The Two-Bear Mambo

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.'

Chapter 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