Armadillos & Old Lace (18 page)

“Why would he just want his head?” one little girl tearfully asked Dylan.

Dylan didn’t have anything cued up in the old answer machine for that one. Indeed, it remains an adult riddle to this day.

I rarely enjoy telling or hearing animal death stories and this one doesn’t shed any light or gloom on Harper Road particularly, nor does it tell us anything much about animals. The only reason I include the story here is because it tells us something about ourselves.

“Why would he just want his head?” I asked Dusty as I followed Boyd Elder’s crude little map to what I expected would be Willis Hoover’s, crude little place.

“Prompt service is required,” said Dusty, as we turned left and headed up a steep, rocky incline.

I checked the rearview and saw nothing but road behind me. It was ironic that the one time the sheriff s department had decided not to shadow me might be the occasion on which I needed them the most. Ah well, as my old friend Slim used to say: “You’s born alone, you dies alone, you best as well get used to it.” Parts one and two of Slim’s credo, of course, were usually more easily accomplished than part three.

We flew across three cattle guards down a lonely road with nothing to break our line of vision but scrub live oak and sinister cloud-shadows that seemed to palpably waver in the heat that enclosed us like a giant microwave. The only signs of life were the dark, peripheral flutterings of the buzzards as they watched from dead trees along the roadside. This definitely didn’t look like the way to grandmother’s house.

“Men have been known to freeze to death on the equator,” I said to Dusty. “Especially when their washer fluid is low.”

Dusty shuddered violently.

We pulled off the gravel road near an old ramshackle log cabin that looked like the Beverly Hillbillies might’ve lived there before they moved. I cut the engine and carefully stepped out of the car to suss out the situation.

“Don’t forget your keys,” said Dusty.

“I didn’t forget them,” I said. “We may be departing rather quickly.”

Nothing appeared to be moving around the vicinity of the cabin, so I walked a little closer. The cabin was atop a small rise, a good vantage point for Hoover to have if waves of Mexicans, communists, Martians, or pointy-headed intellectuals ever tried to capture his somewhat dilapidated command post. There was a deathly quiet about the place, broken only by what sounded like Dizzy Gillespie playing a rather large, mean kazoo. The noise seemed to be emanating from somewhere in the back of the cabin.

I crept quietly along the little path that led up the small hill and discarded several possible cover identities as I went. Jehovah’s Witness didn’t really fit the bill. Sneeze-guard inspector for salad bars didn’t feel right either. Am Way representative had a reasonable ring to it.

Then I saw the flowers.

They literally took your breath away. Beds and beds of roses of all colors and sizes, in that lonely, godforsaken place looking for all the world as beautiful as the butterflies etched by children into the unforgiving walls of Auschwitz. Could a hand with such a remarkable green thumb have so much blood upon it? Could the same mind that created this beauty be capable of the premeditated murders of seven human beings?

With the roses to my right and the cabin to my left I headed toward the Dizzy Gillespie area across the pathway of worn-down flagstones. It was hard to believe that I could very well be tracking a serial killer right into his lair. But that was part of the problem. A serial killer doesn’t usually look like a serial killer. In fact, the serial killer rarely resembles what we think of as a criminal or a monster. He does not radiate evil. More likely, he comes off in the manner of the genial host at the weekend suburban barbecue or that friendly, outgoing, nice-looking delivery man. Why would he just want his head?

The kazoo-playing was getting louder. So was the intermittent pounding of my heart. This was either a ridiculous wild goose chase or, very possibly, I was about to get goosed by God. Suddenly, the feather in my cowboy hat was flying through the air with the cowboy hat still attached. I was, unfortunately, still attached to the cowboy hat. The roses were swirling like those in a painting by a minor French Impressionist. I was caught in some kind of old-fashioned snare trap swinging upside down like a human pendulum about six feet off the ground. The kazoo music, which I’d by this time deduced to be bees, had a nice little Doppler effect going for it each time I swung back and forth. Or it might’ve been the blood rushing to my head.

This was it, I thought. I either should’ve been more considerate of others or less considerate of others during my lifetime. I definitely should’ve been something, because I was going to end up as a humorous little news story: MAN STUNG 7,000 TIMES BY BEES. Of course, the tabloid play would probably be quite a bit more sizable. That depended, naturally, on a number of other factors. How much weight Delta Burke gained this week. How much Magic Johnson lost. What particular peccadillo Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Teddy Kennedy, or the Virgin Mary had gotten involved in recently. Any little thing like that could blow me right out of the tub. I could almost hear the editor of the
Globe
shouting: “Hold the back pages!”

It might make a good B movie, no pun intended, but it was always a shame when the peculiar mode of someone’s death held more interest for people than the tone and timbre of the person’s life. Greater men than myself had fallen victim to this unpleasant little foible of human nature. I wasn’t certain that Nelson Rockefeller was a greater man than myself, but it’d certainly happened to him. Bigger in death than in life. God gave him a wife named Happy. So what does he go and do? Checks out while he’s hosing his secretary. That didn’t make Happy very happy.

It didn’t make me very happy, either, when I saw coming toward me a little man with a head that looked like a toadstool. His gloved hands were held strangely in front of him and seemed to be shaking like a crab. He took off some kind of pith helmet with a long bee screen attached that had previously hidden the upper part of his body. Now he just looked like a kindly, congenial, chuckling, everyday serial killer.

“Glad you came by,” he said. “Why don’t you hang around for a while?”

Then he disappeared around the corner of the little cabin.

Now there was a problem. Hanging six feet off the ground upside down with one foot in a noose was just the kind of activity that could be hazardous to your health. You could learn a little more than you wished to about the birds and the bees, the birds in this case being the buzzards which were already slightly tightening their little circles overhead to get a better look at the catch of the day. Buzzards will eat anything that formerly moved and now doesn’t. To them everything tastes a little bit like dead armadillo.

The prospect of a huge swarm of abandoned honeybees, moderately irritated by the sudden departure of their master and coming upon me like the sudden departure of their master and coming upon me like something out of Gullible’s Travels, was a most unpleasant alternative to the buzzard scenario. An equally tedious potentiality was that the animal kingdom would leave me alone and the beekeeper would return, possibly mistaking me for a large bee. And Willis Hoover’s congeniality worried me. He certainly seemed friendly enough to be a serial killer.

My cowboy hat fell off and drifted and scalloped to the ground like an awkward mutant black snowflake. I continued to hang by one foot. With enormous effort I managed to reach into the right front pocket of my jeans and extract my Chinese version of the Swiss Army Knife, which had undoubtedly been made by Chinese prison labor because I’d bought it for three dollars on Canal Street. I’d bought several of them at the time, all from a large Negro with purple pantyhose on his head who was talking to an imaginary childhood friend. Guy like that you don’t want to Christian down too hard.

I’d given one of the knives to my dad and I remembered him telling me: “My father once gave me a knife like this and now my son has.” Funny what you think about when you have a little time on your hands.

From my ankle to my head the pain was increasing, and if I never had before I now truly empathized with every animal in the wild that was ever trapped by the clever, cruel hand of man. I opened the knife and made a few passes at the rope, but the knife was too dull and the rope was too strong. I shouted for a while, but the only answer was the buzzing of the bees and the ringing in my ears. Hoover was probably inside the cabin tapping his foot to an eight-track of The Captain and Toenail and gaily sprinkling a little Equal on his serial.

I felt like crying. I remembered I hadn’t cried at my mother’s funeral and when the rabbi shook my hand he’d said: “I see it hasn’t hit you yet.” I hadn’t answered him then. But the truth was it’d hit me a long time ago. Now it was hitting me again. All life ever does is hit you when you least expect it, and all you can ever do is laugh or cry whenever the hell you feel like it. As they say, “Anything worth cryin’ can be smiled.”

For some reason I also thought of Patrick O’Malley, who was a homeless person back in the early seventies in Nashville when people used to call them bums. For some reason “bum” sounds more dignified even now than “homeless person.” Patrick was an aristocratic freak and proud to be a bum, and he hung around our little house off Music Row with Billy Swan and Willie Fong Young and Dan Beck and myself in the days when we were getting the old Texas Jewboy band together. Patrick, who’s no doubt hustling handouts in heaven about now, had any number of memorable credos. One of the best was as follows: “If there’s two things I can’t stand it’s a shitty baby and a cryin’ man.”

That was probably why I hadn’t cried at my mother’s funeral.

The bees, the beekeeper, and the buzzards were all beginning to cut into my cocktail hour, so I made one desperate, somewhat herculean effort to grab the rope with one hand and slash it with the other. I felt the knife tearing into the strands of the rope and I felt the combined power of millions of Chinese criminals, many of them no doubt political prisoners, pulling and sawing and ripping the twisted fabric of a spiritually outdated society.

The rope gave.

Bees buzzed.

Flowers flashed by.

Then everything went black. Black as the cemetery that night when I’d met the judge. And I knew, just before the curtain came down, that the solution to these murders lay in the Garden of Memories.

I woke up some time later to what sounded and felt like a racehorse pissing on a flat rock inside my head. I opened my eyes slowly in the darkness and made out the rough form of a strange man carrying a flashlight and a water bucket. He poured the water on my head and shined the flashlight in my eyes. I was glad he wasn’t the beekeeper. I was glad just to be at the party at all.

“Goddamnit!” he said. “You spooked his ass!” I had no idea what he was talking about but it was oddly comforting hearing a human voice.

“Sherlock Holmes was a beekeeper,” I said.

“Fuck a bunch of beekeepers,” he said. “Now we gotta go after his ass, and he knows these hills like a ringtail coon.”

It dawned on me that this man was a sheriffs deputy and that Willis Hoover, possibly through my intrusion, had headed for the hills.

“Is the sheriff here?” I said, rubbing my ankle. “Sheriff was here she’d run your ass right into the sneezer. She ain’t, but I am.”

“So it’s just us fellas,” I said.

“Shit,” he said, and spat disgustedly on the ground dangerously near where my cowboy hat had come to rest.

In the distance I could hear more cars driving up, voices shouting in the night, dogs barking. Here and there, searchlights began to penetrate the darkness. They looked like little lighthouses on an ocean of dust.

“This here beekeeper’s our number one suspect in the killin’s.”

“The killin’s?”

“Them little ol’ ladies. Now, what’s your name, buddy? Sheriff’ll probably be wantin’ to talk to you.” I got up gingerly and limped over to pick up my hat. Then I took out my wallet and fished out my card and handed it over to the deputy. He shined his flashlight on it and studied it for a long while like it was a Dead Sea Scroll.