Mucho Mojo (19 page)

We started to spar, lightly, just tagging one another with control. We did that until we were sweaty and tired and needed showers again. But we didn’t shower. We got to work on the subflooring, and by late that afternoon we were finished. During that entire time, we hardly said a word, just something now and then about nails and boards and such.

When we finished, we sat on the subflooring for a while, sweating, letting time go by. I broke the silence.

“It’s gone far enough, Leonard. I love you like a brother, man, you know that. But Illium didn’t just drive off in that pond by accident. And under that house . . . no telling how many bodies there are. Your uncle’s diagram is probably just for what he located. Or maybe he put them there.”

“You’re back to that,” Leonard said, and he was angry.

“I’m not back to anything. I’m saying we don’t know. We’re not investigators. It’s time we call in the law.”

“The law has been on this case for years, Hap. We’ve found out more in a few days than they have in all that time. Or rather my uncle and Illium found it out and we picked up on it. We let Hanson in on this, he’s still got to mess with the system. I don’t even think it’s purely a black-white thing anymore. It’s more a thing makes the police force look stupid. Justice seldom overrides embarrassment.

“But black-white thing or not, white people run this town, and they’re going to be a lot more rested they think a nigger did it, and did it to little niggers. That fits in with the general thinking and keeps it out of their backyard. They don’t see anything black as being part of their immediate problem, even the liberals.”

“Leonard, most likely, all things considered, a black man did do it. It sure points that way. A white guy would have to be pretty clever to cruise around over here and not get noticed.”

“I’m not saying it isn’t a black man. You’re missing the point. Way it stands now, all we got to show the cops is certain proof my uncle killed those kids and hid their bodies at the Hampstead place, and that this Illium fellow was in on it. Shit, he’s got kid’s clothes and pornography setting on his couch, just waiting for the cops to eyeball it. Cops see that, they aren’t going to look any farther, and Hanson isn’t going to get the chance to look either. They’ll have it all solved. Couple old dead niggers did it, or rather my uncle did it and Illium got in on the business late. Case closed. And I ain’t having it. Uncle Chester’s the one taught me about pride and honor. Taught me not to care about color, one way or the other. Not to hide behind it, not to use it to roll over nobody.

“I was growing up, you hear a crime newscast, read a newspaper, they were always quick to point out when the criminal was a black, but not when they were white. I got the impression it was blacks did everything. It was my uncle showed me things straight. That people were people and there were good and bad, and to just look at a thing head on, not try and dress it up any. And that’s just a reverse way of saying it turns out to be a black man, it’s a black man. That’s no skin off my ass. I just want whoever it is nailed. But I don’t want to give the cops the easy way out. Uncle Chester was a good man, Hap. He had honor. Me and him, we had our problems, but he wasn’t a child killer. There’s no reason you got to believe in him, but I believe in him, and I want to see he gets a fair shake.”

“Thing is, Leonard, whoever killed these kids and did Illium in is still out there. Guys like that, they don’t stop. You know that. While we’re investigating, he could be planning to kill another child. That’s who he’s after. Kids. Illium only got aced because he got in the way, and somehow let on he knew something.”

“I realize that.”

“That first grave we dug into. That’s fresh, Leonard. You know that. It doesn’t take any time at all for a body to decompose. That one still had the stink on it. He’ll kill again, and I don’t want that on my head.”

“And I don’t want my uncle’s reputation destroyed, and I don’t think the cops are going to find who’s doing this anyway. Like I said, they got their suspects. Uncle Chester and Illium. They’ll close the book on this case so quick it’ll make your head swim.”

“I don’t know what to say. I really don’t.”

“Don’t say anything for a while. Don’t tell anybody.”

“Leonard, I already told Florida about Illium.”

“Goddamn you, Hap!”

“She won’t say anything. For a while.”

“You shouldn’t have done that. We had a deal. That goddamn pussy always did mess your thinking.”

“Watch it, Leonard.”

We sat there looking at each other like bad asses for a moment. Leonard smiled slowly. “Hell, Hap, I love you, man. We gonna fight?”

“’Course not.”

“That would be some fight, you know?”

“I couldn’t take you,” I said.

“I don’t know. I think you might. You hesitate now and then, you think you’re gonna hurt someone bad. You ain’t got that killer instinct, but you got mad enough, you’d be some bad business all right.”

“I couldn’t get that mad at you, buddy.”

“Yeah, we’re stuck with one another. . . . Shit, Hap. It’s OK you told Florida. Hell, I know you got a head on you. She’s all right. I mean, you’re a dumb asshole, but what’s done is done, and she’s all right.”

“It just slipped out. A thing like that, it’s hard to keep under your hat.”

“It’s all right, bubba. It’s just I don’t know what to do exactly.”

“Me either,” I said.

A few days went by. The recollection of those bodies burned my memories at night, found their way into my thoughts during the day. It was the same with Leonard. Not that he said much about it. But I could tell. I had known him long enough to see his feelings expressed in the way he moved or smiled or tried to laugh.

To flush the memories out we took to hard work. Manual labor has a way of sweating out impurities. Both physical and emotional.

We finished up the surface flooring late one afternoon and took what scraps of lumber were left over, and went to see MeMaw, dumped the stuff in her yard and made a pledge to patch her porch.

She was agreeable and very grateful. She told us how much Jesus loved us and took us inside and showed us our snapshot. She had pinned it on the wall near the snapshot of her youngest son, Hiram, who she said Leonard reminded her of. She said her boy would soon be home for a visit. When she said it, her entire face brightened and she looked no older than seventy-five. OK, eighty-five.

I looked at the snapshot of her son and the one containing me and Leonard. Well, Leonard and her son were both black, that much was similar.

We had to eat some homemade bread and preserves before we were allowed to consider leaving. It wasn’t a difficult task. We insisted she let us do a few chores for her as well, then we left out of the kitchen and shoved the lumber under her porch and vowed to be back to do the work in a day or two.

Back at Uncle Chester’s, just as the sun faded, Leonard put some water in a pot of yesterday’s pinto beans, dropped in a fresh strip of ham hock, and peppered it. While it stewed, I drove my pickup down Comanche Street to the East Side Grocery for a few supper items. It was a beautiful death to the day, and in the red and gray time before the dark, the East Side took on a sort of fairy brilliance. A lot of walkers had disappeared from the streets for supper, and those who had jobs were back from them and settled, so the streets were near empty and stained with the blood of the sun.

East Side Grocery was a center for more than commerce. It was where the old men gathered to rattle dominoes and cuss and tell about how they used to do this and used to do that. A bunch of them were sitting out front of the grocery, to the right of the door on the concrete walk, underneath an overhang with a tin-capped light that was already on and already swarmed with bugs. They were sitting on old metal lawn chairs playing dominoes on a fold-out table, laughing and drinking beer out of paper cups.

Behind them, stapled on the store wall, there were ads for great black blues musicians, like Bobby Blue Bland. Guys like that played the East Side often, and the white community never even knew it. There was also a colorful poster announcing East Side’s Summer Carnival, August 27th, the “Only All Black Sponsored Major Carnival In East Texas,” if one were to believe the poster. In addition, there were a variety of church and community project bulletins.

I nodded at the old men when I went in the store. They nodded and grinned amiably enough, but even though I had been here a lot of late, there was the usual suspicion on their faces, the unasked questions: Who’s the white guy? What’s he doin’ here? Why’s he keep hangin’ around?

The store owner had been at the domino table, and he reluctantly followed in after me and got behind the counter and waited. I picked up some bread and eggs and cornmeal mix, a six-pack of beer for Leonard, and looked for some nonalcoholic beer for me but didn’t find any. I got a six-pack of Diet Coke instead.

I took my stuff to the counter, plucked a couple of jerky sticks out of a box up front, threw them down with my purchase, and watched some hot links on metal pins turn and sweat and drip inside a humidity-beaded glass enclosure.

The owner had a lot of belly and a lot of gray hair and a sun roof that revealed a dark bald spot. He might have been five two. He appeared to have all his own teeth, and one of the front ones was gold as Rapunzel’s hair. He said, “That do you?”

“Yeah. How’s the dominoes?”

“I’m losing,” he said.

He tallied up my goods on the adding machine, and I continued to look around. I examined a frame on the wall behind the register containing the first dollar the store had taken in, and noted the dollar was play money. Below that, on a shelf, I saw something that startled me. Next to a jar of pickled pig’s feet was a larger jar stuffed with little slips of paper. It looked like one of the jars at Illium’s.

I said, “That jar with the coupons in it? That is coupons, isn’t it?”

He was bagging up my groceries; he stopped, glanced where I was indicating. “Yeah.”

“I’ve seen that setup a couple times,” I said. “The jars, I mean. There something to it besides you saving coupons?”

“That’s the church’s,” he said.

“How’s that?”

“Reverend Fitzgerald, he’s got him a deal with all the businesses in town. We cut coupons, we see them. Folks bring them and donate ’em. Fitzgerald saves them coupons for his youth programs. You know, take the soccer, baseball team out to eat. He’s got this deal with damn near everybody in the city. Even if the coupons expire, they let him use ’em. They gonna make money anyway, discount or not, him bringing in ten, twenty kids at a time, and often. He’s got more coupons than he can use. Illium done told us he gonna stop picking up for a while, he gets this batch. He says they done gettin’ yellow, they got so many. They could take soccer teams out for the next ten years and not run out of coupons. He done s’posed to got this here jar, but he ain’t showed. I reckon he’s been sick.”

Yeah, I thought, real sick.

“Mr. Moon’s the clearinghouse?” I asked.

“You know him?”

“Not really. Know who he is.”

“Yeah, he runs all manner errands for the church. He’s a real do gooder, that Illium. That sonsabitch dies, he’s gone sit on the right side of Jesus, and Jesus gone give him a juice harp, personal like, let him play a few spirituals.”

I figured Illium was probably twanging out a rendition of “The Old Rugged Cross” even as we spoke. I thanked the old man, paid up, and started back to the house, thinking about Illium, the church, Reverend Fitzgerald, and all those coupons, the connection right under our noses all the time.

*  *  *

Next day. A Saturday. Hot. Me and Leonard and Florida and Hanson, out at the lake near my old house, standing on the bank, shadowed by drooping willows, casting fishing lines in the water.

The fish weren’t biting, but the mosquitoes were. They were bad here because of the low areas where the water ran out of the lake and gathered in pools and turned torpid beneath the shades of the willows and gave the little bastards prime breeding grounds.

Florida, dressed in blue jean short-shorts, a short-sleeved blue sailor-style shirt, low-cut blue tennis shoes, and one of those stupid white fishing hats with a big brim that turns up in the front, was doing more slapping than casting.

“You should have worn long pants,” I said. “I told you.”

“Well, damnit, you were right,” she said.

Hanson slapped a mosquito on the side of his face, hard. He looked at his palm. In the center of it was a bloody mess protruding broken insect legs. He wiped the palm on his pants.

“Boys,” he said, “this is just peachy-keen fun, but you didn’t invite me out here to fish. I can tell way you keep looking at each other, so don’t fondle my balls—sorry, Florida.”

“It’s OK,” Florida said. “I’ve heard of them.”

“Get on with it,” Hanson said. “And next time, skip this fishing shit and take me to a movie.”

“I don’t know you’re gonna like this,” Leonard said, “’cause, you see, what we want to do is make some kind’a deal.”

“I don’t like deals,” Hanson said. “It always means some guilty asshole gets off with less than he deserves.”

“We’re not guilty of anything,” Leonard said.

“Except withholding evidence,” I said.

“Yeah,” Leonard said, “there’s that.”

“All right,” Hanson said, reeling in his line, “that’s enough bullshit. . . . You in on this Florida?”

“Nope,” she said. “I’m just a humble fisher girl. And their lawyer, if they need me.”

We all took a moment to slap at a black cloud of mosquitoes. Hanson said, “Let’s go someplace we can talk without pain. Few more minutes of this, I’m gonna need a transfusion.”

We walked back to Leonard’s car, which was up the hill and in the sunlight. The mosquitoes weren’t swarming there, there was just the occasional kamikaze. We took the rods and reels apart and put them in the trunk of the car with the fishing tackle. We poured the worms out so that they might breed and multiply. I watched them squirm around in the soft sand, making their way into the earth.

Florida climbed up on the hood of the car and stretched her legs and scratched at the knots the mosquitoes had made. On her, even the knots looked good. Hanson seemed to be taking note of that himself.