The Magic Wagon Read online

  THE MAGIC WAGON

  By Joe R. Lansdale

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  © 2012 Joe R. Lansdale

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

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  All of the characters in this hook are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This is for Phyllis and Harlie Morton, and Ann and Herman Kasper, for their faith, love, and support.

  CHAPTER 1

  Wild Bill Hickok, some years after he was dead, came to Mud Creek for a shoot-out of sorts.

  I was there. Let me tell you about it.

  About an hour before sunrise, mid-July, 1909, we came rolling into Mud Creek in the Magic Wagon—Billy Bob Daniels, Old Albert, Rot Toe the Wrestling Chimpanzee, the body in the box, and me.

  Night before we'd sort of snuck out of Louisiana and made the Texas border on account of some medicine Billy Bob sold this fella, telling him it would cure the piles. Which it hadn't. Not that any of us thought it would. It was just some water, coloring, and a little whiskey. Well, mostly whiskey.

  But the fella who bought the stuff was a teetotaler and it made him drunk enough to hit his wife some and have a bellyache. And later when he passed out on the bed drunk, she sewed him up in the bedsheets, got herself a broom, and whaled the tar out of him till he was bruised enough to pass for a speckled pup.

  When his wife finally did let him out from beneath the sheets he had sobered considerable, and he got to figuring on what he'd done and the fact that he had the piles bad as ever, and he came looking for Billy Bob.

  Normally we'd have been long gone, as that was the smart thing in our business. Talk the crowd up good, sell them some watered whiskey, smile big, wave a lot, and soon as we had their money and they were walking away, we'd pack up and hightail it out of town like a jackass with his tail on fire. Avoided a lot of unhappy customers that way.

  But now and then we didn't get on our way soon enough, like this evening I'm telling you about, and usually that was because Billy Bob had spotted some gal in the crowd he'd taken a hankering to, and with the way he looked, they often took a hankering back. He was tall and lean with gray eyes and he wore his blond hair long like them old gunfighters you read about in the dime novels. Lot of times he wore guns and did trick shooting, which was something he was darned good at. But this time he didn't have no guns, and that was for the best.

  He was spruced up and leaning against the wagon, ready to go gal'n, when this fella with the piles and the broom bruises shows up with a piece of cordwood in his hand and a converted .36 Navy revolver stuck in his belt. Since Billy Bob was the one who had given the talk on the medicine, told him how it could shrink them piles, it was him he wanted. He tells Billy Bob the whole sad story about how he took the medicine and it made him drunk, how he hit his wife, got sewed up in the sheets and beat, and how his piles weren't any better. In fact, he thought they might be considerable worse. Told Billy Bob the whole shooting match. If he'd had any sense he'd have just walked up and conked Billy Bob on the head with that stove wood, but I figure he was aiming to talk him into giving him his money back before he took to raising knots.

  Well, all the time this fella is telling Billy Bob his story, Billy Bob is leaning up against the Magic Wagon with a hand-rolled hanging out of his mouth unlit. When the fella finished, Billy Bob brought a match out from somewhere, lit the hand-rolled and puffed up a little cloud, squinted his eyes and said, "Ain't nothing to me."

  That Billy Bob always was a considerate sort.

  "It's either my money back," says the speckled pup, "or I'm going to take this here stove wood and work you up a new hat size."

  "I reckon not," Billy Bob said.

  That fella moved pretty quick then, swung that wood at Billy Bob's head, and Billy Bob caught his wrist with one hand and hit him in the stomach with the other, just above where that old Navy stuck out of his belt. When Billy Bob pulled his hand back, the Navy was in it and the fella was on the ground making noises like a loose treadle on a sewing machine.

  Billy Bob pointed the gun and cocked back the hammer. That old cap and ball had been converted over to a cartridge loader, but it looked worn and dangerous, like it was just as likely to blow up in Billy Bob's hand as shoot that fella on the ground.

  "Figure I ought to put a hole in your head," Billy Bob said.

  I tensed when I heard that. Billy Bob of late had lost his sense of humor, which before had been about like a kicked badger's anyway.

  But right when I thought things were going to get their ugliest, Albert said, "Mr. Billy Bob, don't reckon you ought to do that."

  Albert was colored. About fifty, with snow in his short kinky hair and shoulders so wide he had to turn sideways to get inside the wagon. He looked a little bit like a bear that had been trained to wear clothes.

  All the while things had been going on between Billy Bob and the fella, Albert had been standing quietly by with his arms crossed, showing about as much interest as a cow watching a couple of stumps.

  "You talking to me?" Billy Bob said, glancing at Albert. Billy Bob reckoned the war wasn't over yet, and he'd never cottoned to a colored fella telling him anything. Hated it worse than anyone I'd ever seen. Once, in Kansas, I saw him beat a little colored man to his knees just because the fella brushed up against him and didn't say pardon me with enough feeling. But when he talked to Albert like that, the talk seemed mostly just talk. Somehow, Albert had the Indian sign on him, and Billy Bob, who didn't seem afraid of nothing as far as I could tell, didn't give Albert a whole lot of trouble, in spite of Albert being hired help. I sort of got the feeling there was something between them I didn't understand. Something going on I didn't have no sense about.

  Even if Billy Bob wasn't scared of Albert, he wasn't shy of brains at that moment. A man Albert's size and strength—I'd once seen him set the Magic Wagon upright after it had been turned over in a storm—could take a .36 Navy slug pretty good and still get his hands on you and rip you apart like so much pine bark.

  Albert's voice, which had been sharp as a knife edge, now went firm and flat. "Ain't got no right shooting this here fella on account of some stuff we sold him didn't work. It don't never work on nothing besides sober. Kill this fella and you won't have a minute's peace from the law.”

  "And if I decide to go ahead and do what I want?" Billy Bob asked.

  "Then I'm going to have to take that pistol away from you and tie it around your neck and you'll just have to tell folks it's a bow tie."

  Billy Bob looked at Albert and smiled.

  Albert smiled back. They were just a couple of friendly grinners now.

  I could never tell about those two. Didn't know if they were really smiling or possum smiling. But Billy Bob said, "Ah hell, I wasn't going to
shoot nobody."

  "No sir," Albert said, "didn't reckon you was."

  Billy Bob unloaded the gun, tossed it in the street. He looked down at the fella in the dirt who was looking up. "Good drunk didn't hurt you none," Billy Bob said. "Any old battle-axe who'd put up with you deserves a hitting, and a broom whipping didn't do you no harm neither."

  Billy Bob turned around and climbed in the back of the wagon, yelling, "Albert, get us out of here."

  "Yes sir, Mister Billy Bob," Albert said. Billy Bob was in control again, and Albert was like a plantation slave. I couldn't figure it. I didn't say nothing. Just climbed up on the wagon beside Albert and watched him take the lines. He looked over at me and winked. "Guess Mister Billy Bob going to be leaving him another little gal hanging."

  "Reckon so," I said.

  "Git up there, Ishmael," Albert called to the head mule, and off we went.

  I leaned over the side and looked back at the fella in the street. He was standing now, holding his stomach. He stooped to pick up his hat and gun. I turned back to watch the road.

  Albert had the mules talked up pretty good now, and they were stepping on out. Which was a good thing. I figured we'd darn near seen a shooting, one way or another. And after that fella spread word around about what we'd done, it would be right wise of us to be a fair piece on down the road.

  That Billy Bob seemed determined to get himself in trouble, and for some reason, Albert seemed determined to keep him out of it. Me, I was just determined and didn't know what for. From time to time I figured on leaving the Magic Wagon, going my own way. But truth was, I didn't know nothing else. And me and Albert were friends, good friends.

  On the other hand, Billy Bob and me never had got along. We wasn't even friendly. All I knew about Billy Bob was that he'd taken me in after my parents were killed, fed me, clothed me, given me a job and some spending money. All this was on account of Albert pushed him to do it, but nonetheless, it was Billy Bob's wagon and I figured I owed him. That's all the feeling I had for Billy Bob, nothing else. Least that's the way it was until we got to Mud Creek and some new light got shed on things. Then I knew damn good and well how I felt about him.

  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

  So Albert drove the mules through the night, stopping only twice to let them blow, and then just for a few minutes.

  Finally, just after sunup, we made Mud Creek. Good thing. The mules were tuckered out, and so were we. All that fast moving had my guts jostled something terrible, and both my legs were near asleep.

  We stopped just past the sign that read MUD CREEK, and I climbed down from the wagon to stretch. Just a rawboned kid then. Seventeen, with an old gray cap and a grayer shirt and pants that had such a shine to them that they'd have blinded you had the moon or sunlight hit them just right.

  Soon as my feet touched ground, I knew things were going to happen in this town. It was like a ripple had run under my feet, or maybe more like it feels when there's a real bad storm in the air and the lightning is stitching so thick it makes your hair stand up and your skin feel prickly. Mud Creek felt like a town with a soul, and a bad old soul at that.

  It wasn't nothing to look at neither, there in that early morning grayness. It looked like someone had taken a handful of old ugly buildings and tossed them like dice onto a dirty hunk of ground and surrounded them with the biggest, darkest East Texas pines you'd ever seen. Most towns you come to the buildings are on either side of the main street, but here the street just sort of wandered down between the buildings as best it could. Like there wasn't no plan or nothing. Just build as you will, do as you will.

  Albert climbed down, took care of the mules and came around to stand by me. He put his hands on his hips and stretched his back until it popped. When he was stretched out, he looked at the town and grimaced.

  "I tell you, Little Buster, that town's full of all manner of bad spirits. It's done gone and had it a real bad life, and it ain't going to get no better. "

  Now I really had the shakes. Albert claimed he could feel and sometimes see spirits. He believed all things had souls, even rocks and trees. Sounded like some of the stuff I'd heard Indians say, only Albert got his beliefs from his grandfather and great-grandfather, both of which had been slaves, and the great-grandfather had been direct from Africa. He'd told Albert all manner of stories about over there. About spirits and goblins, and little short folks that lived in the woods and had poisoned arrows and such. Some of it sounded pretty wild to me, especially that stuff about the short folks, but Albert believed it all. And from the things that had happened to me since I'd teamed up with the Magic Wagon, I was beginning to believe most anything.

  I could feel the bad in Mud Creek too, though it could have been Albert's tall tales rubbing off on me. But there was the stone cold fact that I'd felt that badness before Albert even stepped down off the wagon.

  I was considering on all of this, when the back door of the Magic Wagon came open and out stumbled Billy Bob, drunker than a fly in a cider barrel. He'd been right heavy into our Cure-All. He made a few steps, turned, looked down the road at the town, and said, "Well, I'll be damned." Then he passed out and hit the dirt, half a bottle of Cure-All spilling out on the ground.

  Albert and me pulled him inside the wagon, laid him out on his stoop, and after Albert went out, I listened a bit to see if I could hear the wood talking like it did sometimes, but it was quiet. Which really suited me best. It gave me the rabbit tops when it talked, but I couldn't keep from listening for it just the same. I tried to tell myself wasn't nothing to it, but I knew better. Each day things seemed to get stranger and stranger with Billy Bob and the Magic Wagon, and I didn't see no letup in sight.

  Since we'd fixed them busted sideboards up with them sacred trees from the Dakotas and Billy Bob had bought that rock-hard body in the box, things had gotten considerably curious. Strangest thing was this storm that had taken to following us wherever we went, though it hadn't caught up with us yet. Sometimes we got a little wind and rain from it, that sort of thing, but never the full blow. We always managed to stay about three days ahead of it. But it was like a hound dog for us, and I knew if we stayed put anywhere long enough, it would show up. And I knew too, if it wasn't for all them pines, I'd be able to look out the back of the Magic Wagon and see lightning flashing way off in the distance. When we was in Kansas, I remember being able to see it darn near all the time, and it was unsettling to always look behind you, night or day, and see lightning forks cutting across the sky, getting closer and closer, until finally you could feel the first licks of the wind and the rain.

  When I first noticed the big blow was following us, I told Albert, and he knew right off what I was talking about. He'd noticed it too, and like me, he figured it was either them sacred trees or that body in the box that was responsible, since both was supposed to have a curse on them.

  Course, Billy Bob wouldn't have such talk. He just laughed. "Ain't nothing following us but your own silly daydreams," he'd say. But I'd seen him watching the skies from time to time, and he never let us stay in any place more than a night, and we always moved out real early the next morning, and he made us move faster than you'd really have a need to unless something was behind us.

  In fact, I sort of think he was glad that wife-beat fella with the stove wood and the pistol came along, as that gave him a good excuse to put a few more hours between him and that storm, and he could tell himself it didn't have nothing to do with fear of curses and such.

  But he didn't fool me. He was as worried and scared of that storm as me and Albert, and he'd taken to drinking a whole lot since the Dakotas and sometimes he cried out in his sleep and shook like a wet pup.

  "Them ole Injun spirits in the wood, they talking to him," Albert would tell me. And Albert believed that. He'd quit sleeping inside the wagon since we'd put in those sideboards from the sacred trees, and you couldn't hardly get him inside of it unless it was to do business of some sort, or it was raining real hard.

&nbs
p; Me, I'd lay there on my stoop at night—Billy Bob across the way and listen to that wood moan and groan, and sometimes, when the back door was open—which was most of the time in the summer—and the moonlight was thick, I'd think I could see eyes looking out of that wood at me, or mouths moving. But when I'd light a match for a look-see, it would just be pine knots. One night I even thought something had reached out of the wood to take hold of my hand, but when l jerked awake, I didn't find nothing there.

  And there was the body in the box. Thinking on that thing didn't improve my sleep neither. The mere thought of it gave me a cold rigor.

  Considering all this as I stood there in the wagon, I turned to look at it and got a start. The box was propped up where it always was, but the lid was open and the body was gone.

  My back felt like a batch of big spiders were crawling up it. I turned and looked around the dark wagon; saw the shape at Billy Bob's feet, between the foot of his stoop and the wall by the door. It had been there all along. Albert and I just hadn't noticed it. That crazy drunk had pulled it out of the box and propped it up so it could look over him, like some kind of bodyguard.

  My eyes were used to the dark enough now that I could see it, but fortunate for me I couldn't see so good I could make out its features—the ones it had left. Even when Billy Bob showed it to folks and said his talk about it, I never really looked straight at it. I somehow figured if I did it would get the whammy in on me, or something. No matter from where you looked at it, it always seemed to be looking at you with them hollow sockets and that half-open mouth with the little thin teeth gone copper-colored and yellow. And I think the wisps of hair that stuck out in spots on the skull like the last down on a near plucked goose were worse. And I didn't care for them pistols that were clenched in them skeleton fists. They looked too shiny and too well-oiled and ready to go. Course, it was Billy Bob that kept them oiled and put hinges in the corpse's elbows so he could set the guns where he wanted them, but the thought of that thing standing there with them old pistols clutched in its bones made me want to wet myself