High Cotton: Selected Stories of Joe R. Lansdale

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Godzilla rises late the next morning, hung over. He remembers the dream. He calls into work sick. Sleeps off most of the day. That evening, he reads about himself in the papers. He really did some damage. Smoked a large part of the city. There’s a very clear picture of him biting the head off of a woman.

  He gets a call from the plant manager that night. The manager’s seen the paper. He tells Godzilla he’s fired.

  Nine: Enticement

  Next day some humans show up. They’re wearing black suits and white shirts and polished shoes and they’ve got badges. They’ve got guns, too. One of them says, “You’re a problem. Our government wants to send you back to Japan.”

  “They hate me there,” says Godzilla. “I burned Tokyo down.”

  “You haven’t done so good here either. Lucky that was a colored section of town you burned, or we’d be on your ass. As it is, we’ve got a job proposition for you.”

  “What?” Godzilla asks.

  “You scratch our back, we’ll scratch yours.” Then the men tell him what they have in mind.

  Ten: Choosing

  Godzilla sleeps badly that night. He gets up and plays the monster mash on his little record player. He dances around the room as if he’s enjoying himself, but knows he’s not. He goes over to the BIG MONSTER RECREATION CENTER. He sees Kong there, On a stool, undressing one of his Barbies, fingering the smooth spot between her legs. He sees that Kong has drawn a crack there, like a vagina. It appears to have been drawn with a blue ink pen. He’s feathered the central line with ink-drawn pubic hair. Godzilla thinks he should have got someone to do the work for him. It doesn’t look all that natural.

  God, he doesn’t want to end up like Kong. Completely spaced. Then again, maybe if he had some dolls he could melt, maybe that would serve to relax him.

  No. After the real thing, what was a Barbie? Some kind of form of Near Beer. That’s what the debris out back was. Near Beer. The foundry. The Twelve Step Program. All of it. Near Beer.

  Eleven: Working for the Government

  Godzilla calls the government assholes. “All right,” he says. “I’ll do it.”

  “Good,” says the government man. “We thought you would. Check your mail box. The map and instructions are there.”

  Godzilla goes outside and looks in his box. There’s a manila envelope there. Inside are instructions. They say: “Burn all the spots you see on the map. You finish those, we’ll find others. No penalties. Just make sure no one escapes. Any rioting starts, you finish them. To the last man, woman and child.”

  Godzilla unfolds the map. On it are red marks. Above the red marks are listings: Nigger Town. Chink Village. White Trash Enclave. A Clutch of Queers. Mostly Democrats.

  Godzilla thinks about what he can do now. Unbidden. He can burn without guilt. He can stomp without guilt. Not only that, they’ll send him a check. He has been hired by his adopted country to clean out the bad spots as they see them.

  Twelve: The Final Step

  Godzilla stops near the first place on the list: Nigger Town. He sees kids playing in the streets. Dogs. Humans looking up at him, wondering what the hell he’s doing here.

  Godzilla suddenly feels something move inside him. He knows he’s being used. He turns around and walks away. He heads toward the government section of town. He starts with the governor’s mansion. He goes wild. Artillery is brought out, but it’s no use, he’s rampaging. Like the old days.

  Reptilicus shows up with a megaphone, tries to talk Godzilla down from the top of the Great Monument Building, but Godzilla doesn’t listen. He’s burning the top of the building off with his breath, moving down, burning some more, moving down, burning some more, all the way to the ground.

  Kong shows up and cheers him on. Kong drops his walker and crawls along the road on his belly and reaches a building and pulls himself up and starts climbing. Bullets spark all around the big ape.

  Godzilla watches as Kong reaches the summit of the building and clings by one hand and waves the other, which contains a Barbie doll.

  Kong puts the Barbie doll between his teeth. He reaches in his coat and brings out a naked Ken doll. Godzilla can see that Kong has made Ken some kind of penis out of silly putty or something. The penis is as big as Ken’s leg.

  Kong is yelling, “Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. I’m AC/DC, you sonsofabitches.”

  Jets appear and swoop down on Kong. The big ape catches a load of rocket right in the teeth. Barbie, teeth and brains decorate the greying sky. Kong falls.

  Gorgo comes out of the crowd and bends over the ape, takes him in her arms and cries. Kong’s hand slowly opens, revealing Ken, his penis broken off.

  The flying turtle shows up and starts trying to steal Godzilla’s thunder, but Godzilla isn’t having it. He tears the top off the building Kong had mounted and beats Gamera with it. Even the cops and the army cheer over this.

  Godzilla beats and beats the turtle, splattering turtle meat all over the place, like an overheated poodle in a microwave. A few quick pedestrians gather up chunks of the turtle meat to take home and cook, cause the rumor is it tastes just like chicken.

  Godzilla takes a triple shot of rockets in the chest, staggers, goes down. Tanks gather around him.

  Godzilla opens his bloody mouth and laughs. He thinks: If I’d have gotten finished here, then I’d have done the black people too. I’d have gotten the yellow people and the white trash and the homosexuals. I’m an equal opportunity destroyer. To hell with the twelve step program. To hell with humanity.

  Then Godzilla dies and makes a mess on the street. Military men tip-toe around the mess and hold their noses.

  Later, Gorgo claims Kong’s body and leaves.

  Reptilicus, being interviewed by television reporters, says, “Zilla was almost there, man. Almost. If he could have completed the program, he’d have been all right. But the pressures of society were too much for him. You can’t blame him for what society made of him.”

  On the way home, Reptilicus thinks about all the excitement. The burning buildings. The gunfire. Just like the old days when he and Zilla and Kong and that goon-ball turtle were young.

  Reptilicus thinks of Kong’s defiance, waving the Ken doll, the Barbie in his teeth. He thinks of Godzilla, laughing as he died.

  Reptilicus finds a lot of old feelings resurfacing. They’re hard to fight. He locates a lonesome spot and a dark house and urinates through an open window, then goes home.

  Drive-in Date

  This is the darkest story I’ve ever written.Thing about it is this: serial killers seem quite normal, and in many ways they are. These two guys are not exactly monsters in appearance or general attitude, but somewhere, in those little wet brain cells something isn’t quite right. Environment? Genetics? Personal choice? All three? I have my feelings on the matter, but I’ve expressed those elsewhere. What I will say is that after writing this story, I felt I had gone about as far as I needed to go with this sort of thing. I had expressed the horror of it, the weirdness of it, about as much as I needed to. And in a horrible way, the whole damn thing is funny. Unless you happen to be a victim of creatures like this, then, it’ll be easy to decide on which side of the coin of horror and humor you will come down. Still, humor is one way we deal with horror. Ask cops, social workers, and firefighters. Ask surviving victims how funny it is, and you might get another take.

  THE LINE INTO THE Starlight Drive-In that night was short. Monday nights were like that. Dave and Merle paid their money at the ticket house and Dave drove the Ford to a spot up near the front where there were only a few cars. He parked in a space with no one directly on either side. On the left the first car was four speakers away, on the right, six speakers.

  Dave said, “I like to be up close so it all looks bigger than life. You don’t mind do you?”

  “You ask me that every time,” Merle said. “You don’t never ask me that when we’re driving in, you ask when we’re parked.”

  “You don’t like it, we can move
.”

  “No. I like it. I’m just saying, you don’t really care if I like it. You just ask.”

  “Politeness isn’t a crime.”

  “No, but you ought to mean it.”

  “I said we can move.”

  “Hell no, stay where you are. I’m just saying when you ask me what I like, you could mean it.”

  “You’re a testy motherfucker tonight. I thought coming to see a monster picture would cheer you up.”

  “You’re the one likes ’em, and that’s why you come. It wasn’t for me, so don’t talk like it was. I don’t believe in monsters, so I can’t enjoy what I’m seeing. I like something that’s real. Cop movie. Things like that.”

  “I tell you, Merle, there’s just no satisfying you, man. You’ll feel better when they cut the lot lights and the movie starts. We can get our date then.”

  “I don’t know that makes me feel better.”

  “You done quit liking pussy?”

  “Watch your mouth. I didn’t say that. You know I like pussy. I like pussy fine.”

  “Whoa. Aren’t we fussy? Way you talk, you’re trying to convince me. Maybe it’s butt holes you like.”

  “Goddamnit, don’t start on the butt holes.”

  Dave laughed and got out a cigarette and lipped it. “I know you did that one ole gal in the butt that night.” Dave reached up and tapped the rear-view mirror. “I seen you in the mirror here.”

  “You didn’t see nothing,” Merle said.

  “I seen you get in her butt hole. I seen that much.”

  “What the hell you doing watching? It ain’t good enough for you by yourself, so you got to watch someone else get theirs?”

  “I don’t mind watching.”

  “Yeah, well, I bet you don’t. You’re like one of those fucking perverts.”

  Dave snickered, popped his lighter and lit his cigarette. The lot lights went out. The big lights at the top of the drive-in screen went black. Dave rolled down the window and pulled the speaker in and fastened it to the door. He slapped at a mosquito on his neck.

  “Won’t be long now,” Dave said.

  “I don’t know I feel up to it tonight.”

  “You don’t like this first feature, the second’s some kind of mystery. It might be like a cop show.”

  “I don’t mean the movies.”

  “The girl?”

  “Yeah. I’m in a funny mood.”

  Dave smoked for a moment. “Merle, this is kind of a touchy subject, but you been having trouble, you know, getting a bone to keep, I’ll tell you, that happens. It’s happened to me. Once.”

  “I’m not having trouble with my dick, okay?”

  “If you are, it’s no disgrace. It’ll happen to a man from time to time.”

  “My tool is all right. It works. No problem.”

  “Then what’s the beef?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a mood. I feel like I’m going through a kind of, I don’t know, mid-life crisis or something.”

  “Mood, huh? Let me tell you, when she’s stretched out on that back seat, you’ll be all right, crisis or no crisis. Hell, get her butt hole if you want it, I don’t care.”

  “Don’t start on me.”

  “Who’s starting? I’m telling you, you want her butt hole, her ear, her goddamn nostril, that’s your business. Me, I’ll stick to the right hole, though.”

  “Think I don’t know a snide remark when you make it?”

  “I hope you do, or I wouldn’t make it. You don’t know I’m making one, what’s the fun in making it?” Dave reached over and slapped Merle playfully on the arm. “Lighten up, boy. Let’s see a movie, get some pussy. Hey, you feel better if I went and got us some corn and stuff…that’d do you better, wouldn’t it?”

  Merle hesitated. “I guess.”

  “Back in a jiffy.”

  Dave got out of the car.

  · · ·

  Fifteen minutes and Dave was back. He had a cardboard box that held two bags of popcorn and some tall drinks. He set the box on top of the car, opened the door then got the box and slid inside. He put the box on the seat between them.

  “How much I owe you?” Merle said.

  “Not a thing. You get it next time…think how much more expensive this would be we had to pay for her to eat too.”

  “A couple or three dollars. So what? That gonna break us?”

  “No, but it’s beer money. You think about it.”

  Merle sat and thought about it.

  The big white drive-in screen was turned whiter by the projector light, then there was a flicker and images moved on the screen:

  Ads for the concession. Coming attractions.

  Dave got his popcorn, started eating. He said, “I’m getting kind of horny thinking about her. You see the legs on that bitch?”

  “Course I seen the legs. You don’t know from legs. A woman’s got legs is all you care, and you might not care about that. Couple of stumps would be all the same to you.”

  “No, I don’t care for any stumps. Got to be feet on one end, pussy on the other. That’s legs enough. But this one, she’s got some good ones. Hell, you’re bound to’ve noticed how good they were.”

  “I noticed. You saying I’m queer or something? I noticed. I noticed she’s got an ankle bracelet on the right leg and she wears about a size ten shoe. Biggest goddamn feet I’ve ever seen on a woman.”

  “Now, it comes out. You wanted to pick the date, not me?”

  “I never did care for a woman with big feet. You got a good-looking woman all over and you get down to them feet and they look like something goes on either side of a water plane…well, it ruins things.”

  “She ain’t ruined. Way she looks, big feet or not, she ain’t ruined. Besides, you don’t fuck the feet…well, maybe you do. Right after the butt hole.”

  “You gonna push one time too much, Dave. One time too much.”

  “I’m just kidding, man. Lighten up. You don’t ever lighten up. Don’t we deserve some fun after working like niggers all day?”

  Merle sighed. “You got to use that nigger stuff? I don’t like it. It makes you sound ignorant. Will, he’s colored and I like him. He’s done me all right. Man like that, he don’t deserve to be called nigger.”

  “He’s all right at the plant, but you go by his house and ask for a loan.”

  “I don’t want to borrow nothing from him. I’m just saying people ought to get their due, no matter what color they are. Nigger is an ugly word.”

  “You like boogie better, Martin Luther? How about coon or shine? I was always kind of fond of burrhead or wooly myself.”

  “There’s just no talking to you, is there?”

  “Hell, you like niggers so much, next date we set up, we’ll make it a nigger. Shit, I’d fuck a nigger. It’s all pink on the inside, ain’t that what you’ve heard?”

  “You’re a bigot is what you are.”

  “If that means I’m not wanting to buddy up to coons, then, yeah, that’s what I am.” Dave thumped his cigarette butt out the window. “You got to learn to lighten up, Merle. You don’t, you’ll die. My uncle, he couldn’t never lighten up. Gave him a spastic colon, all that tension. He swelled up until he couldn’t wear his pants. Had to get some stretch pants, one of those running suits, just so he could have on clothes. He eventually got so bad they had to go in and operate. You can bet he wishes he didn’t do all that worrying now. It didn’t get him a thing but sick. He didn’t get a better life on account of that worry, now did he? Still lives over in that apartment where he’s been living, on account of he got so sick from worry he couldn’t work. They’re about to throw him out of there, and him a grown man and sixty years old. Lost his good job, his wife—which he ought to know is a good thing—and now he’s doing little odd shit here and there to make ends meet. Going down to catch the day work truck with the winos and niggers excuse me. Afro-Americans, Colored Folks, whatever you prefer.

  “Before he got to worrying over nothing, he had him some s
erious savings and was about ready to put some money down on a couple of acres and a good double wide.”

  “I was planning on buying me a double wide, that’d make me worry. Them old trailers ain’t worth a shit. Comes a tornado, or just a good wind, and you can find those fuckers at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico next to the regular trailers. Tornado will take a double wide easy as any of the others.”

  Dave shook his head. “You go from one thing to the other, don’t you? I know what a tornado can do. It can take a house, too. Your house. That don’t matter. I’m not talking about mobile homes here, Merle. I’m talking about living. It’s a thing you better attend to. You’re forty goddamn years old. Your life’s half over…I know that’s a cold thing to say, but there you have it. It’s out of my mouth. I’m forty this next birthday, so I’m not just putting the doom on you. It’s a thing ever man’s got to face. Getting over the hill. Before I die, I’d like to think I did something fun with my life. It’s the little things that count. I want to enjoy things, not worry them away. Hear what I’m saying, Merle?”

  “Hard not to, being in the goddamn car with you.”

  “Look here, way we work, we deserve to lighten up a little. You haul your ashes first. That’ll take some edge off.”

  “Well…”

  “Naw, go on.”

  “All right…but, one thing…”

  “What?”

  “Don’t do me no more butt hole jokes, okay? One friend to another, Dave, no more butt hole jokes.”

  “It bothers you that bad, okay. Deal.”

  Merle climbed over the seat and got on his knees in the floorboard. He took hold of the back seat and pulled. It was rigged with a hinge. It folded down. He got on top of the folded down seat and bent and looked into the exposed trunk. The young woman’s face was turned toward him, half of her cheek was hidden by the spare tire. There was a smudge of grease on her nose.

  “We should have put a blanket back here,” Merle said.

  “Wrapped her in that. I don’t like ’em dirty.”