The Best of Joe R. Lansdale

by Joe R. Lansdale

  There was a circle of chairs between the tables and behind the chairs was a kind of makeshift stage, and there were a handful of folks with guitars and fiddles playing and singing now and then, and the men and womenfolk would gather in the middle and dance to the tunes. Mama and Daddy were dancing too, and Tom was sitting on Cecil’s knee and he was clapping and keeping time to the music, bouncing her up and down.

  I kept thinking Mr. Nation and his boys would show, as they were always ones to be about when there was free food or the possibility of a drink, but they didn’t. I figured that was because of Daddy. Mr. Nation might have looked tough and had a big mouth, but that ax handle had tamed him.

  As the night wore on, the music was stopped and the fireworks were set. The firecrackers popped and the candles and such exploded high above Main Street, burst into all kinds of colors, pinned themselves against the night, then went wide and thin and faded. I remember watching as one bright swathe did not fade right away, but dropped to earth like a falling star, and as my eyes followed it down, it dipped behind Cecil and Tom, and in the final light from its burst, I could see Tom’s smiling face, and Cecil, his hands on her shoulders, his face slack and beaded with sweat, his knee still bouncing her gently, even though there was no music to keep time to, the two of them looking up, awaiting more bright explosions.

  Worry about the murders, about there being a killer amongst us, had withered. In that moment, all seemed right with the world.

  When we got home that night we were all excited, and we sat down for a while under the big oak outside and drank some apple cider. It was great fun, but I kept having that uncomfortable feeling of being watched. I scanned the woods, but didn’t see anything. Tom didn’t seem to have noticed, and neither had my parents. Not long after a possum presented itself at the edge of the woods, peeked out at our celebration and disappeared back into the darkness.

  Daddy and Mama sang a few tunes as he picked his old guitar, then they told stories awhile, and a couple of them were kind of spooky ones, then we all took turns going out to the outhouse, and finally to bed.

  Tom and I talked some, then I helped her open the window by her bed, and the warm air blew in carrying the smell of rain brewing.

  As I lay in bed that night, my ear to the wall, I heard Mama say: “The children will hear, honey. These walls are paper thin.”

  “Don’t you want to?”

  “Of course. Sure.”

  “The walls are always paper thin.”

  “You’re not always like you are tonight. You know how you are when you’re like this.”

  “How am I?”

  Mama laughed. “Loud.”

  “Listen, honey. I really, you know, need to. And I want to be loud. What say we take the car down the road a piece. I know a spot.”

  “Jacob. What if someone came along?”

  “I know a spot they won’t come along. It’ll be real private.”

  “Well, we don’t have to do that. We can do it here. We’ll just have to be quiet.”

  “I don’t want to be quiet. And even if I did, it’s a great night. I’m not sleepy.”

  “What about the children?”

  “It’s just down the road, hon. It’ll be fun.”

  “All right… All right. Why not?”

  I lay there wondering what in the world had gotten into my parents, and as I lay there I heard the car start up and glide away down the road.

  Where could they be going?

  And why?

  It was really some years later before I realized what was going on. At the time it was a mystery. But back then I contemplated it for a time, then nodded off, the wind turning from warm to cool by the touch of oncoming rain.

  Sometime later I was awakened by Toby barking, but it didn’t last and I went back to sleep. After that, I heard a tapping sound. It was as if some bird were pecking corn from a hard surface. I gradually opened my eyes and turned in my bed and saw a figure at the open window. When the curtains blew I could see the shape standing there, looking in. It was a dark shape with horns on its head, and one hand was tapping on the windowsill with long fingernails. The Goat Man was making a kind of grunting sound.

  I sat bolt upright in bed, my back to the wall.

  “Go away!” I said.

  But the shape remained and its gruntings changed to whimpers. The curtains blew in, back out, and the shape was gone. Then I noticed that Tom’s bed, which was directly beneath the window, was empty.

  I had helped open that window.

  I eased over to her bed and peeked outside. Out by the woods I could see the Goat Man. He lifted his hand and summoned me.

  I hesitated. I ran to Mama and Daddy’s room, but they were gone. I dimly remembered before dropping off to sleep they had driven off in the car, for God knows what. I went back to our little room and assured myself I was not dreaming. Tom was gone, stolen by the Goat Man, most likely, and now the thing was summoning me to follow. A kind of taunt. A kind of game.

  I looked out the window again, and the Goat Man was still there. I got the shotgun and some shells and pulled my pants on, tucked in my nightshirt, and slipped on my shoes. I went back to the window and looked out. The Goat Man was still in his spot by the woods. I slid out the window and went after him. As soon as he saw my gun, he ducked into the shadows.

  As I ran, I called for Mama and Daddy and Tom. But no one answered. I tripped and went down. When I rose to my knees I saw that I had tripped over Toby. He lay still on the ground. I put the shotgun down and picked him up. His head rolled limp to one side. His neck was broken.

  Oh God. Toby was dead. After all he had been through, he had been murdered. He had barked earlier, to warn me about the Goat Man, and now he was dead and Tom was missing, and Mama and Daddy had gone off somewhere in the car, and the Goat Man was no longer in sight.

  I put Toby down easy, pushed back the tears, picked up the shotgun and ran blindly into the woods, down the narrow path the Goat Man had taken, fully expecting at any moment to fall over Tom’s body, her neck broken like Toby’s.

  But that didn’t happen.

  There was just enough moon for me to see where I was going, but not enough to keep every shadow from looking like the Goat Man, coiled and ready to pounce. The wind was sighing through the trees and there were bits of rain with it, and the rain was cool.

  I didn’t know if I should go on or go back and try and find Mama and Daddy. I felt that no matter what I did, valuable time was being lost. There was no telling what the Goat Man was doing to poor Tom. He had probably tied her up and put her at the edge of the woods before coming back to taunt me at the window. Maybe he had wanted me too. I thought of what had been done to all those poor women, and I thought of Tom, and a kind of sickness came over me, and I ran faster, deciding it was best to continue on course, hoping I’d come up on the monster and would get a clear shot at him and be able to rescue Tom.

  It was then that I saw a strange thing in the middle of the trail. A limb had been cut, and it was forced into the ground, and it was bent to the right at the top and whittled on to make it sharp. It was like a kind of arrow pointing the way.

  The Goat Man was having his fun with me. I decided I had no choice other than to go where the arrow was pointing, a little trail even more narrow than the one I was on.

  I went on down it, and in the middle of it was another limb, this one more hastily prepared, just broken off and stuck in the ground, bent over at the middle and pointing to the right again.

  Where it pointed wasn’t hardly even a trail, just a break here and there in the trees. I went that way, spider webs twisting into my hair, limbs slapping me across the face, and before I knew it my feet had gone out from under me and I was sliding over the edge of an embankment, and when I hit on the seat of my pants and looked out, I was at the road, the one the preachers traveled. The Goat Man had brought me to the road by a shortcut and had gone straight down it, because right in front of me, drawn in the dirt of the road, was an arrow
. If he could cross the road or travel down it, that meant he could go anywhere he wanted. There wasn’t any safe place from the Goat Man.

  I ran down the road, and I wasn’t even looking for sign anymore. I knew I was heading for the swinging bridge, and across from that the briar tunnels, where I figured the Goat Man had taken her. That would be his place, I reckoned. Those tunnels, and I knew then that the tunnels were where he had done his meanness to those women before casting them into the river. By placing that dead colored woman there, he had been taunting us all, showing us not only the place of the murder but the probable place of all the murders. A place where he could take his time and do what he wanted for as long as he wanted.

  When I got to the swinging bridge, the wind was blowing hard and it was starting to rain harder. The bridge lashed back and forth, and I finally decided I’d be better off to go down to Mose’s cabin and use his boat to cross the river.

  I ran down the bank as fast as I could go, and when I got to the cabin my sides hurt from running. I threw the shotgun into the boat, pushed the boat off its blocks, let it slide down to the edge of the river. It got caught up in the sand there, and I couldn’t move it. It had bogged down good in the soft sand. I pushed and pulled, but no dice. I started to cry. I should have crossed the swinging bridge.

  I grabbed the shotgun out of the boat and started to run back toward the bridge, but as I went up the little hill toward the cabin, I saw something hanging from the nail there that gave me a start.

  There was a chain over the nail, and hanging from the chain was a hand, and part of a wrist. I felt sick. Tom. Oh God. Tom.

  I went up there slowly and bent forward and saw that the hand was too large to be Tom’s, and it was mostly rotten with only a bit of flesh on it. In the shadows it had looked whole, but it was anything but. The chain was not tied to the hand, but the hand was in a half fist and the chain was draped through its fingers, and in the partial open palm I could see what it held was a coin. A French coin with a dent in it. Cecil’s coin.

  I knew I should hurry, but it was as if I had been hit with a stick. The killer had chopped off one of his victim’s hands. I remembered that. I decided the woman had grabbed the killer, and the killer had chopped at her with something big and sharp, and her hand had come off.

  This gave me as many questions as answers. How did Cecil’s coin get in the hand, and how did it end up here? Who was leaving all these things here, and why? Was it the Goat Man?

  Then there was a hand on my shoulder.

  As I jerked my head around I brought up the shotgun, but another hand came out quickly and took the shotgun away from me, and I was looking straight into the face of the Goat Man.

  The moon rolled out from behind a rain cloud, and its light fell into the Goat Man’s eyes, and they shone, and I realized they were green. Green like Ole Mose’s eyes.

  The Goat Man made a soft grunting sound and patted my shoulder. I saw then his horns were not horns at all but an old straw hat that had rotted, leaving a gap in the front, like something had taken a bite out of it, and it made him look like he had horns. It was just a straw hat. A dadburn straw hat. No horns. And those eyes. Ole Mose’s eyes.

  And in that instant I knew. The Goat Man wasn’t any goat man at all. He was Mose’s son, the one wasn’t right in the head and was thought to be dead. He’d been living out here in the woods all this time, and Mose had been taking care of him, and the son in his turn had been trying to take care of Mose by bringing him gifts he had found in the river, and now that Mose was dead and gone, he was still doing it. He was just a big dumb boy in a man’s body, wandering the woods wearing worn-out clothes and shoes with soles that flopped.

  The Goat Man turned and pointed upriver. I knew then he hadn’t killed anyone, hadn’t taken Tom. He had come to warn me, to let me know Tom had been taken, and now he was pointing the way. I just knew it. I didn’t know how he had come by the hand or Cecil’s chain and coin, but I knew the Goat Man hadn’t killed anybody. He had been watching our house, and he had seen what had happened, and now he was trying to help me.

  I broke loose from him and ran back to the boat, tried to push it free again. The Goat Man followed me down and put the shotgun in the boat and grabbed it and pushed it out of the sand and into the river and helped me into it, waded and pushed me out until the current had me good. I watched as he waded back toward the shore and the cabin. I picked up the paddle and went to work, trying not to think too much about what was being done to Tom.

  Dark clouds passed over the moon from time to time, and the raindrops became more frequent and the wind was high and slightly cool with the dampness. I paddled so hard my back and shoulders began to ache, but the current was with me, pulling me fast. I passed a whole school of water moccasins swimming in the dark, and I feared they might try to climb up into the boat, as they liked to do, thinking it was a floating log and wanting a rest.

  I paddled quickly through them, spreading the school, and one did indeed try to climb up the side, but I brought the boat paddle down on him hard and he went back in the water, alive or dead I couldn’t say.

  As I paddled around a bend in the river, I saw where the wild briars grew, and in that moment I had a strange sinking feeling. Not only for fear of what I might find in the briar tunnels, but fear I might find nothing at all. Fear I was all wrong. Or that the Goat Man did indeed have Tom. Perhaps in Mose’s cabin, and had been keeping her there, waiting until I was out of sight. But if that was true, why had he given my gun back? Then again, he wasn’t bright.

  He was a creature of the woods, same as a coon or a possum. He didn’t think like regular folks.

  All of this went through my head and swirled around and confused itself with my own fears and the thought of actually cutting down on a man with a shotgun. I felt like I was in a dream, like the kind I’d had when I’d had the flu the year before and everything had swirled and Mama and Daddy’s voices had seemed to echo and there were shadows all around me, trying to grab at me and pull me away into who knows where.

  I paddled up to the bank and got out and pulled the boat up on shore best I could. I couldn’t quite get it out of the water since I was so tuckered out from paddling. I just hoped it would hang there and hold.

  I got the shotgun out and went up the hill quietly and found the mouth of the tunnel just beyond the tree, where me and Tom and Toby had come out that night.

  It was dark inside the briars, and the moon had gone away behind a cloud and the wind rattled the briars and clicked them together and bits of rain sliced through the briars and mixed with the sweat in my hair, ran down my face and made me shiver. July the Fourth, and I was cold.

  As I sneaked down the tunnel, an orange glow leaped and danced and I could hear a crackling sound. I trembled and eased forward and came to the end of the tunnel, and froze. I couldn’t make myself turn into the other tunnel. It was as if my feet were nailed the ground.

  I pulled back the hammer on the shotgun, slipped my face around the edge of the briars, and looked.

  There was a fire going in the center of the tunnel, in the spot where Tom and I had seen the burn marks that day, and I could see Tom lying on the ground, her clothes off and strewn about, and a man was leaning over her, running his hands over her back and forth, making a sound like an animal eating after a long time without food. His hands flowed over her as if he was playing a piano. A huge machete was stuck up in the dirt near Tom’s head, and Tom’s face was turned toward me. Her eyes were wide and full of tears, and tied around her mouth was a thick bandanna, and her hands and feet were bound with rope, and as I looked the man rose and I saw that his pants were undone and he had hold of himself, and he was walking back and forth behind the fire, looking down at Tom, yelling, “I don’t want to do this. You make me do this. It’s your fault, you know? You’re getting just right. Just right.”

  The voice was loud, but not like any voice I’d ever heard. There was all the darkness and wetness of the bottom of the river in t
hat voice, as well as the mud down there, and anything that might collect in it.

  I hadn’t been able to get a good look at his face, but I could tell from the way he was built, the way the fire caught his hair, it was Mr. Nation’s son, Uriah.

  Then he turned slightly, and it wasn’t Uriah at all. I had merely thought it was Uriah because he was built like Uriah, but it wasn’t.

  I stepped fully into the tunnel and said, “Cecil?”

  The word just came out of my mouth, without me really planning to say it. Cecil turned now, and when he saw me his face was like it had been earlier, when Tom was being bounced on his knee and the fireworks had exploded behind him. He had the same slack-jawed look, his face was beaded in sweat.

  He let go of his privates and just let them hang out for me to see, as if he were proud of them and that I should be too.

  “Oh, boy,” he said, his voice still husky and animal-like. “It’s just gone all wrong. I didn’t want to have to have Tom. I didn’t. But she’s been ripenin’, boy, right in front of my eyes. Every time I saw her, I said, no, you don’t shit where you eat, but she’s ripenin’, boy, and I thought I’d go to your place, peek in on her if I could, and then I seen her there, easy to take, and I knew tonight I had to have her. There wasn’t nothing else for it.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, son. There is no why. I just have to. I have to do them all. I tell myself I won’t, but I do. I do.”

  He eased toward me.

  I lifted the shotgun.

  “Now, boy,” he said. “You don’t want to shoot me.”

  “Yes, sir. I do.”

  “It ain’t something I can help. Listen here. I’ll let her go, and we’ll just forget about this business. Time you get home, I’ll be out of here. I got a little boat hid out, and I can take it downriver to where I can catch a train. I’m good at that. I can be gone before you know it.”

  “You’re wiltin’,” I said.

  His pee-dink had gone limp.