The Best of Joe R. Lansdale Page 36

  Wayne looked at the nun. “I’m going for the cuff key in my pants. Don’t shoot.”

  Wayne fished it out, unlocked the cuff, and Calhoun let it slide to the floor. Wayne saw the nun was curious and he said, “I’m a bounty hunter. Help me get this man to Law Town and I could see you earn a little something for your troubles.”

  The woman shook her head.

  “That’s the spirit,” Calhoun said. “I like a nun that minds her own business… You a real nun?”

  She nodded.

  “Always talk so much?”

  Another nod.

  Wayne said, “I’ve never seen a nun like you. Not dressed like that and with a gun.”

  “We are a small and special order,” she said.

  “You some kind of Sunday school teacher for these dead folks?”

  “Sort of.”

  “But with them dead, ain’t it kind of pointless? They ain’t got no souls now, do they?”

  “No, but their work adds to the glory of God.”

  “Their work?” Wayne looked at the dead folks sitting stiffly in their seats. He noted that one of them was about to lose a rotten ear. He sniffed. “They may be adding to the glory of God, but they don’t do much for the air.”

  The nun reached into a pocket on her habit and took out two round objects. She tossed one to Calhoun, and one to Wayne. “Menthol lozenges. They help you stand the smell.”

  Wayne unwrapped the lozenge and sucked on it. It did help overpower the smell, but the menthol wasn’t all that great either. It reminded him of being sick.

  “What order are you?” Wayne asked.

  “Jesus Loved Mary,” the nun said.

  “His mama?”

  “Mary Magdalene. We think he fucked her. They were lovers. There’s evidence in the scriptures. She was a harlot and we have modeled ourselves on her. She gave up that life and became a harlot for Jesus.”

  “Hate to break it to you, sister,” Calhoun said, “but that do-gooder Jesus is as dead as a post. If you’re waiting for him to slap the meat to you, that sweet thing of yours is going to dry up and blow away.”

  “Thanks for the news,” the nun said. “But we don’t fuck him in person. We fuck him in spirit. We let the spirit enter into men so they may take us in the fashion Jesus took Mary.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  “You know, I think I feel the old boy moving around inside me now. Why don’t you shuck them drawers, honey, throw back in that seat there and let ole Calhoun give you a big load of Jesus.”

  Calhoun shifted in the nun’s direction.

  She pointed the derringer at him, said, “Stay where you are. If it were so, if you were full of Jesus, I would let you have me in a moment. But you’re full of the Devil, not Jesus.”

  “Shit, sister, give ole Devil a break. He’s a fun kind of guy. Let’s you and me mount up… Well, be like that. But if you change your mind, I can get religion at a moment’s notice. I dearly love to fuck. I’ve fucked …ything I could get my hands on but a parakeet, and I’d have fucked that little bitch if I could have found the hole.”

  “I’ve never known any dead folks to be trained,” Wayne said, trying to get the nun talking in a direction that might help, a direction that would let him know what was going on and what sort of trouble he had fallen into.

  “As I said, we are a very special order. Brother Lazarus,” she waved a hand at the bus driver, and without looking he lifted a hand in acknowledgement, “is the founder. I don’t think he’ll mind if I tell his story, explain about us, what we do and why. It’s important that we spread the word to the heathens.”

  “Don’t call me no fucking heathen,” Calhoun said. “This is heathen, riding ‘round in a fucking bus with a bunch of stinking dead folks with funny hats on. Hell, they can’t even carry a tune.”

  The nun ignored him. “Brother Lazarus was once known by another name, but that name no longer matters. He was a research scientist, and he was one of those who worked in the laboratory where the germs escaped into the air and made it so the dead could not truly die as long as they had an undamaged brain in their heads.

  “Brother Lazarus was carrying a dish of the experiment, the germs, and as a joke, one of the lab assistants pretended to trip him, and he, not knowing it was a joke, dodged the assistant’s leg and dropped the dish. In a moment, the air conditioning system had blown the germs throughout the research center. Someone opened a door, and the germs were loose on the world.

  “Brother Lazarus was consumed by guilt. Not only because he dropped the dish, but because he helped create it in the first place. He quit his job at the laboratory, took to wandering the country. He came out here with nothing more than basic food, water and books. Among these books was the Bible, and the lost books of the Bible: the Apocrypha and the many cast-out chapters of the New Testament. As he studied, it occurred to him that these cast-out books actually belonged. He was able to interpret their higher meaning, and an angel came to him in a dream and told him of another book, and Brother Lazarus took up his pen and recorded the angel’s words, direct from God, and in this book, all the mysteries were explained.”

  “Like screwing Jesus,” Calhoun said.

  “Like screwing Jesus, and not being afraid of words that mean sex. Not being afraid of seeing Jesus as both God and man. Seeing that sex, if meant for Christ and the opening of the mind, can be a thrilling and religious experience, not just the rutting of two savage animals.

  “Brother Lazarus roamed the desert, the mountains, thinking of the things the Lord had revealed to him, and lo and behold, the Lord revealed yet another thing to him. Brother Lazarus found a great amusement park.”

  “Didn’t know Jesus went in for rides and such,” Calhoun said.

  “It was long deserted. It had once been part of a place called Disneyland. Brother Lazarus knew of it. There had been several of these Disneylands built about the country, and this one had been in the midst of the Chevy-Cadillac Wars, and had been destroyed and sand had covered most of it.”

  The nun held out her arms. “And in this rubble, he saw a new beginning.”

  “Cool off, baby,” Calhoun said, “before you have a stroke.”

  “He gathered to him men and women of a like mind and taught the gospel to them. The Old Testament. The New Testament. The Lost Books. And his own Book of Lazarus, for he had begun to call himself Lazarus. A symbolic name signifying a new beginning, a rising from the dead and coming to life and seeing things as they really are.”

  The nun moved her hands rapidly, expressively as she talked. Sweat beaded on her forehead and upper lip.

  “So he returned to his skills as a scientist, but applied them to a higher purpose — God’s purpose. And as Brother Lazarus, he realized the use of the dead. They could be taught to work and build a great monument to the glory of God. And this monument, this coed institution of monks and nuns would be called Jesus Land.”

  At the word “Jesus,” the nun gave her voice an extra trill, and the dead folks, cued, said together, “Eees num be prased.”

  “How the hell did you train them dead folks?” Calhoun said. “Dog treats?”

  “Science put to the use of our lord Jesus Christ, that’s how. Brother Lazarus made a special device he could insert directly into the brains of dead folks, through the tops of their heads, and the device controls certain cravings. Makes them passive and responsive — at least to simple commands. With the regulator, as Brother Lazarus calls the device, we have been able to do much positive work with the dead.”

  “Where do you find these dead folks?” Wayne asked.

  “We buy them from the Meat Boys. We save them from amoral purposes.”

  “They ought to be shot through the head and put in the goddamn ground,” Wayne said.

  “If our use of the regulator and the dead folks was merely to better ourselves, I would agree. But it is not. We do the Lord’s work.”

  “Do the monks fuck the sisters?” Calho
un asked.

  “When possessed by the Spirit of Christ. Yes.”

  “And I bet they get possessed a lot. Not a bad setup. Dead folks to do the work on the amusement park —”

  “It isn’t an amusement park now.”

  “— and plenty of free pussy. Sounds cozy. I like it. Old shithead up there’s smarter than he looks.”

  “There is nothing selfish about our motives or those of Brother Lazarus. In fact, as penance for loosing the germ on the world in the first place, Brother Lazarus injected a virus into his nose. It is rotting slowly.”

  “Thought that was quite a snorkel he had on him,” Wayne said.

  “I take it back,” Calhoun said. “He is as dumb as he looks.”

  “Why do the dead folks wear those silly hats?” Wayne asked.

  “Brother Lazarus found a storeroom of them at the site of the old amusement park. They are mouse ears. They represent some cartoon animal that was popular once and part of Disneyland. Mickey Mouse, he was called. This way we know which dead folks are ours, and which ones are not controlled by our regulators. From time to time, stray dead folks wander into our area. Murder victims. Children abandoned in the desert. People crossing the desert who died of heat or illness. We’ve had some of the sisters and brothers attacked. The hats are a precaution.”

  “And what’s the deal with us?” Wayne asked.

  The nun smiled sweetly. “You, my children, are to add to the glory of God.”

  “Children?” Calhoun said. “You call an alligator a lizard, bitch?”

  The nun slid back in the seat and rested the derringer in her lap. She pulled her legs into a cocked position, causing her panties to crease in the valley of her vagina; it looked like a nice place to visit, that valley.

  Wayne turned from the beauty of it and put his head back and closed his eyes, pulled his hat down over them. There was nothing he could do at the moment, and since the nun was watching Calhoun for him, he’d sleep, store up and figure what to do next. If anything.

  He drifted off to sleep wondering what the nun meant by, “You, my children, are to add to the glory of God.”

  He had a feeling that when he found out, he wasn’t going to like it.

  5

  He awoke off and on and saw that the sunlight filtering through the storm had given everything a greenish color. Calhoun, seeing he was awake, said, “Ain’t that a pretty color? I had a shirt that color once and liked it lots, but I got in a fight with this Mexican whore with a wooden leg over some money and she tore it. I punched that little bean bandit good.”

  “Thanks for sharing that,” Wayne said, and went back to sleep.

  Each time he awoke it was brighter, and finally he awoke to the sun going down and the storm having died out. But he didn’t stay awake. He forced himself to close his eyes and store up more energy. To help him nod off he listened to the hum of the motor and thought about the wrecking yard and Pop and all the fun they could have, just drinking beer and playing cards and fucking the border women, and maybe some of those mutated cows they had over there for sale.

  Nah. Nix the cows, or any of those genetically altered critters. A man had to draw the line somewhere, and he drew it at fucking critters, even if they had been bred so that they had human traits. You had to have some standards.

  ‘Course, those standards had a way of eroding. He remembered when he said he’d only fuck the pretty ones. His last whore had been downright scary looking. If he didn’t watch himself he’d be as bad as Calhoun, trying to find the hole in the parakeet.

  He awoke to Calhoun’s elbow in his ribs and the nun was standing beside their seat with the derringer. Wayne knew she hadn’t slept, but she looked bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. She nodded toward their window, said, “Jesus Land.”

  She had put that special touch in her voice again, and the dead folks responded with, “Eees num be prased.”

  It was good and dark now, a crisp night with a big moon the color of hammered brass. The bus sailed across the white sand like a mystical schooner with a full wind in its sails. It went up an impossible hill toward what looked like an aurora borealis, then dove into an atomic rainbow of colors that filled the bus with fairy lights.

  When Wayne’s eyes became accustomed to the lights, and the bus took a right turn along a precarious curve, he glanced down into the valley. An aerial view couldn’t have been any better than the view from his window.

  Down there was a universe of polished metal and twisted neon. In the center of the valley was a great statue of Jesus crucified that must have been twenty-five stories high. Most of the body was made of bright metals and multicolored neon; and much of the light was coming from that. There was a crown of barbed wire wound several times around a chromium plate of a forehead and some rust-colored strands of neon hair. The savior’s eyes were huge, green strobes that swung left and right with the precision of an oscillating fan. There was an ear-to-ear smile on the savior’s face and the teeth were slats of sparkling metal with wide cavity-black gaps between them. The statue was equipped with a massive dick of polished, interwoven cables and coils of neon, the dick was thicker and more solid looking than the arthritic steel-tube legs on either side of it; the head of it was made of an enormous spotlight that pulsed the color of irritation.

  The bus went around and around the valley, descending like a dead roach going down a slow drain, and finally the road rolled out straight and took them into Jesus Land.

  They passed through the legs of Jesus, under the throbbing head of his cock, toward what looked like a small castle of polished gold bricks with an upright drawbridge inlayed with jewels.

  The castle was only one of several tall structures that appeared to be made of rare metals and precious stones: gold, silver, emeralds, rubies, and sapphires. But the closer they got to the buildings, the less fine they looked and the more they looked like what they were: stucco, cardboard, phosphorescent paint, colored spotlights, and bands of neon.

  Off to the left Wayne could see a long, open shed full of vehicles, most of them old school buses. And there were unlighted hovels made of tin and tar paper; homes for the dead, perhaps. Behind the shacks and the bus barn rose skeletal shapes that stretched tall and bleak against the sky and the candy-gem lights; shapes that looked like the bony remains of beached whales.

  On the right, Wayne glimpsed a building with an open front that served as a stage. In front of the stage were chairs filled with monks and nuns. On the stage, six monks — one behind a drum set, one with a saxophone, the others with guitars — were blasting out a loud, rocking rhythm that made the bus shake. A nun with the front of her habit thrown open, her headpiece discarded, sang into a microphone with a voice like a suffering angel. The voice screeched out of the amplifiers and came in through the windows of the bus, crushing the sound of the engine. The nun crowed “Jesus” so long and hard it sounded like a plea from hell. Then she leapt up and came down doing the splits, the impact driving her back to her feet as if her ass had been loaded with springs.

  “Bet that bitch can pick up a quarter with that thing,” Calhoun said.

  Brother Lazarus touched a button, the pseudo-jeweled drawbridge lowered over a narrow moat, and he drove them inside.

  It wasn’t as well lighted in there. The walls were bleak and gray. Brother Lazarus stopped the bus and got off, and another monk came on board. He was tall and thin and had crooked buck teeth that dented his bottom lip. He also had a twelve-gauge pump shotgun.

  “This is Brother Fred,” the nun said. “He’ll be your tour guide.”

  Brother Fred forced Wayne and Calhoun off the bus, away from the dead folks in their mouse-ear hats and the nun in her tight, black panties, jabbed them along a dark corridor, up a swirl of stairs and down a longer corridor with open doors on either side and rooms filled with dark and light and spoiled meat and guts on hooks and skulls and bones lying about like discarded walnut shells and broken sticks; rooms full of dead folks (truly dead) stacked neat as firewood, and roo
ms full of stone shelves stuffed with beakers of fiery-red and sewer-green and sky-blue and piss-yellow liquids, as well as glass coils through which other colored fluids fled as if chased, smoked as if nervous, and ran into big flasks as if relieved; rooms with platforms and tables and boxes and stools and chairs covered with instruments or dead folks or dead-folk pieces or the asses of monks and nuns as they sat and held charts or tubes or body parts and frowned at them with concentration, lips pursed as if about to explode with some earth-shattering pronouncement; and finally they came to a little room with a tall, glassless window that looked out upon the bright, shiny mess that was Jesus Land.

  The room was simple. Table, two chairs, two beds — one on either side of the room. The walls were stone and unadorned. To the right was a little bathroom without a door.

  Wayne walked to the window and looked out at Jesus Land pulsing and thumping like a desperate heart. He listened to the music a moment, leaned over and stuck his head outside.

  They were high up and there was nothing but a straight drop. If you jumped, you’d wind up with the heels of your boots under your tonsils.

  Wayne let out a whistle in appreciation of the drop. Brother Fred thought it was a compliment for Jesus Land. He said, “It’s a miracle, isn’t it?”

  “Miracle?” Calhoun said. “This goony light show? This ain’t no miracle. This is for shit. Get that nun on the bus back there to bend over and shit a perfectly round turd through a hoop at twenty paces, and I’ll call that a miracle, Mr. Fucked-up Teeth. But this Jesus Land crap is the dumbest fucking idea since dog sweaters.

  “And look at this place. You could use some knickknacks or something in here. A picture of some ole naked gal doing a donkey, couple of pigs fucking. Anything. And a door on the shitter would be nice. I hate to be straining out a big one and know someone can look in on me. It ain’t decent. A man ought to have his fucking grunts in private. This place reminds me of a motel I stayed at in Waco one night, and I made the goddamn manager give me my money back. The roaches in that shit hole were big enough to use the shower.”