The Best of Joe R. Lansdale

by Joe R. Lansdale

  “Lil” Arthur got the stick they kept by the door for just such an occasion, used it to roust the pigeons by poking at them. In the long run, it wouldn’t matter. They would fly as high as the roof, then gradually creep back down to roost. But the explosion of bird wings, their rise to the sky through the hole in the roof, lifted his spirits.

  His brother-in-law, Clement, rose up on an elbow from his pallet, and his wife, “Lil” Arthur’s sister Lucy, stirred and rolled over, stretched her arm across Clement’s chest, but didn’t wake up.

  “What you doin’, Arthur?” Clement whispered. “You don’t know a man’s got to sleep? I got work to do ‘morrow. Ain’t all of us sleep all day.”

  “Sleep then. And stay out of my sister. Lucy don’t need no kids now. We got a house full a folks.”

  “She my wife. We supposed to do that. And multiply.”

  “Then get your own place and multiply. We packed tight as turds here.”

  “You crazy, Arthur.”

  Arthur cocked the pigeon stick. “Lay down and shut up.”

  Clement lay down, and Arthur put the stick back and gathered up his pallet and went outside. He inspected the pallet for bird shit, found none, stretched out on the porch, and tried to sleep. He thought about getting his guitar, going back to the beach to strum it, but he was too tired for that. Too tired to do anything, too awake to sleep.

  His mother had told him time and again that when he was a baby, an old Negro lady with the second sight had picked up his little hand and said, “This child gonna eat his bread in many countries.”

  It was something that had always sustained him. But now, he began to wonder. Except for trying to leave Galveston by train once, falling asleep in the boxcar, only to discover it had been making circles in the train yard all night as supplies were unloaded, he’d had no adventures, and was still eating his bread in Galveston.

  All night he fought mosquitoes, the heat, and his own ambition. By morning he was exhausted.

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 10:20 A.M.

  Telegraphed Message from Washington, D.C., Weather Bureau, Central Office, to Issac Cline, Galveston, Texas, Weather Bureau:

  Disturbance center near Key West moving northwest. Vessels bound for Florida and Cuban ports should exercise caution. Storm likely to become dangerous.

  10:23 A.M.

  McBride awoke, fucked the redhead, sat up in bed, and cracked his knuckles, said, “I’m going to eat and train, Red. You have your ass here when I get back, and put it on the Sportin’ Club’s bill. And wash yourself, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Yes sir, Mr. McBride,” she said.

  McBride got up, poured water into a washbasin, washed his dick, under his arms, splashed water on his face. Then he sat at the dresser in front of the mirror and spent twenty minutes putting on the Chinaman’s remedy and combing his hair. As soon as he had it just right, he put on a cap.

  He got dressed in loose pants, a short-sleeved shirt, soft shoes, wrapped his knuckles with gauze, put a little notebook and pencil in his back pocket, then pulled on soft leather gloves. When the redhead wasn’t looking, he wrapped his revolver and razor in a washrag, stuffed them between his shirt and his stomach.

  Downstairs, making sure no one was about, he removed the rag containing his revolver and razor, stuck them into the drooping greenness of a potted plant, then went away.

  He strolled down the street to a café and ordered steak and eggs and lots of coffee. He ate with his gloves and hat on. He paid for the meal, but got a receipt.

  Comfortably full, he went out to train.

  He began at the docks. There were a number of men hard at work. They were loading bags of cottonseed onto a ship. He stood with his hands behind his back and watched. The scent of the sea was strong. The water lapped at the pilings enthusiastically, and the air was as heavy as a cotton sack.

  After a while, he strolled over to a large, bald man with arms and legs like plantation columns. The man wore faded overalls without a shirt, and his chest was as hairy as a bear’s ass. He had on heavy work boots with the sides burst out. McBride could see his bare feet through the openings. McBride hated a man that didn’t keep up his appearance, even when he was working. Pride was like a dog. You didn’t feed it regularly, it died.

  McBride said, “What’s your name?”

  The man, a bag of cottonseed under each arm, stopped and looked at him, taken aback. “Ketchum,” he said. “Warner Ketchum.”

  “Yeah,” McBride said. “Thought so. So, you’re the one.”

  The man glared at him. “One what?”

  The other men stopped working, turned to look.

  “I just wanted to see you,” McBride said. “Yeah, you fit the description. I just never thought there was a white man would stoop to such a thing. Fact is, hard to imagine any man stooping to such a thing.”

  “What are you talkin’ about, fella?”

  “Well, word is, Warner Ketchum that works at the dock has been known to suck a little nigger dick in his time.”

  Ketchum dropped the cottonseed bags. “Who the hell are you? Where you hear that?”

  McBride put his gloved hands behind his back and held them. “They say, on a good night, you can do more with a nigger’s dick than a cat can with a ball of twine.”

  The man was fuming. “You got me mixed up with somebody else, you Yankee-talkin’ sonofabitch.”

  “Naw, I ain’t got you mixed up. Your name’s Warner Ketchum. You look how you was described to me by the nigger whose stick you slicked.”

  Warner stepped forward with his right foot and swung a right punch so looped it looked like a sickle blade. McBride ducked it without removing his hands from behind his back, slipped inside and twisted his hips as he brought a right uppercut into Warner’s midsection.

  Warner’s air exploded and he wobbled back, and McBride was in again, a left hook to the ribs, a straight right to the solar plexus. Warner doubled and went to his knees.

  McBride leaned over and kissed him on the ear, said, “Tell me. Them nigger dicks taste like licorice?”

  Warner came up then, and he was wild. He threw a right, then a left. McBride bobbed beneath them. Warner kicked at him. McBride turned sideways, let the kick go by, unloaded a left hand that caught Warner on the jaw, followed it with a right that struck with a sound like the impact of an artillery shell.

  Warner dropped to one knee. McBride grabbed him by the head and swung his knee into Warner’s face, busting his nose all over the dock. Warner fell face forward, caught himself on his hands, almost got up. Then, very slowly, he collapsed, lay down, and didn’t move.

  McBride looked at the men who were watching him. He said, “He didn’t suck no nigger dicks. I made that up.” He got out his pad and pencil and wrote: Owed me. Price of one sparring partner, FIVE DOLLARS.

  He put the pad and pencil away. Got five dollars out of his wallet, folded it, put it in the man’s back pocket. He turned to the other men who stood staring at him as if he were one of Jesus’ miracles.

  “Frankly, I think you’re all a bunch of sorry assholes, and I think, one at a time, I can lick every goddamn one of you Southern white trash pieces of shit. Any takers?”

  “Not likely,” said a stocky man at the front of the crowd. “You’re a ringer.” He picked up a sack of cottonseed he had put down, started toward the ship. The other men did the same.

  McBride said, “Okay,” and walked away.

  He thought, maybe, on down the docks he might find another sparring partner.

  5:23 P.M.

  By the end of the day, near dark, McBride checked his notepad for expenses, saw the Sporting Club owed him forty-five dollars in sparring partners, and a new pair of gloves, as well as breakfast and dinner to come. He added money for a shoeshine. A clumsy sonofabitch had scuffed one of his shoes.

  He got the shoeshine and ate a steak, flexed his muscles as he arrived at the whorehouse. He felt loose still, like he could take on another two or three yokels.

&
nbsp; He went inside, got his goods out of the potted plant, and climbed the stairs.

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 6:00 P.M.

  Telegraphed Message from Washington, D.C., Weather Bureau, Central Office, to Issac Cline, Galveston, Texas, Weather Bureau:

  Storm center just northwest of Key West.

  7:30 P.M.

  “Lil” Arthur ran down to the Sporting Club that night and stood in front of it, his hands in his pants pockets. The wind was brisk, and the air was just plain sour.

  Saturday, he was going to fight a heavyweight crown contender, and though it would not be listed as an official bout, and McBride was just in it to pick up some money, “Lil” Arthur was glad to have the chance to fight a man who might fight for the championship someday. And if he could beat him, even if it didn’t affect McBride’s record, “Lil” Arthur knew he’d have that; he would have beaten a contender for the Heavyweight Championship of the World.

  It was a far cry from the Battle Royales he had first participated in. There was a time when he looked upon those degrading events with favor.

  He remembered his first Battle Royale. His friend Ernest had talked him into it. Once a month, sometimes more often, white “sporting men” liked to get a bunch of colored boys and men to come down to the club for a free-for-all. They’d put nine or ten of them in a ring, sometimes make them strip naked and wear Sambo masks. He’d done that once himself.

  While the coloreds fought, the whites would toss money and yell for them to kill one another. Sometimes they’d tie two coloreds together by the ankles, let them go at it. Blood flowed thick as molasses on flapjacks. Bones were broken. Muscles torn. For the whites, it was great fun, watching a couple of coons knock each other about.

  “Lil” Arthur found he was good at all that fighting, and even knocked Ernest out, effectively ending their friendship. He couldn’t help himself. He got in there, got the battling blood up, he would hit whoever came near him.

  He started boxing regularly, gained some skill. No more Battle Royales. He got a reputation with the colored boxers, and in time that spread to the whites.

  The Sporting Club, plumb out of new white contenders for their champion, Forrest Thomas, gave “Lil” Arthur twenty-five dollars to mix it up with their man, thinking a colored and a white would be a novelty, and the superiority of the white race would be proved in a match of skill and timing.

  Right before the fight, “Lil” Arthur said his prayers, and then considering he was going to be fighting in front of a bunch of angry, mean-spirited whites, and for the first time, white women — sporting women, but women — who wanted to see a black man knocked to jelly, he took gauze and wrapped his dick. He wrapped it so that it was as thick as a blackjack. He figured he’d give them white folks something to look at. The thing they feared the most. A black as coal stud nigger.

  He whipped Forrest Thomas like he was a redheaded stepchild; whipped him so badly, they stopped the fight so no one would see a colored man knock a white man out.

  Against their wishes, the Sporting Club was forced to hand the championship over to “Lil” Arthur John Johnson, and the fact that a colored now held the club’s precious boxing crown was like a chicken bone in the club’s throat. Primarily Beems’s throat. As the current president of the Sporting Club, the match had been Beems’s idea, and Forrest Thomas had been Beems’s man.

  Enter McBride. Beems, on the side, talked a couple of the Sporting Club’s more wealthy members into financing a fight. One where a true contender to the heavyweight crown would whip “Lil” Arthur and return the local championship to a white man, even if that white man relinquished the crown when he returned to Chicago, leaving it vacant. In that case, “Lil” Arthur was certain he’d never get another shot at the Sporting Club championship. They wanted him out, by hook or crook.

  “Lil” Arthur had never seen McBride. Didn’t know how he fought. He’d just heard he was as tough as stone and had balls like a brass monkey. He liked to think he was the same way. He didn’t intend to give the championship up. Saturday, he’d find out if he had to.

  9:00 P.M.

  The redhead, nursing a fat lip, two black eyes, and a bruise on her belly, rolled over gingerly and put her arm across McBride’s hairy chest. “You had enough?”

  “I’ll say when I’ve had enough.”

  “I was just thinking, I might go downstairs and get something to eat. Come back in a few minutes.”

  “You had time to eat before I got back. You didn’t eat, you just messed up. I’m paying for this. Or rather the Sporting Club is.”

  “An engine’s got to have coal, if you want that engine to go.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” The redhead reached up and ran her fingers through McBride’s hair.

  McBride reached across his chest and slapped the redhead. “Don’t touch my hair. Stay out of my hair. And shut up. I don’t care you want to fuck or not. I want to fuck, we fuck. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Listen here, I’m gonna take a shit. I get back, I want you to wash that goddamn nasty hole of yours. You think I like stickin’ my wick in that, it not being clean? You got to get clean.”

  “It’s so hot. I sweat. And you’re just gonna mess me up again.”

  “I don’t care. You wash that thing. I went around with my johnson like that, it’d fall off. I get a disease, girl, I’ll come back here, kick your ass so hard your butthole will swap places with your cunt.”

  “I ain’t got no disease, Mr. McBride.”

  “Good.”

  “Why you got to be so mean?” the redhead asked suddenly, then couldn’t believe it had come out of her mouth. She realized, not only would a remark like that anger McBride, but the question was stupid. It was like asking a chicken why it pecked shit. It just did. McBride was mean because he was, and that was that.

  But even as the redhead flinched, McBride turned philosophical. “It isn’t a matter of mean. It’s because I can do what I want, and others can’t. You got that, sister?”

  “Sure. I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

  “Someone can do to me what I do to them, then all right, that’s how it is. Isn’t a man, woman, or animal on Earth that’s worth a damn. You know that?”

  “Sure. You’re right.”

  “You bet I am. Only thing pure in this world is a baby. Human or animal, a baby is born hungry and innocent. It can’t do a thing for itself. Then it grows up and gets just like everyone else. A baby is all right until it’s about two. Then, it ought to just be smothered and save the world the room. My sister, she was all right till she was about two, then it wasn’t nothing but her wanting stuff and my mother giving it to her. Later on, Mama didn’t have nothing to do with her either, same as me. She got over two years old, she was just trouble. Like I was. Like everybody else is.”

  “Sure,” the redhead said.

  “Oh, shut up, you don’t know your ass from a pig track.”

  McBride got up and went to the john. He took his revolver and his wallet and his razor with him. He didn’t trust a whore — any woman for that matter — far as he could hurl one.

  While he was in the can trying out the new flush toilet, the redhead eased out of bed wearing only a sheet. She slipped out the door, went downstairs and outside, into the streets. She flagged down a man in a buggy, talked him into a ride, for a ride, then she was out of there, destination unimportant.

  9:49 P.M.

  Later, pissed at the redhead, McBride used the madam herself, blacked both her eyes when she suggested that a lot of sex before a fight might not be a good idea for an athlete.

  The madam, lying in bed with McBride’s muscular arm across her ample breasts, sighed and watched the glow of the gas streetlights play on the ceiling.

  Well, she thought, it’s a living.

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 10:35 A.M.

  Telegraphed Message from Washington, D.C., Weather Bureau, Central Office, to Issac Cline, Galveston, Texas, Weather Bureau:


  Storm warning. Galveston, Texas. Take precautions.

  Issac Cline, head of the Galveston Weather Bureau, sat at his desk on the third floor of the Levy Building and read the telegram. He went downstairs and outside for a look-see.

  The weather was certainly in a stormy mood, but it didn’t look like serious hurricane weather. He had been with the Weather Bureau for eight years, and he thought he ought to know a hurricane by now, and this wasn’t it. The sky wasn’t the right color.

  He walked until he got to the beach. By then the wind was picking up, and the sea was swelling. The clouds were like wads of duck down ripped from a pillow. He walked a little farther down the beach, found a turtle wrapped in seaweed, poked it with a stick. It was dead as a stone.

  Issac returned to the Levy Building, and by the time he made his way back, the wind had picked up considerably. He climbed the stairs to the roof. The roof barometer was dropping quickly, and the wind was serious. He revised his opinion on how much he knew about storms. He estimated the wind to be blowing at twenty miles an hour, and growing. He pushed against it, made his way to the weather pole, hoisted two flags. The top flag was actually a white pennant. It whipped in the wind like a gossip’s tongue. Anyone who saw it knew it meant the wind was coming from the northwest. Beneath it was a red flag with a black center; this flag meant the wind was coming ass over teakettle, and that a seriously violent storm was expected within hours.

  The air smelled dank and fishy. For a moment, Cline thought perhaps he had actually touched the dead turtle and brought its stink back with him. But no, it was the wind.

  At about this same time, the steamship Pensacola, commanded by Captain James Slater, left the port of Galveston from Pier 34, destination Pensacola, Florida.

  Slater had read the hurricane reports of the day before, and though the wind was picking up and was oddly steamy, the sky failed to show what he was watching for. A dusty, brick red color, a sure sign of a hurricane. He felt the whole Weather Bureau business was about as much guess and luck as it was anything else. He figured he could do that and be as accurate.