by Steve Vernon
A
HAT
FULL
OF
STORIES
by
Steve Vernon
Stark Raven Press
What Readers Have To Say About Steve Vernon
If Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch had a three-way sex romp in a hot tub, and then a team of scientists came in and filtered out the water and mixed the leftover DNA into a test tube, the resulting genetic experiment would most likely grow up into Steve Vernon.” – Bookgasm
“Steve Vernon is something of an anomaly in the world of horror literature. He’s one of the freshest new voices in the genre although his career has spanned twenty years. Writing with a rare swagger and confidence, Steve Vernon can lead his readers through an entire gamut of emotions from outright fear and repulsion to pity and laughter.” - Cemetery Dance
“Armed with a bizarre sense of humor, a huge amount of originality, a flair for taking risks and a strong grasp of characterization - Steve’s got the chops for sure.” - Dark Discoveries
“Steve Vernon is a hard writer to pin down. And that’s a good thing.” – Dark Scribe Magazine
“This genre needs new blood and Steve Vernon is quite a transfusion.” –Edward Lee, author of FLESH GOTHIC and CITY INFERNAL
“Steve Vernon is one of the finest new talents of horror and dark fiction” - Owl Goingback, author of CROTA
“Steve Vernon was born to write. He’s the real deal and we’re lucky to have him.” - Richard Chizmar
Introduction
I was born in Northern Ontario and I migrated to Nova Scotia at the age of seventeen, but for some reason a chunk of my heart and imagination has always hunkered down in Texas. Maybe I just saw too many John Wayne movies. Maybe I read Lonesome Dove one too many times. I’m not sure just how I got into this obsession with all things dusty and gun-smoked, but I have been playing at cowboy since I was knee-high to a burro. I’ve been known to wear a Stetson and an oilskin duster.
I like the flavour.
I like the way that folks in westerns can talk around a subject the whole day long without ever coming close to a point. I like the way that arguments are settled at high noon in the centre of Main Street – and odds are that’s the only street in town.
We deal in lead, friend.
And yet, I constantly find myself in love with the booga-booga. So here I am, married to horror and fooling around with dusters. I tried this trick once before with a novella, now out-of-print, entitled Long Horn, Big Shaggy – A Tale of Wild West Terror and Reanimated Buffalo. Long on imagination and short on ambition, I reckon.
That went fairly well for a dirty little POD product. Perhaps someday I’ll revisit that novella, rewrite it a bit, and put it into an actual print-run collection, somewhere up the road.
But we were talking about westerns.
The western, as we know it, is built on the bedrock of fantasy and tall tales. Roy Rogers would have had his ass handed to him in a hat – had he ever dared step into an honest-to-god saloon fight in the old west – which was usually nothing more than a tent pitched up around a whiskey barrel. When the whiskey was gone, the saloon was closed.
So I’m going to keep this introduction fairly short, before the whiskey runs dry.
I’m offering up three short stories that combine my love of Texas – a state that I haven’t ever been to – with my love of horror.
The first story is a kind of Bradbury meets Zane Gray fantasy - a revision of a tale that appeared in my short-lived collection of fiction – Nightmare Dreams. This collection was printed by a lowdown dirty skunk of a POD publisher who left me wishing I’d never heard those three dreaded initials. It’s a tale that came to me back when I was loading and unloading semi trailers. I call it “North of Bigfoot, Bound for Memphis”.
The second story appeared originally in the seventh issue of HORROR GARAGE, along side the likes of Norman Partridge, Harry Shannon, Jack Fisher and Joe Konrath. I call this story “Jumping Chollo Will Not Die”, and it lets me take my raconteur out for a spin.
They’ll arrest for you that anywhere else but in Texas.
The third story, “Two Good Hands and a Holdout” is a no-holds barred tall tale that has never appeared anywhere else before. Which probably means it stinks, but there you go. You’re stuck with it because I’ve tacked it onto the end of this manuscript.
Now saddle up and let’s vamoose.
North of Bigfoot, Bound for Memphis
There I was, just a spit and a handshake north of Bigfoot, about a hundred miles beyond Corpus Christi and bound for Memphis, marooned on the humpbacked shoulder of a hayfield dirt road where a drunken plow hand on a flamingo pink John Deere tractor had booted me off after I confessed that I never cared much for the singing of Willy Nelson.
A squadron of crows flapped out of the hay in sudden panic. I heard a distant growling thunder and a caravan of dust rolled up on the horizon.
Something was coming.
So I stuck out my thumb.
“Well Judas,” I swore.
I had expected to see anything but that big night-black cab-over Kenworth eighteen wheeler coming towards me. It was only a little more unbelievable than finding a great white shark wallowing in a mule’s water trough.
That big rig just didn’t belong out here.
When the Kenny geared down and pulled over I had a half a second’s worth of second thoughts. That truck was so big and so dark looking, like you could put your hand into the paint job and pull back a stump.
I turned a page in the scrapbook of memory and listened to an echo of my dead mother warning me about getting into cars with strangers haunted on back.
Then the black semi stopped and I climbed on in.
It was a hot day and my feet were sore from standing.
The driver was a big fellow, even sitting down. A red face, glowing like a freshly stoked coal stove. A red beard, tight and curly as a fist full of copper wool.
“Where are you heading?” he asked.
“Memphis,” I said.
“Tennessee, Texas or Egypt?”
“Texas.”
“Long way from here.”
“Not as far as Egypt,” I allowed.
I got a funny half fish hook of a grin out of that.
“Do you got yourself a name?” he asked me.
“Everybody does,” I said, letting the question lie right where he dropped it.
The big man laughed at that, a long steady huh-huh-huh, like the sound that empty boxcars make while rolling over a rusty switch. The sound got to aggravate and after a while I wished he’d just shut the hell up.
Then the laughter tickered down into silence and I started in on regretting my last wish.
Sometimes feelings are as changeable as the wind.
You know that part in the movie where somebody says its quiet and somebody else says it is too quiet?
We were both miles past that.
The only thing to look at besides the road was a big old pocket watch swinging from the sun visor like a slice of gallow-meat. The watch wasn’t ticking. I don’t know if it was broken, or if it just hadn’t been wound.
I caught a glimpse of the Texas sky reflected in the truck’s rear mirror, and it was just as lonesome and blue as my wife Amy’s eyes weeping me good bye back in Corpus Christi, right after she’d found out about Misty Abilene.
*
Misty Abilene was the prettiest one hundred eighteen pounds God ever poured into a sun
faded pair of Levi low rise leg hugging jeans. I met her in a Corpus Christi pool hall, name of The Lucky Scratch.
She was trouble on a hook and I bit.
I bit hard.
You might have heard tell about that fellow tempted by a pitiless siren; lured beyond all hope of salvation; lead to a by-the-hour hotel bed; belt unbuckled and forced into making wild hot crazy all night love?
That was some other guy.
I wanted just exactly what I wound up with – belt buckle and all.
I stepped right in and took it.
I looked down at the gold ring on my left hand, dinged in one side from where I’d caught it on a gear at the nail factory. I thought about Amy, waiting at home with the boy; waiting to share a couple of cups of cold coffee and a tired kiss goodnight. I stuck the finger in my mouth, worked up a good cheek and a half full of spit and wiggled the ring off my finger with my teeth.
That was two whole weeks ago.
Right about now I wish somebody had snuck up behind me and dropped a pool table on my head, before I got any further than that.
I should have known better. I would have, if I hadn’t been drinking. Or maybe that’s just an excuse.
There was nothing I could have done, was there?
Shoulda, woulda, coulda - the three stooges of destiny and the devil got the last n’yuck.
*
“Hang on for a moment,” the trucker said.
I opened my eyes as the big rig eased on over to the side of the street in some no-name town whose one horse had probably been sold off to a bankrupt glue factory some half dozen centuries ago. Three street lights marked the road ahead of us, and two of them were burnt out. I must have slept pretty soundly to doze through the fish hooking manoeuvres the trucker had to have put the big rig through, rolling into a snug-hole like this.
The driver got out.
Was it a delivery?
Maybe he just had to step out and take a leak.
It was possible, but it seemed strange, working the big rig into this tiny town just to make a quiet pint of dirty lemonade.
Then I saw her standing on the sidewalk, just a couple of steps from an unpainted door. She was a tiny gray haired Mexican doll. I could tell that once she’d been as beautiful as Misty Abilene. Even now in the lamp light I saw her all dusky and rose hued.
The trucker walked up to her.
I thought I had things figured out.
He spoke in a Mexican dialect, so fluid and graceful it sounded like a slow country waltz molassesing out of the big man’s mouth. I didn’t savvy half what they said, yet I kind of knew what they were talking about. I felt the shape of the words, more than anything else. Slow round words like moon and dream and wind and above it all the silence of the stopped pocket watch that echoed like the sound a stone makes long after you dropped it down a bottomless wishing well.
He lead her out back to the trailer, and I heard the big trailer doors swing wide open, banging on the ass-end of the trailer like the crack of judgement day. I wondered if maybe he had a truckload of queen sized mattresses back there for the use of this beautiful old Mexican senora, but he was only gone for a couple of minutes, just long enough for me to wonder if maybe he wasn’t kidnapping her.
Then he lead her back out from the darkness.
She had a smile on her face like he had just given her about a thousand years of hope.
“Gracias,” she said. “Muchos gracias. Muchissimo gracias.”
Then she leaned over and kissed his left cheek, like a dove pecking at a bit of spilled grain. She whispered something too soft for me to make out. The pocket watch clicked loudly, like a camera shutter. I saw the second hand click backwards one distinct notch, and then the watch was still again.
“Well Judas,” I swore.
Then the trucker was up beside me, swinging his big door shut like he had to be somewhere else yesterday, and we headed out of there fast.
I looked back once and I saw a figure framed in the big rig’s tail light glow, only to my eyes it looked like the old woman was gone, and in her place stood a young senorita so beautiful she looked to me like a sigh torn from the gullet of an angel. In her arms she cradled the form of a tiny baby wrapped in a homespun blanket.
I had to ask.
“What the hell was that about?”
“Just a little life,” the trucker said. “A woman, and a son she’d wished she’d had.”
“And did you give it to her?”
He grinned like the promise of a fresh open highway.
“Sort of,” he said.
And that’s all he would say.
He revved it up and geared it down and we headed on up that distant road.
*
I knew what babies looked like.
Amy and me had the boy in our second year of marriage. We hadn’t really planned to, hadn’t really not planned. He just sort of happened along, and we loved him as best we could.
We called him Jimmy, after my dad’s favourite truck.
Jimmy grew like a running weed, all forward and no reverse. It kind of aggravated me, nights when I was trying to read the paper. It kind of amused me, the way he reminded me so much of myself when I was his age, all go and no stop, and I laughed out loud every time I thought about how badly my own father had wanted to murder me, when he wasn’t busy loving me.
It was a good life.
It was quiet, like a sleep under a tree. Maybe sometimes I wished I hadn’t been so quick to say I do.
Maybe sometimes I wished that I hadn’t locked myself onto this particular road, but most of the time I just couldn’t complain.
Or maybe I just wouldn’t complain.
The quietness of our existence was a terrible lie. Our marriage slowly wound down into just another dead end job I hated but couldn’t bring myself to leave. Our conversations became forces of habit. She would ask a question, and I would answer and expand upon it and ask a question of my own. Nothing that was said really mattered. Nothing but habit and a bit of old glue held the whole damn together.
Then I met Misty Abilene.
Which was when the whole damn thing fell apart.
*
The road seemed to blur, like we were driving somewhere outside of the way. I don’t remember exactly how or when it happened, but somewhere along the way we came to another stop.
We pulled up in the desert, looked to be New Mexico, although I couldn’t rightly remember leaving Texas.
The truck pulled over, next to an old man sitting by a wooden dock in the middle of a desert, fishing over an arroyo that looked to have dried out sometime around the time Christ was whittling toothpicks for his daddy.
A big moonlike caul hung over the old man’s left eye like a penance mark. He saw me staring at the mark and winked himself blind. Then the driver took the old man back behind the truck and the scene from the alley repeated itself, like a beer commercial in a hockey game. When it was over the old man hugged the trucker like a lost brother, kissed him hard on his cheek, and then gravelled out a phrase that was lost in the moonlight.
Then he returned to his dry land fishing.
Just as soon as he picked up the rod it bent double, like he’d caught himself the mother of whales, and the last I saw of him he was reeling in something the size of a deep river salmon. I couldn’t see much where it had come from.
The pocket watch clicked back a single notch.
The truck driver glanced at me once and grinned a big coyote grin.
It started to rain, the kind of frog drowning rain that made a man think of building arks and gathering animals.
We moved on.
*
It was raining something like this the night I first met Misty Abilene at The Lucky Scratch.
The thing that I remember most about that bar was the big neon sign showing a clean break, then it was gone, then it was back again, then it disappeared one ball at a time, then it was back again. Over and over and over, like the goddamn thing would be blinking
come the crack of Judgement Day.
I’d tell you about Misty, but there isn’t a hell of a lot that hasn’t been told before. I got stupid, and let my dick do my thinking for me. Least that’s my excuse. Misty and I ended up in a hotel room. The whole thing was about as memorable as one really good fireworks blast, in a year full of Fourth of Julys.
Three days later Amy found out and handed me my suitcase. I left the suitcase in the back of a piss yellow Mustang, and kept on walking and hitching with whoever would take me, until I came to the field where the big black Kenworth picked me up.
*
We were on that road again, that road that seemed not to be a road. The night was whipping past me like the ring on a merry ground. I saw nothing but a blur, going by really fast.
Then I heard that familiar hiss of the air brakes, and the truck pulled over one more time.
There was a boy, waiting on a large rock in a field that kind of reminded me of the pictures I’d seen of Oklahoma. He was holding a stick in his hand with the fervour of a saint hanging onto his last crucifix. The boy looked a little like Jimmy. When I saw the trucker inviting him back into the shadows, I had to go see what was happening.
I’m ashamed to say that part of me imagined the worst. Part of me got to thinking about all those times my mother had warned about messing with strangers.
No way, I thought. Whatever was happening back in that trailer was going to stop now.
I ran back, just in time to hear the boy say how he wished old Duke had never ran out in front of that danged hay truck.
Then there was a soft sort of hush sound, like my ears had popped.
Then the boy came out, grinning like he’d just been handed golden keys to the cotton candy dream factory. He looked up to the big trucker, and then threw his arms around him and kissed the big man squarely on the end of his red curly beard, which was about as high as the boy could reach.
I heard what the boy said, just as clear as the ringing of a summer bell.
“I forgive you.”
And then the boy ran off into the night, like the way young boys ought to run, all forward and no reverse, and somewhere out there in the darkness I heard the sound of a baying blue tick hound anxious for a stick to be thrown, and I knew without looking that the pocket watch on the sun visor had clicked back one more notch.