“One,” Leonard said.
Moon Crater made a break for it. I owed Leonard one, so I chased Moon Crater down and grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around and threw a right cross into his face, and his face took it. He fell down. Before he could get up Leonard was there with the axe handle. I think it took about three whacks for Leonard to catch him good; I don’t really remember. I looked away. But I think it was the right leg.
We drove Leonard’s car to a church lot, which struck us as ironic, and I drove us in mine over to Marvel Creek. I said, “What if those guys get out of the woods and call? Warn Buster.”
“It’s miles to their car,” Leonard said. “It’s miles to No Enterprise. They got broke legs. Besides, it was you didn’t want me to kill them. Up to me, they’d be in the Sabine River somewhere with fish nibbling on them.”
“You are cold, man,” I said.
“Absolutely,” Leonard said.
We thought we’d stake out the Gospel Opry, but when we drove by, there was action there. A big crowd. Leonard said, “They’re loading them inside. What is it? Nine? Ten o’clock? I didn’t know Jesus stayed up this late.”
“True. He’s usually early to bed and early to rise.”
I got my gun and put it under my shirt in the small of my back. We left the axe handle in the backseat with its memories. As we walked up, we saw the crowd was growing.
I said to an old man on a cane, “What’s up?”
“The Gospel Opry usually. Talent show tonight, though. Y’all don’t know about it?”
“No,” I said. “We don’t.”
“It’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys. There’s people who sing and dance and do comedy. Good clean fun.” He looked at Leonard. “You’ll be able to get in, son. I remember when your color couldn’t.”
“My, how times have changed,” Leonard said.
I glanced around and saw a line going through another door, off to the side. I said to the old man, “Who are they?”
“The talent. They signed up to perform.”
Leonard said, “Come on, Hap.”
We got in line at the talent door.
“More fun than a barrel of monkeys,” I said, “and they let your kind in, Leonard.”
“Well, suh, I sho’ is beholding to some peckerwoods for that. Sho’ is.”
Inside there was a little man at a desk. He wore a bad wig. He asked us our name. We gave him our first names. Leonard said we were a singing act.
The little man couldn’t find us on the roster, of course.
“We were set,” I said. “We called ahead and everything. They think we’re the bee’s knees over in Overton.”
“Overton is so small you can throw a rock across it,” the man said.
“Yep, but we’re still big there,” I said.
He thought about it a moment, said, “Look here. There’s a couple of guys who play bagpipes that canceled. Laundry lost their kilts or some such something. I’ll give you their spot. You didn’t get registered, but it’ll work out. So you sing?”
“Like fucking birds,” Leonard said.
The man looked at him, grinned slowly. Jesus didn’t seem to always be at his house. He waved us inside, and we went.
“A singing group?” I said.
“The bee’s knees,” Leonard said.
Way it worked is we were guided backstage. There were a lot of acts there. One old man had on what looked like a sergeant’s uniform. He was potbellied, bald, and looked as if he should have been on oxygen. He had a ventriloquist dummy with him. It was dressed up like a private, with a field cap and everything. I got to tell you, I seriously hate me some ventriloquist dummies. When I was a kid, late at night, I caught an old movie titled Dead of Night, an anthology film. One of the sections was about a man and a ventriloquist dummy that takes over his life. It scared the living dog shit out of me. I see a block of wood that might be carved into a ventriloquist dummy I get nervous. And this dummy looked as if the rats and someone with an ice pick had been at him.
“How long you been doing this?” I said.
He wheezed a moment before answering. “I used to make real money at it. No one will have me now, except these talent shows, some kids’ parties. I don’t do as well as I once did. They got the goddamn Internet now. Oh, you boys won’t tell on me, will you? They like us to watch our language.”
“We won’t say a fucking word,” Leonard said.
The old man laughed. He leaned in close. “Neither of you boys got a drink, do you?”
We admitted that we didn’t.
“That’s all right, then. Just wondering.” He shook the doll a little, causing dust to stir up. “Private Johnson is getting worn-out. My wife took a knife to him once, and used him to beat me over the head. It did some damage to him and me. I fart, it blacks me out and I wake up wearing a tutu.”
He barked then at his joke, and then he carried on. “I haven’t had the money to get him fixed. I act like the one eyelid he’s got that droops is just part of the act. It adds character.”
“Sure it does,” I said. “You’ll knock them dead.”
I hoped he didn’t knock himself dead. He was red-faced and breathing heavy and looked as if he might blow a major hose at any moment. Maybe his talk about farting and blacking out wasn’t just a joke.
We all stood there in line, looking out at the stage. There were some dance acts going on out there. The band sounded like cows dying. The dancers moved like they had wooden legs. Next a young, beak-nosed man who played a fiddle so bad it sounded like he was sawing on a log did his act. It was the kind of noise that made your asshole pucker.
“The sisters will win this thing,” said the old man. “I ain’t seen them yet, but they’ll probably show soon. Those dried-up-cunt bitches. They enter ever’ week and win the five hundred dollars. It’s those damn hymns. It gets the Jesus going in folks, and they feel like they got to vote for them. Shit, I’m up.”
The old man waddled out with that horrible doll, picked up a stool on the way out. His act was so painful I thought I might use a curtain rope to hang myself, but at the same time I admired the old bastard. He wasn’t a quitter. He wheezed and tried to throw his voice, but by the end of his act the dummy looked healthier than he did.
He came back with his doll and stool. He sat on the stool. “I tried to hit a high note there, when Private sang ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,’ and I damn near shit on myself. I think one of my rib bones moved.”
“You did fine,” I said.
“I did fine about fifty years ago and it was a spring morning and I had just knocked off a piece of ass. I did fine then. Least that’s how I like to remember it. Might have been a hot afternoon in the dead of summer and it might have been a stump-broke cow.”
“Just sit there and rest,” I said.
“You’re all right,” he said to me. “Sure you haven’t a drink?”
“Sure,” I said.
There was another dance troupe onstage, and a guy with some bowling pins he was going to juggle was next in line. Leonard and I glanced around, trying to take in the place. It didn’t look like a joint where a prostitute would be kept, or in this case made to go for free until she was used up. It didn’t look like a place where someone sold drugs. It looked like a place full of bad entertainment. That’s what made it a good hideout, of course, but I wasn’t convinced.
I noticed that the acts that finished were ushered along a certain path, and that there were two guys on either side of a dark stairway. They didn’t look like church deacons, but I decided to call them that in my mind. I left Leonard and walked over to the stairway, looked up it. I said, “What’s up there?”
One of the men stepped forward, said, “That’s private, sir.”
I went back to Leonard. I said, “There’s a whole nuther floor up there.”
“There’s a stairway on the other side of the stage too,” he said. “You can see it from here. It’s got bookends on either side of it too.”