“He has his men, you know.”
“Yeah. But when he goes in the office, maybe he don’t. And maybe I check it out this Thursday, find out when he goes in, and next Thursday I maybe go inside and wait on him.”
“How would you do that?”
“I’m thinkin’ on it, baby.”
“I don’t think it’s such a good idea.”
“You lost fifty grand, and so did I, so blowin’ a hole in his head is as close as we’ll get to satisfaction.”
So Thursday morning I’m going in the garage, to go and check things out, and when I get in the car, before I can open up the garage and back out, a head raises up in the backseat, and a gun barrel, like a wet kiss, pushes against the side of my neck.
I can see him in the mirror. It’s Lou Boo. He says: “You got to go where I tell you, else I shoot a hole in you.”
I said, “Loodie.”
“Yeah, she come to us right away.”
“Come on, man. I was just mad. I wasn’t gonna do nothin’.”
“So here it is Thursday mornin’, and now you’re tellin’ me you wasn’t goin’ nowhere.”
“I was gonna go out and get some breakfast. Really.”
“Don’t believe you.”
“Shit,” I said.
“Yeah, shit,” Lou Boo said.
“How’d you get in here without me knowin’?”
“I’m like a fuckin’ ninja… And the door slides up, you pull it from the bottom.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.”
“Come on, Lou Boo, give a brother a break. You know how it is.”
Lou Boo laughed a little. “Ah, man. Don’t play the brother card. I’m what you might call one of them social progressives. I don’t see color, even if it’s the same as mine. Let’s go, my man.”
It was high morning and cool when we arrived. I drove my car right up to where the pool was dug out, way Lou Boo told me. There was a cement-mixer truck parked nearby for the pool. We stopped, and Lou Boo told me to leave it in neutral. I did. I got out and walked with him to where Big O was sitting in his motorized scooter with Loodie on his lap. His boys were all around him.
Be Bop pointed his finger at me and dropped his thumb. “My man,” he said.
When I was standing in front of Big O, he said, “Now, I want you to understand, you wouldn’t be here had you not decided to kill me. I can’t have that, now can I?”
I didn’t say anything.
I looked at Loodie, she shrugged.
“I figured you owed me money,” I said.
“Yeah,” Big O said. “I know. You see, Loodie, she comes and tells me she’s gonna make a deal with you to kill Jack and make you think you made a deal with her. That way, the deal I made was with her, not you. You followin’ me on this, swivel dick? Then, you come up with this idea to kill me at the doctor’s office. Loodie, she came right to me.”
“So,” I said, “you’re gettin’ Loodie out of the deal, and she’s gettin’ a hundred thousand.”
“That sounds about right, yeah,” Big O said.
I thought about that. Her straddling that fat bastard on his scooter. I shook my head, glared at her, said, “Damn, girl.”
She didn’t look right at me.
Big O said, “Loodie, you go on in the house there and amuse yourself. Get a beer or somethin’. Watch a little TV. Do your nails. Whatever.” Loodie started walking toward the trailers. When she was inside, Big O said, “Hell, boy. I know how she is, and I know what she is. It’s gonna be white gravy on sweet chocolate bread for me. And when I get tired of it, she gonna find a hole out here next to you. I got me all kind of room here. I ain’t usin’ the lake-boat stalls no more. That’s risky. Here is good. Though I’m gonna have to dig another spot for a pool, but that’s how it is. Ain’t no big thing, really.”
“She used me,” I said. “She’s the one led me to this.”
“No doubt, boy. But you got to understand. She come to me and made the deal before you did anything. I got to honor that.”
“I could just go on,” I said. “I could forget all about it. I was just mad. I wouldn’t never bother you. Hell, I can move. I can go out of state.”
“I know that,” he said. “But I got this rule, and it’s simple. You threaten to kill me, I got to have you taken care of. Ain’t that my rule, boys?”
There was a lot of agreement.
Lou Boo was last. He said, “Yep, that’s the way you do it, boss.”
Big O said, “Lou Boo, put him in the car, will you?”
Lou Boo put the gun to back of my head, said, “Get on your knees.”
“Fuck you,” I answered, but he hit me hard behind the head. Next thing I know I’m on my knees, and he’s got my hands behind my back and has fastened a plastic tie over my wrists.
“Get in the car,” Lou Boo said.
I fought him all the way, but Be Bop came out and kicked me in the nuts a couple of times, hard enough I threw up, and then they dragged me to the car and shoved me inside behind the wheel and rolled down the windows and closed the door.
Then they went behind the car and pushed. The car wobbled, then fell, straight down, hit so hard the air bag blew out and knocked the shit out of me. I couldn’t move with it the way it was, my hands bound behind my back, the car on its nose, its back wheels against the side of the hole. It looked like I was trying to drive to hell. I was stunned and bleeding. The bag had knocked a tooth out. I heard the sound of a motor above me, a little motor. The scooter.
I could hear Big O up there. “If you hear me, want you to know I’m having one of the boys bring the cement truck around. We’re gonna fill this hole with cement, and put, I don’t know, a tennis court or somethin’ on top of it. But the thing I want you to know is this is what happens when someone fucks with Big O.”
“You stink,” I said. “And you’re fat. And you’re ugly.”
He couldn’t hear me. I was mostly talking into the air bag.
I heard the scooter go away, followed by the sound of a truck and a beeping as it backed up. Next I heard the churning of the cement in the big mixer that was on the back of it. Then the cement slid down and pounded on the roof and started to slide over the windshield. I closed my eyes and held my breath, and then I felt the cold, wet cement touch my elbow as it came through the open window. I thought about some way out, but there was nothing there, and I knew that within moments there wouldn’t be anything left for me to think about at all.
DUCKWEED by GEORGE WIER
Littlefield
Carlos McDaniel was skimming duckweed when the two men came and shot him full of holes.
It was at his ex-wife’s uncle’s place, fifteen miles south and east of College Station, Texas, and it had a summer cabin on it, complete with air-conditioning and an ancient refrigerator always stocked with Cokes, cheap beer, and sandwich materials. The cabin stood ten feet from the edge of the one-acre lake.
The lake was little more than an overgrown duck pond, but it was all the water anyone could need on a hot summer day when the only breeze came from the flapping wings of wild waterfowl and even the water moccasins lay listless on the floating platform, unmindful of interlopers. It was a hidden spot, well away from competing salesmen and customers who gravitated to the two extremes: bored-stiff disinterest or unrealistic expectation. Carlos got more of those two kinds than any other as a real estate salesman. And when they got to be a little too much for a bright-eyed young man with all of life ahead of him and a ticket for this Saturday’s Lotto Texas in his pocket, he would climb in his ’77 Datsun short-bed pickup and head for the country and the cool, spring-fed waters of Hidden Lake. And his share of the beer.
When blacktop gave way to caliche gravel and a long-following geyser trail of fine, reddish dust spreading out like a comet’s tail, only then could he breathe deeply and begin to take in life again.