“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
