“Nothing like that,” Leonard said. “All right, wrap it up.”
“Don’t you want to see this stuff work?” Haskel asked.
“Yeah, well,” Leonard said. “I reckon.”
8
“We can go outside for these,” Haskel said. “I use the range in back for the heavy shit.”
Leonard and I each carried a rifle and Haskel carried the sawed-off and the revolvers and ammunition in a cloth bag. He walked us out the door, down the trail, and over near the hog pens. He put the bag down, broke open the double-barrel and took two shells out of his overalls pocket and pushed them into the gun.
“Watch this,” Haskel said, and suddenly he turned toward the hog pen and cut down with both barrels. There was a sound like God letting a big one and the fence splintered. When the smoke and dirt and hog shit cleared, both hogs lay with their feet in the air.
“Goddamn,” Leonard said. “Wasn’t any call for that.”
“Gonna eat ’em anyway,” Haskel said, opening the shotgun and popping out the shells. “Soon as I get you two packin’, I’ll get my woman to help crank them sonofabitches up with the wrecker and we’ll scrape ’em. Scrapin’ a hog beats scaldin’ any day. Still got to use lots of hot water, but it ain’t quite the work. Come here, now.”
We followed Haskel down the trail to a spot at the base of the barn. “Ya’ll want telescopic sights for these?”
“No,” Leonard said.
“Might ought to have ’em,” Haskel said.
Leonard shook his head.
Haskel said, “See them bumps on the hill out there?”
We nodded.
He swapped his shotgun for the rifle Leonard was carrying.
“Watch this.” Haskel jerked the rifle up and fired and cocked and fired in rapid succession. The bumps on the hill went away. “Come on out with me now,” Haskel said.
As we walked we could smell yet another awful stench. It wasn’t the outhouse and it wasn’t the pigs; it was something long dead and rotting. It was more armadillo carcasses. They were spread at the base of the little sand hill, and at the top of the hill we saw what Haskel had been shooting. The heads off buried armadillos. We stood at the top of the hill, and all around the spots where the exploded heads stuck out of the dirt there were bones and fragments of skulls and brains, and down on the far side of the hill were wire cages. All but one of the cages was empty. It housed a frightened armadillo that kept darting from one end to the other.
“Were those armadillos alive?” Leonard asked.
“Ain’t no fun shootin’ a dead’n,” Haskel said. “Fuckers root up everything. Figure this is how they pay.”
“They’re just doin’ what their instincts tell ’em,” Leonard said.
“Reckon so,” Haskel said. “But so am I.”
Leonard carefully laid the shotgun down, then I heard the wind, but I didn’t see the punch. It was a right cross, I think, and it caught Haskel on the left side of his cheek and it made a cracking sound, and Haskel seemed to leap away from the hill. He hit the ground at its base, rolled and lay on his face. I was amazed to see that the rifle Haskel had been holding was in Leonard’s left hand. He had snatched the weapon and punched Haskel in less time than it took to spit.
Leonard raised his knuckles to his mouth and sucked on them. I went down the hill to see if Haskel was dead. I lifted his head up and dirt fell out of his mouth. I set him up, got behind him and pulled the little revolver out of his overalls pocket and gave him a couple of whacks on the back with the palm of my hand. He coughed and rolled his eyes.
“You fugger,” Haskel said.
Leonard came down the hill and got out his wallet. He looked at me and sighed, took out the bills. There were a lot of them, large bills. Hundreds. I knew he had gotten them out of the bank for this gun buy, that it was a chunk of the money from the recent sell of his uncle’s old house.
Leonard pushed the bills down the front of Haskel’s overalls. “Here’s the money for the weapons and ammo, shitwipe. We’ll pick them up on the way out. That diller in the cage down there, I’ve tossed in another fifty, so I’m taking him with me. Cage too. Any of your friends, or you, show up to bother us on account of this, I want you to know they’re gonna miss all future meals. And I can find my way back here too, and I do, it won’t be to try and sell you no vacuum cleaner. You happen to wake up when I’m through with you, it’ll be with a tube in your nose and a shit bag strapped to your hip.”
“Azoles,” Haskel said, then stretched out on the ground and turned his head to the side and lay still.
I emptied Haskel’s revolver, dropping the shells in my hand. I put the shells in my pocket and leaned down and put the gun back in Haskel’s pocket. I picked up the cloth bag on my way away from there.
Leonard got the armadillo cage, carried it down the hill with one hand, the rifle in the other, the shotgun tucked under his arm. Down at the barn, we went inside and I got the notepad with our names on it and bent it in half and shoved it in my back pocket. We gathered up the guns and the ammo.
We went out to the truck. Leonard put the dillo in the truck bed. I stepped over the dead possum and got inside the truck with my weapons and ammo. Leonard went around and opened the driver’s door and put the guns and ammunition he was carrying inside.
Sherilee, without her finger in her nose for a change, sort of materialized. She said to Leonard, “Ain’t that our armadillo?”
