Leather Maiden by Joe R. Lansdale Page B

We’re devils together.”
    â€œI guess we are.”
    â€œSure we are. Now, listen up. You get to needing old Booger, you just flip the phone and hit the number. You’d do that, right?”
    â€œSure,” I said.
    â€œI don’t want my little darling here to grow cold, so I’m going to hang up and mount up.”
    â€œEnjoy the ride, and go light on the spurs.”
    â€œHell, Baby Man, I’m a professional.”
    When he hung up, oddly enough, I felt lonely.

    Before arriving in Camp Rapture I had made a detour to get my handful of things from Houston where I had them in storage, and then I had made a detour to visit Booger.
    I call Booger a friend, but I’m not really sure I mean it. He may be more of an attachment, like a growth of some sort. It was like I told Dad. I want to get rid of him, cut him out, but there are complications and attachments.
    Booger makes me nervous. He makes everyone nervous.
    Booger has a real first and last name, but he doesn’t go by them and doesn’t like either mentioned in polite society. He isn’t the kind of guy you take to a fancy tea. You tell him not to handle all the sandwiches, open them up to see what was inside, he might shove your head in the punch bowl and hold you there till you drowned, then piss on the carpet on his way out.
    He lacks patience.
    He’s not tall, but he’s thick and vigorous, and has a shiny shaved head the color of a penny. Racially, he’s marooned somewhere between black guy and honky, with a slightly Asian cast to his eyes. In Iraq, the handful who liked him called him the Copper Cat.
    He’s the kind of guy who’s not averse to scratching his privates in public or beating a smartass near to death with a car antenna, which he nearly did once. No one remembers the source of the disagreement that led to the beating, not even Booger, though he has a faint memory about an argument over a game of horseshoes. And though two witnesses saw him give the beating, they had a sudden loss of sight and memory when it came time for them to give information to the law.
    They get free beer for life at Booger’s bar now, or at least it’s offered. According to Booger, they don’t actually come around and hang out, not after what they saw in the parking lot. The guy Booger got onto, they found him out near the town dump with his pants pulled down and the antenna pretty far up his ass, minus lubricant, and he was running a low-grade fever and hallucinating. He lived, but he developed a solid case of memory loss himself, told some insane story about being attacked and raped by a roving band of belligerent homosexual Bible salesmen. He drives a car that won’t get radio; missing an antenna.
    Around his little town of Hootie Hoot, Oklahoma, the cops make a point of leaving Booger alone. To them, he’s like the big bad ghost that lives on the hill, in the back of his bar.
    Before I had come to Camp Rapture, I had been hanging out with Booger at his gun range, and then his bar. And though me and him are on good terms, it’s always a little precarious when we’re in the process of bonding. A certain shift of light, a fart blow in his direction, and he could go off the beam faster than a Baptist preacher in Las Vegas with a pack of ribbed condoms and the church funds in his pocket.
    Booger had never gone off on me, but I had seen his eyes narrow and his mouth twitch from time to time, and I made a habit to watch for any telltale signs when we were together, minded my Ps and Qs around him and wondered why I bothered at all; that bother is something I keep coming back to, investigating and arriving nowhere.
    I suppose it’s our Iraq connection. That kind of thing, making war together, gives us a link; sometimes, for me, that link is like a ball and chain. Booger, in many ways, has yet to quit fighting the war. Originally, he moved his inborn hatred of just about everybody from Oklahoma