, and then I realize how much progress has been made.”

  “Not enough.”

  “Nope,” I said. “Not enough.”

  “I’ll say this for you, Hap. You hung with me back then, and me being queer didn’t help either.”

  “Gay, Leonard. Gay. That’s the term. You see, queer is for the homophobes.”

  “Gay, queer, bent, what have you,” he said. “Besides, we people, as some refer to us, often use the word too. We’ve claimed it. Can I say nigger?”

  “I hate you,” I said.

  Leonard snickered.

  “We are going to need to have you go see someone about how to talk in the modern world,” I said.

  “Too much bullshit as it is,” Leonard said.

  “Can’t fault that sentiment.”

  As we pulled up to the drive-through, Leonard said, “Hey, let’s go inside. I’d like a burger before that cone.”

  “Talk about me,” I said.

  “Yeah, but I’m not fat.”

  We parked at the Dairy Queen, went inside. We ordered and went to the back and sat at a booth. It was an oddly empty place considering all the traffic, just me and Leonard and the staff.

  “You know,” I said. “One time I was sitting in the back of another Dairy Queen, one in Marvel Creek, and some fellows came to talk to me about you, and they didn’t have anything nice to say about you.”

  “Few do . . . Oh, wait. That was around the time you and me had our first showdown with someone. Together, I mean.”

  “That would be it.”

  When I got out of school that day, I drove over to the Dairy Queen to get a hamburger before I had to go to work at the aluminum chair plant. I had a work permit, so I got off early, and I usually grabbed a burger, and then I drove out to the plant and worked until midnight. A lot of us from high school worked there, making fifty-six dollars and fourteen cents a week, which wasn’t even good for 1968.

  I was sitting at the back of the Dairy Queen, eating quickly, and was about halfway through the burger when four boys from school came in. I knew one of them pretty well, and the others a little. We all knew each other’s names, anyway. I can’t say any of them were friends of mine. We ran in different circles.

  They saw me and came over. Two of them sat down in my booth, across from me, and the other two sat out to the side at a table and leaned on their elbows and looked at me. I didn’t like their attitude.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “You’re seeing it,” the one I knew best said. His name was David. Last time I saw him was at the Swinging Bridge, and there had been a fight there for money. My new friend Leonard was there. He won the fight. It was a friend of David’s he fought, and he beat the guy’s ass like a tambourine and made some money.

  Actually, that fight, lit by a huge tire fire, was the first time I met Leonard, and we hit it off, and we saw each other again in Marvel Creek, running into one another accidentally at first, and then finally on purpose. He lived over in LaBorde with his uncle, but they came to the general store in Marvel Creek to shop, which I didn’t understand. Everyone in Marvel Creek goes to the larger city of LaBorde to shop, but his uncle had a store in Marvel Creek he liked, place where he had been buying shoes for a long time. He liked it, Leonard said, because the owner never told him to come around back, even before laws were passed that said he didn’t have to.

  David said, “We were talking about you the other day.”

  “Were you?” I said.

  “Yeah. Some. We been seeing you around with that nigger.”

  “Leonard?”

  “One name is as good as another for a nigger. ‘Boy’ will work. We’ll call him ‘Boy.’”

  “I won’t. And if I was you, I wouldn’t call him that. You might find yourself turned inside out and made into a change purse.”

  “You think he’s tough, don’t you?”

  “Don’t you? You seen him whip some ass at the Swinging Bridge, same as me.”

  “We seen you whip some too,” another of the boys said, “but that don’t scare us none, about you or the nigger.”

  The big guy’s real name was Colbert, but everyone called him Dinosaur on account of he was big and not that smart. He was a football player and he thought he was as cool as an igloo. He was said to be the toughest guy in school. That might have been true. He hadn’t been at the bridge that night. I didn’t know if he’d seen me and Leonard together or not, but he was riled about it, thanks to David.

  I didn’t like where this was going. I kept eating, but I didn’t taste the rest of the burger.

  “Way we see it,” David said, and bobbed his head a little so as to indicate the others, “you aren’t doing yourself any good.”

  “Oh, how’s that?”

  “Ought not have to spell it out for you, Hap. Hell, you know. Hanging with a nigger.”

  “You mean Leonard.”

  “Yeah. Okay. Leonard the nigger.”

  I nodded. I didn’t realize until that moment that I really liked Leonard, and these guys I had known all my life, if only a little, I didn’t care for that much at all.

  “Word’s getting around you’re a nigger-lover,” Dinosaur said.

  “Is it?”

  “Yeah. You don’t want that,” David said.

  “I don’t?”

  “Are you trying to be a smartass?” Dinosaur said.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. I put one foot out of the booth so I could move if I had to, could get a position to fight or run.

  “There’s talk, and it could reflect on you,” David said.

  “In w
hat way?”

  “You think girls want to date a nigger-lover? And way we hear it, this guy’s queer as a three-dollar bill, and proud of it. A nigger queer, come on, man. You got to be kidding me.”

  “But he has such a nice personality,” I said.

  “You aren’t going to listen, are you?” David said. “Girls don’t want to date no nigger-lover.”

  “You said that.”

  “Because it’s true.”

  “So, you have come here to spare me being viewed in a bad way, and to make sure I don’t lose my pussy quota? That’s what’s up?”

  “You’re making light of something you shouldn’t,” David said. “We got a way of doing things, and you know it.”

  “We got to keep it protected,” Dinosaur said.

  “We?” I said.

  “White people,” David said. “Now that niggers can vote and eat with us, they think they can act like us.”

  I nodded, glanced at the two that hadn’t spoken. “You guys, you thinking the same?”

  They all nodded.

  “Civil rights may change how the Yankees live,” David said, “but it won’t change us.”

  “That’s why I don’t like you guys.”

  This landed on their heads like a rock.

  “You don’t have to like us, but we can’t have one of our own hanging about with niggers. He’s not our kind. He’s not one of us.”

  “You know, it’s really been nice, but I have to go to work now, so I’ll see you.”

  I got up and eased past Dinosaur, keeping an eye on him, but trying to look like I wasn’t concerned.

  They all stood up. I was about halfway to the door when they came up behind me. David grabbed at my arm. I popped it free.

  “You better take in what we’re saying,” David said.

  “I could throw you through that window glass right now,” Dinosaur said.

  “You might need yourself a nap and a sack lunch before you’re able to throw me through that glass, or anywhere else for that matter,” I said.

  I was bluffing. I was a badass, and I knew it. But four guys, badass or not, are four guys. And one of them was a fucking freak of nature. I was reminded of how freakish he was with him standing almost as close to me as a coat of paint. He was looking down at me with a head like a bowling ball, shoulders wide enough to set a refrigerator on one side, a stove on the other.