“So you go straight to shitting in the bed?” Jim Bob said.
“It’s a statement,” Leonard said. “And I’ll have you know, at the bottom of it all I’m a sensitive motherfucker.”
Tonto, who had been listening quietly, watching the road, said, “Hey, Leonard, were you saying you’re queer?”
“The queerest,” Leonard said. “You got a problem with that?”
“Where’s the dick go?”
“Anywhere I can put it.”
“Oh,” Tonto said. “No problem. Just curious. Hap, you’re pussy-whipped.”
“I know.”
“That’s all right,” Tonto said, his voice growing higher than before. “I wish I was pussy-whipped. What about you, Jim Bob?”
“Well, currently, I don’t have a pussy in this fight.”
“You know,” Tonto said, “I think we are bonding like some righteous cocksuckers, don’t you?”
“I assume,” said Leonard, “that you are speaking symbolically because to the best of my knowledge I am the only cocksucker present.”
“Righteous sonsabitches then,” Tonto said.
28
We bonded righteous sonsabitches stopped at a McDonald’s on the other side of Tyler about two hours later. We went in and got some drinks and Tonto got a couple of burgers and then he gave me the keys to the van.
“Something happens to us,” I said, “you may be a long time with Ronald McDonald.”
“This one still has a playground,” Jim Bob said, as he and Tonto took a seat in one of the plastic booths.
“Well, in that case,” I said, “you boys play pretty.”
I drove Leonard and myself over to our meeting place with the FBI. They didn’t know about Jim Bob and Tonto, which was all right. We had agreed to do what they wanted, try to find those kids and get the money back so Hirem would tell all he knew about the Dixie Mafia organization, but we hadn’t said how we were going to do what we had agreed to do and we hadn’t said with whom.
The FBI guys gave us directions to a house at Lake Tyler where they said they were keeping Hirem secluded like a rare animal on the endangered species list. Before we went out there we drove to a place nearby and stopped and used a screwdriver Tonto had given us to take off the plates and put on some others that I think he had had made special. It was a precaution. We didn’t want them to know where we got the van or who it belonged to, so if they ran the plates, they’d come up belonging to someone Tonto made up.
Finished with the plates, we got in and drove. It had turned windy and the blue had gone out of the sky because gray clouds had come in, hiding the sun. The lake house wasn’t on the good side of the lake where there were fine homes and the grass was always freshly mown and there were nice boats docked up close to shore. It was down a precarious red clay road with ruts deeper than the ass crack of time, and the road just kept winding around the evergreens and barren oaks until it died out near the lake. Then you had to park and get out and walk across a messy clay clearing toward a cabin nestled near some pines and beneath a couple of massive cyprus trees from which moss draped like feather boas. The wind whipped the boas and it whipped at us.
It wasn’t much of a cabin. Pretty small and made of logs. The logs had been treated poorly and they were starting to rot, and the cabin leaned downhill toward the lake, which was visible like a blue patch through the boughs of the trees and the mossy boas. The porch was caved in near the steps and there was a window missing and a slab of Sheetrock had been nailed over it from the inside and the Sheetrock was obviously damp and all it would take to knock it loose was a strong cough or foul language.
When we were close up on the cabin I stopped and hollered out, “Hello, the house.”
Some time passed and then the door cracked and I heard Tenson’s voice call out, “Come on up, but you got guns, you need to lose them.”
We had already left them in the van, under the floorboards, so we walked straight to the cabin, wiped the caked clay off our shoes on a stone near the steps, and went inside. Soon as we did I saw Hirem sitting in a rickety chair at a card table, and then I saw Tenson standing in the corner with his gun drawn, dangling by his side. Hirem had lost the suit. He had on casual clothes and a light jacket. Tenson was wearing a dark shirt and jeans and sneakers.
The Mummy was still well wrapped and he stood in a spot on the other side of the room without his gun drawn. There was a humming sound in the room, and it came from small rectangular plug-in heaters on either side of the place. The coils in the heaters glowed red and there was just enough heat to make you glad you were inside instead of out.
The Mummy came over and told us to turn around and put our hands on the wall and spread our legs. We did. Leonard turned his head and looked at the Mummy, said, “You are so butch.”
“Fuck you,” the Mummy said.
“See,” Leonard said. “Told you.”
The Mummy patted us down and took away our combs and my pocketknife and Leonard’s gum.
Tenson said, “All right, relax.”
“We want our combs and I want my pocketknife back,” I said.
“Don’t forget the gum,” Leonard said.
The Mummy gave them back. There were only three chairs. Hirem was in one and the Mummy and Tenson occupied the other two. That left us leaning our backs against the wall. Tenson never put his gun up. He sat with it on his knee.
Leonard looked at the Mummy, said, “How long you got to wear that getup?”
“Too long,” the Mummy said. “I wasn’t even one of them, you dumb ass.”
“How was I to know?” Leonard said. “Wrong place, wrong time, both of us.”
The Mummy didn’t look appeased, or so I thought. Actually, you couldn’t tell much about how he looked. You mostly got what you got from him in the way he moved his eyes or his busted mouth, the way he shrugged his shoulders.
“Hirem here,” Tenson said, waving the gun like a pointer, “he’s got something to tell you, maybe will lead to his boy, but he’s not telling us. He tells you, you take the lead and go after the boy and his poke and bring the money back. FBI gets the drug money, Hirem gets his kid back, the girl doesn’t get shot, and Hirem tells us what he knows and we make all kinds of arrests and you guys go free, no trial, and everyone’s happy, or mostly. You following this scenario?”
“A few dance numbers might liven it up,” I said, “but for the most part, we’re following.”
“Now,” Tenson said, “here’s what we do. You two go outside with Hirem, and we’re gonna stand on the porch so we can see you, and you’re going to walk out a ways and Hirem is going to tell you something he won’t tell us, and that’s okay. That’s how he wants it and we can live with that. We’ll get our results. You hear what I’m saying?”
We nodded, Hirem pulled a heavy coat over his lighter one, and we went outside, across the porch and down a little trail that led into the woods. The wind was picking up and it was carrying a lot more cold with it now, and it hit us like ice picks. I tugged the collar up on my coat and put my hands in my pockets as I walked.
After we were out a ways, Hirem said, “I got to see you guys are wearing a wire or not.”
“You saw him pat us down,” I said.
“Wearing a wire for them,” he said. “They could pat you down all they liked and not find it.”
“All right,” I said and we stopped walking and I held up my arms. Hirem patted me down, then did the same to Leonard.
“Good,” he said. “Now, let’s walk a bit more.”
29
As we started to walk, Tenson yelled from the porch, “Don’t go too far. We start to worry you aren’t so we can see you, Hirem. And you don’t want us worried, do you?”
Hirem didn’t answer, but he turned to us, said, “They know I’m not going anywhere. I want my boy back and I’ll do what I got to do until that’s done. They just like to harass me. Hell, I came to them, wasn’t like they brought me in. They been trying to nail my ass for years. I finally had to hold the nail for them.”