At eleven o’clock that same damn night, somebody, or some-bodies, had to go and ruin my day of black-eyed Susans and Kool-Aid wine kisses by ringing the doorbell. Nobody was home but me. The only light in the house came from the TV, and it was on mute. Hardly ten seconds passed before they rang again. I crawled to the front door on my hands and knees. The hallway was as dark as the inside of my stomach. I didn’t hear anything at first, and then a man said, “I saw her leave before. Around dinnertime. Maybe they both—”
“Will you hush?”
One of the two of them slammed on the door with a fist. The sound of it filled up the hallway like shotgun blasts. I held my breath and waited. It was quiet for a time, and then the first one started up complaining again.
“After all this waiting around, I could eat a bite or two myself. What you think about barbeque? I hear there’s a good place up the road. Just off I-16. I think it’s called the Forking Pork. My cousin went there before and he said he ate the shit out of their pulled-pork sandwiches. I could seriously go for some pulled pork and—”
“Ever hear the expression, never trust a man with an ass wider than his shoulders? Well, you’re one fucking sandwich away from untrustworthy, bo.”
“Wenzell, come on, man. Don’t give me that—”
“What I tell you about using that name? Just quit, before I pop you one. I didn’t choose the damn thing and the hell if I’m going to let you use it.”
“I’d like to see you try.”
“Uh-huh,” the Wenzell man said, and the way he said it, all freezy and evil sounding, I’d of kept my mouth shut about the name, the Forking Pork, and everything else. The hungry one must of agreed with me. Neither said nothing for a while.
Then the hungry guy came on quiet and apologetic-like. “Sorry, I forget. What you want me to—?”
“Wait. Hush up now, Travis.” The second man, who didn’t like to be called Wenzell, made a hissing sound and lowered his voice. “You hear that?”
“No.’
“The car is—” The rest of what he said was a grumble. Neither of their voices sounded like the one I’d heard on the phone. The mouth breather. I tried to picture Marty from when I saw him the other night at Bow Wow’s, but his face wouldn’t come.
“Yeah, that’s probably right. I don’t expect he walked here,” Travis said. His voice was higher pitched and easier to hear.
Something crunched outside and then the flap on the mail slot lifted. I held my breath again and concentrated on being invisible. No one can see me. No one can see me. No one can see me. The man looking through the slot breathed heavily, but not the way Marty did on the phone. This one had a slight wheeze. I hoped to God he couldn’t see the blue flicker from the TV.
“No nothing,” Travis said. “If he’s here, then he’s quiet as a Goddamned mouse. We can tell Marty we waited till …” He paused. “Around midnight. I don’t believe he’s here. Even Hayes ain’t stupid enough to hide out in the first place we’d look.”
He obviously don’t know Hayes, I thought.
“Marty thinks he is.” Wenzell coughed and one or the other of them rubbed his feet against the brickwork, making a couple of sandy scrapes.
“Well, the man can come out here and wait himself, he thinks that. I’ll tell him to his face.” Travis giggled. It was a very unpleasant sound, and I was glad I couldn’t see him while he did it.
“Uh-huh. I’ll be believing that shit when I see it. You always talk big when it’s just you and me.”
“Let’s go get us some food,” Travis said, his voice turning whiney. “We been here for fucking ever. They’re gone. Vamoosed. I still don’t get why Marty won’t let us bust in here and check for sure.”
“Marty says there’s always cops coming over to the emergency room. He said, unless it’s a real dark, overcast night, somebody might see something.”
“Bah. The hospital is a half-mile up the hill. Nobody can see us.” Travis sniffed and spat. “Wait, you hear that sound, Burns?”
Neither of them said anything for a second.
“I don’t hear shit,” Burns, the non-Wenzell, said. Then I remembered the name from that horrible night at Bow Wow’s. I couldn’t remember the man’s face to save my life. Only that ugly pink triangle scar on his cheek and the red baseball cap. Unless these were different Burnses and Travises, I had nearly the whole nasty cast on my doorstep.
“That’s the sound of my stomach eating on itself.” Travis made his horrible giggle again, like a ten-year-old troll girl.
“That be the case, bo, you ain’t got nothing to worry about for a while. You could live off that belly for a month or two.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you yourself.”
“And if you don’t quit with that bo shit, I’ll take up calling you Wenzell again. I noticed bo is what you always call people you’re fixing to punch. Don’t be calling me that. It’s like you calling me bitch or something.”
“No, you dumbass. It ain’t nothing like the same thing,” Burns said. “For somebody so ugly, you sure are sensitive.”
“I’d like to see you say something like that to Butthole.”
“Bah.” Burns paused for a couple beats. “Who?”
“Butthole Gibbs. You know. The one who laid down the law over in Jasper that time. Marty might bring him up to do a job on Hayes.”
Burns grunted and said, “Nuh-uh, I don’t recall nothing about that.”
Travis told him last fall the Higgins brothers held up a high-stakes poker game. The night they came, there was almost forty grand on the table. The man who ran the game called up Marty after it happened, pissed off because he paid Marty to provide protection, and so Marty called Butthole and said for him to fix the ones who did it. The older Higgins boy’s mask slipped when he was scooping the cash up off the table or they might of gotten away clean. Half the room had a good, long look at him by the time he shoved it back in place. A week later and he was in the hospital, a stuttering idjit with half a dozen broken bones. Butthole split his head open and all of elementary school fell out. They never found the younger one, but Travis heard he’d poured lighter fluid in the kid’s mouth and set him alight. The oddest part of all, according to him, was that Butthole lived forty minutes away in a little house in Garden City with his mama. Every Sunday morning he bought her a fresh bouquet of pink carnations and took her to the early service at Second Baptist. Supposedly, even his mama called him Butthole.
The two stopped talking. A car rolled slowly down the road. I’ll be damned if I didn’t hear them scramble behind the holly bushes next to the door. As the headlights strafed the windows, their shadows hunched and fattened against the blinds. I hoped to God it wasn’t my mom coming home. Somewhere close, gravel crunched and a bad muffler farted twice and then the engine quit. A car door slammed. Maybe next door. Then a man started humming an aimless tune. Mr. Cannon. His screen door creaked open and shut, bouncing three times before it came to rest. I smiled to think of those two getting jumpy over Mr. Cannon, who always put me in mind of a pink trash bag filled with mashed potatoes.
“We best be getting on soon,” Travis said. “That was close.”