Read Online Mucho Mojo by Joe R. Lansdale - Free Book Online

though I was no expert on that. Eight, nine years old. From the forehead to a spot square between the eyes, the skull was cracked like the Liberty Bell. The legs had been sawed off at the knees so that it would fit in the trunk, and the arms were pulled free at the shoulders, twisted from their sockets like chicken wings. Beneath and around the bones were moldering magazines, and I realized that much of the smell was from rotting paper, but that certainly wasn’t the whole of it. The bones were old, however, and most of death’s stench had long left them, and perhaps what I did smell on the bones was not death at all, but mold.
    We held our positions for a while, soaking it in. Leonard got one of the newspapers and crunched it over his hand and made a makeshift glove out of it. He got down on his knees and reached inside and picked up one of the arm bones. When he lifted it, it pivoted at the elbow and some of it powdered and fell back in the box. The bones that made up the hand broke loose from the wrist and rattled back into the box, fragmenting pages from one of the old magazines; the fragments wisped and fluttered like a shotgunned bird.
    Leonard held the arm bone and looked at it for a while, then carefully put it back. He used the newspaper to get one of the magazines out of there. He dropped it on the floor. Pages came apart and powdered the way part of the bone had powdered.
    The magazines had been mostly photographs. A lot of the photographs were still visible. I didn’t like them. They were of children, male and female, in sexual positions with adults and each other. Leonard got out a couple other magazines and put them on the floor. More of the same. They were even some with children and animals.
    I looked at them longer than I wanted to, to make sure I was seeing what I was seeing, then I squatted back on my haunches and took a deep breath. The breath was full of rotting paper and that other smell.
    Leonard picked up the magazines and returned them to the trunk. He dropped the newspaper he was using as a glove inside and closed the lid of the trunk and put the padlock on it and locked it.
    He stood up and wiped his hands on his pants and walked around in a small circle, then went to the desk chair and sat down and turned the little fan on his face. He was breathing as if he had just finished a hard workout.
    “Uncle Chester,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”
    I don’t know how long we stayed like that, me on my haunches, Leonard in the chair, the fan blowing on his face. Finally, I said, “It may not be like it looks.”
    “How can it not be like it looks? This is the key he left me. It goes to the trunk and it’s got what it’s got inside. That skeleton is a kid’s skeleton.”
    “I know.”
    “And those magazines. That filth . . . Jesus, was he getting even with me for being gay? Was he telling me he was a sicko, because he thought I was? Or did he get so far gone in the head he thought he had him a real treasure here? That I’d be one happy sonofabitch to have it. What did he do? Get this out now and then, look at the skeleton, the magazines? Jack off?”
    “You’re jumping pretty far.”
    “I’m jumping where there is to jump. The sick fuck had the gall to criticize me, and he was . . . Jesus, Hap. You think there are others?”
    “I don’t know what to think. But you’ll need to tell the cops.”
    “Yeah, they’re so fucking efficient. Jesus, Hap.”
    I stood up slowly. “You could just put the trunk back in the hole, you know. He’s done what he’s done, and now he’s beyond punishment and can’t hurt anyone else. You could just go on with things.”
    “You don’t mean that?”
    “No. . . . Just a small, sad part of me means it.”
    “This child needs to be identified. There might be others. Jesus. How long could this have been going on? There might be a whole slew of bodies under the house here. They could have been down there when I came for summers. He’s up here teaching me