Rumble Tumble (8 page)

11

By the time I drove Brett’s car back to Hootie Hoot, the rain had slacked and the little town looked better than before. It hadn’t suddenly grown in size and had a Wal-Mart SuperCenter built out to the side, but it was shiny and nostalgic-looking.

It made me think of one of the cozy little towns my mom and dad had lived in briefly while my father worked as a mechanic for an oil and gas company. It was very Andy of Mayberry. Clean and simple, where everyone knew one another, and maybe minded each other’s business too much, but where most of that business would be about little more than a secret apple pie recipe. And, of course, the location of the local whorehouse.

I pulled in at the taxi stand and got out. The stand wasn’t much of a place. A little building made of brick that might at one time have been some sort of store, or maybe even an old jail.

Inside, slouched down in a plastic chair next to a card table, was an older man with a three-day growth of tobacco-specked gray beard. His feet were stretched out, resting in another chair. A TV, festooned with rabbit ears wearing aluminum foil accessories, was perched on a little stand next to the wall. The TV was playing only static. But that was all right, the man in the chair was asleep.

There was a dusty calendar on the wall above the TV. It bore a winter scene with snow-covered trees and a sled and two kids in coats, wool hats, and fat mittens. The calendar read December 1988.

There was a small refrigerator in one corner of the room, and I could hear it humming, as if to entertain itself. It was a sound that made you sleepy.

There was a stack of worn paperback Westerns on one corner of the card table. One of them was open and turned facedown.

Next to the book was a cold-drink bottle full of tobacco spit with a fly on the bottle lip and one inside too stupid to find its way out. It kept buzzing around, hitting the glass, but it never went up to the opening. The sky was the limit, but it was too dumb to know.

Finally the fly, pissed off, flew down and sat on a tobacco chunk in the bottom of the bottle, floated there on its nasty little island amidst an ocean of brown spit. It beat its wings a moment, as if to pass the time. Eventually, it stopped doing even that. Just sat there, confused, surprised, a real loser.

I sympathized.

The fly on the bottle lip, fed up with the ignorance of its comrade, flew off.

I stood watching the man for a while, trying to stare in such a way that his primitive brain would pick up my signals. I was attempting to activate that supposedly dormant sixth sense we all possess but so seldom use.

Either he didn’t have a sixth sense or I was missing mine. He didn’t move.

I knocked on the table.

The man opened his eyes and looked at me. “What do you want?”

“Well, I’m at a taxi stand. Say I wanted a taxi?”

“What for?”

“To go someplace.”

“What I mean,” said the old man, dropping his feet from the chair and sliding them under the table, “where would you be going?”

“That’s a good question. And I have an answer.”

“Yeah, well, good. Take this chair and sit in it while you tell me.”

I pulled the chair around in front of the table and looked at the fella. He appeared to be very tired, and maybe not as old as I had first thought, but certainly no spring chicken.

“Let me tell you something,” he said, “this here is a taxi stand, but I don’t really do much taxiing. I take Old Lady McCullers into Oklahoma City twicet a week and do some shoppin’ for her. I got a few more customers I do similar things for, though they ain’t as excitin’ as she is. She has a gas problem. I have to drive with the windows down all the way there. She don’t even say excuse me or nothing. I look back at her in the rearview, she’s lookin’ at me like I cut ’em.”

“So what you’re saying is you drive gaseous old ladies around, but you won’t drive me?”

He leaned and looked past me, through the glass, at Brett’s car. “We gonna hook up your car and pull it?”

“Yeah, well, that would be a problem, wouldn’t it?”

“What you really want?”

“Oh, just curious about a little taxi stand like this. In a town like this.”

“Nothing else to do on a rainy day, so you just drive off I-35, come in here to talk to some local color?”

“Something like that.”

“I think you’re full of shit, mister.”

“Well, I could use your rest room, you got one.”

“Right back there, and don’t make a mess of it. I don’t normally allow customers back there.”

“Maybe you ought to,” I said. “That way they won’t fart in your taxi all the way to Oklahoma City.”

He laughed a little. “You might have a case there,” he said.

I went to the rest room, took a leak, washed my face, studied it in the mirror. It looked as tired as Mr. Taxi Stand’s. I went back and took my chair.

“Haven’t had enough charm for one day?” he asked. “Here, let me give you the five-cent story. Hootie Hoot used to not have I-35 out there. That was long ago. Used to be three, four little towns around here next to us. They weren’t real big, but they were bigger than we were. With one taxi I had a little business. Enough I could take care of my family. Towns around us died, and this one’s dead and don’t know it.

“You drive down the road a piece there, take a right first real road you come to, and you’ll go through a burg used to be three times this size, but it ain’t nothing now but empty buildings with the store glass knocked out by vandals. I hang on here ’cause I ain’t got nothing else to do. Wife died. Kid got married and lives in Tulsa. Me, I got a little war pension and a few bucks now and then from the farting lady and a few others, and it’s all I need. And I got a feeling you didn’t come in here ’cause you needed no taxi. I got a feeling you didn’t come in here ’cause you were curious how come Hootie Hoot’s got one.”

“You could be right. By the way, what’s with the town’s name? Hootie Hoot?”

“I’ve heard about twenty stories,” he said. “Not one of ’em worth a shit and none of them interesting enough for me to repeat, and I don’t think you really care one way or the other.”

I nodded. “All right,” I said. “I got a real reason. I thought as a taxi driver you might could help me with something. I’m looking for a place. A house of prostitution.”

“Ah,” the man said. “I should have known that. I’m losing my snap. It’s just I don’t get many drop-ins for that. Mostly they know where they’re goin’. How come you don’t?”

I studied him. There was a lot more going on behind those slow brown eyes than waiting for the Channel Nine weather report.

“I was just told it was here in Hootie Hoot.”

“Ah hah. Where you from?”

“LaBorde, Texas.”

“Ah. Texas. You drove all the way from Texas to Hootie Hoot, Oklahoma, for a good time at a whorehouse? What’s the deal? They don’t make pussy in Texas no more?”

“I wanted to be real private.”

“I don’t think you wanted to be hundreds of miles private. I think you, sir, may still be full of shit. Even if you did go to the john.”

I considered for a moment, took a flyer. “All right. I’m going to tell you straight.”

“That’s good.”

“I came here because the woman I care about has a daughter who’s a prostitute and she wants out, and a guy told us this is were she is. Me and her, and a friend of mine, we come here to find her and take her home.”

“So you ain’t after pussy?”

“No. Well, I mean, not that way.”

“You want this gal from the whorehouse?”

“If she’s there. I don’t even know she’s there. I don’t even know there’s a whorehouse.”

“You don’t know much, do you, boy?”

“Frankly, I don’t.”

The old man rummaged around in his shirt pocket and came out with a nasty-looking hunk of a chaw. He chewed off a bite and worked it around in his jaw and studied me for a while. He got up and turned off the television set. He went over to the little refrigerator and got out a soft drink and twisted the top off, said, “Want a CoCola?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That would be nice.”

He pushed the drink toward me and I took it. He picked up the soft drink bottle with the fly in it and spat down the bottle neck, splashing the fly off its island and into the nasty brown ocean. He shook the bottle and watched the fly go under.

We sat that way for a while, me sipping a Coke, and him chewing and spitting into his bottle, shaking that fly around in the spit. He said, “You found this whorehouse, what were you going to do?”

“I told you that.”

“But you didn’t say how. Let me tell you somethin’. This house you’re lookin’ for, it exists. It’s down the road a piece. There’s busloads come to that house. It’s out in the sticks ’cause it don’t bust up no big laws out here. That’s the way they like it around here. They want stuff like pussy shacks out of sight and out of mind. There’s people drive from Oklahoma City just to drop their goodies there. There’s conventioneers hit that place on the way to Oklahoma City and back from. It’s busy. And it’s not a casual kind of place neither. Least it ain’t if you really know how to look around.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“The guys run that place, they ain’t just big thugs, they got guns. They’re not going to take kindly you takin’ one of their whores. I think they might twist your arm behind your back, make you yell calf rope, then break your arm off and stick it up your ass. Then they might shoot you and bury you under a rosebush somewheres.”

“That’s what my buddy thinks,” I said. “And I’m starting to believe it. The view seems to have a consensus of opinion.”

“But you’re going in anyway?”

“Yes.”

“This ain’t no daughter of yours?”

“No.”

“This woman whose daughter it is ain’t your wife?”

I shook my head.

“This gal ain’t no stepdaughter?”

“Nope.”

The old man shook his head. “I hate them pimpin’ sonsabitches. I ain’t got nothing against pussy, and I reckon some gal wants to sell it, that’s her business, but this place ain’t so cut-and-dried. I think a gal wants to leave, they don’t just let her leave. I think she wants to go, they ought to let her go. It ain’t the pussy sellin’ bothers me, it’s the lack of free will.”

“I take it this place has been here a while?”

“Many, many years. Used to be run by a madam named Lilly Filigree, and I think most of the girls there chose to be there then, and from what I know, she treated ’em good. When I was a young man I went up to there myself, rode a little tail up the canyon oncet or twicet. But now, last ten years or so, it’s just business. All business, and it ain’t the girls’ business.”

“Anyone ever tried to close the place down?”

“Oh yeah, back when there were enough people in this town to fill a church, a bunch of self-righteous old biddies tried to shut it down. Mostly ’cause their men were up there getting their ashes hauled now and then.”

“They didn’t have any luck?”

“Sheriff, he kind of slapped the madam’s wrist now and then. Ran some of the girls in around election time. But it didn’t mean nothin’. But it’s not that way now. Not just a bunch of ladies makin’ a buck for a fuck. Folks run that show, they ain’t sweet. Used to be a colored lady up there ran it. She came after Filigree. She was as mean as a goddamn crocodile. Seen her a few times in town. Always wore this big old sack dress.”

“A muumuu,” I said.

“You say so. She went away and there was a cowboy midget and a big bastard runnin’ it. Midget liked to come to town so people would look at him. Strutted around like a banty rooster. Right proud of himself, he was.”

I thought about Red and his expensive Western-cut suits. I thought about the lady in the muumuu, resting in a box at the bottom of some lake in Arkansas. Maybe still in the muumuu, shit-stained as it was.

Taxi Man spat into the soft drink bottle, said, “Figured that midget and ole bigin’ was runnin’ things. Then they were gone too and there’s a fellow up there now scares me just to see him come into town and sit in the barbershop. He don’t even pretend he does anything other than sell pussy. But hell, there ain’t nobody ’round here cares. This ain’t where he gets his action. It’s them conventioneers and such pay his bills.”

“I see.”

“No you don’t. You go up there and fuck around, and that monster gets hold of you, they gonna find you in some rock quarry with a .44 slug behind the ear.”

“Cheery scenario,” I said.

“Not really.”

“Any chance you’re going to tell me where this place is?”

“All right,” he said. He produced a stubby pencil from his pocket, wet it with his tongue, used it to draw a map on the fly page under the title of one of the paperback books. I thanked him, took the book, put it in my back pocket.

“Had any balls, I’d go with you,” he said.

“It’s not your problem.”

“Things like this ought to be everyone’s problem.”

“I guess.”

“Maybe if I was younger.”

“Sure.”

I started out the door and he called out, “Hey, boy, you watch your ass.”

“Thanks,” I said.

12

At the motel I told Brett and Leonard what I had learned.

Brett said, “I don’t get it. Everyone knows it’s up there. This taxi man, he says he knows the girls are sort of prisoners—”

“Sort of,” I interrupted. “Tillie got into this by choice. This is the sort of business you don’t know who you’re going to end up with. Not just in bed, but in business. One day you’re selling your product and paying a percentage. Next day you’re owned and selling your product and you get a percentage, and sometimes maybe the customer gives you a black eye. A disease.”

“But the cops?” Brett said.

“There’s one local cop,” I said. “He probably makes more money a year than all the whores do, and he don’t make it on law enforcement.”

“So they get away with it,” Brett said.

“Yeah,” I said. “And the place has a reputation almost like a landmark. Kind of a hangover from the past. Lot of people think, well, they’re just sellin’ meat, what’s the problem?”

“So,” Leonard said, “the next step is?”

“Way I see it,” I said, “is I could go up there now, pose as a customer and try and take Tillie out. But I think it’s better we wait until tonight. That way, I pull it off, we can hustle her out of town with some dark to help us.”

Leonard nodded. “That sounds all right. You go in there, though, you go in with a gun. I didn’t haul all these weapons down here for nothing.”

“Actually,” I said, “I hope you did.”

“You know what I mean,” Leonard said. “I’m going to be nearby, and not with any handgun neither.”

I looked at Brett. She sat quietly, churning her own thoughts about.

Shortly before dark Leonard and I walked down to the Coke machine next to the motel office. I put coins in the machine and got myself a Diet Coke, Leonard a Dr Pepper, and Brett an orange drink. I gave Leonard the Dr Pepper, slipped Brett’s can into my coat pocket, pulled the tab on the Diet Coke and drank some of it.

“How do you think Brett’s doing?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Leonard said. “She’s hard to read.”

I looked out at the highway. Leaves were being blown downhill by a sharp cool wind. The gold and red and brown leaves whirled and whipped above the highway in the fading sunlight like dying birds, floated down and stuck to the cement. Cars came by and tossed them up again. It began to sprinkle gently.

“You watch her,” I said.

“I will.”

We went back to the room, drank our drinks, and I read some of the Western Taxi Man had given me. Leonard paced, went to the bathroom numerous times. Brett lay still on the bed. Once when I looked at her and smiled, she looked at me as if I were nothing more than the nasty wallpaper behind me. It made me nervous.

It went like that for another hour, then the daylight faded. I closed up my book. Leonard handed me the little .38 and I put it in an ankle holster and strapped it on and pulled my pants leg over it. Leonard stuck a revolver under his shirt and gave Brett one. She looked at the pistol with an expression that was hard to figure. Maybe she was thinking about Tillie. Maybe she was thinking what I was thinking. I was scared.

Brett slipped the gun into the holster Leonard provided, strapped it on under her coat. Leonard rolled all the big guns back into the blankets, except for the double-barrel. He held it up and looked at me. “Honky spreader.”

We gathered up our goods. Leonard carried the shotgun down close to his side. It was raining when we went out. We put the gun-stuffed blanket in the trunk, tossed the luggage in the back. Leonard put the shotgun with the luggage. We stopped up front of the office, and I went in and checked us out of the motel.

In the car I got out my flashlight and opened up the paperback Taxi Man had written on. I studied the map and told Leonard how to go. The rain pecked at our windshield and the wet leaves slapped against it and tangled in the windshield wipers, wadded, and were tossed away.

We drove on into Hootie Hoot. Up Main Street and past the taxi stand. I tried to look and see if I could see Taxi Man at his post behind the card table, but it was dark and the street was poorly lit and it was raining hard now.

On up the street we went, out of Hootie Hoot. The rain began to die. I studied the crude map inside the paperback, and we followed it to a blacktop road that turned right. We took it, went along on that for five miles, then turned left on another blacktop. This one was narrow and wound down amongst scrubby Oklahoma trees wound tight with darkness and nesting crows.

We went along the blacktop for ten miles and the trees broke on either side and there was a great hill up ahead and the blacktop quit there and turned into a gravel road, and at the top of the hill the half moon, which had finally shone itself through fading rain clouds, seemed to be balancing, like half a loaf of round white bread, on its rim.

We kept going. Down on the other side the hill fell away into a wide pasture and in the center of the pasture was a big old white house. It was well lit from the inside and by porch lights, and on either side of the house by two tall pole lights that shone on the pasture and revealed it was full of cars and rain puddles.

The house was three stories with columns and a long wide porch that wound all around it. It had a new roof sprouting four brick chimneys. One for each side. All four were breathing smoke. You could see the smoke against the moon, which now sat just above the house like some kind of soiled halo.

“Business is good,” Leonard said, and stopped at the bottom of the hill and rolled down his window and spat outside. He took several deep breaths. I could hear music coming from the house, and I could hear some laughter and some other sounds. It seemed to be a raucous place.

“Well, brother,” Leonard said, “what’s the score?”

“Park far out. I’ll walk.”

“And when you come out,” Leonard said, “I’ll be too far away.”

“I know. But they see y’all sitting out in the car, it’ll make them wonder.”

“You’re trying to say these boys may not like niggers?”

“You said it first, remember.”

“I tell you what I’m gonna do,” Leonard said. “I’m going to give you the time to get down there. Then I’m gonna give you fifteen minutes to line up things, like you’ve come to shop. Then I’m going to move on down about halfway and park. I’ll be on the right. Where you see the gap in those cars. That’s where you want to head. You’re not out of there in twenty minutes, or I hear some kind of hootenanny goin’ on, I’m comin’ in.”

“That’ll just cause more trouble,” I said.

“Not if they’re gutting you with a knife,” Brett said.

“I guess that’s a point worth considering,” I said.

I got out, started walking toward the house.

The wind gathered up the scent of incense and passed it on to me. It was a nice smell. Any other time I might have appreciated it. The music was country. Tanya Tucker. It was cranked up so loud it seemed to be responsible for the leaves blowing off the trees.

When I was on the porch, a guy big enough to fill a bus and stick his ass through the door came outside and made the porch creak when he walked. He was wearing a dark suit with a white shirt and a dark tie. He had a head about the size of an atlas globe and his hair was cut so short, in the porch light I could see razor scrapes on his blue-veined head. He smiled at me.

“Hello,” he said. “Come on in.”

“Thanks.”

He walked down the porch, around it, out of sight. Inside was a brightly lit foyer, and the music was really loud. Tanya Tucker was over with and some guy whose music I didn’t know was singing about something I wasn’t listening to. Loud as that music was, it wasn’t as loud as the thumping of my heart, the pounding of blood in my temples. The incense was so strong in the foyer it made me sick.

A woman in her sixties, carrying about two hundred pounds, and not carrying it well, wearing a multicolored, loose-fitting dress that had all the style of a horse blanket, sort of sprang up in front of me. She had blue hair and loose dentures and too much powder and rouge on her face. She looked as if she ought to be somewhere else, baking cookies.

She said, “Young man. You come for a good time?”

I hesitated, fearing she might think she was supposed to be my good time.

“Yes, ma’am, I suppose I have.”

“Well, there’s a small cover charge. Any other charges, that’s between you and the girls.”

I realized then she was a door greeter, sort of like they have at Wal-Mart. Need a shopping cart? Want to buy some pussy? Man, that was cold. A sixty-year-old woman to warm you up. Like Grandma guiding you around on your first day at kindergarten.

“How much?”

She told me and I gave her some of my bouncer money.

“You need to come into the sittin’ room, son. Look around. See if there’s anyone you like. The girls are real friendly.”

I went past her, through a half-open door and into the sitting room. It was busy in there. Lots of men, all white, were sitting on couches and lots of girls were flittering around them, as if the men were magnets and they were flecks of iron.

The men’s talk was loud, to compete with the music, to try and not show nervousness. I figured there were plenty of husbands in here who weren’t regular whoremongers, but who were trying to start out in style. Most of the men in the room looked to be either businessmen or farmers, and all but one looked to be past thirty.

The women were all young and looked to be whores, of course. You could tell from the lack of clothes. I checked each one individually, trying to determine if any of them were Tillie. Well, maybe that wasn’t why I looked so carefully, but it was part of the reason.

Over by the crackling fireplace was a Steroid Jock wearing an expensive hand-tailored suit, but that didn’t make it pretty. He had chosen to have it made out of a kind of olive green material the texture of grape leaves. His head was square, like a block, and it was topped with black hair cut close to the scalp. His ears reminded me of radar tracking devices. He was talking to a handsome blond man in another hand-tailored suit, only this one was blue and smooth and more tasteful. Then again, who was I? A fashion critic?

The guy in the blue suit was huge too, but it didn’t show right off, he was so well proportioned. I realized utility instead of fashion had more to do with the hand-tailored suits these guys wore. You looked like they did, you couldn’t pick a suit off the rack. The guy in the blue suit was watching me, like a bird stalking a worm. He had one hand on the mantel and he was playing with a smoking pot of incense.

I glanced around the room and saw more of the boys. Not the customers. Just these big sonsabitches. They were trying to look casual, but they looked about as casual as warthogs in jockstraps and snowshoes. There were six of them altogether, packed into those expensive suits, housing enough steroids inside their flesh to accommodate the entire Mr. Universe competition. I wondered how many more like them were upstairs. I thought about the one on the porch. Maybe he and Leonard were sitting on the steps right now, talking about the moon.

Naw.

I took a deep breath and put a smile on my face and started walking among the women, like I was shopping. A redhead looked at me and smiled. Bless her heart, I’d seen more sincerity in the grin of a presidential candidate.

I grinned at her, just to be sociable, but tried to discourage her by turning away and looking at my watch. Only problem was I wasn’t wearing one.

How long had I been inside now?

Five minutes?

Ten?

Soon, Leonard would be moving the car closer, and not long after that he’d be inside looking for me.

I turned slightly and the redhead was at my shoulder. She wasn’t gorgeous, but she was cute. She had a lump of a nose, good teeth, and freckles to go with the red hair, which was the color of copper and probably that way naturally. She was a little thick in the hips, but if she’d been wearing more than thin black panties that wouldn’t have been noticeable. Another ten years those hips were going to give her trouble.

She had me by the elbow. She said, “You need some company?”

“Well, I’m looking for somebody.”

“Here I am.”

“I’m looking for someone named Tillie. I hear good things about Tillie.”

She frowned. “You don’t hear good things about Darlene?”

“Well, I don’t hear bad things about Darlene. It’s just I’m looking for Tillie.”

“I don’t know any Tillie.”

I tried to remember the photograph I had seen of Tillie in Brett’s house. “She might go by Till. Something like that. She’s a redhead too. Big-breasted.”

“That’s it. You don’t like me because I have small tits.”

I knew she could care less if I liked her or her tits. She was doing what she was supposed to do. Drum up commerce.

I saw her glance toward the fireplace mantel a couple of times, looking at the guy in the blue suit. He glanced at us, then looked away, checking out the rest of his business. And I was sure it was his business. Or at least the one he was running for Big Jim. I figured he was the big guy Taxi Man had told me about.

“About this Tillie?” I asked.

“There’s no one named that here,” she said.

“Not even upstairs?”

“You really want this Tillie, don’t you?”

“I’d like to try her. I’ve heard good stuff.”

She shook her head. “Sorry, no Tillie. You get bored and I’m not playing the horizontal tango with some redneck’s weasel, you look me up. For two hundred dollars I can make you forget Tillie, or damn near anybody or anything.”

“I’ll remember that.”

She winked at me, went to join a couple of guys who had just entered the room, and they were damn glad to see her. One of them instantly had his arm around her, and I heard her laugh like she had just heard the funniest goddamn joke ever told.

Time was running out. Already Leonard was slipping shells into that double-barrel. Beard the lion in his den, I thought.

I went over to the guy in the blue suit. I said, “There’s a girl I’m looking for. A Tillie. She here?”

The guy studied me. The guy with him, Cement Head, studied me too. “No,” he said. “There used to be a Tillie here, but she’s not here anymore.”