Funny what goes through your head when you’re dumping a body. I was thinking about how I would explain things to Connie when I got home. As usual, Tuco didn’t give a shit about my concerns.
“I have a bad feelin’ ‘bout this, Blondie,” Tuco said.
Me and Tuco stood along the muddy bank of Black Water Bayou and stared at two human legs bobbing in the water. The rest of the body had already submerged beneath the glassy surface. It looked like the body had been sawed in half, which it hadn’t been. I hadn’t had time.
The rain had finally stopped, and the moon broke through the thick clouds. The heavy branches of an oak tree thick with rain slick leaves and Spanish Moss cast long shadows over the water. An armada of mosquitoes and biting flies buzzed my ears. My right arm worked like a windshield wiper in front of my face. The stench of death and decay hung in the heavy air.
“Speak your peace now,” I said. “He’s going down fast.”
“You’re a cold bastard. No different than the gators in this here river.”
Tuco held an opened umbrella above his head in one hand and a joint in the other. His voice sounded strangled from the smoke in his throat.
“It was a calculated risk.”
“That’s what I mean. Everythin’ is a calculation with you.” Tuco shook the remaining raindrops from his umbrella, collapsed it in on itself, and tossed it into the bayou with a splash. “Anyway, you should have waited for me. It would have been nice to see him alive one more time.”
“Couldn’t be helped. He almost got the jump on me.”
Tuco hit his joint long and hard. He let the smoke escape through his nostrils. He smoked when he was nervous. I smoked when I wasn’t.
“Hey, Blondie. What do you call the loneliest bayou in the world?” he says out of the blue.
“Go fuck yourself.”
He laughed, and said, “Don’t be that way.”
It was an old joke, one my old man used to tell me. I was fifteen the last time he’d told it. It had been the day before a crack-head named Lil Bit stuck up an off the books game my old man ran out of the back of a barber shop. Lil Bit, being a crack head, got spooked and shot up the joint as he was running out the door. A stray round hit my old man in the right eye. He was dead before his head struck the table. The next day cops came around and spoke to my mom. They couldn’t find the killer, but they were doing everything possible to run him down. That’s what they told her. I found Lil Bit an hour later in an abandoned house around the way. He was so high he just stared at me as I pointed one of my old man’s guns at his face and put a bullet in his right eye.
He was the first man I’d ever killed.
The judge sent me to the state correctional facility for juveniles for six years to rehabilitate. Good. Christian. Justice. Razor wire lined the hurricane fence that marked the boundary of the property. I went in angry and came out a hardened, skilled criminal. I could barely read, but I’d received a top notch education in criminal science from Hard Knocks Harvard. Graduated top of my class. That’s where I teamed up with Tuco and Angel Eyes, two fatherless boys like me. Cold bastards even then. Each of us searching for what it meant to be a man and finding our role models in a movie western that gave us our street names. Whenever we were together, the other boys and the guards would say, “there they go. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”
It was a badge of honor. We must have watched it a thousand times.
As fate would have it, we all got out within a month of each other, and wasted no time building a business and a reputation. We left a lot of bodies in our wake. Because we trusted each other like brothers, none of us ever saw the inside of a jail cell for longer than twenty-four hours. There wasn’t anything we wouldn’t do for one another. That’s an arrangement that works until it doesn’t. Boys grow to men. Men want to be free. Tuco hadn’t told the joke in years. He knew how sensitive I was about it.
Tuco repeated himself. “What do you call the loneliest bayou in the world?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Bullshit.”
Black Water Bayou bent nearly ninety degrees where Tuco and I stood in a natural clearing surrounded by trees. A dirt path was the only way in except on the water. The sweet scent of Magnolia mixed with the stench of nature’s rot. Tree frogs croaked loudly across the water. Their call echoed in the darkness. It was the perfect dumping ground because of the alligators. Nature’s greatest garbage collectors. Throw it out and they take care of it. Even on Sunday.
“Fuck!” Tuco shouted.
I looked over and saw him balanced on his left leg while staring at his right shoe stuck out in front of him at an angle.
“What’s eating you?” I said, already grinning because I knew it was gonna be something stupid.
“I got goose shit in my new Stacy Adams.”
“Show some respect, Tuco.”
“Hey, we’re here because of you, remember. You said it had to be done.”
It had to be done. Just business. Him or me, and fuck him. It’s what we said to justify the dirty work of our profession.
Tuco stopped his dancing. “So long Angel Eyes. You were the son of a thousand fathers. All bastards like you.”
It was Tuco’s favorite Eli Wallach quote from the movie. That was his thing. Whenever things were about to go down Tuco would channel Eli, the three of us would laugh, and someone would end up dead. I never imagined he’d be talking over one of us. Shit happens. When it does, somebody dies.
The last of the body slipped beneath the water. There was a rustling in the tall grass on the far bank. I knew from experience it was dinnertime. The headlights on Tuco’s Lexus 450 shone across the bayou. Two sparkling, side-by-side marbles reflected the light as they sliced the surface of the water toward the body. They sank slowly beneath the surface like submarine periscopes.
“You sure we did the right thing?”
“We’ve never done the right thing our whole lives.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I told you,” I said. “Don’t make me tell you again.”
“But, a deal with the feds . . . Rat us out. No way, not Angel Eyes — ”
“He planned to rob us and leave us holding nothing but our dicks when the feds came for us. One of my guys at the bureau told me.”
Tuco shook his head. “That don’t sound like Angel Eyes. He’d die for us.”
I rolled my head around and heard my neck pop.
“He did.”
My Tissot watch beeped. It was getting late. Connie and the kids would be asleep when I got home. My heart was breaking. The longer this took the harder it would be.
“How’d you get him out here anyway?” Tuco said. “He had to know somethin’ was up.”
I had been wondering how long it would take for him to ask.
“I told him the only thing I knew would bring him out. I told him you were going to the cops.”
Tuco stepped back, threw his arms up, and flailed around as though I had bitch slapped him. If he were seriously pissed, he would’ve pulled his cannon and shot me in the back of the head without a word.
“What the fu — ,”
“Quit crying. It worked didn’t it?”
“That’s messed up, bruh. Angel Eyes died thinkin’ I was a punk bitch. That ain’t right. That ain’t right at all. I got a reputation to protect.”
I pulled a box of Marlboros from my suit and offered Tuco one as a peace offering.
“Angel Eyes will keep your secret.”
He took the cigarette, and I slid one between my lips straight from the box. Tuco flipped open his gold lighter and lit our cigs. We stood there, took long drags, and stared past the glowing red tips at the water. I stole another look at my watch. Time was up.
“It’s peaceful out here,” Tuco said. “Like a graveyard should be.”
I couldn’t argue with him. Years before, after our release from Juvie and before we started dumping bodies in the water, the three of us would fish off the bank, drink Mad Dog 20/20 wine, smoke weed, and dream of conquering the world . . . and gold.
Just like Tuco was reading my mind he says, “We should go fishin’ tomorrow. After church. Take the boat out into the Gulf. I still got that old fishing pole I had when we was kids.”
I filled my lungs with smoke and felt it slide along the back of my throat on its journey back up. The tingle as it escaped through my nose helped me imagine myself as a fire-breathing dragon. I flicked the rest of the cigarette out over the bayou in a high arc and watched it land not far from the body’s watery grave. It barely made a splash before something below the surface swallowed it whole.
“I got this thing I got to take care of,” I said.
“What thing?”
“It’s big. When it’s done, I’m out.” I could see Tuco wasn’t happy about the idea. “It’s time to hang up my spurs.”
“This ain’t no movie, Blondie. You don’t get to ride off in the sunset. There ain’t no deals without me. We’re still a team.”
“Not anymore.”
“No. What about the money? You gonna walk away from all of it, everythin’ the three of us built, killed to keep.”
“I’m going my own way. It’s time.”
Tuco jabbed the side of his head with his index finger like a woodpecker drilling a tree hole. “Blondie the big fuckin’ brain. Just like in the movie, right?”
“Gina’s coming with me, too.”
When I put my pack of Marlboros back in my suit pocket, I slid my other hand to the small of my back and wrapped my fingers around the pistol grip of my Glock. Then, when Tuco lit our cigarette, I removed it, and held it next to my leg away from him.
“Gina,” Tuco said. “Angel Eyes’s old lady? What about Connie? What about your wife?”
I watched Tuco from the corner of my eye. “Gina’s knocked up.”
Tuco paced along the bank of the bayou. He liked to pace when his small brain couldn’t comprehend large concepts. He let out a stream of shits and fucks and kiss my ass and son-of-a-bitches before he calmed down and faced me.
“You were doing Gina? Did Angel Eyes know ‘bout the two of you?”
“I’m not the one in the bayou, am I?”
He sped up his pace and pointed at me like a scolding big brother. He wagged a bony finger at me.
“You broke the rule, Blondie. You broke the only rule we had.”
Tuco was right. I broke the one hard and fast rule among the three of us. But, it was a necessary evil. I didn’t want her. I needed her.
“None of us was very good with rules,” I said.
Tuco laughed in that high-pitched staccato of his a Hyena would envy.
“This rule we don’t break. Why? Connie and Gina could pass for twins. Doin’ one is like doin’ the other.”
He took the news better than I thought he would. I guess he figured Angel Eyes no longer had a say. Tuco was right about Gina and Connie looking like twin sisters, but he was wrong thinking that was the attraction. Tuco paced again, then stopped suddenly.
“Angel Eyes wasn’t rattin’ us out. You killed him because of Gina.”
“It’s over, Tuco.”
He stopped, threw his arms open wide like he wanted to embrace the world.
“Or what? You gonna put me in the bayou, too?”
“You didn’t really think it could last forever, did you?”
“Forever? Man, my whole life I just been tryin’ to get to tomorrow.”
“Angel Eyes always said you had too much ambition.”
Tuco dropped his cigarette and crushed it beneath his shoe, turned, and spoke while he faced the water.
“You remember the last scene. Angel Eyes is dead in the grave. Tuco and Blondie dig up the gold and split it.”
“I remember. Blondie had emptied Tuco’s gun the night before the big shootout. He left Tuco hanging from a tree limb, and teetering on a wobbly cross with a noose around his neck. Blondie got away clean.”
“Nobody gets away clean.”
“And life ain’t a movie.”
Tuco turned, faced me. “You ain’t gettin’ all the gold.”
His hand moved to the inside of his jacket toward the cannon he kept in his shoulder holster. I wasn’t worried.
“That’s the other part of this,” I said, and cocked my weapon. “I promised to split it with Angel Eyes after we took care of you.”
Angel Eyes stepped out of the shadows carrying his favorite sawed off shotgun.
“How’s it hangin’, Tuco?” he said just before he emptied a barrel in Tuco’s kneecaps.
Tuco went down like chopped sugar cane, and as he raised his gun on the way down, Angel Eyes blew his hand off with the other barrel. He was a fucking artist with that thing.
Tuco thrashed around in the mud and blood, his scream the only sound for miles.
“You don’t go to the cops,” Angel Eyes spat at Tuco. “After all the shit we’ve been through. You — never — go — to the cops!”
Tuco’s lips formed words, but pain and shock mangled the sound. Gibberish, like baby talk, spewed from his mouth. I took a step forward, raised my weapon, and pointed it at Tuco. My friend knew what was coming and straightened himself as best he could on his blown out knees. He made me proud.
“Hey, Blondie,” he finally whimpered, grinning. “You know what you are? You’re a no good sonofa — ”
Eli Wallach again.
I put a bullet between Tuco’s eyes. The blast knocked him backward into the bayou. His head was submerged, and his legs rested on the muddy bank. It wouldn’t be long before the gators caught his scent and dragged him the rest of the way.
Angel Eyes cracked the barrel of his smoking shotgun and fumbled around in his pocket for cartridges. He was pissed. Too pissed. Shaken. Not his professional self. Not a cold bastard.
“I heard that shit you said about you and Gina. You were pretty convincin’.”
“I only lie when the truth doesn’t work.”
I turned and put two in his chest. The rounds knocked him to the ground; his shotgun went flying in the dark. Angel Eyes wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t gonna live long.
“Motherfuc — ”
“What did you think was going to happen?”
“You no good son of a bitch.”
“Tuco would have said, ‘when you’re going to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.”
Angel Eyes’s hands slipped in the mud as he tried to backpedal away. I almost felt sorry for him.
“You and Tuco weren’t gonna let me just walk away,” I said. “Then there was the Gina problem. I feel bad about that, by the way.”
Angel Eyes chuckled. Blood spilled from his lips. “Gina is bat-shit crazy. You think I’d choose her over you?”
Angel Eyes was smart, as smart as me. Smarter maybe. That’s the real reason he had to go.
“She’ll be taken care. I won’t hurt her.”
“To hell with Gina, and to hell with you.”
“The cops need to find three bodies in the water when they get the anonymous tip. Between you and Tuco, and what’s left of my old man’s remains, the DNA will match all three of us.”
Angel Eyes coughed up more blood, and blood drained through his fingers as he grasped his chest. His eyes drooped; his head lolled to one side.
“All this for the money. Our gold.”
“An end to a means. It wasn’t just the gold.”
Angel Eyes had always prided himself on his appearance. He was the sharpest dresser of the three of us. Tailored suits, custom shirts, and hand-made shoes filled his closets. Bleeding the way he was, he looked pitiful squirming in the mud.
“This ain’t how the movie ends, Blondie.”
“Angel Eyes dies. Blondie gets away clean. So yeah, the ending is the same except now I won’t have to look over my shoulder for Tuco all my life.” I stood above my friend and looked down into his eyes. “You never got it. It was just a movie.”
He deserved better, but better wasn’t gonna come. Without me to do the thinking, it was a matter of time before the cops caught up with them. Angel Eyes would go down in a hail of bullets, but Tuco would roll over like a ten dollar meth whore. This was the only way out for me. I never liked goodbyes.
“I’ll check in with your father when I see him,” Angel Eyes said. “Let him know how you turned out.”
I stepped back to avoid the blood splatter and put two in his head.
The silence that followed stunned me. It was as if the bayou stopped flowing and the animals had turned their backs on me. Angel Eyes and Tuco had always been there. Now they were gone. I was alone.
Movement in the tall grass behind me startled me, and I spun around, gun raised. The eyes of a large gator twinkled and he lumbered out into the clearing unafraid. It was as big as a buick. I’d never seen him before. We stared at each other for a moment until the gator made a wide arc around me and snapped down on Angel Eyes’ head as he crawled to the bayou, his powerful tail dragging along the ground until the bayou embraced them both as though they had never existed.
Bythe time I parked my Mercedes in my driveway, the sun was peeking over the treetops. The kids wouldn’t wake for another two hours. I entered through the garage door and found the kitchen lights on. Connie standing at the kitchen sink wearing the beige silk robe I loved on her. It barely reached her thighs and showed just a hint of firm, brown, ass cheeks below the hem. I wrapped my arms around her and reached inside her robe to cup her tight breasts. The warm scent of her filled my nose. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply. I dreamed of sunny walks along a beach and making love on the sand. The children were playing in the surf in sight, but far enough away so they couldn’t see what we were doing. The image changed, and two familiar looking men were walking along the beach toward them. The sun at their backs obscured their faces, but I recognized Tuco and Angel Eyes.
My eyes snapped open.
“Hey, baby, what you doing up so early,” I said. “You hungry? Why don’t I make some eggs and bacon for all of us? We haven’t had breakfast as a family in a while. I need to talk to you about something. I got plans, baby, big plans.” The words rushed from me.
Connie had one hand in a sink full of soapy water. Steam fogged up the window over the sink. Her reflection was lost in the steam and I couldn’t read her face.
“What’s the matter, baby?” I said, and turned her around to face me.
Gina smiled brighter than the morning sun.
“You did it. You killed them.” She kissed me hard.
I pushed her away and held her at arm’s length.
“What are you doing here? Where’s Connie?”
“It was the only way for us to be free, to be together. Connie and your kids. You wouldn’t be able to leave them. She’d never let you. Not without my help, anyway. So I took care of it. I did it for us.”
I grabbed her by the throat. “What did you do?”
“I was gentle with the babies. A soft pillow over their faces, and it was over. Connie, well, she struggled and . . . I used your straight razor across her throat. I swear — ”
I punched Gina in the jaw with all the rage I had inside. She fell flat on her back, and slid across the kitchen tiles until she came to a stop at the refrigerator. I wanted to run upstairs, but my feet felt nailed down. I didn’t want to believe her. I couldn’t. Women say a lot of things when they’re in love, lies they really believe. Crazy lies, but the blood on Connie’s robe was impossible to dismiss. The robe slipped open revealing her baby bump. I wanted to kill them both.
“What did you do?” I heard myself shout again. My voice sounded as though it came from a far off place. “What did I do?”
Me, Angel Eyes, and Tuco had stashed away fifty-million dollars in gold in safe deposit boxes in different banks in the Caribbean, another twenty million in commercial property in the states, thirty in bearer bonds and cash. Tuco couldn’t keep a nickel for more than an hour without spending it, but Angel Eyes had fifteen million more hidden in a secret account Gina knew how to get. Angel Eyes had been smart to set aside a little for emergencies. We were all skimming from each other. We knew it, but never said anything. We loved each other in our own way. But, I wanted it all. I needed all of it. I wanted to be free.
My family would have been set for the rest of their lives plus twenty years. My children would have grown up normal. They would have eventually learned what kind of man I was, but I didn’t care. They weren’t going to be like daddy. That’s all that mattered.
Gina held a hand across her busted lip. “Don’t you see?” She rubbed her belly. “Now we can have our own family. You’re free. We both are.”
Hearing her say it out loud turned my stomach. She smiled with bloody teeth. The purple swelling on her jaw made her face look lopsided. I pulled out my Glock and chambered a round. She had killed my family. There was no freedom. There was only one thing to do.
I thought of Angel Eyes and Tuco, imagined them sitting beside my old man in Hell. All three of them knocking back shots of expensive Tequila, laughing, waiting for me while an old western movie played on a black and white tv in the background. I heard the theme song whining like dying cat over their laughter. I didn’t have to be told what was on the screen.
“Didn’t I tell him that bitch was crazy?” Angel Eyes says. Tuco nods like a bobble head doll.
“Yo, Blondie,” Tuco says. “How’s the family?”
They laugh until they weep. Even my old man wipes tears from his eyes. He looks directly at me.
“Hey, son. What do you call the loneliest bayou in the world?”
Cold blooded bastards. The three of them. None of us any different from the gators in Black Water Bayou.
The metallic clack of my gun’s hammer echoes in the room. Gina is crying, begging me not to do it.
“You remember the punchline now, don’t you?” Tuco asks.
I nod. The tears make it hard to see. I taste the gun metal on my tongue.
“What do you call the loneliest bayou in the world?” I mumble past the barrel. “Bayou Self.”
Gina screams.
END
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