“Not my sport.”
“Let me ask you something, Hap. Who you think’s been puttin’ the paper on the goddamn roller?”
“Elves?”
“No. Let me ask you something else, Hap. Can you now, after instruction, put the dick in the pussy?”
“What if the paper tube has a headache?”
“Don’t push me, Hap. I’m not finished here. Pay attention.”
Leonard put the roller and paper on his easy chair. He opened the closet door and pulled out a broom. He got down on his knees by the couch, said, “Lift your feet.”
I did. He swiped the broom under there and came out with a pair of formerly white, now gray, jockey shorts, festooned in cobwebs, bearing a couple of dead roaches like stickpins.
“These ain’t mine,” Leonard said. “These here are your ole nasty drawers. You’ve had them under there since you first moved in here. I go to clean today, and what do I see?”
“The toilet paper elves?”
“Your shitty drawers.”
“My guess is, same elves been putting that paper on the roller have been fucking around with my underwear.”
He stuck the broom and underwear in my face. “Got a shit stain in the seat. Your trademark.”
“Careful, you could put an eye out with them drawers.”
“These are yours, Hap.”
“How the hell would you know? You check out my shorts every night? Could be one of your old boyfriend’s.”
“They ain’t no old boyfriend’s, ’cause I don’t mess with men don’t wipe their ass good, and they ain’t mine, ’cause I don’t take off my drawers in the living room and kick’m under the couch. That’s a Hap Collins trademark. That and pissin’ around the toilet, not just in it. You go in that bathroom, stand by the crapper, that goddamn rotten-ass piss on the floor will suck your shoes off and dissolve them.”
“Well, you ought to clean more often, that way there wouldn’t be underwear under the couch, or pee-pee on the bathroom floor.”
“Hap, you’re askin’ for it, man.”
“Way I see it, those elves can put a roll of paper on a stick, they ought to be able to get underwear out from under couches and wipe around the base of the commode, and you and I could just hang easy.”
“You are asking for it, man. Let me question you some-thin’ else: when’s the last time you cleaned anything in this house? We’re gonna have to have a come-to-Jesus meetin’ on that, my friend. And you ate the last vanilla cookie. Those are mine, Hap. Mine.”
“I apologize. We were all out of steak. And if you think you’re blue now, I’m going to throw more color on you. Me and Brett, we’re not moving in together.”
Leonard lowered the underwear onto the floor and tossed the broom down. “Ah, hell. Y’all have a fight?”
“No.”
Leonard picked up the roller and paper and sat down in the chair and held them in his lap while I explained.
When I was finished, he put the roller and paper on the floor and walked over to the shabby fireplace and plucked one of his pipes from the pipe rack on the mantel, grabbed his bag of tobacco, unrolled it, and filled his pipe. He picked up a box of matches, returned to his chair, and studied me a moment.
“What you’re sayin’,” he said, kicking back in his easy chair and sticking the pipe into the corner of his mouth, “is, in a nutshell, this gal, this Tillie, decides to be a whore, then times get hard and she’s ready to quit and they won’t let her quit?”
“That’s it.”
“She think whoring had a retirement plan?”
“I don’t think she thought at all.”
“I don’t even know this girl, Hap. There’s lots of whores out there. Why, if I decided to save one, would I pick this one?”
“Because she’s Brett’s daughter.”
“I don’t know Brett that well. I mean, I like her, but I don’t know her that well. You know this isn’t going to be an easy thing. Just drive up there and knock on the door and help this whore carry her suitcase out to the car.”
“Exactly what I told Brett.”
“You’re going, I go or not, aren’t you?”
“You bet. So’s Brett. She insisted.”
“This Brett, she’s got you by the ying-yang.”
“The ying-yang. The balls. The heart. She’s got me, man. And she’s not asking me to do this. I’m volunteering.”
“Oh, she’s asking all right. I know you, a good-lookin’ woman comes along and plays the right tune, you dance.”
“All right, let’s say she’s asking. I love her. Why shouldn’t she ask? Who else is she going to ask? I’ve done more for people I didn’t care about as much, so why shouldn’t I do it?”
“Because you might get your ass shot off. And considering you got one of them little narrow white asses, you can’t spare much.”
“You got enough for both of us.”
Leonard let that one go by. He pulled a match, lit his pipe and puffed. “I reckon we get this over with, and Brett has time to settle stuff with her daughter, then maybe she’ll take you in.”
“That’s the plan.”
“We get this done, then maybe a short time after, I can get rid of you.”
“That’s possible.”
Leonard nodded. “What we’re going to need first is a few guns. I think for something like this, we’re gonna need a few unmarked guns. I got a shotgun fills that bill, but we could use some other stuff.”
“You’re always with the guns.”
“What do they shoot at us with when we do stuff like this, straws full of spit wads?”
“No.”
“What then?”
“All right, I’ll say it. Guns. Happy?”
“Yep. Now, we’re gonna need guns. Correctomondo?”
“I suppose.”
“I know you don’t like the gun talk, Hap, but you know well as I do, at some point those people up there, they’re who I think they are, they’re gonna point guns at us. And the guns are gonna be loaded, and when they pull the trigger our heads are gonna go away. Unless we shoot first or intimidate their asses into not shooting at all. Maybe that way, we don’t have to shoot. We throw the whore in the car, then drive like bastards.”
“It’s not my plan to go up there with guns blazing. I don’t work like that.”
“I know. I just said as much. We take it easy if the easy way is there. But it isn’t, we got to go the hard way, then we got to be prepared. There’s this guy I know, he can help us.”
I thought awhile. Anytime talk of guns comes up, I get nervous. I don’t like them. I was about the best goddamn shot with a rifle or handgun you ever saw, but I still didn’t like them. I own one, and I still don’t like them. I knew there were times when they were necessary, and it was better to have one and not need it than to not have one and need it, but goddammit, I still don’t like them.
I sighed. “This guy you know. When can we see him?”
“I’ve mentioned him before. Haskel. You don’t call him. You don’t plan. You just go over to his place and be real careful.”
7
This guy Leonard knew sold cold guns was named Haskel Ward. He lived down in the river bottoms about fifty miles from where we lived, not far from the Louisiana border. I had never been to Haskel’s, but I knew where he lived and a little about him from hearing Leonard talk. Not that he had a lot to say about Haskel, but the name had come up, and what little he did say about him was not endearing.
Next morning, on our way to Haskel’s, we drove through town in Leonard’s new Dodge Ram, which was a treat he had given himself when he sold his house. We stopped at a fast-food place and had one of those breakfasts that has so much cholesterol in it the damn thing comes with a vein pump. After breakfast, I found a pay phone and called Brett.
“I’m off work for a couple of weeks, Hap,” she said. “That way, we go get Till, I can have some time with her before I go back to work.”
“That’s good.”
“I’m packing a few things now.”