Leather Maiden

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.

When I had seen him last, we had gone to his gun range. Guns are a passion of his. Shooting things with big guns so he can see them blow up, shooting them until they grow smaller and smaller and finally become one with the universe, that’s a big part of his life. He even has old cars out there and he has the big guns with the big bullets, as I have heard him say, and he likes to shoot those cars with the big bullets and see how things jump to pieces. The flying sparkle of those pieces in the sunlight is like a religious experience for Booger. In their quick bright bursts, it’s as if he sees the face of, and hears the voice of, the god of war.

After the gun range, the bar was Booger’s little slice of heaven. It’s no more than a mile from his range. And it’s where he offered me a job. But like everything else with Booger, even had I been interested, it came with complications.

Way I got the offer was we shot stuff up with the big guns and then went into the bar. When we came in, sitting on a stool was a very fine-looking Hispanic woman wearing a pair of shorts so small and tight, way she was sitting, at first I thought she wasn’t wearing any pants, just a tight white blouse and some flip-flops. It was a thrilling moment, until she shifted and I saw the blue jean shorts, cut so thin and so far up her butt that the denim had to be tickling the back of her tongue.

“How you doin’?” Booger said to the woman. He grinned at her and patted her on the back. “You still ballin’ for money?”

“I ain’t won no lottery yet,” she said. “You lookin’ to clean your pipes, Booger?”

“Maybe later, or if not me, Cason, my buddy.”

“No thanks,” I said.

“He’s kind of shy, ain’t he?” the woman said.

“Naw, he’s just polite, Conchita.”

Booger picked us a table, got us both a cold beer and brought them back and put them down in front of us. He sat down and grinned and said, “You sure you want to go back to Texas?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“What about that hot little Mexican meal over there? Ain’t that got no enticement? You could stay, shack up for a few days. I’ll pay. She’ll turn you every way but loose, that I can guarantee you. She’s finished with you, you won’t know which end your asshole’s on.”

“Booger, I don’t know how to turn down such an appetizing and aptly phrased offer, but I’m going to pass.”

Conchita had the ears of a fox. She said, “What? You don’t like some pussy?”

“It’s very nice actually,” I said, “and I’m a big fan, but I’m going to have to pass. Thank you.”

“It’s a racial thing,” she said.

“No,” I said.

“Hey,” Booger said. “Don’t diss my boy with that. He hangs with me, don’t he? Ain’t nobody knows what I am, not even me. The only color pussy comes in is pink, honey.”

“There you have it,” I said to Conchita.

Booger turned back to me, looked perplexed. “You haven’t gotten a taste for the red eye, have you? Something go on in the showers in Iraq I don’t know about?”

“No. But I’d rather go home.”

“Man, anyone would rather drive to Texas than fuck in Oklahoma, that do be on the confusing side, partner.”

“That’s kind of homo,” Conchita said.

“Naw, he ain’t no homo,” Booger said, feeling it necessary to leap to my defense. Then he turned back to me and shook his head. “Texas. Man, why? It looks like right where you are now. Texas is just the ass end of Oklahoma.”

“East Texas. Lots of big trees and plenty of water. It’s better to me.”

“So it looks like here with trees and a fucking lake. Stick here with me.”

“I got a job interview.”

“That newspaper shit?”

“That’s the stuff.”

“It’s really that Gabby gal, ain’t it?”

“I think that’s over.”

“No you don’t. And I’ll tell you now, bubba, you ought to drop her like a hot rock. I mean, hell, she dropped you. Come on, man. Stick.”

“I’m going to pass, buddy.”

Booger ran his slightly damp hand over his scalp. “I could make you a partner in the range,” Booger said. “You could run it when I’m not there.”

“You’re always there. Only reason you’re not there now is it’s dark, and if the moon was full, you’d be there.”

“I’d be there if it was half full.”

I knew this was true. Booger was the kind of guy that always had a weapon on him, and he carried a duffel bag in his car that had weapons in it, including a rifle you could put together with nothing more than the edge of a coin and a determined attitude. Even had a silencer, and of course plenty of ammunition. I don’t know why he needed the rig or what he used it for, and I didn’t want to know.

“So, what you say, you gonna stay?”

“Thanks, Booger. But no.”

“The bar, you could run the bar.”

“You have Runt to run the bar.”

“I could fire Runt.”

Runt was about six-five with a shock of blond hair, a chest like a fifty-five-gallon drum, and two and a half teeth—the latter being snaggled from taking a tire iron in the mouth. I didn’t get the details, but the guy who hit him was a traveling salesman for industrial vacuums from Arkansas. Booger said Runt just grinned some ragged teeth at the guy and told him he should have brought a Tootsie Roll instead of a tire iron, because they were a lot easier to eat.

I was glad I wasn’t there. I wouldn’t have wanted to see it or know about it, at least not firsthand. It all happened in the parking lot, same place where Booger had inserted the antenna. Bottom line is, somewhere in Arkansas, a vacuum cleaner company is missing a salesman.

“I don’t think I’d want to be the one that told Runt I was taking his place.”

“Oh, hell,” Booger said. “I’ll tell him.”

“No. That’s all right.”

“How about another beer?”

“I’ve had all I want of this one. I’m about to get behind the wheel.”

“Hell, you could drink three or four of those before you needed to worry.”

“No thanks.”

Booger looked at me in that way that made me hope I hadn’t somehow offended his hospitality; it was that little shift I saw in his eye that made me decide, right then and there, I had had enough of Booger.

I got up and smiled and stuck out my hand.

Booger stood up. He shook my hand like he was pumping water, then slapped me on the back.

“Damn, boy,” he said. “We had us some time over there, didn’t we?”

“We did,” I said, remembering it a whole lot less fondly.

“I miss getting up every day and looking forward to blowing some Man Dress out of his knickers.”

“Well, got to go,” I said.

“You missing out,” Conchita said. “I got some business, baby. I can shoot Ping-Pong balls out of it. I had some, I’d show you.”

“As enticing as that is,” I said, “I’m going to leave.” I turned to Booger. “Okay, man. I’m out of here.”

Booger grabbed me and hugged me, shifting one of my ribs a little. “You need anything, call me.”

“I will,” I said.

“Good.”

As I started out, Runt yelled, “See you, Cason.”

“So long, Runt.”

“Hey,” Conchita said.

I turned. “Yeah.”

“You don’t say bye to me?”

“Bye.”

She shifted on the stool, smiled, said, “You ever want some stinky on your dinky, you know where to show. And maybe you bring some Ping-Pong balls, I can show you that trick, man.”

“I’ll certainly give it some thought.”

I went away then, hoping, praying, I’d never see any of them again.

Well, maybe Conchita.

But now that I had heard Booger’s voice on the phone, I felt a strange kind of yearning to see the crazy bastard. And the fact that I wanted to bothered me.

Back at the paper, I forced myself to write a column that had nothing to do with Caroline Allison. I wrote a moderately humorous piece on how much I had loved Tarzan when I was young. Jimmy had got me thinking on this. I told about being up in the tree in my underwear and getting sunburned, but I left the part out about my cooked testicles. A mention of that would have had Baptists on the paper’s doorstep, all of them carrying pitchforks and yelling Bible verses.

When I typed my last line and glanced up, there was Belinda. She looked good, and I got the distinct impression that she had just finished dabbing on fresh makeup. She had a way of wearing it light, so that it didn’t hide her freckles. I liked that. I liked those freckles.

“Is that offer of a coffee after work still good?” she said.

“Absolutely,” I said.

“Could we make it drinks instead of coffee?”

“Absolutely.”