Rumble Tumble

9

Back at Leonard’s house, Leonard took the dillo into the woods while I made coffee. He came back a few minutes later carrying the empty trap. I watched him from the kitchen window. I thought he looked a little sad.

I poured us coffee, took the cups out on the back porch. Leonard joined me and we sat on the steps and sipped. I said, “When do we leave?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“That’s what I figured. That’s what I told Brett.”

“I think we ought to see we can take Brett’s car. We’ll need the trunk room.”

“Done,” I said. “She’ll be glad to do it.”

Leonard nodded. He said, “You want to back out, we can.”

“I didn’t say anything about backing out.”

“I know, but I’m givin’ you the room.”

“I’m committed. I asked you to help me, remember?”

“I remember.”

“If you want to back out, you can.”

“You’ve had to bring a man down before, Hap, and you brood over it still.”

“I’d hate for there to be a time I didn’t brood.”

“What we’re doin’ now ain’t self-defense. We’re goin’ lookin’ for trouble.”

“I know that.”

“You might have to kill someone.”

“I know that too.”

Leonard sipped his coffee, took a moment to study one of his fingernails. He wasn’t looking at me when he spoke.

“There’s things I can live with. Things even you don’t know about. I’m not complainin’, and I’m not apologizin’. I’m just sayin’ there’s things I can live with maybe you can’t.”

“Like killing people?”

“You got more bleeding heart in you than the whole Democratic Congress. You don’t like guns. You’re going against everything you believe because of Brett. You don’t owe this to her. Me, if I know where there’s a nest of poisonous vipers and I can stomp them flat, I think I ought to do it. I figure you’d feed the vipers, try to raise them up, maybe finance their college. I’m not saying one thing or another about this being wrong or right, I’m sayin’ how you are and what you’re goin’ to be dealing with. If what the midget said is true, we got the Oklahoma mafia going on here. We’re walkin’ onto their playin’ field, and we’ll be expected to play. These guys, they take their money, their drug pushin’, their pussy peddlin’, and their murderin’ seriously.”

I sat silent for a while. Leonard took my coffee cup and left, came back with filled cups for us both.

“You’re not altogether wrong, brother,” I said. “But I love Brett. Brett loves Tillie. So I got to do it.”

Leonard nodded. “Since you might stop in the middle of the action to pet a puppy dog, I figure I got no choice than to go in with you.”

“You always have a choice,” I said.

Leonard looked at me and laughed a strange laugh. “The hell I do.”

I didn’t know how to react to that. I eventually just looked away. Out at the edge of the woods, giving us a stunned look, was the armadillo.

“Your son has returned,” I said.

Leonard looked up and saw the dillo. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

We drove over to see my boss at the Black Lace Club, which was essentially a big nasty honky-tonk on the outskirts of town where women shook naked titties on stage to bad country-rock music and sometimes slipped their briefs down to give the drunks a view of the squirrel in the tree.

Most of the time, this led to the dancers having money tossed at them or pushed into their panties, but other times it led to drunks taking it as an invitation to walk on stage and screw whatever was in front of them. That meant the girls, me, the manager, another drunk, the stage, whatever.

It was my job to see they didn’t screw anyone, make too much noise, or fight each other over who could drink the most, had the fastest car and the biggest dick. It was a terrible place, a terrible job. In two weeks you could have more fights and nasty confrontations than three average persons had in a lifetime. It was one of the old-style bad places. Not the new places with clean floors and strobe lights and girls that looked as if they stepped out of the pages of Playboy. Not the places where the worst you had to deal with was some frat boy who thought he was tough. This was where the big bellies and the brainless collected. Guys that wouldn’t fit anyone’s idea of a stereotypical Hollywood tough guy, but the kind of guys who could take any one of those sleek, muscled-up ego machines and kick their asses until it bored them enough to stop.

I had come to feel working in this place was just helping it survive, and that was like feeding shit and sugar to disease-carrying flies. Why do it?

When I got there a couple of the daytime bouncers were on duty, and they knew me. They slapped me on the back and shook hands with Leonard when I introduced him. They were good guys, just shy on brains.