Joe Lansdale - Bad Chili

“Bob Denver?”

“Shit. Don’t you know he gets tired of wearing that stupid sailor hat and trying to look perky?”

“You think the series waddled in shit, you got to see the reunion movie,” Leonard said. “Raul made me watch it. And man, that one is really deadly. It sort of numbs you, you know, like a kind of nerve gas. I was weak for two days.”

“You just hit on the secret,” I said. “It was stolen by the State Department to use as a means of covert warfare.”

“Way I figure it,” Leonard said, “them folks already got a complete set of Gilligan. It goes with their Three’s Company collection. It’s what they watch when they’re supposed to be solving the nation’s problems.”

We worked on the house until early afternoon, had some sandwiches, decided we ought to drive into town and buy a few cleaning supplies. We went in my truck. On the way back to Leonard’s house, he said, “This Old Pine Road, where Horse Dick got it. Could we drive over there?”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Guess I’d like to see the spot where this guy they thought I killed bought it.”

“I don’t know that’s such a good idea,” I said.

“Come on, Hap.”

I didn’t much care for it, but we drove out to Old Pine Road, which isn’t much of a road, really. It’s narrow and winds through a heavily wooded area and links up with a highway that leads to Lufkin. It’s shady because of the trees, and not too heavily traveled.

We drove along, finally saw some tire tracks burned into the road, heading through the underbrush and into a large oak tree. Beyond the oak the ground was covered in a deep carpet of kudzu vines and wildflowers, and the hill rolled down steep and turned level as it met the woods.

We pulled to the side of the road, got out and looked around. It was a bright, hot day, and everything I looked at seemed to be viewed through a piece of transparent, lemon-colored rock candy. The air was full of pollen. Every time I took a breath it was like sniffing flour. Within minutes my throat was scratchy and my nose was plugged. It didn’t help my cold much.

We looked at the oak, could see where the bike struck it. It was a damn good strike. A chunk had been taken out of the tree as if with an axe.

“If the shotgun hadn’t killed him,” Leonard said, “you can bet this tree wouldn’t have done him any good.”

“Without the shotgun, he wouldn’t have hit the tree,” I said. “Now you’ve seen it. Make you feel any better?”

“No. I don’t really know why I wanted to see it.”

We stood under the oak out of the sunlight while Leonard dealt with his thoughts, stood there hugging the shade. Not that it helped. It was still hot and the pollen was thick.

“You know,” Leonard said, “I bet I could put a weenie on a stick, poke it out from under this shade, and the sun would cook it… What’s that?”

Leonard was turned away from the road, looking down the hill, toward the woods. I looked and saw a scattering of mosquitoes buzzing at the edge of the woods where shadow gave way to light. The insects rolled and rose and dropped like a tiny black cloud amongst the trees. I could imagine them looking up at us, thinking, Come on down and we’ll strip your bones, for we are the piranha of the air.

It was the mosquitoes I thought Leonard was talking about, but then I followed his pointing finger and saw what he saw. It lay partially buried in the vines near the woods. It was silver, and the sunlight bounced off of it as if it were a mirror. The reflected light was painful to view and caused me to squint my eyes.

“I don’t know what it is,” I said.

“Could be a piece off the motorcycle,” Leonard said.

“Cops looked the place over,” I said.

“Don’t forget, it’s the LaBorde cops we’re talking about. Charlie, excluded, of course. I bet they didn’t even go down the hill. At least not all the way. Especially the fat ones. They went down too far, they wouldn’t have been able to get back up.”

“What if it is part of the motorcycle?” I said. “So what?”

“It could lead to the solving of the case.”

“What, a fender? The handlebars?”

“You need to read some Agatha Christie, man.”

“Why? Am I being punished?”

“You read her, you’ll find nothing is too small. Let’s go down and see what it is.”

“It’s a steep hill.”

“I bet that’s exactly what the fat cops said.”

“They were right.”

“We’re manly men. We can do it.”

“Will you carry me?”

“Nope.”

We went down the hill, our ankles clutched by kudzu and all manner of undergrowth, and when we were within twenty feet of it I thought it was a huge wad of aluminum foil. Then I saw that what I thought were the natural crumples of a wad of foil were not crumples, but dents, and it wasn’t foil, it was a motorcycle helmet. I could see part of the visor, and it was cracked, and I could see something behind the visor, and Leonard, who was slightly ahead of me, could see it too because he stopped walking, made a kind of startled move and let his breath out slowly.

“Shit,” he said. “Goddamn shit.”

I went on past where he was standing, got closer. There was a head in the helmet, and there was a body attached to the head, and the body was twisted down into the vines. I couldn’t see the body from atop the hill, just a piece of the helmet, but I could see all of it easily from this angle, and the legs and arms looked as if they were nothing more than the limbs of a scarecrow, stuffed with straw, twisted into the kudzu.

I squatted down and looked at the face inside the helmet. The head was turned in there too far and was covered in what looked like molasses but wasn’t. There were ants and maggots on the part of the face I could see. The wind had changed and the smell of death rode on it and blew into my nostrils and defeated the plugs of pollen. It was all I could do not to get sick.

I got up and turned Leonard by grabbing him by the elbow and started us up the hill.

“It was Raul, wasn’t it?” Leonard said.

“Yep.”

We made an anonymous call to the police department and they came and got the body, and next day they made a big deal out of it in the papers, about how the cops had done this great detective work.

There was stuff about the murder of Horse Dick, though he wasn’t called that. There was no mention of the fact Raul was found just down the hill from where Horse bought it. But it was pretty clear, if you read between the lines, that Raul had been on the back of the bike.

It wasn’t clear how Horse, between collecting knots from Leonard, ended up with Raul and the two of them had gone riding. But it appeared when Horse got his head blown off, the bike had gone into a tree, and so had Raul, and Raul had hit the tree so hard it had knocked him willy-nilly down the hill and into the vines.

That was pretty much the sum of all that was known.

Two days later Raul’s parents came from Houston and had him buried in a little graveyard out in the country. It was a quiet shady place with Civil War veterans, black folks, and paupers, and for some reason they decided not to haul him home but to have him planted there.

Leonard wasn’t invited to the funeral or the burying, but he went to the burial anyway. The graveyard was on one side of a blacktop road, and there was a cluster of oaks on the other side. We parked beneath them, sat on the hood of the rented Chevy, and watched the service.

We didn’t have on black. We didn’t have on ties. The coffin was bronze. The family was weeping.

The whole thing was over in short time, then the cars filed out. One of the people attending the funeral stood by the fence for a while, started across the road toward us. He was dressed in black, all neat. At first he was hard to recognize without his Hawaiian shirt, cheap suit, and porkpie hat.