The waiter looked away from Leonard, looked at me. “What happened to your face?”
I reached up and touched the scratches on my cheeks. “Briars.”
“You ought to see his ass,” Leonard said. “That’s where the real work was done.”
“That right?” the waiter said. “Sorry I asked. Here’s menus.”
When the waiter went away, I said, “What you going to have, Gadget?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“That crummy way you feel, that’s because you’re so hungry your belly thinks your throat’s cut. Have some soup. They got soup here. I don’t know how it is, but stay away from the French fries. Soup, any kind of soup, if it’s fresh, it’s pretty hard to mess up.”
She didn’t order anything, but when the waiter came back I ordered a cup of coffee and a bowl of chicken soup and Leonard ordered another hamburger, minus the fries, potato chips instead.
When the waiter was gone, I looked at Leonard, said, “You just ate couple hours ago. Maybe less. You want another hamburger?”
“Whipping the pure-dee-dog-doodie out of people makes me hungry. Don’t it you?”
“A little.”
The food came and I drank the coffee and pushed the soup over close to Gadget. I said, “I don’t want the soup after all. Why don’t you give it a taste? It smells pretty good.”
She shook her head. “I know what you’re doing.”
I nodded. “Suit yourself.”
Leonard dug into his hamburger. “Oh, Jesus, this is so good it makes you want to hold down a wild hog and fuck it in the ass.”
“That passes for manners at his house,” I said to Gadget.
“I’ve heard worse.”
I noticed she had picked up the spoon and was starting to stir the soup. I pushed the crackers over close to her. She opened one of the cracker packages and bit a corner off the cracker. She crumbled the rest in her soup. I turned at an angle so I wasn’t watching her. I got up and went over and ordered some pie and a glass of milk. When my pie and milk came, Leonard had to have the same, and now Gadget, finished with her soup, wanted some pie and milk too.
By this time she was starting to look better. I had a feeling it had been a long time since she’d eaten anything besides cheese crackers, potato chips, peanut butter and Cracker Jack. My guess was she was the neatnik who put the paper towels over the dog piles.
I paid the bill because Leonard didn’t have any money, or said he didn’t, and we drove out of there. The rain had died out and everything, even the crummy little town, looked better than before, spit-cleaned by nature. We hadn’t gone a mile before we looked back and saw Gadget had gone to sleep in the backseat, her belly full, and maybe, for a moment, satiated.
Of course, there was that hairy old cocaine monkey, and when she woke up, it was sure to chatter and show its ass.
I tried to tell myself we had done all we could do. What Marvin had asked. But somehow I didn’t feel satisfied that we could say “job well done.” I kept thinking about what Tanedrue had said, about what Gadget had said. About how we didn’t know what we had done and that hell was coming.
11
When we got back to LaBorde, Gadget was still sleeping. We drove through the wet town on out into the country where Marvin Hanson stayed. He lived there with his daughter and his wife. They had once been a very close family then Marvin’s pecker had gotten excited about a young woman; the same young woman I had liked. She was dead now, and Marvin had gone back to his family and I had gotten over my feelings of wanting to skin him and nail his hide to the side of a barn and throw knives at it. Got over it long ago. Me and him and Leonard had gone through a lot, and we were bonded, as they like to say.
Marvin and his wife, Rachel, had gotten back together, and they were doing all right. But during that time, their daughter, JoAnna, had gone through some stuff, and then she had a daughter of her own, Julie, aka Gadget, by the guy who had run off. I didn’t know that until Marvin told me. I knew I had never met him, but then again, much as Leonard and I liked Marvin, his family didn’t hang with us, didn’t even send us a Christmas card. They could have had three more kids, and close as the three of us were, we might not have known.
Now they all lived in a small two-bedroom house out in the country, trying to pull everything together and live happily ever after.
The house was off a rain-slick red clay road, and we started down it just as Gadget awakened and sat up in the backseat.
“If you hadn’t had such a bad day,” I said, “I’d have made you wear your seat belt, and I should have anyway.”
“You’re not my daddy,” she said.
“No,” Leonard said, “and from what I’ve heard, your daddy, whoever he is, isn’t claiming you either. You weren’t nothin’ to him but a hump and a squirt.”
Gadget crossed her arms and sat back in her seat and looked mad. I gave Leonard a look that could have paralyzed a chicken at twenty paces. If it bothered him, struck a nerve anywhere inside that hard black hide, I didn’t notice it.
We drove up to Marvin’s house and I got out and opened the back door of the truck. Gadget got out with her arms still crossed and walked briskly toward the house. I tried very hard not to notice that from the rear in those very short shorts she had what might be a championship butt. If not, it was certainly a top contender.
