Joe Lansdale - Mucho Mojo

We put the flooring back. We stood on it, and I ran a finger through the dust on the table. I said, “The dust here is a lot thinner than the dust everywhere else. Now, watch this. I think.”

I pulled out the purple tablecloth and spread it on the table. It fit nicely. I took off my shirt and used it to pick up the candlesticks at their bases so as not to leave prints. I put one at either end of the table where the cloth had remnants of wax staining it. I shoved the candles into the sticks, tossed the porno magazines on the table for the hell of it.

I said, “Is a picture starting to form?”

Leonard let it cook a moment. “It’s like an altar. And if that crusty stuff in the middle of the cloth is what I think it is, could be what we have here are sacrifices to a water stain of Jesus?”

“A water stain to some is but the face of God to others,” I said. “Remember those idiots and the tortilla?”

“Well, it ain’t a ritual we done much at our Baptist church.”

“Not my church either, though I might have missed a couple of Sundays.”

I put my shirt on, and Leonard shoveled the flooring up again. We pulled the section back, and I got down in the hole on my hands and knees with my flashlight and waved it around. I saw a number of termite mounds. I unfolded the floor plan and studied it with the flashlight. I felt certain I was close in memory to Uncle Chester’s floor plan, if not dead on. When I thought I had the plan in my head, I folded it up and put it away. I stood up in the hole and said, “Give me the shovel and just hang tight a minute.”

I took the shovel and started crawling toward what I remembered as a rectangle on the map. It was dark under there, but the trim around the house was rotten in spots and pencils of light came through like laser beams.

I got to about where I thought the map indicated a rectangle, and looked around. There wasn’t a mound there, but there was a slight depression about two feet wide and four feet long. Water had run up under the house and filled it and the water had partially evaporated.

I put the light on the ground at an angle where it would shine in the depression, and got to work. It was so low I had a hard time managing the shovel, but I lay on my stomach and poked it in the depression and sort of rolled the handle in my hands and flipped mud and dirt to the side.

About the fourth time I flipped the dirt, a smell came out of there that filled my head and made me choke. It was so potent, I crawled back from it. I must have called out too, because Leonard said, “You all right?”

“Come down here.”

A moment later Leonard crawled up beside me. “Shit, that’s stout. It’s something dead.”

“Yeah.”

We worked our shirts off and tied them over our faces, and while Leonard held the light, I crawled up to the depression and went back to work. I rolled a couple of shovelfuls out of there and came up with something. Leonard put the light on it. It was stuck to the tip of the shovel and I couldn’t move it out of the hole.

Leonard’s voice was muffled behind his shirt. “Chicken wire.”

I edged the shovel beneath the wire and worked along the edge of the depression and picked up another shovelful and came up with more dirt-plugged wire.

Leonard said, “If I buried something and didn’t want animals digging it out, I might put a little chicken wire over or around it.. .. Jesus, Hap. I don’t think I can stand this stink for long.”

It was strong, shirts over our noses or not. I was beginning to feel dizzy and ill. Another shovelful turned up some cloth, and the cloth ripped and snapped on the end of the shovel, and I pulled the shovel over closer and looked at the fragment. It was caked with mud and what I figured was lime. The lime had faded the cloth, and I couldn’t tell much about it.

When I stuck the shovel in again and worked it back, I had a fragment of bone. It might have been a piece of a rib. There was something clinging to it. It looked like lardy chunks of flesh and cloth twisted up together. The smell from it was so intense I thought I was going to pass out.

“Maybe it’s an animal bone?” I said.

“Yeah, and my dick’s a water snake.”

I dug around some more, and after a while I came up with what I knew I would. A hard round ball of mud. Except the mud came off the ball, and it wasn’t a ball at all. It was the top part of a small, dirt-colored skull.

“Sonofabitch,” I said.

I used the shovel to push all I had found back in the hole, then shoveled all the dirt back on top of it.

“We better look around some more,” Leonard said.

We moved back a few paces, away from the smell, and I got my map out and Leonard held the light on it. We studied it, crawled around under there and found some likely locations, and I poked my shovel in them.

Once I came up with a chunk of damp cardboard box dripping doodle bugs. In another spot I came up with more chicken wire. Over near the front of the house, just up under the rotten front-porch steps, we found an open grave about four feet long and two and a half feet wide and two feet deep. It was empty. I pushed at the steps with the shovel. They moved. They weren’t attached to the porch. I also noted that the steps were made of newer wood.

I thought about that. Whoever had made this graveyard had fixed it so they could get under here easy – through the trap in the kitchen or by sliding away the front porch steps. I thought too about this empty grave. Could this be where the skeleton in Uncle Chester’s trunk originally belonged?

“You looked hard enough, sifted through the dirt under here,” Leonard said, “I got a feeling you might turn up more of what we found in that first hole. In different degrees of disintegration.”

“I’ve had enough,” I said. “Let’s get some air.”

We didn’t eat any lunch that day. When we got back to the house we took turns showering. There didn’t seem to be enough hot water and soap to make me feel clean. The smell from the grave was still with me. At least in my head.

While Leonard showered, I walked around the living room, nervous. I had put on jogging pants, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes, and I took advantage of the comfortable clothing to stretch and go through some Hapkido kicks in the living room. I shadowboxed at the air. I side-kicked the couch hard enough to slide it across the room.

After a while, Leonard came into the room. He had put on gray sweatpants and tennis shoes without socks. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. We looked at each other but didn’t say a word. He got one end of the couch and I got the other and we moved it to the far wall. We moved some chairs around. We had a little room now.

We started to spar, lightly, just tagging one another with control. We did that until we were sweaty and tired and needed showers again. But we didn’t shower. We got to work on the subflooring, and by late that afternoon we were finished. During that entire time, we hardly said a word, just something now and then about nails and boards and such.

When we finished, we sat on the subflooring for a while, sweating, letting time go by. I broke the silence.

“It’s gone far enough, Leonard. I love you like a brother, man, you know that. But Illium didn’t just drive off in that pond by accident. And under that house… no telling how many bodies there are. Your uncle’s diagram is probably just for what he located. Or maybe he put them there.”

“You’re back to that,” Leonard said, and he was angry.

“I’m not back to anything. I’m saying we don’t know. We’re not investigators. It’s time we call in the law.”

“The law has been on this case for years, Hap. We’ve found out more in a few days than they have in all that time. Or rather my uncle and Illium found it out and we picked up on it. We let Hanson in on this, he’s still got to mess with the system. I don’t even think it’s purely a black-white thing anymore. It’s more a thing makes the police force look stupid. Justice seldom overrides embarrassment.