Joe Lansdale - Mucho Mojo

We checked around for a long, hot time and found more photos of his uncle at different ages, and finally, on the way out, we came across one near the door. The Uncle Chester there looked a lot like the Uncle Chester I had seen in his coffin, only a little less puffy and a lot less dead. He was standing next to a tall angular black man about his age, and he had his arm around him. They weren’t exactly smiling. They looked self-conscious, as if preparing for a hemorrhoid operation but bound to make the best of it.

“Who’s that with him?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Leonard said.

MeMaw heard us. “I’m pretty sure that’s Illium,” she said. “Take it off the wall and let me see it.”

Leonard freed the photo and took it into the kitchen and gave it to MeMaw. She said, “That’s who it is. Illium Moon.”

“Who is he?” Leonard asked.

“He and your uncle was near growed together at the hip,” she said. “You seen one, you near saw the other. Illium moved here from San Antonio. He’d been a policemans or somethin’ like that. He and your uncle met at the domino shack up by the highway.”

“Illium still around?” Leonard asked.

She studied on that for a moment. “I ain’t seen him for a bit. Couple weeks, I reckon. Hadn’t really thought about it. Your uncle not around, I ain’t expected to see him. Got so you couldn’t think of one without the other.”

“You know where he lives?” Leonard asked. “Being a friend of Uncle Chester’s, I thought I might like to talk to him.”

“No, I don’t,” MeMaw said, “but he works over to the colored Baptist church sometimes. I know that much. He used to drive the bookmobile too.”

“For the library?” I asked.

“It wasn’t the real library, the one downtown,” she said. “Illium, he was like your uncle. He wanted to do good by folks, so he got this bus… or what do they call them now?”

“Van?” I asked.

“That’s it,” she said. “He had him a van fixed up with his own books, and he went around and loaned books here in the East Side, like a library. I never did take none of ’em, ten year ago I quit reading anything ’sides the good book since I couldn’t get around good enough to go to church. I figured God would let me slide on that, I kept knowledge of His word. But I thought Illium was a good man. Sometimes your uncle helped him out, rode around with him.”

“Can you tell us where this church is where Illium works?” Leonard asked.

“I can,” MeMaw said. “But first, Lenny, you go over there and open that cabinet.”

Leonard went over to the cabinet she was indicating with a cadaverous finger and opened it. There was a snapshot camera inside.

“Bring me that camera,” she said.

Leonard did.

MeMaw looked at me, said, “What’s your name now, son?”

“Hap Collins,” I said.

“Hap, you and Lenny sit together at the table.”

We sat and pulled our chairs close and leaned our heads together.

“Ya’ll’d make good salt and pepper shakers,” she said, raised the camera to her face, grinned, said, “Now, boys, say cheese.”

“Do you remember seeing Illium at the funeral?” I asked.

“No,” Leonard said, “but I wasn’t looking for him. He could have been there.”

“I don’t think so, and if he and your uncle were as close as MeMaw claims, he oughta been, don’t you think?”

I shifted gears on my old Dodge pickup and we climbed a hill full of potholes and crumbling slabs of weather-heaved blacktop. The sun was near midsky, and it shone on the faded gray hood of my truck and made me squint, and the hot wind blowing through the open windows made me sweat as if I were in a sauna. I reminded myself that in another couple of hours it would really be hot.

I had brought my truck back with me when we returned to Uncle Chester’s house from our three days in the country, and I was glad to have it, old and uncomfortable as it was. When I first moved in with Leonard, he had picked me up and brought me here and left my truck back home because it was giving me trouble. Turned out the trouble was burned-out rings and cheap gas and no money to fix it.

But on our return to Uncle Chester’s, Leonard needed a way to haul lumber, so he paid for me to get a ring job and real gas. Now, I was no longer polluting half of East Texas, and felt better about that, and without my telltale cloud of black smoke following me I was less embarrassed to be seen driving it.

We were following MeMaw’s directions, looking for the First Primitive Baptist Church, and along the way I got a good look at the East Section, saw parts of it I had never seen before, realized just how truly isolated I was from the way of life here. Along with decent houses, there were houses next to them without electric wires, houses broke down and sagging, their sides actually held up with posts, and out back were outdoor toilets and rusted-out appliances in which garbage had been burned and not collected because the garbage trucks didn’t always come down here.

Black children with blacker eyes wearing dirty clothes sat in yards of sun-bleached sand and struggling grass burrs and looked at us without enthusiasm as we drove past.

It was near midday and grown men of working ages were wandering the streets like dogs looking for bones, and some congregated at storefronts and looked lonesome and hopeless and watched with the same lack of enthusiasm as the children as we drove past.

“Man, I hate seeing that,” Leonard said. “You’d think some of these sonofabitches would want to work.”

“You got to have jobs to work,” I said.

“You got to want jobs too,” Leonard said.

“You saying they don’t?”

“I’m saying too many of them don’t. Whitey still has them on his farm, only they ain’t doing nothing there and they’re getting tidbits tossed to them like dogs, and they take it and keep on keeping on and wanting Whitey to do more.”

“Maybe Whitey owes them.”

“Maybe he does, but you can be a cur or you get up off your ass and start seeing yourself as a person instead of an underdog that’s got to take those scraps. I’ve always worked, Hap. Be it in the rose fields or as a handyman laborer or raising hunting dogs, and you ain’t never known me to take handout checks because I’m black, and my uncle didn’t either.”

“Most of the people taking handout checks are white, Leonard.”

“That’s true, and I ain’t got nothing for those sonofabitches either. Unless you can’t walk or you’re in temporary straits, there ain’t no excuse for it.”

“One minute it’s things are bad here because it’s the black section of town, and next time you open your mouth you’re saying it’s the blacks’ fault. You can’t have it both ways.”

“Yes, you can. Ain’t nothing one way, Hap. Everything’s got two sides and sometimes the same problem’s got two different answers. It’s the ambition and pride these folks are missing. They don’t want nothing but to exist. They think God owes ’em a living.”

“And some of them just haven’t got jobs, Leonard, and it’s as simple as that.”

“Some of them,” Leonard said. “Some gonna tell you too they got to sell drugs to survive ’cause things are bad, and I say you can rationalize anything. ‘I got to sell drugs, I got to sell myself, I got to eat shit with flies on it.’ You don’t got to do nothin’ like that. You grew up poor, Hap. You ever want to sell drugs or hire out to get your dick sucked or maybe lay back and take a check?”

“Government could mail me a check, they wanted to. But I’d want someone to go out to the mailbox and bring it to me. Maybe getting my dick sucked wouldn’t be so bad either, especially someone wanted to pay me for it.”