Outside, the two bodyguards were putting Wilber into the back of a black Cadillac. There was another black Cadillac parked under the tree next to Irvin’s truck.
Irvin got in his truck, started it up, and drove away.
Brett sat with Tillie’s head in her lap. I used the car to brace myself and got around to the passenger’s side. Leonard got behind the wheel. He said, “Shit, no keys.”
“There’s a spare in a magnetic box,” Brett said. “It’s stuck up under the dash there, to the left of the steering wheel.”
Leonard found it and we drove out of the hangar.
I turned to look back. Flames from the plane were licking up higher than the hangar. The big men in their nice suits were escorting Jim out to the Cadillac under the tree. He got in and they closed the door. A few of the men got in the same car. The others opened up the trunk of the Cadillac where Wilber waited, then went back inside the hangar.
As we eased away, I saw them come out of the hangar carrying something. The sun shone brightly on the red hair of that something. They dumped Red into the trunk and returned to the hangar.
“Drive very fast,” I said.
31
The field across the road was frozen and the ice on the dead grass was very pretty in the moonlight. It was mid-December and Leonard and I were sitting on his front porch looking across the road through barbed wire out where forty acres of cleared land lay. It was a hay field, but for some reason none of it had been baled that year. Bad hay maybe. Perhaps the owner died.
We sat on Leonard’s front porch in the porch swing and drank hot chocolate. Bob, Leonard’s son the armadillo, was curled up on the edge of the porch, staring out at the night, perhaps thinking about gunfire and shattering dillo shells, relatives gone to that great armadillo den in the sky, or perhaps he was seeing the leering face of Haskel. I wondered if it would matter to Bob if he knew I had given an anonymous tip to the FBI about Haskel’s location and vocation. Maybe for armadillos, unlike humans, the past was the past, gone away, completely forgotten.
Whatever, Bob had it cushy now. He followed Leonard about and Leonard shared his vanilla cookies with him more frequently than he did me.
I shifted in the porch swing for more comfort. My right thigh still gave me trouble, and my shoulder was a little stiff. I hadn’t gone to the doctor for any of it. Not even blood. I had stayed in bed for a couple of weeks eating steaks and drinking some godawful tonic Leonard made me take. I think I got well so I wouldn’t have to drink that tonic.
Brett came out to see me from time to time. I had only actually talked to Tillie once since the events, and all she had said was hi.
We read in the papers about the wrecked plane and the one body found. Bill’s. The papers called it a real-life mystery. We had no idea what Big Jim had done with Herman’s and Red’s corpses, but my guess was they were feeding a mesquite bush in the desert somewhere. Bill’s death was attributed to bad flying, and someone believed, or wanted to believe, he had crawled free of the wreckage and died.
Of course, Bill hadn’t had a pilot’s license, and it had been Irvin’s plane. Or at least the one he was using. No future newspaper articles followed. No policeman came tapping at our door.
I think the truth of the matter was the authorities knew who Bill was, had dealt with him before, and didn’t give a shit he was gone, just as long as he was out of their hair.
But Bill hadn’t been so bad. I thought about how Bill had called that old man uncle, had given him money, bought him beer and cigarettes. I wondered how Irvin had answered to the old man for Bill’s death. Or if he had.
I said, “It’s funny way it is. I haven’t even seen Brett but a few times since October. We only been to bed once. On my birthday. And it wasn’t too good, you want to know. I think I’d rather have had a pair of socks or a billfold.”
“Maybe you’re taking it too personal.”
“The bad pussy?”
“How she’s treating you, you moron.”
“I don’t want to say it, but I got to say it. I feel I sort of did something for her I wouldn’t have done for nobody but you. And now she’s got Tillie back, I’m like last year’s used Kotex.”
“Tillie needs a lot of attention,” Leonard said.
And she did need attention. She was in drug rehab, but she was back to hooking. This time out of LaBorde’s two main hotels when they didn’t catch her and run her off. Then she’d go to Tyler for a while to hook up with some of the church crowd there, bang them silly.
“You think she’s really going to change?” I asked.
“Nope,” Leonard said. “I could have told you that from the start. She wanted out of what she was in, but she’s not a new person. It could happen I guess, but I wouldn’t tie a rubber band around my dick till it did. Do that, your whang will fall off.”
“You knew from the start it would turn out like this, didn’t you?”
“You didn’t do what you did for Tillie, Hap, you did it for Brett. This has got nothing to do with Tillie, far as I’m concerned. Brett for that matter. I did it for you.”
“I hate I asked. I hate you had to do it.”
“I hate it. But it doesn’t matter Brett isn’t having anything to do with you now.”
