Joe Lansdale: Captains Outrageous

Juan Miguel snapped something in Spanish, and this time both buffaloes jumped on Jim Bob. I wanted to help him, but I knew that wasn’t our game. Jim Bob took a short but rapid beating from their fists, then lay on his side and was kicked for a while.

I said, “You do that much longer, I can assure you, you’ll never see your mistress again, unless it’s in a ditch with a zucchini stuffed up her snatch.”

“Alto,” Juan Miguel said.

Jim Bob lay awhile longer this time, but finally he got up, brushed himself off, righted his chair, recovered his hat, which was the shape of a paper wad, and sat down. “The two of them together, working hard, are almost a man,” he said.

“You are crazy,” Juan Miguel said. “You want to die. And you will.”

Jim Bob spat blood on the stones. “Not unless you want that mistress to end up like my partner said. Only I’ll make sure she gets a zucchini in every hole. Maybe even a melon. No more beatings. No more bullshit. You listen to us. We don’t come back soon, call in, your girlfriend, she’s gonna end up in a bad way. You hear me, you cheap-ass Mexican Godfather wannabe. We’re just hired help, and it don’t mean a thing to us one way or another, except we want to come out of this alive and happy, and if things work out, you get your bitch back alive and happy, and we come out of it with some money. And let me tell you, I’m gonna talk to you, you get some drawers on, or wrap that towel around that limp piece of spaghetti, sit down and listen.”

“You are on my turf, you American turd. Nudity is healthy. I am sixty years old, and I know I do not look it. It is the nudity. The fresh air, the sun. I swim nude every night in this pool, and it has done wonders for me. Man was meant to have fresh air, sunlight, and exercise.”

“It’s dark,” I said.

“Yes, but there is the night air,” Juan Miguel said.

“We’re on your turf,” Jim Bob said, straightening his hat, “but we’ve got your muff. Let me tell you about nudity for health, Zorro. Tried it when I was twelve. Stripped off and played Tarzan. Climbed up in a tree and got a sunburn, damn near fried my pecker off, turned my ass the color of a Washington apple. I didn’t find it so healthy. You get a good sunburn on your general and it starts to peel, let me tell you, it’s highly uncomfortable.”

“You idiot,” Juan Miguel said.

“You gonna sit and deal, or you gonna bore me with your lifestyle choices?”

“You fool,” Juan Miguel said. “You think I am losing true love here? My wife, she is my true love. Ileana, she is a dalliance. A hobby. A pastime. She is one of many.”

I felt my stomach go sour. What if Ileana didn’t matter to him? What if he had women all over Mexico?

Then I thought: Like Ileana? Not likely. Who the hell was he fooling?

“I think we’re wasting time,” I said. “You want her, we best get to talking, and talking now.”

Juan Miguel studied us, as if to be certain we weren’t mirages, some stupid dream. He wrapped the towel around his waist, pulled out a chair and sat down. No sooner had he done that, as if on cue, out of the darkness near the pool, on the far side, something moved.

At first I thought one of the palm trees had come loose of its roots and was about to topple, but the base was much larger than the palms, and as it stepped into the light, I saw it was tall, but shorter than a tree. It looked like someone had stacked some brown tires in a pile, put sumo wrestler legs and arms on it, fastened a vague facsimile of a human head to the top, and tied an anaconda between its legs. It was, of course, our living Michelin Man, in the nude.

Juan Miguel saw our gaze had shifted from him to somewhere over his shoulder. He grinned. “Hammerhead, we call him.”

Hammerhead leaped into the pool with a splash that almost started a tidal wave. He swam across the pool with a couple of strokes, climbed out dripping on our side. He ambled toward us. Moby-Dick gone bipedal.

“What do you think?” Juan Miguel said, as proud as if he was showing us a pet, and I suppose he was. “Is he not something?”

Jim Bob, naturally endearing, said, “An ambulatory shit pile. But I wouldn’t want him to fall on me.”

As Hammerhead grew closer, he became even more frightening. Through the telescope I had not been able to see how strange his head was. The front of it protruded, then sunk toward the nose, which lay flat against his face like a splattered man who had jumped from a great height. He had more scars than a Gurkha division and there were little pale scars like road map lines against the darkness of his body. It was hard to tell his nationality. He was dark, but his features were almost blank. He had Asian eyes and a little mouth that held tiny white childlike teeth. When he moved, water trapped beneath the rolls of his flesh squished out. He came to stand next to Juan Miguel’s chair.

“You’re a cute couple,” Jim Bob said.

I thought, that’s it. Jim Bob’s gonna be dead so fast Juan Miguel will forget why we’re here. But nothing happened. He just stared at Jim Bob for a while. Then at me. He said, “You listen to me. You hurt Ileana, Hammerhead here, he will beat you to death.”

“He could probably do that with that sausage between his legs,” Jim Bob said. “Considering that peanut you carry, I’m surprised you keep this guy around. Seems like it would remind you of your shortcomings.”

Juan Miguel leaped to his feet, his fist crashed down on the table and the glass split and splattered into thousands of fragments that caught the light and ricocheted images of trees and shrubs at us.

When the glass fallout was over, Jim Bob, in a bored voice, said, “You broke your table.”

“Enough!” Juan Miguel said. “It is enough!”

“I guess he’s had enough,” Jim Bob said to me.

“Reckon so,” I said.

Juan Miguel was panting. “What is… How do you say it? The deal? What is it? Tell me now, or I have you killed.”

Juan Miguel’s hand was bleeding. He pressed it to the towel at his waist.

“The deal is this,” Jim Bob said. “We want half a million dollars for your little doll, and we want to tell you why we want the money.”

“I know why you want the money,” Juan Miguel said. “I know why anyone wants the money.”

“No,” I said. “No, you don’t. We want the money because of Beatrice and Charlie.”

“Who?”

“We want the money because you wanted to kill me and the old man. I even want it for Billy, and I didn’t even like that sonofabitch.”

“What is it that you are talking about?” Juan Miguel said, his words becoming more accented and purposeful. “What is the fuck you want?”

“That’s what the fuck,” Jim Bob said. “That’s the way you say it. No slight there, just thought you might like to know that for future reference.”

“You do have half a million?” I said. “We’d hate to think you don’t. ’Cause you don’t, we got to take less, well, you get her back, but without a little finger or a thumb. You know what I’m saying?”

“Let me tell you a little thing you have not thought of,” Juan Miguel said. “I get her back with any part missing, her hair cut, a scar on her thigh, I do not want her back. She must come back as she is supposed to be. She does not, she is of no use to me, understand?”

Definitely not true love, I thought. And, unlike us, he wasn’t bluffing.

“Very well,” I said. “She comes back pretty quick if you act pretty quick.”

“How dare you threaten me.”

I knew we were beginning to play it pretty close. Maybe Juan Miguel was thinking now he could let Ileana go, shop for another. Then again, she was special. Unique. And she was his, and he liked to own things, and once owned, he didn’t like giving them up.