High Cotton: Selected Stories of Joe R. Lansdale Read online

  “Not a bad way to remember you,” Standers said. “It’s the only part of you that wasn’t a cheat.”

  Standers took the box containing the hair out of the closet, put the closet back in shape, got the wheelbarrow and used it to haul Babe, her purse, and the guns out of there and through the woods to a pond his relatives had built fifty years ago.

  He dumped Babe beside the pond, went back for Mulroy and dumped him beside her. He got Mulroy’s car keys out of his pocket and Babe’s keys out of her purse.

  Standers walked back to Babe’s car and drove it to the edge of the pond, rolled down the windows a little, put her and Mulroy in the back seat with her purse and the guns, then he put the car in neutral. He pushed it off in the water. It was a deep, dirty pond. The car went down quick.

  Standers waited at the shack until almost dark, then took the box containing the hair, walked back, found Mulroy’s car and drove it out of there. He stopped the car beside a dirt road about a mile from his house and wiped it clean with a handkerchief he found in the front seat. He got the box out of the car and walked back to his trailer.

  It was dark when he got there. The door was still open. He went inside, locked up and set the box with the hair on the counter beside the sink. He opened the box and took out the smaller box and studied the hair through the smeary glass.

  He thought to himself: What if this is the Virgin Mary’s hair?

  It could even be an ass hair, but if it’s the Virgin Mary’s…well, it’s the Virgin Mary’s. And what if it’s a dog hair? It’ll still sell for the same. It was time to get rid of it. He would book a flight to Germany tomorrow, search out the right people, sell it, sock what he got from it away in his foreign bank account, come back and fence the gold bars and sell all his land, except for the chunk with the house and pond on it. He’d fill the pond in himself with a rented backhoe and dozer, plant some trees on top of it, let it set while he lived a broad.

  Simple, but a good plan, he thought.

  Standers drank a glass of water and took the box and lay down on the couch snuggling it. He was exhausted. Fear of death did that to a fella. He closed his eyes and went to sleep immediately.

  A short time later he awoke in pain. His whole body ached. He leaped up, dropping the box. He began to slap at his legs and chest, tear at his clothes. Jesus. The fire ants! His entire body was covered with the bastards.

  Standers felt queasy. My God, he thought. I’m having a reaction. I’m allergic to the little shits.

  He got his pants and underwear peeled down to his ankles, but he couldn’t get them over his boots. He began to hop about the room. He hit the light switch and saw the ants all over the place. They had followed the stream of syrup, and then they had found him on the couch and gone after him. Standers screamed and slapped, hopped over and grabbed the box from the floor and jerked open the front door. He held the box in one hand and tugged at his pants with the other, but as he was going down the steps, he tripped, fell forward and landed on his head and lay there with his head and knees holding him up. He tried to stand, but couldn’t. He realized he had broken his neck, and from the waist down he was paralyzed. Oh God, he thought. The ants. Then he thought. Well, at least I can’t feel them, but he found he could feel them on his face. His face still had sensation.

  It’s temporary, the paralysis will pass, he told himself, but it didn’t. The ants began to climb into his hair and swarm over his lips. He batted at them with his eyelashes and blew at them with his mouth, but it didn’t do any good. They swarmed him. He tried to scream, but with his neck bent the way it was, his throat constricted somewhat, he couldn’t make a good noise. And when he opened his mouth the furious little ants swarmed in and bit his tongue, which swelled instantly.

  Oh Jesus, he thought. Jesus and the Virgin Mary.

  But Jesus wasn’t listening. Neither was the Virgin Mary.

  The night grew darker and the ants grew more intense, but Standers was dead long before morning.

  · · ·

  About ten A.M. a car drove up in Standers’s drive and a fat man in a cheap blue suit with a suitcase full of bibles got out; a real bible salesman with a craving for drink.

  The bible salesman, whose name was Bill Longstreet, had his mind on business. He needed to sell a couple of moderate-priced bibles so he could get a drink. He’d spent his last money in Beaumont, Texas on a double, and now he needed another.

  Longstreet strolled around his car, whistling, trying to put up a happy Christian front. Then he saw Standers in the front yard supported by his head and knees, his ass exposed, his entire body swarming with ants. The corpse was swollen up and spotted with bites. Standers’s neck was twisted so that Longstreet could see the right side of his face, and his right eye was nothing more than an ant cavern, and the lips were eaten away and the nostrils were a tunnel for the ants. They were coming in one side, and going out the other.

  Longstreet dropped his sample case, staggered back to his car, climbed on the hood and just sat there and looked for a long time.

  Finally, he got over it. He looked about and saw no one other than the dead man. The door to the trailer was open. Longstreet got off the car. Watching for ants, he went as close as he had courage and yelled toward the open door a few times.

  No one came out.

  Longstreet licked his lips, eased over to Standers and moving quickly, stomping his feet, he reached in Standers’s back pocket and pulled out his wallet.

  Longstreet rushed back to his car and got up on the hood. He looked in the wallet. There were two ten dollar bills and a couple of ones. He took the money, folded it neatly and put it in his coat pocket. He tossed the wallet back at Standers, got down off the car and got his case and put it on the back seat. He got behind the wheel, was about to drive off, when he saw the little box near Standers’s swollen hand.

  Longstreet sat for a moment, then got out, ran over, grabbed the box, and ran back to the car, beating the ants off as he went. He got behind the wheel, opened the box and found another box with a little crude glass window fashioned into it. There was something small and dark and squiggly behind the glass. He wondered what it was.

  He knew a junk store bought stuff like this. He might get a couple bucks from the lady who ran it. He tossed it in the back seat, cranked up the car and drove into town and had a drink.

  He had two drinks. Then three. It was nearly dark by the time he came out of the bar and wobbled out to his car. He started it up and d rove out onto the highway right in front of a speeding semi.

  The truck hit Longstreet’s car and turned it into a horseshoe and sent it spinning across the road, into a telephone pole. The car ricocheted off the pole, back onto the road and the semi, which was slamming hard on its brakes, clipped it again. This time Longstreet and his car went through a barbed wire fence and spun about in a pasture and stopped near a startled bull.

  The bull looked in the open car window and sniffed and went away. The semi driver parked and got out and ran over and looked in the window himself.

  Longstreet’s brains were all over the car and his face had lost a lot of definition. His mouth was dripping bloody teeth. He had fallen with his head against an open bible. Later, when he was hauled off, the bible had to go with him. Blood had plastered it to the side of his head, and when the ambulance arrived, the blood had clotted and the bible was even better attached; way it was on there, you would have thought it was some kind of bizarre growth Longstreet had been born with. Doctors at the hospital wouldn’t mess with it. What was the point. Fucker was dead and they didn’t know him.

  At the funeral home they hosed his head down with warm water and yanked the bible off his face and threw it away.

  Later on, well after the funeral, Longstreet’s widow inherited what was left of Longstreet’s car, which she gave to the junkyard.

  She burned the bibles and all of Longstreet’s clothes. The box with the little box in it she opened and examined. She couldn’t figure what was behind the glass
. She used a screwdriver to get the glass off, tweezers to pinch out the hair.

  She held the hair in the light, twisted it this way and that. She couldn’t make out what it was. A bug leg, maybe. She tossed the hair in the commode and flushed it. She put the little box in the big box and threw it in the trash.

  Later yet, she collected quite a bit of insurance money from Longstreet’s death. She bought herself a new car and some see-through panties and used the rest to finance her lover’s plans to open a used car lot in downtown Beaumont, but it didn’t work out. He used the money to finance himself and she never saw him again.

  Steppin’ Out, Summer ’68

  This is one of my favorites of my own work. It’s based on a number of true incidents, stories I heard, and damn lies. Certain kinds of stupidity amaze me, and I can’t help but feel these types deserve exploring. I think the happily stupid, those people who are that way because they choose to be, or are too lazy or uninspired to be otherwise, are among the scariest people in the world. They are also, if you squint slightly, and can deal with a lot of sadness, pretty funny.

  What amazes me about folks like this is the fact they can repeat the same bad mistakes time after time after time. Or if they avoid the repetition of a mistake, they have an amazing knack for choosing something just as, or even more stupid than their last choice. That really takes effort of a sort, don’t you think? Or, maybe it doesn’t.

  Anyway, stupidity and adolescence, which, unfortunately, often go hand in hand, welded together with a rush of hormones often result in some of the most outlandish behaviors. This story is an example of all those elements at work.

  BUDDY DRANK ANOTHER SWIG of beer and when he brought the bottle down he said to Jake and Wilson, “I could sure use some pussy.”

  “We could all use some,” Wilson said, “problem is we don’t never get any.”

  “That’s the way I see it too,” Jake said.

  “You don’t get any,” Buddy said. “I get plenty, you can count on that.”

  “Uh huh,” Wilson said. “You talk pussy plenty good, but I don’t ever see you with a date. I ain’t never even seen you walking a dog, let alone a girl. You don’t even have a car, so how you gonna get with a girl?”

  “That’s the way I see it too,” Jake said.

  “You see what you want,” Buddy said. “I’m gonna be getting me a Chevy soon. I got my eye on one.”

  “Yeah?” Wilson said. “What one?”

  “Drew Carrington’s old crate.”

  “Shit,” Wilson said, “that motherfucker caught on fire at a streetlight and he run it off in the creek.”

  “They got it out,” Buddy said.

  “They say them flames jumped twenty feet out from under the hood before he run it off in there,” Jake said.

  “Water put the fire out,” Buddy said.

  “Uh huh,” Wilson said, “after the motor blowed up through the hood. They found that motherfucker in a tree out back of old Maud Page’s place. One of the pistons fell out of it and hit her on the head while she was picking up apples. She was in the hospital three days.”

  “Yeah,” Jake said. “And I hear Carrington’s in Dallas now, never got better from the accident. Near drowned and some of the engine blew back into the car and hit him in the nuts, castrated him, fucked up his legs. He can’t walk. He’s on a wheeled board or something, got some retard that pulls him around.”

  “Them’s just stories,” Buddy said. “Motor’s still in the car. Carrington got him a job in Dallas as a mechanic. He didn’t get hurt at all. Old Woman Page didn’t get hit by no piston either. It missed her by a foot. Scared her so bad she had a little stroke. That’s why she was in the hospital.”

  “You seen the motor?” Wilson asked. “Tell me you’ve seen it.”

  “No,” Buddy said, “but I’ve heard about it from good sources, and they say it can be fixed.”

  “Jack it up and drive another car under it,” Wilson said, “it’ll be all right.”

  “That’s the way I see it too,” Jake said.

  “Listen to you two,” Buddy said. “You know it all. You’re real operators. I’ll tell you morons one thing, I line up a little of the hole that winks and stinks, like I’m doing tonight, you won’t get none of it.”

  Wilson and Jake shuffled and eyed each other. An unspoken, but clear message passed between them. They had never known Buddy to actually get any, or anyone else to know of him getting any, but he had a couple of years on them, and he might have gotten some, way he talked about it, and they damn sure knew they weren’t getting any, and if there was a chance of it, things had to be patched up.

  “Car like that,” Wilson said, “if you worked hard enough, you might get it to run. Some new pistons or something…what you got lined up for tonight?”

  Buddy’s face put on some importance. “I know a gal likes to do the circle, you know what I mean?”

  Wilson hated to admit it, but he didn’t. “The circle?”

  “Pull the train,” Buddy said. “Do the team. You know, fuck a bunch a guys, one after the other.”

  “Oh,” Wilson said.

  “I knew that,” Jake said.

  “Yeah,” Wilson said. “Yeah sure you did.” Then to Buddy: “When you gonna see this gal?”

  Buddy, still important, took a swig of beer and pursed his lips and studied the afternoon sky. “Figured I’d walk on over there little after dark. It’s a mile or so.”

  “Say she likes to do more than one guy?” Wilson asked.

  “Way I hear it,” Buddy said, “she’ll do ’em till they ain’t able to do. My cousin, Butch, he told me about her.”

  Butch. The magic word. Wilson and Jake eyed each other again. There could be something in this after all. Butch was twenty, had a fast car, could play a little bit on the harmonica, bought his own beer, cussed in front of adults, and most importantly, he had been seen with women.

  Buddy continued. “Her name’s Sally. Butch said she cost five dollars. He’s done her a few times. Got her name off a bathroom wall.”

  “She costs?” Wilson asked.

  “Think some gal’s going to do us all without some money for it?” Buddy said.

  Again, an unspoken signal passed between Wilson and Jake. There could be truth in that.

  “Butch gave me her address, said her pimp sits on the front porch and you go right up and negotiate with him. Says you talk right, he might take four.”

  “I don’t know,” Wilson said. “I ain’t never paid for it.”

  “Me neither,” said Jake.

  “Ain’t neither one of you ever had any at all, let alone paid for it,” Buddy said.

  Once more, Wilson and Jake were struck with the hard and painful facts.

  Buddy looked at their faces and smiled. He took another sip of beer. “Well, you bring your five dollars, and I reckon you can tag along with me. Come by the house about dark and we’ll walk over together.”

  “Yeah, well, all right,” Wilson said. “I wish we had a car.”

  “Keep wishing,” Buddy said. “You boys hang with me, we’ll all be riding in Carrington’s old Chevy before long. I’ve got some prospects.”

  It was just about dark when Wilson and Jake got over to Buddy’s neighborhood, which was a long street with four houses on it widely spaced. Buddy’s house was the ugliest of the four. It looked ready to nod off its concrete blocks at any moment and go crashing into the unkempt yard and die in a heap of rotting lumber and squeaking nails. Great strips of graying Sherwin Williams flat-white paint hung from it in patches, giving it the appearance of having a skin disease. The roof was tin and loved the sun and pulled it in and held it so that the interior basked in a sort of slow simmer until well after sundown. Even now, late in the day, a rush of heat came off the roof and rippled down the street like the last results of a nuclear wind.

  Wilson and Jake came up on the house from the side, not wanting to go to the door. Buddy’s mother was a grumpy old bitch in a brown bathrobe and bu
nny rabbit slippers with an ear missing on the left foot. No one had ever seen her wearing anything else, except now and then she added a shower cap to her uniform, and no one had ever seen her, with or without the shower cap, except through the screen-wire door. She wasn’t thought to leave the house. She played radio contests and had to be near the radio at strategic times throughout the day so she could phone if she knew the answer to something. She claimed to be listening for household tips, but no one had ever seen her apply any. She also watched her daughter’s soap operas, though she never owned up to it. She always pretended to be reading, kept a Reader’s Digest cracked so she could look over it and see the TV.

  She wasn’t friendly either. Times Wilson and Jake had come over before, she’d met them at the screen door and wouldn’t let them in. She wouldn’t even talk to them. She’d call back to Buddy inside, “Hey, those hoodlum friends of yours are here.”

  Neither Wilson or Jake could see any sort of relationship developing between them and Buddy’s mother, and they had stopped trying. They hung around outside the house under the open windows until Buddy came out. There were always interesting things to hear while they waited. Wilson told Jake it was educational.

  This time, as before, they sidled up close to the house where they could hear. The television was on. A laugh track drifted out to them. That meant Buddy’s sister LuWanda was in there watching. If it wasn’t on, it meant she was asleep. Like her mother, she was drawing a check. Back problems plagued the family. Except for Buddy’s pa. His back was good. He was in prison for sticking up a liquor store. What little check he was getting for making license plates probably didn’t amount to much.

  Now they could hear Buddy’s mother. Her voice had a quality that made you think of someone trying to talk while fatally injured; like she was lying under an overturned refrigerator, or had been thrown free of a car and had hit a tree.

  “LuWanda, turn that thing down. You know I got bad feet.”

  “You don’t listen none with your feet, Mama,” LuWanda said. Her voice was kind of slow and lazy, faintly squeaky, as if hoisted from her throat by a handover pulley.