Rumble Tumble (12 page)

“What kind of mark?” Leonard asked.

“It wasn’t the best choice, but it was memorable. He took to cutting off the heads of their penises and putting them in their front right pants pocket. The police thought they had some kind of weird serial killer case. I read about it in the papers having no idea it was Herman at work. I suspected a mad Jewish rabbi. Later, as the story drifted back to me through old connections, I realized what it had been about. It was Herman’s way of thumbing his nose at those who had been sent to kill him. A sort of manhood rite.”

“Mine’s bigger than yours?” I said.

“Exactly,” Red said. “After three years of this, evading the cops and the Bandito Supremes, Herman began to seek out the Supremes directly, killing them on their own turf.

“Well, this would not do, but the Supremes had no luck killing Herman off. He was like a shadow. A ghost. A blood truce was made. People cutting their hands with knives and pressing them together like adolescents. Herman paid back the money and made an apology, and all was forgotten. As long as he never had anything to do with the Bandito Supremes again. This mean he couldn’t even cross their territory without a threat of death hanging over his head. He agreed, got a job selling vacuums door-to-door, but never could move the super models, and that’s where you made your money, so he dropped out of that, and next thing I knew he was a preacher. I’ve visited him several times, and he’s tried to bring me into the fold. Though it’s tempting, and Herman certainly gives a good fiery sermon, I find money and sex with average-size women more appealing than future paradise.”

“You said average-size women,” Brett said. “That mean you won’t fuck a midget? That what you’re sayin’? That sounds prejudicial to me. Not wanting to fuck a midget, and you being one your ownself.”

Red refused to answer. He glared at her.

“This brother of yours?” I asked. “Where is he?”

“Southwest Texas. Near a little town called Seminole. But I advise you to make your presence known gradually. Preacher or not, I doubt Herman would welcome a surprise introduction.”

“We’ll keep that in mind,” Leonard said.

17

When we got to Seminole Leonard steered us through a drive-through, bought some hamburgers, then we cruised out of town to the west. It was a fair enough day, with cumulus clouds riding high and giving shade. Mesquite trees stubbed the ground all about, and behind barbed wire fences there were little patches of greenery mixed with prickly pear stands and dirt the color of dried peas. Sheep, goats, and windmills dotted the land, and the world seemed bleak and sad to me. All I could think of was getting back to East Texas. Back to greenery and creeks and rivers and the sky as seen through pine tree limbs.

After a while Red asked us to slow down, so that his memory might have time to work.

Finally, he said, “This is it. I remember now. This is it.”

Leonard slowed, turned right, drove a great distance, came out on another highway, was directed by Red to the left, went along that way for some distance before Red said, “On the right.”

On the right was a red windmill that had seen better days, but was still turning. There was a sign next to the road that read
THE CHURCH OF THE BAPTISTS
, and about an acre’s distance behind the windmill in a clearing spotted with scrubby weeds was a little church made of plyboard, green lumber, ill-fitting windows, and hope. The church was warped due to the cheap lumber, and seemed as if it were about to pucker up and explode. The windows had cracks in the glass or no panes at all, and behind the glass I could see plyboard, and in one case some kind of thick yellow paper. The north end of the church touched the ground, while the south stood on dissolving concrete blocks, as if rearing up for a peek across the vast expanse of West Texas. The cross on the roof peak was weathered gray and starting to strip; it leaned a bit to starboard.

Out to the left was a wet-looking green slush hole that had to be the end result of a broken sewage line. Not far from that, like the husk of a great insect, lay an aluminum camper shell.

“Seems to have gone downhill,” Red said.

We turned down a dirt drive. Dust rose around the car in white puffs thicker than the cumulus clouds above us. We parked out front of the church and got out.

Red was almost jovial. He coughed the dust away, started calling: “Herman! Herman Ames. It’s me, Red.”

After a moment the front door of the church moved, then caught, then burst open. A stout Mexican woman of about thirty came out and stood on the porch in a position that made me think of a wrestler about to get down and to it.

Red said, “Herman Ames. He here?”

She just stared at us.

“I don’t think she speaks English,” I said. “You got any Spanish, Brett?”

“Just rice, but it’s back in the cabinet at home,” she said.

“Herman,” Red said again. “Herman.”

The woman shook her head and moved into the yard, such as it was, ambled to the side of the church and pointed to the field out back.

“ ’erman,” she said, “ ’erman.”

“Gracias,” I said.

The woman tugged on the swollen door again, pulled it free, disappeared inside the church. We walked around the side of the building and started into the field.

“Remember,” Leonard said to Red, “I’d rather not poke a gun in your neck all the time, but you do anything fancy, or Herman thinks he’s going to do anything fancy, I might have to shoot somebody and tell God he died.”

Red grunted and we kept walking.

The field sloped gently downward, and on the other side, in the middle of it, we saw an elderly black pickup and next to it an apparatus perched on big wheels with thick transparent hoses attached to the main body. The thing, whatever it was, looked like a visiting Martian. The hoses were stuck in the ground, and a huge bearded man who had gone to fat was standing next to the odd device, watching us come.

“Is that him?” Brett asked.

“That’s him,” Red said. “Porked up a lot, but that’s him,” and before we knew it, he took off running.

The man by the apparatus recognized him, of course—aren’t that many redheaded midgets around. Red ran right up to Herman and leaped. Herman caught him, lifted him above his head.

As we neared we could hear laughter, and Herman said, “Red, you old sonofagun.”

“And you’re an old sonofabitch,” Red said. “Oh, forgot, Herman, you’re a man of God now.”

“The word couldn’t be any worse than the sonofabitches themselves,” Herman said, lowering Red to the ground.

Herman looked up as we came. He spent a little extra time looking at Brett. I didn’t blame him. She was worth it. She wore a loose blue shirt and jeans tight enough you would have thought she had Levi legs. The wind had taken hold of her thick red hair, and the way it whipped around her head she looked like a goddess. Herman may have been a man of the cloth, but right then I don’t think he was thinking about Bible verses, unless they were designed to give him strength.

Red said, “These are, I suppose you might say, associates of mine. It’s a little complicated, actually.”

“You in trouble, Red?” Herman asked.

“Kinda sorta,” Red said.

Herman shook his head. “Well, let me finish up here, then we’ll go up to the church and talk about it.”

“What is this?” Brett asked, nodding at the apparatus.

“Well, lady,” Herman said, “it sucks prairie dogs out of the ground.”

“Any reason you’re doing that?” Brett asked. “You don’t stuff them, do you?”

“No. Ranchers around here hate ’em. Always digging holes for stock to get their legs into, and to keep them from shooting and poisoning the little boogers, someone came up with this device. I bought one, modified it to suit me. Church offerings weren’t that good, so I needed a bit of a profession.”

“Sucking prairie dogs out of the dirt is a profession?” Brett asked.

Herman grinned. “As a matter of fact, it is.”

“Seems to me a device like that would cost more than it was worth,” I said. “You aren’t a rancher, are you?”

“No, but I got the dogs on my land.”

“What you going to do with all them dogs when you get ’em?” Leonard asked.

“Sell ’em,” Herman said.

“Who buys them?” Red said.

“Japanese are a big market. They pay up to five hundred dollars for the little suckers.”

“Do they eat ’em?” Leonard asked.

“Oh, no,” Herman said. “They make pets out of them.”

“Hell,” Leonard said, “for five hundred dollars them little suckers ought to clean your house and turn down the sheets.”

“Just pets,” Herman said. “There’s Yankees do the same, only they pay about half that price.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Leonard said. “Now I’ve heard of everything.”

“Watch this,” Herman said, and flipped a switch on the device. The motor whined, there was a sound like someone clearing their nose, and suddenly, riding up the transparent hoses, speeding along like bullets, came dark shapes.

“Wow!” Red said.

“Yeah,” Herman said. “I think we got three of them that time.”

“Christ,” Brett said. “Don’t that hurt them little dudes?”

“Just ruffles their hair, lady,” Herman said. “And I doubt Our Savior enjoys his name being exploded like that for the sake of prairie dogs.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Brett said, “I was him I’d want to take a look at something like this.”

Herman smiled, walked us around to the other side of the machine, showed us a transparent plastic cage where the dogs had been delivered. There were three all right, and they looked puzzled as all get out. I suppose I would too, I was sitting in my living room, was suddenly sucked up a hose and into a plastic container. I reckoned prairie dogs were developing a rather interesting set of stories about alien abduction.

“Well, ain’t they the cutest little things,” Brett said. “You don’t just box ’em up and send them to Japan, do you? I mean, I can’t see a bunch of them dogs in a box with air holes cut in the sides.”

“I sell them to a distributor,” Herman says. “He has them shipped. Big business, actually. After everyone gets their cut, I make about a hundred and fifty a dog. Most of the time. Sometimes the market’s a little less.”

“Looks to me like you’d run out of dogs,” Leonard said.

Herman waved his hand expansively. “This is seven hundred acres, and it’s all mine,” Herman said. “Got it for a song.”

I looked out over the land. Bleak and gray and ugly, with splotches of mesquite. I hoped he got it for a short song. A ditty maybe.

“Place is riddled with dogs,” Herman said. “I farm ’em. I come out here and watch ’em some afternoons. Kind of educational, really, watching them pop out of their holes and look around. You get so you know when the babies are grown up enough to suck out of the ground. I don’t like to get no little bitty dogs. I want them to grow up. Then I’ll suck ’em up. If I was to run out of dogs here, there’s plenty of ranchers be glad to see me coming with this baby.”

Herman detached the cage from the vacuum and slid a perforated top over it. He sat it in the bed of the pickup. The dogs rose up and pressed against the plastic and pushed their noses to it.

The vacuum was hooked up to a little motorized device. Herman fired it up with a jerk of a cord, sort of steered it to the pickup by holding on to the back of it. At the pickup, he cut the motor back with a switch, pulled a wide piece of plyboard out of the bed of the pickup and fixed it so one end was in the truck and the other slanted to the ground. Pushing the throttle switch, steering the device with his hands, Herman guided it up the ramp and into the truck and killed the motor. He pushed the board up alongside it, said, “Y’all climb in somewhere.”

Leonard got in front beside Herman, leaving me and Red and Brett to ride in the bed. We sat with our feet dangling over the open tailgate and Herman drove us slowly to the church, bouncing along the hard ground.

“I don’t know why Leonard didn’t let me sit up front with Herman,” Red said.

“I do,” I said. “We don’t want you telling your brother a line of shit before we got time to lay things out.”

“Don’t think ’cause you’re with some family,” Brett said, “that everything is hokey-dokey. You’re still our prisoner, and we still got guns under our shirts, and I’m just dyin’ to hit you on the other side of your little punkin’ head.”

“There’s that little stuff again,” Red said. “There’s just no peace from it.”

18

The inside of the church lived down to expectations. It was ripe with the smell of sweat and boiling pinto beans and something baking. It was very hot inside, and Herman shoved at the swollen door until it hung open and a shaft of sunlight fell through it and hit the dirt floor and gave the cigarette butts there a sort of royal glow, as if they were floating in God’s own butter.

There were four long pews to the left, and the closest one had a cot mattress on it with a sheet and a pillow that drooped over the side. The edge of the mattress, where it touched the ground, was brown with dirt. There were plastic cases with perforated tops in one corner behind the pews, stacked on top of one another, and in the cases were water pans and food pans and prairie dogs and newspaper lining and piles of prairie dog shit, both fresh and dry. The dogs reared up against their clear plastic cages and took note of us.

There was a wooden stove with a big iron pot on the top, boiling away, and the heavyset Mexican woman was stirring the contents of the pot with a long wooden spoon. She watched us with the same lack of enthusiasm she had showed us in the yard.

To the left of the stove was a doorway so narrow you’d have to turn sideways to go through it. The door itself was open, and I could see an ominous-looking shitter in there, stained black and green with a stack of newspapers by it, and on the other side a cardboard box.

Herman strolled over to the window with the yellow paper, pulled at the shade. It rolled up and light came in and made the place look worse.

Another step deeper and I could smell the prairie dogs and their offal, and it wasn’t something that went with pinto beans and baked goods.

Red looked about, took off his hat and held it in his hand as if acknowledging the dead. “Kind of let the place go, haven’t you, Herman?”

“Reckon so,” Herman said. “People quit coming.”

“You always gave a good sermon,” Red said.

“Yeah, but I didn’t give it so good in Spanish and most of the Mexicans around here are Catholics anyway.”

“The woman?” Red said. “She a working girl?”

Herman laughed. “Girl. She hasn’t been a girl since the Mexican Revolution. She works for me. Don’t even know her name. She takes a hundred dollars a month. Comes in and cooks for me, and if she’s in the mood, sweeps the place out. She’d service me for an additional fifty dollars a month, but I’m not interested.”

“You still preach?” Red said.

“Just to myself,” Herman said. “I hope I can convince you and your friends to stay for supper. Don’t worry. She’s clean. The woman, I mean. And the food. The place could use some work.”

“Perhaps a fire,” Red said.

“Yeah, well,” Herman said, sitting down on the edge of the pew with the mattress, “I call it home. How’s about you tell me what your problem is, Red. You still doing … the work?”

“I was, up until the other day,” Red said. “I was pulled out of it by this lady and these two gentlemen. They’ve kept me company these last few days, and let me tell you, it’s been an experience.”

Herman was looking at the wad of bloody toilet tissue on Red’s head. “What happened to your noggin?” Herman asked.

“Oh, the lady here took a pistol to my skull,” Red said. “And she made quite a time of it.”

Herman stood up. Leonard said, “Sit down, Herman. You need to hear the whole story before we start hitting each other.”

Brett pulled her pistol from under her shirt, said, “Hell, who’s hittin’?”

“Everybody ease off and lighten up,” I said.

Herman turned to the Mexican woman and said something quick in Spanish. She let go of the spoon, walked past us, right out the door without so much as a change of expression.

I said, “I hope you just told her to go to the house.”

Herman nodded. “Go on, let’s hear it.”

“Red here says he’s done some bad stuff and you got him into it,” I said.

“True,” Herman said. “I’ve abandoned that kind of life myself. I wish my brother would. If you’re looking for me to give you connections, I can’t.”

“Nope,” Leonard said. “We’re looking for directions to The Farm.”

Herman looked at Red. Red said, “Well, they said they’d kill me if I didn’t show them where The Farm was, but I didn’t know where it was, so I had to tell them about you.”

“You’re still involved with Big Jim?” Herman asked.

“I was,” Red said. “These three may have queered me there.” Red told Herman what had happened from when he and Wilber had put the bite on Brett for money, on up to the moment. I thought his telling was accurate, if overly long, and that goddamn steak ranchero came up again.

Herman sat with his head down for a long while, thinking. We let him think. I looked out the door and saw the Mexican woman trudging down the road, dragging little clouds of dust behind her heels.

“I don’t know,” Herman finally said. “This is some kind of situation. You’ve abused and humiliated my brother, and yet you ask me for help. You ask me to violate a trust, an agreement to never step foot on Bandito Supreme property again. I’d be tossing my life away.”

“Directions will do,” Leonard said. “You can stay here and suck prairie dogs out of holes.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” Herman said. “But then I’d be tossing your lives away.”

“My suggestion,” Red said, “is you let them toss their lives and just save mine. They hit me a lot, you know?”

“Yes, I see that,” Herman said.

“It hurt,” Red said. “They’re capable of anything. I saw this one,” he indicated Leonard, “shoot Moose’s foot off. You remember Moose, don’t you?”

“You do that?” Herman asked Leonard. “You shoot Moose’s foot off?”

“Yep,” Leonard said. “Thought it was kind of funny actually.”

“See,” Red said. “They have no conscience. You should have seen her pistol-whip me. I’ve never seen anyone happier.”

“And I suppose you want me to do something about it,” Herman said.

“It crossed my mind,” Red said.

“In case you haven’t noticed,” Herman said, “the lady has a gun, and my guess is there are guns under the shirts of these two men, and you just finished telling me how ruthless they are.”

“That’s right,” Leonard said. “And we’re just full of whup ass too. And we got shotguns in the trunk, we need ’em.”

“Lots of ammunition,” I said.

“That don’t do it,” Leonard said, “we’ll use rude language too.”

Herman nodded, turned to Red. “We got a problem here, Red. First off, you’re my brother. I love you. But you’re a piece of shit. I used to be a piece of shit, and may still be one, but you are definitely still one.”

“A matter of opinion,” Red said. “But the words are particularly foul coming from the mouth of my own kin, and a man of God at that.”

“They are neither foul or not foul,” Herman said, “they’re the truth. And I haven’t been a man of God in some time now. There’s also the fact I’m fat and not nearly as tough as I used to be. Or maybe I don’t want to be tough anymore. Do you want me shot, Red?”

“Of course not,” Red said.

“Then relax a little.” Then to Brett: “This girl, this Tillie. She’s your daughter? I understand that right?”

“That’s right,” Brett said. “And I want her back.”

“She chose the life,” Red said.

“She didn’t choose to be taken to The Farm,” Herman said. “You know what that means.”

“I don’t see how it’s my problem,” Red said.

“You wouldn’t,” Herman said. “I did you a great disservice, Red. Bringing you into the business. If I could undo it I would. You might have been better off with the circus.”

“Don’t say that,” Red said.

“You’re saying you’ll help us?” Brett asked Herman.

“Maybe,” Herman said. “I don’t know.”

“We could make you,” Brett said.

“Maybe,” Herman said. “Maybe you couldn’t. Neither pain nor death scares me much these days.”

“I might could show you a side of pain you haven’t visited before,” Leonard said.

Herman grinned at him. Leonard grinned back. It was great to see two sweet fellows bond.

“We don’t want to make you do anything,” I said. “We want to find Brett’s daughter and bring her home. That’s the end of it.”

“For you, maybe,” Herman said. “It wouldn’t be for me.”

“You keep talkin’ like you got to really do somethin’,” Leonard said. “All you need to do is give directions. We’ll keep your brother just to make sure your memory’s good. We find what we’re looking for, we’ll let him go and he won’t even have to be involved in the ruckus.”

“It’s not that easy,” Herman said. “It’s not like I can give you highway numbers, simple landmarks.” Herman paused for a moment. “Let’s eat. Let’s stay friendly. Let me think about it some.”

“Eating’s okay,” Brett said, “but you got to think about it a lot. We can’t let it drag into tomorrow. I don’t know what kind of situation she’s in. I don’t know what’s happening to her, or for that matter, what may have happened to her already.”

Herman looked at the floor, then out the door. It wasn’t the answer Brett wanted. I saw her swallow hard. She went outside and I followed her but gave her space. I leaned against the side of the church and watched Brett walk about in the yard as if she couldn’t decide on a direction. I could see the Mexican woman too. She had really made some distance. She was down the road and to the highway. I watched her cross the highway, duck and crawl through a barbed wire fence, and walk out into a plowed field. She started across the field, dragging more dust clouds behind her. After a while I could only see the dust. It was as if the woman had disappeared into a cloud of sand.

Mexican ninjas.

Brett walked out to her car and leaned on the hood with both hands, as if trying to push it to the center of the earth. I saw her body tremble, her head shake.

I went over and put my arm around her shoulders and didn’t say anything. After a time her hand came up and went behind my waist. She held me and began to sob.

Later, we had pinto beans and slightly burned cornbread and ate it off paper plates with plastic forks. We sat outside on Brett’s car. This was much better than inside the church, except when the wind blew and picked up the smell of sewage or blew dust into our food.

I was watching Herman and Red carefully, lest Herman decide to break loose and try and shove Leonard, Brett, and me into a prairie dog hole. I was perhaps giving Herman too much attention, actually being prejudicial. Red was right. Something about him being small caused you to underestimate him. Maybe it was his way of talking. Here was a man who had strangled a woman and nailed a little girl’s hand to a boat paddle, and he consistently looked dazed and confused and about as dangerous as a wet newspaper.

I had to remember these guys weren’t just a couple of goofballs, no matter how goofy they seemed.

We sat so that Herman was on the hood between me and Leonard, and Red sat on the trunk with Brett, who sat far enough from him to use the gun she kept in her lap. She was very nervous, anxious, and I was hoping Red didn’t make a sudden dive to scratch his nuts or pick his nose, or he might end up with a .38 round in his teeth.

After a bit, Red finished his meal, slid off the trunk, and came around front. He said, “Do your facilities function, brother?”

“More or less,” Herman said. “You got to flush it twice or three times, and if it overflows there’s a plunger in there and a mop. Stinks some. It hasn’t been cleaned in, oh, two years.”

“Goodness,” Red said.

“And you got to wipe on newspapers and throw them in a cardboard box.”

“Maybe I’ll just walk out in the field some,” Red said, “do it down a prairie dog hole. I have some Kleenex in my suit pocket.”

“No,” I said. “Don’t think so. I don’t want you going that far.”

Red looked at Herman. Herman shrugged. “There wouldn’t be a gun or anything in the house, would there?” Leonard asked.

“I disposed of them all long ago,” Herman said.

“I hope so,” Leonard said. “Don’t go out the back, Red.”

“There’s no rear exit,” Herman said.

“Then see you later,” Leonard said to Red. “Happy bowel movements.”

“Crude,” Red said. “I’m the one being chastised here for my lifestyle, and the four of you are crude. Very crude. I can assure you, if one of us was invited to tea with the Queen of England, it wouldn’t be you two or the woman, and I am sorry to say, it wouldn’t be you either, brother.”

Red went away then, trudging toward the church and the toilet, his head held high, his bowels contained.

“He’s kind of prideful,” Herman said.

“Hell,” Leonard said. “He’s just full of shit is all.”