Rumble Tumble

“I can do it,” Brett said. She turned and ran wide along the low ridge, went over it stooping, making a wide circle toward the back of the house.

Leonard rolled over on his back and stuck out his hand and I shook it. He said, “Good luck, brother.”

“Ditto,” I said.

“When this is over, Hap, what you say we make something of our lives?”

“I’d like that.”

“I mean it this time.”

“I mean it every time.”

“But it don’t change.”

“I mean for it to.”

“We got to do more than mean it this time. It’s got to happen.”

“Maybe I don’t know how to change.”

“We’re going to learn how. Got me?”

I saw that Brett had gone wide and was now behind the house. Herman was out of sight. Most likely in the jeep. I said, “Watch your ass, Leonard.”

“You too,” he said, and grinned at me. The moonlight made his teeth seem magnificently white, as if they were lit by blacklight. I gave him a pat on the arm and we eased over the rise on our bellies, made a Y. Me to the left, Leonard to the right. We were about thirty feet apart, crawling toward the thick clusters of brush in front of the house. It was slow go and hard on the body, especially since I was toting a few more pounds than I needed. The air seemed clean and sharp as a knife inside my lungs. My mouth was dry. My body seemed disconnected from my mind. As if I were standing up on the hill watching myself ease down toward the house. I tried not to think beyond the moment. The moment was all that mattered now. I had to be alert. I had to be ready.

Quit thinking about the moment, goddammit, about being ready. Just be ready. Keep crawling. An inch at a time. Eyes open, ears alert. Reach down inside yourself and find that primal part of yourself. The old reptilian brain. The part of the mind that is nothing more than motor response; the part that’s pure survival. Don’t think, just do.

The brush was sharp with thorns and bristles and it tore at my light jacket. I slipped out of the jacket, took the Winchester shells from it, and put them in my right back pocket. I took the pistol out of the jacket and slipped it in my left back pocket. I crawled on.

A sidewinder rattlesnake slithered in front of me and went into the brush. It was all I could do not to leap up and start running. All I could do not to open fire on it.

I thought, you’re going to run like hell from a snake, but you think you’re going to kick open the front door of a house full of bad-asses and go in there shooting?

Reptilian brain, my ass.

You are one crazy sonofabitch, Hap Collins.

Finally I bellied within twenty feet of the cabin. Around the door the vegetation was cleared. I could smell food coming from under the crack of the door. Steak maybe. My stomach rolled over. It was loud and rambunctious in there. They were playing ZZ Top’s “Legs.” Just a bunch of guys having a party. Drinking and doping and dancing and banging whores. Who was I to interrupt them? I didn’t make Tillie a whore. I didn’t ask her to run with the wrong crowd. I didn’t even know her.

I turned my head. I couldn’t see Leonard, just brush. After a moment he raised his hand above the brush. We both rose and darted toward the door. I stopped on the left side of the entryway, Leonard on the right. He looked at me. I took a deep breath and nodded.

Leonard turned the knob, swung the door open, stepped in and I went in behind him. He fanned right, I fanned left. At a glance I saw eight men. One of them, a black man, was lying on the floor in a pool of blood. Another black man was sitting in a chair beside him holding the dead man’s head, saying over and over, “That nigger’s dead. I killed that nigger.”

As everyone turned to look at us, the black man kept repeating himself. “That nigger’s dead. I killed that nigger.” Apparently he and his buddy had had an altercation, and now his buddy was gradually assuming room temperature. No one else seemed in the least bothered by this.

There were two women in the room, and one of them, a pretty black girl, naked except for a T-shirt that almost covered her breasts and none of her bottom, wobbled over to the wall, stepped in the dead man’s blood and sat her naked ass in it. “Wow,” she said. The other woman, whose hair was so bleached it looked like cotton candy, was completely naked and being held up by a man so small his head was just under her left breast. As she wobbled, his greasy hair kept lifting it as if it might be trying to wave.

“Who the fuck are you?” said one of the men. He wore leather pants and work boots and was shirtless. He was balding and bearded and had a big belly. Tattooed on his belly was a blue and red eagle with a stick of lit dynamite clutched in its beak. On his chest was tattooed I LICK PUSSY LIKE A DOG. In green letters. Very festive. I didn’t worry about what was tattooed on the knuckles of both hands. Too far away. But I figured it was easily on the intellectual level of the chest tattoo.

“Everybody shut up,” I yelled over the music. “We’re here for Tillie.”

“Tillie?” said another man. “Who the fuck’s Tillie?”