Miracles Ain't What They Used to Be Read online

  There was a lemon-colored Buick parked inside the garage, and it was the car my father had been working on that morning. Dad was drying his hands on a shop rag when this guy swaggered in, leaned a large hand on the Buick, and said, “This car fixed yet?”

  Dad studied Apollo Red the way a snake studies a frog.

  “Yep,” Dad said.

  “My girlfriend’s got to have it.”

  “All right,” Dad said. And he told the guy what the charge was.

  “She’ll have to owe you,” said Apollo Red.

  “Owes me for the last time I fixed it.”

  “Looks like you didn’t fix it good enough.”

  “That was the transmission, this here was a leak in the carburetor. I rebuilt it so she don’t have to buy a new one. I saved her about thirty dollars.”

  “Did, did you?”

  Dad just looked at him.

  The fellow strayed an eyeball my way. “That your boy?”

  “Yeah,” Dad said.

  “Needs a haircut.”

  “Yeah, he does.”

  “I’d hold him down and trim it with a pocket knife.”

  I had heard this shit a million times, and sometimes it seemed a million times a day. Lot of the kids then had long hair. The girls liked it and so did I. I thought this hair remark was an odd statement coming from a man that wore his hair the way he did. Probably as long as mine, but tamed with hair oil and spray and a lot of mirror examination and a fine-toothed comb. I started to say something smart, but somehow I didn’t want to get into Dad’s bubble. And something about that guy made me cautious, like knowing to avoid a dark alley at night in a strange city.

  “He might need it, but it won’t be you cutting it, or two more just like you,” Daddy said.

  That caused Apollo Red to purse his lips and knit his brows. His gray eyes became slits. Apollo Red thought a moment, almost loud enough to hear his thoughts running about in his head like mice on gravel, and then he turned his attention back to Dad.

  “Girlfriend needs the car. She sent me to get it. She can’t pay you nothing right now, but she’s good for it, and I’m going to take it.”

  “Naw, she ain’t taking it, and neither are you,” Dad said. “Shouldn’t have worked on it, knowing she don’t pay her bills.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Know she works at the beauty parlor and has a long walk to work. Wanted to help her out, but I need at least half what she owes me for the last job. You got that, you can take it, though how you’re going to drive two cars is a puzzle.”

  “I’ll pull it out, park it in the lot, bring her to get it when she gets off work. She needs it tonight.”

  “Tell her to get the money,” Dad said, and he was through talking. He walked by Red toward the garage doors. The doors were two wide metal sections you pulled closed and linked with a chain that ran through a hole in the doors, then you padlocked them together. Dad was about to pull the doors when Red said, “Wait a minute, old man.”

  Now at this time, Dad was pushing sixty, and that was back when sixty was old. He had gained a lot of weight and was tired-looking, but back in his younger days he had been a boxer and a carnival wrestler. He had a kind of strength, especially when he was younger, that was almost startling. It wasn’t built-up gym stuff, it was working-man muscle, compacted and stretched and flexed by hard work from the time he was a child. He didn’t look like much, but neither does a stick of dynamite.

  That said, this guy was young and well formed, and he moved like a cat. Just looking at him, I knew he had done bad things and wanted to do more. I could feel a crackle in the air when he talked. It’s that strange feeling you get when things aren’t right, a sensation of something mean and nasty on the other side of some kind of dimensional barrier, waiting to get through a slit in time and space, enter into one of us humans and ignite our most evil traits, send us flailing with fists, snapping with teeth, slashing with knives, slinging clubs and tossing rocks.

  Apollo Red, obviously annoyed, came outside and put his butt to the fender of his car, said, “You ain’t going nowhere till you give me that car.”

  “Going to get something to eat,” Dad said.

  Apollo Red reached down and took hold of his belt with both hands and hitched it up, like maybe he was making room for a set of testicles the size of bowling balls, and said, “You ain’t going nowhere, Greasy, less’n you give me that car.”

  “Soon as I lock these doors you can watch me and my boy and my greasy clothes drive away, cause I’m done talking to you.”

  This was like tossing gasoline on a fire for Apollo Red. “Tell you what, old man, I’ll sort your shit out right now, that’s what I’ll do.”

  Dad looked at him. I had seen that gaze before, and let me tell you, you had to be a fucking idiot not to know there was something feral behind his near-black eyes, and that my dad was a man who had seen the devil and kicked his ass. But the devil had taken his beating twenty years earlier, not of recent from an overweight old man pushing sixty.

  Apollo Red bounced himself off the car fender, cocked his hand back as he came forward, and I thought, Well, I’m stepping in. Dad’s getting old, and I better help. But even though I was no slouch when it came to fighting, I was afraid. Apollo Red wasn’t merely a smart-ass kid that wanted to tussle a bit. He was a bad man and you could sense it.

  All of these thoughts came quickly, of course, and as I prepared to jump into the fray, Dad lunged forward. He was standing still one moment, and in the next he was covering ground like a bullet.

  And then it came. It was an impossibly fast and short uppercut, but it was still a punch from hell. Before Apollo Red’s punch could reach him, the uppercut rose, almost touching Red’s chest as it tracked toward his chin. To this day I imagine flames coming off it, Dad was moving so fast. His shot hit while Apollo Red was still bringing his punch around. Dad’s flat, fat fist caught Apollo Red solid under the chin, and it’s the only time in my life I have actually seen someone lifted off the ground from a punch. That loudmouth was launched like a space rocket, and the only thing missing was a monkey on board and radio contact with NASA.

  The blow made a sickening sound, and that uppercut lifted him onto the fender of his car. He rolled then, caught his shirt in the flying bird hood ornament and tore it half off, then rolled down onto the concrete drive. One leg starting kicking, like maybe he was trying to stomp a bug in a ditch, and then Apollo Red’s head cocked back and he let out with a wheeze similar to steam hissing from a teapot. His eyes rolled up in his head like cherries in a slot machine. I almost expected him to spit coins.

  And then he was still.

  Corpse still.

  I wouldn’t have been surprised if vultures were already passing the word.

  I went over, leaned down, and looked. Apollo Red’s lips were blue. He may have been the sun god where he came from, but the god of lightning and thunder had just knocked the sunlight out of his ass.

  I said, “Dad, I think you killed him.”

  Dad always carried a stub of a cigar in his shirt pocket, and as he walked over he pinched it from his pocket and poked it in his mouth. He scratched around in his pants pockets for a box of matches. When he found them, he took a match out slowly, struck it on the strike-strip on the side of the box, held the flame to that foul-smelling cigar. He shook the match and threw it down. He looked down at Red, turned his head from side to side like a curious dog, and said, “Nah. He’ll come around.”

  I wasn’t so sure.

  “You hit him hard, Daddy.”

  “Man’s punch is the last thing to go.”

  I guess Dad might actually have been a little concerned, because we didn’t go to dinner. He stood near the guy’s car for a bit, then went inside and picked up a comic book. He couldn’t actually read, but he was learning a bit with western comics. He liked Billy the Kid. I sometimes helped him with the words.

  “Go get us some hamburgers, Baby Man,” he said.

  I h
ad anything but dinner on my mind, but in a kind of daze I drove to the café and got hamburgers, fries, couple of Cokes, and drove back.

  This took about thirty minutes or so. Dad was still attempting to read his comic, moving his lips over the words he was learning. Apollo Red still hadn’t moved. It had grown really hot.

  Dad ate his hamburger and fries, then went back to work on a car at the rear of the garage, his head under the hood, whistling like one of the dwarfs from Snow White. Apollo Red, lying on the summer-hot concrete, still had not wiggled a muscle.

  I tried to eat but couldn’t. I stood and looked at Red. About an hour after he had taken a ride on the rocket from Hell, he twitched.

  Like the Frankenstein monster testing his nerves and muscles, starting to recognize shapes and shadows, he writhed against the concrete. His jaw on one side had swollen to about the size of an eggplant and his chin had blackened like a two-day beard. The flesh around the eye on the side of the swelling had gone black as well. There was blood at the corners of his mouth.

  Apollo Red stirred a little more. He rolled to one side with no more trouble than a beached whale. He lay there for a while pulling in ultraviolet rays. Birds flew over and dropped their shadows on him. Apollo Red finally got a knee under him, but his head hung low, as if heavy. The position he was in, it looked as if he were about to attempt an impromptu headstand. A tooth fell out of his mouth. He laid back down for a while.

  I looked at Dad. He was still doping out the comic book.

  Another fifteen or twenty minutes passed, and then Apollo Red moved again. He went through all the formations he had managed before, but this time, when it came to the knee position, he pushed up to his feet, wobbled a bit, and then forgetting he had come by car, started slowly zigzagging away, as if practicing evasive maneuvers against a slow-moving, heat-seeking missile.

  He staggered across the street, over the dead grass next to the oil well bit shop, fell down, then got up with excruciating slowness, and continued to zigzag until he stumbled out of sight behind a high stack of tires at the rear of a filling station.

  I finally ate my hamburger. Dad went back to work. I sat around for another hour. I had planned to eat dinner with Dad, go home, and go to work, but I decided the hell with it. I was too shook up. I walked across to the bit shop, borrowed their phone, called my boss, said I would be in late, if at all.

  There was only one old man in the bit shop that day, and he grinned what teeth he had at me. “I seen him hit that sucker,” he said, and pointed to a window in the side of the aluminum building to show me the exact spot where he had stood. “Damn. Bud’s still got the punch, ain’t he?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “Appears he does.”

  By the time I crossed back to the garage, a police car had pulled up alongside Apollo Red’s golden chariot. There was a young policeman on the passenger side, and an older hand I recognized behind the wheel. He had once pulled me in for throwing water balloons. I nodded at him, like an experienced criminal acknowledging a foe.

  The one on the passenger side, the younger one, got out as Dad came wandering out of the shop. Dad leaned against the hood of Red’s car, which bore part of Red’s shirt on the broken hood ornament like some sort of surrender flag. I came over and stood by Dad.

  The young cop said, “Mr. Lansdale. There’s been a complaint that you hit a man here.”

  “Hard as I could,” Dad said.

  “He has a broken jaw and is at the hospital and is a little confused.”

  “He was confused when he got here,” Dad said.

  The young cop nodded. “Well, sir, why’d you do it?”

  “Threatened me.”

  “How?”

  “Tried to hit me.”

  “Did he?”

  “Too slow.”

  The young cop computed this, and said, “Sir, you have to come with us downtown. There’s been a complaint. His girlfriend filed it.”

  “I don’t think so,” Dad said.

  “You don’t think what?” said the young cop.

  “I don’t think I’m coming.”

  The older cop behind the steering wheel leaned across the seat, and said through the open door, “Bud, you really got to come.”

  Dad turned his head in that curious dog way. “That you, Clyde?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You know me,” Dad said.

  “Yes, sir,” Clyde said.

  “You know I’m not coming.”

  Clyde cleared his throat. “We’re supposed to bring you in.”

  “Folks make plans.”

  The young cop, feeling the drift of things, stepped back and put his hand on his gun.

  Dad reached out and gently pushed me away from him.

  The older cop said, “Dean. Get back in the car.”

  Dean stood there with his hand on the butt of his revolver. He was sweating. The cop cap on his head seemed too big all of a sudden. I noted that the distance between him and Dad was not a lot different from the distance between Dad and Apollo Red when he had leaped forward and hit him.

  “Dean,” Clyde said. “Get back in the car.”

  After a long moment, Dean uncoiled and moved his hand from the gun.

  Dad had not so much as changed his expression.

  Dean got back in the car and closed the door.

  They drove away and never came back.

  Next day, when Dad went back to work, Red’s car was gone, and about two weeks later the woman who owned the Buick came in and paid him all she owed, saying only, “How much?”

  I was there that day, having dropped by to go to dinner with Dad again. The woman was a nice-looking blonde with a lot of hairspray on her hair; it formed a little blue cloud around her head when the sunlight hit it. I wanted to ask her if Apollo Red knew his own name and still remembered how to drive a car. I knew for sure he wasn’t the one who had come for it. Apollo Red had descended, and would not be ascending for quite some time.

  “It was the carburetor this time,” Dad told her. “You might ought to think on getting some tires, too. These are may-pops.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the lady.

  Dad gave her the keys.

  As she was slipping behind the wheel of her car, starting it up, Dad said, “Come on back, it gives you any trouble.”

  SHORT NIGHT

  “ALL RIGHT, IT’S YOUR turn,” Ed said, and lit a cigarette.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Everyone else has done her.”

  “I can see that.”

  The back passenger door of the car opened and Jack climbed out pulling up his pants, swinging his dong like the pendulum inside a grandfather clock. He took his time to tuck it into place behind his jeans and fasten his belt. He was pretty proud of his dick, and had the nickname Horse.

  “I’m all done,” Jack said.

  “You was done before you got started,” a female voice from inside the car said.

  “I did all right,” Jack said.

  “Sure you did,” she said.

  Jack coughed and sidled off to the back of the car and leaned on the trunk and looked at the moon as if it were his job to study the arrangement of craters.

  Ed put his arm around my shoulders and walked me to the car and the open door.

  “You might as well knock some off,” Ed said. He was kind of the co-coordinator of the event.

  “It’s all right, hon,” Billie Sue said from inside the car. “I don’t mind.”

  “I can see that,” I said.

  “Oh come on,” she said. “I said I could fuck you all, and you’re the last one left.”

  “Fuck Jack twice,” I said.

  “Ah come on,” she said. “He barely managed it the first time.”

  “To hell with you, you old whore,” Jack said.

  “Flattery will get you nowhere,” she said.

  Jack walked away from the car to the edge of the woods and took his horse dick out again and took a piss.

  I lo
oked in the car.

  Billie Sue was big and fat and her belly heaved. Her legs were spread and what I could see was less inviting than a leap into the bayou at night. You couldn’t be sure what was down there. I looked away and felt ashamed of myself for being out there in the first place.

  Billie Sue was married to a Baptist preacher, and she liked to take a break from gospel singing and collecting the Lottie Moon offerings to come out in the woods and fuck the senior class. Lottie Moon was a missionary who bothered the Chinese by trying to convert them. She was a kind of Baptist hero, but for me she was a long-dead busybody.

  Billie Sue had been doing her own form of missionary work among each year’s seniors for some four to five years. It was well known around town that she liked to bump with the boys, but her husband was said to give one damn fine sermon. The Baptists didn’t want to lose him. And the knowledge of what his wife did made everyone in the congregation feel good about themselves. A little adultery and hypocrisy was easier to accept in oneself if the preacher’s wife was considerably more wicked than they were. I thought that was nice. The Church of Christ had fired their preacher because he got caught dancing at a honky-tonk.

  “Come on, kid, hop on,” Billie Sue said. “I’ve got my second wind.”

  “No disrespect to you,” I said. “Know you’re trying to break a record, but I just came out here to see the stars.”

  “The stars?” Billie Sue said and laughed.

  “Well, I didn’t come for this,” I said.

  “Shit,” Ed said. “You come for something, and it wasn’t any stars. I think you ain’t got the wood in your pencil to do it.”

  “Now that I’ve seen what I’m supposed to do, and who’s gone before me, I’ll admit there may be a severe lack of wood.”

  “You queer?” Billie Sue said, sat up and rested her back against the door on the far side.

  “No.”

  “Free pussy and you ain’t taking any?” Jack said. He had wandered back over. “That sounds queer to me.”

  “Jack’s trying to get back on my good side,” Billie Sue said.

  Mike, a guy I knew a little, moved away from the other boys who were drinking beer near the back of the car, came over to me, said to Jack and Ed, “Leave him be. It wasn’t any good anyway.”