"Well, that's between you and him," said the doc. "He ain't none of my problem neither."
"Sure I am," I said. "You're a man of medicine."
"Just counts on animals. Someone found I was checkin' on you, they'd take my license. 'Sides, you seem all right to me." He poked me in the ribs with his finger. "That hurt?"
"Hell yeah."
"Good. I'm through. You gonna live. Just stay out of trouble for a while. I tell you, both you boys, you the luckiest fellas I've seen. Ain't neither one of you look like much, but you're both tough as a roadhouse steak. The one in there, his head wasn't like that before the beatin' was it?"
"No."
"Then he's tough, not just ugly. Y'all be all right. That's sixty dollars apiece."
"Apiece?" I said. "What do you charge dogs?"
"I don't charge them nothin', but their owners pay me sixty dollars apiece for a lookover like this."
"We get anything for pain?"
"My sympathies and Bacon's aspirin. I can't be dolin' out medicine. I'm a vet."
"Hell," I said, and gave him some of the money Charlie had given me.
About ten P.M. the rain slacked. I hadn't moved much from my position on the couch, and that had been a mistake. I was very stiff now. Bacon fixed some fried egg sandwiches and finally got the TV to work. He found an old black-and-white movie about gangsters, interspersed with long stupid commercials, and we watched it. When we finished the sandwiches, Bacon said,
"You want some whiskey? I likes a little jolt or two before bedtime."
"I gave up drinking anything but nonalcoholic beer."
"You a drunk?"
"Nope. Just felt it wasn't healthy."
"I'm gonna take me a little jolt. All that pain and such, you might want you a little."
"Oh, all right, what the hell, just a shot."
He poured us both some in plastic glasses and gave me a handful of aspirin. I took the aspirin and we sipped and watched the movie. I finished off my whiskey and began to nod. The gangsters were taking another gangster for a ride when I lost track of the plot. Next thing I knew it was morning.
Chapter 20
I tried to get up and go pee, but it wasn't as easy as I would have hoped. It was a job just to get my legs over the side of the couch.
I saw Bacon in the kitchen, sleeping on a cot with a blanket pulled over him. I finally got up and old-man-stepped to the bedroom/bathroom, pissed and checked on Leonard. He opened his eyes and looked at me.
"I got to go," he said.
I pulled back the covers, discovered he had been dressed by the doctor in some of Bacon's old clothes. Helping him took about twenty minutes from bed to toilet. I wasn't all that brisk myself. Leonard took a leak and looked in the mirror. "Oh, my God," he said. "I look like the Elephant Man." I led him back to bed. We were doing better, it only took ten minutes to get back.
"I feel awful," he said. "Where are we?"
I filled him in.
"Bacon? His name is Bacon?"
"Yeah, and he's grumpy. The doctor, you remember him?"
"Not really."
"He was grumpy too. And he's a vet, not a real doctor."
"That figures."
"Everybody is grumpy in Grovetown. I want to go home."
"Me too. Hap?"
"Yeah."
"This Bacon, he can't hear me, can he?"
"No."
"Then I got to tell you, just between you and me, I was really scared. I mean really. I don't know I could face any of them guys again. I'd wet myself."
"You already have."
"Oh yeah."
"And I forgot to tell you, you cut a big fart when you fell down in the alley. I was really embarrassed for you. And they messed up your hat too."
"I looked good in that hat."
"No, you didn't."
"I been whipped before, but not like that," Leonard said. "I've never been humiliated that way. I've strapped three and four fuckers at a time. So have you. Like the assholes next door. The crack house. I whipped them like they were nothing."
"In this case, we were vastly outnumbered, the space was small, we did not have the element of surprise, we're older today than we were yesterday, and to be just goddamn honest, Leonard, those bastards, young and old and female, were about as tough and determined as any I've fought, and they came on like a tidal wave. Under the circumstances we did pretty good, and the fact that we're mostly bushed and stove up and not broken and killed is due to the fact that we have some manly skills in the art of self-defense."
"I figure we just lucked out."
"Actually, me too."
"I really want to go home. For the first time, I really want to give up. Why'd you have to tell me about the fart and the dick part? The pissin' on myself was bad enough."
"I didn't think you'd want it coming from someone else. And besides, misery loves company."
"We were certainly cocky before all this, weren't we?"
"You were. I wasn't."
"Now I don't know if I want to shit or wind my watch."
We sat for a while, not saying anything. I said, "You hear the joke about the lonesome cowpokes."
"Ah, Hap, not now."
"Just to cheer you up."
"You can't tell a joke for shit, Hap."
"You see, there was this cowboy town, and this guy rides in—"
"Hap, please."
"—and he goes to the bar, and he has a few drinks—"
"You're going to do this anyway, aren't you?"
"—and after he gets pretty lubricated, he says to the bartender, 'Where are all the gals? Hell, I ain't had a woman in six months.' "
"Is this going to be sexist?"
"Probably."
"Well, all right, go ahead, even if it's the wrong sex for me."
"We can change it to a gay cowboy. The line is now, 'I ain't had a man's ass in six months.' We have to take for granted that this is sort of a progressive cowboy bar, okay?"
"Just get it over with."
"So, the bartender says, 'Hell, there ain't no gals . . . guys.' You know, Leonard, for this one to work it has to be gals."
"Okay. Whatever."
"The bartender says, 'There ain't no gals, but we got something we do for that little problem.' Cowboy says, 'Yeah, what's that?' And the bartender says, 'Show 'em, boys.' So the boys take the cowboy out back of the saloon, and there's this watermelon patch."
"I see this coming."
"No you don't. They take him over to the fence and he looks at the watermelons growing there, says, 'I don't get it,' and one of the cowboys says, 'We just cut us a plug out of one of these melons, and on a hot night like this, we fuck it, and it feels damn good.' "
"This is disgusting, Hap. Go on."
"So the cowboy, he's, to put it mildly, shocked, but as we have established he hasn't had any in six months, so he climbs over the fence, looks around, sees him a fine-lookin' melon, one of those striped rattlesnake melons, and damn if he don't actually feel a little something for it. A stirrin'. He picks it up, takes out his pocketknife, starts to cut him out a plug, when suddenly all the cowboys gasp and fall back. He turns, looks at them. Says, 'Hey, what's wrong?'
" 'Why stranger,' one of 'em says, 'you're playin' with fire. That's Johnny Ringo's girl.' "
A long moment of silence, then Leonard sighed. "Oh God. It's worse than I thought. That's tasteless. Which is okay. But it's not funny."
"Is too."
"No, it isn't. Hap?"
"Yeah."
"You know what?"
"Yeah. One way or the other, we got to finish what we started."
Leonard wasn't much fun. He hadn't liked my joke and fell asleep while I was talking to him. I went back to the living room. Bacon was up. He had put the cot away. He was wearing boxer shorts with flowers on them, a stained T-shirt, and old brown slippers. He was standing by the stove. He said, "Want a scrambled egg, somethin?"
"Egg is fine."
"How about two and some biscuits?"
"All right."
I went into the kitchen and sat at the table. It was warm in the kitchen. Bacon had slept with the oven lit and the oven door open. He took a can of biscuits out of the fridge and whacked it on the edge of the counter, plucked the biscuits out and snapped them into a greased pan. He paused to scratch his ass, went back to his business. I tried to keep an eye on which biscuits he handled after the ass scratching, so I could locate them in the pan.