The Two-Bear Mambo (9 page)

"I know about that," said Tim. "I got that much out of her. | We talked a little when we saw each other. She was convinced Bobby Joe was innocent just because he was black and in a white jail."

"Innocent really hasn't got anything to do with it," I said. "Guilty or innocent, you're supposed to let the State of Texas do j the killing, and with a needleful of poison."

"Yeah, well, we're back to where we started," Tim said. "Like I was sayin', I don't give a shit what happened to Soothe."

"Frankly," Leonard said, "I don't give a shit, if he had it comin'. I'm not as sweet as Hap. He still has all his Roy Rogers [cap guns and stuff. But what we're concerned with is that Florida was in Grovetown, now she isn't, and she isn't home, and |we're nervous."

"You're thinking bad business descended?" Tim said.

"We're thinking it might have, or can yet," Leonard said. "We hope we're just old worried grandmas."

"I don't know I can help you beyond saying I hope you're wrong," Tim said.

"Anything different about her last time you saw her?" Leonard asked.

"Maybe she was a little tired, or nervous, but you're black and hang out here, you're gonna get a little nervous. Don't believe in time travel, just hang around here a week. Better yet, don't. "

"So, " Leonard said, "you're saying' all the white guys in town, except you, were just perched like buzzards waiting to take her down?"

"I suppose you could say that. "

"I don't doubt this town is backwards as hell, " Leonard said, "but I don't buy every white guy here is a murderous prick. Is that what you're trying to tell me? You are, I got to ask, what makes you so special? You ain't threatening me. You wanted to fuck Florida. You don't seem like you're worried that the White Knights of the Asshole will come down on you with a barrel of tar and a basket of chicken feathers for wanting to bury your toad in some black hole, you got the chance. "

"You're kinda dropping down on me pretty quick, aren't you, pal?" Tim said.

"Leonard's motto is 'Make a New Friend Every Day, ' " I said.

Tim grinned that infectious grin. "Hey, it's all right. And you got some points, fella. But let me sorta tick 'em off. First off, my dick ain't no toad. It's just as pretty as a little old skinned banana, but a hell of a lot harder. 'Specially after I've had some pickled pig's feet. Pussy ain't a black hole. If it's black pussy, white pussy, yellow pussy, or red pussy, any other color, on the inside it's all pink and it all feels like a hot mink glove on your weener. So now we got that straight.

"Next thing. This town ain't filled with Klan types. It only needs a diligent few to be members. A few more who won't participate in their shit, but are behind them, and some others that might be against them, but are afraid to say anything, and for good reason. You don't believe me, let me tell you, not that long ago they sewed a little ole black gal's thang together and got away with it."

"So we heard," I said.

"They've been known to nail black men to trees and work them over with a blowtorch. Burn off their balls. You don't hear about all that goin' on, but it does. Maybe not right here in town, but roundabouts. And maybe not recently, but recent enough, and it could get real recent anytime.

"And I can hustle a little black tail if I want. You see, it's okay a white man wants to get him a dark piece, long as he has a sense of humor about it and thinks of the piece as just nigger pussy. 'Course, this white and black thing, here in Grovetown, it don't work in reverse. Black man wants to get him a white piece, well, that's considered unnatural and punishable by death.

"All that aside, main reason I'm left alone is my daddy. The old sonofabitch is Jackson Truman Brown. I've kept my mother's name. Anyway, Daddy's Grovetown s old-time swingin' dick. He's smooth, dresses in nice suits, can talk that shit, but he's at heart a plantation owner that misses the old days when you could work a black man to death and hang him for fartin'. His daddy's daddy, my great-grandfather, was famous for hanging a black man that looked at great-grandpa's wife a little longer than great-grand thought he should have. But hanging wasn't good enough. When the fella was dead, he propped him on a post out in his fields to use as a scarecrow. Left him there for his black field hands to see till the body rotted away. In other words, he wasn't just scarin' crows. He was scarin' his slaves."

"What is it your daddy does?" I asked.

"He owns Jackson's Christmas Tree Farm and the lumber mill here. Both thriving concerns. Folks from all over Texas and the United States got to have their Christmas trees, I can tell you that. He's got these goddamn fir trees that all grow to look exactly alike. Not native trees, Yankee trees. They've been rebred, or whatever trees do to make more trees, and they can stand the Texas heat and the clay soil better than a native pine. He ships those dudes from here to Kansas City in air-conditioned trucks. And you want to work here in Grovetown, you want him to be happy with you. Because not only does he own the lumber mill and run the Christmas tree farm, he owns a lot of other things, as well as a lot of people. Black and white. Only things in this town he don't own are the cafe and the Chief, and maybe with the Chief it don't matter much. Like I said, he's honest and fair, but he and my old man share a lot of the same views."

"I notice you have an aluminum Christmas tree," Leonard said.

"Sort of speaks volumes, don't it?" Tim said.

"What about your station here?" I asked. "He own that?"

"Goddamn him, he owns that too. Loaned me the money for it—key word here is loaned, not gave, and he expects the payments, or I'll be back at the Christmas tree farm. I hate the bustard, and he knows it, and likes it. What I want most in the world is to get the money to pay him off, be a free man. Fact is, what I want most in the world is money. I admit it. Here I was, son of the richest man in town, and I was always wearing worn-out clothes with patches and carried my lunch in a fucking paper bag. Wouldn't even let me buy a lunch box like the rest of the kids. Thought it built character. What it did was it embarrassed me. I said I got older and got a chance to get money, I'd get it. The whole idea of going around poor, even owning this shitty filling station when I ought to have a good life, all the money he's got, I get itchy. Mad even.

"But I got my edge on him. See, I'm kind of an embarrassment. I actually had a couple years college in something besides business. Anthropology. Though it didn't take. I can tell you a little about North American Indians, you want, but when it comes down to it, what I know is about as useless as tits on a boar hog. Still, I'm his son, and he's insurance for me. I wanted to, I could go over there and set fire to the cafe, and he'd make it

so it was understood I was merely tryin' to warm up the place. But he wouldn't drop what I owe him on this station, and I don't pay it, he'll own the station. More coffee, fellas?"

Leonard and I declined. Tim offered us the pig's feet again, at a slightly reduced price, but we declined those as well.

"Let me ask you something," I said. "There anyplace we could rent a room for a few nights in this town?"

"I doubt it," Tim said. "I mean, I don't know."

"You don't know?" Leonard said. "Then let me ask you this. Where did Florida stay?"

Tim smiled, but the smile looked silly this time, not infectious. "Why, out at my mother's place."

About noon, we bought some sandwich makings, and Tim called his mother, tried to get us a place to stay. Turned out his mother owned a few trailers she rented out, and one was available.

"I like you fellas and all,” Tim said after the phone call,” but way it works, needing money like I do, you pay Mom, and you pay me a little finder's fee.”

"What's a little?" Leonard asked.

"Fifty dollars.”

"That's a little!" I said.

"It's how much it's gonna be you stay at Mom's trailer park.”

Leonard grumbled, paid the fifty in two twenties and a ten.

"Florida pay you a finder's fee?" Leonard asked.

"You betcha,” Tim said, folding his money into his wallet. ”I never claimed I was a philanthropist."

Tim decided to close up and guide us out to his mom's place. He told us he had planned to stay open Christmas Day, partly out of boredom, and out of the fact he could snag a few extra dollars by being the only place available in town to pick up gas and goods, but the weather being the way it was, that turned out to be a pipe dream.

Still, bad as it was, it had slacked some, and we took the moment to get started. Tim drove an old four-wheel-drive, green, broad wheel-base pickup with gaudy tail flaps. One flap had the silhouette of a naked silver lady on it. The other would have had the same but it was ripped in half, leaving only the lady's head.

We followed in Leonard's heap, and as we drove, Leonard said,” He could have told us up front Florida had been staying with his mother.”

"I think he was just being cautious,” I said. ”Watching out for Florida. Remember, he was mum until he asked if we were kin, boyfriends, or bill collectors? I think he didn't want to bring shit down on Florida, if he could keep from it. Or maybe he was watching out for his mother. Either way, I think he was being considerate. And remember, he didn't have to tell us dick.”

"I don't like the dude.”

"Really? He seems all right. Maybe a little too self-consciously folksy, but okay.”

"A fifty-dollar finder's fee? I don't give a shit about his childhood money problems. I give a shit about my fifty dollars he's got.”

"You are the most suspicious sonofabitch I have ever known, Leonard. He's a little overly money-conscious, and he strikes me as a would-be cock dog, but neither of those things are exactly criminal.”

"Yeah, well doesn't he make you feel kind of creepy, him talking all that good ole boy bullshit?"

"Only thing creepy is how easy it is for me to do it too.”

"There's some truth.”

"Yeah. Well, what about that cockroaches can't play basketball thing?"

"I like that one,” Leonard said. ”But that aside, if Florida stayed out here, you got to bet this guy was sniffing her ass regular like.”

"He may have wanted her, but trust me, my friend, if this gal doesn't want to put up with bullshit, she has a way of dealing with you that'll make you feel knee high to a cricket pretty quick. And maybe it takes a heterosexual to understand what I'm getting at, but this lady, young as she is, pretty as she is, she isn't any babe in the woods. Not about men, anyway. Maybe about other things, but trust me, she's got an A+ in Dealing With Men.”

"All right. There's some more truth. I saw Florida drag you around by your ying-yang some, that's for sure.”

"I ain't proud of it.”

"Nor should you be.”

One minute it was gray and damp, the heater humming, keeping us warm, the wipers thumping almost happily, and suddenly the sky went black as night and the rain fell down in silver sheets thick as corrugated tin. The air in the car turned cool and the heater moaned as if dying of pneumonia, the wipers swiped at the rain like a drowning victim trying to tread water.

Got so bad, Tim pulled over to the side of the road and sat in his truck. We pulled up behind him and sat too, waited. It was a full forty-five minutes before the rain subsided enough for us to continue, and as we drove on, slowly, I looked out my side, watched as we crawled past an old gray clapboard building. It was long and low-built and the walls were leaning, and you could tell the floor had long since lost its battle against gravity and was lying flat on the ground, the old support blocks having shifted and sunk. Through one of the windows I could see an unlit Christmas tree tilting to port, and an unlit neon sign over the front door that was impossible to read through the slash and thrash of the rain.

"A black juke joint,” Leonard said.

"Yep,” I said.

We continued at a drag, the water splitting before us and slamming against the bottom of the car, floating us left and right. I began to understand how it must feel to be in a submarine.

Tim's mother's place proved to be well outside of Grovetown, down some incredibly muddy roads, deep in some bottom land that made me nervous, weather being the way it was. I didn't know much about Grovetown, but I knew the dam for Lake Nanonitche was nearby, and not too many years ago it had burst and drowned three people and waterlogged enough property to cause Grovetown and surrounding burgs to become designated as a National Disaster Area.

When we got to the trailer park, I was even more nervous. I'd never seen anything like it. The park consisted of six nasty-ass mobile homes — one a double-wide — standing on stilts damn near twelve feet off the ground with crude wooden stairways leading to their doors.

We parked and sat in Leonard's car while Tim went up to the double-wide, climbed the stairs and knocked on the door. He went inside and stayed awhile.

When he came out he was under an umbrella with an older woman who was wearing an orange raincoat and matching galoshes. Tim beckoned us to him. We got out in the driving rain and met them at the bottom of the stairs. The woman was sixty-ish, attractive in an "I’ve been hit by a truck" kind of way.

Tim said,” This is my mother.”

"Y'all got money?" she said.

Like son, like mother.

"We can buy lunch and have dessert if the waiters don't wear suits,” Leonard said.

Mom studied on that, said,” Come on.”

We moved through ankle-deep muddy water behind them, soaked to the bone. The woman walked with her left leg stiff, her left hand in her raincoat pocket. She leaned against Tim as if she was trying to find her sea legs.

We climbed some stairs, the woman managing it with considerable effort, and stood on a platform in front of a trailer door that was all bent up with an aluminum strip peeling off to one side. There was a huge splotch of blackness at the edge of the door where fire had slipped from the inside and kissed the exterior.

Ms. Garner put a key in the door, and when it was unlocked, Tim got hold of the edge with his fingers and tugged at it. It screeched as if alive, then we were in.

It smelled doggy dank and burnt in there. There was a carpet that looked as if it had once lined a pigpen, and the dog odor came from it. The burnt smell came from a portion of the wall next to the door. That part of the wall was absent of paneling and consisted of charred insulation. The "living room" was furnished with one old rickety couch mounted on cinder blocks and a chair with a cushion that dipped almost to the floor. There was one little gas heater and it was missing most of its grates, and the ones it had were busted.

The kitchen was just another part of the same room, and you could see where there had been a grease fire over the stove. The dank carpet and burnt insulation odor that tracked us from the living room blended with the stench of rancid grease coating the stove top. The fridge hummed desperately, like a dying man trying to remember a sentimental tune.

"Well,” Leonard said,” this is nice.”

"Don't like it, go to hell,” said Ms. Garner. She said that without so much as a change of features.

"So much for the big sell,” Leonard said. ”How much is it? Considering we'll be camping out.”

"Ten dollars a day, pay by the day. Use too much gas or electricity, there'll be a charge for that. I watch the meters.”

"This place looks like you found it when it floated downriver after a fire and tornado,” Leonard said.

"It wasn't so bad six months ago,” Ms. Garner said. ”Morons moved in here were a bunch of them goddamn holier-than-thou Christians. Ones where the men wear their pants pulled up under the armpits and like green suits with white shoes. Women like to pile their hair on their head and wear ugly dresses.”

"Pentecostal,” I said.

"Morons,” Ms. Garner said.

"Did they live in here with a herd of cows?" Leonard asked.

"You're a smart one, ain't you?" Ms. Garner said.

"My dearest friends call me the Smartest Nigger in the World.”

"Yeah. Well, I believe it. What these Christian high-hairs had was a goddamn Chihuahua. One of them little ugly Mexican dogs looks like a shaved rat with a disease. Goddamned lab experiment material is what they are.

"Three men and three women, two kids. I charged 'em twenty dollars a day, there being so many. And they had a whole slew of Bibles and tracts and religious crap. Stupid morons.”

"Calm down, Mom,” Tim said. ”You're gonna strain yourself.”

"Don't talk to me like I'm constipated,” she said.

"Whatever,” Tim said, and shrugged his shoulders at us.

"Kids gave the dog a bath,” she said,” and get this, they put the goddamn rat in the oven to dry. Turned on the oven and put the rat in there. He got dried up all right. Little turd caught on fire, starting barking — screaming, really. A dog gets hurt enough, it can scream. Heard him all the way over in my trailer. They let him out of the oven just before he was a casserole. He run all over the place. Caught them Bibles and tracts on fire, then that crap caught the wall on fire. I threw them Christians out on their holy butts. They had to tote what was left of that mutt off in a smokin' pail. Looked kind of pathetic, even if it was a Chihuahua. Nothing but that old blackened tail stickin' out of the top of that bucket, like a burned-down lantern wick.”

"Yeeech,” Leonard said. “I'm just glad it wasn't a real dog.”

"Anyway, those irresponsibles burned up their dog and trashed my trailer. What a bunch of dipshits. I hope y'all aren't dipshits.”

"No, ma'am,” Leonard said.” Least I'm not. But I'll watch Hap for you.”

"Yeah, well don't put him in the oven,” she said. ”And if you've got any more snide remarks about the accommodations here, you can hit the road before we get started. Let me tell you something. I didn't ask to rent to either of you. My son wanted me to help out, way I did that colored gal. I'd rather do without money than put up with shit. You boys got that?"

We said we had it.

She pointed to a dark and exceptionally narrow doorway. ”Crapper's right over there. It's slow flush, so don't wipe so severe you cram the bowl with paper. You won't never get it down. Guess that's about it. Want the place or not?"

"We'll stay,” I said. “But might I ask, as if I didn't know, why all these trailers are on stilts?"

"About five years ago we had a hell of a rain and a flood. Down here in the bottoms, it comes a good rain, you can catch catfish in the commode. Flood washed the entire park away. Fortunately I was in town. Couple old geezers renting the far end trailer drowned like ants in a ditch.”

"That's what I was afraid of,” I said.

"That's why I had these trailers put on stilts. These are good solid posts under us.”

To prove her point she hopped heavily on her one good leg three or four times. ”See there. Doesn't even move.”

She pointed at the stove. ”Top burners work. Oven don't. Damn dog fire messed it up. You won't want to cook much nohow. Even if you cook on the top burners, stove heats up, it smells like burning Chihuahua. I don't know about you, but that would set me off my feed.”

"Yeah, ”Leonard said. ”I think that would bother me too.”

"Come on and I'll show you the bedroom. And by the way, I don't want y'all having anybody over. 'Specially gals. This ain't no brothel.”

"We don't know anybody to have over, ”Leonard said.

"Good. Come on.”

Tim looked at us, tried to grin, but couldn't quite make it. We followed Momsy into the bedroom. There was a single bed with a mattress that looked pretty dadgum bleak.

"Looks as if someone's been pissin' on it nightly,” Leonard said.

"That Chihuahua,” she said. ”Sonofabitches would rather bark and piss than fornicate and eat. That's the thing about 'em. They got no priorities. My sister had one of them little poots, and she used to jack him off once a week 'cause he was tense. Never could figure what was wrong with the sonofabitch lickin' his noodle like any other respectable dog. Fact is, more men could lick their noodle, the world would be better off. Less mess'n around. Y'all just turn the mattress.”

"I'll take the couch,” I said.

"We'll flip for it,” Leonard said.

"Hell, dog pissed on the couch too,” she said.

"Dibs on the bed then,” I said. ”I'll turn the mattress."