Mucho Mojo Read Free

got out his pocket knife and cut it off and we went inside the church.
    We paraded by the open coffin, and of course, Uncle Chester hadn’t missed his chance to be guest of honor. He was one ugly sonofabitch, and I figured alive he hadn’t looked much better. He wasn’t very tall, but he was wide, and being dead a few days before they found him hadn’t helped his looks any. The mortician had only succeeded in making him look a bit like a swollen Cabbage Patch Doll.
    After the eulogies and prayers and singing and people falling over the coffin and crying whether they wanted to or not, we drove out to a little cemetery in the woods and the coffin was unloaded from an ancient black hearse with a sticker on the back bumper that read BINGO FOR GOD .
    Underneath a striped tent, with the hot wind blowing, we stood next to an open grave and the ceremony went on. There was a kind of thespian quality about the whole thing. The only one who seemed to be truly upset was Leonard. He wasn’t saying anything, and he’s too macho to cry in public, but I knew him. I saw the way his hands shook, the tilt of his mouth, the hooding of his eyes.
    “It’s a nice enough place to get put down,” I whispered to Leonard.
    “You’re dead, you’re dead,” Leonard said. “You told me that. It’s a thing takes the edge off how you feel about your surroundings.”
    “Right. Fuck Uncle Chester. Let’s talk fashion. You’ll note no one else here looks like a black fag Roy Rogers but you.”
    That got a smile out of him.
    During the preacher’s generic marathon tribute to Uncle Chester, I spent some time looking at a pretty black woman in a short, tight black dress standing near us. She, like Leonard, was one of the few not trying out for the Academy Awards. She didn’t look particularly sad, but she was solemn. Now and then she turned and looked at Leonard. I couldn’t tell if he noticed. A heterosexual would have noticed if there was anything romantic in her attitude or not. It can’t be helped. A heterosexual dick senses a pretty woman, no matter what the cultural and social training of its owner, and it’ll always point true north. Or maybe it’s south, now that I think about it.
    The preacher finished up a prayer slightly longer than the complete set of the
Encyclopedia Britannica
and signaled to lower the coffin.
    A long lean guy with his hand on the device that lowers the coffin pushed the lever and the coffin started down, wobbled, righted itself. Someone in the audience let out a sob and went quiet. A woman in front of me, wearing a hat with everything on it but fresh fruit and a strand of barbed wire, shook and let out a wail and waved a hanky.
    A moment later it was all over except for the grave diggers throwing dirt in the hole.
    There was some hand-shaking and talking, and most of the crowd came over and spoke to Leonard and said how sorry they were, looked at me out of the corners of their eyes, suspicious because I was white, or maybe because they assumed I was Leonard’s lover. It was bad enough they had a relative or acquaintance who was queer, but shit, looked like he was fucking a white guy.
    We were invited, not with great enthusiasm, to a gathering of friends and family, but Leonard passed, and the crowd faded out. The pretty woman in black came over and smiled at Leonard and shook his hand and said she was sorry.
    “I’m Florida Grange. I was your uncle’s lawyer, Mr. Pine,” she said. “Guess I still am. You’re in the will. I’ll make it official if you’ll come by my office tomorrow. Here’s my card. And here’s the key to his house. You get that and some money.”
    Leonard took the key and card and stood there looking stunned. I said, “Hello, Miss Grange, my name’s Hap Collins.”
    “Hello,” she said, and shook my hand.
    “You know my uncle well?” Leonard asked.
    “No. Not really,” Florida Grange said, and she went away, and so did we.

3.
    Uncle Chester’s house was in that part of