Rumble Tumble

Leonard went around and got in the truck, started up, and drove off. I looked in the side mirror, said, “He’s standing in the middle of the road.”

“Dammit,” Leonard said. He found a spot to pull around, went back and parked, got out and grabbed the cage. He opened it and set it on the ground in front of the dillo. The beast ambled into the cage and lay down. Leonard closed the cage and put the armadillo in the truck bed and got back behind the wheel, paused to pull lovebugs from his hair and toss them out the window.

“Damnedest thing I ever saw,” Leonard said, rolling up the window. “Couldn’t leave him though. He’d probably end up caught again, target practice for Haskel.”

“Probably. Think Haskel is going to hunt us down and kill us?”

“You destroyed the record.”

“Haskel could have memorized our names.”

“Let him come see us, then.”

“That was one hell of a punch you hit Haskel with.”

“Actually, I must be getting old. Skin on my knuckles scraped worse than usual.”

“Can you still get your pecker up?”

“I can hang an American flag on it and wave it.”

“Then you’re not getting old.”

“What’re you snickerin’ about?”

“Your dillo.”

“What about him?”

“Neat,” I said. “You’ve got an heir.”

9

Back at Leonard’s house, Leonard took the dillo into the woods while I made coffee. He came back a few minutes later carrying the empty trap. I watched him from the kitchen window. I thought he looked a little sad.

I poured us coffee, took the cups out on the back porch. Leonard joined me and we sat on the steps and sipped. I said, “When do we leave?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“That’s what I figured. That’s what I told Brett.”

“I think we ought to see we can take Brett’s car. We’ll need the trunk room.”

“Done,” I said. “She’ll be glad to do it.”

Leonard nodded. He said, “You want to back out, we can.”

“I didn’t say anything about backing out.”

“I know, but I’m givin’ you the room.”

“I’m committed. I asked you to help me, remember?”

“I remember.”

“If you want to back out, you can.”

“You’ve had to bring a man down before, Hap, and you brood over it still.”

“I’d hate for there to be a time I didn’t brood.”

“What we’re doin’ now ain’t self-defense. We’re goin’ lookin’ for trouble.”

“I know that.”

“You might have to kill someone.”

“I know that too.”

Leonard sipped his coffee, took a moment to study one of his fingernails. He wasn’t looking at me when he spoke.

“There’s things I can live with. Things even you don’t know about. I’m not complainin’, and I’m not apologizin’. I’m just sayin’ there’s things I can live with maybe you can’t.”

“Like killing people?”

“You got more bleeding heart in you than the whole Democratic Congress. You don’t like guns. You’re going against everything you believe because of Brett. You don’t owe this to her. Me, if I know where there’s a nest of poisonous vipers and I can stomp them flat, I think I ought to do it. I figure you’d feed the vipers, try to raise them up, maybe finance their college. I’m not saying one thing or another about this being wrong or right, I’m sayin’ how you are and what you’re goin’ to be dealing with. If what the midget said is true, we got the Oklahoma mafia going on here. We’re walkin’ onto their playin’ field, and we’ll be expected to play. These guys, they take their money, their drug pushin’, their pussy peddlin’, and their murderin’ seriously.”

I sat silent for a while. Leonard took my coffee cup and left, came back with filled cups for us both.

“You’re not altogether wrong, brother,” I said. “But I love Brett. Brett loves Tillie. So I got to do it.”

Leonard nodded. “Since you might stop in the middle of the action to pet a puppy dog, I figure I got no choice than to go in with you.”

“You always have a choice,” I said.

Leonard looked at me and laughed a strange laugh. “The hell I do.”

I didn’t know how to react to that. I eventually just looked away. Out at the edge of the woods, giving us a stunned look, was the armadillo.

“Your son has returned,” I said.

Leonard looked up and saw the dillo. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

We drove over to see my boss at the Black Lace Club, which was essentially a big nasty honky-tonk on the outskirts of town where women shook naked titties on stage to bad country-rock music and sometimes slipped their briefs down to give the drunks a view of the squirrel in the tree.

Most of the time, this led to the dancers having money tossed at them or pushed into their panties, but other times it led to drunks taking it as an invitation to walk on stage and screw whatever was in front of them. That meant the girls, me, the manager, another drunk, the stage, whatever.