Devil Red

by Joe R. Lansdale

  I twisted so I could sit on the bed and put my feet on the floor. I took some deep breaths. I tried to imagine encasing my thoughts in a dark balloon and letting it float away.

  I had to float a lot of balloons.

  After a little while, I felt better. I decided to take a hot shower and stand and soak the back of my neck for a while. I did that, and when I came out, toweling off, I checked the clock for the time. It was late.

  I looked at my cell lying on the nightstand.

  I had missed two calls.

  I checked.

  They were from Bert.

  24

  There was a message on the cell.

  “Hey, this is Bert. Saw you and the colored guy with the silly hat at the auction barn, today, remember?” the message started, like maybe we wouldn’t remember him. “Give me a call, you got some money. I got something for you.”

  I called his number.

  Nothing.

  I left a message.

  I had missed his call by only a few minutes. Where the hell was he?

  I finished drying off and crawled back into bed and picked up my book. I read only a page or two before I called him again.

  Nothing.

  I finally turned in and went to sleep, and in the middle of the night I woke up thinking about Bert’s call. There was no reason to suspect anything odd, anything foul. He had called and left a message, and I had called back and left one, and that was it, but I couldn’t get the paranoid feeling out of my head that something was wrong.

  He hadn’t said anything particularly suspicious in his call, but I had detected a worried tone in his voice. Or had I? Maybe I was projecting.

  I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep, but that didn’t work.

  I turned on the light by the bed and tried to read some more, but my mind wouldn’t focus on the words. I got up and dressed and drove over to Camp Rapture and the address I had for Bert. It was about a forty-five-minute drive.

  His place was off the main road and over a cattle guard, down a drive that was little more than a crease in a pasture. As I turned into the long drive, a car nearly sideswiped me, and was gone.

  I couldn’t tell much about the car, but I thought it was some kind of SUV. All I had seen was lights, and the blur of a passing vehicle. It could have been any dark color.

  I drove on cautiously, came to where he lived, which was a green-and-white trailer up on blocks in a little grown-up yard next to a creek on one side, an aluminum outbuilding with the door missing on the other side. I could see a lawn mower in there and what looked like an automobile engine up on sawhorses.

  Bert’s trailer didn’t look as if it had been new when it was new. His pickup was in the yard. The closest house around, another mobile home up the road, wasn’t close at all. Maybe half a mile. It was a lonely kind of place.

  I sat in my car for a moment, then reached over and opened the glove box and got my .38 Super out of there, along with gloves and a little pocket flashlight. I mention it was a Super because if I don’t Leonard always says something like “They don’t actually make thirty-eights in automatic.” And I always think if they don’t, then why do they call it a .38 with a word behind it? Shouldn’t he know I’m talking about a .38 Super? Gun fanatics make my ass tired.

  This was the sort of thing I thought about when I didn’t want to think about doing what I was about to do, because I knew it was stupid, more stupid than Leonard wanting me to say Super on the end of .38. But it settled the nerves. I figured whoever was in the SUV was long gone, and if they were someone I should worry about, that worry was doing seventy-five miles an hour down a dark road. I hoped.

  I looked back that way. No lights. No shapes in the dark. Just lots of empty pasture. I didn’t see any cows. Maybe Bert was planning to go into that business. Or maybe he had been in that business, but no more. Maybe he just liked cows, and that’s why he hung out at the auction barn.

  I stepped out of the car, put the gun and flashlight in my coat pocket, and pulled on the gloves. I walked up to the front door. A cement block served as a footstep. I stepped up on it, tried to look through the little diamond-shaped glass on the door, but it was designed for looks, not use. It was opaque. It was certainly nice that a fine wood-and-aluminum rectangle like a mobile home had so much class about its door window. Inside, maybe there was a chandelier over a coffee table.

  I knocked, lightly at first, and then more briskly. I went around the trailer to the back. There was a rickety, weathered porch there. I went up on it and knocked again. My knock echoed through the trailer and then the noise died like a ball that had quit bouncing. I walked around the trailer and tried to look in the windows, but all the curtains were drawn, and I had to stand on my tiptoes to look at them.

  I could hear the air conditioner that poked out of the bedroom window humming, which, considering we were on the edge of winter, seemed unnecessary.

  I went to the front door again, thought about trying to jimmy it, but couldn’t see any future in that, other than a visit to the Camp Rapture jail.

  Then I thought, What the hell, and tried the doorknob.

  It was unlocked.

  I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. I looked at the edge of the door frame, near the lock. The wood was cracked there. It was the kind of thing a professional could do in a second, and almost soundlessly. The hair on the back of my neck stood up like brush bristles.

  I opened the door and hoped what I smelled was a rat in the wall, but I had smelled that before and I knew what it was. It wasn’t old death. It was the smell of fresh blood and excrement, the common result of violent death.

  The thing to do was to call the police and not go inside. So I didn’t call them and went inside. That was my style. I put my right hand in my coat pocket to keep the gun warm, and used my other to flash the light around, but otherwise, I stayed where I was, sniffing that stink, half-expecting someone to pop out at me.

  There was a very large and nice television in the front room, and it took up most of it. There was a painting of dogs on the wall playing poker. Someone had to have one. I spent more time admiring it than it deserved. The place was so small, living there might require acrobatics. I kept looking at that painting of the dogs playing poker in the light of my flash. Anything to keep me from going back there where the stench was coming from. The air conditioner hummed and it was cold enough to be uncomfortable.

  Finally, I pulled my feet loose and started walking. There was a bedroom in the rear of the trailer, and the door to it was open. I went inside. I bounced the light around. It looked as if it had been hit by a small tornado. Drawers were emptied on the floor, on the bed. Under some of the stuff on the bed was a heap that seemed to be the source of the smell.

  Since no vampires seemed to be lurking in the shadows, I put the gun in my pocket and took out my flash and turned it on, shined it on the bed. I took hold of the edge of the covers topping the heap and moved them.

  A body was underneath, not sleeping. I pulled my T-shirt up over my nose, but it didn’t help much; that blood and excrement smell was stout. The body lay on its back and it was nude and dark and bloody. I moved the flash over it carefully.

  It was, as I expected, Bert.

  There was a hole in the forehead. The bedsheets behind the head were thick with dark, drying blood. In the beam of my light it looked as if the victim had leaked black wax. His hands were stretched out and held with rope. The rope had been pulled down on both sides of the bed and tied to the bed rail. His feet were tied off at the end of the bed in the same way.

  I moved the beam down his bare chest, down to the groin. There was something there that looked like the remains of a penis, because it had been worked over with something sharp. You might call it a major circumcision.

  A cockroach crawled out from under the body and scuttled over the sheet, proving Bert wasn’t much of a housekeeper or the killers had brought their own roaches. Between his legs, about calf level, there was a design
drawn on the sheets in dried blood.

  A devil’s head.

  25

  I threw up out by the car because the stench of the dead man was still in my nostrils. It wasn’t the first time I had seen anyone dead or smelled death, but tonight it clung to me like shit on a stick.

  Driving home, I could still smell it.

  Several times I thought about pulling out my cell and dialing the cops, or calling Leonard, or Marvin, telling them what I found, but I didn’t. I don’t know why. I was overwhelmed with the feeling that had I arrived at the trailer just a little bit earlier, I could have ended up like Bert. It wasn’t my first close call, but it seemed to me there had been a bunch of them now, and that my string was bound to be running out.

  As I went along the road that led out to the main highway, I kept feeling as if I were disconnected. A part of me kept wondering if I was still asleep, dreaming about all this. But I knew better.

  When I got to the highway, I saw a dark SUV pull out and move up quickly. Maybe it was the one I had seen before. Maybe not.

  I put my foot on it and sped up. I might as well have been walking. The SUV passed me like I was standing still, but when it got in front of me, it kept going.

  Moving along like a jet. Pretty soon, it was out of sight.

  My cell rang. I almost crawled out of my skin when it did.

  It was Bert’s number.

  I said, “Hello.”

  The phone went dead.

  Shit. They had Bert’s phone, and they had my number. If they had a way of tracing it, they could find me, and these days, with all the Internet stuff, that would be easy. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like what I did for a living. I didn’t like me. I didn’t like most anything I could think of at that moment.

  I thought about Bert, and I thought about a person, or persons, who could do to him what they had. He’d been tortured. Maybe he did know something important, or maybe it was back to what I had thought before, they thought he did. Now maybe they thought I knew something.

  Damn.

  When I got home, I got out of the car and went carefully inside with my gun drawn. I looked around, went upstairs, looked it over.

  I went back downstairs and looked out the living room windows, and then the kitchen windows, but didn’t see anything that made me want to start shooting. I felt strangely weak, in a way I had never felt before.

  I thought about Brett. I could call her. I could tell her what I found.

  I didn’t.

  I sat in a chair in the living room and laid the automatic on the chair arm. I kept telling myself to get up and go to bed or make a call to someone. Leonard. Marvin. Brett. But I didn’t move.

  I didn’t want to go upstairs.

  I didn’t want anyone sneaking up on me.

  I wanted to be near the front and rear doors by being in the center of the living room in the chair. I tried to sleep in the chair, but I couldn’t. I felt like I wanted to go to the bathroom, but I couldn’t.

  I sat there.

  And sat there, and then I realized I had gone to the bathroom. I was in the chair and I hadn’t got up, and I could smell myself. My mind seemed rational. Like it knew what was going on, but it wouldn’t connect to the physical. My emotions were on holiday.

  Time folded in on itself. I didn’t move. I sat there and smelled myself and thought about getting up, but still I sat.

  I had a feeling vampires were in the room. That they had turned to shadow and slid under the door and were behind me, but I couldn’t turn to look. I couldn’t move. I felt them come closer and closer and closer. They were crawling along the walls. I could see them out of the corner of my eye. When cars drove by on the road out front their headlights moved the vampires away and washed them into the walls, and as the lights passed, the vampires returned and melted down the walls and into the floor. I sensed they were flowing along close to my feet.

  But still, I sat.

  The sun came up. It reddened the curtains.

  The day passed in what seemed like instants. I watched shadows moving along the wall again. They weren’t vampires this time. They were glimpses of time being stolen from my life. The room was as dark and heavy as if it were covered in thick black velvet.

  I heard the door open, and Brett called out, “Hap?”

  I tried to answer, but all my answers, like my emotions, were still on vacation. I kept thinking I would gather them up and weld them together and be myself, but I didn’t move. I might as well have been a turnip waiting to be plucked.

  The room grew suddenly bright.

  Brett touched me and called my name, and then I saw her nose wrinkle up from the smell of me, and I wanted to say I was sorry, but it just wouldn’t come out. Then I climbed into my spaceship and stretched out on my bunk and buckled in and looked through the windshield at the stars and colorful planets moving closer. I was cruising through the great black star-studded forever that was space. Twinkle, twinkle, little star, vampires suck blood, and humans make war. Ducks have feathers, goats have hair, pigs have pink feet, and Davy Crockett killed a bear.

  A big black planet swung in from the right, and I could see the planet had eyes. The planet moved closer and I could see the planet had a resemblance to Leonard. The planet Leonard had arrived, and the knowledge of that made me feel better.

  I heard Brett say, “I found him like this. I checked his vitals. They seem okay. Maybe I should have called nine-one-one.”

  “I got him,” Leonard said.

  I wanted to say something back. I could hear them and I could understand their words, but what they said were like trains passing in the night. I could see their words go by, but no way they were gonna stop and let me ride.

  I was pulled right out of my spaceship. I felt myself floating upward (antigravity, baby), and I could see Leonard’s face clearly, and he was looking right at me. Brett said, “I’ll call the doctor.”

  “He don’t need no doctor,” Leonard said.

  “But—”

  “I got him. Open the bathroom door.”

  Yeah. That would be nice. I need to go to the bathroom. Again.

  And then I was sitting on the floor by the tub and Leonard was leaning over the tub running water. I finally turned my head. It was no more trouble than trying to screw a large bolt through the center of the earth.

  “Throw this shit away,” Leonard said.

  I saw Brett’s hands taking my old clothes.

  I felt cold. And then I was lifted, and I felt wet. But it was a warm wet. I didn’t feel cold anymore. I was drifting comfortably through space, and the great black planet called Leonard was leaning over me in the tub.

  “He going to be okay?” Brett said.

  “Goddamn right he is.”

  I closed my eyes, and as I drifted down into the wet warmth, I heard Brett say, “What … what is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Life,” Leonard said.

  26

  When I opened my eyes I was still warm, but I wasn’t wet. I was warm because I was in bed with the covers pulled up to my chest. Leonard was sitting by my bedside reading one of my paperbacks. I said, “What are you doing here?”

  “Well,” Leonard said. “I finish this book, I’m gonna steal everything you got while you’re lying there like a dumb ass. And then I’m gonna turn heterosexual and me and Brett are gonna run off together, but not until we sell your organs to science and burn the house down and collect the insurance money. I was thinking we might buy a pig to take with us, start a hog farm.”

  “You need two pigs,” I said. “One male, one female.”

  “Guess I hadn’t thought that through.” Leonard reached out and took my hand. “You back, brother?”

  “Was I gone?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Brett? I remember seeing her, hearing her, but I couldn’t answer. Where is she?”

  “Downstairs fixing me and her some breakfast. Want me to add you to the list?”

  “That would be nice … But, what h
appened?”

  “You had what some people call a nervous breakdown, and what I call a major fuckup by way of an easy chair and crapping your pants. You peed too. The world got hold of you and whipped your ass, Hap. But only for a round. You’re back now and pretty soon you’ll be off the stool and back in the fight. Though you may have to start with some tomato cans and work your way up to the contenders.”

  “I’m glad Brett called you.”

  “I’m not. I had to change your clothes and bathe you, wash the shit off, and then dry your ass with a towel, put you in your jammies, and carry you upstairs. I tell you now, boy, you got to lay off the pancakes if you want me carryin’ your fat ass up a flight of stairs. Let me have Brett fix you some eggs or somethin’.”

  Leonard got up and walked toward the bedroom door.

  I said, “Leonard.”

  He paused, looked at me. “Yeah?”

  “A man couldn’t ask for a better brother.”

  “Hell, I know that.”

  27

  I was halfway through my scrambled eggs and bacon, sitting in bed with a tray, enjoying it, looking forward to my coffee, when suddenly I felt there was something I was trying to remember, something I wanted to say. It roamed around the alleys of my mind like a drunk trying to find where he’d dropped his car keys.

  Brett was in bed with me, stretched out beside me, a pillow propped behind her head. She wore shorts and a sweatshirt. She smelled like perfume and fried foods. Leonard was in the chair next to the bed. He had been talking about things that didn’t matter, and it was exactly what I wanted to hear. Those things that didn’t matter were really good conversation right then. I knew Leonard thought I was bad off because he even asked me if I would tell a joke. He hates my jokes.

  I didn’t have a joke. I was too weak to have a joke. I could see he was actually relieved, and so was Brett.

  “Did Leonard tell you I wanted to put you down, but he insisted you were going to be all right? I was about to call the vet and have it done, and he showed up.”