"What?"
"Nothing. Buddy, I tell you, the vibes from that town, from that cafe, it's like going back to the middle sixties, when I was marching for civil rights and getting my head cracked. Not only because I was for civil rights, but because I was white and marching for civil rights. You know, I don't know I'm brave enough to do what I did then. It was all going on now, I think I'd hide in the house."
"It is going on now, and you're not hiding in the house. You're back in the shit. You weren't special brave then, Hap. You were young and stupid and overly idealistic. You're still the last two, even if the idealistic part is slightly tainted."
"What amazes me, Leonard, is you're more of an optimist than I am. You even thought your time in Vietnam was well spent. If anyone should be bitching, it should be you. A black guy used up and thrown out. You hadn't gone to war, man, no telling what you'd have made of yourself."
"I don't blame anyone or anything for who I am or what I do. I consider myself just fine, Hap. I make my own choices, my own decisions, I sail my own ship till it crashes. Thing with you, is you actually feel guilty you're not on the cover of Time magazine. Deep down, you believe that shit Florida used to tell you about how you weren't ever gonna amount to anything or do anything. You think to be important you got to be some kind of Wall Street stockbroker or Nobel Prize winner. Listen here. You're a good man and my friend, and we're true as we know how to be to what we think is right. I don't know what else there is that matters. All that other shit is just cake decoration."
"Thanks, Leonard."
"That's all right. I didn't mean any of it."
"Now that it's established we're good people and righteous friends, we still don't have a place to stay."
"We might try the black folks. I figure the other side of town is where they hang out. They got to be around, all this field work and lumbering has to be done. They got to be there so
white folks can tell them what to do. And, of course, they need a nigger to hang now and then."
"Good thing you showed up, huh?"
Leonard looked at the sky. "You know, this weather is creepy. Last time I saw a sky like this it turned super-cold and full of ice, and bad things happened. I can still feel the pain in my leg now and then. And it was all your fault too."
"I remember. But the clouds look to me more like they're filled with rain. I think we're in for a hell of a soaking."
"We don't find a place, we could just go on back for tonight. Regroup, start over in the next day or two."
"I want to find Florida. It won't be any easier a day or two from now, even if the weather is better. And it could be worse. Seeing Grovetown, I'm a little nervous for her welfare. Florida has to be staying somewhere."
"It's logical that she'll be in the black section."
"Probably, but for protocol's sake, I think a good place to start is the Chief of Police. If she was doing research on this jail hanging, you know she talked to him. We might get something from the Chief that'll save us some steps."
And now, cruising back to Grovetown, eyes closed, listening to the tires humming, I tried to tell myself I wasn't really worried much. Tried to convince myself I didn't know Leonard so well that I could be certain he was worried too and didn't want to say anything to make me more uptight than I was. And maybe I was sensing nothing of the kind from Leonard. He had his own heartaches. Raul was gone.
But Raul wasn't dead.
Jesus. Don't let Florida be dead, and don't let that kind of bullshit get in your thinking, Hap, you jinx, you. Because if she's dead, that makes two, back to back. Then I was thinking about Florida, about her coffee-colored skin, soft as butter, the way she smiled, the white, near perfect teeth, the long smooth
legs and the way she whispered to me when we made love. And there were the more primitive thoughts as well; the ones that are as real as any other. The way she took me inside her and moved her ass and made me feel strong and masculine, and loved me until the world went away and I was centered. A nirvana where all past and present and future moments were non-existent.
Shit, that was good. I got home, I had to write that down.
That's right, Hap, clown on out. Try not to think about the fact that you thought things between you and Florida were going to be wonderful and forever. And then she was gone.
But she hadn't married Hanson. I liked to think I was part of the reason. That she loved me still.
Yeah. And now and then, I liked to believe I would live forever too, and that I wouldn't age past where I was now and the meaning of life would soon come to me, and would not disappoint me when I knew it.
Sometimes I feared I knew the meaning of life. Simplicity itself. We're born to propagate, then we die. In my case, or so it seemed, I was merely born to die.
Clear the head, Hap, ole buddy, you loser times two. No bad thoughts today. No letting a heavy gray sky hold you hostage. No memories you can't deal with. A step at a time. Keep an even heartbeat and roll on down the road.
But then I thought of Trudy, my ex-wife, dead now for ... my God, what was it?
Four years.
Jesus.
It seemed like yesterday.
It seemed like a thousand years ago.
Blond, long-legged beauty with a smile like an angel and a misguided heart. And it had been winter then too. I nearly lost Leonard then as well, and that too had been my fault.
Okay, Trudy is dead and gone, Hap, I says to my ownself, but you don't know about Florida. You're overreacting. She's all
right. You'll find her. If not today, tomorrow. Alive. She may not be happy to see you. Might think you're a meddling sonofabitch, and you are, but when you see her, and she's okay, that's all that will matter.
She's all right, Hap, my man.
She's fine.
Fit as a fiddle.
Ripe as a peach.
A roll of thunder. A crack of lightning.
I opened my eyes and turned and looked at Leonard in the cloud-suffocated light. He looked at me briefly with no expression, his fingers flexed on the steering wheel. He turned back to his driving.
The clouds were black now, with a little spoiled milk in them. They rolled down low and came in over the highway like hell's own tumbleweeds. The windshield turned dark as early evening.
Leonard pulled on the headlights and turned on the wipers as it started to rain.
Chapter 8
Back in Grovetown, at the Chief of Police's office, a middle-aged lady with a sprayed, bleached blond hairdo high enough to house a colony of African wasps told us Chief Cantuck had gone out to investigate a fire, and she gave us directions. She eyed Leonard as if he might spring on her and rape her at any moment. She had a little aluminum Christmas tree on one corner of her desk and it was surrounded by a city of Christmas cards from well-wishers; she leaned in that direction, as if she might decide to hide behind them.
Back in the car, I said, "You made that lady nervous, Leonard. She thought you were going to try and take her on her desk."
"Wishful thinking. Actually, I wanted to fuck that hairdo she had, just in case there was something in it needed fucking. That little gap in it, right over her widow's peak, it reminded me of a butthole."
"Knowing you like I do," I said, "I hate it when someone says you aren't romantic."
We followed directions, drove out to where the Chief's car was parked beside the road, along with a rickety fire truck. The rain had temporarily subsided, but the sky was still ripe with it, and it didn't take a weatherman to see it would come again, and maybe harder.
The Chief, a fat man wearing a straw hat and boots with a khaki pants leg inside one and outside the other, watched the house burn, his hands behind his back. The rain hadn't slowed this baby down a bit. The firemen were all volunteers in regular clothing with a couple of fire hats and one Scott Pack between them—not that they needed it. They were on or around the truck and had a weak spew of water sputtering from a thick white hose. One of them got a brainstorm, got off the truck, turned on a leaky garden hose and started spewing that through a window that had been blown out by the hot pressure of the fire. He might as well have been pissing on an oil well blaze. Two other guys were eating Hostess Twinkies, one of them managing to chew with a cigarette in one corner of his mouth.