Joe Lansdale - Leather Maiden

“Could have just been a concerned citizen,” I said.

“There’s that,” he said.

15

I shook hands with him and left out of there. At least there wasn’t anything to tie Jimmy to the disappearance. Any DNA that might be tested, provided it could be afforded, had never been collected. Jimmy might have leaned against the car and left a print, but if the cops were as sloppy as I thought they were, and with the car gone now and no one to match the prints to, it probably wouldn’t have mattered if he had, wouldn’t have mattered if he had bled all over the seat, shit in the glove compartment and jacked off on the package shelf. I figured he was probably home free in the DNA department.

Next person I had to find was Ronnie Fisher. But right then, I needed to get back to the paper and do some work.

As I was driving back, my cell rang. I flipped it open as I drove, saw the number. Oklahoma prefix. Booger. I started not to answer. I didn’t want to answer. But I couldn’t help myself.

“My man,” Booger said.

“Hello, Booger. How’s things?”

“Well, I had an early morning at the range, and a very fine constitutional shit that caused me to strain enough to temporarily cross into another dimension, drank six beers, and right now I’m lying here in bed with one hand on the cell phone and the other lying between Conchita’s legs.”

“Too much information, buddy.”

“I like to be thorough. That Gabby girl. You porkin’ her again?”

“No. Me and Gabby. We’re done.”

“Well, all right then, come on back to Oklahoma. I told you I’d put you to work.”

“I got a job.”

“That newspaper thing.”

“That’s the one.”

“You know what, Cason old buddy?”

“What?”

“You sound like you got some woes to live on.”

“How do you mean?”

“Your voice. There’s an imp down in it.”

I tried to be very calm. Booger was like that. Some people thought because he was raw he was stupid. That would be far from the truth. And he had an instinct about things, could see the slightest disruption in the force. Not that he usually gave a damn how anyone felt, but he had keen radar. And in my case, he probably did care.

“I’m just tired, Booger.”

“Do I need to come down there?”

“I can’t imagine what for.”

Booger laughed. “I know I make you nervous, bro, but you ain’t got no worries. We done thrown in together. We been through hell’s ass and out the other side. We’re devils together.”

“I guess we are.”

“Sure we are. Now, listen up. You get to needing old Booger, you just flip the phone and hit the number. You’d do that, right?”

“Sure,” I said.

“I don’t want my little darling here to grow cold, so I’m going to hang up and mount up.”

“Enjoy the ride, and go light on the spurs.”

“Hell, Baby Man, I’m a professional.”

When he hung up, oddly enough, I felt lonely.

Before arriving in Camp Rapture I had made a detour to get my handful of things from Houston where I had them in storage, and then I had made a detour to visit Booger.

I call Booger a friend, but I’m not really sure I mean it. He may be more of an attachment, like a growth of some sort. It was like I told Dad. I want to get rid of him, cut him out, but there are complications and attachments.

Booger makes me nervous. He makes everyone nervous.

Booger has a real first and last name, but he doesn’t go by them and doesn’t like either mentioned in polite society. He isn’t the kind of guy you take to a fancy tea. You tell him not to handle all the sandwiches, open them up to see what was inside, he might shove your head in the punch bowl and hold you there till you drowned, then piss on the carpet on his way out.

He lacks patience.

He’s not tall, but he’s thick and vigorous, and has a shiny shaved head the color of a penny. Racially, he’s marooned somewhere between black guy and honky, with a slightly Asian cast to his eyes. In Iraq, the handful who liked him called him the Copper Cat.

He’s the kind of guy who’s not averse to scratching his privates in public or beating a smartass near to death with a car antenna, which he nearly did once. No one remembers the source of the disagreement that led to the beating, not even Booger, though he has a faint memory about an argument over a game of horseshoes. And though two witnesses saw him give the beating, they had a sudden loss of sight and memory when it came time for them to give information to the law.

They get free beer for life at Booger’s bar now, or at least it’s offered. According to Booger, they don’t actually come around and hang out, not after what they saw in the parking lot. The guy Booger got onto, they found him out near the town dump with his pants pulled down and the antenna pretty far up his ass, minus lubricant, and he was running a low-grade fever and hallucinating. He lived, but he developed a solid case of memory loss himself, told some insane story about being attacked and raped by a roving band of belligerent homosexual Bible salesmen. He drives a car that won’t get radio; missing an antenna.

Around his little town of Hootie Hoot, Oklahoma, the cops make a point of leaving Booger alone. To them, he’s like the big bad ghost that lives on the hill, in the back of his bar.

Before I had come to Camp Rapture, I had been hanging out with Booger at his gun range, and then his bar. And though me and him are on good terms, it’s always a little precarious when we’re in the process of bonding. A certain shift of light, a fart blow in his direction, and he could go off the beam faster than a Baptist preacher in Las Vegas with a pack of ribbed condoms and the church funds in his pocket.

Booger had never gone off on me, but I had seen his eyes narrow and his mouth twitch from time to time, and I made a habit to watch for any telltale signs when we were together, minded my Ps and Qs around him and wondered why I bothered at all; that bother is something I keep coming back to, investigating and arriving nowhere.

I suppose it’s our Iraq connection. That kind of thing, making war together, gives us a link; sometimes, for me, that link is like a ball and chain. Booger, in many ways, has yet to quit fighting the war. Originally, he moved his inborn hatred of just about everybody from Oklahoma to Iraq, and now that he was home again, shooting squirrels and deer didn’t do it anymore. He kept hoping they’d call him back to Iraq. He liked the smell of blood, the charred odor of burning corpses. He liked being shot at. He told me so. He was that soldier who gave the rest of us a bad name.

It’s possible he could go to Iraq again. They’re taking anyone who can fog up a mirror these days. But last word from the military was they hated to see him go, but sort of had to let him, which gives you some idea of where Booger is on the reenlistment charter. They were beginning to suspect he might have killed some of our soldiers, ones he deemed weak, pussies not driven to take enough lives and enjoy the pleasure. They called it friendly fire, and he was suspected, but if it was Booger, one thing I can assure you, it wasn’t friendly. I hoped it was just a rumor. I had to believe it was.

For some reason Booger forgave my not being gung ho about killing. I did what I had to do. When I killed, I felt as if I had collected the souls of the dead, and they were heavy, a weight I didn’t want to carry. Booger knew how I felt, but in me he didn’t see it as a weakness. Coming from me, somehow, it was novel, a point of interest that intrigued him, like watching a dog leap through a ring of fire in the circus. In others, thoughts of compassion for the enemy or civilians, doubts of purpose and feelings of guilt would have been suspect and common. I was Booger’s soft spot, his Achilles’ heel. He had saved my life more than once in Iraq. Maybe he thought of me as a pet.