“I do.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“He scares you a little, doesn’t he, Leonard?”
“Me? Hell no.”
“He scares me.”
“Really?”
“Yep.”
“Well, all right. He scares me a little. I think he made me pee-pee some in my pants.”
“Is that fear or sexuality?”
“I do kind of find him attractive,” Leonard said, “but, alas, he’s not my type. He’s heterosexual. That always puts a damper on things. And another thing—he’s a killer.”
“So are we.”
“Not for money. Not for any reason that isn’t self-defense or the defense of someone else.”
“So we’re noble?”
“Nope,” Leonard said. “We’re two guys trying to be like heroes, and the problem is, we’re just two guys. Though I, of course, am highly attractive and hung like an elephant and have nifty pajamas and smooth black skin.”
“I have bunny shoes.”
“Yep, but you didn’t bring them.”
“There is that…. How about John? How’s things? Have you called home since we been on the road?”
“I have. He told me to eat shit.”
“Not good.”
“Nope. Not good. These days he doesn’t find me that attractive, which is something I can’t quite wrap my mind around. I look in the mirror, I’m pretty satisfied.”
“So what did he say?”
“He said don’t call anymore, he has things to work out.”
“That stinks.”
“He thinks Jesus is pulling his ear, trying to get him over there on the good side with the straights. Thinks suddenly he’s gonna lose interest in the rod and go to the hole punch.”
“Maybe it’s the devil pulling his ear.”
“Whatever it is, I don’t like it. We had a good thing going.”
“Sucks.”
“He used to suck, and I liked it. Now he doesn’t suck. I don’t like being without him, Hap. I don’t like someone’s mythology getting in the way of my romance.”
“I know.”
“It’s like you being without Brett.”
“I know that too. And I miss her.”
“We should really give up on the adventures and stay home.”
“Yep. But we didn’t really have a choice here.”
“We could have gone to trial. I think we’d have been no-billed. It was self-defense.”
“But it was nasty self-defense.”
“This is Texas,” Leonard said.
“There is that. Let’s go to sleep.”
“Hap?”
“Yep.”
“Will you tell me a story?”
“All right. There were four bears.”
“Four?”
“This is my story. There were four bears. Two of them were not as smart as the other two because they were really at heart nicer bears, and they kept getting themselves into rotten situations, and eventually two of the bears, the ones that weren’t so smart but were nicer, they got themselves killed.”
“Those two dead bears? That us?”
“Yep,” I said.
“I don’t like that story.”
“Me either. You want to hear a joke?”
“Hell no. Not one of your jokes. Go to sleep.”
“Spoilsport. … There was this dog—”
“I said I didn’t want to hear it.”
“—and he came limping into this Western town—”
“You’ve told this one.”
“And he held up his injured foot, said, ‘I’m here to get the man who shot my paw’ … get it?”
“I get it. You tell this to me at least once a month.”
“You see, paw and pa, like the old Westerns. Guy comes into town—”
“Hap. I get it. It stinks. It stunk the first time and it stinks this time.”
“Brett laughed.”
“I don’t believe that. You’re lying. You made that up. I’ll call her.”
“There’s no need to call her.”
“Aha.”
“Well. She smiled.”
“She was embarrassed.”
“Maybe.”
“Good night, Hap.”
“Good night, Leonard.”
35
Lake O’ the Pines is a big lake, man-made, like all the lakes in Texas except Caddo Lake. It was made a long time ago and on this cold morning the water was looking blue as a Patsy Cline song. I thought that by midday, we didn’t get any cloud cover, the cold could burn off a little and it might be a fairly warm day. But if the clouds came in, it could turn damn cold damn quick because a wind was starting up, and as we drove by the lake, I could see through the trees along the bank that the water was rippling the way coffee will ripple when you blow on it to cool it.
We drove around, trying to follow the directions Hirem gave us, but there were a lot of little cabins. Finally, about lunchtime we came out from around the lake and stopped at a gas station and mini-mart and got some gas. There was a couple there with a break-down cage that you could put up easy and dismantle easy and haul away, and in the cage was a bear. It was a pretty good-sized bear. They had a deal where you could get your picture taken with the bear, Cindy. Of course, Leonard had to do it and I had to do it with him. When we went inside the cage and were introduced to Cindy, she was sitting on a stool like a human being, as if on break. I half expected her to be smoking a cigarette. She saw us, got up, waddled over, and stretched out her arms and put them over our shoulders. She had done this before and it was a livin’. The muscles in her arms felt like steel cables.
Jim Bob and Tonto, being smarter, didn’t have their picture taken. They stood outside the cage and looked at us as if they soon expected to see us eaten. When the photo was taken, Cindy moved her arms and went back and sat on her stool. It was a double cage, two rooms if you will, and part of it had photographs of Cindy the Bear swimming in her pond on her owner’s property. They told us all about it. The bear was a Russian bear.
“Is she a vodka-drinking commie?” Leonard asked.
“The Soviet Union is no more,” said the lady owner. She was a blond woman with a nice build and the attitude of someone who had never met a sense of humor. Her old man was skinny and he grinned. I don’t know if he thought what Leonard said was funny. I think he just grinned a lot.
We got our photograph of us with the bear, which they put between two pieces of cardboard, and then we went inside the station. As we did, Jim Bob said, “You guys are pretty weird, you know.”
The station had a little stove and grill, and there was a glass cover where you could see what they had cooked. There was some fried chicken on greasy white paper and hot links and there was a place where you could get some slices of bread and put mustard and relish on it if you wanted, make a sandwich with the links. There were also a few sides, like some suspicious-looking baked potatoes and a Crock-Pot of red beans in a congealed soup that looked as if you might need a pickax to crack the surface.
We got a little of this and a little of that, picking potato chips and some candy bars and sodas to go with the chicken and links, and went to the back of the place, where there were a few tables, and had our lunch. There was enough grease in the chicken to lube up a whorehouse on a sailor’s Saturday night, but it tasted really good and so did the links. We ate not only because we were hungry but because we were bored. Where I was sitting I could look out the big window at the pumps, and I could see the van parked up front near the door. And I could also see something else. A brown Ford. It slowed out on the highway, and as it did, I stuck an elbow in Leonard and he turned to look.
“Brown Ford,” I said.
“Yep,” he said.
Jim Bob and Tonto looked too. The Ford pulled up at a pump and a guy about the size of Tonto, and then Tonto again, got out. It wasn’t just that he was tall. He was no taller than Tonto, but he was wide as a truck and had a chest big enough to store a winter’s worth of corn in it. His legs were bigger around than my waist and his head looked like someone had anchored a medicine ball to his neck. He had blond hair and a little goatee and the kind of tan that comes from solar lamps. I figured he had fallen off Jack’s beanstalk and was learning to make his way in our world.