Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales

by Norman Partridge

  Smit laughed at the men on the porch. "Hell, ain't none of you ever seen a red man before?"

  The Indians stared at him, button-lipped. Smit spat on his dye-stained palms and rolled up his dye-splattered shirt-sleeves. He laughed again —short and hard, a challenge — and all eyes turned away.

  Pussies, plain and simple.

  Smit's boots thudded over pine porch steps. Before him, the cabin wall was covered with wooden masks —birds and fish and bears and beavers and all kinds of other spooky-looking totem pole shit. The masks smiled and leered, peeking at Smit over slumped Indian shoulders and downcast Indian heads. Smit grinned back, appreciating the contrast.

  Fuckin' masks. It was the same thing everywhere. Pussies always wear masks when they want to act tough. In the city, it's a gangbanger who's scared shitless without a bandana mummy-wrapped around his pimply face. Out here, it's an old drunk baying at the moon, goddamn totem pole face strapped to his head, scared of God or the Big Buffalo or whatever.

  The men inched out of Smit's way. He cupped his hands against the dirty window and peered inside the cabin. Dark. A Budweiser sign glowed feebly above an empty bar. A dingy pool table sat in one corner, unattended.

  "Got a place to wash up in there?" Smit asked.

  No one answered. No one even looked up.

  Indians. Who could figure 'em? Smit sure couldn't. First he'd had to put up with Cochise, and now these morons.

  Smit pulled out his pistol. "Let's see some eyes," he said, and the Indians obliged. "Okay, here's the drill: I got this gun, but I ain't lookin' to take any money from you boys. In fact, if things work out right tonight you all stand to pick up a little scratch for your trouble." Smit paused just long enough to let the idea sink in, and then he turned to the biggest, meanest-looking Indian on the porch, a hatchetfaced man who was missing an ear. "You —Van Gogh —I'm putting you on the payroll. Fifty bucks an hour. Figure three hours work. Right now I see five pickups parked down the road, and it's your job to make sure that they don't go anywhere. If I hear any engines, see any headlights, it's your ass."

  Van Gogh smiled, nodded.

  Relaxing, Smit slid the pistol under his belt. Without throwing a single punch, he'd just beaten the biggest, baddest cat on the porch. None of the others would try shit with Van Gogh in line.

  Smit was a student of human nature. What he realized, what the other men on the sagging porch didn't know (and didn't have the stones to find out), was that a guy like Van Gogh was a dog, a loser. Sure he looked tough, but someone had taken his ear and a man couldn't forget something like that, especially when he was confronted by someone like Smit, who could flash a perfect, ear-eating grin. And if the man with the grin was smart, he'd offer the dog a bone — say a few fifties—just so the dog could save some flea-bitten face.

  "Good enough," Smit said. Grinning, flashing big white teeth, he left Van Gogh with an unspoken warning: You and me know how you really are, so be smart and don't push it.

  Smit opened the rusty screen door and slipped inside the bar. The bartender thrust a thumb over his shoulder. "Can's in the back."

  Smit slapped a twenty onto the bar. "You got any steel wool? You know, like SOS pads, or Brillo?"

  "Sure." The bartender's thumb did an instant replay. "Back there. In the can." He covered Smit's twenty with a callused palm and slid it across the bar. Cash somebody's welfare check with it, that's what he'd do. Out here in the sticks, nobody would complain if Andy Jackson had red hair.

  Hell, out here, a twenty was still a twenty.

  Smit headed down a hallway, past more creepy masks. He was sure that the bartender had seen his gun, and just as sure that this little backroads shitsplat didn't have a telephone. No one was going to call the cavalry while he was indisposed, not unless one of the guys on the porch had a car phone in his pickup.

  The very idea of that made Smit laugh out loud.

  It wasn't a spotless Chevron shitter, that was for sure. Smit would have given a hundred bucks just to see one square inch of clean porcelain anywhere in the place, but such was not his luck.

  Smit peeled off his shirt and T-shirt and stared into the mirror. The red dye was all over his hands and face, and in his hair, which was now half dusty-blond and half red. He looked like a king-sized demon who'd escaped from hell.

  No wonder the Indians had been scared. Some bloody-looking bastard, bigger than George Foreman, comes out of the dark talking about how he's a red man, and he's got a gun too, for Christsakes. You're just naturally going to get out of the motherfucker's way.

  Smit dug around under the sink and found a cake of Lava and an old box of Brillo pads. Lathered up with the soap. Rinsed off. Lots of hot water.

  Shit. Still red as a motherfuckin' beet.

  He took a Brillo pad from the faded box, humming a corny commercial jingle that had aired when he was a kid. Well now de pot was callin' de kettle black... Harry Belafonte calypso beat. And de kettle was ashamed to answer back... Smit worked the pad over his fingers, rubbing them raw. Den de kettle got shined with a Brillo pad... Sanded his knuckles down to scar tissue that was white and smooth. Now it's de pot dat's feelin' bad... The steel wool caught the fine hair on the back of his hands. Ninety-nine squeezes, ninety-nine... Smit pulled the pad loose; macho electrolysis. Make de Brillo soap pad shine shine shine...

  Hands clean, Smit started in on his face, wincing despite his best efforts. He no longer felt like humming.

  Add this one to your resume, smart guy. Failed bank job. June 17, 1992. Roseburg, Oregon. John Smith-known professionally, and in Salem Correctional, as Smit - falls for the old exploding-dye-bomb-in-the-money-bag trick.

  Oh, but he'd been so smart. An inside job. Get to know that little Indian teller, the one with the nice ass. Liked him to call her Cochise. He should have known that she'd be trouble the first time he saw her naked. She had Bill tattooed on one cheek and Larry tattooed on the other. Smit remembered thinking, Christ, where's she going to put my name?

  The whole thing seemed funny now. Especially the job. Some old biddy squawking to Cochise about a lost social security check that never made direct deposit, and Smit gets the wrong teller — some prune-faced bitch who clears out her drawer right away. Acting so scared, too.

  Shit. Acting was right.

  Okay. He didn't panic. Stuck to the plan. Took Cochise "hostage" and jammed. Left everyone listening to the old biddy, who was still complaining about the social security check.

  Cochise was trying to warn him when the dye bomb exploded.

  They got away, but then Cochise got weird. The first night, camping by the Umpqua River, Smit sorted through the money. In the middle of the packs he found $7,000 in twenties and fifties that had been protected from the worst of the dye. Cochise acted like they were set for life, like they were Bonnie and Clyde. She practically raped him on the spot.

  She was good — had a tongue on her that could have done battle with the baddest boa constrictor in all of Brazil — but she wasn't worth thirty-five hundred.

  Smit waited, of course. Waited until she got them over the old switchback trail that cut through the forest, waited until he learned which logging roads to take. And when he saw the bar, the first sign of a genuine American automobile since they'd ditched the getaway car, he dropped Cochise with the prettiest left-right-left you'd ever want to see and tied her to a fat Douglas fir.

  Smit rinsed the Brillo glop off of his face. Better. The dye was coming off.

  Smit grinned... because skin was coming off too.

  Smit started down the hallway, rubbing his freshly shaved skull. The skin on his hands and face glowed bright pink, but not red, and at least he could sniff his fingers now without smelling moss and banana slugs and all that other outdoorsy shit.

  Dim light from the bathroom played over the hanging masks, angling across a black-and-red beaver face. A few teeth were missing from the grinning muzzle, and Smit smiled at that because the deformity made the mask look like the face of a blood he'd cl
obbered in Salem Correctional. Smit remembered another pretty left-right-left, saw the blood down on his knees picking teeth up off the basketball court.

  The memory charged Smit's confidence. "Beer," he said, pounding the bar. "Whatever you got on tap."

  The bartender brought out a tall stein—ceramic, naked women twined around it like fleshy vines, undoubtedly hand-painted. "Got this off a biker who came through here once," he said. "Okay?"

  Smit nodded. The bartender knew how to treat a paying customer, and how to draw a beer. An inch of foam on the top. Just right.

  "Good stuff." Smit wiped his mouth. "Imported?"

  The bartender grinned tightly, his chapped lips showing cracks. It was one of those goofy, mystic grins that said he knew the real poop about life, and at the same time looked sorrowful because you, poor bastard, would never even be on sniffing terms with it.

  Smit looked down at his beer. The head had died, and the dark liquid suddenly reminded him of an old guy in the slam who had bad kidneys and pissed brown after drinking too much jailhouse hooch.

  No sense thinking about that. Smit drained the beer. Slapped down another half-red twenty to show his appreciation.

  The Indians gathered at the bar. Smit sized them up, trying to figure out how much this was going to cost him. There was old Van Gogh, of course, the aforementioned one-eared dog, but he wasn't the only guy in the bar who looked like he'd spent considerable time as an ass-kickee. Smit looked over the group and saw a fine array of scars, twisted noses, and cauliflower ears, and a dozen-plus getting-out-of-your-way-right-now-sir expressions.

  Still, Smit was wary of a trap. This was too damn easy. Just to be on the safe side he was generous with his money, paying more than he should have for a change of clothes and an old Ford truck. He couldn't figure out why the bastards weren't pushing him. Not even a little bit. There was usually one idiot in every crowd who finally popped off—but the Indians went along with the drill, cooperating like a bunch of soft, flabby businessmen.

  Okay then, Smit. Why worry? No rush. Have another beer. Wash the tinny taste of canteen water out of your mouth and put a quarter in the juke. No juke here, though. Doesn’t matter. In this joint, a red-spotted fifty buys a cheap Panasonic boom box and a handful of ancient and mournful Buffy Sainte-Marie tapes.

  The bartender kept on pouring twenty-dollar beers, and Smit's hands and face started to feel a whole hell of a lot better.

  The Indians remained quiet.

  Not that Smit's buddies weren't doing anything. While he drank, they crept one by one into the hallway and donned their masks, quietly, so Smit wouldn't notice.

  "Where ya goin'?" Smit asked when the bartender stepped from behind the bar.

  For an answer the bartender smiled, full and wide. Smit saw the man's split teeth. Then he saw the beaver's split teeth and grinning black lips slip over the man's smile.

  Another mask came toward him. A wolf face, missing an ear. "Can I get that hunert-and-fifty now?" Van Gogh asked.

  "Hell." Smit laughed, drunk. "Where's my mask?"

  A bird whispered through its broken beak. "You don't get one."

  "C'mon, guys. I'll pay. I wanna play too. Howl at the moon or whatever you're gonna do."

  A roar came from the other side of the rusty screen door.

  The bartender ran the tap, then slammed a bowl of beer onto the counter.

  Smit turned toward the door. Nothing there. Eyed the Indians. Leering, animal faces stared back at him, every mask deformed in some way. Twisted noses, missing teeth, mangled ears. Shattered faces crowning thick male bodies... but one body wasn't the same as the others.

  Cold sweat beaded on Smit's forehead as his gaze traveled over cocked hips and generous curves and settled finally on the mask above — a beautiful face, brown as the earth, with a red-eyed snake jutting from between amused lips.

  The snake's head eased over the cedar mouth, forked tongue licking at splinters.

  No. Smit blinked. He was seeing things. He had to be seeing —

  The wooden porch creaked and moaned.

  The smell of moss and banana slugs drifted into the bar.

  The screen door squeaked open.

  The thing that stood in the doorway wasn't wearing a mask. It grinned — a full, foot-wide, slobbering grin, yellow teeth glimmering.

  To be precise, it was the biggest, baddest, ear-eating grin that Smit had ever seen.

  Rejection, Resolve and Respect

  The following story includes a satanic cult, illicit use of a baseball chalker, king-sized bat creatures, several topical references which have dated badly, and a couple of small-town heroes who are just this side of clueless. If you were reading small press magazines in the late eighties and early nineties you probably encountered more than a few tales like this—goofy adventure yarns with fantastic sensibilities that could only see print in publications designed on a home computer.

  Call 'em dot-matrix pulp. Done right they were just this side of a guilty pleasure, and I admit that I loved 'em. Like the best of the old-time pulp stories, dot-matrix pulp tales cranked hard, got where they were going, and didn't apologize for being purely entertaining.

  Joe Lansdale wrote more than a few. I'm thinking of stories like "The Junkyard" and "The Valley of the Swastika." Fact is I can almost see Joe cringing at the mention of the latter. Doesn't matter. Let him cringe all he wants. "Valley" is by far the best lost Nazis in the Appalachians story I have ever read. I love the damn thing—inbred cavemen, clay-and-straw airplane, and all.

  When I sat down to write "Black Leather Kites," I tried to put myself in a Lansdale frame of mind. After all, Joe was one of my favorite writers back then (still is), and sooner or later I was bound to try a little imitation. You'd have to look pretty hard to find a beginner who hasn't done that, intentionally or unintentionally. But it's tough to pull off, kind of like trying to wear another guy's clothes when you're not even close to the same size. Hell, those clothes might look great on him. But on you....

  Well, you'll see what I mean when you read this one. If you're in the right mood you just might get a kick out of it. Anyway, go ahead and give "Black Leather Kites" a test drive, then come back and check in with me when you're done. I've got another story to tell you that'll keep until then.

  All right. Time for "Black Leather Kites," Part Two, with a little writerly advice about rejection, resolve, and respect.

  So I'm finishing up my tale of runaway lawnmowers and werebats and wondering where I should submit it. The phone rings. It's Rich Chizmar, editor of Cemetery Dance, calling up to talk shop. In the course of our conversation Rich mentions that he's heard about a new dark suspense anthology that Joe Lansdale's editing. "Sounds right up your alley," Rich says. "Maybe you should send Lansdale a query and see if he'll take a look at a story."

  By this time I'm eager to break out of small magazines into the professional short story market, so Rich's suggestion sounds like a plan to me. I don't know Joe Lansdale from Adam, so I query away—keeping my letter short, mentioning my credits, asking Joe if he'd be willing to look at a story. Joe replies that he is indeed editing a dark suspense anthology (actually, he's co-editing it with his wife, Karen), and they're open to submissions.

  I figure, hot damn, do I have a story for the Lansdales—it's definitely suspenseful. As for "dark"—well, hell, it's got werebats. Gotta be that fits the bill. In short order I finish up "Black Leather Kites." Then I type a cover letter, enclose a SASE, and hand off my manuscript to the good folks at the USPS.

  I wait. A couple weeks later, here comes my manuscript, rebounding with a note from hisownself:

  Norman:

  Thanks for "Black Leather Kites." Not bad at all, but not what I'm looking for. I'm doing a suspense, not a horror anthology, though I might buy something with horror if it struck me just right. It should go somewhere, however, and I wish you luck with it and your writing career.

  Best,

  Joe Lansdale

  Whoops. A cordial
, kind letter, but certainly not what I was hoping for. Still, looking over Joe's rejection, I see that I made the most basic of mistakes with my submission—I didn't understand what the editor was looking for when I sent in my story. I heard "dark suspense," and it meant one thing to me. Obviously, it meant something else to Joe.

  Now, "dark suspense" was a new term at the time, and it was being defined a number of ways. Take a broad view, and maybe there was room for werebats.[13] Take a narrower view, you're looking more along the lines of dark crime or noir. Either way, in this particular case, Joe's was the only definition that mattered. Why? Easy answer—he was the editor.

  And I was left sitting there with a rejection letter in my hands. Now, I could have sat there kicking myself all afternoon. I could have beaten myself up over blowing a chance to crack a top-drawer anthology. Worst case scenario, I could have moped around, cried woe is me, and not written another word for a week or a month.

  I didn't do any of those things. Instead, I went for a walk. I got some air and some sunshine and some distance from my mailbox, but not from Joe's letter. It was still there in my head. I couldn't help wishing that I'd asked him exactly what kind of story he was looking for when I first sent my query instead of making an assumption, but I hadn't done that and I couldn't turn back the clock and do it now, so the knowledge didn't do me any good when I'd already submitted and been rejected.

  Or maybe it did. I thought about Joe's letter, what it said and what it didn't say. He hadn't praised my story to high heaven, but he hadn't slammed it, either. "Not bad at all," was what he said. And while he hadn't invited me to send another story, he hadn't told me that he was closed to submissions, either.

  Now this wasn't exactly a glowing ray of sunshine, but it did give me a little hope, and I grabbed it. Right then and there I decided to try Joe with another story—the right kind of story this time. Something suspenseful and dark... but not at all supernatural.