Armadillos & Old Lace Read online

  From my ankle to my head the pain was increasing, and if I never had before I now truly empathized with every animal in the wild that was ever trapped by the clever, cruel hand of man. I opened the knife and made a few passes at the rope, but the knife was too dull and the rope was too strong. I shouted for a while, but the only answer was the buzzing of the bees and the ringing in my ears. Hoover was probably inside the cabin tapping his foot to an eight-track of The Captain and Toenail and gaily sprinkling a little Equal on his serial.

  I felt like crying. I remembered I hadn’t cried at my mother’s funeral and when the rabbi shook my hand he’d said: “I see it hasn’t hit you yet.” I hadn’t answered him then. But the truth was it’d hit me a long time ago. Now it was hitting me again. All life ever does is hit you when you least expect it, and all you can ever do is laugh or cry whenever the hell you feel like it. As they say, “Anything worth cryin’ can be smiled.”

  For some reason I also thought of Patrick O’Malley, who was a homeless person back in the early seventies in Nashville when people used to call them bums. For some reason “bum” sounds more dignified even now than “homeless person.” Patrick was an aristocratic freak and proud to be a bum, and he hung around our little house off Music Row with Billy Swan and Willie Fong Young and Dan Beck and myself in the days when we were getting the old Texas Jewboy band together. Patrick, who’s no doubt hustling handouts in heaven about now, had any number of memorable credos. One of the best was as follows: “If there’s two things I can’t stand it’s a shitty baby and a cryin’ man.”

  That was probably why I hadn’t cried at my mother’s funeral.

  The bees, the beekeeper, and the buzzards were all beginning to cut into my cocktail hour, so I made one desperate, somewhat herculean effort to grab the rope with one hand and slash it with the other. I felt the knife tearing into the strands of the rope and I felt the combined power of millions of Chinese criminals, many of them no doubt political prisoners, pulling and sawing and ripping the twisted fabric of a spiritually outdated society.

  The rope gave.

  Bees buzzed.

  Flowers flashed by.

  Then everything went black. Black as the cemetery that night when I’d met the judge. And I knew, just before the curtain came down, that the solution to these murders lay in the Garden of Memories.

  CHAPTER 35

  I woke up some time later to what sounded and felt like a racehorse pissing on a flat rock inside my head. I opened my eyes slowly in the darkness and made out the rough form of a strange man carrying a flashlight and a water bucket. He poured the water on my head and shined the flashlight in my eyes. I was glad he wasn’t the beekeeper. I was glad just to be at the party at all.

  “Goddamnit!” he said. “You spooked his ass!” I had no idea what he was talking about but it was oddly comforting hearing a human voice.

  “Sherlock Holmes was a beekeeper,” I said.

  “Fuck a bunch of beekeepers,” he said. “Now we gotta go after his ass, and he knows these hills like a ringtail coon.”

  It dawned on me that this man was a sheriffs deputy and that Willis Hoover, possibly through my intrusion, had headed for the hills.

  “Is the sheriff here?” I said, rubbing my ankle. “Sheriff was here she’d run your ass right into the sneezer. She ain’t, but I am.”

  “So it’s just us fellas,” I said.

  “Shit,” he said, and spat disgustedly on the ground dangerously near where my cowboy hat had come to rest.

  In the distance I could hear more cars driving up, voices shouting in the night, dogs barking. Here and there, searchlights began to penetrate the darkness. They looked like little lighthouses on an ocean of dust.

  “This here beekeeper’s our number one suspect in the killin’s.”

  “The killin’s?”

  “Them little ol’ ladies. Now, what’s your name, buddy? Sheriff’ll probably be wantin’ to talk to you.” I got up gingerly and limped over to pick up my hat. Then I took out my wallet and fished out my card and handed it over to the deputy. He shined his flashlight on it and studied it for a long while like it was a Dead Sea Scroll.

  The card read: “Kinky Friedman is allowed to walk on the grounds unattended. If found elsewhere, contact: Echo Hill Ranch, Medina, Texas, 78055.” And it gave my phone number.

  “I know the sheriff s gonna want to talk to you,” he said. “I didn’t know who you were at first but now I do. Sheriff told us about you.”

  “I’m the legendary what’s-his-name,” I said.

  “Well, you can get goin’ and stay gone,” said the deputy.

  “That’s good,” I said. “I was getting tired of holding on line two.”

  I put on my hat and limped away. Then I climbed into Dusty and got the hell out of there.

  “A door is ajar,” said Dusty, as we drove away.

  The ranch was quiet and peaceful as we splashed across the causeway and pulled into the parking area very slowly with headlights off. At Echo Hill it’s always considered best to let sleeping ranchers lie. It was about a quarter past Cinderella time when I parked Dusty in front of the green trailer, went in and poured a generous shot of Jameson’s, went back outside and sat in an old wooden chair, and leaned up against the trailer. One of the most comforting things to know in life is that even if you feel everyone in the world’s let you down you can always lean on a trailer.

  I sipped the shot and relaxed and watched the horses grazing in the parking area. Farther over on the flat I could see deer and jackrabbits and I could hear a group of counselors talking and laughing in the dining hall. On the archery range a horse was chewing the straw out from under one of the targets, another case of exactly what Uncle Tom didn’t want to happen.

  The little line of bunkhouses set against the base of Echo Hill itself all were in stillness with their porch lights glowing yellow like a village of island people, which in a sense, I suppose, we were. The scene looked like it’d been painted by Gauguin on tequila. I took another swallow of Jameson’s and heard the dull thudding noise of the cat jumping from the roof of the trailer and landing on top of the air conditioner. The air conditioner had been dysfunctional long before most modem mental landscapers had heard of the word. Like most modern mental landscapers it blew only hot air. From the top of the air conditioner the cat’s next move was to wait until I’d gone to sleep, then jump through the open window and land on my testicles. I could hardly wait.

  I was getting up to walk to the Jameson bottle when the phone rang. I collared it quickly.

  “Start talkin’.”

  “So you made it safe and sound.” It was the judge.

  “Well, let’s not go that far. I’ve been hangin’ upside down like a large grouper for most of the afternoon but I am alive and able to answer your phone call at this time.”

  “Well, I found something out about Willis Hoover.

  “So did I. Never sneak up on a veteran.”

  “He’s done some prison time. Do you know what for?”

  “Insider trading?”

  “Try rape. And the victim, I understand, was an older woman.”

  CHAPTER 36

  It wasn’t a particularly pleasant feeling to know that Willis Hoover was roaming the hills possibly in a halfcrazed predatory state and that I had done my little bit to put him wherever the hell he was geographically and emotionally. Not that I spent a lot of time blaming myself. He was a big beekeeper. Besides, with every law enforcement nerd in the Texas Hill Country scouring the hills for his ass, how long could he hold out? He couldn’t remain on the run forever. Even a survivalist has to survive.

  In the days following Hoover’s flying the coop I hung around the ranch, although not by one foot, and tried to work out a few little matters in my still somewhat bruised head. Had the sheriffs department tailed me out to Hoover’s place without my knowing it? Had Boyd Elder or someone else given the sheriff the same tip that I’d received in the Smokehouse? Or had the sheriff checked out H
oover’s criminal record, at least twenty years old apparently, and got onto him by herself? It was very much a Sherlock Holmes-Inspector LeStrade relationship I enjoyed, so to speak, with the sheriff. As Emily Dickinson wrote: “Though we are each unknown to ourself / and each other, / ’tis not what well conferred it, / the dying soldier asks / it is only the water.” That was Emily’s convoluted and beautiful way of saying it didn’t matter who actually solved this case just as long as somebody caught the bastard.

  The judge, J. Tom Graham, and myself began telephonically to pursue a concentrated campaign aimed at isolating the nature of the “special population” that apparently made up the victims of this peculiar and very particular monster. Again and again, as Inspector Maigret might have done, we delved into the pasts of the victims. Needless to say, we did not find the tie that binds one life to live to search for tomorrow. The sands of time had done their job well, it seemed, for the further back we looked the less there was to see. And there appeared to be nothing, beyond the superficial similarities that everyone already knew, that might engender any special qualities exclusive to our special population.

  “Most of the women were Republicans, of course,” J. Tom had told me recently.

  “Hell,” I’d said, “all seventy-six-year-old women in the Texas Hill Country are probably Republicans. If I was a seventy-six-year-old constipated, humorless woman living in the Texas Hill Country I’d most likely be a Republican, too.”

  J. Tom had laughed. “Maybe the killer’s a Democrat,” he’d said.

  “I’d opt for libertarian.”

  “Anyway, I just wanted you to know I’m feeding all the data on the seven victims into the computer. We may soon have some interesting results.”

  “I’m not optimistic. Computers understand the human mind about as well as the Japanese understand baseball. They play by all the rules, but when a player makes an error on a Japanese team—even if he’s a star player—the manager immediately benches him. That shows that even with their zealous efforts to imitate our culture like a monkey in a zoo, the Japanese have never truly understood the spirit of baseball.”

  J. Tom had apparently nodded out briefly during my Japanese-computer analogy, but when he came to, he jumped right back on where he’d left off.

  “It’s somewhat arbitrary,” he’d said before he hung up, “but I’m considering four to be a significant number in a universe of seven.”

  “A universe of seven,” I’d repeated to the cat.

  The conversation had occurred a few days ago and I still hadn’t heard back from J. Tom on any computer results. It would be galling to have the case solved by a computer, I thought, but “ ’tis not what well conferred it, / the dying soldier asks / it is only the water.” I was beginning to understand Emily Dickinson’s mind, and that was also cause for some worry on my part. On the other hand, if you could truly understand Emily Dickinson you just might be able to figure out where a guy like Willis Hoover was coming from.

  CHAPTER 37

  It was one of those hot, almost-mythical Texas summer nights where you drop off to sleep not knowing if you’re a man or a child and you wake up in the morning half-wishing you were an angel.

  I never got to the angel part.

  I was deep in what seemed to be a rather pleasant routine dream about my brother Roger the psychologist walking around naked with my cat on top of his head. Both parties, though it would’ve been quite out of character under normal circumstances, seemed to be enjoying themselves enormously. Man and cat appeared to be smiling beatifically and this, of course, caused me and Hank Williams to smile crooked little semi-beatific smiles ourselves and even produced a mischievous little serial-killer-type smirk upon the otherwise passive countenance of Gandhi, almost as if he’d broken one of his famous fasts with a hearty bite of beansprout vindaloo.

  I was just considering getting some lip chap balm for Gandhi when a loud metallic sound began reverberating through the dank night air, sending all the smiles undulating slightly like large lobsters in the death-row tanks of some trendy restaurant far from the sea. Emanating occasionally from the sumptuous dinner tables could be heard the ugly sounds of rich people laughing.

  Suddenly the trailer door was opening and in walked a fifteen-year-old junior counselor named Danny Carl, who was taller than the Holy Ghost returning and appeared to be about twice as agitato.

  “Kinkster!” he shouted. “Come quick! The Mavericks are on an overnight at Big Foot and there’s a huge swarm of killer bees buzzing anyone who moves!”

  Danny Carl was the ranch belching champion, the perennial winner of the Counselors Night belching contest, having only been defeated once at the hands, or rather, mouth, of Katy Sternberg in a much-disputed, somewhat bitter belch-off during first session the previous summer. Danny could belch the entire alphabet in one sustained belch—a sure crowd pleaser.

  All championship belchers in the history of the ranch had belching regimens they followed religiously. Katy Sternberg favored Coca-Cola to enhance her efforts and, as 1 recall, competed one year with a sustained belch of “Jump! Shake your booty! Jump! Jump! Shake your booty!”

  Eddie Wolff, a daunting competitor, insisted upon a diet of raisin bran and Seven-Up before all major contests. Danny Carl believed exclusively in pork rinds. I myself, in my salad days before becoming a CBE (Championship Belcher Emeritus), had always sworn by the Chocolate Soldier, a hard-to-find carbonated drink that long ago had fallen out of favor, not to mention flavor.

  In last summer’s contest, the one in which Danny had only gotten as far as “U” in the alphabet, there had been a nice, engaging repartee amongst the competitors, all conveyed, of course, in sustained belches. “I’m better than you,” belched Danny, to which Eddie belched back, “But I’m bigger.” Katy responded with “I want to win!” to which Eddie replied “That was good for a girl.”

  Katy went on to win the championship with a terrific, gut-wrenching rendering of the phrase: “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar.” Wayne the wrangler, who was also involved but was never considered to be a really serious competitor, finished the contest by vomiting on the gray truck. Wayne’s regimen, at this writing, is not known to me.

  But Danny Carl wasn’t belching now; he was scared. His demeanor did not appear to relax measurably as he saw me walk across to the little closet and extract the large 12-gauge riot gun.

  “You’re not going to get many of them with that” he said, looking at me as if I were walking around with the cat on top of my head.

  “I’m not my brother’s beekeeper,” I said in a somewhat sphinxlike manner as I walked out the door and climbed into Dusty. Danny got into the passenger seat along with Sam, who didn’t like the shotgun but was a car whore as long as he could sit in the front seat. There was not a lot of room in the passenger seat even for one normal-sized American and Danny’s large adolescent body combined with an excited Sambo created yet another situation in which, when Danny closed his door not quite completely, Dusty found it necessary to remark: “A door is ajar.”

  Moments later, flying on adrenaline and moonlight, we splashed across Big Foot Wallace Creek and arrived at the campsite. I killed the engine and when the dust had settled we saw that the place looked deserted. I gingerly got out of the car and listened for any sound, human or otherwise. It was the otherwise I was worried about.

  As our eyes adjusted to the semidark terrain we could see a group of figures by some trees down by the creek. No sign or sound of the bees. We walked down the small rise and Floyd, the nature-study counselor, came out to meet us.

  “No sign of the bees for about ten minutes now,” he said, staring pointedly at the shotgun I was cradling. “What in the hell did you bring that for?”

  I pulled Floyd aside for a moment, waved to the kids with a confidence I didn’t feel, and scanned the dark horizon for any sign of man or bee. There was none. Probably it was just a coincidence that I hadn’t seen a swarm of bees in the Hill Country for many years and now I’d had close en
counters with two swarms in the same week. Most likely these bees, wherever the hell they were, had never even heard of Willis Hoover. But it was a chance I couldn’t take. What if they’d followed him over here? What if they’d followed me over here? In my head the whole situation was taking on the proportions of a Shakespearian tragedy. To bee or not to bee.

  “What did you bring the shotgun for?” Floyd was asking me again.

  In terse tones I explained to Floyd about my recent adventures with Willis Hoover. I told him Hoover was a fugitive and possible serial killer and I asked him if there was any way the bees could’ve accompanied him here to the ranch.

  “The only way,” said Floyd, “would be if he took the queen with him. If he did that, the rest of the swarm would very likely follow. Of course, he’d have to be pretty crazy to do that.”

  “All beekeepers are crazy,” I said. “Not to mention serial killers.”

  “Well, if that’s what you’re worried about, it’s very doubtful that this is the same swarm. It’s probably just a hive that one of the kids bumped into in the dark. Bees don’t usually display much activity once it’s dark. I think you can put the shotgun away. You might take out a cigar and puff on it. They’re not really all that fond of smoke.”

  There was something in Floyd’s light, knowledgeable approach and something in his eyes that reminded me strongly of his father, a man who’d known more about the out-of-doors than anyone I’d ever met, and I found this comforting. I walked over to Dusty, put the shotgun in the trunk, and went down to the bank of the river where Floyd and the kids all were.

  “Why’d you bring the shotgun?” asked one of the boys.

  “To blow Ernest Hemingway’s head off,” I said.

  I took out a cigar and lit it up to buy time and calm my nerves. Floyd winked at me just like his dad would’ve done. I’d taken about three puffs when a loud buzzing blur that sounded like the Mighty Eighth came roaring through the air just over my left shoulder.