I looked. Sure enough. Two more guys. If the two near us were not church deacons, those two were not in the choir. Upstairs could have just been a storage place for hymn books, but I doubted it.
“Buster don’t work the brothers,” Leonard said. “All white thugs.”
“It may not seem that long ago to them that your kind couldn’t come in, and it may be they liked it like that.”
“That really isn’t true,” Leonard said. “They did come in here, and you know it.”
“They did janitor work,” I said, “and they used to come up the stairs at the back and sat up there in the balcony.”
“Nigger money was good as any,” Leonard said. “I know. I sat up there in the balcony once and spat on a white boy’s head.”
“You did not,” I said.
“No, but now and again I like to dream.”
We were whispering a game plan when all of a sudden the little fellow that had signed us in came over. He said, “The Honey Girls are sick.”
“Who?” I said.
“The gospel singers I told you about,” said the old ventriloquist, who had come over. “Their adult diapers probably got bunched up and they couldn’t make it. Or they heard that young girl come on and sing and left. I know they were here. I seen them, the smug assholes.”
“That’ll be enough,” said the little man.
“Sorry,” said the ventriloquist, and he waddled back to his stool.
I had my mind on other things, and hadn’t even noticed the young girl, not really. But in the back of my mind I sort of remembered her doing a Patsy Cline number, and not badly at all.
“Honey Sisters say they got sick,” said the little man.
“Both of them?” Leonard said.
“It hit them sudden, so you two are on next.”
“Oh,” I said.
Leonard grabbed my elbow. “Come on, I still remember ‘The Old Rugged Cross.’ ”
“You’re yanking me,” I said. “We’re really going out there?”
“I sing in the shower,” Leonard said. “I do all right.”
“Oh, hell,” I said.
Well, we went out there, and I knew that old tune too. I am an atheist, but I like a good gospel tune now and again. We didn’t have any music, but there was the house band and they knew the tune, sort of, though I didn’t remember it with a tuba solo. We started out with it. Leonard was good, actually; he sounded way all right. I sort of chimed in when he lifted a hand to me, but after a few lines I forgot the words, so I started singing nonsense. An old lady in the front row in a wheelchair said, “Get the hook.”
Leonard finished out while I snapped my fingers and tried to look cool. I think had I had sunglasses I could have pulled it off.
When we finished, or more less quit, they were glad to see us go. Someone even threw a wadded-up paper cup at me. Fuckers missed.
When we exited on the other side, Leonard said, “Damn, Hap. You fucked it up. We could have won that prize money. Or I could have.”
“I didn’t make us out as a duet, since we have never sung together even once. I never intended to go out there.”
“I’ve always wanted to do that.”
“You sounded all right,” I said, “but don’t be thinking of it as a second job.”
“As for you,” Leonard said, “you don’t be thinking of it at all. Now, let’s see if we can find Tillie.”
“If she’s alive,” I said.
“She’s alive, they are going to pay for it. If she’s dead, they’re going to pay for it, and then pay a dividend.”
I didn’t even like Tillie, but I sure liked Brett. Brett called her a bent twig. She’d say, “Hap, she’s a bent twig, but she’s not broken. She can weather the storm and come out on the other side.”
She was pretty much still in the storm as far as I was concerned, but if the information we had was right, she didn’t deserve this; this was even worse than what should happen to politicians. We headed toward the staircase on the side where we exited, near the choirboys. A man over there pointed us toward an exit. He was a chubby guy in a faded, purple leisure suit old enough to belong in a museum. He said, “That was bad, boys. Real bad.”
We ignored him and headed for the staircase.
“Not over there,” he said, and he grabbed my sleeve. I shook him loose and kept going. I had a feeling that most everyone here had no idea what was going on upstairs, no idea that the man who ran the Gospel Opry was about as reverent and kind as the business end of a hatchet.
“Those guys don’t kid,” said the man who had grabbed my sleeve. He was talking about the two boys at the stairs. They stepped out, one toward me, one toward Leonard.
The choirboy on my side said, “You don’t come this way.”
I kicked him in the balls and he bent a little and I hit him with a right hook. He went against the wall and came off of it mad. I hit him again, a straight right to the jaw. He went to one knee and tried to draw a pistol from under his coat. I pulled mine and hit him in the head with it. He went to his hands and knees, and I hit him again. He kind of bent his elbows like he had failed to do a push-up and lay on the floor. It was then that I noticed my leg where Kevin had hit me with the axe handle was really aching. I noticed this because I was going to kick him again and decided against it.
I looked over at Leonard. His man was already unconscious at the base of the stairs. I think he took him out with one good punch. I rolled my man over and took his gun. I had one in either hand now. I went up the stairs behind Leonard. Back onstage I heard laughter. Someone had finally succeeded at something. A joke maybe.
When I got to the top of the stairs, Leonard had taken an automatic off of the man he had hit and he had it at the ready. I turned and looked down, wondering if the deacons across the way knew what we were up to. If they didn’t, they would soon. I figured the man who grabbed my sleeve would tell them. He might not know what really went on here, but he knew who he worked for.
Of course, if we were wrong, and what we expected was not at the top of the stairs, was really a bingo parlor, we would have a lot of explaining to do. For that matter, we could have a lot of explaining to do anyway.
The deacons figured it out. They came running across the stage in the middle of a dance number with a man and a woman in a horse suit. The man was the back end, the horse’s ass. I knew this because I came back down the stairs when I heard running. It gave me a view of the stage. The deacons knocked the horse over and the man and woman spilled out of it. The couple said some words you wouldn’t expect to hear at a Gospel Opry. God probably made a big black mark in their book right then.
The deacons didn’t have guns drawn, and they almost ran right over me they were coming so fast. When they saw my revolver, as well as the automatic I had taken off one of the choirboys, they stopped up short. They froze like ice cubes.
I said, “Do you really want to get dead?”
One man shook his head and started to run across the stage again, past the horse that had been put together again. A tinny trumpet was playing somewhere and a piano. The horse was dancing. That goddamn tuba was hitting some random notes; that guy, he ought to be put down in the ground with that tuba.
The other deacon, the one that didn’t run, put his hands up. He said, “You got to at least take my gun, so I can say I was unarmed.”
“That’ll work,” I said. “But pull it easy.”
He did, squatted down and put it on the floor and backed up. “I got no beef,” he said.
“That’s good,” I said, “because I am in one shitty mood.”
He backed out and went across the stage, walking fast. The couple in the horse suit just quit then. The woman pulled off the horse’s head and tossed it into the audience. I hoped she hit the old woman in the wheelchair who said to get the hook.