Bad Chili Read online

  “Why didn’t you?

  “Afraid I’d burn my balls.”

  “Some help you are. I think you just don’t want to be handlin’ no queer’s balls.”

  “I don’t want to be handling anybody’s balls but my own.”

  “Yeah, well, you’ll be sorry, I get that tick disease. You’ll wish you’d pinched that tick off.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Way this sonofabitch is swellin’ up, I’m gonna have to put a camp chair beside the bed so my balls and the tick got a place to sleep.”

  “Hey, you want, I’ll get your balls and the tick a blanket and a fluffy pillow, but I’m not pulling nothing off your balls.”

  As usual, the conversation degenerated from there, finally drifted, and we just sat there silently and fished. The wind stopped and turned hard and hot and the air was difficult to breathe, but still we sat, and finally the heat began to fade, and it was cool again, without the wind, and the air was fresh and the brightness of the day fell down amongst the trees, and the sky turned purple, then black, and the stars came out, big and bright and splendid.

  We walked home through the dark with our gear, a can of perch and a flashlight, arrived at my house in time to clean the fish by porch light, fry them up, and have a good supper.

  After supper we watched a little TV. Then Leonard left early. I promised to come over the next morning and help him clean. He drove off and I watched something on TV I wasn’t really paying attention to for about an hour, then cut it off, went to bed, and read a science fiction novel for a while.

  * * *

  Next morning, early, I got up and drove to town and bought some sausage and biscuits at the drive-through of a fast-food joint, went over to Leonard’s place.

  When he let me in, the house smelled of coffee, and most of the living room had been picked up, and the kitchen porcelain was shiny and the kitchen floor in front of the refrigerator was bright and damp from a recent mopping.

  “You’ve been busy,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Leonard said. “Couldn’t sleep last night. Stayed up cleaning. Come in the kitchen, just step careful. Floor’s still damp.”

  I did that. Put the sack on the table, pulled up a chair. I said, “You pour us some coffee, and I’ll give you a sausage and biscuit.”

  “That’s a good-enough deal,” Leonard said. “You know what’s odd? I discovered something missing.”

  “Oh?”

  “Videotapes. The blank ones, and the ones with movies on them. They’re all gone.”

  “You mean someone broke into the house and stole movies?”

  “Looks that way,” Leonard said. “I got to figuring, and thought, well, the Gilligan tapes are gone, so it could have been Raul. Maybe he’s the one wrecked the house. You know, pissed at me. Maybe thinks I did Horse Dick in. So he comes here, throws stuff around, and takes his Gilligan tapes. But the thing is, why would he take The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and a bunch of others?”

  “They’re good movies?”

  “He didn’t think so. Anything that had gunfire in it he was against. I’m not sayin’ my tastes run to Battleship Potemkin, but all of Raul’s taste was in his mouth, and besides for my dick, which spent a goodly amount of time in his mouth, I don’t think he knew good taste.”

  “Maybe he stole them because you liked them? A kind of revenge.”

  “I thought of that,” Leonard said. “But why did he steal the blank videotapes?”

  “So he could tape stuff on them.”

  “All right. All that works, but why just the videotapes? There’s music CDs here he liked, and he didn’t take those. He didn’t take anything else I think would have interested him. And this mess doesn’t strike me as vandalism. There’s a lot of things could have been broken for fun, but weren’t. Most of the stuff is just tossed around. What’s broken seems to have been the result of a search. It wasn’t a vandal. I think someone was looking for something, and that doesn’t fit in with Raul. He knew where everything was, so why would he throw stuff around?”

  “He was mad at you.”

  “Could be. But, I don’t think he took the videos at all.”

  “Someone else took the Gilligan tapes?”

  “That’s my guess.”

  “Man, a crime like that, it shows you what the world is coming to. Fucking crooks are like bottom feeders now. Who the fuck in their right mind would want a tape of Gilligan’s Island, let alone the whole series?”

  “Bob Denver?”

  “Shit. Don’t you know he gets tired of wearing that stupid sailor hat and trying to look perky?”

  “You think the series waddled in shit, you got to see the reunion movie,” Leonard said. “Raul made me watch it. And man, that one is really deadly. It sort of numbs you, you know, like a kind of nerve gas. I was weak for two days.”

  “You just hit on the secret,” I said. “It was stolen by the State Department to use as a means of covert warfare.”

  “Way I figure it,” Leonard said, “them folks already got a complete set of Gilligan. It goes with their Three’s Company collection. It’s what they watch when they’re supposed to be solving the nation’s problems.”

  * * *

  We worked on the house until early afternoon, had some sandwiches, decided we ought to drive into town and buy a few cleaning supplies. We went in my truck. On the way back to Leonard’s house, he said, “This Old Pine Road, where Horse Dick got it. Could we drive over there?”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Guess I’d like to see the spot where this guy they thought I killed bought it.”

  “I don’t know that’s such a good idea,” I said.

  “Come on, Hap.”

  I didn’t much care for it, but we drove out to Old Pine Road, which isn’t much of a road, really. It’s narrow and winds through a heavily wooded area and links up with a highway that leads to Lufkin. It’s shady because of the trees, and not too heavily traveled.

  We drove along, finally saw some tire tracks burned into the road, heading through the underbrush and into a large oak tree. Beyond the oak the ground was covered in a deep carpet of kudzu vines and wildflowers, and the hill rolled down steep and turned level as it met the woods.

  We pulled to the side of the road, got out and looked around. It was a bright, hot day, and everything I looked at seemed to be viewed through a piece of transparent, lemon-colored rock candy. The air was full of pollen. Every time I took a breath it was like sniffing flour. Within minutes my throat was scratchy and my nose was plugged. It didn’t help my cold much.

  We looked at the oak, could see where the bike struck it. It was a damn good strike. A chunk had been taken out of the tree as if with an axe.

  “If the shotgun hadn’t killed him,” Leonard said, “you can bet this tree wouldn’t have done him any good.”

  “Without the shotgun, he wouldn’t have hit the tree,” I said. “Now you’ve seen it. Make you feel any better?”

  “No. I don’t really know why I wanted to see it.”

  We stood under the oak out of the sunlight while Leonard dealt with his thoughts, stood there hugging the shade. Not that it helped. It was still hot and the pollen was thick.

  “You know,” Leonard said, “I bet I could put a weenie on a stick, poke it out from under this shade, and the sun would cook it. . . . What’s that?”

  Leonard was turned away from the road, looking down the hill, toward the woods. I looked and saw a scattering of mosquitoes buzzing at the edge of the woods where shadow gave way to light. The insects rolled and rose and dropped like a tiny black cloud amongst the trees. I could imagine them looking up at us, thinking, Come on down and we’ll strip your bones, for we are the piranha of the air.

  It was the mosquitoes I thought Leonard was talking about, but then I followed his pointing finger and saw what he saw. It lay partially buried in the vines near the woods. It was silver, and the sunlight bounced off of it as if it were a m
irror. The reflected light was painful to view and caused me to squint my eyes.

  “I don’t know what it is,” I said.

  “Could be a piece off the motorcycle,” Leonard said.

  “Cops looked the place over,” I said.

  “Don’t forget, it’s the LaBorde cops we’re talking about. Charlie, excluded, of course. I bet they didn’t even go down the hill. At least not all the way. Especially the fat ones. They went down too far, they wouldn’t have been able to get back up.”

  “What if it is part of the motorcycle?” I said. “So what?”

  “It could lead to the solving of the case.”

  “What, a fender? The handlebars?”

  “You need to read some Agatha Christie, man.”

  “Why? Am I being punished?”

  “You read her, you’ll find nothing is too small. Let’s go down and see what it is.”

  “It’s a steep hill.”

  “I bet that’s exactly what the fat cops said.”

  “They were right.”

  “We’re manly men. We can do it.”

  “Will you carry me?”

  “Nope.”

  We went down the hill, our ankles clutched by kudzu and all manner of undergrowth, and when we were within twenty feet of it I thought it was a huge wad of aluminum foil. Then I saw that what I thought were the natural crumples of a wad of foil were not crumples, but dents, and it wasn’t foil, it was a motorcycle helmet. I could see part of the visor, and it was cracked, and I could see something behind the visor, and Leonard, who was slightly ahead of me, could see it too because he stopped walking, made a kind of startled move and let his breath out slowly.

  “Shit,” he said. “Goddamn shit.”

  I went on past where he was standing, got closer. There was a head in the helmet, and there was a body attached to the head, and the body was twisted down into the vines. I couldn’t see the body from atop the hill, just a piece of the helmet, but I could see all of it easily from this angle, and the legs and arms looked as if they were nothing more than the limbs of a scarecrow, stuffed with straw, twisted into the kudzu.

  I squatted down and looked at the face inside the helmet. The head was turned in there too far and was covered in what looked like molasses but wasn’t. There were ants and maggots on the part of the face I could see. The wind had changed and the smell of death rode on it and blew into my nostrils and defeated the plugs of pollen. It was all I could do not to get sick.

  I got up and turned Leonard by grabbing him by the elbow and started us up the hill.

  “It was Raul, wasn’t it?” Leonard said.

  “Yep.”

  11

  We made an anonymous call to the police department and they came and got the body, and next day they made a big deal out of it in the papers, about how the cops had done this great detective work.

  There was stuff about the murder of Horse Dick, though he wasn’t called that. There was no mention of the fact Raul was found just down the hill from where Horse bought it. But it was pretty clear, if you read between the lines, that Raul had been on the back of the bike.

  It wasn’t clear how Horse, between collecting knots from Leonard, ended up with Raul and the two of them had gone riding. But it appeared when Horse got his head blown off, the bike had gone into a tree, and so had Raul, and Raul had hit the tree so hard it had knocked him willy-nilly down the hill and into the vines.

  That was pretty much the sum of all that was known.

  Two days later Raul’s parents came from Houston and had him buried in a little graveyard out in the country. It was a quiet shady place with Civil War veterans, black folks, and paupers, and for some reason they decided not to haul him home but to have him planted there.

  Leonard wasn’t invited to the funeral or the burying, but he went to the burial anyway. The graveyard was on one side of a blacktop road, and there was a cluster of oaks on the other side. We parked beneath them, sat on the hood of the rented Chevy, and watched the service.

  We didn’t have on black. We didn’t have on ties. The coffin was bronze. The family was weeping.

  The whole thing was over in short time, then the cars filed out. One of the people attending the funeral stood by the fence for a while, started across the road toward us. He was dressed in black, all neat. At first he was hard to recognize without his Hawaiian shirt, cheap suit, and porkpie hat.

  “Thought you might be here,” he said to Leonard.

  “Yeah,” Leonard said.

  “I’m sorry,” Charlie said. “You should have been invited.”

  “Family don’t like queers,” Leonard said. “Far as they were concerned, Raul wasn’t queer. He was just a little confused. Any day now he’d quit suckin’ dicks and start dive-bombing pussy.”

  “Easy, Leonard,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Leonard said. “Easy.”

  Charlie climbed onto the Chevy’s hood, sat by Leonard. “I wasn’t invited either. Came anyway. Thought whoever did it might show up. You know, like in the movies. Returning to the scene of the crime.”

  “You don’t mean me, do you?” Leonard said.

  “No,” Charlie said.

  “Well, you sure don’t mean me,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “Actually, I came ’cause I thought I might see you two. Raul’s body was on Old Pine Road, just down the hill from where Horse Dick bought it. Down there all the time.”

  “So we heard,” Leonard said.

  “Shits went out there to investigate the site didn’t do much of a job,” Charlie said.

  “Boy, that surprises me,” Leonard said. “A dead queer, I thought everybody would be in a hurry.”

  “It ain’t one dead queer,” Charlie said. “It’s two.”

  “All right,” Leonard said. “Two dead queers.”

  “Could it be one of you boys called in about the body?” Charlie asked.

  “Could be,” I said.

  “Thought so. You boys are too nosey to let something lay.”

  “Hey, we did better than you guys,” I said.

  “That’s what gets my goat,” Charlie said. “Want a little tidbit, boys?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “The two dead queers,” Charlie said. “One of them was a cop.”

  We both stared at Charlie. I said, “Well, since it wasn’t Raul, that leaves Horse.”

  “See,” Charlie said, “your powers of deduction. Phenomenal.”

  “Don’t fuck around here,” Leonard said. “I’m not in the mood. Horse Dick was a cop?”

  “Yep,” Charlie said. He reached inside his suit coat, brought out a flattened pack of cigarettes. He put one in his mouth, got out a lighter, and lit it. He said, “He was working undercover.”

  “Under Raul’s covers,” Leonard said.

  “He was on special assignment,” Charlie said. “Didn’t know it till the other day. It wasn’t part of my business. This was something the chief set up.”

  “The chief set up stuff with a gay cop?” I said.

  “Didn’t know he was gay,” Charlie said. “Chief knew, guy wouldn’t have been a cop, let alone on assignment. I’d seen the guy around, but he wasn’t part of my action. I didn’t connect the death of the biker with the cop’s death, not until it got to be more common knowledge. It was slow to leak around the department. Chief thought it made him look like an idiot, so he wasn’t blowin’ any trumpets.”

  “I’ll be a sonofabitch,” I said.

  “Guys are running a lot of drugs through the Blazing Wheel,” Charlie said. “So Chief got Horse . . . McNee . . . and that’s another alias. His real name is Bill Jenkins. Anyway, Chief got him to go undercover. Horse got involved with Raul, then he and Raul got dead.”

  “You think it had something to do with Horse being a cop, or being gay?” I said.

  “Don’t know,” Charlie said, shaking his head as he blew out smoke. “Maybe both. Maybe neither. Whatever, I wanted y’all to know, ’cause truth of the matter is this
one may not get the attention it deserves. Cop gets killed in the line of duty, we’re all over it. But, like you said, Leonard, couple of fags, Chief being like he is, seeing this as some reflection on the department and himself . . . It could fall between the cracks. Might already be there. I maybe can’t do what ought to be done. Get what I’m sayin’?”

  “Yeah,” Leonard said. “We get what you’re sayin’.”

  “I didn’t really know Raul that much,” Charlie said. “I hate he’s dead, though. I mean, you liked him.”

  “Good enough,” Leonard said.

  Charlie finished his smoke, climbed off the hood. “See you boys later.”

  Charlie went down to his car and drove away.

  We sat there for a while watching the grave digger with his backhoe. He threw the dirt in fast and got things tidy, drove the backhoe through a large gate on the other side of the graveyard, wheeled it onto a trailer hooked to a truck. He fastened the backhoe down. He locked the gate up. He drove the trailer and the backhoe away.

  Two men took down the striped funeral tent and placed the flowers and wreaths the bereaved had ordered onto and around the grave. They loaded up and got out of there.

  We walked down to the graveyard, went through the gate. Walked past gravestones. I read some of them. Civil War dates. One worn stone bore the faded words BELOVED SLAVE AND SERVANT chiseled on it, which I thought was kind of ironic.

  One said JAKE REMINGTON, adding, NO RELATION TO THE ARTIST OR THE GUN MANUFACTOR OF THE SAME LAST NAME. There was a Jane Skipforth, who died in the early 1900s, FROM COMPLICATIONS WITH MEN. A Bill Smith, who died in World War I. HIS PLANE WENT DOWN, BUT HIS SPIRIT SOARS. A Frank Jerbovavitch, who got old and died. A Willie, no dates, just Willie. A Fred Russel, just dates. No mention of his relationship to the famous western artist of the same last name.

  And so it went. But it really didn’t matter what was said or wasn’t. Now they were all brothers and sisters under the dirt.

  Leonard stood at Raul’s grave, said, “Somehow, it don’t mean nothin’, a grave. Just like when my uncle got buried. He’s dead, and that’s all there is to it.”

  Leonard kicked some dirt onto the grave and we left.