The Two-Bear Mambo by Joe R. Lansdale

said. "Jimmy. He got so bad, only way he could get around was me totin' him. He was eleven. My youngest. Damn good age for a boy, but for him it was hell. Spittin' image of me. Good boy. Never did nothing but try and be good. Made good grades until he got so bad he just couldn't study. His body turned to jelly. Just goddamn jelly."
    "I'm sorry."
    "He was a good boy. He was a good boy right to the end, trying to cheer me up. Trying to smile. He died with me holding his hand. It was so little, I closed mine, you couldn't even see his. He hadn't had that shit, hell, he'd gone to college and made something of himself. God bless him."
    "I truly am sorry, Chief."
    "Well, don't whine about it. You didn't know him. Wasn't nothing to you. I shouldn't even have said anything to you about it ... now, this nigger gal."
    "Florida."
    "Yeah, Florida. She came to the jail, asked a few questions, left, and I didn't see her again, 'cept around town. Over at the filling station getting some gas in that little car of hers."
    "A gray Toyota."
    "That's the one. Real sporty."
    "That's all you know about her?"
    "That's it. I heard a few of the boys mention they'd seen her and that she dressed a little too rich, if you know what I mean, but had she been a couple shades paler, they might have taken her to church, and to a little social after."
    I thought of Florida and her dresses. Mostly short. Mostly tight. I thought of the story Charlie told me. I had a sudden red-hot and angry vision of the Chief with an upholstery needle threaded with wire.
    "Let me ask a couple of questions that don't have to do with Florida," I said. "This guy that hung himself in jail. Why?"
    "Who's to know a nigger's mind? I wasn't even around. I was out of town."
    "Lot of hangings in your little jail?"
    Chief Cantuck studied me a moment. "You a reporter? The colored gal said she was doing some kind of article. Said she was a lawyer too, though I ain't sure about that."
    "She was."
    "If she was, then you just shit on yourself, pilgrim. She was a lawyer, then she didn't work for you, did she?"
    "Well, she did law work."
    "I think you're full of it, buddy."
    I had been feeling superior and condescending to the old man, and he'd been baiting me all along. Dropping sugar in front of me until he got me close enough to whack with the swatter. His tone was different now. A lot less cracker. "You think you're so smart," he said. "Well, I got to tell you, you ain't that smart."
    "I see that," I said.
    He casually slipped the leather trigger guard off his revolver and shifted toward me in the seat, his hand resting on the butt of his pistol. A bead of sweat formed immediately on my upper lip and ran into my mouth.
    "Listen here. I knew you and that smartass nigger were full of shit soon as I saw you. Ain't a word come out of your mouth that's even kin to the truth. There's nothing about you boys that fits, so I figure you're trouble. More do-gooders trying to come down here and check on our nigger trouble and make it into something it isn't. I haven't heard one do-gooder ask about the people this nigger killed. The white man this guitar plunker cut up for a few dollars."
    "I didn't say anything about his guilt or innocence. I'm just asking about Florida."
    "Don't take me for a fool 'cause I got swollen nuts and bad teeth and I eat too much. I'm on the dime much as you are, College Boy."
    "Actually, I dropped out. And I'm way past being a boy."
    "Well, you should have finished college, boy. Might have learned something. Let me tell you this, Swiftie. That little nigger came snooping around asking questions. She wanted to see if that boy was murdered. She figured the Caucasian Knights was in on it. Let me tell you something. The Knights are ripe in this town, and they're mostly nothing but a bunch of mean bastards, just like the Klan, which is really all they are, but now and then they do a good thing or two. There's folks need killin'."
    "Then you're saying the Klan, or these Knights,