Big Man bent down, snapped a revolver out of an ankle holster, leaped for the door, jerked it open. The night was bright orange and yellow with flecks of red. I could see the ’64 Impala. It was blazing, sending up gasoline and oil to the great motor gods of the heavens.
A sound behind me. A wham! Followed by another. Then another. Booger leaped and got hold of the ball bat, and Pock Face jerked back from where he was kneeling. The wires on the battery jumped out of the bowl, and the bowl turned over and the ice ran under my ass. Pock Face bumped my chair and I went over sideways. Pock’s head knocked against the lightbulb, sent it swinging.
Then it all happened in the alternating light and shadow of the swaying bulb.
Big Man popped a shot from his little ankle gun. It made a bright burst in the shadows. The bulb swung back and there was a blast from a shotgun.
Pock Face, a.k.a. Kinney, hurtled over my chair, crashed to the floor next to me. Some of the dark jelly that was now his face slapped against my cheek and chin. The blood was so hot it stung.
Big Man bellowed, bolted through the open door as another blast from the shotgun ripped into the air where he had been standing. Fragments of the wall and door frame leaped toward me.
Shadow.
A tall man, the one with the shotgun, stumped past me, and as the light swung back and finally came to rest, I saw his shotgun stock swing out, catch Booger upside the head with a sound like someone popping loose the vacuum-packed lid of a jar.
Booger took the blow with a grunt and a spray of teeth. He swung the bat, but the man holding the shotgun used his weapon to block it, brought the barrel around in a short arc and hit Booger in the face. Booger did a kind of backwards hop, hit the table, knocked it flat, fell down on top of it.
The man with the shotgun kicked his boot into Booger’s balls. Booger screamed and the man fit the shotgun into Booger’s mouth. He said, “Good night, ass-lick,” and fired.
Booger’s head sort of went away.
I lay very still. The man with the shotgun squatted down and looked at me. He was a lean-faced dude wearing a stained white cowboy hat, old boots, blue jeans, and a faded western shirt decorated with little green flowers. I realized the face belonged to the man in the yellow Pontiac.
“Your ass is hangin’ out, friend,” he said.
“I’m also tied to a chair.”
“I see that.”
“You planning on shooting me, too?”
“Well, you are kinda gift-wrapped… But no.”
The cowboy took a large knife from his jeans pocket, cut the cord on my feet and around my chest, then he got behind me and went to work on the wire, twisting it free.
I wobbled as I tried to stand. The cowboy put the knife away with one quick movement, took my arm and helped me. I pulled up my pants and fastened them. I said, “Man, I don’t know what to say… Did you have to kill them?”
“How about ‘Howdy’? And yeah, I guess I did. I started to just yell time-out, but decided that wasn’t a good idea. I’m Jim Bob Luke.”
“Hap Collins,” I said.
“I know who you are,” he said. “I followed them out here, then drove past, you know, to stay cool, so they wouldn’t know I was following them, but the sonofabitches sort of lost me for a time or I’d have been here sooner.”
“I’m just glad you showed up. Not that I understand why. What about Big Man?”
“Oh, I ain’t worried. I been watchin’ the doors.”
“Confident, aren’t you?”
“I invented the goddamn word. Now, why don’t you use your shirtsleeve and wipe them brains off your face, and let’s skedaddle before ole big un comes back.”
“I thought you were confident.”
“I am. But I ain’t stupid.”
20
Jim Bob Luke led me out through the back way, over the door he had kicked down. We went quickly into the woods. He moved well in the woods, and we went along like that and found a spot where we could look through the foliage, back at the shack and the raging fire of the Impala, but there wasn’t any sign of Big Man Mountain.
“Hated to burn a classic car like that,” Jim Bob said. “I started to just kick the door down and come in blazin’, but I like a little edge. You any good with guns?”
“I don’t like them, but I’m good with them.”
“Good. I got another one here, and it ain’t no peashooter. It’s a forty-five automatic.”
He gave it to me. We sat there and watched the car burn. The fire wasn’t so high now and it licked around the frame of the Impala like the devil’s tongue licking the bones of an animal.
“Ole big un is out there somewhere,” Jim Bob said. “I’m tryin’ to decide I want to hunt him down or not.”
“He has a gun.”
“I know. He shot at me with it. He’s a shitty shot. Couldn’t hit a circus elephant in the ass with a trick stool. But out here in the dark, and this being his stomping grounds, maybe I ought not. How you feelin’?”
“Queasy.”
“Can you buck up?”
“Yeah.”
“Come on.”
We moved deeper into the woods, along the edge of a swampy creek, then finally out of the trees into a clearing. We climbed under a barbed-wire fence and onto the grass next to the road. The yellow Pontiac was parked there, in the grass. It sat on four flat tires.
“Well,” Jim Bob said, looking around. “Looks like ole big un got here ahead of us.”
“Think he’s watching us?”
“Could be.”
Jim Bob reached in his back pocket, took out a penlight and flashed it around. He found tracks in the soft dirt of the road. He said, “Motherfucker’s got some feet on him, don’t he?”
“I’ll say.”
“And look here.”
Jim Bob put the penlight’s glow on the side of his car. There was a deep scrape along the side.
“He just had to do that, didn’t he?” Jim Bob said. “Well, the scraped paint don’t stop me, and I got me four spares in the trunk, so fuck him. I used to be a goddamn Boy Scout. I came prepared.”
I hurt something awful downstairs in the ball department, but I changed the tires while Jim Bob kept guard with the shotgun. “Why’d he just do the tires?” I said. “Why not screw something else up?”
“I think we interrupted him,” Jim Bob said. “And he didn’t want any part of this shotgun.”
I changed the tires as fast as I could, constantly expecting a shot in the back. But Big Man Mountain didn’t come out of the woods with his little ankle gun blazing. He didn’t offer to help me with the lug bolts. A Saint Bernard didn’t bring me a keg.
When all four spares were on, Jim Bob put the flats in the trunk along with the jack and drove us out of there. I couldn’t hold out any longer. The pain was too much. The activity had made it worse. I passed out on the car seat.
When I awoke, Jim Bob had my feet and Leonard had my arms. I looked up at Leonard. He said, “Take it easy, brother. You all right now.”
“Funny,” I said. “I don’t feel all right.”
I closed my eyes and they carried me away and put me on a cloud and the cloud was comfortable, except for a fire built between my legs, but I couldn’t move to get away from the fire; no matter how hard I tried it followed me, and finally I slept, fire or no fire, and in my dream heads kept exploding, and two rabid squirrels, one with a pocked face, the other one black with a shaved head, bit me repeated on the balls, while another squirrel, very plump with oversized feet and a beard and devil’s horns, turned a crank on a battery that threw sparks.
21
When I awoke it was early morning, still dark. There were strands of light in the darkness outside, but the strands seemed to be suffering against the night, as if blackness had decided to push the light back and hold it down until it stopped breathing.
And maybe it just seemed that way because I had witnessed two men killed and hadn’t had any breakfast and my balls felt as if someone had borrowed them during the night for a game of Ping-Pong and had put them back in reverse.