’Course, getting married wasn’t on my mind. Something else was, and I did my best to satisfy my mind with some more of that authentic Chinee sweet and sour.
Billy was asleep the next day, Sunday, when I come stumbling back, so I crapped out, too. I remember right, we headed home separate on Sunday night late. Both of us crippled and green but back in Laredo Billy’s car was washed and spanky clean except for a cracked rear window. Billy said some Matamoros drunk had made a failed try to break in. He showed me his raw knuckles to prove it.
Billy said, “I can still punch like you taught me, Reddy.”
Driving myself home alone, I was all bowlegged, and my heart was leaping sideways. But when it’s my time to go to sleep for the last time, I want to die in Boys Town teasing the girls and learning Chinee.
I was still hung over on Monday, and had to lay around all pale and shaky until I could load up on biscuits and gravy, fresh salsa, fried grits, a near pound of bacon, three or four tomatoes, and a few thousand longnecks. I guess I slept most of the time ’cause I don’t remember no TV.
It wasn’t until when I got to the gym on Tuesday that I found out about Kenny Coyle. Hunters found him dead in the dirt. He was beside his torched BMW in the mesquite on the outside of town. They found him Sunday noon, and word was he’d been dead some twelve hours, which meant he’d been killed near midnight Saturday night. Someone at the gym said the cops had been by to see me. Hell, me’n Billy was in Mexico, and Dee-Cee was in Houston.
The inside skinny was that Coyle’d been hog-tied with them plastic cable-tie deals that cops’ll sometimes use instead of handcuffs. One leg’d been knee-capped with his own Ruger someplace else, and later his head was busted in by blunt force with a unknown object. His brains was said to hang free, and looked like a bunch of grapes. His balls was in his mouth, and his mouth had been slit to the ear so’s both balls’d fit. The story I got was that the cops who found him got to laughing, said it was funny seeing a man eating his own mountain oysters. See, police right away knew it was business.
When the cops stopped by the gym Tuesday morning, I was still having coffee and looking out the storefront window. I didn’t have nothing to hide, so I stayed sipping my joe right where I was. I told them the same story I been telling you, starting off with stopping by to see old Royal in Dilley. See, the head cop was old Junior, and old Junior was daddy to that plain-Jane gal.
I told him me and Billy had been down Nuevo Laredo when the tragedy occurred. Told him about the Cadillac Bar, and about drinking tequila and teasing the girls in Boys Town. ’Course, I left out a few thousand details I didn’t think was any of his business. Old Junior’s eyes got paler still, and his jaw was clenched up to where his lips didn’t hardly move when he talked. He didn’t ask but two or three questions, and looked satisfied with what I answered.
Fixing to leave, Junior said, “Seems like some’s got to learn good sense the hard way.”
Once Junior’d gone, talk started up in the gym again and ropes got jumped. Fight gyms from northern Mexico all up through Texas knew what happened to Coyle. Far as I know, the cops never knocked on Billy Clancy’s door, but I can tell you that none of Billy’s fighters never had trouble working up a sweat no more, or getting up for a fight neither.
I was into my third cup of coffee when I saw old Dee-Cee get off the bus. He was same as always, except this time he had him a knobby new walking stick. It was made of mesquite like the last one. But as he come closer, I could see that the wood on this new one was still green from the tree.
I said, “You hear about Coyle?”
“I jus’ got back,” said Dee-Cee, “what about him?” One of the colored boys working out started to snicker. Dee-Cee gave that boy a look with those greeny-blue eyes. And that was the end of that.
Daniel Waterman
A Lepidopterist’s Tale
From Bomb
When my sister Janie and I were coming up in Smoketown, not long after Skeet came from across the street to stay and be our brother, an alley cat took to lingering around our house. Like all stray cats it lingered indecisively, torn between its two basic natures — it rubbed against your leg, but wouldn’t let you pet it. It followed you everywhere, but hissed viciously if you tried to pick it up.
Skeet loved that cat. For a while. It was scrofulous and rib-thin, but with lively gray eyes it still had its pride. Skeet put up with its nasty attitude, fed it food and milk, watched it stalk and prowl. I guess he just wanted something to take care of even then. But since no one really wants a cat that can’t be picked up and petted, an unfriendly cat, he stopped feeding it and petting it and letting it in. After a while the cat didn’t come around anymore. I guess it was picked up or wandered off or died — I don’t know which. And I guess Skeet was a lot like that cat. That cat had its own doom in it like a tumor.
It’s a slight episode from my childhood, and I wouldn’t have remembered it at all if Janie hadn’t phoned me in tears at the office last week and asked me to meet her at Skeet’s apartment. Skeet lived in a lot of places around town after we all left home eight years ago. I never saw most of the places Skeet lived, and I probably wouldn’t have cared to. But two months ago, out of the blue, he turned up in the neighborhood that Janie and I always took pains to avoid, the one where we all grew up together.
This was Smoketown, where the shotgun houses run undistinguished for blocks and blocks, like brick after brick in a masonry wall. Where the tedium of the street, dull and scrubbed and empty and clean, is punctuated at odd intersections by a few corner storefronts — a convenience store or a laundromat or a bar. Where the enormous chimney of the city incinerator looms over everything, and the smoke that erupts from it all day long gives the neighborhood its name.
Skeet’s few belongings were still at his place, and his landlord had asked us to clear them out. Apparently Skeet had put down Janie’s name as the person to notify in case of an emergency. It wasn’t an emergency anymore, but Janie had finally found the nerve to go over and see what was there. On her day off, calling me from a pay phone on the corner because Skeet didn’t have a phone, had never had a phone, she wanted me to come over too. Quick.
“What is it?” I asked her.
“Just come over.”
“It’s a bad time, Janie,” I told her. “I’m new here. I can’t be running out on little errands in the middle of the day.”
“Just come over. All right?”
“Listen,” I said, guessing she’d just had a bad attack of the sorrows. “Leave it alone now. Tomorrow’s Saturday. I’ve got the day off. I’ll help tomorrow.”
“That’s not it.”
“Well, what is it?”
In the pause that followed I could hear her inhale, that signature breadth of time. She was smoking again. “Just come over,” she said.
“I can’t. Can’t you call Hal?” I asked, hoping she might consider calling her husband. A vicious silence ensued, and I remembered that Hal, who is not a bad person, had fallen from grace with my sister, his wife. I had no doubt he’d done nothing wrong, but that wasn’t going to help Hal any. Janie’s judgments have lives of their own, never dependent on things like good and bad behavior, one’s deservings.
“Never mind,” I said.
“He never knew Skeet,” she said, almost a growl.
“Janie,” I sighed.
“Sorry,” she said, softening a little but still defensive, still the disappointed little girl. “Look,” she went on. “I found something.”