Joe Lansdale - Mucho Mojo

“She came out to my house day before yesterday. She was sorry about the whole thing. Shocked. What you’d expect. She said to give you her best.”

“I notice she hasn’t been back over here.”

“Yeah, well, we just got back. What’d you think, she’d be waiting on the porch?”

“I guess I’m getting sensitive in my old age.”

“She’ll be back. Or I think she will. I hope she will.”

“How’s the relationship?”

“I’m not sure. We like each other. We have sex and we can joke with each other, and I want there to be more to it than there is at the moment, but I get the feeling she doesn’t want to be seen with me in public.”

“I have the same problem.”

“Seriously. I think it’s because I’m white. She said as much once, but I thought she got past it.”

“She may know better than feeling that way, but that doesn’t mean she can get completely past it. Not in that short time anyway. Hey, look at it this way, she’s made great strides. She’s fucking you, and you’re white.”

“That’s what I like about you, Leonard. You’re such a romantic.”

“Hap, you think my uncle killed that kid?”

“I don’t know. It looks that way. Main thing is you don’t think so.”

“I did at first, and you told me not to jump to conclusions. Remember?”

“I’ll be honest. I thought he did it the moment you found the body. I said what I said to be nice to you. There’s things point to him having done it, besides the obvious, the skeleton under the floorboards. Stuff like him being a cop freak. That by itself doesn’t mean anything, but lots of times, people who are into wanting to be cops and can’t, people obsessed with it, have some kind of control fixation. Child abuse, the abuse of anyone weaker than you, is a form of control. Like rape. Wife-beating. Maybe your uncle was an abused child and it affected him. It all goes together.”

“I know my uncle.”

“You knew your uncle.”

“He didn’t change that much. I never got any indication from him he was an abused child. And if he was, it didn’t make him a child abuser. Lots of abused children aren’t child molesters. He was the one taught me how to live, how to think. He didn’t just turn around one day and start wanting to kill children.”

“It could have been going on for a time.”

Leonard shook his head. “Nope. And I don’t think he had a power fixation. I think the man wanted a job with respect, and law enforcement was it. He just never got it because of who he was and where he was. He may have begun to lose his head some at the end, but that doesn’t mean he lost his ethics. I want to know what happened, Hap, no matter what the results, and I want you to help me.”

“What makes you think you have to ask?”

We finished our coffee and were about to go back to work, when across the street we saw the old, black lady on the walker come onto her front porch. It was a slow and dutiful process, her coming outside, and watching her made me nervous. The screen door slammed her in the hip because she couldn’t move away from it fast enough, and she wobbled and the porch groaned loud enough for us to hear across the street. I bet she didn’t weigh ninety pounds, but I could see boards sagging as she went.

She looked across the street at us and we waved. She waved back, careful to do it so her arm didn’t come off at the shoulder.

She stood in the frame of her walker and watched us awhile, then slowly lifted her hand and flicked a come-over signal with her fingers.

We went over and stood at the bottom step of her porch and looked up at her. The hot sunlight lay on her like a slice of thin cheese and showed her to no advantage. She looked as if she had been boiled down and wrung out and left to dry. The wrinkles in her face were very deep and rivered with sweat. Her prune-colored eyes were runny and the whites were no longer white; they were a Hiroshima of exploded blood vessels: pink, red, and blue. Her false teeth hung too low in her mouth at the top and were set too high at the bottom, giving the impression of living things trying to climb out of a hole. Her head was mostly bald and her hair was spaced in gray tufts and looked like dirty cotton that had been blown by the wind to collect on a damp, black rock. Her breasts sagged and wobbled against her ribs inside her simple blue shift. She wore fuzzy pink house shoes on her feet and one black toe, like a water-logged pecan, poked through a hole in the right one.

I tried to imagine her younger, middle-aged even, but it was impossible to envision that she might ever have looked any different.

I said, “We help you with something, ma’am?”

She took a deep breath, collecting enough wind to speak, ignored me, and turned to Leonard. “You,” she said, “the colored boy,” just in case Leonard might be confused on his ancestry. “I heard about your uncle. I don’t believe it for a minute. I don’t care if they found babies in his toilet, he didn’t murder and saw up no chil’ren. I’ve known that boy all his life.”

“Word sure gets around,” Leonard said.

“Ain’t no secrets in nigger town,” she said.

“No, ma’am, guess not,” Leonard said.

“And if the policemens catch anybody it’ll be an accident. They done decided it was Chester, and that will be the end of it.”

“What I’m afraid of too, ma’am,” Leonard said.

“Them boys next door,” she said. “Y’all don’t have nothing to do with them niggers. They’re on drugs.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Leonard said. “We was kinda thinkin’ they were.”

“You can tell way they walk,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Leonard said.

“And they sell’m too,” she said. “Every little chile you see go in over there and come out, they done sold them some drugs. They kill’n their own, and I betcha some fat-cat peckerwood somewheres is on the gettin’ end of the money.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Leonard said.

She looked at me, as if examining my fat-cat white peckerwood tendencies. I guess none showed. Her wrinkles shifted. She said, “Listen here, I got some apple and pear pies baking. You boys come on in and help me get ’em out of the oven a’foe they burn up. I wore myself out bakin’ ’em.”

We mounted the porch and it screamed at us. I looked down and saw a split in the boards and the ground looking up at me. That old lady fell through those boards, she’d break a leg or kill herself.

The smell of baking pies from inside was rich and fine and made me hungry. I opened the screen door and held it. Leonard stood beside her while she used the walker, and after she made a few short steps she said to me, “Close the screen door, son. You’re lettin’ in flies. I’m gonna be coming for a bit.”

I closed the screen until she got closer, which, true to her words, took awhile, and when she was close enough, I held the screen open and she and Leonard went past to the tune of straining boards.

I followed inside and closed the screen and left the front door open because it was hot in there with all the heat from the oven and there being only a little rotating fan on the kitchen table to cool the place. I felt mildly dizzy, as if I had been riding too fast on a merry-go-round. When I looked back at the screen door, it had begun to bead and buzz with house flies hoping for a chance to wipe their shitty legs on some pies.

The kitchen was very clean, and beneath the smell of the pies I caught a hint of Pine Sol. I wondered if she cleaned the place herself, and couldn’t figure the how of it if she did. Being frail as she was, a bathroom trip would be like an expedition through the South American jungles.

One wall was quite amazing. It was papered with snapshots taped to it, some in color, some black and white, some very old and very faded. Where the wall gave them up was a doorway, and through the doorway I could see another room, and the part of the wall I could see in there was also covered in photographs.