“This isn’t sporting, Dennis. At least I gave you a fighting chance.”
“I’m not a sport,” Dennis said.
He sprayed Morley’s testicles with the chemical. When he finished he tossed the canister aside, walked over to the door and listened to the Dobermans scuttling on the other side.
“Dennis!”
Dennis took hold of the doorknob.
“Screw you then,” Morley said. “I’m not afraid. I won’t scream. I won’t give you the pleasure.”
“You didn’t even love her,” Dennis said, and opened the door.
The Dobermans went straight for the stench of the spray, straight for Morley’s testicles.
Dennis waked calmly out the back way, closed the glass door. And as he limped down the drive, making for the gate, he began to laugh.
Morley had lied. He did too scream. In fact, he was still screaming.
Night They Missed the Horror Show
I suppose this is my signature story. It wasn’t the first story of mine to get some real attention—that would be “Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back,”—but it was the one that really got the ball rolling faster. I read it at a World Fantasy Convention in Nashville just before the book containing it came out, and when I first started reading, the audience went stone quiet, then someone snickered, letting folks realize it was okay to laugh. Then everyone was laughing. This was okay. But there was a point when I felt everyone should cease to laugh, and when I came to that point, they did. I could feel the audience with me all the way. I knew I had done good. And I must admit, to this day, this is my favorite of all my short stories.
I felt I had turned a big corner when I wrote it. This was made all the better with the experience of the reading, and then it came out in Silver Scream, my pick for the best horror anthology of the eighties, and it got a lot of attention, and is periodically reprinted here or abroad.
That said, it seems the perfect story to close out this collection.
IF THEY’D GONE TO THE DRIVE-IN like they’d planned, none of this would have happened. But Leonard didn’t like drive-ins when he didn’t have a date, and he’d heard about Night Of The Living Dead, and he knew a nigger starred in it. He didn’t want to see no movie with a nigger star.
Niggers chopped cotton, fixed flats, and pimped nigger girls, but he’d never heard of one that killed zombies. And he’d heard too that there was a white girl in the movie that let the nigger touch her, and that peeved him. Any white gal that would let a nigger touch her must be the lowest trash in the world. Probably from Hollywood, New York, or Waco, some godforsaken place like that.
Now Steve McQueen would have been all right for zombie killing and girl handling. He would have been the ticket. But a nigger? No sir.
Boy, that Steve McQueen was one cool head. Way he said stuff in them pictures was so good you couldn’t help but think someone had written it down for him. He could sure think fast on his feet to come up with the things he said, and he had that real cool, mean look.
Leonard wished he could be Steve McQueen, or Paul Newman even. Someone like that always knew what to say, and he figured they got plenty of bush too. Certainly they didn’t get as bored as he did. He was so bored he felt as if he were going to die from it before the night was out. Bored, bored, bored. Just wasn’t nothing exciting about being in the Dairy Queen parking lot, leaning on the front of his ’64 Impala looking out at the highway. He figured maybe old crazy Harry who janitored at the high school might be right about them flying saucers. Harry was always seeing something. Bigfoot, six-legged weasels, all manner of things. But maybe he was right about the saucers. He’d said he’d seen one a couple nights back hovering over Mud Creek and it was shooting down these rays that looked like wet peppermint sticks. Leonard figured if Harry really had seen the saucers and the rays, then those rays were boredom rays. It would be a way for space critters to get at Earth folks, boring them to death. Getting melted down by heat rays would have been better. That was at least quick, but being bored to death was sort of like being nibbled to death by ducks.
Leonard continued looking at the highway, trying to imagine flying saucers and boredom rays, but he couldn’t keep his mind on it. He finally focused on something in the highway. A dead dog.
Not just a dead dog. But a DEAD DOG. The mutt had been hit by a semi at least, maybe several. It looked as if it had rained dog. There were pieces of that pooch all over the concrete and one leg was lying on the curbing on the opposite side, stuck up in such a way that it seemed to be waving hello. Doctor Frankenstein with a grant from Johns Hopkins and assistance from NASA couldn’t have put that sucker together again.
Leonard leaned over to his faithful, drunk companion, Billy—known among the gang as Farto, because he was fart-lighting champion of Mud Creek—and said, “See that dog there?”
Farto looked where Leonard was pointing. He hadn’t noticed the dog before, and he wasn’t nearly as casual about it as Leonard. The puzzle-piece hound brought back memories. It reminded him of a dog he’d had when he was thirteen. A big, fine German shepherd that loved him better than his Mama.
Sonofabitch dog tangled its chain through and over a barbed wire fence somehow and hung itself. When Farto found the dog its tongue looked like a stuffed, black sock and he could see where its claws had just been able to scrape the ground, but not quite enough to get a toe hold. It looked as if the dog had been scratching out some sort of coded message in the dirt. When Farto told his old man about it later, crying as he did, his old man laughed and said, “Probably a goddamn suicide note.”
Now, as he looked out at the highway, and his whiskey-laced Coke collected warmly in his gut, he felt a tear form in his eyes. Last time he’d felt that sappy was when he’d won the fart-lighting championship with a four-inch burner that singed the hairs of his ass, and the gang awarded him with a pair of colored boxing shorts. Brown and yellow ones so he could wear them without having to change them too often.
So there they were, Leonard and Farto, parked outside the DQ, leaning on the hood of Leonard’s Impala, sipping Coke and whiskey, feeling bored and blue and horny, looking at a dead dog and having nothing to do but go to a show with a nigger starring in it. Which, to be up front, wouldn’t have been so bad if they’d had dates. Dates could make up for a lot of sins, or help make a few good ones, depending on one’s outlook.
But the night was criminal. Dates they didn’t have. Worse yet, wasn’t a girl in the entire high school would date them. Not even Marylou Flowers, and she had some kind of disease.
All this nagged Leonard something awful. He could see what the problem was with Farto. He was ugly. Had the kind of face that attracted flies. And though being fart-lighting champion of Mud Creek had a certain prestige among the gang, it lacked a certain something when it came to charming the gals.
But for the life of him, Leonard couldn’t figure his own problem. He was handsome, had some good clothes, and his car ran good when he didn’t buy that old cheap gas. He even had a few bucks in his jeans from breaking into washaterias. Yet his right arm had damn near grown to the size of his thigh from all the whacking off he did. Last time he’d been out with a girl had been a month ago, and as he’d been out with her along with nine other guys, he wasn’t rightly sure he could call that a date. He wondered about it so much, he’d asked Farto if he thought it qualified as a date. Farto, who had been fifth in line, said he didn’t think so, but if Leonard wanted to call it one, wasn’t no skin off his dick.
But Leonard didn’t want to call it a date. It just didn’t have the feel of one, lacked that something special. There was no romance to it.
True, Big Red had called him Honey when he put the mule in the barn, but she called everyone Honey—except Stoney. Stoney was Possum Sweets, and he was the one who talked her into wearing the grocery bag with the mouth and eye holes. Stoney was like that. He could sweet talk the camel out from under a sand nigger. When he got through chatting Big Red down, she was plumb proud to w
ear that bag.
When finally it came his turn to do Big Red, Leonard had let her take the bag off as a gesture of good will.That was a mistake. He just hadn’t known a good thing when he had it. Stoney had had the right idea. The bag coming off spoiled everything. With it on, it was sort of like balling the Lone Hippo or some such thing, but with the bag off, you were absolutely certain what you were getting, and it wasn’t pretty.
Even closing his eyes hadn’t helped. He found that the ugliness of that face had branded itself on the back of his eyeballs. He couldn’t even imagine the sack back over her head. All he could think about was that puffy, too-painted face with the sort of bad complexion that began at the bone.
He’d gotten so disappointed, he’d had to fake an orgasm and get off before his hooter shriveled up and his Trojan fell off and was lost in the vacuum.
Thinking back on it, Leonard sighed. It would certainly be nice for a change to go with a girl that didn’t pull the train or had a hole between her legs that looked like a manhole cover ought to be on it. Sometimes he wished he could be like Farto, who was as happy as if he had good sense. Anything thrilled him. Give him a can of Wolf Brand Chili, a big moon pie, Coke and whiskey and he could spend the rest of his life fucking Big Red and lighting the gas out of his asshole.
God, but this was no way to live. No women and no fun. Bored, bored, bored. Leonard found himself looking overhead for space ships and peppermint-colored boredom rays, but he saw only a few moths fluttering drunkenly through the beams of the DQ’s lights.
Lowering his eyes back to the highway and the dog, Leonard had a sudden flash. “Why don’t we get the chain out of the back and hook it up to Rex there? Take him for a ride.”
“You mean drag his dead ass around?” Farto asked.
Leonard nodded.
“Beats stepping on a tack,” Farto said.
They drove the Impala into the middle of the highway at a safe moment and got out for a look. Up close the mutt was a lot worse. Its innards had been mashed out of its mouth and asshole and it stunk something awful. The dog was wearing a thick, metal-studded collar and they fastened one end of their fifteen foot chain to that and the other to the rear bumper.
Bob, the Dairy Queen manager, noticed them through the window, came outside and yelled, “What are you fucking morons doing?”
“Taking this doggie to the vet,” Leonard said. “We think this sumbitch looks a might peaked. He may have been hit by a car.”
“That’s so fucking funny I’m about to piss myself,” Bob said.
“Old folks have that problem,” Leonard said.
Leonard got behind the wheel and Farto climbed in on the passenger side. They maneuvered the car and dog around and out of the path of a tractor-trailer truck just in time. As they drove off, Bob screamed after them, “I hope you two no-dicks wrap that Chevy piece of shit around a goddamn pole.”
As they roared along, parts of the dog, like crumbs from a flaky loaf of bread, came off. A tooth here. Some hair there. A string of guts. A dew claw. And some unidentifiable pink stuff. The metal-studded collar and chain threw up sparks now and then like fiery crickets. Finally they hit seventy-five and the dog was swinging wider and wider on the chain, like it was looking for an opportunity to pass.
Farto poured him and Leonard Cokes and whiskey as they drove along. He handed Leonard his paper cup and Leonard knocked it back, a lot happier now than he had been a moment ago. Maybe this night wasn’t going to turn out so bad after all.
They drove by a crowd at the side of the road, a tan station wagon and a wreck of a Ford up on a jack. At a glance they could see that there was a nigger in the middle of the crowd and he wasn’t witnessing to the white boys. He was hopping around like a pig with a hotshot up his ass, trying to find a break in the white boys so he could make a run for it. But there wasn’t any break to be found and there were too many to fight. Nine white boys were knocking him around like he was a pinball and they were a malicious machine.
“Ain’t that one of our niggers?” Farto asked. “And ain’t that some of them White Tree football players that’s trying to kill him?”
“Scott,” Leonard said, and the name was dogshit in his mouth. It had been Scott who had outdone him for the position of quarterback on the team. That damn jig could put together a play more tangled than a can of fishing worms, but it damn near always worked. And he could run like a spotted-ass ape.
As they passed, Farto said, “We’ll read about him tomorrow in the papers.”
But Leonard drove only a short way before slamming on the brakes and whipping the Impala around. Rex swung way out and clipped off some tall, dried sunflowers at the edge of the road like a scythe.
“We gonna go back and watch?” Farto said. “I don’t think them White Tree boys would bother us none if that’s all we was gonna do, watch.”
“He may be a nigger,” Leonard said, not liking himself, “but he’s OUR nigger and we can’t let them do that. They kill him, they’ll beat us in football.”
Farto saw the truth of this immediately. “Damn right. They can’t do that to OUR nigger.”
Leonard crossed the road again and went straight for the White Tree boys, hit down hard on the horn. The White Tree boys abandoned beating their prey and jumped in all directions.
Bullfrogs couldn’t have done any better.
Scott stood startled and weak where he was, his knees bent in and touching one another, his eyes big as pizza pans. He had never noticed how big grillwork was. It looked like teeth there in the night and the headlights looked like eyes. He felt like a stupid fish about to be eaten by a shark.
Leonard braked hard, but off the highway in the dirt it wasn’t enough to keep from bumping Scott, sending him flying over the hood and against the glass where his face mashed to it then rolled away, his shirt snagging one of the windshield wipers and pulling it off.
Leonard opened the car door and called to Scott who lay on the ground. “It’s now or never.”
A White Tree boy made for the car, and Leonard pulled the taped hammer handle out from beneath the seat and stepped out of the car and hit him with it. The White Tree boy went down to his knees and said something that sounded like French but wasn’t. Leonard grabbed Scott by the back of the shirt and pulled him up and guided him around and threw him into the open door. Scott scrambled over the front seat and into the back. Leonard threw the hammer handle at one of the White Tree boys and stepped back, whirled into the car behind the wheel. He put the car in gear again and stepped on the gas. The Impala lurched forward, and with one hand on the door Leonard flipped it wider and clipped a White Tree boy with it as if he were flexing a wing. The car bumped back on the highway and the chain swung out and Rex clipped the feet out from under two White Tree boys as neatly as he had taken down the dried sunflowers.
Leonard looked in his rear-view mirror and saw two White Tree boys carrying the one he had clubbed with the hammer handle to the station wagon. The others he and the dog had knocked down were getting up. One had kicked the jack out from under Scott’s car and was using it to smash the headlights and windshield. “Hope you got insurance on that thing,” Leonard said.
“I borrowed it,” Scott said, peeling the windshield wiper out of his T-shirt. “Here, you might want this.” He dropped the wiper over the seat and between Leonard and Farto.
“That’s a borrowed car?” Farto said. “That’s worse.”
“Nah,” Scott said. “Owner don’t know I borrowed it. I’d have had that flat changed if that sucker had had him a spare tire, but I got back there and wasn’t nothing but the rim, man. Say, thanks for not letting me get killed, else we couldn’t have run that ole pig together no more. Course, you almost run over me. My chest hurts.”
Leonard checked the rear-view again. The White Tree boys were coming fast. “You complaining?” Leonard said.
“Nah,” Scott said, and turned to look through the back glass.
He could see the dog swinging in short arcs and
pieces of it going wide and far. “Hope you didn’t go off and forget your dog tied to the bumper.”
“Goddamn,” said Farto, “and him registered too.”
“This ain’t so funny,” Leonard said, “them White Tree boys are gaining.”
“Well, speed it up,” Scott said.
Leonard gnashed his teeth. “I could always get rid of some excess baggage, you know.”
“Throwing that windshield wiper out ain’t gonna help,” Scott said.
Leonard looked in the mirror and saw the grinning nigger in the back seat. Nothing worse than a comic coon. He didn’t even look grateful. Leonard had a sudden horrid vision of being overtaken by the White Tree boys. What if he were killed with the nigger? Getting killed was bad enough, but what if tomorrow they found him in a ditch with Farto and the nigger. Or maybe them White Tree boys would make him do something awful with the nigger before they killed them. Like making him suck the nigger’s dick or some such thing. Leonard held his foot all the way to the floor; as they passed the Dairy Queen he took a hard left and the car just made it and Rex swung out and slammed a light pole, then popped back in line behind them.
The White Tree boys couldn’t make the corner in the station wagon and they didn’t even try. They screeched into a car lot down a piece, turned around and came back. By that time the tail lights of the Impala were moving away from them rapidly, looking like two inflamed hemorrhoids in a dark asshole.
“Take the next right coming up,” Scott said, “then you’ll see a little road off to the left. Kill your lights and take that.”
Leonard hated taking orders from Scott on the field, but this was worse. Insulting. Still, Scott called good plays on the field, and the habit of following instructions from the quarterback died hard. Leonard made the right and Rex made it with them after taking a dip in a water-filled bar ditch.
Leonard saw the little road and killed his lights and took it. It carried them down between several rows of large tin storage buildings, and Leonard pulled between two of them and drove down a little alley lined with more. He stopped the car and they waited and listened. After about five minutes, Farto said, “I think we skunked those father-rapers.”
High Cotton: Selected Stories of Joe R. Lansdale Page 30