The Two-Bear Mambo Read Online Free PDF Page A

too."
    "Yeah, you're right, Charlie," Hanson said. “It won't work. It was a major stupid idea. It's like I been having a sack of shit for a head lately. Idea like that sucks big time."
    "I can feel a draft from it over here," Charlie said.
    "Yeah," Hanson said. “Let's have some eggnog, then, Hap, Leonard, we'll take y'all back to the hoosegow."
    "Grovetown," I said, "it's a place I been wanting to visit. I'd just like to go by the house, get a change of clothes, maybe a paperback to go."
    "Unless, of course," Leonard said, "you'd prefer we leave tonight. Right now."
    Chapter 4
    It was after midnight, Christmas Day, when I took the wheel of Charlie's car and drove him over to Leonard's. Idea was, Leonard was going to get his car and follow me to Charlie's place. I'd drop Charlie and his car off, then we'd leave in Leonard's heap. Charlie was just too drunk to drive.
    It had grown quite cold and it was a clear night. Kind of night I relished when I was a kid. My dad, who worked as a mechanic, or at the foundry from time to time, would go out in the yard with me and we'd throw a blanket over our shoulders and sit on the porch stoop and look at the stars. We were well out in the country then, and there were no streetlights, and with the house lights off the stars glowed in the black satin heavens like white dots of neon.
    Dad was a heavy man and very tired and we didn't play ball together or do any of the classic stuff fathers and sons are supposed to do. He put in twelve-hour days and did hard manual labor, so he wasn't up for much ball chasing when he came home. But he did his best. He taught me about the woods when he had time, went to my school plays, made sure I had money for comic books, and found the time, now and then, when he should have been sleeping, to sit on the porch and point out the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, and he had names for some of the other stars I've forgotten, but they weren't the names you normally hear. They were names given the constellations by his father or grandfather, and they had known the stars as well as a seasoned truck driver knows a road map.
    Dad told me stories while we looked at the stars. He had known Bonnie and Clyde. He had driven around Gladewater, Texas, with them one Fourth of July and tossed firecrackers out the windows of their automobile. At the time, he didn't know they were being pursued by every law enforcement agency in Texas.
    Late one night during the depths of the Great Depression, down by the railroad track where he was hoboing, he and his friends had met Pretty Boy Floyd. He had fought bareknuckle and wrestled at county fairs for money. He knew handed-down stories of Billy the Kid, Belle Starr, Sam Bass, and Jessie James, and when he was a child, he'd seen Frank James giving a talk in a Sears store on the ills of crime. He may have yarned a little, but I liked it all anyway.
    Now, the stories I heard were off the late-night news. Rapes and serial murders and child molestations. Children with guns and no imagination and less ambition. It wasn't a world my father would have understood. Last time I had seen him was a Christmas many years ago. He looked as if he'd just viewed the new world he was living in for the very first time and didn't like it and didn't want to stay. He was dead in two weeks. A heart attack and he was out of there.
    When we got to Leonard's, I knew he was hoping Raul hadn't left, but Raul's Ford station wagon was gone. There were a couple of cops there, watching the place. Leonard thanked them, shooed them off, and Charlie let him.
    Leonard went inside while we sat in Charlie's car with the engine running and the heater turned high. It was quite cozy. Charlie was pretty drunk, but when he spoke his words were clear, so I figured he still had a few brain cells left.
    "Here's y'all's Christmas present," Charlie said. "Some advice. Don't do this thing for Hanson."
    "It beats jail," I said.
    "You ain't goin' to jail. You know that. Hanson ain't