Joe Lansdale - Mucho Mojo

“That’s exactly what I mean, Hap. You’re waiting for luck. Waiting to win the lottery. Waiting for something wonderful to show up on the doorstep. You’re not out there trying to make anything happen.”

“I’ve got enough money for now.”

“For now. And it’s not money, I tell you. It’s purpose. Ambition. You’d rather coast.”

“And maybe it looks bad for a beautiful black lawyer to have a rose field worker for a husband too. And I’m white. Let’s throw that turd out and dissect it. Not once since we’ve been…dating, as you call it, have we gone out together. Really out. You come here or out to my place, and we eat here and go to bed and make love, and then in the morning you leave. You don’t want to go to a movie with me, out to dinner, because someone might see you with a white man.”

She rolled over on her back and looked at the ceiling. She pulled the sheet up tight under her chin. “I never said anything other than I had problems with it.”

“So it boils down to I’m white, I’m lazy, I don’t have money, and I could have a better job.”

“That makes it all sound so harsh. I don’t mean it that way. Not exactly. If those things really bothered me, I wouldn’t be here.” Florida rolled over and put her arm around me. “Are you really in love with me, Hap, or are you in love with being in love?”

I thought that over. I said, “You’re right. I’m pushing things. Maybe I just been lonely too long, like the Young Rascals song.”

“Who?”

“Before your time. Like Kung Fu.”

“Do you want me to go?” she asked.

“In this rain?”

“Do you want me to go in the morning and not come back?”

“Of course not.”

We lay quietly for a while. Then she said: “Hap, even though I’m a racist castrating bitch that wants you to be better than you are, wants you to do something with your life besides be a knockabout, do you think you could find it in your heart, in your itty-bitty white man’s dick, to get a hard-on for me? In other words, want to fuck?”

I rolled up against her, kissed her forehead, her nose, and finally her lips. She reached down and touched me.

“Is that your answer?” she said.

“Sure,” I said. “I have no shame.”

In the gray morning I awoke to the smell of Florida’s perfume and the dent her head had made in her pillow. I had not heard her leave. It was still raining.

After breakfast, Leonard and I went to work on the subflooring, our hammering not much louder than the pounding of the rain on the roof.

We worked off and on until about suppertime. Then the rain quit and so did we. We locked up and took Leonard’s car and went out to a Mexican restaurant to eat, then decided to try and drive out to Calachase Road and see if we could find Illium Moon’s place. That didn’t work, we’d do what you’re supposed to do. We’d scout around till we found someone who knew where Illium lived.

It was still light, the summer days being long here in East Texas, but the sun was oozing down over the edge of the earth, and the sky in the west looked like a burst blood vessel. The air was a little cool and it smelled sweetly of damp dirt.

Calachase Road is a long road of clay and intermediate stretches of blacktop and gravel. It winds down between the East Texas pines and oaks, and in the summer the air is thick with their smell, and the late sunlight filtering through them turns the shadows on the road dark emerald.

We drove around for a while, saw some houses and trailers, but no mailboxes that said Illium Moon. We finally pulled up to a nasty shack that looked as if a brisk fart might knock it over. It was gray and weathered with a roof that almost had a dozen shingles on it. The rest of the roof was tar paper, decking, and silver tacks. The tiles that belonged up there were in ragged torn heaps beside the house, and leaning against the house was a crowbar and a hammer. A couple window screens were swung free of the windows, dangling by single nails. The front porch and front door were flame-licked black. There was a healthy stack of beer cans by the porch that weren’t even damp, and it had been raining solid for nearly three days. Budweiser was a major label.

Beside the house was a man. He was black and bald and bony and wore a T-shirt that was stained to a color that wouldn’t be found on any paint charts. He had on khaki pants with red-clay knees. His once-black loafers were colored with red clay and gray something-or-other. He had a shovel and he was digging, and he was somehow managing to hang onto a beer can while he did. He looked up when we pulled into the yard.

We got out of the car and walked over to him. The gray something-or-other on his shoes was immediately made identifiable by smell. Sewage.

Up close, we could see he had quite a trench going.

“Hello,” Leonard said.

The man looked at us. His face was boiling in sweat. He opened his mouth to speak and revealed all his front teeth were missing. When he spoke, his missing teeth made him sound a little like he was talking with a sock in his mouth. “Shit, man. I thought y’all’s comin’ tomorrow.” He stood up and pushed his chest out. “I know y’all seen them beer cans, but we ain’t no algogolic’s here.”

Algogolics? What was that? An alligator with alcohol problems?

“You’ve got us confused with someone else,” I said. “We’ve just come to ask directions.”

“Y’all ain’t from Community Action?” he said.

“Nope,” I said.

“Damn, that’s good,” he said. “I’m hoping to get them cans up.”

“What’s Community Action?” I asked.

“They come and see I deserve to have my house weather-proofed or not. It’s for the underprivileged. Figure I tear a few more shingles off the roof, they got to fix the whole thing instead of just spots, which is what they did last time.”

“I don’t know,” Leonard said. “I doubt that dozen or so up there is worth bothering with. I’d go with what I got. But I’d move the shingles in the yard outta sight.”

“I’m gonna tell ’em the wind done it,” the man said. “There was some bad wind with that rain. ’Course, I took ’em off ’fore the rain.”

“That crowbar and hammer look suspicious,” I said.

“I’ll throw ’em up under the house,” he said. “Say, you fellas was Community Action, seen my roof like that, would you fix it?”

“I’d be all over that sonofabitch,” Leonard said.

“That’s what I figured,” the man said. “Wish I hadn’t started taking them shingles off ’fore it rained. Leaks between them tacks. Top of the TV’s all fucked up. Run into the VCR and fucked it too, but I got it at Wal-Mart. They take anything back and give you another. One time I wore some shoes a year and took ’em back. You got to keep your sales slip, though.”

“Digging a new sewer line?” I asked.

“Naw,” the man said, swigging from the beer can and tossing it on the ground. “I’m digging in the old one. I lost my teeth.”

“Ah,” Leonard said.

“Got so drunk last night I was puking in the toilet, and I pulled out my bridge and flushed it. It’s here in the line somewhere, it didn’t go into the septic tank. It’s in the tank, reckon I’m fucked.”

“Sorry about the teeth,” I said.

“They ain’t gone yet,” he said. “We ain’t flushed the commode since, so I’m kinda thinkin’ them teeth’s here somewhere in the line. It runs slow.”

I looked at the line. It was a ditch seething with broken red sewer tile and gray sludge. Flies pocked it like jewels.

“I don’t want to buy no new teeth,” the man said, “and I need to get ’em now so I can flush the trapper. Damn wife shit in there a couple of times knowing it ain’t supposed to be flushed. Can’t go in the house it stinks so much.”