The inside of the church lived down to expectations. It was ripe with the smell of sweat and boiling pinto beans and something baking. It was very hot inside, and Herman shoved at the swollen door until it hung open and a shaft of sunlight fell through it and hit the dirt floor and gave the cigarette butts there a sort of royal glow, as if they were floating in God’s own butter.
There were four long pews to the left, and the closest one had a cot mattress on it with a sheet and a pillow that drooped over the side. The edge of the mattress, where it touched the ground, was brown with dirt. There were plastic cases with perforated tops in one corner behind the pews, stacked on top of one another, and in the cases were water pans and food pans and prairie dogs and newspaper lining and piles of prairie dog shit, both fresh and dry. The dogs reared up against their clear plastic cages and took note of us.
There was a wooden stove with a big iron pot on the top, boiling away, and the heavyset Mexican woman was stirring the contents of the pot with a long wooden spoon. She watched us with the same lack of enthusiasm she had showed us in the yard.
To the left of the stove was a doorway so narrow you’d have to turn sideways to go through it. The door itself was open, and I could see an ominous-looking shitter in there, stained black and green with a stack of newspapers by it, and on the other side a cardboard box.
Herman strolled over to the window with the yellow paper, pulled at the shade. It rolled up and light came in and made the place look worse.
Another step deeper and I could smell the prairie dogs and their offal, and it wasn’t something that went with pinto beans and baked goods.
Red looked about, took off his hat and held it in his hand as if acknowledging the dead. “Kind of let the place go, haven’t you, Herman?”
“Reckon so,” Herman said. “People quit coming.”
“You always gave a good sermon,” Red said.
“Yeah, but I didn’t give it so good in Spanish and most of the Mexicans around here are Catholics anyway.”
“The woman?” Red said. “She a working girl?”
Herman laughed. “Girl. She hasn’t been a girl since the Mexican Revolution. She works for me. Don’t even know her name. She takes a hundred dollars a month. Comes in and cooks for me, and if she’s in the mood, sweeps the place out. She’d service me for an additional fifty dollars a month, but I’m not interested.”
“You still preach?” Red said.
“Just to myself,” Herman said. “I hope I can convince you and your friends to stay for supper. Don’t worry. She’s clean. The woman, I mean. And the food. The place could use some work.”
“Perhaps a fire,” Red said.
“Yeah, well,” Herman said, sitting down on the edge of the pew with the mattress, “I call it home. How’s about you tell me what your problem is, Red. You still doing … the work?”
“I was, up until the other day,” Red said. “I was pulled out of it by this lady and these two gentlemen. They’ve kept me company these last few days, and let me tell you, it’s been an experience.”
Herman was looking at the wad of bloody toilet tissue on Red’s head. “What happened to your noggin?” Herman asked.
“Oh, the lady here took a pistol to my skull,” Red said. “And she made quite a time of it.”
Herman stood up. Leonard said, “Sit down, Herman. You need to hear the whole story before we start hitting each other.”
Brett pulled her pistol from under her shirt, said, “Hell, who’s hittin’?”
“Everybody ease off and lighten up,” I said.
Herman turned to the Mexican woman and said something quick in Spanish. She let go of the spoon, walked past us, right out the door without so much as a change of expression.
I said, “I hope you just told her to go to the house.”
Herman nodded. “Go on, let’s hear it.”
“Red here says he’s done some bad stuff and you got him into it,” I said.
“True,” Herman said. “I’ve abandoned that kind of life myself. I wish my brother would. If you’re looking for me to give you connections, I can’t.”
“Nope,” Leonard said. “We’re looking for directions to The Farm.”
Herman looked at Red. Red said, “Well, they said they’d kill me if I didn’t show them where The Farm was, but I didn’t know where it was, so I had to tell them about you.”
“You’re still involved with Big Jim?” Herman asked.
“I was,” Red said. “These three may have queered me there.” Red told Herman what had happened from when he and Wilber had put the bite on Brett for money, on up to the moment. I thought his telling was accurate, if overly long, and that goddamn steak ranchero came up again.
Herman sat with his head down for a long while, thinking. We let him think. I looked out the door and saw the Mexican woman trudging down the road, dragging little clouds of dust behind her heels.
“I don’t know,” Herman finally said. “This is some kind of situation. You’ve abused and humiliated my brother, and yet you ask me for help. You ask me to violate a trust, an agreement to never step foot on Bandito Supreme property again. I’d be tossing my life away.”
“Directions will do,” Leonard said. “You can stay here and suck prairie dogs out of holes.”
