A few days went by and no answers fell out of the sky on us. Raul was still dead. I hadn’t won the lottery. The two security guards didn’t show up with new brass knucks. Bissinggame didn’t send us a fashion catalogue containing custom-made leisure suits in ugly colors.
There were events, however. Leonard had finally gotten the tick off his balls. Used a match, as I had suggested. It worked. ’Course, as he feared, he managed to burn his nuts, so I was on his shit list for a couple days. The tick ended up in the commode, a burial at sea.
Somewhere during all this we put the notebook and the videos back in the Jiffy bag, placed them in a metal box, hid them out at Leonard’s old house inside a torn-out section in the back of his living room couch.
I got my last rabies shot from my surly doctor, found out the squirrel head had come back positive from Austin. That part made me feel kind of weird for a day or two.
Oh, yeah, and the guy in a yellow Pontiac wearing a cowboy hat was glanced by Leonard and myself on several occasions, following us when we were together a couple of times, following me once on my own, and following Leonard a few times. It was, of course, the yellow Pontiac I had seen outside of Leonard’s house the day I went in and found it tossed. So much for paranoia. Sometimes they are out to get you. They’d do better sneaking up on you, though, if they didn’t drive yellow Pontiacs. A Yorkshire hog in a three-piece suit and a derby with a red turkey feather in it would have been less conspicuous.
We didn’t let on we knew he was following us. We wanted him to make a move, but he never did. Kept his distance, wasn’t always there, but just when you thought he was gone for sure, he’d show up again, like a pee stain in your shorts.
The only really good thing about those few days was Brett. We spent a lot of time together, getting to know each other, solidifying our relationship, allowing our souls to meld into one, and, of course, fucking like two anacondas during mating season.
So, life wasn’t all bad on my end, but Leonard, well, he was like a pot of water on the stove. You never knew when he’d boil. Little things like that lousy tick and a burn on his balls set him off. And all those videos that had gone missing, his John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies were in the batch. He really took that hard. And the fact his J. C. Penney’s suit had been mistreated and had a stain of some kind on it didn’t set well with him either. Just grumpy, is what he was. It was getting so I wanted to find Raul’s killer just so I wouldn’t have to hear Leonard bitch.
One day, because we hadn’t figured out our next move, which with us was common, Leonard and I went miniature-golfing. Spring had choked off pretty much for good, it seemed. It was late April and unseasonably hot, like two rats in caps and sweaters fucking in a wool sock under a sun lamp.
The sand at the little golf course was turning pure white from the heat, was as thin as bleached flour, and the gravel that was mixed with it crunched wearily under our hot, heavy feet. No trees. Kids screaming and shoving. And the windmill on the tenth hole didn’t work; wouldn’t turn, so you had to kind of boost your ball over the boards on the side, shoot from the foul area, knock it back in. Done that way, it was hard to figure your points. I wanted to just pass up the hole altogether, but Leonard wouldn’t hear of it.
“A man starts, a man finishes, no matter what,” he said.
“Yeah, right, boss.”
We batted the ball around for a while, and by the time we finished I had won and Leonard was in an even more foul mood.
“I used to be good at this,” Leonard said. “You know me and Raul played a lot?”
“No. I didn’t.”
“Yeah. I always beat him. I can’t believe you beat me.”
“Look, you want the truth, Leonard, I boosted the ball with my foot on the windmill hole. Okay. It gave me the one-point difference.”
“What I figured… You’re not just sayin’ that?”
“Nope. I boosted it.”
“Cross your heart and hope to-”
“Leonard. I said, I boosted it.”
“I thought I saw you do that out of the corner of my eye.”
“Let’s don’t get too carried away.”
“Then you didn’t really?”
“I did, but I was very clever about it. You didn’t see me.”
“Good,” Leonard said, “loser buys lunch.”
There was a little restaurant in front of the miniature-golf course, and we went in there to eat. It was supposed to be a health-food place, so most of the food tasted like yesterday’s dog shit reheated and hammered, but they made a pretty good meat loaf. We had that. We sat near the window.
The yellow Pontiac, which had followed us from home, was sitting across the street in the Kroger parking lot. It was a good spot. The traffic on North Street was heavy, and it would be hard for us to get over there before he spotted us, cranked up, and left.
“You think he thinks we don’t see him?” Leonard said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Leonard ate a bite of his meat loaf, said, “Remember how this meat loaf used to just pass muster?”
“Yeah.”
“It tastes like it was rolled in someone’s dirty socks now.”
“Oh, good. I can’t wait… Who do you think the guy in the Pontiac is working for?”
“King Arthur,” Leonard said.
“You didn’t exactly take time to think about that answer.”
“No. You asked me what I thought, and I told you.”
“You got to remember, I saw Mr. Pontiac before we ever went out to the chili empire.”
“That’s because he had my house staked out. He was waiting to see who came in. You happened to be there.”
“But he quit following me. He just showed up again recently.”
“Right after we went out to the Chili King’s place of business. Seems obvious to me.”
“Why did he stop following me in between?”
“Maybe he lost you and didn’t find you again. Until lately. Hell, you gave Bissinggame your address and mine.”
I nodded. “That works pretty good. I like it. I doubt it’s true, but we’ll go with it. I hate unsolved stuff.”
“Me too,” Leonard said. “Want to go over and knock on his door?”
“We’d never make it. He’d be gone before we got halfway across the street.”
“You think he’s takin’ notes, snappin’ pictures?”
“I don’t care if he’s playing with himself over there, I’m tired of him following us around. It makes me nervous.”
As if he had heard us, the car began to roll. It went out of the Kroger lot and onto the street and headed north.
“Shall we chase it?” Leonard said.
“What?” I said. “And miss this meat loaf?… What the fuck we eatin’ here for?”
“It’s cheap and all we can afford,” Leonard said.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Pass the hot sauce.”
After lunch we came up with an idea. It may not have been the best in the world, but it was an idea, and when we had one, we liked to grab on to it and hold it tight, ’cause we might not have another.
We stopped at a gas station, filled up, and headed south for Houston. It was almost a three-hour drive, and then we got lost, so we spent five hours from LaBorde to the store I had written down on my list, East Side Video.
East Side Video was in an okay section of town and it had lots of videos. We looked around the store for a while, then went over to the fellow behind the counter. He was in his late twenties, with longish red hair done up in corn rows. He looked up at us. He had a pimple on his chin like a volcano. It had such a puss head on it you wanted to hit it with something.
“Help you?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “We’re looking for a special kind of movie.”
“What kind?” he asked.
“Well, I don’t see it on the shelves. It’s… a little different.”
“Yeah,” he said. “You mean in-and-out stuff? We got that, but we don’t put it out next to Mickey Mouse.”
“It’s under the counter, then?” Leonard said.
“Yeah. We got some stuff you can look at.”
“What we’re really looking for is a little different from that,” I said.
“How different?”
“Real different,” Leonard said. “We were told you had some tapes, some stuff like they make in Japan.”
The guy pursed his lips. “Yeah? Who told you this?”
“Some guy,” Leonard said.
The counter man nodded. “We got some tapes we sell that are a little different.”
“One we’re interested in… well… it’s got queers getting the shit kicked out them,” Leonard said.
The redhead grinned. “Yeah. Some people think they’re real. They look real ’cause they’re so sloppy. Yeah, we got that. It’s not common knowledge, but we got it. We sell ’em. Not good quality. I mean, it ain’t gonna be Ole Yeller, know what I’m sayin’?”
“Sell a lot of them?”
“No,” said the counter man, “but at a hundred dollars a pop, we don’t have to sell a lot. Come to think of it, I guess we do a pretty good business with it.”
“Against the law?” Leonard asked.
“Why you ask?”
“Just wondering,” Leonard said. “And if it is, maybe we got to think twice about buying it.”
“Technically it’s covered by the First Amendment. ’Cause it ain’t real. Just looks real. But there’s folks don’t like the idea, so we keep it under the counter.”
“We seen the one our friend had,” Leonard said. “It looked real.”
“’Tween you and me,” the counter man said, “it might be real. But the people make ’em claim they ain’t. They get cornered, they say they bought them from a video enthusiast and they’re just showin’ what someone took a video of. Kind of like reporting the news. You know, like that fellow few years ago did the video of executions. We got that one here, you want it.”
“No, thanks,” I said.
“These queer kick videos, I figure what the hell, one more queer with a black eye ain’t nothing to me. I’d kick one of the little faggots myself, make him suck my dick I wanted it sucked, though I ain’t so sure I’d want a queer’s lips on my tootie-toot, know what I’m sayin’? AIDS and all. Fucker might bite me.”
I could sense Leonard’s tension. This guy kept it up, he was gonna wake up with a shelf full of videos shoved up his ass.
“All right,” I said. “We’ll take one. If it’s one thing we like to see, it’s a queer get his.”
The kid reached under the counter and brought out a tape in a cheap box with a photocopied cover that read: KICKIN’ FAIRIES.
“Nice title,” I said.
“Yeah, they ain’t real original,” the kid said. “But I seen this one, and I tell you, if it’s set up, it’s set up good. It looks real as a car wreck.”
I peeled a hundred dollars out of my wallet, just like I had it to spare. I put it on the counter.
The kid took the money and shoved the video at me and said, “No receipt on this stuff. No returns. We don’t buy this shit back. We can run off another one cheaper than we can fuck with that.”
“I.R.S. might not like you not keeping records on this stuff,” Leonard said.
“I.R.S. might not know,” the kid said.
We drove into the nightfall, cruised mostly silent back to LaBorde, the video on the seat between us.