High Cotton: Selected Stories of Joe R. Lansdale

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Moon Face froze, glanced in the direction the knife had taken. He seemed empty and confused without it.

  Ellen swung the pan again. Moon Face caught her wrist and jerked her around and she lost the pan and was sent hurtling toward the bed, where she collapsed on the mattress. The bed slid down and smashed through the thin wall of sticks and a foot of the bed stuck out into blackness and the great drop below. The bed tottered slightly, and Ellen rolled off of it, directly into the legs of Moon Face. As his knees bent, and he reached for her, she rolled backwards and went under the bed and her hand came to rest on the knife. She grabbed it, rolled back toward Moon Face’s feet, reached out quickly and brought the knife down on one of his shoes and drove it in as hard as she could.

  A bellow from Moon Face. His foot leaped back and it took the knife with it. Moon Face screamed, “Sissie! You’re hurting me!”

  Moon Face reached down and pulled the knife out, and Ellen saw his foot come forward, and then he was grabbing the bed and effortlessly jerking it off of her and back, smashing it into the crib, causing the child to topple out of it and roll across the floor, the rattle clattering behind it. He grabbed Ellen by the back of her dress and jerked her up and spun her around to face him, clutched her throat in one hand and held the knife close to her face with the other, as if for inspection; the blade caught the moonlight and winked.

  Beyond the knife, she saw his face, pathetic and pained and white. His breath, sharp as the knife, practically wilted her. His neck wound whistled softly. The remnants of his nose dangled wet and red against his upper lip and cheek and his teeth grinned a moon-lit, metal good-bye.

  It was all over, and she knew it, but then Bruce’s words came back to her in a rush. When it looks as if you’re defeated, and there’s nothing left, try anything.

  She twisted and jabbed at his eyes with her fingers and caught him solid enough that he thrust her away and stumbled backwards. But only for an instant. He bolted forward, and Ellen stooped and grabbed the dead child by the ankle and struck Moon Face with it as if it were a club. Once in the face, once in the mid-section. The rotting child burst into a spray of desiccated flesh and innards and she hurled the leg at Moon Face and then she was circling around the roll-away bed, trying to make the door. Moon Face, at the other end of the bed, saw this, and when she moved for the door, he lunged in that direction, causing her to jump back to the end of the bed. Smiling, he returned to his end, waited for her next attempt.

  She lurched for the door again, and Moon Face jerked back too, but this time Ellen bent and grabbed the end of the bed and hurled herself against it. The bed hit Moon Face in the knees, and as he fell, the bed rolled over him and he let go of the knife and tried to put out his hands to stop the bed’s momentum. The impetus of the roll-away carried him across the short length of the dirt floor and his head hit the far wall and the sticks cracked and hurtled out into blackness, and Moon Face followed and the bed followed him, then caught on the edge of the drop and the wheels buried up in the dirt and hung there.

  Ellen had shoved so hard she fell face down, and when she looked up, she saw the bed was dangling, shaking, the mattress slipping loose, about to glide off into nothingness.

  Moon Face’s hands flicked into sight, clawing at the sides of the bed’s frame. Ellen gasped. He was going to make it up. The bed’s wheels were going to hold.

  She pulled a knee under her, cocking herself, then sprang forward, thrusting both palms savagely against the bed. The wheels popped free and the roll-away shot out into the dark emptiness.

  Ellen scooted forward on her knees and looked over the edge. There was blackness, a glimpse of the mattress falling free, and a pale object, like a white-washed planet with a great vein of silver in it, jetting through the cold expanse of space. Then the mattress and the face were gone and there was just the darkness and a distant sound like a water balloon exploding.

  Ellen sat back and took a breather. When she felt strong again and felt certain her heart wouldn’t tear through her chest, she stood up and looked around the room. She thought a long time about what she saw.

  She found her purse and panties, went out of the hut and up the trail, and after a few wrong turns, she found the proper trail that wound its way up the mountainside to where her car was parked. When she climbed over the railing, she was exhausted.

  Everything was as it was. She wondered if anyone had seen the cars, if anyone had stopped, then decided it didn’t matter. There was no one here now, and that’s what was important.

  She took the keys from her purse and tried the engine. It turned over. That was a relief.

  She killed the engine, got out and went around and opened the trunk of the Chevy and looked down at Bruce’s body. His face looked like one big bruise, his lips were as large as sausages. It made her happy to look at him.

  A new energy came to her. She got him under the arms and pulled him out and managed him over to the rail and grabbed his legs and flipped him over the railing and onto the trail. She got one of his hands and started pulling him down the path, letting the momentum help her. She felt good. She felt strong. First Bruce had tried to dominate her, had threatened her, had thought she was weak because she was a woman, and one night, after slapping her, after raping her, while he slept a drunken sleep, she had pulled the blankets up tight around him and looped rope over and under the bed and used the knots he had taught her, and secured him.

  Then she took a stick of stove wood and had beat him until she was so weak she fell to her knees. She hadn’t meant to kill him, just punish him for slapping her around, but when she got started she couldn’t stop until she was too worn out to go on, and when she was finished, she discovered he was dead.

  That didn’t disturb her much. The thing then was to get rid of the body somewhere, drive on back to the city and say he had abandoned her and not come back. It was weak, but all she had. Until now.

  After several stops for breath, a chance to lie on her back and look up at the stars, Ellen managed Bruce to the hut and got her arms under his and got him seated in one of the empty chairs. She straightened things up as best as she could. She put the larger pieces of the baby back in the crib. She picked Moon Face’s knife up off the floor and looked at it and looked at Bruce, his eyes wide open, the moonlight from the roof striking them, showing them to be dull as scratched glass.

  Bending over his face, she went to work on his eyes. When she finished with them, she pushed his head forward and used the blade like a drill. She worked until the holes satisfied her. Now if the police found the Buick up there and came down the trail to investigate, and found the trail leading here, saw what was in the shack, Bruce would fit in with the rest of Moon Face’s victims. The police would probably conclude Moon Face, sleeping here with his “family,” had put his bed too close to the cliff and it had broken through the thin wall and he had tumbled to his death.

  She liked it.

  She held Bruce’s chin, lifted it, examined her work.

  “You can be Uncle Brucey,” she said, and gave Bruce a pat on the shoulder. “Thanks for all your advice and help, Uncle Brucey. It’s what got me through.” She gave him another pat.

  She found a shirt—possibly Moon Face’s, possibly a victim’s—on the opposite side of the shack, next to a little box of Harlequin Romances, and she used it to wipe the knife, pan, all she had touched, clean of her prints, then she went out of there, back up to her car.

  My Dead Dog, Bobby

  This little short-short is one of my more popular stories. In one way it’s amusing, but like most stories of this sort, its roots are not amusing. When you think about what it’s really about, it’s pretty damn depressing. But there’s humor in horror. Robert Bloch, one of the greatest writers the field has ever known, proved that time after time. He was a great influence on me. I consider this a kind of Robert Bloch story. Or maybe Fred Brown, another of my favorites.

  Voice-wise, however, it’s all me.

  It first appeared in a smal
l magazine, was then photocopied by readers to share with friends, told aloud, and talked about for some years before it was reprinted again. It was even read on Welsh radio.

  It was inspired by eating too much popcorn, which always gives me bad dreams. There was a time in my career when popcorn and its influences were of great importance to me. I’d eat it before bed and it would give me a stomachache and bad dreams. Next morning those dreams would become a story or stories. My record of sales for stories based on gorging popcorn was remarkable. These days, the types of stories write are not popcorn inspired; in fact, I don’t eat a fraction of what I used to eat. My stomach can’t take it. I like to think what I do now is just as good, or better. But there certainly was a type of story that seemed to come out of this habit, and I don’t write that sort anymore. Occasionally I miss them and turn my head to the cabinet where the popcorn resides.

  I always end up eating a proper amount however.

  But who knows. Maybe a good gorging is just around the corner.

  MY DEAD DOG, BOBBY, doesn’t do tricks anymore. In fact, to look that sucker in the eye I either have to get down on my knees and put my head to the ground or prop him up with a stick.

  I’ve thought of nailing his head to the shed out back, that way maybe the ants won’t be so bad. But as my Old Man says, “ants can climb.” So, maybe that isn’t such a good idea after all.

  He was such a good dog, though, and I hate to see him rot away. But I’m also tired of carrying him around with me in a sack, lugging him into the freezer morning and night.

  One thing though. Getting killed broke him from chasing cars, which is how he got mashed in the first place. Now, to get him to play with cars, I have to go out to the edge of the Interstate and throw him and his sack at them, and when he gets caught under the tires and bounced up, I have to use my foot to push on one end of him to make the other end fill up with guts again. I get so I really kind of hate to look in the sack at the end of the day, and I have to admit giving him his good night kiss on the lips is not nearly as fun as it used to be.He has a smell and the teeth that have been smashed through his snout are sharp and stick out every which way and sometimes cut my face.

  I’m going to take Bobby down to the lake again tomorrow. If you tie him to a blowed-up inner tube he floats. It’s not a bad way to cool off from a hot day,and it also drowns the ants and maggots and such.

  I know it does. We kept my little brother in pretty good shape for six months that way. It wasn’t until we started nailing him to the shed out back that he got to looking ragged. It wasn’t the ants crawling up there and getting him, it was the damn nails. We ran out of good places to drive them after his ears came off, and we had to use longer and longer nails to put through his head and neck and the like. Pulling the nails out everyday with the hammer claw didn’t do him any good either.

  My Old Man said that if he had it do over, he wouldn’t have hit my brother so hard with that chair. But he said that about my little sister too when he kicked her head in. She didn’t keep long, by the way. We didn’t know as many tricks then as we do now.

  Well, I hope I can get Bobby back in this sack. He’s starting to swell and come apart on me. I’m sort of ready to get him packed away so I can get home and see Mom. I always look at her for a few minutes before I put Bobby in the freezer with her.

  Trains Not Taken

  This is considered atypical of me. Maybe it is. I think the truth is most readers remember the stories you do that they like, and the ones they like most often fit into one niche. Those outside of it they discard from their memory. I think this one actually fits comfortably into a larger niche of my work than some realize. If I’m anything, it’s varied.

  I have always loved science fiction, and it was my original plan to write it. Problem was, I didn’t know much science. I was more of the Bradbury school. Still, there were plenty of science fiction stories that didn’t use real science, and I always presumed this would be where I ended up: a full-time science fiction writer. It wasn’t. I began to write crime and horror, which I also loved. And then other things: Westerns, etc. In fact, when I first started writing, I wrote non-fiction articles. Those took off and I lost interest in being a full-time science fiction writer.

  I still love the genre, and now and then I like to dabble in it, but I have no regrets about how things turned out.

  Anyway, my favorite kinds of science fiction, or science fantasy, or speculative fiction, if you prefer, were alternate universe, time travel, and apocalyptic. This is one of the former.

  I love the Old West and it’s no surprise to me that when I sat down to write an alternate universe story I used the West as the background. I knew what I was talking about for one, and knew I could tweak it in different directions if I so chose to make it interesting, and yet, maintain some resemblance to real history.

  This story first appeared in a literary magazine, and has been reprinted numerous times. Funny thing, I’ve had some believe it’s true history. Where were they during American History class? Smoking a joint in the bathroom?

  On the other end of the spectrum, I had one reader dislike it because the history was wrong.

  Bill Hickok wasn’t a clerk. William Cody wasn’t a diplomat.

  Say they weren’t?

  Lack of imagination amazes me.

  Not even a general idea of the events of American History amazes me.

  I’m not talking dates and figures here, even names. But the broad knowledge that we really weren’t colonized on the West coast by the Japanese and that the Europeans and the Japanese didn’t really war with one another in North America until they joined hands to fight Native Americans.

  That, my friends, is the part that didn’t happen.On the other hand, if you believe in alternate universes, maybe everything here did happen. Somewhere.

  DAPPLED SUNLIGHT DANCED on the eastern side of the train. The boughs of the great cherry trees reached out along the tracks and almost touched the cars, but not quite; they had purposely been trimmed to fall short of that.

  James Butler Hickok wondered how far the rows of cherry trees went. He leaned against the window of the Pullman car and tried to look down the track. The speed of the train, the shadows of the trees and the illness of his eyesight did not make the attempt very successful. But the dark line that filled his vision went on and on and on.

  Leaning back, he felt more than just a bit awed. He was actually seeing the famous Japanese cherry trees of the Western Plains; one of the Great Cherry Roads that stretched along the tracks from mid-continent to the Black Hills of the Dakotas.

  Turning, he glanced at his wife. She was sleeping, her attractive, sharp-boned face marred by the pout of her mouth and the tight lines around her eyes. That look was a perpetual item she had cultivated in the last few years, and it stayed in place both awake or asleep. Once her face held nothing but laughter, vision and hope, but now it hurt him to look at her.

  For a while he turned his attention back to the trees, allowing the rhythmic beat of the tracks, the overhead hiss of the fire line and the shadows of the limbs to pleasantly massage his mind into white oblivion.

  After a while, he opened his eyes, noted that his wife had left her seat. Gone back to the sleeping car, most likely. He did not hasten to join her. He took out his pocket watch and looked at it. He had been asleep just under an hour. Both he and Mary Jane had had their breakfast early, and had decided to sit in the parlor car and watch the people pass. But they had proved disinterested in their fellow passengers and in each other, and had both fallen asleep.

  Well, he did not blame her for going back to bed, though she spent a lot of time there these days. He was, and had been all morning, sorry company.

  A big man with blonde goatee and mustache came down the aisle, spotted the empty seat next to Hickok and sat down. He produced a pipe and a leather pouch of tobacco, held it hopefully. “Could I trouble you for a light, sir?”

  Hickok found a lucifer and lit the pipe while the m
an puffed. “Thank you,” the man said. “Name’s Cody. Bill Cody.”

  “Jim Hickok.”

  They shook hands.

  “Your first trip to the Dakotas?” Cody asked.

  Hickok nodded.

  “Beautiful country, Jim, beautiful. The Japanese may have been a pain in the neck in their time, but they sure know how to make a garden spot of the world. White men couldn’t have grown sagebrush or tree moss in the places they’ve beautified.”

  “Quite true,” Hickok said. He got out the makings and rolled himself a smoke. He did this slowly, with precision, as if the anticipation and preparation were greater than the final event. When he had rolled the cigarette to his satisfaction, he put a lucifer to it and glanced out the window. A small, attractive stone shrine, nestled among the cherry trees, whizzed past his vision.

  Glancing back at Cody, Hickok said, “I take it this is not your first trip?”

  “Oh no, no. I’m in politics. Something of an ambassador, guess you’d say. Necessary that I make a lot of trips this way. Cementing relationships with the Japanese, you know. To pat myself on the back a bit, friend, I’m responsible for the Cherry Road being expanded into the area of the U.S. Sort of a diplomatic gesture I arranged with the Japanese.”

  “Do you believe there will be more war?”

  “Uncertain. But with the Sioux and the Cheyenne forming up again, I figure the yellows and the whites are going to be pretty busy with the reds. Especially after last week.”

  “Last week?”

  “You haven’t heard?”

  Hickok shook his head.

  “The Sioux and some Cheyenne under Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull wiped out General Custer and the Japanese General Miyamoto Yoshii.”