We gathered up our goods. Leonard carried the shotgun down close to his side. It was raining when we went out. We put the gun-stuffed blanket in the trunk, tossed the luggage in the back. Leonard put the shotgun with the luggage. We stopped up front of the office, and I went in and checked us out of the motel.
In the car I got out my flashlight and opened up the paperback Taxi Man had written on. I studied the map and told Leonard how to go. The rain pecked at our windshield and the wet leaves slapped against it and tangled in the windshield wipers, wadded, and were tossed away.
We drove on into Hootie Hoot. Up Main Street and past the taxi stand. I tried to look and see if I could see Taxi Man at his post behind the card table, but it was dark and the street was poorly lit and it was raining hard now.
On up the street we went, out of Hootie Hoot. The rain began to die. I studied the crude map inside the paperback, and we followed it to a blacktop road that turned right. We took it, went along on that for five miles, then turned left on another blacktop. This one was narrow and wound down amongst scrubby Oklahoma trees wound tight with darkness and nesting crows.
We went along the blacktop for ten miles and the trees broke on either side and there was a great hill up ahead and the blacktop quit there and turned into a gravel road, and at the top of the hill the half moon, which had finally shone itself through fading rain clouds, seemed to be balancing, like half a loaf of round white bread, on its rim.
We kept going. Down on the other side the hill fell away into a wide pasture and in the center of the pasture was a big old white house. It was well lit from the inside and by porch lights, and on either side of the house by two tall pole lights that shone on the pasture and revealed it was full of cars and rain puddles.
The house was three stories with columns and a long wide porch that wound all around it. It had a new roof sprouting four brick chimneys. One for each side. All four were breathing smoke. You could see the smoke against the moon, which now sat just above the house like some kind of soiled halo.
“Business is good,” Leonard said, and stopped at the bottom of the hill and rolled down his window and spat outside. He took several deep breaths. I could hear music coming from the house, and I could hear some laughter and some other sounds. It seemed to be a raucous place.
“Well, brother,” Leonard said, “what’s the score?”
“Park far out. I’ll walk.”
“And when you come out,” Leonard said, “I’ll be too far away.”
“I know. But they see y’all sitting out in the car, it’ll make them wonder.”
“You’re trying to say these boys may not like niggers?”
“You said it first, remember.”
“I tell you what I’m gonna do,” Leonard said. “I’m going to give you the time to get down there. Then I’m gonna give you fifteen minutes to line up things, like you’ve come to shop. Then I’m going to move on down about halfway and park. I’ll be on the right. Where you see the gap in those cars. That’s where you want to head. You’re not out of there in twenty minutes, or I hear some kind of hootenanny goin’ on, I’m comin’ in.”
“That’ll just cause more trouble,” I said.
“Not if they’re gutting you with a knife,” Brett said.
“I guess that’s a point worth considering,” I said.
I got out, started walking toward the house.
The wind gathered up the scent of incense and passed it on to me. It was a nice smell. Any other time I might have appreciated it. The music was country. Tanya Tucker. It was cranked up so loud it seemed to be responsible for the leaves blowing off the trees.
When I was on the porch, a guy big enough to fill a bus and stick his ass through the door came outside and made the porch creak when he walked. He was wearing a dark suit with a white shirt and a dark tie. He had a head about the size of an atlas globe and his hair was cut so short, in the porch light I could see razor scrapes on his blue-veined head. He smiled at me.
“Hello,” he said. “Come on in.”
“Thanks.”
He walked down the porch, around it, out of sight. Inside was a brightly lit foyer, and the music was really loud. Tanya Tucker was over with and some guy whose music I didn’t know was singing about something I wasn’t listening to. Loud as that music was, it wasn’t as loud as the thumping of my heart, the pounding of blood in my temples. The incense was so strong in the foyer it made me sick.
A woman in her sixties, carrying about two hundred pounds, and not carrying it well, wearing a multicolored, loose-fitting dress that had all the style of a horse blanket, sort of sprang up in front of me. She had blue hair and loose dentures and too much powder and rouge on her face. She looked as if she ought to be somewhere else, baking cookies.
She said, “Young man. You come for a good time?”
I hesitated, fearing she might think she was supposed to be my good time.
“Yes, ma’am, I suppose I have.”
“Well, there’s a small cover charge. Any other charges, that’s between you and the girls.”
I realized then she was a door greeter, sort of like they have at Wal-Mart. Need a shopping cart? Want to buy some pussy? Man, that was cold. A sixty-year-old woman to warm you up. Like Grandma guiding you around on your first day at kindergarten.
“How much?”
She told me and I gave her some of my bouncer money.
“You need to come into the sittin’ room, son. Look around. See if there’s anyone you like. The girls are real friendly.”
