Joe Lansdale - Mucho Mojo

I held my position and listened, felt a little silly. All I could hear were the assholes next door. Their voices. Their music. I looked over there. The porch light had been turned off, but I could see a couple of people on the porch. I could hear them talking. They weren’t looking in my direction. I eased down the porch steps and stopped to listen again. And heard something this time.

The whimpering. It reminded me a bit of a dog I’d had when I was a kid. It had been fed glass in raw hamburger meat by our next-door neighbor who didn’t like it digging in his flowerbeds. The dog died. When my dad found out what happened, he worked the neighbor over with his fists and tried to feed him about three feet of a garden rake handle. He finished up by using the neighbor’s head to plow the man’s flowers up. My dad liked animals. For petunias, he didn’t give a damn.

I eased toward the sound, which was consistent now and had turned to a moaning. I went around the side of the house and saw Leonard down on his hands and knees. He had put the shotgun on the ground and was crawling through a gap in the skirting around the house.

By the time I got over there, Leonard was backing out and pulling something out with him. It was a kid. He had the boy by the pants, and when he had him tugged out from under there, I recognized him in the moonlight. It was the boy who had gotten the shot of horse on Uncle Chester’s front porch, the boy who’d ended up with a beeper.

The boy was shaking and his eyes were rolled up in his head and he was making the sound that had reminded me of the dog. He was in a bad way and didn’t seem to know where he was. He’d crawled under the house like a wounded animal, seeking the dark, the cool pressure of the ground. I thought it odd that the gap in the siding, the place he’d chosen to hide and try and ride out his pain, was beneath the flooring Leonard and I had built. He had been lying not far from where Leonard had discovered the trunk with the pathetic little bones inside. I realized now in my dream, when I had visualized the child in the trunk, the bones dressed in flesh, it had been the face of this boy I had seen.

“He don’t seem to be injured,” Leonard said. “I don’t see any blood.”

“Overdose,” I said. “He’s riding the merry-go-round, hard.”

“Goddamn them,” Leonard said. “He’s just a baby.”

I gave the revolver to Leonard and picked up the boy. “I’m calling an ambulance.”

I started across the street to MeMaw’s. I heard an asshole yell from the crack house, “Hey, whatcha got there?”

The sound of that guy’s voice was like sandpaper on my brain. Later, I would think back and know that voice had been the snapping point, the catalyst for what was to follow. I heard that voice and was reminded of what was going on next door, and thought: here Leonard and I were trying to stop some whacko from torturing and killing kids, and in quite a different way, next door to us, operating against the law, but not restrained or bothered by it, a whole houseful of ball sweats were doing a similar thing, and we weren’t stopping them, weren’t making any effort to. Kids were being tortured to death by addiction, and the drug dealers were taking in big money and making friends with the bail bondsmen, and were practically being treated like businessmen.

I went up on the porch and kicked the bottom of the door, yelled, “MeMaw. Hiram. Emergency. It’s me, Hap.”

A few minutes later the door opened. It was Hiram. He stood looking at us through the screen. He was dressed in his bathrobe and the expression on his face was odd. You’d have thought I was bringing him a take-out order.

“Wha…?” he said.

“Wake up, man. Got an emergency here.”

I could feel the boy shivering in my arms. I glanced down at him. Saliva was running out of the corner of his mouth and his body was trying to bend into a fetal position.

“Yeah… yeah,” Hiram said, and opened the screen.

I slid inside, said, “I need to call an ambulance. We found him by the house. Drug overdose, I think.”

“I’ll take him,” Hiram said. “No need to wake Mama. She’s sick.”

I handed the boy to Hiram, and he held him and looked at him, then took him around the table and into the back room. I used the phone to call the ambulance. I’d no sooner done that when I heard a shotgun blast.

I ran outside, keeping low. I saw Leonard standing in the yard of the crack dealers. He had a shotgun. He fired another shot into the side of the house. He yelled: “Out, ever’body out!”

“Leonard,” I yelled, and I started running across the street. I wasn’t fast enough. He’d reached the porch over there, and there was one guy still standing on it, standing between Leonard and the front door. Not because he was brave, because he was petrified.

Leonard reached out and shoved him aside. The guy went over the edge of the porch and rolled on the grass and got up and started running.

Leonard tried to open the front door, but someone had locked it. I got up on the front porch about the time Leonard screamed, “Stand back, motherfuckers,” and shot a hole through the door big enough to poke your head through.

I grabbed Leonard by the shoulder, “Hold up, man.”

Leonard looked back at me, and I saw in his eyes what I had felt moments ago. Anger. Frustration.

“You can’t kill them, Leonard.”

“I can kill the house.”

I took my hand off his shoulder and stood back, and he kicked the door where the blast had torn a hole, and the hole got wider, and he kicked again, and an entire panel of the door collapsed, and swift as a summer cloud blowing across the face of the sun, Leonard hit the door and it went to pieces and he was inside.

And I was in after him.

The house was poorly lit, and when we came through the door, Mohawk and the one I called Parade Float came out of the dark. They leaped and grabbed Leonard, one on either side, Mohawk trapping the shotgun against Leonard’s body.

Mohawk yelled, “Now, baby.”

Over Leonard’s shoulder I saw a stringy white woman with greasy hair, dressed in nothing but a pair of shorts, stick a little automatic in Leonard’s face and pull the trigger.

Nothing happened. The gun had jammed. A rush of adrenaline shot through me like a gusher of crude oil blasting to the surface.

I stepped in and hit Mohawk in the side of the head with a right and he loosened up on Leonard just as Leonard kicked the woman in front of him in the stomach and sent her tumbling down the hallway.

I reached out and clawed my fingers across Mohawk’s face, raking him in the eyes, and then I turned sideways and kicked him in the side of the knee. The kick was off, and the knee didn’t break, but he yelped and let go of Leonard and fell backward through an open doorway.

Leonard was using the shotgun stock to do some dental work on Parade Float when I went by him and grabbed the woman. She was obviously fucked up on something and feeling no pain, and she’d gotten up on her knees and grabbed the gun again. She pointed it at my groin, and I reached down and scooped it aside with my palm and jumped in close and grabbed her head with both my hands and gave her a knee in the face, hard as I could. I figured I’d be hearing from the Southern Club for Manhood after that, but I didn’t give a shit, you try and hurt me, I’m going hurt you back. She went backward with her nose flat and blood flying and the gun went off and plaster puffed out of the wall. I kneed her again, and the automatic went sailing away from her, down the hall, and now there were guys coming out of nowhere, all over, a half-dozen of them, and one of them came up behind me and grabbed me in a full nelson. I dropped to a wide stance and punched forward with both hands, and that loosened the guy’s grip. I wheeled and hit him in the side of the head with my elbow, and followed on around with my body and scooped my arm around behind his head and pulled him down and kneed him in the groin and kicked the inside of one of his knees and then the other, and the second one broke with a sound like a drumstick snapping.