Rumble Tumble

Rumble Tumble by Joe R. Lansdale

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Authors: Joe R. Lansdale
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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.
    Haskel cut an eye toward Leonard. “You mean stewardess, don’t you?”
    “I don’t think so,” Leonard said, and let Haskel churn that one over. Haskel didn’t seem to come to any decision. Maybe he’d look up the word “steward” in the dictionary after we left and think about it some and be real upset. I hoped so.
    I was amazed at all the guns and ammo and the boxes that surely contained more of the same. On racks were things like rocket launchers and grenades and knives. I personally don’t like the idea of someone as stupid as Haskel with guns. Actually, I didn’t like the idea of anyone with guns. Me especially. It was one thing to own a handgun, a hunting rifle, but to have enough weapons to give the United States Army a fight went beyond desire for liberty and went over into plain ole anarchy. Pretty soon we would decide liberty also included the right to own our own personal backyard nuclear device. That goes with our right to bear arms, doesn’t it? Maybe Haskel could sell us a nuke and we could use it to turn Tillie’s new pimp into a mushroom cloud. That would teach him.
    Haskel raised an arm and pointed around the expanse of the barn. “This has got to be the best goddamn store of weapons in East Texas. Maybe Texas. What I’m sayin’ to you is, had I not done business with you before, colored fella—”
    “Leonard,” Leonard said.
    “—I wouldn’t be doing business with you now. If anything goes wrong, and things come back on me, and I get my dick in the wood chipper over selling you guns, I got connections, and these connections, they wouldn’t like to find out you fucked me. You did that to me, even if I’m in a jail cell, some night you go to bed, you won’t wake up. There’s people I know will see to it.”
    “Wow,” Leonard said, “I just had a little tingle all the way to the end of my big black toes. What about you, Hap?”
    “My toes aren’t black, but I think I felt a tingle.”
    Haskel said, “What I want you to do is go over to that table there, write your name on the pad, and I want you to show me your driver’s license so I know you got the same name you put down. You got other identification, I want to see it. That way, something goes wrong, cops come down on my head, I got your name and identification. We all go down together.”
    “Last time I was here you just had guns in the trunk of your car,” Leonard said.
    “Business is good,” Haskel said. “That Waco thing, the Oklahoma bombing. That’s good for business.”
    We went over to the desk, got out our driver’s licenses and let Haskel look at them. Neither of us had credit cards to show, but we both had ancient Social Security cards and we let him look at those. He carefully wrote down our license and card numbers

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