Freezer Burn

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Bill looked at Chaplin. Chaplin and Bill looked at the stand owner, who suddenly grew pale.

  “You fucked up,” said Chaplin.

  “Don’t,” Bill said, but Chaplin shot the stand owner between the eyes. The stand owner did a short hop backwards, coiled down over his legs as if they were boneless, and lay behind the counter with his head on his knee, one hand reaching up and pulling down a box of firecrackers. Then he was still as the dirt beneath him.

  “Oh my God,” Bill said. “You shot him.”

  “He knew who you were.”

  “I didn’t want nobody killed.”

  “Pray over him a bit, maybe he’ll come around.”

  Bumfuzzled, Bill stood still as a post.

  “Climb over there and get the money,” Chaplin said.

  Bill climbed over the counter, got a bag and shoved the money into it, got another bag and put the candles and the ’crackers in it, picked him out a few cherry bombs and the teepee things, put those in the sack. He looked through the dead man’s pockets and found a quarter. He climbed over the counter, tossed the firecracker bag to Chaplin, and they darted out to the car, got in the back seat.

  “I heard you shoot,” Fat Boy said. “You shot him, didn’t you?”

  “Weren’t no choice,” Chaplin said.

  “I didn’t mean for nothing like that to happen,” Bill said.

  “That’s what I hate about jobs where you got to have guns,” Fat Boy said. “I hate it.” Fat Boy drove off peeling rubber. “I hate it big. I knew someone was gonna get shot.”

  “Well,” Chaplin said, “it weren’t you, so that’s good.”

  “It ain’t good,” Fat Boy said. “It ain’t good at all.”

  “It don’t matter now,” Chaplin said, counting the money. “Goddamn, we got maybe three thousand dollars here.”

  At that moment there was a loud explosion and the car’s rear end did a quick dodge to the right, went off the road and into a ditch, turned over and righted again next to the woods.

  Bill licked blood off his mouth and let his stomach fall back down to its proper place. He had taken a bite out of the seat in front of him, but all his teeth were still intact, and his tongue wasn’t bit in two. He only had mashed his lips.

  Chaplin sat next to him, very still. The sack with the Roman candles had been in front of Chaplin, and the wreck had driven him forward into one of them; it had fitted itself snugly into his eye socket. He was bent at the waist with the candle in his eye. He had one hand on the candle as if to pull it out, but he hadn’t lived long enough. Blood ran along the candle and down over his hands and spilled into his lap and onto the car seat.

  Fat Boy, who had a split bloody nose and a knot on his forehead big enough to wear a hat, turned in his seat, held his head, and looked at Chaplin.

  “Shit!” he said. “Shit!”

  Bill opened the door, stumbled out and fell down. Fat Boy got out. He leaned against the side of the car. He said, “Blowout. Fuckin’ tire blew out. Dumb shit Chaplin could have stole a better car.”

  Bill fell down and lay on the grass for a moment, then got up. He used his pocketknife and a few hard kicks to open the trunk, pulled out the jack, the tire iron, and the spare.

  “What you doin’?” Fat Boy said.

  “What’s it look like?”

  “Chaplin’s dead!”

  “He ain’t gonna get no more alive if we leave the tire flat. We got to get out of here.”

  Bill put on the emergency brake and set to work jacking up the bumper to get at the blown tire. It was a real job in the dark and Fat Boy continued to wander about the car like a lost duck. He seemed to want to go somewhere but couldn’t quite figure which direction to take.

  “Get your ass over here and help with these lug bolts,” Bill said.

  Fat Boy lumbered over and got the lug wrench and went at it. He worked the bolts loose, popped two of his knuckles open in the process, pulled the tire off. Bill slipped on the spare. Fat Boy screwed down the bolts and Bill lowered the wheel and Fat Boy tightened them. Bill rolled the bad tire off into the woods and tightened down the trunk lid with a piece of a coat hanger he found back there. They got in the crumpled car, Bill on the passenger side now, and Fat Boy drove them out of there.

  Three

  They drove along the highway very fast and passed a deputy sheriff’s car running emergency lights and siren.

  “Shit,” Fat Boy said. “Is that for us?”

  “Got to be. Or at least for the shooting. Someone must have heard it and called. You think anyone could have seen us in the dark?”

  “Ain’t that dark,” Fat Boy said. “And the stand had lights. We got to hide this car.”

  “Can’t we dump it near your car?”

  “Too far away. In a minute them cops’ll be on our ass like hemorrhoids.”

  Fat Boy found a little road to the right and took it, drove down into the thick woods. The headbeams showed sparkles to the left and right. Bill realized there was water in the woods.

  “Where the hell are we?” Bill said.

  “I ain’t never been down here,” Fat Boy said. “But I know it’s the bottoms. I know some niggers fish down here all the time. They say you get down in here good, ain’t nobody ever gonna find you. There’s supposed to be enough bodies down here, you could dig them all up and count ’em, there’d be enough to fill a town.”

  Fat Boy threw an eye on the rearview mirror, said, “Fuck!”

  Bill looked over his shoulder.

  Lights flashing. A moment later, sirens. Chaplin’s body bounced around the back seat like a jumping bean, the Roman candle sticking out of his face, his dead hand clutching it as if holding a telescope to his eye.

  “Goddamn,” Fat Boy said. “Cop turned around. Someone must have given them a make on the car.”

  “Probably one of my nosy neighbors ’cross the highway,” Bill said. “Show them fuckers you know how to drive.”

  Fat Boy put his foot to the floor. The car leaped. A curve showed up in the headlights, Fat Boy made it, threw dirt as he went. The dirt reflected in the red tail-lights like a bloody mist. In the back seat, Chaplin hopped about as if excited.

  The cop car made the turn too. When Bill looked back the cop car was rocking left and right, but it fell in line and jumped close to them.

  “Go! Go! Go!” Bill yelled.

  There was a big curve coming up. Fat Boy went around it, pedal to the metal, nose forward, ears back, balls sucked up tight as mad baby fists.

  They made the curve and the cop didn’t. His car went through a barbed wire fence and smacked a tree. The front turned butter soft and looked like an accordion. Steam hissed out from under the crumpled hood and made a white mushroom cloud.

  Just as they approached another curve, Bill looked back and was amazed to see the cop car back away from the tree and onto the road. It wasn’t exactly motoring like it had a rocket in its ass, but it was coming. The hood flapped up and down like a gossip’s tongue.

  “He ain’t got a prayer and a sandwich now,” Fat Boy said, laughed, and they made the curve. Then there was a clunk and a grind and a bumpty-bumpty, bumpty-bump.

  Fat Boy said, “Goddamn muffler’s hangin’. But we ain’t gonna let that stop us.”

  Around another curve they went, and the muffler swung to the left and came loose. But not before the rear tire met it and the muffler snapped and the end of it drove into the rubber and the tire blew. The Chevy, going about eighty, spun around in the road and left it, knocked through a barbed wire fence, rampaged over a few small trees, slapped the hell out of a couple of unsuspecting frogs, then sailed out into the water.

  It was odd the way that car went in. All white and shiny, spinning around and around, almost levitating across the top of the water, then suddenly it nosed down fast. Then, as if it were a cork, it bobbed in the swamp a moment next to a blackened cypress stump.

  Creatures in the water and the woods moved. The car gave off steam. The water rippled wa
y out from the impact and frogs croaked and hopped away. The moon’s image lay full and huge on the swampy water, as if God had dropped a greasy dinner plate. Inside, Chaplin had been tossed over the seat to join Bill and Fat Boy. Bill pushed Chaplin aside, put his foot on the corpse’s head, climbed over the seat, and rolled down a back window as the Chevy began to slide into the gloom.

  Bill climbed out. Fat Boy, wearing a steering wheel tattoo on his forehead next to the mountainous knot he had acquired earlier, fought the floating body of Chaplin off, and followed.

  Moments after they abandoned the Chevy, the car went down, along with the firecrackers, the money, and Chaplin.

  Bill and Fat Boy swam in the warm water. The water was thick as good beef stew. Underwater weeds and vines grabbed at their ankles and tried to hold them. They swam back toward the road. But as they did, the injured deputy’s car, hissing smoke from under its hood, pulled up and stopped and the deputy, his cowboy hat twisted to one side on his head, got out, pulled a pistol, and started shooting at them.

  Bill and Fat Boy turned and swam and clawed in the other direction. The shots hopped all around them, like corn popping. They kept swimming, made some thick grass that grew high out of the water, grabbed hold of it and pulled themselves into a maze of cattails, then onto a spur of land and into a nest of trees.

  The deputy had reloaded and was firing again. Lead danced across the water, but after a moment, Bill and Fat Boy realized the lead was only dancing so far.

  “We’re out of range,” Fat Boy said.

  At that moment, the deputy waded into the water and started calling them “cocksuckers.” They could hear his voice loud and clear across the water. He was wading and holding the hand with the pistol up out of the water and firing toward them. “Cocksuckers!” he kept saying over and over.

  Before the deputy could bring them into range, they turned and went through the trees, back into waist-high water, and started wading toward an isle where great roots stuck out from the shore and plunged into the water like anacondas frozen on film. On the island itself, gnarly willows twisted amongst cypress stumps. There were high weeds beyond that and more cattails and thick brush and plenty of darkness.

  The swamp smelled like an outhouse, and the moonlight on the water made it silver. In spots near the shore the water boiled, and pretty soon they were close to the boiling, and Bill could see there were little heads sticking out of the water, and the moonlight caught the dead eyes planted on the little heads and made them no brighter, but showed them for what they were. The flat black eyes of the devil, multiplied and trapped in the triangular-shaped faces of about twenty-five cotton-mouth water moccasins.

  “By Jesus’s blue-veined dick!” Fat Boy yelled.

  Bill backpedaled, trying to return to the bank behind him. Then he heard, “Cocksuckers . . . Cocksuckers,” and the water grew hot with pistol shot. Bill floundered back toward the snakes and to the right, and Fat Boy panicked, screamed, began to slap at the water to scare the snakes. But the snakes didn’t scare. The slapping excited them. They swam toward Fat Boy, their heads standing out of the swamp like malignant periscopes.

  Fat Boy ducked under the water, possibly trying to swim under the snakes, or hoping the old story about how snakes couldn’t bite underwater was true, but the snakes dove down after him, and in the next moment he rose up wearing several of them, dispelling the myth. He screamed and screamed and the snakes struck up and out of the water and buried their fangs in him.

  Fat Boy quit fighting them. He swam toward shore with the snakes dangling from his body. He made the bank by taking hold of a root and pulling himself up. Just before he was completely on shore, the deputy yelled “Cocksucker” again, and fired, and perhaps by accident, put a load in Fat Boy’s back.

  Bill, who had made shore, was watching Fat Boy from behind the cypress stump. Fat Boy crawled onto shore and the snakes let go and bit him again and slithered away into the water. Fat Boy rolled onto his back and lay beneath willow shadows and a rich slice of lime-colored moonlight on his face.

  The deputy, who was halfway across, partly wading, partly swimming, saw the little heads coming his way, gave out with a couple more “cocksuckers” and retreated. He made the shore ahead of the snakes and snapped a half dozen bullets across the water into the woods where Fat Boy lay and Bill cowered. He just kept firing and reloading, and Bill realized the deputy actually had two pistols. However, his marksmanship proved no better than his language, and Bill was certain the shot that had caught Fat Boy was an accident.

  The deputy began to snap an empty revolver at them. He yelled. “Cocksuckers. I’m gonna get the shotgun. Hear me cocksuckers!” Then the deputy moved out of their sight, and Bill could hear him across the way, cussing and thrashing through the water back to his car.

  Bill came out from behind the stump and looked at Fat Boy. Fat Boy had a head like a watermelon now. He looked much fatter all over and the steering wheel indentation and the knot made him look like some kind of space monster.

  Fat Boy turned his head toward Bill. Fat Boy’s eyes were barely visible. His face had puffed up all around them. Fat Boy said, “One of ’em bit me on the balls. You got to get the poison out.”

  “They bit you all over,” Bill said.

  “But one bit me on the balls.”

  “It don’t matter where they bit you. They bit you all over. You got shot too.”

  “But one bit me on the balls. Oh shit. I ain’t gonna make it.” Then Fat Boy’s eyes went as flat and black as the eyes of the water moccasins. A cloud moved over the moon.

  Four

  The moon stayed behind clouds for a while, and Bill left Fat Boy where he lay and struck out into the swamp water. He felt like a sewer rat wading through a shit-clogged drain. The swamp seemed to rise up out of nowhere. One moment you were walking on land, the next you were up to your neck in water and grass and maybe water moccasins.

  Bill tried not to think about the water moccasins. He understood how Fat Boy had felt about being bit on the balls. You got to go, you don’t want to get it in the balls. The Old Man had told him once you could do a lot of things, but you shouldn’t let nobody get their hands on your balls. Bill was uncertain if this had been street fighting or sexual advice. It was about the only real advice his father had ever given him, because when Bill was twelve the Old Man did a fade. Considering the Old Man had to deal with Bill’s mother all the time, it left the boy with less hurt and a world of understanding. Actually, he was proud of the Old Man for bailing. He had never had the guts to leave. He had to wait until his mother left him. It felt odd now not to be bossed about by an overbearing woman. He had grown so accustomed to it, he thought it was natural, like trips to the bathroom.

  Bill heard something slither by him in the water. His bowels loosened, but he kept wading. Soon the clouds around the moon faded or rolled away, leaving only tufts of mist across its face, like an adolescent wearing cotton whiskers.

  Eventually Bill climbed on a little island and lay down to rest. He could hear things moving around him in the brush and among the willows and the old cypress stumps that had once been great trees but had been cut out years ago. He could hear something else.

  “Cocksucker! Cocksucker! Cocksucker!” drifted over the swamp water as clear and clean as if shouted through a bullhorn. The bastard was nuts. Maybe when he wrecked he’d banged his head and sort of lost it. Bill remembered what the deputy had said about going back to his car to get his shotgun. It was Bill’s guess that if the deputy had the ammunition, he had reloaded both pistols as well.

  Bill lifted up and peered in the direction he thought the last “Cocksucker!” had come from. A light was dancing in the darkness amidst the willows and cattails. The deputy had gotten a flashlight. But there was no way the bastard could be following him. You couldn’t follow anyone in this muck. The sonofabitch was just lucky. Or maybe the deputy was pursuing the most logical path . . . the little islands situated between patches of swamp water.

>   Crawling on his hands and knees, sweating so badly his face felt as if it had been buttered, Bill crossed the narrow little strip of land and slithered off into the water on the other side like a moccasin himself. He swam hard, but as quietly as he could, out to the center of the swamp and got hold of a cypress stump with a hole in it. While he was clinging to it, in the moonlight, he saw eyes looking out of the hollow at him. The stump was the home of a possum. The possum bared its fangs. Bill moved around to the other side of the stump and got up close to it and hoped for the best.

  Out on the surface of the water he could see the heads of moccasins crossing toward the isle he had just vacated. He could hear the deputy crashing in the water and cussing a blue streak. The moccasins, perhaps offended by such language, turned, and headed back in the direction from which they had come.

  Bill watched from the concealment of his stump as the deputy waded and made the little isle across the way, holding his shotgun over his head like a native bearer. He was still repeating “cocksucker” over and over.

  In a moment, the deputy climbed onto the island across the way and cussed and thrashed through the growth there, and in the distance Bill could hear him cussing, and finally Bill swam out into the deeper part of the swamp and tried to strike out for an isle far across the way.

  About halfway he became exhausted, considered just giving it up. But the sighting of a small gator changed his mind. He found he could tread water a lot longer than he thought. The gator cruised on. Invigorated, Bill began to swim, thinking about how gators liked to grab things and drag them down and stuff them in holes and let them ripen.

  After a long time Bill made the isle he wanted, climbed onto it and lay there and rested, and finally slept. When he awoke it was to daylight shining through a patch of water oak and willow trees. He was wearing a faceful of mosquitoes.

  Five

  The mosquitoes had enjoyed quite a feast. Bill’s lips were swollen and his face wasn’t feeling all that good either. It seemed as if his skin was a sack of light bulbs someone had stepped on. Bill lay there and felt the steamy heat and brought a weak hand up and slapped the mosquitoes away. They gathered back, like beggars looking for money.