By Bizarre Hands

by Joe R. Lansdale

  There was nothing I could do for her.

  I made a torch out of a chair leg and an old quilt, set fire to it, burned the vine from between her legs, watched it retreat, smoking, under the door. Then I got a board, nailed it along the bottom, hoping it would keep others out for at least a little while. I got one of the twelve-gauges and loaded it. It's on the desk beside me, Mr. Journal, but even I know I'll never use it. It was just something to do, as Jacobs said when he killed and ate the whale. Something to do.

  I can hardly write any more. My back and shoulders hurt so bad. It's the weight of Rae and the world.

  I've just come back from the mirror and there's very little left of the tattoo. Some blue and black ink, a touch of red that was Rae's hair. It looks like an abstract painting now. Collapsed design, running colors. It's real swollen. I look like the hunchback of Notre Dame.

  What am I going to do, Mr. Journal?

  Well, as always, I'm glad you asked me that. You see, I've thought this out.

  I could throw Mary's body over the railing before it blooms. I could do that. Then I could doctor my back. It might even heal, though I doubt it. Rae wouldn't let that happen, I can tell you now. And I don't blame her. I'm on her side. I'm just a walking dead man and have been for years.

  I could put the shotgun under my chin and work the trigger with my toe, or maybe push it with the very pen I'm using to create you, Mr. Journal. Wouldn't that be neat? Blow my brains to the ceiling and sprinkle you with my blood.

  But as I said, I loaded the gun because it was something to do. I'd never use it on myself or Mary.

  You see, I want Mary. I want her to hold Rae and me one last time like she used to in the park. And she can. There's a way.

  I've drawn all the curtains and made curtains out of blankets for those spots where there aren't any. It'll be sunup soon and I don't want that kind of light in here. I'm writing this by candlelight and it gives the entire room a warm glow. I wish I had wine. I want the atmosphere to be just right.

  Over on Mary's bunk she's starting to twitch. Her neck is swollen where the vines have congested and are writhing toward their favorite morsel, the brain. Pretty soon the rose will bloom (I hope she's one of the bright yellow ones, yellow was her favorite color and she wore it well) and Mary will come for me.

  When she does, I'll stand with my naked back to her. The vines will whip out and cut me before she reaches me, but I can stand it. I'm used to pain. I'll pretend the thorns are Mary's needles. I'll stand that way until she folds her dead arms around me and her body pushes up against the wound she made in my back, the wound that is our daughter Rae. She'll hold me so the vines and the proboscis can do their work. And while she holds me, I'll grab her fine hands and push them against my chest, and it will be we three again, standing against the world, and I'll close my eyes and delight in her soft, soft hands one last time.

  THE WINDSTORM PASSES

  For Ardath Mayhar

  The winter I come to believe in signs and omens was the baddest old winter we'd ever seen. The winter I turned fifteen.

  It had come a rare snow that year, and even rarer for East Texas, it had actually stuck to the ground and got thick. Along came the wind, colder than ever, and it turned the snow to ice. It was beautiful, like sugar and egg-white icing on a cake, but it wasn't nothing to enjoy after the excitement of first seeing it come down. I had to get out in it and do chores, and that made me wish for a lot of sunshine and a time to go fishing.

  Third day after it snowed and things had gotten real icy, I was out cutting some firewood from the woodlot and I found a madman in a ditch.

  I'd already chopped down a tree and was trimming the limbs off of it, waiting for Papa who was coming across the way with a cross cut so we could saw it up into firewood sizes. While I was trimming I heard a voice.

  "I got a message. Get out of this ditch, I got a message."

  Clutching the axe tight, I went over and looked in the ditch, and there was a man. His face was as blue as my Mama's eyes; Papa says they're so blue the sky looks white beside them, even on the sky's best day. His long, oily hair had stuck to the ground and frozen there so that the clumped strands looked like snakes or fat worms trying to find holes to crawl into. There were icicles hanging off his eyelids and he was barefoot.

  I screamed for Papa. He tossed down the saw and came running as fast as he could go on that ice. We got down in the ditch, hauled the feller up, pulling out some of his frozen hair in the doing. He was wearing a baggy old pair of faded black suit pants with the rear busted out, and his butt was hanging free and bare. It was darker than his face, looked a bit like a split, overripe watermelon gone dark in the sun. His feet and hands were somewhere between the blue of his face and the blue-black of his butt. The shirt he had on was three sizes too big, and when Papa and I had him standing, the wind came a-whistling along and flapped the feller's shirt around him till he looked like a scarecrow we was trying to poke in the ground.

  We got him up to the house, laid him out on the kitchen table. He looked like he'd had it. Didn't move, just laid there, eyes closed, breathing slow. Then, all of a sudden, his eyes snapped open and he shot out a bony hand and grabbed Papa by the coat collar. He pulled himself to a sitting position until his face was right even with Papa's and said, "I got a message from the Lord. You are doomed, brother, doomed to the wind 'cause it's going to blow you away." Then he closed his eyes, laid back down and let go of Papa's coat.

  "Easy there," Papa said. But about that time the feller gave a shake, like he was going to have a rigor, then he went still as a turnip. Papa felt for a pulse and put his ear to the feller's chest looking for a heartbeat. From the expression on Papa's face, I could tell he hadn't found neither.

  "He dead, Papa?"

  "Couldn't get no deader, son," Papa said, lifting his head from the feller's chest.

  Mama, who'd sort of been standing off to the side watching, came over now. "You know him, Harold?" she asked.

  "Think this is Hazel Onin's boy," Papa said.

  "The crazy boy?"

  "I just seen him the once, but I think it's him. They had him on a leash out in the yard one summer, had this colored feller leading him around, and the boy was running on all fours, howling and trying to lift his leg to pee on things. His pants were all wet."

  "How pitiful," Mama said.

  I knew of Hazel Onin's crazy boy, but if he had a name I'd never heard it. He'd always been crazy, but not so crazy at first that they couldn't let him run free. He was just considered peculiar. When he was eighteen he got religion real bad, took to preaching. Then right after he turned twenty he tried to rape this little high yeller gal he was teaching some Bible verses to, and that's when the Onins throwed him in the attic room, locked and barred the windows. If he'd been out of that room since that time, I'd never heard of it till now.

  I'm ashamed of it now, but when I was twelve or thirteen, me and some of the other boys used to have to walk by there on our way to and from school, and the madman would holler out from his barred windows at us, "Repent, 'cause you're all going to have a bad fall," then he'd go to singing some old gospel song, and it gave me the jitters 'cause there was an echo up there in that attic, and it made it seem there was someone else inside singing along with him. Someone with a voice as deep and trembly as Old Man Death ought to have.

  Johnny Clarence used to pull his pants down, bend over and show his naked butt to the madman, and we'd follow his lead on account of we didn't want to be considered no chickens. Then we'd all take off out of there running, hoopin' and a hollerin', pulling our pants and suspenders up as we ran.

  But we'd quit going there long time back, as had almost everyone in town. They moved Main Street when the railroad came through on the other side, and from then on the town built up over there. They even tore down and rebuilt the school house on that side, and there wasn't no need for us to come that way no more. We could cut shorter by going another way. And after that, I mostly forgot about the ma
dman prophet.

  "It's such a shame," Mama said. "Poor boy."

  "It's a blessing, is what it is," Papa said. "He don't look like he's been eating so good to me, and I bet that's because the Onins ain't feeding him like they ought to. They figure him a shame and a curse from God, and they've treated him like it was his fault his head ain't no good ever since he was born."

  "He was dangerous, Harold," Mama said. "Remember that little high yeller girl?"

  "Ain't saying he ought to have been invited to a church social. But they didn't have to treat him like an animal."

  "Guess it's not ours to judge," Mama said.

  "Damn sure don't matter now," Papa said.

  "What do you think he meant about that thing he said, Papa?" I asked. "About the wind and all?"

  "Didn't mean nothing, son. Just crazy talk, Go on out and hitch up the wagon and I'll get him wound up in a sheet. We'll take him back to the Onins. Maybe they'll want to stuff him and put him in the attic window so folks can see him as they walk or ride by. Or they could charge two bits for folks to come inside and look at him. Kind of pull his arm with a string so it looks like he's waving at them."

  "That's quite enough, Harold," Mama said. "Don't talk like that in front of the boy."

  Papa grumbled something, went out of the room for a sheet, and I went out to the barn and hitched the mules up. I drove the wagon up to the front door, went in to help Papa carry the body out. Not that it really took both of us. He was as light as a big, empty corn husk. But somehow, the two of us carrying him seemed a lot more respectable than just tossing him over a shoulder and slamming him down in the wagon bed.

  We took the body over to the Onins, and if they was broke up about it, I missed the signs. They looked like they'd just finally gotten some stomach tonic to work, and had made that long put off and desired trip to the outhouse.

  Papa didn't say nothing stern to them, though I expected him to, since he wasn't short on honest words. But I figure he didn't see no need in it now.

  Mrs. Onin stood in the doorway all the time, didn't come out to the wagon bed while the body was there. After Mr. Onin unwound the sheet and took a look at the madman's face, said what a sad day it was and all, he asked us if we'd mind putting the body in the toolshed.

  We did, and when we got back to the wagon Mrs. Onin was waiting by it. Mr. Onin offered us a dollar for bringing the body home, but of course, Papa wouldn't take it.

  Before we climbed up on the wagon, Mrs. Onin said, "He'd been yelling all morning from upstairs, saying how an angel from God wearing a suit coat and a top hat, had brought him a message he was supposed to pass on. Kept sayin' the angel was giving him a test, see if he deserved heaven after what he done to that little girl."

  Papa went ahead and climbed on the wagon, took hold of the lines. With his head, he motioned me up.

  "Then we didn't hear nothing no more," Mr. Onin said. "I went up there to check on him and he'd pulled the bars out of one of the windows and got out. I don't reckon how he did that, as he'd never been able to do it before, and them bars was as sturdy as the day I put them in, no rotten wood around the sills or nothing."

  Papa had taken out his pocket knife and tobacco bar, and he was cutting him a chaw off it. "Reckon you went right then to the sheriff to tell him your boy run off,'' Papa said, and there was that edge to his voice, like when he finds me peeing out back too close to the house.

  "Naw," Mr. Onin said looking at the ground. "I didn't. Figured cold as he was, he'd come on back."

  "Don't matter none now, does it?" Papa said.

  "No," Mr. Onin said. "He's out of his misery now."

  "Thems as true a words as you've spoke," Papa said.

  "I'll be getting your sheet back to you," Mr. Onin said.

  "Don't want it," Papa said. He clucked up the mules and we started off.

  When we were out of earshot of the house, I said, "Papa, you really think they thought that crazy feller would go back because it was cold?"

  "Why in hell would he want to go back to that attic? I don't reckon it was all that warm. I figure they thought he'd freeze and they'd be rid of him."

  We didn't say anything else until we got home, then wasn't none of the talking about the madman or the Onins. Mama didn't even mention it after she saw Papa's face.

  Just before supper, Papa went out on the porch to smoke his pipe, and I went out to the barn to toss the mules and milk cow some hay. I was out there tossing and smelling that animal smell, thinking how it reminded me of my whole life, that smell. Reminded me of Mama and Papa, warm nights with very little breeze, cold nights with the fire stoked up big and warm, late suppers, tall tales in front of the fireplace, standing on the porch or looking out the windows at the morning, noon or night, spring, summer, winter or fall. And that smell, always there, like a friend who had on some peculiar, if not bad smelling, toilet water. It was in the floorboards of the house, in the yard, thick in the barn. A smell that even now moves me backwards and forwards in time.

  So there I was, throwing hay, thinking this fine life would go on forever, and all of a sudden I felt it before it happened.

  I quit tossing hay, turned to look out the barn door. It was like I was looking at a painting, things had gone so still. The sky had turned yellow. The late birds quit singing and the mules and the milk cow turned their heads to look out of doors too.

  Way off I heard it, a sound like a locomotive making the grade, burning that timber. Only there wasn't a track within ten miles of us. Outside the sky went from yellow to black, from still to windy. Pine straw, dust, and all manner of things began whipping by. I knew what was happening: twister.

  I dropped the pitchfork, dove for the inside of an old shovel scoop mule sled, and no sooner had I hit face down and put my hands over my head, then it hit.

  I caught a glimpse of a cow flying by, legs splayed like she thought she could stop the tug of the wind easy as she could stop the tug of a rope. Then the cow was gone and the sled started to move.

  After that, everything started happening so quickly I'm not certain what I saw. Lots of things flying by, and I could hardly breathe. The sled might have gone as high as thirty feet, 'cause when I came down it was hard. Hadn't been for the ice, I'd probably have been driven into the ground like a cork in a bottle. But the sled hit the ice and started sliding, throwing up dirty, hard snow on either side of me. Ice pieces hit me in the face, then the sled fetched up against something solid, a stump probably, and I went flying out of it, hit the ice, whirled around and around, came to rest in that ditch where I'd found the madman.

  I passed out for a while, and I dreamed. Dreamed I was in the sled again, flying through the air, and there was our house, lifting up from the ground, floor and all. It flew right past me, rising fast. In the brief instant it moved in front of me, I saw Mama. She was standing at the window. All the glass was blown out, and she was clinging to the sill with both hands. Her eyes were as big and blue as her china saucers, and her red hair had come undone and was blowing and whipping around her like a brush fire.

  The house shot on up, and when I looked up to see, there wasn't nothing but whirling blackness with little chunks of wood and junk disappearing into it.

  "Mama," I said, and I must have said it a lot of times, 'cause that's what woke me up. The sound of my voice calling Mama.

  I tried to stand, but my ankle wasn't having it. It hurt like hell, and when I looked down, I saw my boot and sock had been ripped off by the blow, and the ankle was as big as a coiled cottonmouth snake.

  I put a hand on the edge of the ditch, dug my fingers through the ice and pulled myself up, taking some of the skin off my naked foot as I did. It was so cold the flesh had frozen to the ground and it had peeled off when I moved, like sweetgum bark.

  Once I was out of the ditch, I started crawling across the ice, dragging my useless foot behind me. Little chunks of skin came off my palms, so I had to get down and pull myself forward on my coat-sleeved forearms.

 
I hadn't gone far before I found Papa. He was sitting in his rocking chair, and in one hand he held his pipe and it was still smoking. The porch the chair had been sitting on was gone, but Papa was rocking gently in what remained of the wind. And the pitchfork I'd tossed before diving into the sled was sticking out of his chest like it had growed there. I didn't see a drop of blood. His eyes were open and staring, and every time that chair rocked forward, he seemed to look and nod at me.

  Behind Papa, where the house ought to have been, wasn't nothing. It was like it hadn't never been built. I quit crawling and started crying. Did that till there wasn't nothing in me to cry, and the cold started making me so numb I just wanted to lay there and freeze at Papa's feet like an old dog. I felt like if I wasn't his killer, I was at least a helper, having tossed down the very pitchfork that had murdered him.

  It started to rain little ice pellets, and somehow the pain of those things pounding on me, gave me the will to crawl toward a heap of hay that had been tossed there by the wind. By the time I got to the pile and looked back, Papa wasn't rocking no more. Those runners had froze to the ground and his black hair had turned white from the ice that had stuck to him.

  I worked my way into the hay and tried to pull as much of it over me as I could. Doing that wore me out, and I fell asleep wondering about Mama, wondering what had happened to her, hoping she was alive.

  The wind picked up again, took most of my hay away, but by then I didn't care. I awoke remembering that I'd had that dream about Mama and the house again. Even though I didn't have much hay on me, it didn't seem so cold anymore. I figured it was either warming up, or I was getting used to it. Course, wasn't neither of them things. I was freezing to death, and would have too, if not for Mr. Parks and his boys.