“My brown Ford,” I said.
“Haven’t seen any brown Ford,” Tonto said. “I tell you simple, it’s my gut telling me things.”
“Right now,” Leonard said, “my gut is telling me I’m going to order some fried chicken and some mashed potatoes with gravy, and maybe afterward, a slice of some kind of pie. And then, if I’m feeling really rowdy, I might wipe my hands on my pants.”
“You are such a tough guy,” I said.
“And don’t you forget it.”
33
On the way back to the tourist courts, Tonto stopped and got a six-pack of beer and Jim Bob bought some Jack Daniel’s. Leonard bought a bottle of malt liquor, to keep up stereotypes, he said, and I bought a six-pack of Diet Coke and a peanut pattie, also to keep up stereotypes. I almost got an RC to go with it. That would have been even more perfect. Maybe a couple of MoonPies too.
In Tonto and Jim Bob’s room, we all drank our poison and talked. After three beers, Tonto began to talk. It just sort of flowed out of him like sweet maple sap in the springtime.
“You know, I grew up in Louisiana, not really all that far from here,” he said.
“No shit?” Jim Bob said.
“No shit,” Tonto said. “My dad, he worked offshore on an oil rig, and one time there was a big storm. They say it was so big the waves climbed up high enough to look like the walls of the world. That’s what the survivors said. See, they were supposed to have a helicopter fly them out, ’cause they got word of the storm, but the helicopter got delayed, and then when it finally got out to the rig, the storm was swirling up the sea and swallowing up that big rig like it was made of pipe cleaners and a whore’s best wishes. My dad, he went down with all that steel. They never found his body, so I guess it’s still down there, or is all ate up from the fishes and such. I think about him nonetheless, and here’s the thing. I didn’t even like him.
“When he wasn’t beating me he was calling me stupid, and this went along with what they called me at school, and that’s where they started calling me Tonto, on account of I look like I’m an Indian.”
“You’re not?” Leonard said.
“Nope. Greek. Full-blood. But they called me that so much I started going by it. Got so it didn’t hurt if it was my name. See what I’m saying? You can’t call me a thing and make it bad if that’s the name I got. So, in time, that’s what everyone knew me by, and soon enough my real name was forgotten. I even almost forgot. My dad was dead, that left me with my stepmom and some nuns at school, and I want to tell you now, I got the Lord beat into me and he’s in my skin and in my blood and down in my bones. I love the Lord and I disobey him every day. My stepmother, she was lonely like, and I was a pretty big boy, and pretty soon she’s greasing my weasel, and my little brother finds out, and then it gets around to the nuns at school, because my brother, Jimmy, he’s jealous, ’cause my stepmom, Trish, she’s a looker, and he’s wanting to get him some of that too. She was that kind of woman, went around the house half naked. She was askin’ for it, and I gave her what she was askin’, and at the time it seemed like pretty good stuff. Now, all these years later, I feel dirty about the whole thing, but you see, it was like I was fucking what my father fucked, and I was showing him, even if the old bastard was turning round and round at the bottom of the sea. Showing him I could take his piece of tail and be as good or better than him. That fucking asshole beat me with a big leather belt that he kept hung on a nail by the door. He hit us, me and my little brother, with it so much that when it was laid across the nail it hung flat. It was damn near worn out from slapping ass.
“When I got into Trish I told myself I was a man from then on and wasn’t nobody going to use a belt on me. No one was going to lay a hand on me. And then one morning I got up and she was gone and I never saw her again. I took to doing push-ups, by the hours. I got so I could do hundreds, and I got stronger and I grew bigger, able to bend a tire iron over my thigh. You don’t believe that, I can show you.”
“I’ll take you at your word,” Jim Bob said.
“Not me,” Leonard said. “I want to see it.”
“Later,” Tonto said, and took a deep drink of beer and crushed the can. “One day my brother, Jimmy, he run off because the nuns were rapping his knuckles and a whole bunch of people at school were calling him names, and like I said, it was known at school about me and Trish, and I was getting called stuff too. Guess Jimmy couldn’t take it no more. I never did see Jimmy again, at least I don’t know for a fact if I did, though one time in the Houston airport I saw a fellow I thought was Jimmy. He was with a woman and a baby. I studied him for a long time, and he looked over at me a time or two, and I got this feeling he knew me and that it was Jimmy. But I just walked on by and never knew for sure, and didn’t want to. Not really. I had gotten used to him being gone and not having a brother. I liked it that way.
“But after Jimmy run off, the meanness that was divided on me and Jimmy all turned on me. Even the nuns got worse. I think maybe they thought they could beat the evil out of me, and one of the worst was a younger nun who I always thought was looking me up, trying to think if she could figure some way to get her a little of what I was toting between the legs. It could have just been my thinking, ’cause I always did want to fuck a nun. Anyway, I don’t know that for a fact, but it could have been true, and she maybe thought about it so much and got so much a feeling of being a sinner that she took it out on me with that ruler. One day I took it away from her and broke it and threatened to stick it up her ass and break it off again. I was a pretty big boy then, even if I was young, and it scared her. I got sent home for a few days, but when I went back she never did hit me with that ruler no more. But it didn’t change the way the kids talked, especially this one fella, Danny Sonier. He wouldn’t let it go, and he went around saying I was fucking my mother. Well, she wasn’t my mother. She was my stepmother, and I don’t even think she and Daddy were married. I think she was just some whore he brought home from Shreveport.
“Anyway, one day this Sonier boy followed me home with a couple of his buddies, and as they got closer to my house, walking behind me, calling me names, saying things, I finally got fed up and stopped in the middle of the road, grabbed up some rocks and threw them. They bolted. But when I got to the house, which wasn’t much of a house, by the way, I was going up on the porch and turned around and there was Danny Sonier, standing in the yard. His buddies were gone. It was just him.
“He was calling me names and acting all tough, and I came off that porch like a rocket. We went together hard at it, fists flying, and all I remember was everything turned red, and when it wasn’t red anymore, I was looking down at Danny and his head was like a big squash that had dried out and been broken open, only it was leaking blood, and I had a big stone in my hand. I had pulled it out of the ground and beat him like a snake, and I didn’t even remember it. He was dead. I dragged his body off out to the swamp, where I knew there were alligators, and I dropped him in. I sat there on the bank the rest of the day and the body floated. It didn’t sink like I thought it would. It floated. And it was just about night when a big old gator came up and grabbed the body by its mashed head and took it down. Happened so sudden it made me jump to my feet. And when I did, I heard a scuttling, and behind me was two more gators. I made a run for it, but they went straight into the water. I saw this when I got to a tree and went up in it. Those gators went in the water where the other gator had taken Danny down and there was all kind of rolling around in the water, a flashing of gator tails, a glimpse of big teeth, and it went on like that for some time. And then just when I was fixin’ to come down from that tree, I see that an old bull gator had crawled up under it, this old cypress, and he was just waiting there, his head lifted, and his mouth open, like he was expectin’ me to drop into it.