We got up, but not quite on the double. We showered together, made love in the stall, then showered again. By the time we’d dried off, brushed our teeth, and dressed, Leonard had arrived.
We gathered our suitcases, locked the place, and met him outside. We loaded the guns, which Leonard had wrapped in blankets, into Brett’s trunk, tossed the suitcases on the back seat. Brett let Leonard drive. She sat between us on the front seat and we started out.
“See your son anymore?” I asked Leonard.
“He rooted up the place last night. He was sleeping peacefully under the porch this morning. I’ve decided to name him Bob.”
“That certainly took some strain,” Brett said.
“I get enough strain without trying to cleverly name an armadillo,” Leonard said.
We stopped at Burger King, bought some breakfast and lots of coffee, then headed for Oklahoma, minding the speed limit, minding our manners, minding our business, praying for hope, expecting rain.
10
We got on 59, headed north to 259, caught I-20 at Kilgore and went west toward Dallas. We skirted the roof of Dallas, hit 35, and except for a couple of pee breaks, we rode it all the way into Oklahoma.
We stopped at Ardmore about eight that evening and had dinner in a steak house. When we finished, we decided to find a place for the night and smoke on into Hootie Hoot early in the morning.
We got rooms at a cheap motel and toted the blanket-wrapped guns into the rooms with us, just in case someone decided to steal a spare out of our trunk and ended up with a bargain.
Brett and I had a small room that smelled strongly of detergent or disinfectant, but after brushing our teeth and washing our faces, we found the bed inviting and the smell less annoying. We didn’t feel like making love, which meant we were probably on our way to a solid relationship. We just slept together, cuddled up spoon style.
When we awoke the next morning it was raining lightly. We collected Leonard, had breakfast at the same cafe where we had eaten our steaks, and set out again. The rain began to fall harder, and the storm followed us all the way into Hootie Hoot, which lay about twenty-five miles outside of Oklahoma City.
When we got there, it was early afternoon and the rain had not stopped. Hootie Hoot was, as Red had said, a burg. There was a long street with old brick buildings. A theater, a cafe, a filling station, and, strangely enough, a taxi stand, with one old battered blue cab out front. I wondered where it took people. Up one side of the street and down the other?
We didn’t see any neon signs that blinked BIG JIM’S HOOTIE HOOT WHOREHOUSE, so we left town and found another cheap motel five miles out, not far from I-35. Leonard got a room next to ours. We bought some groceries at a little store across the highway, sat in Brett’s and my room laying out plans and eating store-bought ham and cheese sandwiches and Cheez Doodles.
Leonard finished his lunch, sat by the window. He held a can of Coke in one hand, held the curtain back with the other and watched the rain snap down on the parking lot. He said, “Thing is, whatever we do, we got to do it and be done with it.”
“My suggestion is we find the whorehouse and start from there,” I said.
“Now that’s a good idea,” Leonard said. “I’m glad you’re along, Hap. Me and Brett might not have thought of that.”
“Do we just go in and get her?” Brett asked.
“I don’t think that’d work so good,” I said. “Posing as a customer is probably the best way to go.”
“And you’ll have to be the customer,” Leonard said.
“You think they’ll know you’re gay?” Brett asked.
Leonard laughed. “No, but they’ll know I’m black.”
“Oh,” Brett said.
“Black or white may not matter,” Leonard said, “but this is a little burg in Oklahoma. I was in Maine, I’d be thinking the same thing. It might not matter, but on the other hand it might. My guess is this is a redneck operation.”
“Remember what Wilber said about Big Jim being nice to niggers,” I said. “That doesn’t bode well for Brother Leonard here.”
“No use getting the rednecks stirred we don’t have to,” Leonard said.
“That doesn’t sound like you,” I said.
“Older and wiser,” Leonard said.
“So you’ll go in?” Brett asked me.
“Yeah,” I said. “Thing we got to do next is find the whorehouse, and, as Leonard pointed out, maybe I ought to do the investigation work on that instead of him. They might not take kindly to a brother askin’ where the white women are.”
“Couldn’t some of the women be black?” Brett asked.
“They could,” I said, “but in redneck mentality it’s okay to screw a black woman, but it isn’t okay to have a relationship with her.”
“And it isn’t okay at all a black man screws a white woman,” Leonard said. “Weird territorial stuff.”
“And there’s another thing,” I said. “We don’t even know there’s a house of ill repute here.”
“Ill repute?” Leonard said. “Man, you been reading those Victorian novels again?”
“Red could have lied,” I said. “In fact, this is all starting to look like a big joke on us. He might not even have worked for any Big Jim. There might only be one grain of truth to the story. He knows your daughter works as a prostitute, and maybe he knows that because he was a customer.”
“The old postmarks on Till’s letters were out of Oklahoma City,” Brett said.
“Yeah,” I said, “a card mailed from here, most likely that’s where it would get stamped. But it’s all iffy.”
“I’m prepared for it not to work out,” Brett said. “But I’m more prepared to do something. It makes me feel like I’m trying.”
“I’ll start now,” I said.
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.