Joe Lansdale - Captains Outrageous

Brett and I were sitting together with a spare seat between us. We were holding hands like teenagers, but it was too humid, and by mutual unspoken agreement, we let go. I opened my shirt collar, adjusted the air-conditioning vent, but no help there.

“I got sweat beads in my crack,” Brett said. “Both cracks.”

“Overshare,” I said.

There were no clouds and the sun was beginning to dip as we flew into Mexico City’s airspace. We circled for a while. Through the window I could see mountains and snow-capped volcanoes bathed in the red of the dying sun.

Finally we flew in closer to the city. A haze of pollution thick enough to wear overalls hung over everything. Mixed with the sunlight the air achieved the color of a dried wound. Buildings jumped up at us and the streets below were as confused as a ball of twine.

Soon we were landing, hustling our luggage, trying to move through a sweaty crowd of people toward the street and a taxi. Jim Bob spoke to a driver and got us a ride. The car was once blue, but was now spotted like a pinto horse with gray filler. The tires were so worn-looking the rubber seemed attached to them by no more than a prayer.

We packed our luggage in the trunk, which smelled as if fish had recently been stored there, and no sooner had we closed the doors of the taxi than the driver gave it gas and leaped us out in front of traffic like a sacrifice.

Horns blared. We cruised at top speed through lights that once they turned red were shaded by at least three or four cars before anyone actually took heed of their color. We bounced the curb a couple of times, as if our driver might get points for pedestrians, and he may actually have clipped the ass of a slow-moving woman carrying a shopping bag. It was hard to tell if she was knocked or she jumped. She just went leaping away, her long blue dress fluttering, one shoe flying, the bag swinging on her arm by its rope handle.

I turned to look out the back window to see if she got up, but we turned so fast everything behind us became a blur and we edged in on another taxi as if to initiate a duel.

I glanced out the left-hand window of the back seat, saw we were close enough for me to put gas in the other taxi’s tank, but that wasn’t close enough. Not for our man. He edged in tighter, so close that if the elderly lady in the back seat had rolled down her window, we could have French kissed.

The lady looked to be on the verge of a stroke, or at least a very heavy-duty bowel movement. She glanced at me, swallowed. I smiled as our taxi driver cut down on his horn hard enough and loud enough to alert any ship channel within a thousand miles, then we shot away from the car beside us as if we had just vaulted to warp speed, changed lanes tighter than a suppository in a fat man’s ass, went weaving, honking, and being honked at all the way to the Presidente Intercontinental.

As our driver pulled into the driveway at the hotel and I stepped out on solid ground, I felt like a ripped-up teddy bear that had just had its legs sewn back on, but without all the stuffing.

Our driver lugged our luggage out of the trunk with the care of a murderer disposing of a body in a tar pit, and a fellow who looked as if he could bench-press the taxi came out, threw our bags on a rolling rack, and showed us he had all his teeth and every one of them yellow. Jim Bob paid the taxi driver, and we followed our toothy man with the rack to the front desk.

“I haven’t had that much fun since my last yeast infection,” Brett said.

“I just kept my eyes closed,” Leonard said.

Jim Bob talked in Spanish to a pretty woman at the desk with too much eye makeup. They smiled at each other a lot. Jim Bob borrowed the desk phone.

The phone conversation was short. Jim Bob talked to the lady at the desk again. She gave him some keys.

Jim Bob said, “Cesar already has our rooms. You and me, Leonard, we’re roomies.”

“Oh boy,” Leonard said. “Up late spitting water and reading fashion magazines.”

“Hot damn,” Jim Bob said.

We rode the elevator up with the man with the luggage carriage, got our stuff loaded in our rooms, paid the guy off, then took a walk down the corridor where Jim Bob knocked on a door.

Cesar opened up and let us in. “Que pasa,” he said.

He was dressed in a navy blue shirt that fit him tight as a grapeskin. His pants were tight as well, and too short. He looked like someone who had tucked his belongings into his crotch and was trying to wade high water.

Ferdinand appeared, wearing what must have been one of Cesar’s shirts; it was black as the grave and the collars were flared as if they were wings. He was silent as usual, sat at the table near the window, looking down at the streets and the hot sunshine. He was drinking a Mexican beer. Another was on the table, opened.

“Would you like drinks?” Cesar asked. He opened up the little bar with his key. Brett and Leonard took a beer, I took a Diet Coke. We sat on one of the beds, Cesar took a chair at the table. He said, “Our little mistress is quite the busy one already.”

“Aren’t we supposed to go out and spring on her or something?” Leonard said.

“In due time,” Cesar said. “I have followed her before, remember. Jim Bob and I followed her. But I have watched her before that.”

“Why?” Brett said.

“I have watched her because I have watched everything there is to know about this Juan Miguel. I am very patient, you see. But I must confess, this idea of kidnapping her, it had not occurred to me. It is a good idea for what you have in mind. I should have thought of it some time ago.”

“We are masters of crime,” I said.

“She is in this hotel,” Cesar said. “It is where she always stays. She will go to the Museum of Anthropology. She will shop, and she will come to the restaurant here to have her dinner. This is her schedule in the past.”

“What if she changes it?” I said.

“It is possible, but I will chance that she does not.”

“You’re chancing our money, Cesar,” I said. “I only have so much. I can’t run around all over Mexico.”

“Trust me,” Cesar said. “Tell them, Jim Bob.”

“Trust him,” Jim Bob said.

“I feel better,” Brett said.

“What’s up with the Museum of Anthropology?” Leonard asked.

“That is for Juan Miguel, or so I believe,” Cesar said. “I think she is trying to sell certain pieces that Juan Miguel has to the museum. She goes there each time she comes here. Juan Miguel, as I’m sure my friend Jim Bob has explained to you, is known to have an extensive collection, known to traffic in antiquities. So it is possible.”

“And maybe,” Brett said, “the reason she’s his mistress is she shares Juan Miguel’s interests. Maybe she isn’t just a poke piece, but someone who is smart, sophisticated, and loves anthropology and archaeology, and maybe his wife doesn’t.”

“And she’s a poke piece,” Jim Bob said.

“That too,” Brett said. “But Hap and I are attracted to each other because we share interests.”

“Like what?” Jim Bob said.

“Chickens. He protects them, and I deep-fry them.”

“I was once asked to masturbate a rooster,” I said.

“I don’t even want to know about that,” Jim Bob said.

“I think that I would, senor,” said Cesar.

Even Ferdinand looked interested.

I told them about being offered a job to garner rooster sperm. Cesar laughed as if I had told him the best joke he had ever heard.

Brett said, “That’s my man.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Hard to believe I turned them down.”

“About this thing we’re doing?” Leonard asked. “You know, the thing that’s not as exciting as jerking a chicken’s nub, but this thing with the woman… She has her bodyguards with her, of course?”