Joe Lansdale - Mucho Mojo

I went inside.

“I was going to shoot you,” I said.

He looked up at me.

“Who the hell did you think it’d be?”

“Guess I’ve got the jumps a little, those guys next door.”

“Did it come back to you? The sex stuff, I mean?”

“Yes, but we did some things I don’t remember doing before. I guess it’s OK, though. Neither of us got hurt.”

“What do you think of her?”

“Well, we haven’t sent out wedding invitations, but I like her. She’s smart. Witty. Fun to be with.”

“And she’s fucking you.”

“There’s that.”

“Come here and give me a hand. I’ve found something interesting.”

I put the gun on the table next to the little fan, went over and got down on my knees and grabbed hold of the board he was holding and helped him pull it up. There was a screech of nails as it came loose.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I came in here and started looking around, moved some papers and found this spot. You’ll notice, not all these boards are rotten.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning what happened was the floor was repaired here with untreated wood to replace old wood, and some of that has rotted because of the roof leak. I think Uncle Chester took advantage of replacing the floor to make a hiding place.”

He pointed. “For this,” he said.

In the gap in the floor I could see something large lying in the dark against the ground. There must have been about four feet between the floor and the dirt.

“When I moved the papers, I spotted it through the hole and got busy pulling the rest of the lumber out,” Leonard said. “I didn’t wake up Florida, did I?”

“From what I can tell, she doesn’t sleep. She hibernates.”

“Help me get this out of here, would you?”

I leaned down and got hold of the heavy metal trunk, for that’s what it was, and we pulled it out of there and set it on the floor beside us. It was army green and there was a padlock on it. It had CHESTER PINE stenciled in white letters on the lid. It smelled of damp earth.

Leonard got the crowbar and put it inside the loop of the padlock and started to give it a flex, but I grabbed his arm.

“Before you do that,” I said,. “I was thinking there might be another way.”

He looked at me, and slowly it dawned on him.

Leonard went to get the key while visions of outdated coupons danced in my head.

When he returned, he tried the key and the lock sprang open. Leonard removed the lock and lifted the lid. There was a puff of dust and a smell came out of there I couldn’t quite identify. Musty, a little sharp. Leonard leaned over and looked inside, and stared. I looked too.

It wasn’t coupons.

There was a small, yellowed skeleton, blackened in spots. The skull was turned toward me. Some of its teeth were milk teeth. Probably a male, though I was no expert on that. Eight, nine years old. From the forehead to a spot square between the eyes, the skull was cracked like the Liberty Bell. The legs had been sawed off at the knees so that it would fit in the trunk, and the arms were pulled free at the shoulders, twisted from their sockets like chicken wings. Beneath and around the bones were moldering magazines, and I realized that much of the smell was from rotting paper, but that certainly wasn’t the whole of it. The bones were old, however, and most of death’s stench had long left them, and perhaps what I did smell on the bones was not death at all, but mold.

We held our positions for a while, soaking it in. Leonard got one of the newspapers and crunched it over his hand and made a makeshift glove out of it. He got down on his knees and reached inside and picked up one of the arm bones. When he lifted it, it pivoted at the elbow and some of it powdered and fell back in the box. The bones that made up the hand broke loose from the wrist and rattled back into the box, fragmenting pages from one of the old magazines; the fragments wisped and fluttered like a shotgunned bird.

Leonard held the arm bone and looked at it for a while, then carefully put it back. He used the newspaper to get one of the magazines out of there. He dropped it on the floor. Pages came apart and powdered the way part of the bone had powdered.

The magazines had been mostly photographs. A lot of the photographs were still visible. I didn’t like them. They were of children, male and female, in sexual positions with adults and each other. Leonard got out a couple other magazines and put them on the floor. More of the same. They were even some with children and animals.

I looked at them longer than I wanted to, to make sure I was seeing what I was seeing, then I squatted back on my haunches and took a deep breath. The breath was full of rotting paper and that other smell.

Leonard picked up the magazines and returned them to the trunk. He dropped the newspaper he was using as a glove inside and closed the lid of the trunk and put the padlock on it and locked it.

He stood up and wiped his hands on his pants and walked around in a small circle, then went to the desk chair and sat down and turned the little fan on his face. He was breathing as if he had just finished a hard workout.

“Uncle Chester,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”

I don’t know how long we stayed like that, me on my haunches, Leonard in the chair, the fan blowing on his face. Finally, I said, “It may not be like it looks.”

“How can it not be like it looks? This is the key he left me. It goes to the trunk and it’s got what it’s got inside. That skeleton is a kid’s skeleton.”

“I know.”

“And those magazines. That filth… Jesus, was he getting even with me for being gay? Was he telling me he was a sicko, because he thought I was? Or did he get so far gone in the head he thought he had him a real treasure here? That I’d be one happy sonofabitch to have it. What did he do? Get this out now and then, look at the skeleton, the magazines? Jack off?”

“You’re jumping pretty far.”

“I’m jumping where there is to jump. The sick fuck had the gall to criticize me, and he was… Jesus, Hap. You think there are others?”

“I don’t know what to think. But you’ll need to tell the cops.”

“Yeah, they’re so fucking efficient. Jesus, Hap.”

I stood up slowly. “You could just put the trunk back in the hole, you know. He’s done what he’s done, and now he’s beyond punishment and can’t hurt anyone else. You could just go on with things.”

“You don’t mean that?”

“No… Just a small, sad part of me means it.”

“This child needs to be identified. There might be others. Jesus. How long could this have been going on? There might be a whole slew of bodies under the house here. They could have been down there when I came for summers. He’s up here teaching me to tie a fishing fly, reading me a story, tucking me in bed, and underneath our feet, children are rotting.”

“He was sick in the head, Leonard. You know that. It could have just happened recently.”

“That only makes it a little better. Shit, it don’t make it any better… Don’t tell Florida. Not yet.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“Christ.”

“Tell you what, Leonard. Let’s put the trunk up for now. Nothing can be changed tonight. Absorb all this best you can. Tomorrow, after Florida leaves, we’ll do what you want to do. Of course, once the police know, it isn’t a secret any longer.”

“Yeah. Help me with the trunk, Hap.”

We put the trunk back. Leonard put a few boards over the hole and we stacked some of the newspapers over that. When we were finished, Leonard said, “Thanks, man.”

“Not at all.”

We washed up and I got that drink of water I’d been wanting. I went back to the bedroom.