As we were driving, Leonard said, “You think Cason’s too busy dropping the rope down the well to do us any good?”
“I think he’s the kind of guy that can screw and chew gum and do math problems all at the same time.”
“I doubt Cason’s date would appreciate his ability to do more than one thing at a time.”
“True,” I said, “but my guess is he’ll have lunch, knock him off a piece, get with this Mercury fella, and have something for us pretty damn quick. He’s pretty high-energy.”
“And if your description is right, he’s not particularly thoughtful,” Leonard said.
Leonard made a curve and looked at me out of the corner of his eye.
“How you feelin’, Hap?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It comes in waves. Sometimes I feel fine, other times I want to go back to that big armchair and not get up.”
“The chair’s at the dump, and since we’re not going to the dump to let you sit in it, that means you just got to live with things.”
“How do you do it, Leonard?”
“Because I have to.”
“That’s no kind of answer.”
“It’s my answer. I look at it this way. If what I choose to do seems right to me, I do it.”
“And what if,” I said, “what I choose to do seems right, but isn’t. Ku Klux Klan people think they’re right, but they aren’t.”
“I get your point. But you just made a point. You said they aren’t right, those KKK fucks, and being a black man, I have to agree. But saying they’re wrong means you have what you think is a clear-cut position, and you back it up with experience and facts. Like it or not, you believe you can tell right from wrong, and I trust your judgment and mine on those matters more than I trust the judgment of paranoid and inferior-feeling assholes who are all about making people’s lives miserable because they can. I’m simple enough about the matter to consider that if I’m doing something to protect someone or make their life better, and I have the ability to do it, and I’m going to feel good about myself afterward, that’s what I do.”
“Seems more complicated than that to me,” I said.
“Didn’t say it wasn’t complicated for some. What I said was it’s easy for me. Do you think if we hadn’t killed those who were trying to kill us in the past, they would have let us go with a pat on the butt? Do you really think there’s a god that sorts them out and punishes them if someone here in reality land doesn’t?”
“No. But we’re part of the problem.”
“Let me ask you why we put ourselves in those positions.”
“We’re stupid.”
“Next answer.”
I sighed. “We were trying to help someone, or we were trying to help ourselves, and at least once, we were trying to make some money.”
Leonard turned a wicked eye toward me, and then put it back on the road.
“That was my fault,” I said.
“Just looking for an acknowledgment… Let me give you the bottom line, Hap. People we’ve chosen to help over the years, had we not helped them, it wouldn’t have turned out well. The people we killed, if we hadn’t, would have gone on doing what they were doing, which wasn’t good. You are who you are, and you are an avenging angel. You were born to it. For some years I’ve been trying to figure what my career ought to be. What can I make of myself? Then one night, while I was pulling my johnson, having to use both hands, of course, I had a epiphany. I’m following my calling as surely as those who grow up to be astronauts or firemen or doctors. So are you. Maybe it’s a kind of post-traumatic stress you’re suffering. But I don’t think the reason you had a nervous breakdown was about what you’ve done. It’s about you trying to find a way to stop being you, and you can’t.”