Joe Lansdale - Bad Chili

Leonard shook his head. “I don’t know what the hell to do. I’m damned if I do, and damned if I don’t.”

I heard the phone ringing in the house. I said, “I’ll answer that while you clean the hog shit off my floor and carpet.”

“Do I have to?”

“Damn straight. And don’t just wipe the surface. You use some cleanser and de-stinker. It’s all under the kitchen sink.”

“De-stinker?” Leonard said.

It was Doc Sylvan on the phone.

“Are you out of your mind?” he asked.

“I’m not sure one way or the other.”

“I can believe that. You have to have those shots, Hap, or you will die.”

“Come on, Doc, I got five days before the next one.”

“What about the insurance problem? You forgot about that?”

“Can’t you fudge a little? I had to leave the hospital. It wasn’t by choice, but I had to.”

“Why?”

“I haven’t done laundry in days.”

“You went home to do laundry!”

“I had some bills to pay.”

“Why don’t you just say you needed to wash your hair?”

“Well, it does need it.”

“Hap, listen here. You come back to the hospital tonight and stay, and I’ll work something out. But you got to be there tonight. I can rig something for you being out of the room a while. Say I had you over at the office for tests, but that’s as far as I go. Doing something like that, getting caught, I could lose my license, and I don’t think you make enough to support us both.”

“Not in the style to which you are accustomed. Fact is, I don’t make enough to support me. In any kind of style.”

“You be in the hospital tonight, and I promise I will have you out of there within two days, and still make the insurance work. It’ll take some finagling, but I’ll do it. Just to get you out of my hair.”

“Got you.”

“I will be by the hospital at eight-thirty tonight, Hap. Be there. In bed.”

“In one of those little gowns?”

“You bet.”

“Shall I wear a little perfume?”

“Please do.”

“I think you just want to see me naked, Doc.”

“It’s all I think about.”

Leonard came in with a scrub brush full of hog shit, a pail of stinky water, and a couple of towels.

“These towels weren’t the good stuff, were they?” he asked.

“Not anymore.”

“They have holes in them.”

“Yeah, and the bad towels have more holes in them. You clean the mess up?”

“Yeah.”

We went out back and Leonard dumped the water on the ground and used the water hose to clean the brush and towels. He hung the towels on my clothesline. He said, “I’ve been hesitating to ask. But what about Raul? Charlie know anything about him?”

I shook my head.

Leonard said, “That worries me. I hope he’s all right.”

Leonard’s voice would have sounded calm to anyone who didn’t know him, but I caught the tremolo there. He was not only worried, he was scared. Maybe not for himself, but certainly for Raul.

“He’s probably all right,” I said.

“Maybe you could check around. Just to see. It’s not like I can go out and look for him.”

“I wouldn’t know where to start, Leonard. He may have run off back to Houston. He’s done that before, right?”

Leonard nodded.

“I figure him and Horse Dick had a fight,” I said, “and he went away, then you stepped into the picture a day late and a dollar short and got your ass in a crack with all this business. Right now, way I see it, and you better believe me on this, Raul is the least of your worries.”

“I guess you’re right,” Leonard said. “Just forget it.”

But that wasn’t the end of Leonard’s wheedling about Raul. He worked on me for an hour, and since nothing else was shaking and our time was ticking away, I decided if I could locate Raul I could find out better what this was all about. Raul might have some idea who would want to kill his new boyfriend, and if he did, that could lead to placing Leonard in the clear.

I also decided that if I was going to start looking, I had best do it before the net was put out for Leonard. For all I knew, some cop other than Charlie had already put two and two together and they were seining for my buddy at this very moment. Even Charlie, if put in the wrong position, might have to break his promise to me and cast the net himself.

I left Leonard with a glass of milk, a bag of vanilla cookies, and a sad expression, drove into town and over to his place. I thought if I was Raul, I might go to Leonard’s place to hide. It wouldn’t be smart, since the cops were bound to look there, but if I was Raul and had all the street savvy of a broken knickknack, that might be what I’d do.

On the way, I tried to figure Raul for the part of Horse Dick’s murderer, but that didn’t play. Raul didn’t have the temperament to step on a slug, let alone aim a shotgun at someone and blow off their head. Not even in self-defense could I imagine Raul doing such a thing.

But where the hell was he?

When I got to Leonard’s house the day had turned off a little warm, but not uncomfortable. A light breeze was blowing and the blue sky was as clear as the Virgin Mary’s conscience. All the lily-white clouds had blown away, or sunk into the sky, and it seemed like a day when you shouldn’t have a care in the world.

I got out my key to the house and went inside. Raul was nowhere in sight. But the house didn’t look like Charlie had described it to me. It had been turned inside out.

The living room couch had been pulled out into a bed, and the thin mattress had been tossed on the floor. The stereo was turned over and the back was ripped off the television set. In the bedroom the dresser mirror was broken, and the mattress had been cut apart and the cotton stuffing strewn about like the guts of a cloud. The closet door was thrown wide. Leonard’s shotguns and rifles lay on the floor, and everything in the closet from clothes to coats to ammunition to income tax records were heaped to one side.

In all the rooms the drawers had been dumped, books pulled onto the floors, and in the kitchen the flour, sugar, baking soda, stuff like that, were strewn about or were in the sink. In the bathroom the ceramic lid to the back of the toilet had been dropped and broken on the floor and someone had been pawing about in the plumbing.

I checked the back door. It had been jimmied, the lock snapped free by a crowbar, or some similar instrument. I pushed it open, stepped onto the screened-in porch Leonard had rebuilt, examined the aluminum-framed screen door that led outside. I was surprised to discover it was locked.

I went down the steps and looked around. The rain from the other night had left the ground soft and there were footprints in the mud. Big goddamn shoe prints. Bastard must have worn a size fourteen. The tracks were leading away from the house, not to it. I followed them into the woods, and from there I lost them. I was a fair tracker, but I wasn’t the Deerslayer.

Still, I took a flyer and went on through the woods a piece, over to where the foliage gave way to a muddy country road, and started up again on the other side. I walked out to the edge of the road just as an old pollen-coated brown pickup with two young men in it clattered by. They waved at me and I waved back.

I walked onto the road and looked around. It was a dirt road, so there were plenty of tracks, of course. Nothing odd about that. I walked along a piece and found a tire-smashed armadillo and a flattened copperhead, and finally took note of what I determined were the marks of motorcycle tires. Normally, that wouldn’t mean much, but they ran off the side of the road, and I discovered where they trailed red mud across the grass and into the woods. The bike had been pushed, because there were shoe tracks alongside the tire marks. The same big shoe tracks.