by Paula Guran
Garrett stepped aside, let her pass.
“I heard what you did to her,” Penny was saying.
“What’s this about?” Garrett said again.
The deputy on the right shrugged, said, “She kept calling, claims her sister—that something’s happened to her sister.”
“Sister?” Garrett said, looking back to Penny, walking all over the room. Into the bathroom now, having to step over the sheet that had fallen over the bloodstain.
“Apparently she thought she heard her sister be the victim of some sort of violence,” the deputy on the left said.
“Hunh,” Garrett said, then: “She’s Lady’s sister?”
“So you do know Lady Catches Twice,” one of the deputies said, Garrett couldn’t tell, was watching Penny now.
“I ought to,” Garrett said. “She took my jeep.”
Penny was back, glaring at him.
“Your jeep?” she said.
“Would you like to file a—?” the deputy on the left said, but Garrett held a hand up, was already shaking his head no.
“You’re Penny,” Garrett said, to Penny.
“I’m the alive sister, yeah,” Penny said.
“You think I—” Garrett started, said again: “You think I did something to Lady?”
“Was there an argument, sir?”
Garrett nodded, said, “She broke the lamp. I told her we were going to have to pay for that. She screamed, threw her shit into her bag. I didn’t realize she had my keys until it was too late.”
Penny threw herself into Garrett, her nails gouging into his chest where his shirt was open.
Garrett turned his head and fell back until the deputies dragged her off.
He looked down to the scratches on his chest.
“I figured she went to you,” he said to Penny, breathing hard now, restrained.
“She can’t,” Penny said. “Because she’s dead. I can’t feel her.”
“You can’t . . . ?” Garrett said, squinting for help.
“Because they’re sisters,” the deputy on the right said.
“Twins,” the left deputy said, as if embarrassed about what this was becoming.
Garrett nodded like he was processing this—not believing it, just understanding it—and finally said, “She’s done this before. She knows I can’t pay without her card. She’ll leave me here for three or four days, come back with enough cash to cover it. I don’t know where she gets it.”
“You lie,” Penny said, still struggling.
“You know her,” Garrett said. “You know this is what she does.”
“You killed her!” Penny screamed. “I heard it! I felt it!”
“You heard the lamp break?” Garrett said, touching a delicate finger to one of the deeper claw marks on his chest, making sure the deputies saw what she’d done to him—what they were now accomplices to, if it came to that.
They stepped out, Penny between them, her feet pedaling air.
“We’re sorry to bother you, sir,” the left one said.
“You’ll be here for a day or two?” the right one said.
Garrett nodded, said, “I need my jeep.”
“Year and make?”
“Green and rusted. CJ, eighty-two. Pipe bumpers front and back.” Garrett supplied a license plate number when asked. If they checked, they’d find a match, but he’d abandoned the jeep with a blown engine months before.
“We’ll keep a lookout, sir.”
“Check the bars.”
“Like I said, we’ll keep a lookout.”
“You can’t do this!” Penny said, trying to pull away.
Garrett closed the door on her, stood there with his eyes closed.
This was better, he told himself.
They hadn’t connected his truck to him. His plates were on the index card at Registration, but with no body, it wasn’t going to come to that. If he left now, if he made sure to pay then left, they’d probably just toss his index card, right? Clean getaway. No tracks.
The clock on the nightstand said he could still make breakfast.
Garrett slid his pants on, stepped into his boots, ran a finger through his hair and left the hellhole of a room.
The whole way down, federal agents in various states of dress and undress were stationed in their doorways, clocking him.
He nodded to the first couple then just pushed on, down to the elevator, to the lobby, where he made sure to pay for his stay with cash.
“Let me ask you something,” he said to the clerk.
“Shoot,” the clerk said.
“At breakfast,” Garrett said. “Are those omelettes, or they still eggs?”
“I didn’t see you at breakfast,” the clerk said, and Garrett turned around to the breakfast area.
It was closed down.
The clock had still been lying to him.
“Lady,” he said, shaking his head.
Garrett made like he was going for the elevator but kept walking, down the long hall to the back parking lot.
When there were no Sheriff ’s department cruisers loitering around, and when there were no curtains on the second floor parted with federal interest, and when the Border Patrol Blazer parked by the dually was just flashing its side mirrors back at the morning, Garrett climbed behind the wheel, waited for the glow plugs, and left.
Ten miles out of town, nobody important in the rear view, Garrett pulled over to a rest stop’s barrel trashcan, emptied the contents of Lady’s roller bag into it, then covered it with some of the trash from the bed of the dually.
Twenty miles after that he turned off into some BLM, massaged a fire up from the belly of the roller bag. The smoke was oily and black and perfect. He left it burning.
That was it, then.
Now he could speed if he wanted. Now he could do anything.
“New Mexico,” he said out loud. To the dually, he guessed. It was his new partner in crime.
New Mexico, though. Driving out of Gallup with Bats once, Bats had tipped his head to the north side of the highway, a different patch of BLM, and dropped into this story about how his dad, in West Texas in high school, his dad and a buddy had found a hole out in a field, and followed it down to a cave that had been a home, a hundred and fifty years ago. There were untouched baskets, pots, tools, a woven sleeping mat.
It was the sleeping mat that got Garrett’s interest. Because the Comanche would have used robes or skins.
Did a mat mean that cave might have been older than the Comanche? Pre-Clovis, even?
A score like that, it would set him up for life.
Bats’ dad and buddy had rocked it shut, walked away.
Like a hundred other stories you heard around the pawnshop.
But still, right?
The end of Bats’ story was how his stash might be like that for somebody someday. Garrett had looked over for the rest of the story and Bats shrugged, said didn’t Garrett cache his stuff somewhere?
“A storage unit, yeah,” Garrett had said.
Bats shook his head no, no, said the proper place—tipping his head to the north side of the highway again, twelve and a half miles west of Gallup, New Mexico—it was a natural cave, one that nobody else knows about.
He might as well have said his stash was there.
And Garrett could find it, he knew. Because he knew how Bats’ head worked. What his eyes could and couldn’t see.
There’d be a faded silver can or two close to the hidden entrance.
Any pothunter worth his salt wouldn’t need three days.
Garrett gave himself two, tops, and eased into the dually’s turbo diesel, switching hands on the wheel.
Instead of turning the air on like Lady always insisted on, he cracked the window and then slid the back glass open.
In a pickup with no camper, it would pull the wind through too fast, be a mess. With a camper as poorly matched to the bed rails as Garrett’s, it just made for a breeze.
Because the troopers only patrolled th
is stretch of highway with planes—which is to say, with road signs threatening planes—Garrett let the dually have its head. Seventy, eighty, ninety.
In the bed, under the shell, some of the trash kept lifting up into the rear view. It was kind of pretty in its slow, go-nowhere way.
Garrett leaned ahead to the radio to dial away the solitude, and when he looked up to the road again, the trash in the rear view had coalesced into a shape. A form.
A woman.
He locked his arm against the steering wheel, opened his mouth to bellow, to scream, he didn’t know and it didn’t matter.
She was already crawling through the rear window, seeping through it like oil, pulling herself through from the bed.
Garrett leaned forward, away from her, he was ready to crawl through the windshield out on to the hood—who cared?—but now her sharp-fingered hands had him by the side of the head, some of that foul taste in the corners of his mouth, her skin so dry.
She pulled his head back to the headrest, his mouth open, and brought her face up alongside his, her loose chin rubbing at the base of his jaw, his hands clawing blackened skin from her wrists.
It meant driving with his knees.
Except he was pushing his feet into the floorboard, trying to fight her.
In what felt like slow motion, then, he felt the left front tire of the dually find the inside shoulder, spatter gravel up into the wheel well. An instant later the double back tires did the same, the gravel they threw bursting through the fiberglass fender.
Garrett tried to shake his head no, no, not like this, but the dually’s weight was already shifting, one side of it lighter now, and the semi coming on the westbound side of the highway was already flashing its lights in panic, and now Lady had her mouth open to his cheek, her blind dry tongue to his skin, one of her eyes open against his, the pupil blown wide.
Garrett never heard the crash, even though it lasted nearly half a mile.
His last glimmer of a thought was of a tall woman standing at the foot of his bed the night before, then, as if hearing something, jerking her head over, following that sound out of the room.
No, not a woman.
A lady.
Joe Lansdale’s Texas tall tale was first published in 1994, but it became well known when Don Coscarelli’s film Bubba Ho-tep, starring Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis, was released in 2002. Critical acclaim followed. (Roger Ebert praised the film’s “delightful wackiness,” saying it had the “damnedest ingratiating way of making us sit there and grin at its harebrained audacity, laugh at its outhouse humor, and be somewhat moved . . . ”) The film had achieved cult status by the time it was released on DVD. Lansdale’s mummy is certainly an original ideation, and his story deals with the subject of immortality—and the lack of it—in his unique way.
Bubba Ho-Tep
Joe R. Lansdale
Elvis dreamed he had his dick out, checking to see if the bump on the head of it had filled with pus again. If it had, he was going to name the bump Priscilla, after his ex-wife, and bust it by jacking off. Or he liked to think that’s what he’d do. Dreams let you think like that. The truth was, he hadn’t had a hard-on in years.
That bitch, Priscilla. Gets a new hairdo and she’s gone, just because she caught him fucking a big-tittied gospel singer. It wasn’t like the singer had mattered. Priscilla ought to have understood that, so what was with her making a big deal out of it?
Was it because she couldn’t hit a high note same and as good as the singer when she came?
When had that happened anyway, Priscilla leaving?
Yesterday? Last year? Ten years ago?
Oh God, it came to him instantly as he slipped out of sleep like a soft turd squeezed free of a loose asshole—for he could hardly think of himself or life in any context other than sewage, since so often he was too tired to do anything other than let it all fly in his sleep, wake up in an ocean of piss or shit, waiting for the nurses or the aides to come in and wipe his ass. But now it came to him. Suddenly he realized it had been years ago that he had supposedly died, and longer years than that since Priscilla left, and how old was she anyway? Sixty-five? Seventy?
And how old was he?
Christ! He was almost convinced he was too old to be alive, and had to be dead, but he wasn’t convinced enough, unfortunately. He knew where he was now, and in that moment of realization, he sincerely wished he were dead. This was worse than death.
From across the room, his roommate, Bull Thomas, bellowed and coughed and moaned and fell back into painful sleep, the cancer gnawing at his insides like a rat plugged up inside a watermelon.
Bull’s bellow of pain and anger and indignation at growing old and diseased was the only thing bullish about him now, though Elvis had seen photographs of him when he was younger, and Bull had been very bullish indeed. Thick-chested, slab-faced, and tall. Probably thought he’d live forever, and happily. A boozing, pill-popping, swinging dick until the end of time.
Now Bull was shrunk down, was little more than a wrinkled sheet-white husk that throbbed with occasional pulses of blood while the carcinoma fed.
Elvis took hold of the bed’s lift button, eased himself upright. He glanced at Bull. Bull was breathing heavily and his bony knees rose up and down like he was pedaling a bicycle; his kneecaps punched feebly at the sheet, making pup tents that rose up and collapsed, rose up and collapsed.
Elvis looked down at the sheet stretched over his own bony knees.
He thought: My God, how long have I been here? Am I really awake now, or am I dreaming I’m awake? How could my plans have gone so wrong? When are they going to serve lunch, and considering what they serve, why do I care? And if Priscilla discovered I was alive, would she come see me, would she want to see me, and would we still want to fuck, or would we have to merely talk about it? Is there finally, and really, anything to life other than food and shit and sex?
Elvis pushed the sheet down to do what he had done in the dream. He pulled up his gown, leaned forward, and examined his dick. It was wrinkled and small. It didn’t look like something that had dive-bombed movie starlet pussies or filled their mouths like a big zucchini or pumped forth a load of sperm frothy as cake icing. The healthiest thing about his pecker was the big red bump with the black ring around it and the pus-filled white center. Fact was, that bump kept growing, he was going to have to pull a chair up beside his bed and put a pillow in it so the bump would have some place to sleep at night. There was more pus in that damn bump than there was cum in his loins. Yep, the old diddlebopper was no longer a flesh cannon loaded for bare ass. It was a peanut too small to harvest, wasting away on the vine.
His nuts were a couple of darkening, about-to-rot grapes, too limp to produce juice for life’s wine. His legs were stick and paper things with over-large, vein-swollen feet on the ends. His belly was such a bloat, it was a pain for him to lean forward and scrutinize his dick and balls.
Pulling his gown down and the sheet back over himself, Elvis leaned back and wished he had a peanut butter and banana sandwich fried in butter. There had been a time when he and his crew would board his private jet and fly clean across country just to have a special-made fried peanut butter and ’nanner sandwich. He could still taste the damn things.
Elvis closed his eyes and thought he would awake from a bad dream, but didn’t. He opened his eyes again, slowly, and saw that he was still where he had been, and things were no better. He reached over and opened his dresser drawer and got out a little round mirror and looked at himself.
He was horrified. His hair was white as salt and had receded dramatically. He had wrinkles deep enough to conceal outstretched earthworms, the big ones, the night crawlers. His pouty mouth no longer appeared pouty. It looked like the dropping waddles of a bulldog, seeming more that way because he was slobbering a mite. He dragged his tired tongue across his lips to daub the slobber, revealed to himself in the mirror that he was missing a lot of teeth.
Goddamn it! How had he gone from King of
Rock and Roll to this? Old guy in a rest home in East Texas with a growth on his dick? And what was that growth? Cancer? No one was talking. No one seemed to know. Perhaps the bump was a manifestation of the mistakes of his life, so many of them made with his dick.
He considered on that. Did he ask himself this question every day, or just now and then? Time sort of ran together when the last moment and the immediate moment and the moment forthcoming were all alike.
Shit, when was lunchtime? Had he slept through it?
Was it about time for his main nurse again? The good-looking one with the smooth chocolate skin and tits like grapefruits? The one who came in and sponge bathed him and held his pitiful little pecker in her gloved hands and put salve on his canker with all the enthusiasm of a mechanic oiling a defective part?
He hoped not. That was the worst of it. A doll like that handling him without warmth or emotion. Twenty years ago, just twenty, he could have made with the curled-lip smile and had her eating out of his asshole. Where had his youth gone? Why hadn’t fame sustained old age and death, and why had he left his fame in the first place, and did he want it back, and could he have it back, and if he could, would it make any difference?
And finally, when he was evacuated from the bowels of life into the toilet bowl of the beyond and was flushed, would the great sewer pipe flow him to the other side where God would—in the guise of a great all-seeing turd with corn kernel eyes—be waiting with open turd arms, and would there be amongst the sewage his mother (bless her fat little heart) and father and friends, waiting with fried peanut butter and ’nanner sandwiches and ice cream cones, predigested, of course?
He was reflecting on this, pondering the afterlife, when Bull gave out with a hell of a scream, pouched his eyes damn near out of his head, arched his back, grease-farted like a blast from Gabriel’s trumpet, and checked his tired old soul out of the Mud Creek Shady Rest Convalescent Home; flushed it on out and across the great shitty beyond.
Later that day, Elvis lay sleeping, his lips fluttering the bad taste of lunch—steamed zucchini and boiled peas—out of his belly. He awoke to a noise, rolled over to see a young attractive woman cleaning out Bull’s dresser drawer. The curtains over the window next to Bull’s bed were pulled wide open, and the sunlight was cutting through it and showing her to great advantage. She was blonde and Nordic-featured and her long hair was tied back with a big red bow and she wore big gold hoop earrings that shimmered in the sunlight. She was dressed in a white blouse and a short black skirt and dark hose and high heels.