said, I'm one to know.'
'You don't know anything,' Howard said. 'You and that other guy, you think you know all there is to know, but you don't know a thing.'
'Let's leave it,' I said. 'I don't want to hear any more. So it isn't the whales. Do what you got to do for people and animals and nuclear disarmament, and give my regards to the boys in Leavenworth.'
'To hell with you, pilgrim,' Howard said. He moved around the coffee table, staggered slightly. That bit of alcohol really had got to him. Or maybe it was the capper to some he drank earlier. Had I been in his place, knowing Trudy was supposed to be with me but was off with one of her ex-husbands for a few days, I'd have took to drinking too. At one point I had.
He came around the coffee table and put his hand out and pushed me hard in the chest, but he made the mistake of not pulling back fast enough, and I put my hand over the back of his, trapped it to my chest and bent forward. It sent Howard to his knees. It was a playground trick, but heck, he started it.
'Stop it, Hap,' Trudy said. 'Let him go.'
I let him go. Trudy bent down and put an arm around him and tried to hoist him up. He shrugged her off, got up on his own.
He pointed a finger at me, but he wasn't standing as close as before. 'Try that when I haven't been drinking.'
'Okay,' I said.
'Hell, listen to me,' he said. 'I'm playing your macho game now. I'm not getting pulled into this. I'm gonna lie down. I've had all this foolishness I want.'
Without wobbling too much, he went through the hallway door and out of sight. Maybe he and Chub had their own special place to sulk back there. Some old sixties records to play.
'Happy?' Trudy said.
'Semi.'
Chapter 10
I awoke to the sound of a bird and the embrace of the cold. The voice of the bird was pathetic, and the cold was criminal.
I was on the back porch of the little house, and it had once been screened in, and in a sense still was, but to make it a kind of room, cardboard had been tacked all around on the inside of the screen in a couple of layers. It might have worked okay summers, but winters, especially this winter, it wasn't much.
I wondered whose idea it was to fix the porch this way. The landlord or its erstwhile renters? I voted on the renters. A landlord who'd let people live in this shit box didn't strike me as the type to bother with even cardboard siding.
Originally Leonard and I had been in the kitchen, sleeping on the floor. The cookstove, with the oven door open, heated up the small room perfectly. But I awoke in the middle of the night bathed in sweat, finding it hard to breathe. I opened the door that led out to the back porch and that helped some, but the air in the kitchen was still poisonous with butane. I toed Leonard awake and told him I was going out to the porch, and if he didn't want to spend tomorrow in Marvel Creek Funeral Home, he might want to do the same.
Now I was lying under some ice-crusted blankets, inside an old sleeping bag. The bag was on top of some broken down cardboard boxes (probably the remains of the interior decorating scheme), and the seams on the cardboard had worked through the bag and into my back. I was still in my clothes. My socks felt damp from yesterday's sweat. My body felt stiff as wire.
I rolled over, and sitting in the kitchen doorway with a blanket over his shoulders, shivering, looking at me in what can only be called an unpleasant manner, was Leonard. His breath was snorting out of his mouth and nostrils in white puffs and his eyes were narrow.
He said, 'I've let you talk me into some shit before, Hap, but this one is the king of all the dumb things. These fuckers are seriously balled up. Ought to have my ass kicked, and be proud of it.'
'Good morning.'
'Chub is really in orbit, and Howard is so full of what Trudy's filled him with, he doesn't know if he needs to shit or throw up.'
'Don't you have something unpleasant to say about Paco? You wouldn't want to leave anybody out.'
'He confuses me. He doesn't seem like part of this. He's got his feet on the ground.'
'You're just sweet on him because he went out on the porch and had a smoke with you.'
'Yeah, that's it.'
'They're kind of silly, Leonard, but they've got good intentions. Without people like these sillies, blacks would still be drinking at water fountains that said colored and they'd be going around back of a restaurant to get their food through a little slot.'
'Now you're talking like the fat guy.'
'He's a clown, but his heart's in the right place.'
'Tell me about women's rights now. Toss in something about how the gays used to be more oppressed before people like these, people like you, came along. Tell me how you people ended the war.'
'All true.'
'Then why in hell didn't you go for what they wanted you to go for yesterday? They were fishing with every kind of bait they had.'
