“And it’s such lovely hair,” I said. “Very gritty.”
“What?” Haskel said.
“Forget it,” Leonard said. “Don’t pay him any mind.”
“I tell you what,” Haskel said, “you two jerk-offs get back in that there truck and haul on out of here. I don’t like you much.”
“We’re not here to be friends,” Leonard said. “Hap here, he got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. Had to get rolling before he had his coffee and jerked his dick. But you don’t like us, that’s okay. You can like our money.”
“Yeah, well,” Haskel said, giving me a beady eyeball, “now we got that out of the way, you know what I sell, so let’s get on with it.”
“We need some cold pieces,” Leonard said. “And not so old you load them with a ramrod and a powder horn.”
Haskel was all business now. It was like we’d never had a disagreeable moment. “Heavy work?”
“Hard to say. We don’t want machine guns, stuff like that. Simple, effective stuff. Probably close-range. One long-range weapon might be good. Maybe two.”
“Cowboy style?”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“Stuff like that, it doesn’t come cheap.”
“Let’s see what you got, then talk prices.”
“All right,” Haskel said, then nodded toward me and asked Leonard: “This guy, he gonna have anything to say about this?”
“Jes when Massa Leonard say it okay to talk,” I said.
“He jokin’?” Haskel said.
“Yeah,” Leonard said. “He does that all the time. He thinks he’s funny.”
“Well, he ain’t. In fact, I’ve already had about enough of him. Come on.”
As we followed Haskel, Leonard cut his eyes toward me. I gave him a big juicy smile. It was nice to put Leonard on the receiving end of bullshit for a change. Guy like this Haskel, I couldn’t help myself. Then again, it was me and Leonard buying from him, so what did that make us? Thinking about that, some of the humor went out of my spirit and my feet began to drag.
We went around the house, past some leaning sheds and a pen with hogs in it. The hogs came up to the fence and stuck their noses through and sniffed. The wind was picking up their scent, and I’ll tell you, it was healthy.
Down past the pens and the outhouse, which had a unique and memorable aroma all its own, we entered a path in the woods, and after a while we came to a clearing, and in the clearing was a huge well-cared-for barn. Out to the right of the clearing were a number of stinking armadillo carcasses; nothing was left but the decaying shells and the ants and flies they housed.
There was a mound of dirt beyond that, and I could see something on top of the mounds, in a row, about two feet apart, but I couldn’t make out what it was.
Inside, the barn was air-conditioned. Haskel flipped a switch and the lights came on and showed boxes and racks of guns and the smell of gun oil was strong and sweet, and there was the stench of gunpowder too, and it was acrid and biting to the nostrils. In the back you could see a kind of gun range with bags of sand and bales of hay and targets.
“Run everything on a generator,” Haskel said. “Got to keep it a certain temperature for the stuff I carry. Not too cold. Not too hot. There’s shit in here, weather got wrong, it’d go off and blow our asses all the way to Mineola. Maybe out in the goddamned Gulf.”
“I don’t like to travel that far unless I got plane tickets and a steward in my lap,” Leonard said.
Haskel cut an eye toward Leonard. “You mean stewardess, don’t you?”
“I don’t think so,” Leonard said, and let Haskel churn that one over. Haskel didn’t seem to come to any decision. Maybe he’d look up the word “steward” in the dictionary after we left and think about it some and be real upset. I hoped so.
I was amazed at all the guns and ammo and the boxes that surely contained more of the same. On racks were things like rocket launchers and grenades and knives. I personally don’t like the idea of someone as stupid as Haskel with guns. Actually, I didn’t like the idea of anyone with guns. Me especially. It was one thing to own a handgun, a hunting rifle, but to have enough weapons to give the United States Army a fight went beyond desire for liberty and went over into plain ole anarchy. Pretty soon we would decide liberty also included the right to own our own personal backyard nuclear device. That goes with our right to bear arms, doesn’t it? Maybe Haskel could sell us a nuke and we could use it to turn Tillie’s new pimp into a mushroom cloud. That would teach him.
Haskel raised an arm and pointed around the expanse of the barn. “This has got to be the best goddamn store of weapons in East Texas. Maybe Texas. What I’m sayin’ to you is, had I not done business with you before, colored fella—”
“Leonard,” Leonard said.
“—I wouldn’t be doing business with you now. If anything goes wrong, and things come back on me, and I get my dick in the wood chipper over selling you guns, I got connections, and these connections, they wouldn’t like to find out you fucked me. You did that to me, even if I’m in a jail cell, some night you go to bed, you won’t wake up. There’s people I know will see to it.”
“Wow,” Leonard said, “I just had a little tingle all the way to the end of my big black toes. What about you, Hap?”
“My toes aren’t black, but I think I felt a tingle.”
Haskel said, “What I want you to do is go over to that table there, write your name on the pad, and I want you to show me your driver’s license so I know you got the same name you put down. You got other identification, I want to see it. That way, something goes wrong, cops come down on my head, I got your name and identification. We all go down together.”
“Last time I was here you just had guns in the trunk of your car,” Leonard said.
“Business is good,” Haskel said. “That Waco thing, the Oklahoma bombing. That’s good for business.”
We went over to the desk, got out our driver’s licenses and let Haskel look at them. Neither of us had credit cards to show, but we both had ancient Social Security cards and we let him look at those. He carefully wrote down our license and card numbers and we signed the notepad.
I felt creeped by all that. Cops, FBI agents raided this place, there was my name, my address. Not only was I fucked, but so was Leonard. Once again, I had dragged him into the shit.
When we finished, Haskel went away for a moment, came back with an armload of weapons. He put them on a bare table by the door. He picked up one of them, a double-barreled shotgun.
“Apologies to you, colored fella, but they call this a nigger spreader.”
“How nice,” Leonard said.
“Twelve-gauge Remington double-barrel. Short barrels, not sawed but specially altered by yours truly. Short-range, hair triggers. Let this fucker go in a filling station shitter, it’ll kill everyone in there, wipe their asses and flush the commode. Interested?”
“How much?” I asked.
“Eight hundred dollars.”
“Goddamn!” Leonard said. “Sonofabitch better not just wipe asses, it better come on over to my house and suck my dick.”
“It might do it,” Haskel said, “but this baby sucks your dick, you won’t like it. Shit, colored fella—”
“Leonard.”
“—you was expectin’ illegal cold guns to come at Kmart prices?”
“We were hoping,” Leonard said. “I don’t suppose that price includes ammunition?”
“It don’t, but I’ll throw in a box of shells.”
“Two boxes of shells, and shave a hundred dollars off and you got a deal,” Leonard said.
“Sold,” Haskel said, and put the shotgun on the table and picked up a rifle. It was one of two. “My design. You want to cowboy, you get to cowboy.” Haskel tossed the gun to me and I caught it.