Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet

by Adam Howe

  They delivered Grace to Croker. Rusty’s arm was slung around her waist so she wouldn’t collapse. Judging by his leering grin, he was copping a good feel while he could. In his other hand he was clutching a revolver. Lyle’s pistol was tucked in the front of his waistband. I hadn’t seen Lyle since I stole his job. He was unshaven, bleary-eyed, reeking like a hog; he’d clearly fallen on hard times and looked like he’d been making ends meet as a carny geek. He shouldered past me to the piano and reclaimed his stool with a satisfied sigh. “Ahhhh, it’s good to be back,” he said. “I always knew you was a wrong’un.”

  “Lyle,” Croker warned him. “You start in on that I-told-you-so shit, you’ll be joining him.” Lyle grumbled to himself and started pecking out an off-key Funeral Waltz on the piano. Croker winced at the noise Lyle made. “I’m almost gonna miss you, Smitty.”

  I took a deep breath. “You know what I’m gonna miss, Croker?”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Fucking your wife in your own bed.”

  Quick as another lightning flash, there was a knife in Croker’s hand, a Bowie with a blade the size of a machete. I flinched in my chair—my tough guy act vanishing—as he stabbed the knife down into the table. The hilt quivered to a stop. “You think you can provoke me into killin’ you quick, you’re wrong.”

  He rolled his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “But I’ll make you a deal, Smitty … You cut that bait out of my whore’s belly and feed it to Big George and I’ll have my boys shoot you; you don’t, I’ll hang you from the deck rail and let him eat you from the toes on up.” He shrugged extravagantly. “Can’t say fairer than that, now can I?”

  Behind him, Grace said: “Horace, please—”

  “Whore!” Croker roared. “You’ll shut your hole if you know what’s good for you!”

  I stared at the knife on the table before me.

  Glanced up at Grace—couldn’t hold her gaze—dropped my eyes to her belly.

  She wasn’t showing … Would that make it any easier?

  I tore my eyes away, horrified. Christ, had I even considered it?

  I found myself looking at the knife again.

  “No …” Grace whimpered, seeing what I meant to do before I did.

  Croker watched me with ghoulish curiosity. As he puffed his cigar, the coal burned red like the eyes of the devil who would greet me in hell if I did what I was thinking. “That’s it,” he coaxed me, “ you just cut that bait on outta there …”

  I choked down a cry of shame.

  “I’m sorry, Grace …”

  My trembling hand reached towards the knife.

  “Hold her steady now, boys,” Croker said to Rusty and Lyle. “She’s liable to buck some.” He greedily sucked his cigar, the coal glowing red-hot.

  My fingers brushed the hilt of the knife—and then I jerked my hand to the side and snatched up my glass and flung the hooch into Croker’s face. The coal of his cigar ignited the liquor with a violent woof and he screamed as his head burst into flames. Lurching up from his chair, beating at the flames but seeming only to fan them, Croker staggered back into Rusty and Grace. Rusty stumbled off-balance. Grace grabbed his gun hand and started wrestling him for the revolver.

  As they fought for the gun, I wrenched the knife from the table and whirled towards Lyle, slashing the blade across his throat, blood erupting from the wound in a scarlet spray. I kicked him back against the piano and the sound he made when he crashed against the keys was the best he’d ever got from the instrument. The gun fell from his waistband and skittered across the floor.

  As I scrambled across the room to help Grace, I saw Croker—screaming and beating at the flames, dripping fire in his wake—crash to his knees at the foot of the bar. He grabbed a spittoon and slopped the contents over his head, anointing himself in slobbery brown spit and dousing the flames. A great cloud of smoke billowed from his cindered skull. He slumped facedown to the floor.

  Then a bullet whizzed inches above my head and I turned back towards Grace and Rusty. As they fought for the gun, they looked like winos ballroom dancing.

  Rusty fired off wild shots that fizzed through the room. Bullets shattered bottles. Liquor flooded to the floor and ignited in the flames that Croker had dripped in his wake. The rain pissing down through the ceiling might well have been gasoline, the speed with which the fire took hold.

  Clutching Rusty’s gun hand, Grace raked his wrist with her nails. Rusty howled in pain as she bent back his wrist. He fired his last shot reflexively and his face was shorn away in a brilliant spray of blood and skull and teeth and brains that splattered the ceiling. The faceless man crumpled to the floor at her feet.

  I dragged Grace into my arms. Not knowing where to kiss her without causing her more pain, I just held her against me as the room burned around us. I stroked her hair and whispered in her ear that never once had I truly considered cutting the child—our child—from her belly. I prayed she believed my lies.

  She raised her head from my chest. “The money?”

  “It can wait,” I said.

  Maybe not for long—the bar was burning fast—but it would have to.

  Croker was still alive.

  He was crawling through the smoke and fiery ash towards Lyle’s gun. I let him lay a paw on the pistol before I stepped on his hand. I ground my heel and his knuckles crunched like gravel and he gave a wheezing cry. I wrenched the gun from his broken fingers and gave it to Grace. Then I kicked Croker onto his back.

  His head was a smoldering chunk of barbecued meat, his ears melted nubs, his nose seared flat to his face, carved with slits I guessed were nostrils. His skull was blistered and cracked and tufted with patches of singed hair. His cigar stub was fused to his bottom lip. I guessed he didn’t mind that. He was never without a damn stogie in his mouth anyway. The lids of his left eye had melted together like a fleshy pirate patch; his other eye glared at me hatefully. “I’ll see you in hell,” he said. Not very original, but it clearly pained him to say even that much. The flames must have burned down his gullet as he was screaming; his voice sounded as cooked as his face looked.

  I nodded at him. “You be sure to save a seat for me.”

  Then I grabbed him by the ankles, meaning to drag him outside onto the deck. His wooden leg tore away from his thigh, and I stumbled and fell, landing heavily on my ass, clutching the limb with a look of surprise. Croker gave a bark of throaty laughter. I had to admit it was pretty damn funny. I started laughing too. Even Grace had an uneasy smile on her face. Soon we were all roaring with laughter.

  Croker was still cackling—a laughter tinged with madness—even as I clubbed him with his own wooden leg, and the straps and buckles scourged his face and lacerated his hands like a cat-flail; even as I herded him outside, and he crabbed across the deck to the rail; even as I tossed his wooden leg down into the pond and Big George shattered it to sawdust with a snap of his jaws.

  Then the laughter stopped and the tears started.

  “Please, Smitty—I’m begging you, son—not like this.”

  I dragged him to his feet—his foot—leaned him back against the deck rail.

  And then I gave him a good hard shove.

  Croker tumbled back over the rail. The last thing I saw before I turned away was Big George rising from the pond with his maw open wide to catch his old friend. Croker had been wrong; there was something Big George liked more than ‘gator bait’ after all.

  11.

  The bar was an inferno.

  So much for the perfect murder. We’d have to take what money we could and hope it was enough to bury us somewhere Croker’s gangster pals wouldn’t find us and buried us for real.

  Beating back the flames with a wet tablecloth, I charged the office door with my shoulder, knocking it down off its hinges. I stumbled inside the room, catching my balance against Croker’s Hot Seat. The floorboards wobbled beneath me and I remembered what Grace had told me about the trapdoor. It had seemed like something from a bad pulp
book, but I wasn’t taking any chances now; I scuttled off the ratty rug the chair was nailed to. Then, shouting to be heard above the roaring flames, I called to Grace to fetch a bag for the money. I tore that hateful painting off the wall and flung it aside and there was the safe. Praying Croker hadn’t changed the combination—the man was arrogant enough, I didn’t think he would have—I dialed it into the safe, the lock yielded with a clang, I dragged the heavy steel door open, and there was the money. All of it. And more. Croker clearly hadn’t put his faith in banks.

  I laughed and called to Grace, “Better make that two bags—”

  And then a chain of firecrackers pop-pop-popped behind me. The breath was punched from my lungs and I pitched forwards with a grunt of pain. I glanced down to see the front of my shirt blooming with blood. My knees buckled and I clutched the open door of the safe before my legs collapsed beneath me. I turned and saw the smoking gun in Grace’s hand. Lyle’s gun. The gun I had given her.

  Then my sweaty grip slid away from the safe door and I keeled towards Croker’s desk and collapsed down into the recliner. Sucking for air in agonizing gasps, I tore open my shirt and tried in vain to staunch the wounds. Blood gushed through my missing fingers. My hands fell away and dropped to my lap.

  My eyelids grew heavy, my head started drooping; I could feel the big sleep coming. In my weakening state, I could only watch as Grace emptied the bundles of cash from the safe and stacked them neatly inside a leather Gladstone bag. Barely able to breathe, let alone talk, I tried willing Grace to look at me, but she wouldn’t. She was all business—just like her mentor, Chauncey Clyde must have taught her. She clasped the bag shut and then turned to leave the office and me for dead. I gutted down the pain, and managed to croak: “Grace …”

  She paused at the door, turning around and looking at me with all the warmth of someone checking their shoe for dog dirt, and as we looked in each other’s eyes, I’d never known an understanding like it.

  “The baby?” I said, knowing the answer already.

  She came towards me, resting the bag on the Hot Seat and smiling at me like I was the baby. She placed her hand on her belly. “Who says it’s yours?”

  I gave a grudging snort of admiration; blood spattered my chin.

  She’d played me better than I ever played the piano.

  As she turned to leave, with the last of my strength I reached down and hauled back the lever under Croker’s desk—just where she’d said it was—and Grace dropped through the trapdoor with a falling dream-gasp, and landed with a splash in the pond.

  For a moment, I wondered if Big George had lost his appetite.

  Then the screaming started.

  I sank back into the recliner, watching as tongues of fire began licking inside the office, devouring the painting I’d flung to the floor, and the bag of money Grace had left behind. As I watched the banknotes burn to cinders that swirled in fiery motes about the room, I wondered what would kill me first, the bullets or the flames; or maybe Big George would clamber up through the trapdoor and finish the job? It didn’t matter. Where I was going there’d be plenty of everything: fire, teeth and pain. And who cared? Me and Grace and Croker and Big George … There could be nothing worse waiting for us all in hell.

  STORY NOTES

  DIE DOG OR EAT THE HATCHET

  Every so often, I’ll write something so disturbing it gives me pause. Case in point: The “fisting” scene between Dwight Ritter and the Jarvis gal … Die Dog was originally conceived as a short story with the working title Treed, in which a door-to-door salesman arrives at the Ritter house, where he is attacked by a dog and forced to shelter in a tree. From there his only option is to caterpillar crawl along an overhanging tree branch to the porch roof. Through a bedroom window he spies Dwight … shall we say, tormenting the Jarvis gal with a disembodied human arm. I had a vague notion that the salesman would become an unlikely hero and attempt to rescue the Jarvis gal while playing cat-and-mouse with the maniac. Little did I know what the salesman would see until he peered through that window. Given the nasty shit I write about, I suspected it would be unpleasant. But the force of the scene stopped me dead. I saw it, I smelled it; I heard the screams. (And now I’ve rubbed your nose in it—sorry about that …) Not knowing how to proceed from there—the scene didn’t seem to suit the sleazy salesman hero I’d written—I shut down the computer and for the rest of the day wondered where these fucking ideas come from …

  I was inspired to return to the story by a beat from the movie Blue Ruin. (Good movie, check it out.) Our hero has trapped one of the villains in the trunk of his car. Having left him there for some time, he returns to the car and, not knowing if the man is dead or alive, nervously approaches the trunk and knocks on the trunk lid—And the guy in the trunk goes batshit, starts hollering for help. Nice little jump scare. It’s not a big moment in the movie, though it’s nicely played. But it gave me the ‘What if?’ moment which brought me back to Die Dog. What if a car trunk captive started hollering for help at an inopportune time for the captor? At a gas station, say. While the attendant is gassing the car. And what if the gas station attendant is an even nastier piece of work than the kidnapper? This became the genesis for the scene between Hingle and Dwayne at the RITTER GAS & TOW filling station, which in turn led me back to the Treed setpiece. The Jarvis Gal scene remained (and remains) disturbing, but seemed to work better within the context of the kidnap-thriller involving Tilly and Hingle.

  I hope the story kept you entertained. It’s a pulp piece, a dark thrill ride in the mould of Richard Laymon and Jack Ketchum. Early readers told me it reads like a survival horror movie, which was the scuzzy feel I was aiming for. Other influences? There’s a nod to Psycho—Hingle is my Marion Crane; I even attempted a little trick known as “The Psycho Switch” midway through the story. I liked the idea of this Ted Bundy-style serial killer finding himself at the mercy of a pair of Texas Chainsaw-style brothers. Poor Tilly is the meat in a maniac sandwich and must undergo a Straw Dogs-style transformation to survive.

  I’m hugely grateful to Champion Mojo Storyteller Joe R. Lansdale for the title. “Die dog or eat the hatchet” is apparently an old nautical expression, meaning “do or die,” or “needs must when the devil drives.” It’s a phrase I’d noticed in a lot of Lansdale’s works. When I contacted Joe and asked his permission to use it here, he told me it was a phrase his dad had used—along with many other colourful expressions that have found their way into his work. So thanks, Joe. Chances are the title’s better than the story!

  GATOR BAIT

  For some time, I’d wanted to write about little-known Texan serial killer, Joe “The Alligator Man” Ball, the Prohibition bootlegger turned bar owner who fed a bunch of gals to the pet gators he kept in the pond behind his place. Horror movie fans will be familiar with the Joe Ball story from Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive (known in the UK as Deathtrap), the director’s follow-up to Texas Chainsaw. Back in my screenwriting days I pitched a riff on the Joe Ball story. “Boardwalk Empire meets Jaws” was what I then had in mind. There was some resistance to a period genre film. This was hard for me to shake when I finally attempted to write a prose version. I kept trying to update the story but it wouldn’t pop. I reminded myself I was writing prose fiction, and no longer bound by the same constraints as a screenwriter. So fuck it, I went back to what I had in mind. By now enough time had passed that my initial idea of “Boardwalk Empire meets Jaws” had changed. Now I saw it as a traditional hardboiled crime piece—my template was The Postman Always Rings Twice—with creature-feature horror elements.

  What really kicked the story into gear was something I read in one of James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux books, a passing mention of the barbaric bayou bloodsport “coon-on-a-log.” Innocent that I am, I believed this was something Mr. Burke had surely invented. A quick Google search proved otherwise … From this grew the scene in which poor Johnson is fed to Big George for the entertainment of Horace Croker and his cronies. This scene, I knew,
would be highly racially charged, though I felt it was in keeping with what we know of the South of the time. But little did I suspect the horrific historical detail I would stumble upon as I keyword-searched my title. (I figured someone must’ve the title Gator Bait before. And sure enough, they have. I figured what the hell and used it anyway.) What I found were archive documents claiming Southern alligator hunters had used slave children as “gator bait.” It’s difficult to believe this was a widespread practice. That it happened even once is quite horrifying enough. But on consideration, I’m probably just being naïve … When I wove this detail into my plot, it gave the narrative an even greater intensity, and in Horace Croker allowed me to create a truly terrifying villain.

  DAMN DIRTY APES

  The North American Skunk Ape, as any hominologist will tell you, is the redneck cousin to Bigfoot and Sasquatch. Native to the swamps and sticks of the American South, offensively odorous, and aggressive towards humans, the loveable Bigfoot of Harry and the Hendersons fame he is not. Little is known about this reclusive hominid. Despite compelling evidence from hominologists, mainstream science would have us believe the creature doesn’t even exist. As such, the skunk ape of Damn Dirty Apes is largely my own invention.

  The inspiration for this story came from an article I read in the Fortean Times about legendary skunk ape hunter Gerard Hauser. (For a full account of the problems this would ultimately cause me, see the next chapter entitled: The Damn Dirty Apes Controversy.) I was indebted in my research to an entertaining book by Lyle Blackburn, The Beast of Boggy Creek: The True Story of the Fouke Monster. Of course, I put my own lurid spin on things …