“You might find my clock hands harder to wind than you think, boys,” Haskel said, then noticed his children standing around. The little girl had her mouth open and was picking her nose. The other two boys were watching Haskel as if waiting for him to offer them their medication.
“You goddamn kids run along to the house now,” Haskel said. “Go squirrel huntin’. Fish. Make yourself useful. Don’t make me tell you twicet. And get your fuckin’ finger out of your nose, Sherilee.”
The goddamn kids evaporated, though Sherilee kept her fuckin’ finger in its probing position. Maybe it was latched there.
Haskel said, “Little shits.”
“You always greet people want to do business with you like this?” Leonard said.
“I’m cautious,” Haskel said. “You can’t be too goddamn cautious these days. Consider what happened to those folks in Waco.”
“You mean the religious nuts who were abusing their children?” I asked. “You know what I think, except for those poor children and the government folks, fuck ’em. Far as I’m concerned the only thing wrong with that operation was the government folks were stupid and the folks inside the compound were even more stupid. I figure you’re that stupid, you ought not be in the gene pool.”
“You’re awful uppity for a man who’s come to see me,” Haskel said.
“How you know I’m not here to give you a Jehovah Witness tract?” I said.
Haskel turned to Leonard: “What can I do you for this time, colored fella?”
“Leonard’s the name.”
“I don’t like to get too personal,” Haskel said. “Fact is, I’ll tell you right now, I don’t shake hands. Now. Later. On the deal. Anything. I don’t like being touched. I ain’t one for having fingers run through my curly hair, you know what I mean.”
“And it’s such lovely hair,” I said. “Very gritty.”
“What?” Haskel said.
“Forget it,” Leonard said. “Don’t pay him any mind.”
“I tell you what,” Haskel said, “you two jerk-offs get back in that there truck and haul on out of here. I don’t like you much.”
“We’re not here to be friends,” Leonard said. “Hap here, he got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. Had to get rolling before he had his coffee and jerked his dick. But you don’t like us, that’s okay. You can like our money.”
“Yeah, well,” Haskel said, giving me a beady eyeball, “now we got that out of the way, you know what I sell, so let’s get on with it.”
“We need some cold pieces,” Leonard said. “And not so old you load them with a ramrod and a powder horn.”
Haskel was all business now. It was like we’d never had a disagreeable moment. “Heavy work?”
“Hard to say. We don’t want machine guns, stuff like that. Simple, effective stuff. Probably close-range. One long-range weapon might be good. Maybe two.”
“Cowboy style?”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“Stuff like that, it doesn’t come cheap.”
“Let’s see what you got, then talk prices.”
“All right,” Haskel said, then nodded toward me and asked Leonard: “This guy, he gonna have anything to say about this?”
“Jes when Massa Leonard say it okay to talk,” I said.
“He jokin’?” Haskel said.
“Yeah,” Leonard said. “He does that all the time. He thinks he’s funny.”
“Well, he ain’t. In fact, I’ve already had about enough of him. Come on.”
As we followed Haskel, Leonard cut his eyes toward me. I gave him a big juicy smile. It was nice to put Leonard on the receiving end of bullshit for a change. Guy like this Haskel, I couldn’t help myself. Then again, it was me and Leonard buying from him, so what did that make us? Thinking about that, some of the humor went out of my spirit and my feet began to drag.
We went around the house, past some leaning sheds and a pen with hogs in it. The hogs came up to the fence and stuck their noses through and sniffed. The wind was picking up their scent, and I’ll tell you, it was healthy.
Down past the pens and the outhouse, which had a unique and memorable aroma all its own, we entered a path in the woods, and after a while we came to a clearing, and in the clearing was a huge well-cared-for barn. Out to the right of the clearing were a number of stinking armadillo carcasses; nothing was left but the decaying shells and the ants and flies they housed.
There was a mound of dirt beyond that, and I could see something on top of the mounds, in a row, about two feet apart, but I couldn’t make out what it was.
Inside, the barn was air-conditioned. Haskel flipped a switch and the lights came on and showed boxes and racks of guns and the smell of gun oil was strong and sweet, and there was the stench of gunpowder too, and it was acrid and biting to the nostrils. In the back you could see a kind of gun range with bags of sand and bales of hay and targets.
“Run everything on a generator,” Haskel said. “Got to keep it a certain temperature for the stuff I carry. Not too cold. Not too hot. There’s shit in here, weather got wrong, it’d go off and blow our asses all the way to Mineola. Maybe out in the goddamned Gulf.”
“I don’t like to travel that far unless I got plane tickets and a steward in my lap,” Leonard said.
