Joe Lansdale: Mucho Mojo

“I’ll say this,” Leonard said, “you walk light for a big dude.”

“It’s my fuckin’ Indian blood. What you two doin’ here? I said you were out. You done more than you’re supposed to already.”

“And very well, I might add,” said Leonard.

“Don’t let your dicks get too hard,” Hanson said. “You did all right, but you had some luck.”

“So did you,” I said. “We came along.”

“You didn’t even know for sure you had a case before we showed up,” Leonard said.

“I still don’t know I got anything,” Hanson said.

“Bullshit,” I said.

“All right,” Hanson said, “you’re goddamn wizards of detection. Now go home or take in the carnival. I want you out of my way. I mean it now. I got men on the job, and they even know what they’re doin’. Well, they got an idea, anyway.”

We left Hanson and walked around the carnival. It was bright with lights and the sounds of voices and the cranking of machinery and the blasting of music, presumably conceived by ears of tin and played on matching instruments. There was the smell of sweat from excited children and tired adults, the butter-rich aroma of popcorn and the sugar-sick sweetness of cotton candy, the burning stench of fresh animal shit from the petting zoo.

We were over by the petting zoo when we came across Hiram. He was standing there with his hands in his pockets, looking forlorn as a man who’d just prematurely ejaculated. He was looking at a spotted goat.

We walked up beside him. I said, “Hiram.”

He turned and looked at me, but it took him a moment to know I was there.

“Oh, hi,” he said.

“Surprised to see you here,” Leonard said.

“Mama’s with my sister. She drove down.”

“How is MeMaw?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Same. Doctor said she could stay like that awhile. A day, six months.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Me too,” Leonard said.

“I had to get out, you know?” he said.

“Sure,” I said. “Nothing wrong with that. There’s not a lot you can do.”

“I just needed a break,” he said. “Even if I just end up watching a goat.”

Hiram turned back to watch the goat, and a little boy came up and started petting it. We stood there in awkward silence for a time, then said good-bye and slipped away.

“Too bad,” Leonard said as we bought cotton candy. “I like MeMaw and Hiram.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but she lived a full life. We all got to check out sometime.”

“It’s not dying I hate for her,” Leonard said. “It’s lingering. I think we embarrassed Hiram.”

“Yeah, he feels guilty. Like he ought to be with her, but there’s just so much of the deathwatch a person can take.”

“You know what?”

“What?”

“This cotton candy is making me sick.”

I guess we wandered around for a couple of hours. We saw the Reverend and his kids and their leisure-suited shadow a few times, but the Reverend didn’t see us. We saw Melton, aka Mohawk, walking with a young black girl who looked as if she had not long back abandoned her training bra and dolls. They went around behind a hot dog stand and we lost sight of them. We saw Hanson a few times. He looked as sullen as ever, as if the sight of us was causing his nuts to shrink.

As we strolled, a lot of blacks looked at me like I was an exotic animal, maybe belonged in the petting zoo. And in a way, I suppose I was exotic, least here and on this night. There were only a handful of white people at the carnival, and some of them were cops.

Another hour passed, and you could smell the storm on the warm night wind. It mixed with the other aromas and became a heady cocktail. You could taste electricity in the air. The machinery that wound around and around and took the children up into the sky and back down again, creaked and whined and groaned and squeaked and rattled bolts in its metal joints and made me nervous. Off in the distance, amid that swirling darkness, was the occasional flash of lightning, like a liquid tuning fork thrown against the sky.

Not long after the lightning flashes, the machineries stopped and the rides got canceled. All that was left was the petting zoo and the booths where you lost your money trying to throw softballs into bushel baskets or baseballs through hoops.

A half-hour later they canceled the whole thing and disgruntled patrons were moving toward the gate. Before we got out of there, the rain blew in, came faster and harder than anyone would have expected. Through the sheets of aluminum-colored rain, the lights of the carnival were like winking gold coins at the bottom of a fountain, and now there was nothing to smell but the rain, and the rain was cold, and within seconds Leonard and I were soaking wet.

We made our way through the crowd and out to the car. We sat there and watched as people rushed out and cars pulled away. We watched as the short church bus came through the gate and drove off. We drove off after it.

The deluge was intense, and the bus drove slowly, and so did we, and so did Leisure Suit. He was following behind us. After a little bit, we decided to beat the bus back to the church, get our parking place. As we passed, Leonard said, “Hap, the Reverend ain’t driving. It’s that woman. I don’t see him at all.”

I drove on around, tires sloshing and tossing water. “Don’t mean he isn’t there. I didn’t see the woman when they left the church. He could be in back.”

“Yeah, but… I don’t know. Something sucks the big ole donkey dick here.”

We beat the bus, got our parking place, turned off the lights, and sat there and ate from a box of M amp;Ms Leonard had left in the glove box. They had melted into a colorful mess, but we ate them anyway. We were licking our fingers when the bus drove up to the church and stopped in the driveway.

“Reckon they’re staying close to the curb to help the parents out,” Leonard said. “Kids are already soaked to the bone.”

Leisure Suit drove over to the curb opposite the church and parked facing the wrong way.

“Cop is less smart now than he was earlier,” Leonard said. “I don’t think he’s even made us yet, ain’t figured we been riding around behind him and paying his way into the carnival. Mr. Sneaky, he don’t see any connection between us and him and the bus.”

“As the day wears on,” I said, “a cop’s brain settles. It’s kind of like sediment.”

“And he ain’t fueled by the magic of melted M amp;Ms.”

“There’s that too.”

“Ain’t the green M amp;Ms supposed to do something to you?” Leonard said. “I always heard you had to watch the green ones.”

“The guy at the factory, he jacks off in the juice makes the green ones, that’s what I heard.”

“No,” Leonard said, “that’s the mayonnaise at McDonald’s, or Burger King, or one of those places. It’s supposed to be a black man does it. That way it scares the shit out of the peckerwoods, ’cause the black customers, they’re in on it, it’s a conspiracy-type thing. They know to hold the mayonnaise. The white folks, they don’t all know about it, so some of ’em eat it. Oh, and the black guy, he’s got AIDS.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. Ain’t that awful, a nigger with AIDS jacking off in the poor honkie folks’ mayonnaise?”

“A queer nigger, of course?”

“Without question. And he’s ugly too.”

We sat there until our asses and the seatcovers seemed one and the same, then the cars started to arrive and park at the curb, beating their wipers against the rain.

It was hard to see with the rain the way it was, but we could see kids come off the bus and rush into cars, and those cars would go away, then more would show up, and a new flock of kids would come off the bus, and pretty soon all the cars were gone, and no more came. The bus cranked up, turned on its lights, drove to the back of the church.