Waltz of Shadows

by Joe R. Lansdale

  There were clapboard shutters all around the sawmill, and I found myself watching those as I ran, expecting Snake to pop one open and take a shot.

  I wondered what he had been doing when all this had started. Had he not been aware? Or had he realized it was a hit, and that it was foolish to go out into the open? Or was he here at all? Did stinky child pornographers with cobras tattooed on their heads take vacations?

  I made the right side of the mill and didn’t get the side of my head blown off, and I tried not to think about the possibility. I thought only of doing what I had to do, and being cautious about it. I eased along with my back against the clapboard wall and came to where a large sliding wood door was pushed back and there was a dark opening.

  On this side of the mill, if I entered, the last of the sunlight would be at my back, and I’d be outlined against the light like a moth on a hundred-and-twenty watt bulb. I decided to cross in front of the opening instead. I darted quickly to the other side, put my back against the wall and took a deep breath. Then the wall to the right of my cheek exploded and a barrage of splinters went into my face and I dove for the ground and rolled as far from the opening as I could and lay still.

  There was a ringing in my ears, and for a moment I felt confused. I waited and considered.

  Snake had seen me pass by the door, and had guessed I was lurking on the other side, and had shot through the thin, clapboard wall, taking a flyer. It was only luck that had kept him from hitting me. I glanced at the spot on the mill where the bullet had exited. It was a medium sized hole, but big enough it would have done me severe damage. Way the wood splintered out from it, I guessed the shot had come from above, a landing somewhere. A .38 from the size of that hole and the sound of the load.

  I put the Marlin on the ground and got the .38 out from under my shirt. The revolver loaded with wadրcutters would be better for close work. I felt for the lump of extra ammunition in my pants pocket. It was there. Not that I thought it had gone anywhere, but I damn sure wanted to be certain.

  I crawled along the side of the building. When I came to the open doorway, I coiled my knees under me and squinted my eyes and tried to see into the dark. I suddenly found myself thinking about Bev and the kids. With difficulty, I tossed off the thought and focused on what I was doing. I didn’t want to die. I wanted Snake to die. I wanted to see my family again. I had to stay centered. I had to do this like I was delivering the mail.

  It was growing darker by the moment, so my eyes were adjusting rapidly. I could see a great, rusted saw in there, about eight feet away, to the left, mounted on a metal rig and some planking. There was a lot of debris scattered about. Some barrels of wooden crates. I could actually smell Snake. Sour and rotten, like meat gone bad. I made a leap through the doorway and rolled up against the base of the saw as two shots slammed at me. One struck the ground near me as I rolled and the other touched a spark off the saw.

  I scooted away from the base of the saw, which was not solid protection, but open railing and planks, and got my back against a metal barrel and pressed tight to it. Another shot slammed through the barrel and a streak of oil gushed out of it and splashed onto my left shoulder and down my pants leg.

  I twisted around the side of the barrel and jerked the .38 up in what I thought was the direction of the shots and snapped off two. I heard them whine and strike something solid and sing off that and hit something else and make a flat sound. Then I heard movement up there, then a shotgun thundered, and I knew Arnold had found an entrance and was on the scene. The shotgun slug made a hard clang of a sound as it tore through the metal roof of the mill.

  “Bubba,” Arnold yelled out. “He’s above you, to the right, on a platform. Watch your ass!”

  But Arnold’s brotherly warning had given Snake an opportunity to better locate. I heard him step on some squeaking lumber, scrape over something, then there was silence.

  A short-lived silence. A gun barked and Arnold yelled and I rose up behind the saw without thinking and the gun barked again. A metal tip of one of the jagged saw blades went away with a brilliant display of sparks, and I fired off a couple of quick rounds in the direction of the shot and dropped back down.

  “Arnold!” I said.

  “Okay, okay,” Arnold said. “I took one. I’m all right. Shit. No I ain’t. My fucking hip’s on fire. Goddamn you, Snake shit! Come see me, motherfucker! Come see me!”

  Snake fired another shot from above. I heard it strike the dirt floor over by Arnold with a dead thud. This time Arnold didn’t ask him to visit. I heard running above us, sagging, squeaking boards, then the dreaded silence.

  I got some ammo out of my pocket and filled all the chambers in the .38, then I came out from behind the saw and darted to the right behind a heap of crates. From there, I slid up to a wooden ladder that led to the landing. I looked up. It was awfully dark, and Snake could have been lurking anywhere, though I felt certain from the sound of the movement I had heard, he had traveled on a ways, possibly to a more proۀto a mortected position.

  “Arnold?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  I slipped across to where his voice was coming from. He was behind a heap of crates lying on his side. The shotgun lay beside him. One of the crates had exploded, scattering pornographic debris about like chicken feathers.

  “Crates and photographs, they don’t block slugs too well,” Arnold whispered. “Actually, it wasn’t a bullet I caught, it was a chunk of wood from one of the crates.”

  I bent down and touched him on the shoulder and dragged him behind a deeper stack of boxes. “Shut up and stay here,” I said. “I’ll get him.”

  “I certainly hope so,” Arnold said. “I don’t think I’m up for it right this moment.”

  I left him and started up the ladder, holding the .38 before me, using one hand to take myself up. I kept watching for the face of Snake, that tattooed moon, to rise over the horizon of the wooden platform above so I could put a crater in it. But the moon didn’t rise. I sniffed. I could smell him, but it wasn’t overwhelming. I became convinced that he wasn’t right above me. But he wouldn’t have to be. He could be off to the left or the right somewhere, waiting, sighting down the barrel of the .38.

  I made the top of the landing and Snake didn’t strike. I looked to my left and saw that the landing played out into a mass of thin, sagging boards that couldn’t have supported anything heavier than a spider or a cockroach.

  He had gone right, across a path of stronger boards that lay across the rafters, through a doorless doorway that led onto a kind of loft.

  I crouched on the landing and figured on things. I was him, I’d be on either side of that opening, waiting in the dark.

  I took a prone position on the rickety landing and borrowed a trick from Snake’s book. I lifted my .38 and shot through the wood, two shots in succession on the left side of the doorway, about three feet up, two on the right, the same height. The wood crackled and heaved and there was a grunt, and a silhouette moved in front of the doorway and red blasts of light jumped out of both his fists and bullets sang all around me. Had I been standing, as he suspected, I’d have had more holes in me than a cheese grater.

  Even as Snake realized he’d missed, he turned his back to me, and ran straight into the darkness and the darkness was split by a thud of shutters and a burst of daylight and Snake leaped into the light and fell out of sight.

  I bounded up, charged for the room, and a board gave and my leg went through, scaring about ten years off my life. I got my leg out of the break, and moved on into the room. The light from outside was faded, but it was enough to show me it was Snake’s headquarters. There was a TV up there and a VCR, some personal items, and a shelf containing a smattering of bones, like a child’s collection. There were pictures of naked children nailed to the wall.

  I went over to the opening made by the thrown back shutters, and looked down. Snake had made a drop of about thirty feet. I could see him limping away in the distance, holding a revolver in
either hand, struggling toward the cluۀoward thtch of blackgum trees and the biplane beyond.

  I fired two shots at him and neither hit. I was still sharp with a rifle, but with a handgun I was so-so. I made my way back to the ladder without falling or catching my balls on a nail, went out of the mill and ran toward the blackjacks and the branch.

  Snake wasn’t making great time. That jump had caused him injury. It was a wonder he wasn’t wearing his knee caps under his earlobes. Still, he was going to make the plane well ahead of me. I got to the copse of trees, and slid on my ass down the side of the creek branch, stepped in the three or four inches of water there, and climbed up on the other side.

  Snake was thirty feet away, in the cockpit of the Stearman. I heard an electric starter spark up, and the prop began to spin. The plane turned slightly to the right, then suddenly made a complete circle, then made it again.

  Snake got it straight finally, just about the time I got close, and he started trying to take it for a run across the field. I knew by then he didn’t know how to fly. Fat Boy had probably been the pilot, and Snake only had some idea of how it was done.

  I lifted the .38 and pulled the trigger. The hammer clicked on an empty chamber. I started to reach in my pocket for a load, but Snake actually had the plane moving now, starting down the field.

  I ran after the plane, which was not gaining much speed because it was bouncing and sawing left and right, and I got hold of the bottom wing and it jerked forward and I fell in the dirt and lost the .38. I leaped to my feet and ran after the plane again, got the wing just before the speed picked up. I tugged myself onto the bottom wing and used it as a platform to spring at Snake in the open cockpit. I came down on him and hammered his head with the side of my fist and held to his neck with my other arm. The plane went crazy, and Snake lifted back on the throttle, and the plane went up and came down with a hard bounce that nearly threw me, then it went up again. I got a tighter grip on his throat and hit him again and he tried to pick one of his .38’s from his lap and shoot me with it. The process caught his sleeve in the throttle, and as he pulled around to shoot, he jerked back on the throttle and we went up again, higher this time.

  I glanced at the nose of the plane, saw it lifting toward the sky, then it dipped down and we were diving into a line of trees that appeared to be dancing along the edge of the woods. Then they weren’t dancing at all, they were just close. We hit with a sound like a bat catching a home run, only louder. The prop chopped branches like a Vegematic doing celery. A limb reached out and politely plucked me off Snake and the cockpit. The Stearman came apart like a box kite being shoved through the whirling blades of a window fan.

  I lost all the breath that could possibly be in me, dropped down through a couple of boughs hard enough to crack a limb against my thigh, then made a drop that seemed to me was a world record. I hit the ground so hard I realized I only thought I’d lost all my breath. Now I knew what that sensation was truly like, and I knew another sensation as well. That of going very fast and spinning about and not being on some kind of carnival ride.

  I went sliding down a muddy slope, over branches that whapped my legs and face and poked a few other parts of me for good measure. I came to rest at the base of a pine in time to see the Stearman’s parts rainingۀparts ra through the trees. The prop came whacking down the hill and bounced by me and crashed along, and from the sound of it, fetched up against something pretty solid. An oak was probably a good guess. An oak could stop a prop.

  I lay there until my lungs came unglued and began to pump air. I used the tree I was lying against to help myself up, discovered my left wrist was broken, and my knee had a piece of tree branch in it about the size of a tent peg. I was bleeding profusely down my pants leg, and I had little desire to pull the chunk out, but I got hold of it and jerked and sat down again. The wood fragment was still in me and I felt a lot worse than I had a moment before. I gave it another jerk, and it came out this time. I tossed it aside and lay back until the pain quit churning around inside me.

  My head a smidgen clearer, I was suddenly overcome with an overwhelming desire to know what Snake was doing. Decorating an assortment of trees, I hoped.

  I looked up the muddy, leafy hill I’d slid down, and saw Snake at the top of it, pushing out of what was left of a clutch of young pines, all now broken off by debris of the plane. Something had caught the flesh on the top of Snake’s head and peeled back a big chunk of his cobra tattoo. I could see the bone of his bloodstained skull. He was limping like both legs were made of sticks and a chunk of canvas from the plane was draped around his neck like a scarf. He glared down on me with something less than admiration. He jerked the canvas fragment off and tossed it aside. He bent painfully and pulled up his pants leg and got a little gun, probably a .22, out of an ankle holster.

  He was moving slow, but I figured it was time to move on just the same. I got a leg under me and put my back to the tree and got up. Snake fired the gun and a chunk of bark jumped out of the tree on my left.

  Most definitely a .22.

  I stumbled behind the tree, let myself fall on my butt so I could slide down the rest of the slope on the mud. At the bottom of the slope, it fell off dramatically and dropped through a thicker growth of brush and gave me up about six feet over a foot of creek water.

  Splashing into the cold water charged me. I got my bad leg under me, which was about as supple and useful as a fence post, slopped down the creek and around a bend.

  At the end of the bend, the creek went under a bridge, and it went under it through a metal culvert. The bridge supported a narrow dirt road that had given up to weeds and had probably once been a logging road.

  I stumbled to the road and was about to climb out of the creek and cross it, when I saw the culvert the water was running into was mostly blocked by accumulated pine needles, leaves, and branches.

  It occurred to me, that if I could ease that debris back, I could slip inside the culvert and pull it to me. If Snake wasn’t looking just right, he might not realize the culvert was as wide and deep as it was, and he’d go on by. That would give me a chance to sneak out later, and get back to Arnold and Price and the car.

  It wasn’t a military plan up there with D-Day, but I didn’t feel all that good. In fact, I felt light headed and delirious from all the banging around I’d gone through and all the blood I’d lost.

  I got hold oۀ>I got hf the debris and pushed it aside without pulling it up, and wiggled into the culvert head first, crawled on my hands and knees until only my feet were touching the refuse. I used the top of my foot to pull the stuff back down. It grew darker. The water sounded loud inside the culvert.

  The pain in my leg was only a little worse than if it were being sawed off with a dull rock, and my wrist had taken on the appearance of a fleshy baseball. I used my good hand to palm the mud on the bottom of the culvert, and pulled myself forward, toward the other end, which was unblocked by nature’s dandruff.

  When I got there, I cautiously stuck my head out and looked down. The water had eaten out a pretty fair drop on this side, ten feet maybe before you hit the creek and deeper water than the other side. Three or four feet perhaps.

  I pulled back inside the culvert and listened to my breathing. It seemed stereophonic in there. I slowed and softened it by breathing deeply through my nose and letting it out easy through my mouth.

  Back down the far end of the culvert I could hear Snake stumbling slowly along, the splashing of the creek water echoing up through the culvert like a megaphone. I hoped that the leaves and needles that had bunched there would fool him.

  Closer he came, the dumber I felt. All I had done was climb into the mouth of a cannon with the fuse about to be lit. I felt about in the bed of the culvert for some weapon, but there was just cold water and mud. I checked my pockets and came up with the wadcutters and the pocket knife Arnold had given me. I dropped the wadcutters and opened the knife and held it. I noticed that the blood from my leg was coloring the water, r
unning a dark stream over the lip of the opening and down into the creek. I hoped it had grown dark enough that if Snake looked he wouldn’t realize what he was seeing.

  Snake stumped and splashed along until he reached the culvert and stopped.

  I held my breath. I looked down past my legs, down the twelve foot length of the culvert. Through a rent in the debris, I could see Snake’s legs. He hesitated only a moment, then I heard him scrambling up the side of the bank and onto the road.

  I listened for footsteps above me, but heard nothing. Was the road too thick to hear? Had I fooled him? Or was Snake standing up there thinking things over?

  Then I knew what he was doing. He was leaning over the edge of the road, toward the open end of the culvert. I could smell him and I could see his shadow darkening the opening, blocking out the last red drips of the sun.

  I scooted up close to the mouth of the culvert and cocked the knife back and held my breath. Snake hung his head over and down, looked inside. I could see the little dark caverns where his eyes lived, but not the eyes themselves. It was strange, being looked at that way and not seeing the eyes that were looking. He dropped the hand with the .22 in it into view and I pushed off with my good leg and went straight at him and jabbed the knife toward one of those dark spots where an eye lived.

  Snake snapped his head to the side, and my blade went into this cheek, hit bone and ripped free of his flesh. He bellowed and the sound of it bounced about my close quarters and the .22 went off and put a shot into the bank around the culvert. He tried to get his hands back andۀands bac under him to pull himself up, but I got my injured arm around his neck and tugged him, pulled him off the road and halfway over the lip of the culvert. I tried to hold him that way while I plunged the knife into the side of his neck, but he fell the rest of the way off the road and over the edge. The momentum of his fall, and me still holding him, jerked me out of the culvert and sent me banging into the bank beneath the culvert, tumbling into the water below, on top of him. As we fell, I saw the .22 pistol come free of him, heard it hit somewhere on the far bank, then we were underwater.