By Bizarre Hands

by Joe R. Lansdale

  "There doesn't feel like there's any air out there," Wayne said. "And the sun feels just like it always does. Hot."

  "Please."

  He picked her up and carried her outside and found a ridge of sand and laid her down so her head was propped against it.

  "I . . . I need batteries," she said.

  "Say what?" Wayne said.

  She lay looking straight into the sun. "Brother Lazarus's greatest work . . . a dead folk that can think . . . has memory of the past . . . Was a scientist too . . . " Her hand came up in stages, finally got hold of her head gear and pushed it off.

  Gleaming from the center to her tangled blond hair was a silver knob.

  "He. . . was not a good man. . . I am a good woman. . . I want to feel alive . . . like before . . . batteries going . . . brought others."

  Her hand fumbled at a snap pocket on her habit. Wayne opened it for her and got out what was inside. Four batteries.

  "Uses two . . . simple."

  Calhoun was standing over them now. "That explains some things," he said.

  "Don't look at me like that . . . " Sister Worth said, and Wayne realized he had never told her his name and she had never asked. "Unscrew . . . put the batteries in . . . Without them I'll be an eater . . . Can't wait too long."

  "All right," Wayne said. He went behind her and propped her up on the sand drift and unscrewed the metal shaft from her skull. He thought about when she had fucked him on the wheel and how desperate she had been to feel something, and how she had been cold as flint and lustless. He remembered how she had looked in the mirror hoping to see something that wasn't there.

  He dropped the batteries in the sand and took out one of the revolvers and put it close to the back of her head and pulled the trigger. Her body jerked slightly and fell over, her face turning toward him.

  The bullet had come out where the bird had been on her cheek and had taken it completely away, leaving a bloodless hole.

  "Best thing," Calhoun said. "There's enough live pussy in the world without you pulling this broken-legged dead thing around after you on a board."

  "Shut up," Wayne said.

  "When a man gets sentimental over women and kids, he can count himself out." Wayne stood up.

  "Well boy," Calhoun said. "I reckon it's time."

  "Reckon so," Wayne said.

  "How about we do this with some class? Give me one of your pistols and we'll get back-to-back and I'll count to ten, and when I get there, we'll turn and shoot."

  Wayne gave Calhoun one of the pistols. Calhoun checked the chambers, said, "I've got four loads."

  Wayne took two out of his pistol and tossed them on the ground. "Even Steven," he said.

  They got back-to-back and held the guns by their legs.

  "Guess if you kill me you'll take me in," Calhoun said. "So that means you'll put a bullet through my head if I need it. I don't want to come back as one of the dead folks. Got your word on that?"

  "Yep."

  "I'll do the same for you. Give my word. You know that's worth something."

  "We gonna shoot or talk?"

  "You know, boy, under different circumstances, I could have liked you. We might have been friends."

  "Not likely."

  Calhoun started counting, and they started stepping. When he got to ten, they turned.

  Calhoun's pistol barked first, and Wayne felt the bullet punch him low in the right side of his chest, spinning him slightly. He lifted his revolver and took his time and shot just as Calhoun fired again.

  Calhoun's second bullet whizzed by Wayne's head. Wayne's shot hit Calhoun in the stomach.

  Calhoun went to his knees and had trouble drawing a breath. He tried to lift his revolver but couldn't; it was as if it had turned into an anvil.

  Wayne shot him again. Hitting him in the middle of the chest this time and knocking him back so that his legs were curled beneath him.

  Wayne walked over to Calhoun, dropped to one knee and took the revolver from him.

  "Shit," Calhoun said. "I wouldn't have thought that for nothing. You hit?" "Scratched."

  "Shit."

  Wayne put the revolver to Calhoun's forehead and Calhoun closed his eyes and Wayne pulled the trigger.

  13

  The wound wasn't a scratch. Wayne knew he should leave Sister Worth where she was and load Calhoun on the bus and haul him in for bounty. But he didn't care about the bounty anymore.

  He used the ragged piece of bumper to dig them a shallow side-by-side grave. When he finished, he stuck the fender fragment up between them and used the sight of one of the revolvers to scratch into it: HERE LIES SISTER WORTH AND CALHOUN WHO KEPT HIS WORD.

  You couldn't really read it good and he knew the first real wind would keel it over, but it made him feel better about something, even if he couldn't put his finger on it.

  His wound had opened up and the sun was very hot now, and since he had lost his hat he could feel his brain cooking in his skull like meat boiling in a pot.

  He got on the bus, started it and drove through the day and the night and it was near morning when he came to the Cadillacs and turned down between them and drove until he came to the '57.

  When he stopped and tried to get off the bus, he found he could hardly move. The revolvers in his belt were stuck to his shirt and stomach because of the blood from his wound.

  He pulled himself up with the steering wheel, got one of the shotguns and used it for a crutch. He got the food and water and went out to inspect the '57.

  It was for shit. It had not only lost its windshield, the front end was mashed way back and one of the big sand tires was twisted at such an angle he knew the axle was shot.

  He leaned against the Chevy and tried to think. The bus was okay and there was still some gas in it, and he could get the hose out of the trunk of the '57 and siphon gas out of its tanks and put it in the bus. That would give him a few miles.

  Miles.

  He didn't feel as if he could walk twenty feet, let alone concentrate on driving.

  He let go of the shotgun, the food and water. He scooted onto the hood of the Chevy and managed himself to the roof. He lay there on his back and looked at the sky.

  It was a clear night and the stars were sharp with no fuzz around them. He felt cold. In a couple of hours the stars would fade and the sun would come up and the cool would give way to heat.

  He turned his head and looked at one of the Cadillacs and a skeleton face pressed to its windshield, forever looking down at the sand.

  That was no way to end, looking down.

  He crossed his legs and stretched out his arms and studied the sky. It didn't feel so cold now, and the pain had almost stopped. He was more numb than anything else.

  He pulled one of the revolvers and cocked it and put it to his temple and continued to look at the stars. Then he closed his eyes and found that he could still see them. He was once again hanging in the void between the stars wearing only his hat and cowboy boots, and floating about him were the junk cars and the '57, undamaged.

  The cars were moving toward him this time, not away. The '57 was in the lead, and as it grew closer he saw Pop behind the wheel and beside him was a Mexican puta, and in the back, two more. They were all smiling and Pop honked the horn and waved.

  The '57 came alongside him and the back door opened. Sitting between the whores was Sister Worth. She had not been there a moment ago, but now she was. And he had never noticed how big the back seat of the '57 was.

  Sister Worth smiled at him and the bird on her cheek lifted higher. Her hair was combed out long and straight and she looked pink-skinned and happy. On the floorboard at her feet was a chest of iced-beer. Lone Star, by God.

  Pop was leaning over the front seat, holding out his hand and Sister Worth and the whores were beckoning him inside.

  Wayne worked his hands and feet, found this time that he could move. He swam through the open door, touched Pop's hand, and Pop said, ''It's good to see you, son," and at the moment
Wayne pulled the trigger, Pop pulled him inside.

  AFTERWORD

  Where do we begin with the dauntingly talented Joe Lansdale? His range is so various, and his output so bountiful, that there are any number of routes into his work. Early novels such as the raw and powerful supernatural tale The Nightrunners and the compellingly ingenious crime tale Cold in July are surrounded by other less immediately definable tales—the first two joyfully extravagant Drive-in fantasies, for instance. That splendidly productive period—the late Eighties—also saw the start of his Hap and Leonard series, crime novels as darkly comic as they are suspenseful, with a thoroughly Texan tang. But many of the elements I've cited here can be sampled, along with much more, in his first collection, By Bizarre Hands, an ideal introduction to the breadth of his work.

  Let me follow the order of the book. "Fish Night" has all the visionary simplicity of Ray Bradbury at his most poetic. Its opening lines epitomise Lansdale's economy of effect, his instinct for the strikingly original image that wastes no words, the clarity of his observation, his ear for language, Texan in particular. With the latter, in the voices both of characters and narrative, comes a rich, dark, highly individual humour. Add to all this a fantastic concept that resonates like a modern myth.

  By contrast, "The Pit" takes a long hard look into the human abyss. The late Richard Laymon wrote a short tale called "The Champion," which reached a similar conclusion, but whereas Laymon's story is a grisly horror comic (which is not to denigrate either the tale or the Fifties comic books it recalls), Lansdale's probes the psychology of its characters far more deeply. Its relentlessness extends to the depiction of violence and racism (a recurring Lansdale theme), which is certainly confrontational but never gratuitous. By comparison, "Duck Hunt"—a nightmare vignette about coming of age in the backwoods—is a flare that illuminates the minds of too many men, and not just characters in fiction, I fear. The name of one character should be familiar, and we're left to interpret its presence as we will.

  Sometimes only the author's dark humour holds his vision back from becoming unbearable, to this reader at any rate. So it is with "By Bizarre Hands," where we're trapped inside the deplorable protagonist's head with his blackest thoughts. So many of them veer towards, if not beyond, ghastly comedy that we may feel uncomfortably complicit with them, but like all of Lansdale's portraits of humanity at its worst, the tale never loses moral focus. The excesses of the preacher's secret thoughts distance us enough from him to let us judge him, but perhaps we're judging our own responses too. Horror and humour are never more closely related than when they're most confrontational, but few writers besides Lansdale unite them with such power. The title of the tale, incidentally, was a phrase the author overheard—no wonder it lodged in his head, as is the way with writers.

  "The Steel Valentine" stands in the tradition of such tales as H. G. Wells's "The Cone" and Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game"—suspenseful studies of male conflict and revenge—and would equally be at home in the most noir of the pulps. "I Tell You It's Love" distils the grimness of his darkest work into a vignette; to linger over material as progressively transgressive as this might be too much both for the reader and the author. "Letter from the South, Two Moons West of Nacogdoches" plays a game science fiction often plays, gradually revealing a great deal of its world in casual details. It's surprising to the end.

  "Boys Will Be Boys" later formed part of The Nightrunners, the most relentless of his novels. It gives a typical Lansdale character even more of a voice with which to reveal the depths of himself, and examines in daunting detail the development of a criminal relationship, but it also adumbrates the supernatural aspect of the novel in one extraordinary paragraph about a vampiric house. Even Lovecraft never wrote prose more elaborately orchestrated or evocative. For that matter, even Lansdale has rarely given us such a portrait of unbridled evil as the story offers, though the novel goes further still.

  If you're reading the stories sequentially, "The Fat Man and the Elephant" may well come as a relief. While the wry sketch of a dilapidated highway museum rings horribly true, the story is a ray of dusty desert light amid the darkness of much of the book. Its obsessed preacher and his obsession are more genial than those in the title tale, and his delusions are closer to deadpan humour. However, Candy is the real star of the story, and a great addition to the gallery of witty tricksters in fiction—Br'er Rabbit would be proud of him.

  "Hell through a Windshield" begins as reminiscence and ends as nightmare—more specifically, as a miniature development of the ideas Lansdale expanded in the Drive-in trilogy. The present tale is a dark vignette, whereas the novels explode into Technicolor. The piece gives us a glimpse of the author's working process, not least in presenting the actual material his soaring flights of fancy were based upon. It's a peculiarly Texan celebration of the American phenomenon that state embraced, the open-air cinema. Examples of that institution can be found in Europe, but I suspect a true Texan would find them stifled by politeness.

  "Down by the Sea near the Great Big Rock" revives the poetic gentleness that "Fish Night" conveys, but dread overtakes the narrative soon enough. In five pages Lansdale lets us glimpse an evil influence all the more alien because its effects may not necessarily be conscious, a concept of the Other even Lovecraft didn't depict. "Trains Not Taken" frames a failing marriage with a vignette of an alternate history of the American west, to come to a conclusion poignant with hope. It's a tale to remind us how our lives have been composed of possibilities—indeed, still are if we have the nerve to risk them.

  "Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back" is as tortured a tale as you'll find in this book. It begins as a Freudian nuclear nightmare that outdoes even Kubrick's Dr Strangelove in those terms, before mutating into a monstrous vision of inhuman life. All this is only a preamble to a hallucinatory conclusion, a metaphor that expresses the desperate theme. Don't overlook the inspired title either—Lansdale has a flair for them.

  "The Windstorm Passes" speaks in a youthful voice that's anything but naive. I'd suggest Mark Twain as an influence, though subsumed into the author's distinctive style, just as Twain is into Stephen King's. In Lansdale's case it's the freshness and vividness of imagery that brings the story as alive as your own breath. Be aware that it reappears as a section of his truly magical novel The Magic Wagon, and if you don't go on to read that, you'll be missing a treat.

  "A story that doesn't flinch"! Some readers may do so in anticipation, given several of the preceding tales. In fact, "Night They Missed the Horror Show" begins with several pages of Lansdale's best outrageous humour. Be warned, however: it gives way to grimness before we're even nearly at the end. One definition of horror is surely that terrible fates befall the undeserving. Admittedly the pivotal deed our heroes perform is only slightly good, but it leads to far worse than they warrant, and ghastly ironies abound.

  Last and very far from least, "On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks" was written for an anthology of tales set in the world of George Romero's zombie films. I'll own up to having been invited to contribute at the time but not feeling qualified to do so; I felt Romero had said all that was to be said on his theme. Joe Lansdale is one of the writers who proved me wrong. Indeed, his story deals with issues Romero would later explore—the human monstrousness exposed by the omnipresence of the living dead, the cost of trying to exist in such a world, the ghastly ingenuity it may entail. The context lets a pair of typical Lansdale characters reveal the worst about themselves, but there are glimpses of optimism too, insofar as the world of the narrative has room. The story is a mutated Western as well, and like much of his work, has space for breathless action. If Budd Boetticher had ever made a zombie Western, it might have been something like this, even if the violence is post-Peckinpah. Imagine Randolph Scott and Richard Boone beset by each other and the walking dead.

  Enough of my timid attempt to match Joe's inventiveness and daring! The splatterpunk writers were a short-lived movem
ent, now largely forgotten, but such of his work that belongs in that category has retained its power to shock on the deepest level. By Bizarre Hands contains many things I wouldn't dare to write, but I'm more than glad he did. It's a powerful start to a vigorously varied body of work that could be nobody else's but his.

  Ramsey Campbell

  Wallasey, Merseyside

  21 November 2015

  www.doverpublications.com