I covered my ears with my hands. “I get it!” I stepped onto the small cement front porch and rang the bell. A little old man with wispy gray hair and skin like a Shar-Pei answered.
“Andy Gimp?” I asked.
“Nope. I'm Bernie. Andy's my older brother,” the man said. “Come on in. Andy's watching television.”
“I got a bad feeling about this,” Lula said. “If this is the younger brother, what the heck does the older one look like?”
“Hey, Andy,” Bernie called out. “You got company. You got a couple hot ones.”
I followed Bernie into the living room and immediately spotted Andy. He was slouched into a broken-down overstuffed chair facing the television. He was wearing a white dress shirt buttoned to the neck and black socks and black shoes, and that was it. No pants. He looked like a bag of bones with skin cancer. He was milk-white skin and red splotches everywhere. And I mean everywhere. There was a lot of nose and a lot of ears, and gonads hanging low between his knobby knees.
“Come on in,” he said, gesturing with big boney hands. “What can I do you for?”
“I knew it,” Lula said. “I knew it. I knew it. I knew it. This here's gonna haunt me forever. This is what I got to look forward to after a hundred years of marriage. This here's what happens to outdoor plumbing when a man gets old. I don't know if I can go through with the wedding.”
“Age don't got nothing to do with it,” Bernie said. “He's always looked like that.”
“You're not wearing any pants,” I said to Andy Gimp.
“Don't like them. Never wear them.”
“Fine by me,” I said, “but you didn't show up for your court appearance.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yep.”
“I had it marked on my calendar,” Andy said. “Bernie, where's the calendar?”
“Lost it,” Bernie said.
“They say I didn't show up for my court appearance.”
Bernie shrugged. “So what? They'll give you another one.”
Andy was on his feet, looking for the calendar. He walked body bent, arms akimbo, feet planted wide for balance, his nuts practically dragging on the floor.
“I know it's here somewhere,” he said, shuffling through magazines on the coffee table, rifling through a pile of newspapers on the floor.
“I'm feelin' faint,” Lula said. “If he bends over one more time, I'm gonna pass out. I can't stop lookin'. It's a train wreck. It's like the end of the universe. You know, when you get sucked into that thing. What do you call it?”
“Black hole?”
“Yeah, that's it. It's like staring into the black hole.”
Andy was distracted by the calendar hunt, so I gave my business card to Bemie and introduced myself.
“Lula and I need to take Andy to the courthouse so he can reinstate his bail bond,” I told Bemie. “Can you get him to put some pants on?”
“He don't own none,” Bernie said. “And I'm not loaning him any of mine. You don't know where he's been sitting.”
“Hell, I'll buy him some pants if he'll stop bending over,” Lula said.
“Won't do no good,” Bernie said. “He won't wear them. He made up his mind.”
Since I've had this job, I've hauled in a naked, greased-up fat guy, a half-naked homie, and a naked old pervert, and I've worked with a little naked guy who thought he was a leprechaun. A geriatric nudist wasn't going to slow me down.
“Get a jacket,” I said to Andy. “We're going downtown.”