Out back we slung the baseball bats in the direction of the ball field. We went and got in the car. Leonard said, “You thanked her? And gave her a diet tip?”
“It just sort of came out,” I said.
“It took the edge off my witty remarks.”
“Sorry.”
“Well,” Leonard said. “You got to be you. How about we go by Wal-Mart, buy some cookies-and-cream ice cream, some vanilla wafers to dip in it?”
“Nothing like leg breaking and dessert,” I said.
“I broke the motherfucker’s hand, and I think I got a rib too,” Leonard said. “You’re the one broke a leg. A kneecap.”
“I can still hear it crack,” I said.
“Maybe we’ll get a couple cartons of ice cream, brother.”
Leonard started up his car and pulled out.
I said, “That really made you feel good, didn’t it, Leonard? Hittin’ that guy.”
“I don’t know good is how I feel, but satisfied sort of fits,” Leonard said. “And he didn’t shoot me, so I feel good about that. Motherfucker would have done better to throw the gun at me, his aim was so bad.”
Leonard took Thomas’s gun out of his waistband and handed it to me and I popped out the clip and cleaned it with a Kleenex. I wrapped the clip in the Kleenex and Leonard drove by a Dumpster behind a mall and I dropped it in. Then we drove out to the edge of town and I wiped the pistol clean and wrapped it in a piece of newspaper from the backseat and gave it to Leonard and he carried it out into the woods. When he came back, he said, “There now, all done. I dropped it down an armadillo hole.”
“If we hear of armadillos taking over possum kingdom, then we know what happened,” I said.
We took off our gloves, Leonard drove us to Wal-Mart, and we bought ice cream and cookies. I didn’t say much when we got to Leonard’s place, which was recently rented and cheap and in a part of town only slightly better than the one we had just left. We went upstairs and sat in fold-out chairs in a corner that served as a kitchen at a crate that served as a table, and with a spoon apiece, and cookies to dip, we ate and counted roaches racing across the floor. There were a lot of roaches, and some of them were bigger than my thumb. I was glad Brett wasn’t around for a change. She would charge a rhino if she felt it necessary, but the clicking of roach legs on linoleum could run her ten miles and make her climb a tree.
When we were done eating, Leonard said, “You want to go home, or you gonna stay?”
“Drive me home,” I said. “Brett will be waiting. Besides, I don’t want to get eaten by roaches.”
“You have gotten so persnickety,” Leonard said. “I remember a time when you would have named them, made them each little hats, and called them your friends.”