By Bizarre Hands Read online

  BY BIZARRE HANDS

  JOE R. LANSDALE

  INTRODUCTION BY

  LEWIS SHINER

  NEW AFTERWORD BY

  RAMSEY CAMPBELL

  DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

  MINEOLA, NEW YORK

  DOVER HORROR CLASSICS

  For mature readers only. This work includes some violent, sexual, and racial content which may be objectionable to some readers.

  Copyright

  Copyright © 1989 by Joe R. Lansdale

  Introduction copyright © 1989 by Lewis Shiner

  Afterword copyright © 2016 by Ramsey Campbell

  All rights reserved.

  Bibliographical Note

  This Dover edition, first published in 2016, is a republication of the work published by Avon Books, New York, in 1991. A new Afterword by Ramsey Campbell has been specially written for this Dover edition.

  International Standard Book Number

  ISBN-13: 978-0-486-80561-0

  ISBN-10: 0-486-80561-1

  Manufactured in the United States by RR Donnelley

  80561101 2016

  www.doverpublications.com

  This book is dedicated with love and respect

  to Ardath Mayhar

  who read most of these before anyone else

  and was always there

  with encouragement or a wise suggestion.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Lewis Shiner

  Fish Night

  The Pit

  Duck Hunt

  By Bizarre Hands

  The Steel Valentine

  I Tell You It's Love

  Letter from the South, Two Moons West of Nacogdoches

  Boys Will Be Boys

  The Fat Man and the Elephant

  Hell Through a Windshield

  Down by the Sea Near the Great Big Rock

  Trains Not Taken

  Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back

  The Windstorm Passes

  Night They Missed the Horror Show

  On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks

  Afterword by Ramsey Campbell

  INTRODUCTION

  by Lewis Shiner

  Joe Lansdale scares the living shit out of some people.

  I'm talking about his work here, of course. Joe himself is a sweetheart: modest, funny, easygoing, quick to make friends. He's even as gentle and peace-loving as you could hope for in a six-foot, 180-pound former karate instructor with more black belts than he has shoes.

  No, the problem comes from these stories he keeps writing. They get great rejection letters from top editors in the field. People love his writing, his dialogue, his sense of place, but they can't quite bring themselves to publish him. They invite him into anthologies and then when they read what he sends them, they ask him to leave quietly and please not break anything on the way out.

  I know how they feel. I bought a story from Joe myself, "I Tell You It's Love," and it didn't scare me, exactly, but it made me very damned uncomfortable.

  So what is it about these stories? What kind of stories are they, exactly?

  People have been trying for years to explain what kind of writer Joe is. They've compared him to Clive Barker, which I don't really see. Barker is best known for the explicit violence of his work, and yes, Joe's done that. But Joe has never spilled a quart of blood without good and sufficient reason. The violence in Joe's stories is not there for its own sake, but as a natural outgrowth of the characters.

  He's been compared to Barry Hannah, a master of voice and atmosphere. Joe does that too, with the best of them, vii but he hooks that voice and atmosphere to a story engine that just won't quit.

  He's been compared to Mark Twain, which comes closer than any of the others. Twain was a stylist, a storyteller, and a social critic. He wrote for literature professors as well as the barely literate. Even so, Twain never disappeared from his work as thoroughly as Joe does, leaving only the naked voice of another, infinitely strange human mind.

  If we can't pin Joe down as a writer, how about putting the stories themselves into categories? After all he is one of the brightest lights of modern horror fiction, part of this new "splatterpunk" business we keep hearing about. Right?

  Wrong. Joe at his best, as he is in this book, doesn't properly fit in anywhere. "Night They Missed the Horror Show" reads like a horror story, but there's nothing supernatural about it. Likewise "The Steel Valentine" (one of two stories original to this anthology) and "The Pit." ''Duck Hunt'' is a similar exercise in realistic horror, except its most obvious inspiration is the animated cartoon.

  "Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back" is neither quite S/F nor quite fantasy; "Trains Not Taken" is not quite a western; and ''Hell Through a Windshield'' is not quite a memoir. "The Fat Man and the Elephant" (the other original, and perhaps my favorite in the collection) most resembles a mainstream story of character, but unlike any you will ever see in The New Yorker.

  Joe's life would have been easier if he'd been willing to blunt these stories in order to fit them into the conventional categories. Publishers would be able to slap a label on him that would stick; his audience would already be defined; people writing introductions to his short story collections could say, "If you like [fill in the blank] you'll love Joe Lansdale."

  But Joe doesn't walk that line, and he's not the first. For example there's Don DeLillo and William Goldman and Graham Greene, writers who have become categories unto themselves. It takes longer for these writers to build an audience, longer to find a publisher who'll put up with their departures. They demand readers who think for themselves, who want more than just one more fix of the same old thing.

  There's not a lot of incentive for these writers. The pressure to go rogue this way, to jump off the interstate and cut your own roads, has to come from inside. It takes ambition and determination, patience and courage. Much the same qualities it took for Joe to drag himself, by his bootstraps, out of the East Texas swamps of Gladewater, Texas (immortalized as "Mud Creek" in many of his stories) and off to the relative metropolis of Nacogdoches.

  Once those new roads are cut, however, everybody else is rushing to get on them.

  Joe has as much drive to write as anybody I've ever seen. He's never met a writing challenge he couldn't solve with his one-size-fits-all advice, "Put ass to chair in front of typewriter.'' He spends every available minute working. There was a stretch after his son Keith was born when that meant typing with an infant on his lap. (Which made, by the way, for some weird intrusions in his letters.)

  Joe writes from his heart, and he lives the same way. I've gotten letters from him that tore my work to shreds, and then awkwardly apologized for his honesty. The thing is, I don't believe there was a choice involved. If Joe couldn't tell me what he really thought, I don't think he would have been able to write at all.

  Which brings us back to the stories in this collection. Every one of them is the truth the way Joe saw it at the time. Joe doesn't especially enjoy frightening or disturbing or embarrassing his readers. But if that's the price of honesty, it's a price he's willing to pay.

  This is Joe's first short story collection. I think it's a triumph in its own small way. Here is an individual whose vision was strong enough to overpower the faint-hearted, to confound the restrictions of genres, to outlast poverty, tragedy, and obscurity. Here is a vision that is finally coming into its own.

  This book documents Joe's vision in technicolor and 3-D. It's an express mail package from hell, full of black humor, crawling horror, outrageous and telling satire, memorable characters, and above all a sense of personal integrity. And if the truth makes you a little uncomfortable, or maybe just flat scares the shit out of you, then you'd better leave the lig
hts on while you read it.

  FISH NIGHT

  For Bill Pronzini

  It was a bleached-bone afternoon with a cloudless sky and a monstrous sun. The air trembled like a mass of gelatinous ectoplasm. No wind blew.

  Through the swelter came a worn, black Plymouth, coughing and belching white smoke from beneath its hood. It wheezed twice, backfired loudly, died by the side of the road.

  The driver got out and went around to the hood. He was a man in the hard winter years of life, with dead brown hair and a heavy belly riding his hips. His shirt was open to the navel, the sleeves rolled up past his elbows. The hair on his chest and arms was gray.

  A younger man climbed out on the passenger side, went around front too. Yellow sweat-explosions stained the pits of his white shirt. An unfastened, striped tie was draped over his neck like a pet snake that had died in its sleep.

  "Well?" the younger man said.

  The old man said nothing. He opened the hood. A calliope note of steam blew out from the radiator in a white puff, rose to the sky, turned clear.

  "Damn," the old man said, and he kicked the bumper of the Plymouth as if he were kicking a foe in the teeth. He got little satisfaction out of the action, just a nasty scuff on his brown wingtip and a jar to his ankle that hurt like hell.

  "Well?" the young man repeated.

  "Well what? What do you think? Dead as the can opener trade this week. Deader. The radiator's chickenpocked with holes."

  "Maybe someone will come by and give us a hand."

  "Sure."

  "A ride anyway."

  "Keep thinking that, college boy."

  "Someone is bound to come along," the young man said.

  "Maybe. Maybe not. Who else takes these cutoffs? The main highway, that's where everyone is. Not this little no account shortcut." He finished by glaring at the young man.

  "I didn't make you take it," the young man snapped. "It was on the map. I told you about it, that's all. You chose it. You're the one that decided to take it. It's not my fault. Besides, who'd have expected the car to die?"

  "I did tell you to check the water in the radiator, didn't I? Wasn't that back as far as El Paso?"

  "I checked. It had water then. I tell you, it's not my fault. You're the one that's done all the Arizona driving."

  "Yeah, yeah," the old man said, as if this were something he didn't want to hear. He turned to look up the highway.

  No cars. No trucks. Just heat waves and miles of empty concrete in sight.

  They seated themselves on the hot ground with their backs to the car. That way it provided some shade—but not much. They sipped on a jug of lukewarm water from the Plymouth and spoke little until the sun fell down. By then they had both mellowed a bit. The heat had vacated the sands and the desert chill had settled in. Where the warmth had made the pair snappy, the cold drew them together.

  The old man buttoned his shirt and rolled down his sleeves while the young man rummaged a sweater out of the backseat. He put the sweater on, sat back down. "I'm sorry about this," he said suddenly.

  "Wasn't your fault. Wasn't anyone's fault. I just get to yelling sometime, taking out the can-opener trade on everything but the can-openers and myself. The days of the door-to-door salesman are gone, son."

  "And I thought I was going to have an easy summer job," the young man said.

  The old man laughed. "Bet you did. They talk a good line, don't they?"

  "I'll say!"

  "Make it sound like found money, but there ain't no found money, boy. Ain't nothing simple in this world. The company is the only one ever makes any money. We just get tireder and older with more holes in our shoes. If I had any sense I'd have quit years ago. All you got to make is this summer—"

  "Maybe not that long."

  "Well, this is all I know. Just town after town, motel after motel, house after house, looking at people through screen wire while they shake their heads No. Even the cockroaches at the sleazy motels begin to look like little fellows you've seen before, like maybe they're door-to-door peddlers that have to rent rooms too."

  The young man chuckled. "You might have something there."

  They sat quietly for a moment, welded in silence. Night had full grip on the desert now. A mammoth gold moon and billions of stars cast a whitish glow from eons away.

  The wind picked up. The sand shifted, found new places to lie down. The undulations of it, slow and easy, were reminiscent of the midnight sea. The young man, who had crossed the Atlantic by ship once, said as much.

  "The sea?" the old man replied. "Yes, yes, exactly like that. I was thinking the same. That's part of the reason it bothers me. Part of why I was stirred up this afternoon. Wasn't just the heat doing it. There are memories of mine out here," he nodded at the desert, "and they're visiting me again."

  The young man made a face. "I don't understand."

  "You wouldn't. You shouldn't. You'd think I'm crazy."

  "I already think you're crazy. So tell me."

  The old man smiled. "All right, but don't you laugh."

  "I won't."

  A moment of silence moved in between them. Finally the old man said, "It's fish night, boy. Tonight's the full moon and this is the right part of the desert if memory serves me, and the feel is right—I mean, doesn't the night feel like it's made up of some fabric, that it's different from other nights, that it's like being inside a big dark bag, the sides sprinkled with glitter, a spotlight at the top, at the open mouth, to serve as a moon?"

  "You lost me."

  The old man sighed. "But it feels different. Right? You can feel it too, can't you?"

  "I suppose. Sort of thought it was just the desert air. I've never camped out in the desert before, and I guess it is different."

  "Different, all right. You see, this is the road I got stranded on twenty years back. I didn't know it at first, least not consciously. But down deep in my gut I must have known all along I was taking this road, tempting fate, offering it, as the football people say, an instant replay."

  "I still don't understand about fish night. What do you mean, you were here before?"

  "Not this exact spot, somewhere along in here. This was even less of a road back then than it is now. The Navajos were about the only ones who traveled it. My car conked out like this one today, and I started walking instead of waiting. As I walked the fish came out. Swimming along in the starlight pretty as you please. Lots of them. All the colors of the rainbow. Small ones, big ones, thick ones, thin ones. Swam right up to me . . . right through me! Fish just as far as you could see. High up and low down to the ground.

  "Hold on boy. Don't start looking at me like that. Listen: You're a college boy, you know what was here before we were, before we crawled out of the sea and changed enough to call ourselves men. Weren't we once just slimy things, brothers to the things that swim?"

  "I guess, but—"

  "Millions and millions of years ago this desert was a sea bottom. Maybe even the birthplace of man. Who knows? I read that in some science books. And I got to thinking this: If the ghosts of people who have lived can haunt houses, why can't the ghosts of creatures long dead haunt where they once lived, float about in a ghostly sea?"

  "Fish with a soul?"

  "Don't go small-mind on me, boy. Look here: Some of the Indians I've talked to up North tell me about a thing they call the manitou. That's a spirit. They believe everything has one. Rocks, trees, you name it. Even if the rock wears to dust or the tree gets cut to lumber, the manitou of it is still around."

  "Then why can't you see these fish all the time?"

  "Why can't we see ghosts all the time? Why do some of us never see them? Time's not right, that's why. It's a precious situation, and I figure it's like some fancy time lock—like the banks use. The lock clicks open at the bank, and there's the money. Here it ticks open and we get the fish of a world long gone."

  "Well, it's something to think about," the young man managed.

  The old man grinned at him. "
I don't blame you for thinking what you're thinking. But this happened to me twenty years ago and I've never forgotten it. I saw those fish for a good hour before they disappeared. A Navajo came along in an old pickup right after and I bummed a ride into town with him. I told him what I'd seen. He just looked at me and grunted. But I could tell he knew what I was talking about. He'd seen it too, and probably not for the first time.

  "I've heard that Navajos don't eat fish for some reason or another, and I bet it's the fish in the desert that keep them from it. Maybe they hold them sacred. And why not? It was like being in the presence of the Creator; like crawling around in the liquids with no cares in the world."

  "I don't know. That sounds sort of . . ."

  "Fishy?" The old man laughed. "It does, it does. So this Navajo drove me to town. Next day I got my car fixed and went on. I've never taken that cutoff again—until today, and I think that was more than accident. My subconscious was driving me. That night scared me, boy, and I don't mind admitting it. But it was wonderful too, and I've never been able to get it out of my mind."

  The young man didn't know what to say.

  The old man looked at him and smiled. "I don't blame you," he said. "Not even a little bit. Maybe I am crazy."

  They sat awhile longer with the desert night, and the old man took his false teeth out and poured some of the warm water on them to clean them of coffee and cigarette residue.

  "I hope we don't need that water," the young man said.

  "You're right. Stupid of me! We'll sleep awhile, start walking before daylight. It's not far to the next town. Ten miles at best." He put his teeth back in. "We'll be just fine."

  The young man nodded.

  No fish came. They did not discuss it. They crawled inside the car, the young man in the front seat, the old man in the back. They used their spare clothes to bundle under, to pad out the cold fingers of the night.

  Near midnight the old man came awake suddenly and lay with his hands behind his head and looked up and out the window opposite him, studied the crisp desert sky.

  And a fish swam by.