by Brian Hodge
“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, and 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.
He went back to the nightstand, tugged the cork from the whisky with his teeth. He took a swig. The whiskey was warm both in temperature and spirit, and he could have cleaned his pistols with it, but it did the trick. He felt a comfortable heat in his throat and his stomach, a wave of relaxation soaking into his brain. It wasn’t food, and it wasn’t water, but it beat nothing in his stomach at all. After a moment, and a few more swigs, the whisky warmed him from head to toe, set a bit of a fire in his balls.
He sat on the bed and took several sips before returning the cork to the bottle and going downstairs. He went out into the street again, still looking for some place with water. He glanced at the stagecoach lying on its side, horseless, and noted something he had not noted before. The runner to which the horses would be hooked was dark with blood. Jebidiah examined it. Dried gore was all along the runner. And now he noted there were horse hooves, bits of hair, even a gray horse ear, and what looked like a strip of skin lying in the street. Not to mention a hat and a shotgun. There was a smell too. Not just the smell of dried blood, but a kind of wet stink smell in the air. Jebidiah was sure the source was not from the blood or the horse remains. It was the stink of evil, and the smell of it made him absently push back his long black coat and touch the revolvers in their holsters.
He heard a moan. It was coming from the stagecoach. Jebidiah scampered onto the runner and onto the side of the coach, moved along to the door with its cut-away window, looked down and inside. Lying against the far side of the door that lay on the ground, was a woman. Jebidiah reached through the open gap, grabbed the interior latch, swung the door open and climbed inside. He touched the woman’s throat. She moved a little, groaned again. Jebidiah turned her face and looked at it. She was a handsome woman with a big, dark bruise on her forehead. Her hair was as red as a campfire. She wore a tight fitting green dress, some fancy green shoes. She wore a lot of makeup. He lifted her to a sitting position. She fluttered her eyes open, jumped a little.
Jebidiah tried to give her a smile, but he was no good at it. “It’s okay, lady” he said. “I am here to help.”
“Thanks. But I need you to let me lift my ass. I’m sitting on my umbrella.”
Jebidiah helped her out of the stagecoach, into the hotel and upstairs. He put her on the bed he had shaken the dust from, gave her a snort of the whisky, which she took like a trooper. In fact, she took the bottle from him and took a long, deep swig. She slapped the umbrella, which had a loop for her wrist against the bed.
“Damn, if that don’t cut the dust,” she said.
Jebidiah pulled a chair beside the bed and sat. “What’s your name?” he said.
“Mary,” she said disengaging herself from the umbrella, tossing it onto the end of the bed.
“I’m Jebidiah. What happened? Where are the stage horses?”
“Eat up,” she said. “Them, the driver, and the shotgunner too.”
“Eaten?”
Mary nodded.
“Tell me about it.”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“You might be surprised.”
And then, after another shot of whisky, she told it.
“I’m a working girl, as you may have already noticed. I am late of Austin, Texas and Miss Mattie Jane’s establishment. But Mattie met a man, got married, sold her place, made a deal with the madam here in Falling Rock for my services, as well as the remaining girls. I was the only one that took her up on the deal. The others spread out across Texas like prairie chickens.
“Must say, I thought there would be more to Falling Rock than this. Thought it would be a sizable town. And maybe it was. I figure whatever got the driver and shotgunner, as well as a whisky drummer in the coach with me, got most of the town too. Hadn’t been for my umbrella, I’d be dead. I was surprised at how well I was able to protect myself with it.
“We came into town late last night, me ready to start my job here at the Gentleman’s Hotel, ready to buck pussy, when a strange thing occurred. No sooner had the stage entered the town, then a shadow, heavy as if it had weight, fell across the place, and sort of lay there. You could see the moon, you could see the town, but the shadow flowed between buildings and into the stagecoach. It became hard to breath. It was like trying to suck down flannel instead of air. Then the stage shadow flowed away and the stage rolled on, stopped in front of the hotel. The stage shook real hard and then I heard a noise. A kind of screech, unlike anything I had ever heard. Then I remembered one of my old johns telling about being in an Indi
an fight, and that it had been close and hand to hand, and the horses had been wounded, and there had been a fire in a barn that the Indians set, and the horses inside burned alive. He said the horses screamed. Somehow, I knew that was what I was hearing. Screaming horses. Except there wasn’t any fire to burn them. But something was scaring them, causing them pain.
“The stagecoach shook and tumbled over. I heard the shotgun go off a couple of times, and next thing I knew the driver and the shotgunner were yelling. The whisky drummer stuck his head out of the overturned window, jerked it back again. He turned and looked at me. His face, even in the night, was as white as the hairs on an albino’s ass. He pulled a derringer, then there was a face at the window. I ain’t never seen a face like it. I couldn’t place it. My mind wouldn’t wrap around it.
“The drummer fired his derringer, and the face jerked back, then it filled the window again. An arm, a hairy arm with what looked like hooks on it snapped through the window and caught the drummer in the face, peeled him from his left ear to the side of his lip. I remember seeing his teeth exposed through a gap in his jaw. Then the hairy, hooked hand had him by the throat. The drummer fought, slamming the derringer into the thing’s face, pounding on its hands with the butt of the gun. He was snatched through the window in a spray of blood.
“I didn’t know nothing but to grab up my umbrella. It’s all I had. Then the face was there again, tugging at the door, about to pull it off, I figured, so I jumped forward
and stabbed out with the tip of the umbrella and got the thing in the eye. It let out a horrible howl, moved away. But two more ugly, hairy faces took its place. Yellow eyes glowing, and all those teeth, dripping spit. I’m not brave, but fear drove me to jump at them and stab into them, and I got one of them, and it, he, whatever it was, jumped back and went away.