I went over and put my arm around her shoulders and didn’t say anything. After a time her hand came up and went behind my waist. She held me and began to sob.
Later, we had pinto beans and slightly burned cornbread and ate it off paper plates with plastic forks. We sat outside on Brett’s car. This was much better than inside the church, except when the wind blew and picked up the smell of sewage or blew dust into our food.
I was watching Herman and Red carefully, lest Herman decide to break loose and try and shove Leonard, Brett, and me into a prairie dog hole. I was perhaps giving Herman too much attention, actually being prejudicial. Red was right. Something about him being small caused you to underestimate him. Maybe it was his way of talking. Here was a man who had strangled a woman and nailed a little girl’s hand to a boat paddle, and he consistently looked dazed and confused and about as dangerous as a wet newspaper.
I had to remember these guys weren’t just a couple of goofballs, no matter how goofy they seemed.
We sat so that Herman was on the hood between me and Leonard, and Red sat on the trunk with Brett, who sat far enough from him to use the gun she kept in her lap. She was very nervous, anxious, and I was hoping Red didn’t make a sudden dive to scratch his nuts or pick his nose, or he might end up with a .38 round in his teeth.
After a bit, Red finished his meal, slid off the trunk, and came around front. He said, “Do your facilities function, brother?”
“More or less,” Herman said. “You got to flush it twice or three times, and if it overflows there’s a plunger in there and a mop. Stinks some. It hasn’t been cleaned in, oh, two years.”
“Goodness,” Red said.
“And you got to wipe on newspapers and throw them in a cardboard box.”
“Maybe I’ll just walk out in the field some,” Red said, “do it down a prairie dog hole. I have some Kleenex in my suit pocket.”
“No,” I said. “Don’t think so. I don’t want you going that far.”
Red looked at Herman. Herman shrugged. “There wouldn’t be a gun or anything in the house, would there?” Leonard asked.
“I disposed of them all long ago,” Herman said.
“I hope so,” Leonard said. “Don’t go out the back, Red.”
“There’s no rear exit,” Herman said.
“Then see you later,” Leonard said to Red. “Happy bowel movements.”
“Crude,” Red said. “I’m the one being chastised here for my lifestyle, and the four of you are crude. Very crude. I can assure you, if one of us was invited to tea with the Queen of England, it wouldn’t be you two or the woman, and I am sorry to say, it wouldn’t be you either, brother.”
Red went away then, trudging toward the church and the toilet, his head held high, his bowels contained.
“He’s kind of prideful,” Herman said.
“Hell,” Leonard said. “He’s just full of shit is all.”
19
I suppose it was midnight. I hadn’t looked at a clock in some time. I was sitting on the hood of Brett’s car with my back against the windshield. I had my hands under my shirt, on my revolver, just in case I needed to blow Herman’s brains out.
Above me was a great and beautiful canopy of stars. They seemed different stars from East Texas stars. They were brighter and closer. They looked sharp enough to cut your hand.
On the far side of the hood, stretched out, his feet dangling over the front of the car, was Herman. He had his hands behind his head and his eyes open. His belly heaved like a great turtle sleeping.
Leonard was in the front seat, stretched out, catching a catnap. Red was in the back seat. Red thought Leonard was awake watching him, so when Red went to sleep, Leonard took advantage of it. Brett was in the house, lying on the dirty mattress and the pew. She had spent two hours cleaning the prairie dog cages, feeding and watering the critters. Somewhere, buried inside her, was a housewife with an apron and fuzzy house slippers. Of course, in Brett’s case, that internal woman wasn’t wearing anything but the apron and slippers, and there was a shovel, lighter fluid, a box of matches, and a revolver nearby.
Herman spoke suddenly, “It’s strange how a man perceives things. Once, I felt nothing. Then I felt everything. Now I feel nothing again, except remorse. I can’t lose remorse.”
“Not sure you should,” I said.
“It’s odd. I went my way and did the things I did, and one day I began to think about my brother. I hadn’t missed him until that moment. Hadn’t thought of him at all. I was like our parents. He was just an embarrassment. Then one day I’m in Dallas. I was there to kill a man because I had been hired to kill him. He was not an important man, but he had insulted a man who had the money to have him killed, and I was the man to do it. I had gotten the job through the Bandito Supremes. They are something, Hap. Once they were nothing more than a two-bit motorcycle gang, running a few drugs, selling whores. Now, they have little to do with motorcycles. They are a large clearinghouse for disaster, and they get a slice of every disastrous pie they bake. Part of that pie went to me. Anyway, I’m in Dallas and I’m not thinking about this guy I’m going to kill at all. I had already made up my mind how to do it and make it messy the way the client wanted it, and I’m waiting for nighttime when I’m going to do it, and I see these kids playing in the park, and one of them is little and ugly and redheaded and these other kids are picking on him. Hitting him. Tossing rocks. Yelling at him. Stuff like, ‘We’d rather be dead than red on the head,’ and the kid’s running, and they’re busting him from every side, and there’s a kind of frenzy going on. I believe, down deep, in each of us, especially males, there’s a hunter-killer switch of sorts, and sometimes odd things can set it off. We still have a pack mentality, and this kid was wounded, and the pack smelled blood, and they were all going for this kid, and though I can’t say he would have died from it, he would certainly have been hurt. And it wasn’t that I was particularly moved by children prior to this, but the redheaded kid pulled something inside of me, another kind of switch, and I could see my brother in this child’s place, and suddenly I’m up screaming and I chased the boys off and helped the redheaded kid up. He ran away from me as fast as he could. That was it. End of story. But
