Joe Lansdale - Mucho Mojo

The walls of the gym turned to hot liquid and flowed over me and the ceiling fell down and light and shadow scrambled and there were bongos in my head and I realized I had waited too late, because T.J. wasn’t going to put me down, and I was too weak now to do anything about it.

Bright and dark, bending in upon themselves, whirling around and around to the tune of blood pounding in my skull, and I had a flash of that dream where I was underwater in the bookmobile with Illium and Chester and the dead boy with the flesh floating away from his bones.

…

When I awoke, I was on the floor of the gym. First thing I saw was Hiram. He was leaning over me. He looked concerned. He said, “Hap, you OK?”

“Yeah,” I said.

Fitzgerald came into view. “Sorry about T.J. Normally, he stays in check. He got the feeling we were really into it. He squeezed your air out.”

“I know,” I said. “And we were into it.”

I sat up slowly. The gym was only moving a little. My ribs were mildly sore. I figured that would balance out the knot on my head I’d gotten the night before. I’d certainly had an interesting two days, and it wasn’t even lunch yet.

T.J. was standing against the far wall with his hands by his sides and his head hung. He looked as passive as a puppet. I thought: Klaatu barada nikto.

“Yeah,” Fitzgerald said, “we were into it. It’s my turn to apologize again. For T.J. And for going so hard, keeping up with the rhetoric. I guess I do bear a little animosity for the other day, and I just can’t help but be a preacher. By the way, you were putting it on me pretty good. But I’d have come back.”

“Now we’ll never know, will we?”

“Maybe we’ll do it again sometime.”

I got up slowly with Hiram’s assistance. “It could happen,” I said.

On the way home, Hiram was quiet until we turned onto Comanche Street. He said, “Man, there’s more than stuff between him and Leonard. What’s the deal with you two, that’s what I want to know?”

“Bad chemistry,” I said.

When we got back and I was out of the van telling Hiram ’bye, apologizing for going in the first place and letting things escalate the way they did, I began to feel a strange sensation.

It was partially due to the fact that Hanson’s car was parked at the curb along with a pickup I didn’t recognize, and of course, I knew what that meant. But there was something else, and I didn’t understand it until I was on Uncle Chester’s porch about to open the door. Then it hit me.

The sensation was fear. Because now I knew what I thought I’d known all along. Fitzgerald was a killer.

I had been with him and his giant brother, and I had been unconscious on the floor of Fitzgerald’s gym. I had pushed certain buttons inside Fitzgerald and inside myself, and it was possible I had fucked things up. I had let the Reverend know I knew something was going on with him and the kids.

Perhaps all that had saved me and Hiram was the fact that Fitzgerald assumed someone, like MeMaw, knew where we were going. Then again, had he been inclined, he could have taken his chances, put us unconscious in Hiram’s van and taken us for a little drive that ended at the bottom of some pond somewhere – an exit like Illium’s. Maybe kiddie porn would be found in our possession. And when the good Reverend was questioned, all he had to say was we never arrived. Or that we came and went.

Then again, that might have been too complicated in broad daylight, or Fitzgerald may have figured me for nothing more than a belligerent sinner and not worthy of action.

I felt like a fool attempting to beard the lion in his own den, but I felt another thing now. An absolute certainty Fitzgerald, with the help of his poor brother, was our killer. It all fit together too damn neat to be otherwise.

I was trembling by the time I discovered the front door was locked. I realized Leonard and the others had gone on up to the Hampstead place.

I got a shovel off the back porch and went up there too, along the creek bed and through the woods.

When I arrived at the Hampstead place, Hanson was there, along with his crew. Unexpectedly, the retired coroner from Houston had brought his own crew. They were dressed in white paper suits and gas masks with charcoal filters. The front steps had been removed and a number of boards had been taken off the porch. White suits were crawling under there, busy as grubs in shit.

Inside the house, down in the open trapdoor, Leonard and Charlie, wearing paper suits and gas masks, were bringing out buckets containing dirt and worms and dirty lard. The worms were long and red and very busy. Leonard put his flashlight on the bucket, and I watched them squirm, like dancers under spotlights. The odor that came from the bucket and from the dank dark below was stronger than sun-hot road-kill.

“Where you been?” Leonard said through his mask. He sounded like Darth Vader.

“Visiting a friend.”

“Good time for it, asshole.”

“Sorry.”

“Hi, Hap,” Charlie said.

“Hi, Charlie. See you’re wearing those Kmart shoes.”

“Won’t leave home without ’em.”

“You see Mohawk… Melton, tell him Hap says hey, will you?”

“Absolutely.”

Hanson introduced me to the retired coroner, Doc Warren, an old wizened white-haired guy who looked as if he might have been dug up himself. He had on a paper suit and gloves. He was sitting on the floor by the trapdoor taking a rest. He was sweaty and tired looking. His filtered mask was in his lap. There were fragments of bone on a plastic drop-cloth beside him. Very small bones. He didn’t bother to get up or shake my hand.

He said, “You and your friend have found quite a mess.”

“Tell me about it,” I said.

Turned out they had located four bodies. One of them, the one that smelled, the one I had first discovered, had been there about a year. As I had suspected, something in the soil down there, the way the water flooded in, had caused it to decay slowly, in spite of the East Texas heat. That lard in the bucket was not lard at all. It had once been flesh. It was now the result of decay and putrefaction. With the lard were bones. A child’s bones.

The rest of the bodies were not bodies at all, but bones, skeletal remains. Warren estimated the other bones had been there some time. They were all the bones of children. There was enough evidence to suggest the bodies had been cut up and wrapped in cloth and put in cardboard boxes and wrapped in chicken wire, then buried carefully.

“I believe you’ll find enough bones to make up for the missing kids from the East Side,” I said. “Maybe more.”

“I believe you’re right,” Doc Warren said.

Leonard popped out of the hole. He said, “Hey, Hap, you gonna supervise, or what?”

“Is the job open?”

“Ha,” Leonard said, and disappeared back into the trapdoor hole.

“You’ll need to slip on one of these paper suits, get a gas mask,” Hanson said.

“You got to watch infection,” Warren said, “case there’s any more bodies with meat on them. Streptococci likes to get in your lungs and into cuts. It can fuck you up big time.”

I put on a paper suit and gas mask and went to work. It’s not a day I’ll forget. Sometimes, even now, I awake from a dream where I’m crawling on my belly beneath that old, rotten house, turning my shovel awkwardly in the dirt, and the smell of that child, the one that was lard and bone, still seems strong in my nostrils.

By nightfall we’d found the remains of nine children. And one large skeleton – well, what was left of a large skeleton. Warren said it was a woman. He estimated she had been there a long time. Thirty years or longer. Warren concluded her skull had been cracked, and she had most likely been cut up the same way as the kids. There were no immediate signs of cloth, but around her remains was a coil of chicken wire.