Freezer Burn

by Joe R. Lansdale

  “Those made like that?”

  Gidget, who seemed unaware of the fact she was nearly naked, glanced up. “Oh, yeah. They come like that. You like ’em?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Come here, baby.”

  He moved toward her. When he touched her, her skin was cool and clammy, but after a few moments it was warm and damp. He touched her everywhere he could. Her lips were soft and her tongue was like a hot probe.

  Finally he pushed her away and came out of his clothes. She did not help him undress. She bent across the freezer, her naked breasts against the mustard and the glass, her tail, trimmed by black lace, lifted to him.

  Bill did not remember moving across the room to take her from behind. He felt as if he had fallen into her from a great height. He began to thrust. She moaned and her breasts slid across the mustard-smeared glass and made a sound like a squeegee cleaning a windshield. The corn dog bobbed about and leaped to the floor and rolled under the bed.

  “Hurt me,” she said, and he slapped her buttocks with his hands, leaving great red palm and finger marks. He was reminded of pictures he had seen of Indian ponies where their owners had dipped hands in red paint and pressed their palms against the horse’s sides, leaving bright signs of ownership and decoration.

  He spanked her harder and rammed her harder and she let out little happy hurt sounds. She rose up on the balls of her feet and her ass grew firmer and he bored deeper, trying not to finish too soon. He thought of other things to hold it back. He looked at the Ice Man through smears of mustard, for the heat of their activity had warmed the glass and made him visible.

  Sweat filled Bill’s eyes as he continued to work. He grabbed Gidget’s hair and she squealed. He pulled her head back and kissed the side of her throat, feeling her pulse throb against his lips. He rubbed the mustard all over her.

  “I can’t wait,” he said. “Jeez . . . I’m gonna finish.”

  “Now?”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “It’s okay, baby. Give me all of it.”

  He jerked her panties with his hands and they tore away. He tossed them on the floor and thrust into her hard, and just as he was about to let loose Gidget slipped from him, dropped and turned and took him in her mouth and he let go.

  He pulled her up and lay her on her back across the glass and got between her legs, worked his tongue while he reached up and squeezed her nipples. Seconds later she let go with a soft scream. They found their way to the shower and bathed together, and made love standing up, then they dried off and lay down in bed.

  “Won’t he wake up and miss you?”

  “He won’t wake up till morning. I’ve used that stuff before. Thing I hate is he’ll wake up at all.”

  “You shouldn’t talk like that.”

  “Shouldn’t I?”

  “No, you shouldn’t.”

  “I don’t think I knew how bad I wanted to go away from here until you showed.”

  “You didn’t like me, remember?”

  “I didn’t like that face. When you cleared up I liked you fine. You look like James Dean.”

  “Aren’t we supposed to like each other for who we are?”

  “Bullshit. I want someone looks good and wants me as bad as I want him. Let me tell you something, Frost don’t look that good naked. And he has this kind of smell. I can’t describe it. It’s not a bad smell. He’s always pure and clean. It’s like . . . I don’t know. Do you smell us?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hot and nasty and I like it. He’s like angel food cake out of the oven, all sweet and fresh baked. It gets to me. And that hand. I make him wear a glove when we fuck.”

  Bill thought of the time Frost had stopped the fight between Conrad and Phil. He had been wearing the glove then. He remembered Gidget at the door of the motor home, somewhat peeved and slightly dressed.

  “Why the glove?”

  “I don’t like looking at it.”

  “You still have to look at it, except it’s in a glove.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t have to feel that hand. When he lays against me, I feel that hand. If he lifts up, the hand drops and touches me . . . You just don’t know. That hand . . . Sometimes I think it’s alive, not just flapping around against me. I keep thinking that hand wants to get hold of my throat.”

  “Frost don’t seem that way to me.”

  “He isn’t, but I think that hand is . . . and don’t smile at me like that. You’ve never had to touch it. It’s like something wet and muddy crawling over you. It feels like you think a snake ought to feel. I can’t take much more of it. He’s talking about us having a baby, and I’m thinking, yeah, great, we have a baby I can teach it to wash three hands. It might have four. It could work here in the carnival, wave at the crowd and knit a sweater. I don’t want to have no freak baby. It’s bad enough I got to have a freak inside me trying to get off.”

  “But you went with him. It was your choice.”

  “I’d have screwed a monkey while I was blowin’ the organ grinder to get out of that damn restaurant. I didn’t know what I was gettin’ into. I thought I could take it. I can’t take it. I want you, not him. We’re a beautiful couple, Bill.”

  Bill’s body turned cool and goose bumps rose over him and the bumps were hard, like headstones. No one had ever wanted him before, least of all someone who looked like, felt like, and smelled like Gidget.

  “I got to get rid of him, you know.”

  “We could go away.”

  “I thought about that.”

  “We could just go off and you could get a divorce.”

  “I could, yeah.”

  “It seems like the only way.”

  “I’ve gone off before, and I’m always just the same when I get to where I go. I might as well have stayed before I went. Everything I do is like fuckin’ déjà vu. This time I got to do different.”

  “We could go off and you could get a divorce and I could get a job.”

  “Doing what? Brain surgery? You look good, baby, and I like what you do to me, how you make me feel, but you’re not exactly a hot job property.”

  “It wouldn’t matter as long as we had each other.”

  “It would matter to me. I don’t want to live in no shithole little town in a goddamn trailer with three snot-nosed brats pulling at my dress. I may not be worth a shit, and you may not be either, but I still want something better.”

  “Then what can we do?”

  “How much do you love me?”

  Love hadn’t been mentioned before. Bill was taken aback. “I . . . I don’t know.”

  Gidget turned away from him and stuck her face in a pillow and began to cry. “Jesus. Fuckin’ Jesus.”

  “What?”

  “Here I am pouring my heart out to you, and I’m just a piece to you. You don’t care about me. You don’t care I got to stay with this freak. It don’t mean a thing to you.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  Gidget got up, still crying. She found her panties in the light from the lamp and tried to pull them on, but they were wrecked. She threw them on the floor, began to thrash about looking for the rest of her clothes.

  Bill lay on the bed and looked at her and tried to think of something to say.

  “I thought you loved me,” she said as she pulled her shorts on one leg.

  “I didn’t say I didn’t love you.”

  “It’s not something you have to think about, goddamnit.”

  “Look, Gidget. I love you. I just . . . I’ve never been in love before. I didn’t know how to say it.”

  She smiled and sniffed. “You just say it. That’s all. You just say it.”

  “I love you.”

  She pulled her shorts off the one leg she had managed to get them on, came back to bed and rolled up against him and ran her fingers down his cheeks and kissed him. They lay together for a while, not speaking. Bill broke the ice.

  “So what do we do?”

  “You want to be together, right?”


  “I said so.”

  “Then we do what we have to do.”

  Bill let that one roll around inside his thoughts for a while. “God in heaven, Gidget. We couldn’t do that.”

  “We could.”

  “We shouldn’t. I mean, I’ve done some things, but I haven’t ever done anything like that. Well, not exactly.”

  “What do you mean not exactly?”

  He told her about his mother, the firecracker stand robbery and how his partner had shot the operator. He told her everything. It came out like water boiling over, every little detail.

  “That stand operator should have kept his mouth shut and just given the money. That fella Chaplin didn’t do any more than he had to do. It just didn’t work out in the long run, but he was doing what needed to be done. The cop you didn’t kill, he killed himself. You haven’t killed anybody and you’re whining.”

  “I’m not whinin’. I’m just sayin’.”

  “Sounds like a whine to me.”

  Bill lay still. “I planned the whole thing, but I didn’t mean for nothing like that. It’s one thing for a murder to happen, it’s another to plot it and do it yourself. And the truth is, I like Frost. I owe him.”

  “Maybe you do, but you’ve paid that debt. It’s not like a lifetime thing.”

  “There’s a line I’ve stepped over already and I don’t like it. I do this on purpose, there ain’t even a line. We shouldn’t do something like that.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t, but we could, and I would. And there isn’t any line, Bill. Never has been. The only line is the one you draw yourself. Listen here, hon. I got to get loose, and I divorce him, I got nothing. He dies, a little accident, I got a little something. And I got you. And you got those checks of your mother’s. I’m a forger, remember. It would be seed money for us to get going, you know.”

  “You said he dies you got a little something. What little something?”

  “The Ice Man. The carnival, for that matter. Do you know how much that Ice Man takes in? It isn’t exactly Fort Knox numbers, but you could live pretty good. Get rid of the rest of these freaks, ditch ’em. Just keep the Ice Man, take him around.”

  “Wouldn’t you make more with the carnival altogether?”

  “Sure. Shit, Bill, I don’t care. I’m just saying we get rid of Frost, we got the Ice Man, carnival if we want it, and we got your mother’s checks. It’s a good start. Time comes we want to sell the Ice Man, we get a good price, and we use that money to invest in something else.”

  “Something straight.”

  “Yeah. I don’t want to run the Ice Man around Texas all my life. I just want to get shed of Frost and have some seed money, a little income till we get our shit together. We could maybe open some cafe or something, hire waitresses to do what I used to do. I don’t even care you pinch one or two of them on the ass once in a while.”

  Bill grinned. “We could do that, couldn’t we?”

  “Or something like it.”

  “I don’t know. Frost has done me all right.”

  “Good. Take advantage of it. Build on that. Look at it this way, Bill, an opportunity is an opportunity, and if it comes to you, you ought to take it. You don’t look to me you’re a fella with a lot of grabs at brass rings.”

  “Could be there’s a warrant out on me. You think about that? You and me doing this thing, then going into something like that, them looking for me. He dies, cops’ll be around asking questions.”

  “We’ll dodge it until it blows over. Hell, cops don’t catch one in ten criminals anymore, and I bet there’s not that many people sweating over a firecracker stand and its owner. Then again, there may not be any warrants. Probably don’t even know you’re involved. We start with this one thing, then we worry about the other problems as we come to them.”

  “Christ, I don’t know.”

  “Tell you what,” Gidget said, getting up, sliding into her shorts more easily this time. “You think about the poontang you aren’t getting and the poontang he’s getting, and you think about that dead hand of his rubbing me down.” She fastened her shorts and pulled on her T-shirt. “You think about that, baby. Then you let me know how you feel. Tell me you haven’t got anything against him. Fact he’s fuckin’ me like I was a fertility goddess ought to be cause enough you want to see him dead. What he’s getting, you aren’t getting. Remember that.”

  Gidget pulled the slicker over her head, stopped at the door, and looked back. “You ought to clean up that mustard. And there’s a corn dog under your bed. I can see it from here.”

  She went out in the rain and closed the door. After a time, Bill got up, cleaned the freezer, rinsed off the corn dog, rewarmed it in the microwave and ate it.

  Twenty-four

  Next day the rain cleared up. Dampness hung from every tree limb and leaf and blade of grass and the trailers were slicked as if coated with gloss. The whirligig arrived from its last location via the trailer, along with the Pickled Punks. Phil had driven the trailer himself and a wetback he’d hired followed him in a car with a smoking exhaust. It looked like an old-fashioned mosquito fogger.

  Phil and Frost parleyed and Phil went out of there with a scowl on his face, his South of the Border driver at the wheel.

  Frost rounded up enough folks to erect the whirligig. It was wet from being dragged around on the damp grass. Much of it had worn bright silver through the green paint.

  This was the very thing that was getting Frost. The green paint worn away. He was standing under the whirligig with the only two helpers who hadn’t faded. Double Buckwheat and Conrad, who, as usual, was smoking a cigarette. Breakfast had not only involved eggs but grits, so Double Buckwheat’s two heads looked like Brillo pads that had scoured most of the breakfast dishes of the continental United States.

  Each stood with a hand over his eyes to shield out the brightness of the sun. Conrad had on a felt hat with a black band with a feather in it. He looked kind of cute, the way a dog does when you dress it up in clothes.

  Bill, who had not participated in erecting the whirligig or done anything else this morning, came out and leaned against the Ice Man’s trailer, eating a corn dog. He watched them stare up at the whirligig. He would have felt last night had been a dream had he not woken up this morning and found Gidget’s ruined panties. He had lain in bed with them over his face, his nose sticking through the slit designed for what he felt might be the best part of her. He smelled the panties for a time, and when he got up, he realized he had missed breakfast.

  He ate the corn dog slowly. He was so worn out his teeth hurt. He thought about what he and Gidget had talked about, and decided maybe Gidget had been half goofy last night, thinking out loud about something she didn’t really want.

  He walked over to where Frost, Double Buckwheat, and Conrad stood looking up at the whirligig.

  “Bird watching?” Bill asked.

  “Bird watching,” one of Double Buckwheat’s heads said.

  “Needs paint,” Frost said.

  “Needs paint,” the other Double Buckwheat head said.

  “I think it’s all right,” Conrad said. “Especially since he’s wanting to get us up there to paint it. This ground down here would be littered with pinheads and such. And I’m not so good at climbing either.”

  “Not everyone here is mentally handicapped,” Frost said.

  “Handicapped,” Double Buckwheat said.

  “Let me think on that,” Conrad said. “I ain’t so sure.”

  “He ain’t sure,” the other head said.

  “I’m just saying it needs paint,” Frost said.

  “Paint,” said Double Buckwheat.

  “I know how you are when you think something needs paint,” Conrad said. “Or something needs this, or something needs that. You can’t leave it alone until it’s done. And that generally means I’m in on the doing it.”

  “You do work here, Conrad.”

  “I do everything but wipe the twins’ ass,” Conrad said, “and I ain’t abou
t to add to my job description ass-wiping or climbing up there on that bolt-rattling sonofabitch to paint it.”

  “Sonofabitch,” both heads said.

  “Very well,” Frost said. “I’ll paint it myself.”

  “He’ll paint it,” one head said.

  “It’s gonna rain again anyhow,” Conrad said.

  “Rain,” the other head said.

  Frost turned and looked at Double Buckwheat. He smiled. “Do you think you boys could go somewhere else to stand? And maybe you could wash your hair.”

  One of the Buckwheats said, “Packin’ it in,” and off they went.

  “I think the rain is finished for the next day or two,” Frost said, “and if I can get it painted, the sun’s hot enough it’ll dry out all right before this weekend’s show.”

  “What makes you think the rain is over with?” Conrad said.

  “It’s stopped.”

  “Oh, good. You’re a regular weatherman.”

  “What makes you think it’ll continue? Huh?”

  “Hey, you win. Just as long as I don’t paint it.” Conrad peeled back his ugly lips, showed his teeth, tipped his hat, and went off on all fours.

  “What do you think, Bill?”

  “Mr. Frost, I ain’t got a clue.”

  “Would you help me paint it?”

  It wasn’t something Bill looked forward to, but he felt he was in no position to quarrel.

  “Sure.”

  Frost went into town and came back with lots of green paint and a sackful of brushes. By midday the dampness had burned off and the whirligig was dry and receptive to paint.

  Frost enlisted the help of a couple of others but as the day progressed, like vapor, they disappeared, leaving brushes and cans in whirligig buckets. Complaints of old ailments kept popping up. One of the workers, whose only handicap was his lack of hygiene, was not missed. There had been just enough wind up there to blow his armpit aroma about, and by the time the man climbed down with some minor excuse, Bill and Frost were glad to see him go. Bill felt as if he had been wrestling a stink demon all day, and was about worn out from it.

  Even though a certain amount of climbing was to be expected, mostly they rode about on the rails and in the cars by having one of the pinheads pull the switch. The problem was making the pinhead not pull the switch, and after half a day the pinhead wandered off and was last seen rubbing his ass out by the river.