Joe Lansdale: Hyenas

When we got over to the address Marvin had given us, we parked down from their house in the lot of an abandoned convenience store. It was about three blocks from their house, but seemed the best place to park. Everything there was as Marvin said. The houses and most of the convenience store were burned out and you could smell the dead fire still. Something had set the whole block on fire. Where the burned buildings ended, the woods took over, and up on a hill with some logged out acres behind it, was the house.

I opened the glove box and got out my automatic and gave Leonard his. They were both in black holsters, but the guns themselves did not match. Brett thought it would be cute if we got matching guns with our initials on them.

We got out of the car and Leonard pulled out his shirt and lifted it up and clipped on his holster. He arranged his shirt around it. It was only hidden if you weren’t looking for it or you were blind in one eye and couldn’t see out the other. I clipped mine to my belt. I was wearing a loose tee-shirt, so it didn’t cover much.

“Ready?” I said.

“I was born ready,” Leonard said.

“Scared?”

“I never get scared.”

“Bullshit.”

“Okay, I’m a little scared. Let’s get it done before I get more scared.”

We started walking.

THE HOUSE HAD a car out front, and we had to climb up the hill to get there. We stayed to the right side where there was still a line of trees just behind a barbed wire fence, and then there was a pasture, and more trees, and then the house with the logged out area behind it.

The house was not well lit and there wasn’t much you could tell about it in the dark, but there seemed to be a sadness that came from it. All old uncared for houses seem that way to me. As if they are living things dying slowly from neglect. It’s like they’re old people no one will visit, or if they do, it’s out of obligation or even spite.

There were a series of walking stones that led from a place near the road to the front porch, but grass had mostly covered them. There were a few shingles lying like scales in the yard; they had blown off the roof in a high wind. The rest of the yard had grass growing tall enough to hide a rhinoceros if he crouched a little. There was a washing machine in the yard, tipped on its side, and it looked to have been a popular model about the turn of the century. An old stone bird feeder was still standing. Grass seeds had gotten in it along with enough blown dirt and dust to make a bed, and blades of grass had grown up in a manner that made it look as if someone had used Butch Wax on them.

There was a thin beam of light escaping from under a window to the right of the door. I went up and bent down and looked through the window. There were three guys on the couch passing a joint back and forth. The light of a television strobed across their faces. One of them was Smoke Stack. He was hard to miss. He took up about a third of the couch. He was wearing a tee-shirt with the sleeves rolled up so folks could get a look at his biceps, which looked like bowling balls in tight rubber tubing. There were tattoos on his arms, some kind of Chinese writing. I figured Smoke Stack was doing well to read English, let alone Chinese. The tats looked like they had been made by a blow torch and a fountain pen.

I didn’t see Donny.

I stepped back and Leonard took my place. After he took a look, he said, “Rock and roll.”

I went up on the porch and Leonard went around back. We didn’t say that we should do this. We just knew it. It wasn’t our first rodeo.

I carefully pulled back the screen, which had so many holes punched through it, it might as well have just been a frame. It squeaked a little, like a dog toy.

I waited. No one shot at me through the door. No one jerked the door open. I could hear the TV. It was some kind of music show. Music videos, I guess. The music playing was Rap, the only kind of music I can’t stand, unless it’s bag pipe music, which, with the exception of “Amazing Grace,” always sounds to me like someone starting up a lawn mower.

I heard the back door breaking open, and when I did, I kicked the front door with all my might. It hurt my foot a little, but the door sagged back, which spoke not so much for my manliness as it did for the geriatric state of the house.

Rushing inside, I had my gun drawn. I was wearing my bad ass smile. I know it’s bad ass because I practice it in front of a mirror.

AS WE CAME in, me from the front, Leonard from the back, I focused on the three on the couch. As I said, one of them was Smoke Stack. The thugs on either side of him were almost interchangeable. Lanky with pot bellies and greasy hair, arms branded with tattoos, their heads wreathed in cigarette smoke. They looked like the kind of guys that might share a brain, and today the brain had a day off.

Sitting in chairs to the side were Donny and another guy. Leonard was watching them. Donny looked like a dumb kid, thin faced, big-eyed, his chin bristling with a few hairs and competing pimples. The guy next to him was dark and short and stout and sunburned. He had his hair cut in a military ’do, probably because the hair on top was as thin as dirty water. Overall, he gave the impression of someone who had lived on a planet with heavy gravity and too much sunlight.

They jumped up and went for guns they had in their pants. Except Donny. He just sat there with his mouth hanging open.

Leonard waved his gun, said, “Who do I shoot first?”

There were no volunteers. They stopped moving.

I had my gun pointed too. I said, “Okay, boys, let’s keep standing, and take them out one at a time, starting with you, Smoke Stack. Put them on the floor. And I’m not talking about your dicks.”

“Do I know you?” Smoke Stack said.

“No,” I said. “But you’re about to know a little about me, and my guess is you aren’t going to like it.”

When they had the guns on the floor, I told them to kick them lightly away. Leonard held his gun on them, collected theirs and took them outside. I watched through the open door as he threw them under the porch and came back inside.

“Nice night,” I said to no one in particular.

Leonard turned off the TV.

“What you guys want?” Smoke Stack said. “We ain’t got nothing for you to rob.”

“I think maybe you got some money from a bank robbery somewhere,” Leonard said.

Smoke Stack looked at Leonard, then me, then they all looked at Donny. They just kept staring, like they were waiting for him to break out into a little dance.

“No, man,” Donny said. “I didn’t tell them anything. I don’t even know these guys.”

“He ain’t lying,” I said. “He doesn’t know us. But, we are here for Donny’s benefit. We want that you should quit this group, Donny. Come home and quit acting like a gangster wannabe. Or what we refer to in the privacies of our homes as a dumb dick.”

“My brother,” Donny said. “He sent you. That’s it, isn’t it? Well, he and you both can keep your nose out of my business.”

“Just come home and forget these guys,” I said. “You do that, life will be a lot better for you, and so will the air. Man, you guys could use a bath. Or is it because you’re shitting behind the couch.”

“Ha!” Smoke Stack said. He looked at us and our guns like he was looking at kids with suckers. “You ain’t so much.”