Joe Lansdale: Hyenas

“That’s your instinct?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Well,” Leonard said, “instinct is all right, but it can be you telling yourself something and thinking you’re enlightened. Gut instinct tells people to believe lots of things, and most of them are wrong. And, Kelly, this isn’t our problem. It’s a police problem.”

He shook his head. “No. The police pick up Donny, his life is ruined.”

“He robs an armored car, a bank, he might get a bullet through his head,” Leonard said. “That ruins things too.”

“Yeah, that can cut a career short,” I said.

“Last night, I went to that bar looking for help. I didn’t tell the details to those guys, but I said I was looking for someone could do a little rough house work. Those guys were recommended to me by a fellow I know. And then there was that whole thing about one of them calling you a name, and it all getting started…I think they started it just to show me how tough they were. Next thing I knew, I was in it with them, you know, part of the pack, and then I’m down, and one guy’s got his head through the sheet rock, and you’re chasing the other guy outside. And you’re older than them.”

“Watch it,” Leonard said.

“All I’m saying is, after I saw that, I decided maybe you were the guy instead of them.”

“I don’t know,” Leonard said.

“Donny, he really looks up to this Smoke Stack. He wants to impress him. The guy’s got muscles on muscles and he’s just mean. Just mean.”

“The gut instinct again?” Leonard said.

“Yeah.”

“Well,” Leonard said, “in cases like that, the gut is often right. We still know a shark when we see one. That’s why we crawled out of the water and became men in the first place. Only thing is, some of the sharks crawled out after us.”

“That would be the lawyers,” I said.

“I told Smoke Stack and his buddies not to come back, but it doesn’t matter,” Kelly said. “They come around anyway, and if they don’t, Donny goes to meet them. Him being twenty-one, I can’t legally tell him squat.”

“You wouldn’t know where he goes to meet them, would you?” I asked.

“No,” Kelly said. “And I’m embarrassed to tell you, I’m afraid to follow. I’m afraid they’ll catch me. I think Smoke Stack and those guys would do anything.”

“What about the other guys, his pals.”

“Three of them. They’re followers. It’s Smoke Stack runs the program, that’s easy to see. I don’t know their names, anything about them. Hell, I don’t really know anything about Smoke Stack.”

“Say we looked into it, found Donny was just smoking dope, or maybe he was selling drugs. What then?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you can discourage him. It’s such a mess. I wanted to be a big brother to him, but he doesn’t care what I think. This Smoke Stack, I think he’s like a tough father figure. And he looks like he could wad up a wrench. Again, I think he’s like a father for Donny.”

“Fathers just need to be tough in will,” I said. “It don’t hurt if they can bend a tire tool over their knee, but it’s not part of the job description.”

“Yeah,” Kelly said, “but Donny doesn’t know that. Look, really. He’s a good kid. He’s just got to get straight. He gets into this, his life is ruined. I got some money. It’s from my savings, saved up before I moved here. I’ll give you ten thousand apiece.”

I looked at Leonard. He sighed.

I said, “Look, for right now, hang onto your money. Let us think about it, maybe look things over, and then, if we think we can help, we’ll talk. If not, we’ll still talk. But you might not like the conversation.”

“Sure,” Kelly said. “Sure, that’s all right. That’s good.”

THAT AFTERNOON, WE went over to the gym to work out. Our gym sucks. It’s small and it’s hot and it has a small mat room. The mat is thin as paper and smells like sweaty feet. The owner isn’t someone who is much into gym work himself. He’s a guy with a physique akin to a rubber apple. He sits on a stool by the door so he can get some wind from outside, meaning there’s no air conditioning. The door’s always open, except dead of winter. Flies are always fluttering about.

He sits there to check memberships. The only advantage his gym has is his memberships are cheap, and he’s not that far from the house. The only conversation I remember having with him was him saying, “That’ll be thirty dollars a month, apiece.”

But, it’s all right. We bring our own gloves when we spar. When we spar we use fists a lot, but in real situations I like to use an open hand along with fists. You can use open hands with the gloves we have, but we’re friends, and that kind of business can sometimes be worse than fists. Nothing says, “Oh, shit,” like sticking a finger in your buddy’s eye.

We moved around a little, flicking punches, throwing kicks. We were gym fighting, not really fighting. The two should never be confused. The first is like a swim in a heated pool, the other is like being dropped into a stormy, shark-infested ocean.

So, we were moving around, getting a work out, popping each other a little, and I said, “You believe him?”

“I don’t know,” Leonard said, pausing a little, putting his hands on his hips, taking a deep breath. “Maybe. A story like that, it’s so stupid it’s bound to have some reality about it. I mean, a guy has a problem with his younger brother hanging with thugs that might be bank robbers, so he goes into a bar to get someone to beat the robbers up.”

“You think that’s all he wanted?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he wants us to do something more permanent with these guys.”

“That, I don’t want to do.”

“We may not need to. Here’s the thing, Hap. I think the guy is serious about being worried about his brother, but maybe we can look into it and solve it better than him. We don’t, he’s going to hire someone like that guy I left in the parking lot. Then things will turn messy, and before it’s over Kelly and his brother both might go to prison.”

“Usually, you’re talking me out of stupid shit

like this.”

“Does it ever work?”

“Not so much. This guy got to you a little,

didn’t he?”

“A little.”

We moved around some more. Leonard hit me a good snap on the forehead. I hooked low, then switched to an overhand right and caught him on the cheek.

He said, “Ouch, I’ve had enough for the day. That was right on my wound.”

“That was your cheek,” I said.

“I don’t mean the taped part of my head, I mean the bruise. I am so wonderfully black you just can’t see it.”

“If you say so.”

There was no place to take a shower, and as part of our workout, we had jogged from my house, into town and to the gym.

As we jogged back to my place, I said, “We can check into things, see the lay of the land. If it’s not lying right, and we don’t like it, we can step out. Call the law if we choose.”

“Then we’ll have some explaining to do.”

“We say we thought the guy was full of it, and just wanted us to straighten his brother out.”

“You think these guys really are bank robbers?” Leonard said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Anything is possible. Say they are robbers. Kid comes along, they see a new recruit. Someone to drive the car is my guess. They start buttering him up with all their King Robber stories, tell him how he’ll be rich and his own man, that kind of stuff. The kid, not having a father around and his mother dead, his brother not being around before, maybe not having the relationship they could have had, Donny’s ripe for bad business.”