The Killer's Game

by Joe R. Lansdale

  I didn’t invite him to do that again.

  I cocked my piece of wood and let him get as close as I could allow without fear taking over, then I ducked under the metal runner and he ducked under it after me, poking straight out with the knife.

  I swung at him, and the wood, rotten, possibly termite ridden, came apart close to my hand and went sailing and crumbling across the dump.

  Waldo and I watched the chunk of wood until it hit the dirt by the derrick and exploded into a half-dozen fragments.

  Waldo turned his attention to me again, smiled, and came fast. I jumped backwards and my feet went out from under me and dogs yelped.

  The lover mutts. I had backed over them while they were screwing. I looked up between my knees and saw the dogs turned butt to butt, hung up, and then I looked higher, and there was Waldo and his knife. I rolled and came up and grabbed a wet cardboard box of something and threw it. It struck Waldo in the chest and what was in the box flew out and spun along the wet ground. It was half a mannequin torso.

  “You’re ruining everything,” Waldo said.

  I glanced down and saw one of the mannequin legs Sam had pulled from a box and tossed. I grabbed the leg and cocked it on my shoulder like a baseball bat.

  “Come on, asshole,” I said. “Come on. Let’s see if I can put one over the fence with you.”

  He went nuts then, dove for me. The knife jabbed out, fast and blurry.

  I swatted. My swing hit his arm and his knife hand went wide and opened up and the knife flew into a pile of garbage and out of sight.

  Waldo and I both looked at where it had disappeared.

  We looked at one another. It was my turn to smile.

  He staggered back and I followed, rotating the leg, trying to pick my shot.

  He darted to his right, dipped, came up clutching one of the mannequin’s arms. He held it by the wrist and smiled. He rotated it the way I had the leg.

  We came together, leg and arm swinging. He swung at my head. I blocked with the leg and swung at his knees. He jumped the swing, kicked beautifully while airborne, hit me in the chin and knocked my head back, but I didn’t go down.

  Four of the poodles came out of nowhere, bouncing and barking beside us, and one of them got hold of my pants leg and started tugging. I hit at him. He yelped. Waldo hit me with the arm across the shoulder. I hit him back with the leg and kicked out and shook the poodle free.

  Waldo laughed.

  Another of the poodles got hold of his pants legs.

  Waldo quit laughing. “Not me, you dumb ingrate!”

  Waldo whacked the poodle hard with the arm. It let go, ran off a distance, whirled, took a defiant stance and barked.

  I hit Waldo then. It was a good shot, clean and clear and sweet with the sound of the wind, but he got his shoulder up and blocked the blow and he only lost a bit of shirt sleeve, which popped open like a flower blossoming.

  “Man, I just bought this shirt,” he said.

  I swung high to his head and let my body go completely around with the swing, twisting on the balls of my feet, and as I came back around, I lowered the blow and hit him in the ribs. He bellowed and tripped over something, went down and dropped his mannequin arm. Three poodles leapt on his chest and one grabbed at his ankle. Behind him, the other two were still hung up, tongues dangling happily. They were waiting for the seasons to change. The next ice age. It didn’t matter. They were in no hurry.

  I went after Waldo, closing for the kill. He wiped the poodles off his chest with a sweep of his arm and grabbed the mannequin arm beside him, took it by the thick end and stuck it at me as I was about to lower the boom on him. The tips of the mannequin’s fingers caught me in the family jewels and a moment later a pain went through me that wasn’t quite as bad as being hit by a truck. But it didn’t keep me from whacking him over the head with everything I had. The mannequin leg fragmented in my hands and Waldo screamed and rolled and came up and charged me, his forehead streaked with blood, a poodle dangling from one pants leg by the teeth. The poodle stayed with him as he leaped and grabbed my legs at the knees and drove his head into my abdomen and knocked me back into a heap of smoking garbage. The smoke rose up around us and closed over us like a pod and with it came a stink that brought bile to my throat. I felt heat on my back and something sharp like glass and I yelled and rolled with Waldo and the growling poodle. Out of the corner of my eye, in mid-roll, I saw another of the poodles had caught on fire in the garbage and was running about like a low-flying comet. We tumbled over some more junk, and over again. Next thing I knew, Waldo had rolled away and was up and over me, had hold of six feet of two-by-four with a couple of nails hanging out of the end.

  “Goodnight,” Waldo said.

  The board came around and the tips of the nails caught some light from the garbage fires, made them shine like animal eyes in the dark. The same light made Waldo look like the Devil. Then the side of my neck exploded. The pain and shock were like things that had burrowed inside me to live. They owned me. I lay where I was, unable to move, the board hung up in my neck. Waldo tugged, but the board wouldn’t come free. He put a foot on my chest and worked the board back and forth. The nails in my neck made a noise like someone trying to whistle through gapped teeth. I tried to lift a hand and grab at the board, but I was too weak. My hands fluttered at my sides as if I were petting the ground. My head wobbled back and forth with Waldo’s efforts. I could see him through a blur. His teeth were clenched and spittle was foaming across his lips.

  I found my eyes drifting to the top of the oil derrick, perhaps in search of a heavenly choir. Lightning flashed rose-red and sweat-stain yellow in the distance. My eyes fell back to Waldo. I watched him work. My body started trembling as if electrically charged.

  Eventually Waldo worked the nails out of my neck. He stood back and took a breath. Getting that board loose was hard work. I noted in an absent kind of way that the poodle had finally let go of his ankle and had wandered off. I felt blood gushing out of my neck, maybe as much as the oil well was pumping. I thought sadly of what was going to happen to Jasmine.

  My eyelids were heavy and I could hardly keep them open. A poodle came up and sniffed my face. Waldo finally got his breath. He straddled me and cocked the board and positioned his features for the strike; his face showed plenty of expression now. I wanted to kick up between his legs and hit him in the balls, but I might as well have wanted to be in Las Vegas.

  “You’re dog food,” Waldo said, and just before he swung, my eyes started going out of focus like a movie camera on the fade, but I caught fuzzy movement behind him and there was a silver snake leaping through the air and the snake bit Waldo in the side of the head and he went away from me as if jerked aside by ropes.

  My eyes focused again, slowly, and there was Martha, wobbling, holding the golf club properly, end of the swing position. She might have been posing for a photo. The striking end of the club was framed beautifully against the dark sky. I hadn’t realized just how pretty her mustache was, all beaded up there in the firelight and the occasional bright throb of the storm.

  Martha lowered the club and leaned on it. All of us were pretty tuckered out tonight.

  Martha looked at Waldo who lay face down in the trash, not moving, his hand slowly letting loose of the two-by-four, like a dying octopus relaxing its grip on a sunken ship timber.

  “Fore, motherfucker,” she said, then she slid down the golf club to her knees. Blood ran out from beneath her wool cap. Things went fuzzy for me again. I closed my eyes as a red glow bloomed to my left, where Waldo’s trailer was. It began to rain harder. A poodle licked my bleeding neck.

  When I awoke in the hospital I felt very stiff, and I could feel that my shoulders were slightly burned. No flesh missing back there, though, just a feeling akin to mild sunburn. I weakly raised an arm to the bandage on my neck and put it down again. That nearly wore me out.

  Jasmine and Martha and Sam came in shortly thereafter. Martha was on crutches and minus her wool
cap. Her head was bandaged. Her mustache was clean and well groomed, as if with a toothbrush.

  “How’s the boy?” Sam said.

  “You’d listened, could have been a lot better.” I said.

  “Yeah, well, the boy that cried wolf and all that,” Sam said.

  “Jasmine, baby,” I said, “how are you?”

  “I’m all right. No traumatic scars. Martha got us both out of there.”

  “I had to rest awhile,” Martha said, “but all’s well that ends well. You did nearly bleed to death.”

  “What about you?” I said. “You look pretty good after all that.”

  “Hey,” Martha said, “I’ve got enough fat and muscle on me to take a few meat cleaver blows. He’d have done better to drive a truck over me. When he caught us sneaking around his trailer, he came up behind me and clubbed me in the head with a meat cleaver before I knew he was there, or I’d have kicked his ass into next Tuesday. After he hit me in the head he worked on me some more when I went down. He should have stuck to my head instead of pounding me in the back. That just tired me out for a while.”

  “Daddy, there were all kinds of horrid things in his trailer. Photographs, and… there were some pieces of women.”

  “Pussies,” Martha said. “He’d tanned them. Had one on a belt. I figure he put it on and wore it now and then. One of those pervert types.”

  “What about old Waldo?” I asked.

  “I made a hole-in-one on that sonofabitch,” Martha said, “but looks like he’ll recover. And though the trailer burned down, enough evidence survived to hang him. If we’re lucky they’ll give his ass the hot needle. Right, Sam?”

  “That’s right,” Sam said.

  “Whoa,” I said. “How’d the trailer burn down?”

  “One of the poodles caught on fire in the garbage,” Jasmine said. “Poor thing. It ran back to the trailer and the door was open and it ran inside and jumped up in the bed, burned that end of the trailer up.”

  “Ruined a bunch of Harlequin romances,” Martha said. “Wish the little fuck had traded those in too. Might have made us a few dollars. Thing is, most of the photographs and the leather pussies survived, so we got the little shit by the balls.”

  I looked at Jasmine and smiled.

  She smiled back, reached out and patted my shoulder. “Oh, yeah,” she said, and opened her purse and took out an envelope. “This is for you. From Mama.”

  “Open it,” I said.

  Jasmine opened it and handed it to me. I took it. It was a get well card that had been sent to Connie at some time by one of her friends. She had blatantly marked out her name, and the sender’s name, had written under the canned sentiment printed there, “Get well, SLOWLY.”

  “I’m beginning to think me and your Mom aren’t going to patch things up,” I said.

  “Afraid not,” Jasmine said.

  “Good reason to move then,” Martha said. “I’m getting out of this one-dog town. I’ll level with you. I got a little inheritance I live off of. An uncle left it to me. Said in the will, since I was the ugliest one in the family, I’d need it.”

  “That’s awful,” Jasmine said. “Don’t you believe that.”

  “The hell it’s awful,” Martha said. “I didn’t have that money put back to live on, me and those damn books would be on the street. Ugly has its compensations. I’ve decided to start a bookstore in LaBorde, and I’m gonna open me a private investigations agency with it. Nice combo, huh? Read a little. Snoop a little. And you two, you want, can be my operatives. You full-time, Plebin, and Jasmine, you can work part-time while you go to college. What do you think?”

  “Do we get a discount on paperbacks?” I asked.

  Martha considered that. “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “Air conditioning?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Let me consider it,” I said.

  Suddenly, I couldn’t keep my eyes open.

  Jasmine gently placed her hand on my arm. “Rest now,” she said.

  And I did.

  (For Roman Ranieri)

  The Gentleman’s Hotel

  A little dust devil danced in front of Jebidiah Rain’s horse, twisted up a few leaves in the street, carried them skittering and twisting across the road and through a gap made by a sagging wide door and into an abandoned livery stable. Inside, the tiny windstorm died out suddenly, dropping the leaves it had hoisted to the ground like scales scraped from a fish. Dust from the devil puffed in all directions and joined the dirt on the livery floor.

  Jebidiah rode his horse to the front of the livery, looked inside. The door groaned on the one hinge that held it, moved slightly in the wind, but remained open. The interior of the livery was well lit from sunlight slicing through cracks in the wall like the edges of sharp weapons. Jebidiah saw a blacksmith’s anvil, some bellows, a few old, nasty clumps of hay, a pitchfork and some horse tackle gone green with mold draped over a stall. There were no human footprints in the dirt, but it was littered with all manner of animal prints.

  Jebidiah dismounted, glanced down the street. Except for an overturned stagecoach near a weathered building that bore a sign that read: GENTLEMAN’S HOTEL, the street was as empty as a wolf’s gut in winter. The rest of the buildings looked equally as worn, and one, positioned across the street from the hotel, had burned down, leaving only blackened ruins and a batch of crows that moved about in the wreckage. The only sound was of the wind.

  Jebidiah thought: Welcome to the town of Falling Rock.

  He led his horse inside the livery, looked about. The animal tracks were what you would expect. Possum. Coon. Squirrel. Dog and cat. There were also some large and odd tracks that Jebidiah did not recognize. He studied them for a while, gave up on their recognition. But he knew one thing for sure. They were not human and they were not truly animal tracks. They were something quite different.

  This was the place. Any place where evil lurked was his place. For he was God’s messenger, that old celestial sonofabitch. Jebidiah wished he were free of him, and even thought sometimes that being the Devil’s assistant might be the better deal. But he had once gotten a glance at hell, and it was well short of appealing. The old bad devil was one of God’s own, because God liked Hell as much as heaven. It was God’s game, Heaven and Hell, good and evil. That’s all it was, a game, and Jebidiah despised, and feared God because of it. He had been chosen to be God’s avenger against evil, and he couldn’t give the job back. God didn’t work that way. He was mighty mean-spirited. He created man, then gave him a choice, but within the choice was a whore’s promise. And instead of making it easy for man, as any truly kind spirit might, he allowed evil and sin and Hell and the Devil to exist and blamed it all on man. God’s choice was simple. Do as I say, even if I make it hard on you to do so. It didn’t make sense, but that’s how it was.

  Jebidiah tied his horse in one of the stalls, took the pitchfork and moved the old hay about. He found some good hay in the middle of the stack, forked it out, shook the dust from it and tossed it to his horse. It wasn’t the best there was, but it would do, along with the grain he carried in a bag on his saddle. While the horse ate, Jebidiah put the fork aside, went into the stall and loosened the saddle, slid it off and hung it over the railing. He removed the bridle and reins, briefly interrupting his horse’s feed, slung it over the stall, went out and shut the gate. He didn’t like leaving his horse here in this bleak, unattended stable, but he had come up on another of life’s evils and he had to be about his business. He didn’t know the particulars, but he could sense evil. It was the gift, or the curse, that God had given him for his sins. And this sense, this gift, had come alert the minute he had ridden into the ghost town of Falling Rock. His urge was to ride away. But he couldn’t. He had to do whatever it was that needed to be done. But for the moment, he needed to find water for his horse and himself, grain the horse, then find a safe place to bed down. Or as safe a place as possible.

  Jebidiah walked down the street, a
nd even though it was fall, he felt warm. The air was humid and the wind was hot. He walked until he came to the end of the street, finally walked back toward the Gentleman’s Hotel. He paused for a brief look at the overturned stage coach, then turned and went into the hotel.

  He saw immediately from the look of it that it had been a brothel. There was a bar and there were a series of stalls, not too unlike horse stalls. He had seen that sort of thing once before, in a town near Mexico. Women worked the stalls. Once there might have been curtains around the stalls, which would have come to the women’s waist. But business would have been done there in each of them, the women hiking up their dresses so that cowboys, at two-bits a pop, could clean their pipes and happy up their spirits, be cheered on by their comrades as they rode the whores like bucking horses. Upstairs, in the beds, the finer girls would work, bringing in five Yankee dollars per roll on the sheets.

  Jebidiah slid in behind the bar, saw that on the lower shelf were all manner of whiskey bottles. He chose one, held it up to the light. It was corked and full. He sat it on the bar and found some beer bottles with pry up pressure caps. He took a couple of those as well. Clutching it all in his arms, he climbed the stairs. He kicked a few doors open, found a room with a large bed covered in dust. He placed the bottles on a night table, pulled the top blanket back, shook the dust onto the floor. After replacing the blanket, he went to the window and pushed it up. There wasn’t much air, and it was warm, but it was welcome in comparison to the still humidity of the room.

  Jebidiah had found his camp. He sat on the bed and opened one of the beers and took a cautious sip. It was as flat as North Texas. He took it and the other beer, which he didn’t bother to open, and tossed them out the window, sent them breaking and splattering into the dry, dirt street below. He wasn’t sure what had possessed him to do such a thing, but now it was done and he felt better for having done it.