The Best of Joe R. Lansdale

by Joe R. Lansdale

  “You get in there with me,” he said, “and I’ll take that shower.”

  “You silly thing,” she said, and pulled his nightgown down and stood and removed her plastic gloves and dropped them in the trash can beside his bed.

  “Why don’t you pull on it a little,” Elvis said.

  “You ought to be ashamed,” the nurse said, but she smiled when she said it.

  She left the room door open after she left. This concerned Elvis a little, but he felt his bed was at such an angle no one could look in, and if they did, tough luck. He wasn’t going to look a gift hard-on in the pee-hole. He pulled the sheet over him and pushed his hands beneath the sheets and got his gown pulled up over his belly. He took hold of his snake and began to choke it with one hand, running his thumb over the pus-filled bump. With his other hand, he fondled his balls. He thought of Priscilla and the pretty black nurse and Bull’s daughter and even the blue-haired fat lady with ELVIS tattooed on her butt, and he stroked harder and faster, and goddamn but he got stiffer and stiffer, and the bump on his cock gave up its load first, exploded hot pus down his thighs, and then his balls, which he thought forever empty, filled up with juice and electricity, and finally he threw the switch. The dam broke and the juice flew. He heard himself scream happily and felt hot wetness jetting down his legs, splattering as far as his big toes.

  “Oh God,” he said softly. “I like that. I like that.”

  He closed his eyes and slept. And for the first time in a long time, not fitfully.

  Lunchtime. The Shady Grove lunch room.

  Elvis sat with a plate of steamed carrots and broccoli and flaky roast beef in front of him. A dry roll, a pat of butter and a short glass of milk soldiered on the side. It was not inspiring.

  Next to him, The Blue Yodeler was stuffing a carrot up her nose while she expounded on the sins of God, the Heavenly Father, for knocking up that nice Mary in her sleep, slipping up her ungreased poontang while she snored, and — bless her little heart — not even knowing it, or getting a clit throb from it, but waking up with a belly full of baby and no memory of action.

  Elvis had heard it all before. It used to offend him, this talk of God as rapist, but he’d heard it so much now he didn’t care. She rattled on.

  Across the way, an old man who wore a black mask and sometimes a white stetson, known to residents and staff alike as Kemosabe, snapped one of his two capless cap pistols at the floor and called for an invisible Tonto to bend over so he could drive him home.

  At the far end of the table, Dillinger was talking about how much whisky he used to drink, and how many cigars he used to smoke before he got his dick cut off at the stump and split so he could become a she and hide out as a woman. Now she said she no longer thought of banks and machine guns, women and fine cigars. She now thought about spots on dishes, the colors of curtains and drapes as coordinated with carpets and walls.

  Even as the depression of his surroundings settled over him again, Elvis deliberated last night, and glanced down the length of the table at Jack (Mr. Kennedy) who headed its far end. He saw the old man was looking at him, as if they shared a secret. Elvis’s ill mood dropped a notch; a real mystery was at work here, and come nightfall, he was going to investigate.

  Swing the Shady Grove Convalescent Home’s side of the Earth away from the sun again, and swing the moon in close and blue again. Blow some gauzy clouds across the nasty, black sky. Now ease on into three A.M.

  Elvis awoke with a start and turned his head toward the intrusion. Jack stood next to the bed looking down at him. Jack was wearing a suit coat over his nightgown and he had on thick glasses. He said, “Sebastian. It’s loose.”

  Elvis collected his thoughts, pasted them together into a not-too-scattered collage. “What’s loose?”

  “It,” said Jack. “Listen.”

  Elvis listened. Out in the hall he heard the scuttling sound of the night before. Tonight, it reminded him of great locust wings beating frantically inside a small cardboard box, the tips of them scratching at the cardboard, cutting it, ripping it apart.

  “Jesus Christ, what is it?” Elvis said.

  “I thought it was Lyndon Johnson, but it isn’t. I’ve come across new evidence that suggests another assassin.”

  “Assassin?”

  Jack cocked an ear. The sound had gone away, moved distant, then ceased.

  “It’s got another target tonight,” said Jack. “Come on. I want to show you something. I don’t think it’s safe if you go back to sleep.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Elvis said. “Tell the administrators.”

  “The suits and the white starches,” Jack said. “No thanks. I trusted them back when I was in Dallas, and look where that got my brain and me. I’m thinking with sand here, maybe picking up a few waves from my brain. Someday, who’s to say they won’t just disconnect the battery at the White House?”

  “That’s something to worry about, all right,” Elvis said.

  “Listen here,” Jack said. “I know you’re Elvis, and there were rumors, you know…about how you hated me, but I’ve thought it over. You hated me, you could have finished me the other night. All I want from you is to look me in the eye and assure me you had nothing to do with that day in Dallas, and that you never knew Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby.”

  Elvis stared at him as sincerely as possible. “I had nothing to do with Dallas, and I knew neither Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby.”

  “Good,” said Jack. “May I call you Elvis instead of Sebastian?”

  “You may.”

  “Excellent. You wear glasses to read?”

  “I wear glasses when I really want to see,” Elvis said.

  “Get ‘em and come on.”

  Elvis swung his walker along easily, not feeling as if he needed it too much tonight. He was excited. Jack was a nut, and maybe he himself was nuts, but there was an adventure going on.

  They came to the hall restroom. The one reserved for male visitors. “In here,” Jack said.

  “Now wait a minute,” Elvis said. “You’re not going to get me in there and try and play with my pecker, are you?”

  Jack stared at him. “Man, I made love to Jackie and Marilyn and a ton of others, and you think I want to play with your nasty ole dick?”

  “Good point,” said Elvis.

  They went into the restroom. It was large, with several stalls and urinals.

  “Over here,” said Jack. He went over to one of the stalls and pushed open the door and stood back by the commode to make room for Elvis’s walker. Elvis eased inside and looked at what Jack was now pointing to.

  Graffiti.

  “That’s it?” Elvis said. “We’re investigating a scuttling in the hall, trying to discover who attacked you last night, and you bring me in here to show me stick pictures on the shit house wall?”

  “Look close,” Jack said.

  Elvis leaned forward. His eyes weren’t what they used to be, and his glasses probably needed to be upgraded, but he could see that instead of writing, the graffiti was a series of simple pictorials.

  A thrill, like a shot of good booze, ran through Elvis. He had once been a fanatic reader of ancient and esoteric lore, like The Egyptian Book of the Dead and The Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft, and straight away he recognized what he was staring at. “Egyptian hieroglyphics,” he said.

  “Right-a-reen-O,” Jack said. “Hey, you’re not as stupid as some folks made you out.”

  “Thanks,” Elvis said.

  Jack reached into his suit coat pocket and took out a folded piece of paper and unfolded it. He pressed it to the wall. Elvis saw that it was covered with the same sort of figures that were on the wall of the stall.

  “I copied this down yesterday. I came in here to shit because they hadn’t cleaned up my bathroom. I saw this on the wall, went back to my room and looked it up in my books and wrote it all down. The top line translates something like: Pharaoh gobbles donkey goober. And the bottom line is: Cleopatra does the dirty.
”

  “What?”

  “Well, pretty much,” Jack said.

  Elvis was mystified. “All right,” he said. “One of the nuts here, present company excluded, thinks he’s Tutankhamun or something, and he writes on the wall in hieroglyphics. So what? I mean, what’s the connection? Why are we hanging out in a toilet?”

  “I don’t know how they connect exactly,” Jack said. “Not yet. But this… thing, it caught me asleep last night, and I came awake just in time to…well, he had me on the floor and had his mouth over my asshole.”

  “A shit eater?” Elvis said.

  “I don’t think so,” Jack said. “He was after my soul. You can get that out of any of the major orifices in a person’s body. I’ve read about it.”

  “Where?” Elvis asked. “Hustler?”

  “The Everyday Man or Woman’s Book of the Soul by David Webb. It has some pretty good movie reviews about stolen soul movies in the back, too.”

  “Oh, that sounds trustworthy,” Elvis said.

  They went back to Jack’s room and sat on his bed and looked through his many books on astrology, the Kennedy assassination, and a number of esoteric tomes, including the philosophy book, The Everyday Man or Woman’s Book of the Soul.

  Elvis found that book fascinating in particular; it indicated that not only did humans have a soul, but that the soul could be stolen, and there was a section concerning vampires and ghouls and incubi and succubi, as well as related soul suckers. Bottom line was, one of those dudes was around, you had to watch your holes. Mouth hole. Nose hole. Asshole. If you were a woman, you needed to watch a different hole. Dick pee-holes and ear holes — male or female — didn’t matter. The soul didn’t hang out there. They weren’t considered major orifices for some reason.

  In the back of the book was a list of items, related and not related to the book, that you could buy. Little plastic pyramids. Hats you could wear while channeling. Subliminal tapes that would help you learn Arabic. Postage was paid.

  “Every kind of soul eater is in that book except politicians and science fiction fans,” Jack said. “And I think that’s what we got here in Shady Grove. A soul eater. Turn to the Egyptian section.”

  Elvis did. The chapter was prefaced by a movie still from The Ten Commandments with Yul Brynner playing Pharaoh. He was standing up in his chariot looking serious, which seemed a fair enough expression, considering the Red Sea, which had been parted by Moses, was about to come back together and drown him and his army.

  Elvis read the article slowly while Jack heated water with his plug-in heater and made cups of instant coffee. “I get my niece to smuggle this stuff in,” said Jack. “Or she claims to be my niece. She’s a black woman. I never saw her before I was shot that day in Dallas and they took my brain out. She’s part of the new identity they’ve given me. She’s got a great ass.”

  “Damn,” said Elvis. “What it says here, is that you can bury some dude, and if he gets the right tanna leaves and spells said over him and such bullshit, he can come back to life some thousands of years later, and to stay alive, he has to suck on the souls of the living, and that if the souls are small, his life force doesn’t last long. Small. What’s that mean?”

  “Read on… No, never mind, I’ll tell you.” Jack handed Elvis his cup of coffee and sat down on the bed next to him. “Before I do, want a Ding Dong? Not mine. The chocolate kind. Well, I guess mine is chocolate, now that I’ve been dyed.”

  “You got Ding Dongs?” Elvis asked.

  “Couple of PayDays and Baby Ruth too,” Jack said. “Which will it be? Let’s get decadent.”

  Elvis licked his lips. “I’ll have a Ding Dong.”

  While Elvis savored the Ding Dong, gumming it sloppily, sipping his coffee between bites, Jack, coffee cup balanced on his knee, a Baby Ruth in one mitt, expounded.

  “Small souls means those without much fire for life,” Jack said. “You know a place like that?”

  “If souls were fires,” Elvis said, “they couldn’t burn much lower without being out than here. Only thing we got going in this joint is the pilot light.”

  “Exactamundo,” Jack said. “What we got here in Shady Grove is an Egyptian soul sucker of some sort. A mummy hiding out, coming in here to feed on the sleeping. It’s perfect, you see. The souls are little, and don’t provide him with much. If this thing comes back two or three times in a row to wrap his lips around some elder’s asshole, that elder is going to die pretty soon, and who’s the wiser? Our mummy may not be getting much energy out of this, way he would with big souls, but the prey is easy. A mummy couldn’t be too strong, really. Mostly just husk. But we’re pretty much that way ourselves. We’re not too far off being mummies.”

  “And with new people coming in all the time,” Elvis said, “he can keep this up forever, this soul robbing.”

  “That’s right. Because that’s what we’re brought here for. To get us out of the way until we die. And the ones don’t die first of disease, or just plain old age, he gets.”

  Elvis considered all that. “That’s why he doesn’t bother the nurses and aides and administrators? He can go unsuspected.”

  “That, and they’re not asleep. He has to get you when you’re sleeping or unconscious.”

  “All right, but the thing throws me, Jack, is how does an ancient Egyptian end up in an East Texas rest home, and why is he writing on shit house walls?”

  “He went to take a crap, got bored, and wrote on the wall. He probably wrote on pyramid walls, centuries ago.”

  “What would he crap?” Elvis said. “It’s not like he’d eat, is it?”

  “He eats souls,” Jack said, “so I assume, he craps soul residue. And what that means to me is, you die by his mouth, you don’t go to the other side, or wherever souls go. He digests the souls ‘til they don’t exist anymore —”

  “And you’re just so much toilet water decoration,” Elvis said.

  “That’s the way I’ve got it worked out,” Jack said. “He’s just like anyone else when he wants to take a dump. He likes a nice clean place with a flush. They didn’t have that in his time, and I’m sure he finds it handy. The writing on the walls is just habit. Maybe, to him, Pharaoh and Cleopatra were just yesterday.”

  Elvis finished off the Ding Dong and sipped his coffee. He felt a rush from the sugar and he loved it. He wanted to ask Jack for the PayDay he had mentioned, but restrained himself. Sweets, fried foods, late nights and drugs had been the beginning of his original downhill spiral. He had to keep himself collected this time. He had to be ready to battle the Egyptian soul-sucking menace.

  Soul-sucking menace?

  God. He was really bored. It was time for him to go back to his room and to bed so he could shit on himself, get back to normal.

  But Jesus and Ra, this was different from what had been going on up until now! It might all be bullshit, but considering what was going on in his life right now, it was absorbing bullshit. It might be worth playing the game to the hilt, even if he was playing it with a black guy who thought he was John F. Kennedy and believed an Egyptian mummy was stalking the corridors of Shady Grove Convalescent Home, writing graffiti on toilet stalls, sucking people’s souls out through their assholes, digesting them, and crapping them down the visitors’ toilet.

  Suddenly, Elvis was pulled out of his considerations. There came from the hall the noise again. The sound that each time he heard it reminded him of something different. This time it was dried corn husks being rattled in a high wind. He felt goose bumps travel up his spine and the hairs on the back of his neck and arms stood up. He leaned forward and put his hands on his walker and pulled himself upright.

  “Don’t go in the hall,” Jack said.

  “I’m not asleep.”

  “That doesn’t mean it won’t hurt you.

  “It my ass, there isn’t any mummy from Egypt.”

  “Nice knowing you, Elvis.”

  Elvis inched the walker forward. He was halfway to the open door when he spied the
figure in the hallway.

  As the thing came even with the doorway, the hall lights went dim and sputtered. Twisting about the apparition, like pet crows, were flutters of shadows. The thing walked and stumbled, shuffled and flowed. Its legs moved like Elvis’ own, meaning not too good, and yet, there was something about its locomotion that was impossible to identify. Stiff, but ghostly smooth. It was dressed in nasty looking jeans, a black shirt and a black cowboy hat that came down so low it covered where the thing’s eyebrows should be. It wore large cowboy boots with the toes curled up, and there came from the thing a kind of mixed-stench: a compost pile of mud, rotting leaves, resin, spoiled fruit, dry dust and gassy sewage.

  Elvis found that he couldn’t scoot ahead another inch. He froze. The thing stopped and cautiously turned its head on its apple stem neck and looked at Elvis with empty eye sockets, revealing that it was, in fact, uglier than Lyndon Johnson.

  Surprisingly, Elvis found he was surging forward as if on a zooming camera dolly, and that he was plunging into the thing’s right eye socket, which swelled speedily to the dimensions of a vast canyon bottomed by blackness.

  Down Elvis went, spinning and spinning, and out of the emptiness rushed resin-scented memories of pyramids and boats on a river, hot, blue skies, and a great silver bus lashed hard by black rain, a crumbling bridge and a charge of dusky water and a gleam of silver. Then there was a darkness so caliginous it was beyond being called dark, and Elvis could feel and taste mud in his mouth and a sensation of claustrophobia beyond expression. And he could perceive the thing’s hunger, a hunger that prodded him like hot pins, and then —

  — there came a popping sound in rapid succession, and Elvis felt himself whirling even faster, spinning backwards out of that deep memory canyon of the dusty head, and now he stood once again within the framework of his walker, and the mummy — for Elvis no longer denied to himself that it was such — turned its head away and began to move again, to shuffle, to flow, to stumble, to glide, down the hall, its pet shadows screeching with rusty throats around its head. Pop! Pop! Pop!