scream was mine. The room was blood-red, then black, and out of the blackness Big Man’s face floated and hung above me like a moon made of gangrene flesh surrounded by hair and the sweet smell of a breath mint.
“How was that?” Big Man asked.
It took a while for me to get my breath. “Invigorating,” I said.
“Oh,” Big Man said. “You liked that, huh?”
Again, some time passed. I said, “I prefer it as a one-time experience.”
“I bet. We got to do it again, Collins. Unless you want to tell me something I want to know. I’ll say this for you, you let a fart like the clap of creation, but you didn’t shit yourself. But let me tell you this. Booger, he knows better than to stand behind that chair. Shit has a way of flyin’ out from the back there and sprayin’. Those stains on the pillow, what you think that is?”
“Olive oil?”
“Shit. A little blood.”
“You might as well finish me,” I said. “You aren’t going to get anything from me, because I don’t know anything.”
“He might be tellin’ the truth,” Booger said.
“Yeah,” Big Man said. “He might. But things still got to come out the same. How’s about we give him another boost?”
I already felt as if I were going to pass out. I pulled up all my reserves, which were mostly AWOL, and steeled myself.
There was an explosion and the walls of the shack vibrated and the floor jumped and the lightbulb above me rocked and I realized it wasn’t my balls and brain dealing with electricity. It was a real explosion, outside the shack.
Big Man bent down, snapped a revolver out of an ankle holster, leaped for the door, jerked it open. The night was bright orange and yellow with flecks of red. I could see the ’64 Impala. It was blazing, sending up gasoline and oil to the great motor gods of the heavens.
A sound behind me. A wham! Followed by another. Then another. Booger leaped and got hold of the ball bat, and Pock Face jerked back from where he was kneeling. The wires on the battery jumped out of the bowl, and the bowl turned over and the ice ran under my ass. Pock Face bumped my chair and I went over sideways. Pock’s head knocked against the lightbulb, sent it swinging.
Then it all happened in the alternating light and shadow of the swaying bulb.
Big Man popped a shot from his little ankle gun. It made a bright burst in the shadows. The bulb swung back and there was a blast from a shotgun.
Pock Face, a.k.a. Kinney, hurtled over my chair, crashed to the floor next to me. Some of the dark jelly that was now his face slapped against my cheek and chin. The blood was so hot it stung.
Big Man bellowed, bolted through the open door as another blast from the shotgun ripped into the air where he had been standing. Fragments of the wall and door frame leaped toward me.
Shadow.
A tall man, the one with the shotgun, stumped past me, and as the light swung back and finally came to rest, I saw his shotgun stock swing out, catch Booger upside the head with a sound like someone popping loose the vacuum-packed lid of a jar.
Booger took the blow with a grunt and a spray of teeth. He swung the bat, but the man holding the shotgun used his weapon to block it, brought the barrel around in a short arc and hit Booger in the face. Booger did a kind of backwards hop, hit the table, knocked it flat, fell down on top of it.
The man with the shotgun kicked his boot into Booger’s balls. Booger screamed and the man fit the shotgun into Booger’s mouth. He said, “Good night, ass-lick,” and fired.
Booger’s head sort of went away.
I lay very still. The man with the shotgun squatted down and looked at me. He was a lean-faced dude wearing a stained white cowboy hat, old boots, blue jeans, and a faded western shirt decorated with little green flowers. I realized the face belonged to the man in the yellow Pontiac.
“Your ass is hangin’ out, friend,” he said.
“I’m also tied to a chair.”
“I see that.”
“You planning on shooting me, too?”
“Well, you are kinda gift-wrapped… But no.”
The cowboy took a large knife from his jeans pocket, cut the cord on my feet and around my chest, then he got behind me and went to work on the wire, twisting it free.
I wobbled as I tried to stand. The cowboy put the knife away with one quick movement, took my arm and helped me. I pulled up my pants and fastened them. I said, “Man, I don’t know what to say… Did you have to kill them?”
“How about ‘Howdy’? And yeah, I guess I did. I started to just yell time-out, but decided that wasn’t a good idea. I’m Jim Bob Luke.”
“Hap Collins,” I said.
“I know who you are,” he said. “I followed them out here, then drove past, you know, to stay cool, so they wouldn’t know I was following them, but the sonofabitches sort of lost me for a time or I’d have been here sooner.”
“I’m just glad you showed up. Not that I understand why. What about Big Man?”
“Oh, I ain’t worried. I been watchin’ the doors.”
“Confident, aren’t you?”
“I invented the goddamn word. Now, why don’t you use your shirtsleeve and wipe them brains off your face, and let’s skedaddle before ole big un comes back.”
“I thought you were confident.”
“I am. But I ain’t stupid.”
20
Jim Bob Luke led me out through the back way, over the door he had kicked down. We went quickly into the woods. He moved well in the woods, and we went along like that and found a spot where we could look through the foliage, back at the shack and the raging fire of the Impala, but there wasn’t any sign of Big Man Mountain.
“Hated to burn a classic car like that,” Jim Bob said. “I started to just kick the door down and come in blazin’, but I like a little edge. You any good with guns?”
“I don’t like them, but I’m good with them.”
“Good. I got another one here, and it ain’t no peashooter. It’s a forty-five automatic.”
He gave it to me. We sat there and watched the car burn. The fire wasn’t so high now and it licked around the frame of the Impala like the devil’s tongue licking the bones of an animal.
“Ole big un is out there somewhere,” Jim Bob said. “I’m tryin’ to decide I want to hunt him down or not.”
“He has a gun.”
“I know. He shot at me with it. He’s a shitty shot. Couldn’t hit a circus elephant in the ass with a trick stool. But out here in the dark, and this being his stomping grounds, maybe I ought not. How you feelin’?”
“Queasy.”
“Can you buck up?”
“Yeah.”
“Come on.”
We moved deeper into the woods, along the edge of a swampy creek, then finally out of the trees into a clearing. We climbed under a barbed-wire fence and onto the grass next to the road. The yellow Pontiac was parked there, in the grass. It sat on four flat tires.
“Well,” Jim Bob said, looking around. “Looks like ole big un got here ahead of us.”
