PROOF OF GOD, was Booger.
“I was hoping you were a burglar,” Booger said. “That would have given me a reason to blow your head off.”
“What in hell are you doing here?”
“Well, howdy to you too,” Booger said.
“Again. What in hell are you doing here?” I said.
“Drinking a beer. Right before you came in I was scratching my nuts, and about an hour ago I was watching a cooking show with some hot lady on it cooking Italian food. I’d like to bend her over her pasta, I’m telling you right now. She had legs just like I like ’em. Feet on one end, poontang on the other. Come to think of it, I don’t even give a shit if she has feet. Let’s see, what else. I think before the cooking show I took a dump. By the way, your toilet has a slow flush. I think they got some Chinaman on the other side of the world using a hand pump.”
“What are you doing here, Booger? Why did you pick my lock? And why in hell did you get that tattoo?”
“I couldn’t get in. It was locked. So I had to pick it. It was easy, by the way. You ought to get some other kind of lock, something a little more serious than government work. The tat. I got that as a homage to what matters in life…Hey, how you doing, buddy?”
“Right now, I’m a little busy.”
Booger looked hurt. “Man, you don’t sound glad to see me.”
Actually, in spite of myself, I was very glad to see him. “It’s not that, Booger. I’ve been a little busy with something. How you doing, man? Glad to see you. How did you get here?”
“After a misunderstanding in Oklahoma, I drove here, and since I had my car’s papers with me, I sold it to a gentleman down on a lot on the outskirts of town, and then I took a taxi to the store where I bought some provisions, and then I took the taxi here. Want a beer?”
“It’s my house. I should be offering you something.”
“Hey,” he said, and held up the beer, “said I got provisions. Help yourself.”
“I’m just going to have bottled coffee.”
“Who the hell bottles coffee, Cason?”
“Starbucks.”
“That’s sissy shit. Whoever heard of drinking cold coffee out of a fucking bottle?”
“It’s happening everywhere,” I said, making my way to the fridge. “You should get out more. They even have soft drinks in cans now.”
I opened the refrigerator. It was stocked thick with beer, two or three different kinds. I found the bottled coffee behind some tall green bottles and got one and went back to the living room, or that part of my apartment that passed for one, sat down in a chair and looked at Booger. My eyes had adjusted to the darkened room. He had a cut on his forehead and some bruises on his face.
“What happened to you?” I said. “You get caught up in machinery?”
“I got caught up in four guys in Tulsa,” he said. “They wanted me to pay for some skank they managed who didn’t know how to give a blow job. Way she worked, you’d have thought she was sucking a rock through a straw. Didn’t do a man any good at all. I didn’t want to pay. These gentlemen, her pimp and some bouncers, had different ideas.”
“How did that work out?”
“I got cut across the head with a knife, and I got hit a lot because all of them, except the one with the knife, had blackjacks. But what I can report is that three of them are a little broken up, and one of them can now put his leg over his head with no real effort. He might even be able to remove it and swing it around. And I suppose, right now, a whore who can’t blow a dick is looking for a new pimp to walk her around. And I have a new knife.”
“How bad did you hurt the pimp?”
“He’s not hurting now. So, after that, I needed a place to go and have a little R&R. But don’t worry, they don’t know who I am. I gave them Runt’s name when I signed on there for business.”
I smiled. “No you didn’t.”
“Of course not. I gave them yours.”
“You are funny.”
“Let’s just say if they’re looking for someone, his name is Delbert Littleball. I had it on one of my false licenses, so it’s the one I showed them. These days, just to get your ashes carried, you got to have identification so they don’t think some Arab has flown all the way over here to blow up some random whore with a bomb in a rubber.”
“How long you been here?”
“Not real long. I got here it was raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock, so I let myself in. I slept a bit on the couch. By the way, I also played on your computer. Looked at porn, just the free stuff, and I found where you had a big old fat file on a chick named Caroline who was so good-looking I thought my left nut was going to go in orbit around my johnson.”
“You looked at my personal stuff?”
“Hey, it wasn’t coded or anything. All I had to do was turn it on and it came up on the menu, along with other stuff. I looked at everything there. Say, you get back with that Gabby girl?”
“No.”
“Good. You don’t need her. By the way, all those notes you got on Caroline, this business you got going, it’s interesting.”
“It is at that.”
“Reporting is more fun than I thought. I thought you just mostly typed up shit, but you get into some action, don’t you?”
“Booger, you ought not to have been in my business like that.”
“I was bored, and after a while all the porno starts to look alike. I can’t tell who’s got the dick and who’s got the tits. So, I got to playing. You got lots of notes, bro. I read them all. Those kids got killed, I read your article on that, all your articles in fact. I liked most of them. I even read about the town on the Internet. This little place is hopping. All that racial shit going on. Best way to keep yourself sane on matters like that is to hate everyone straight across the board, except your bros of course. Way I see it, humanity is like a hungry, parasitic dog without a home, crossing the highway, back and forth. Sooner or later to be hit by a car.”
“What about your sisters?”
“Women I know aren’t my sisters and I wouldn’t trust them to hold five dollars for me while I went to the toilet. I’ll tell you something, though: all this stuff going down, black preacher and white preacher, could be some action in the old town that night. Or is it midday?”
“Midday. Look, Booger—”
“Hey, man. Almost forgot something. In all that rain, a mailman showed up. Can you believe that? Rain and sleet and all that shit, and this guy meant it. Actually, though, he wasn’t a government employee. He was FedEx or UPS or one of those things. Another kind of mailman. He had a package for you.”
“A package?”
“What are you, a fucking parrot? Yeah, a package.”
“I wasn’t expecting anything.”
“It’s on the kitchen counter.”
I went into the kitchen and got it. The handwriting on the front didn’t look like any handwriting I had seen before. There was an address on the front, one that indicated who had mailed the package to me. I recognized it immediately. It was Jimmy’s address.
I got out my pocketknife and slit the package open and eased out the contents. There was a letter and a photograph. I looked at the photograph and caught my breath.
“What is it, bro?” Booger said.
I turned back toward the living room and sat down in my chair again and looked at the photograph some more. It was of three women. I recognized one of them right off. It was Tabitha. She wasn’t looking so good. She was stretched out on a board like those photos of Old West villains shot and displayed for the crowd and she didn’t appear to have any insides, just a skull and a skin hanging off of that. Next to her, on another slab, was another woman. The face was withered and the eyes were gone and her body was in the same condition. Next to her was another withered body with long blond hair, and her lower body was partially covered by a blanket, or some kind of
