The Two-Bear Mambo Read online

  A fiftyish lady who might have been pretty if she’d had enough energy to hold herself straighter and her hair wasn’t oily and stuck to her cheeks, came out of the back wiping wet flour on her apron. “What can I get you?”

  “Couple hamburgers and large coffees to go. Some potato chips.”

  “It’s early for hamburgers,” she said.

  “I missed breakfast. Got any fried pies?”

  “No. We sell some candy at the register. Peanut patties, Tootsie Rolls, Mounds, Snickers, Milky Way. That’s it.”

  “All right. Couple of peanut patties.”

  “That nigger out there will want more’n a couple of them patties,” said one of the men in the back. “A nigger likes a peanut pattie. Next to what a woman’s got, and a watermelon, ain’t much they like better.”

  “And loose shoes,” said the other fella. “And a warm place to shit.”

  “Boys,” said the woman, “you watch your language in here.”

  I looked at them and smiled sadly. I began to understand why so many clichés persist. Too much truth in them. I gave them a real looksee for the first time.

  Big motherfuckers. Not physicists. They looked like human bookends for the Adult Western Novel shelf. Both rednecked and stupid. The one talking almost had a mustache, or maybe he just hadn’t quite got shaving down yet. I wished, just once in a while, the guys wanted to harass me or whip my ass would be short. Kind of small. Weak even. In business suits. Yankees. That would make things a little more all right.

  Better yet, I wished those dudes would just leave me alone. What was it about me that I was the one always stepped in the doo-doo? If I walked ten miles around a cow lot to keep the manure off my shoes, I’d manage to find a fresh heap of dog shit to put my foot in.

  “Better give me a couple creams to go with that coffee,” I told the lady.

  “Nigger working for you?” said the other man. This one was not a bad-looking guy, but he had a tavern tumor that was threatening the buttons on his paisley shirt, and a kind of smirk like he’d been corn-holing your wife and she’d told him to tell you so.

  The lady said, “Boys, y’all ought to go hang out somewhere else.” Then to me: “I’ll just be a minute. You want those well-done, don’t you?”

  I spoke so only she could hear. “Actually, I’d like them about as quick as I can get them.”

  She smiled. “They don’t mean no harm. They just don’t like niggers.”

  “Ah.”

  Now I felt better.

  I glanced out at Leonard. He was really snoozing. In fact, he might have been hibernating. Great. Here I was with the hippo twins, and the Smartest Nigger in the World was tucked in for the winter.

  The boys came over and sat on stools on either side of me.

  “I ain’t seen you before,” said Paisley Shirt.

  “Well,” I said, “I don’t get through here much. Buy you fellas some coffee?”

  “Naw,” said the other one. “We’ve had coffee.”

  “Lots of it,” said Paisley Shirt.

  “I don’t know about you,” I said, “but lots of coffee makes me nervous. In fact, maybe I shouldn’t have got coffee with my lunch. I’ve had too much this morning already.”

  “You look a little nervous,” said Paisley Shirt. “Maybe you ought to give up coffee altogether.”

  “I just might,” I said.

  “Me and my brother,” said Paisley Shirt, “we don’t have trouble with coffee. We don’t have trouble with beer, wine, or whiskey.”

  “What about Christmas ants?” I said. “You got Christmas ant trouble, I know two guys you ought to meet.”

  “Christmas ants?” said Bad Mustache.

  The woman called from the back then. Her voice was a little halfhearted, like she was calling a dog she figured had gotten run over. “Y’all go back and sit down, now.”

  “We’re all right, Mama,” said Paisley Shirt.

  “Mama?” I said.

  “Uh huh,” said Bad Mustache. “What’s this about Christmas ants?”

  “Little bastards are serious trouble where I come from,” I said. “You think fire ants are hell, you get into some of them Christmas ants, well, those buggers won’t never let go.”

  “I ain’t never heard of no Christmas ants,” said Paisley Shirt.

  “Neither had most anybody else in LaBorde until yesterday,” I said. “But you’ll read about it in the papers today or tomorrow, see it on the news. They’re epidemic there. Brought in from Mexico, they think. In a crate of bananas. Or a shipment of cigars. They’re deadly dudes, these Christmas ants.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Bad Mustache. “Is that like them ants in that movie where they take over this plantation and this guy—”

  “Charlton Heston,” I said.

  “Yeah, I guess … you’ve seen it?”

  “Yep,” I said. “And that’s exactly what I’m talking about. But that was only a picture. They couldn’t show it the way it is. I tell you, LaBorde’s a mess. I think the loss of life is in the hundreds. Maybe the thousands by now. The guy in the car, Doctor Pine. He’s from the government. World’s expert on Christmas ants. One reason he’s passed out is he’s been up all night battling them. He lost.”

  “A nigger expert?” said Paisley. “There’s your goddamn problem.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He had some good ideas, but the ants were too entrenched. I’ll be honest with you. I work for the city there. Water Department. We were the first to catch on to the epidemic. Lots of people don’t give us credit. They don’t think much of the Water Department, but they don’t know the things we see. Alligators. Snakes. Christmas ants. You can’t drown those little bastards. The Christmas ants, I mean. And you better not have a banana, or some kind of fruit in your house. They track to the stuff like a pig to corn. Anyway, what I was saying is this. I’m not going back. Dr. Pine out there wants to go back, and he can if he wants, but not me. The ants have gotten too goddamn big for this cowboy.”

  “They grow?” said Paisley Shirt.

  I smiled. “Look, it’s not a science-fiction movie. It’s not like they’re ten feet tall. That’s bullshit. They only get about the size of a rat. Some of them do, I mean. Most of them, they’re more mouse or mole size.”

  “Naw,” said Bad Mustache. “You’re pulling our dicks.”

  “I wouldn’t think of pulling your dick,” I said. “Listen here, I wouldn’t have believed it either had I not been there. These ants, they don’t get that big in their own environment. But they thrive here. No one knew that until this week. What they’ve discovered, and it’s something no one would have suspected, is that the tropical weather was keeping them small. They get a little cold snap, bam, they’re big as rodents. It has something to do with the way they eat and the way their metabolism deals with the natural sugars and starches in human flesh.”

  “Human flesh?” Bad Mustache said.

  “Uh huh,” I said. “It’s not a horror movie where they swarm someone and eat every inch of skin off of them. But they leave bad bites. And they can cause death, and have. Like I said, in the hundreds.”

  “They bite you to death?” said Bad Mustache.

  “I’m a little sketchy on if it’s the bite or the poisons in their system that kills humans. They do take a lot of meat with them, though. Actually, you’d have to get Dr. Pine to explain it to you.”

  “Wow!” said Paisley Shirt.

  “Wow, indeed,” I said.

  “But why do you call them Christmas ants?” Bad Mustache asked.

  “Again, you got me. I’m no ant expert. Maybe because they were discovered around Christmastime. That’s what I figure.”

  The lady came out with my hamburgers.

  “LaBorde,” said Paisley Shirt. “That’s not that far from here.”

  “No it isn’t,” I said. I got up, went over to the register, and called back to them. “I wouldn’t alarm myself. I’d just be alert. Watch the ground. Especially at sunset and sunris
e. That’s when they like to travel.”

  The lady took my money at the register. She said, “Those boys are so dumb, I sometimes think maybe my kids were switched at birth, and they gave me these two jackasses. All they know is what they see on the TV.”

  “Maybe they ought to watch the educational channel. Last night they had a great National Geographic special on bears. I tell you, it tantalized me to the point I couldn’t sleep afterwards.”

  “I like a good nature program myself,” she said.

  I got my change, and started out. Paisley Shirt said, “Hey, you said there were two guys we ought to meet.”

  “Well,” I said, “I meant you would have liked them. They’re back in LaBorde. Or were. But, you know … the ants.”

  “You been jacking with us, ain’t you?” said Paisley Shirt.

  “There’s lots of people who’ve ignored the facts of scientific research,” I said. “All of it to their detriment. Believe what you want, it’s nothing to me. It’s not my job to educate the masses. I work for the Water Department. But I will say this. I’m proud of that. I don’t care what anyone else thinks about the Water Department. I’m proud.”

  I went out to the car and got in. I shook Leonard. He came around slowly and looked at me. “Man, I sort of passed out.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Leonard started the car as the brothers came out of the cafe, stood on the sidewalk and looked at us. Leonard watched them a moment, backed out and drove off.

  “Trouble?” he asked.

  “No. But I will say this. It’s not every day you can actually step into a science-fiction episode of The Andy Griffith Show by way of Deliverance.”

  7

  We drove out the way we’d come, stopped off at a little roadside park we’d passed. We got out under the pearl gray sky and ate our hamburgers and drank our coffee and rested our elbows on the concrete table. It was cold and the air smelled wet. Blue-jays, bold as priests, came out of the woods and hopped around the table looking for crumbs. I don’t think we left too many. We were starved.

  “I could do that again,” Leonard said. “Even if it did taste as if it was rubbed under someone’s armpit first.”

  “Frankly, short of the meat being kneaded between the cheeks of a fat man’s ass, I could have eaten it anyway.”

  “And how old were those peanut patties? Them peanuts were like gravel.”

  “The peanut patties aren’t nearly as big a problem as the fact we still don’t know where we’re going to stay. Did you have an urge for two of those, by the way? The peanut patties, I mean?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Buddy, I tell you, the vibes from that town, from that cafe, it’s like going back to the middle sixties, when I was marching for civil rights and getting my head cracked. Not only because I was for civil rights, but because I was white and marching for civil rights. You know, I don’t know I’m brave enough to do what I did then. It was all going on now, I think I’d hide in the house.”

  “It is going on now, and you’re not hiding in the house. You’re back in the shit. You weren’t special brave then, Hap. You were young and stupid and overly idealistic. You’re still the last two, even if the idealistic part is slightly tainted.”

  “What amazes me, Leonard, is you’re more of an optimist than I am. You even thought your time in Vietnam was well spent. If anyone should be bitching, it should be you. A black guy used up and thrown out. You hadn’t gone to war, man, no telling what you’d have made of yourself.”

  “I don’t blame anyone or anything for who I am or what I do. I consider myself just fine, Hap. I make my own choices, my own decisions, I sail my own ship till it crashes. Thing with you, is you actually feel guilty you’re not on the cover of Time magazine. Deep down, you believe that shit Florida used to tell you about how you weren’t ever gonna amount to anything or do anything. You think to be important you got to be some kind of Wall Street stockbroker or Nobel Prize winner. Listen here. You’re a good man and my friend, and we’re true as we know how to be to what we think is right. I don’t know what else there is that matters. All that other shit is just cake decoration.”

  “Thanks, Leonard.”

  “That’s all right. I didn’t mean any of it.”

  “Now that it’s established we’re good people and righteous friends, we still don’t have a place to stay.”

  “We might try the black folks. I figure the other side of town is where they hang out. They got to be around, all this field work and lumbering has to be done. They got to be there so white folks can tell them what to do. And, of course, they need a nigger to hang now and then.”

  “Good thing you showed up, huh?”

  Leonard looked at the sky. “You know, this weather is creepy. Last time I saw a sky like this it turned super-cold and full of ice, and bad things happened. I can still feel the pain in my leg now and then. And it was all your fault too.”

  “I remember. But the clouds look to me more like they’re filled with rain. I think we’re in for a hell of a soaking.”

  “We don’t find a place, we could just go on back for tonight. Regroup, start over in the next day or two.”

  “I want to find Florida. It won’t be any easier a day or two from now, even if the weather is better. And it could be worse. Seeing Grovetown, I’m a little nervous for her welfare. Florida has to be staying somewhere.”

  “It’s logical that she’ll be in the black section.”

  “Probably, but for protocol’s sake, I think a good place to start is the Chief of Police. If she was doing research on this jail hanging, you know she talked to him. We might get something from the Chief that’ll save us some steps.”

  And now, cruising back to Grovetown, eyes closed, listening to the tires humming, I tried to tell myself I wasn’t really worried much. Tried to convince myself I didn’t know Leonard so well that I could be certain he was worried too and didn’t want to say anything to make me more uptight than I was. And maybe I was sensing nothing of the kind from Leonard. He had his own heartaches. Raul was gone.

  But Raul wasn’t dead.

  Jesus. Don’t let Florida be dead, and don’t let that kind of bullshit get in your thinking, Hap, you jinx, you. Because if she’s dead, that makes two, back to back. Then I was thinking about Florida, about her coffee-colored skin, soft as butter, the way she smiled, the white, near perfect teeth, the long smooth legs and the way she whispered to me when we made love. And there were the more primitive thoughts as well; the ones that are as real as any other. The way she took me inside her and moved her ass and made me feel strong and masculine, and loved me until the world went away and I was centered. A nirvana where all past and present and future moments were non-existent.

  Shit, that was good. I got home, I had to write that down.

  That’s right, Hap, clown on out. Try not to think about the fact that you thought things between you and Florida were going to be wonderful and forever. And then she was gone.

  But she hadn’t married Hanson. I liked to think I was part of the reason. That she loved me still.

  Yeah. And now and then, I liked to believe I would live forever too, and that I wouldn’t age past where I was now and the meaning of life would soon come to me, and would not disappoint me when I knew it.

  Sometimes I feared I knew the meaning of life. Simplicity itself. We’re born to propagate, then we die. In my case, or so it seemed, I was merely born to die.

  Clear the head, Hap, ole buddy, you loser times two. No bad thoughts today. No letting a heavy gray sky hold you hostage. No memories you can’t deal with. A step at a time. Keep an even heartbeat and roll on down the road.

  But then I thought of Trudy, my ex-wife, dead now for … my God, what was it?

  Four years.

  Jesus.

  It seemed like yesterday.

  It seemed like a thousand years ago.

  Blond, long-legged beauty with a smile like an angel and a misguided heart. And it had been w
inter then too. I nearly lost Leonard then as well, and that too had been my fault.

  Okay, Trudy is dead and gone, Hap, I says to my ownself, but you don’t know about Florida. You’re overreacting. She’s all right. You’ll find her. If not today, tomorrow. Alive. She may not be happy to see you. Might think you’re a meddling sonofabitch, and you are, but when you see her, and she’s okay, that’s all that will matter.

  She’s all right, Hap, my man.

  She’s fine.

  Fit as a fiddle.

  Ripe as a peach.

  A roll of thunder. A crack of lightning.

  I opened my eyes and turned and looked at Leonard in the cloud-suffocated light. He looked at me briefly with no expression, his fingers flexed on the steering wheel. He turned back to his driving.

  The clouds were black now, with a little spoiled milk in them. They rolled down low and came in over the highway like hell’s own tumbleweeds. The windshield turned dark as early evening.

  Leonard pulled on the headlights and turned on the wipers as it started to rain.

  8

  Back in Grovetown, at the Chief of Polices office, a middle-aged lady with a sprayed, bleached blond hairdo high enough to house a colony of African wasps told us Chief Cantuck had gone out to investigate a fire, and she gave us directions. She eyed Leonard as if he might spring on her and rape her at any moment. She had a little aluminum Christmas tree on one corner of her desk and it was surrounded by a city of Christmas cards from well-wishers; she leaned in that direction, as if she might decide to hide behind them.

  Back in the car, I said, “You made that lady nervous, Leonard. She thought you were going to try and take her on her desk.”

  “Wishful thinking. Actually, I wanted to fuck that hairdo she had, just in case there was something in it needed fucking. That little gap in it, right over her widow’s peak, it reminded me of a butthole.”

  “Knowing you like I do,” I said, “I hate it when someone says you aren’t romantic.”

  We followed directions, drove out to where the Chief’s car was parked beside the road, along with a rickety fire truck. The rain had temporarily subsided, but the sky was still ripe with it, and it didn’t take a weatherman to see it would come again, and maybe harder.