"What's a little?" Leonard asked.
"Fifty dollars.”
"That's a little!" I said.
"It's how much it's gonna be you stay at Mom's trailer park.”
Leonard grumbled, paid the fifty in two twenties and a ten.
"Florida pay you a finder's fee?" Leonard asked.
"You betcha,” Tim said, folding his money into his wallet. ”I never claimed I was a philanthropist."
Tim decided to close up and guide us out to his mom's place. He told us he had planned to stay open Christmas Day, partly out of boredom, and out of the fact he could snag a few extra dollars by being the only place available in town to pick up gas and goods, but the weather being the way it was, that turned out to be a pipe dream.
Still, bad as it was, it had slacked some, and we took the moment to get started. Tim drove an old four-wheel-drive, green, broad wheel-base pickup with gaudy tail flaps. One flap had the silhouette of a naked silver lady on it. The other would have had the same but it was ripped in half, leaving only the lady's head.
We followed in Leonard's heap, and as we drove, Leonard said,” He could have told us up front Florida had been staying with his mother.”
"I think he was just being cautious,” I said. ”Watching out for Florida. Remember, he was mum until he asked if we were kin, boyfriends, or bill collectors? I think he didn't want to bring shit down on Florida, if he could keep from it. Or maybe he was watching out for his mother. Either way, I think he was being considerate. And remember, he didn't have to tell us dick.”
"I don't like the dude.”
"Really? He seems all right. Maybe a little too self-consciously folksy, but okay.”
"A fifty-dollar finder's fee? I don't give a shit about his childhood money problems. I give a shit about my fifty dollars he's got.”
"You are the most suspicious sonofabitch I have ever known, Leonard. He's a little overly money-conscious, and he strikes me as a would-be cock dog, but neither of those things are exactly criminal.”
"Yeah, well doesn't he make you feel kind of creepy, him talking all that good ole boy bullshit?"
"Only thing creepy is how easy it is for me to do it too.”
"There's some truth.”
"Yeah. Well, what about that cockroaches can't play basketball thing?"
"I like that one,” Leonard said. ”But that aside, if Florida stayed out here, you got to bet this guy was sniffing her ass regular like.”
"He may have wanted her, but trust me, my friend, if this gal doesn't want to put up with bullshit, she has a way of dealing with you that'll make you feel knee high to a cricket pretty quick. And maybe it takes a heterosexual to understand what I'm getting at, but this lady, young as she is, pretty as she is, she isn't any babe in the woods. Not about men, anyway. Maybe about other things, but trust me, she's got an A+ in Dealing With Men.”
"All right. There's some more truth. I saw Florida drag you around by your ying-yang some, that's for sure.”
"I ain't proud of it.”
"Nor should you be.”
One minute it was gray and damp, the heater humming, keeping us warm, the wipers thumping almost happily, and suddenly the sky went black as night and the rain fell down in silver sheets thick as corrugated tin. The air in the car turned cool and the heater moaned as if dying of pneumonia, the wipers swiped at the rain like a drowning victim trying to tread water.
Got so bad, Tim pulled over to the side of the road and sat in his truck. We pulled up behind him and sat too, waited. It was a full forty-five minutes before the rain subsided enough for us to continue, and as we drove on, slowly, I looked out my side, watched as we crawled past an old gray clapboard building. It was long and low-built and the walls were leaning, and you could tell the floor had long since lost its battle against gravity and was lying flat on the ground, the old support blocks having shifted and sunk. Through one of the windows I could see an unlit Christmas tree tilting to port, and an unlit neon sign over the front door that was impossible to read through the slash and thrash of the rain.
"A black juke joint,” Leonard said.
"Yep,” I said.
We continued at a drag, the water splitting before us and slamming against the bottom of the car, floating us left and right. I began to understand how it must feel to be in a submarine.
Tim's mother's place proved to be well outside of Grovetown, down some incredibly muddy roads, deep in some bottom land that made me nervous, weather being the way it was. I didn't know much about Grovetown, but I knew the dam for Lake Nanonitche was nearby, and not too many years ago it had burst and drowned three people and waterlogged enough property to cause Grovetown and surrounding burgs to become designated as a National Disaster Area.
When we got to the trailer park, I was even more nervous. I'd never seen anything like it. The park consisted of six nasty-ass mobile homes — one a double-wide — standing on stilts damn near twelve feet off the ground with crude wooden stairways leading to their doors.
We parked and sat in Leonard's car while Tim went up to the double-wide, climbed the stairs and knocked on the door. He went inside and stayed awhile.
When he came out he was under an umbrella with an older woman who was wearing an orange raincoat and matching galoshes. Tim beckoned us to him. We got out in the driving rain and met them at the bottom of the stairs. The woman was sixty-ish, attractive in an "I’ve been hit by a truck" kind of way.
Tim said,” This is my mother.”
"Y'all got money?" she said.
Like son, like mother.
"We can buy lunch and have dessert if the waiters don't wear suits,” Leonard said.
Mom studied on that, said,” Come on.”
We moved through ankle-deep muddy water behind them, soaked to the bone. The woman walked with her left leg stiff, her left hand in her raincoat pocket. She leaned against Tim as if she was trying to find her sea legs.
We climbed some stairs, the woman managing it with considerable effort, and stood on a platform in front of a trailer door that was all bent up with an aluminum strip peeling off to one side. There was a huge splotch of blackness at the edge of the door where fire had slipped from the inside and kissed the exterior.
Ms. Garner put a key in the door, and when it was unlocked, Tim got hold of the edge with his fingers and tugged at it. It screeched as if alive, then we were in.
It smelled doggy dank and burnt in there. There was a carpet that looked as if it had once lined a pigpen, and the dog odor came from it. The burnt smell came from a portion of the wall next to the door. That part of the wall was absent of paneling and consisted of charred insulation. The "living room" was furnished with one old rickety couch mounted on cinder blocks and a chair with a cushion that dipped almost to the floor. There was one little gas heater and it was missing most of its grates, and the ones it had were busted.
The kitchen was just another part of the same room, and you could see where there had been a grease fire over the stove. The dank carpet and burnt insulation odor that tracked us from the living room blended with the stench of rancid grease coating the stove top. The fridge hummed desperately, like a dying man trying to remember a sentimental tune.
"Well,” Leonard said,” this is nice.”
"Don't like it, go to hell,” said Ms. Garner. She said that without so much as a change of features.
"So much for the big sell,” Leonard said. ”How much is it? Considering we'll be camping out.”
"Ten dollars a day, pay by the day. Use too much gas or electricity, there'll be a charge for that. I watch the meters.”
"This place looks like you found it when it floated downriver after a fire and tornado,” Leonard said.
"It wasn't so bad six months ago,” Ms. Garner said. ”Morons moved in here were a bunch of them goddamn holier-than-thou Christians. Ones where the men wear their pants pulled up under the armpits and like green suits with white shoes. Women like to pile their hair on their head and wear ugly dresses.”