Waltz of Shadows

by Joe R. Lansdale

  I came up as he did, pivoted on my good leg and got my bad arm around his neck from behind, tried to choke him with it. He got his chin down and I couldn’t do what I wanted to do. It was like trying to squeeze the bone out of the leg of a rhinoceros.

  I brought the knife around and jabbed him in the side. He made a sound like a man straining to shit, swung his right elbow back and caught me in the side and made my legs buckle. But I hung on. I knew if I let go of him, he was going to be mad.

  I put my foot in the back of one of his knees and pushed, keeping my grip on his throat with my arm. His leg bent and he went down again, face first under the shallow water. I went under with him a little, then he arched his back and lifted me into the air, raised his head slowly. I was losing my grip on his throat. He had his fingers buried into the ball that had once been my wrist and he was squeezing so hard it was giving me hemorrhoids. I brought the knife around, over my forearm, yanked my forearm away, and jerked back with the knife.

  He twisted sideways and sent me backwards. I hit on my back in the water, got my good leg under me and rolled to my right, started climbing onto the bank, but it was too steep and too muddy for me to make it all the way. I turned on my back and held the knife cocked and ready.

  Snake had wobbled to his feet. He stood in the middle of the creek with a hand over his throat. Wet darkness seeped between his fingers. The final redness of the dying sun bled over his already bloody head, the deep wound I had made in his cheek. He staggered toward me, almost reached me, then went to his knees in the water. He was making a sound like a pig with slop in its nostrils. He heaved and spat blood and crawled through the water and got up on the bank beside me, and lay on his belly. I turned my head to look at him, and he turned to look at me. He went to an elbow and pushed over on his back and slid down the bank until his feet were in the water. He lay there and held his throat and made a rasping noise, worked his mouth like a guppy.

  Some part of me, a stupid part, felt sorry for the poor sonofabitch.

  I shivered with the wet cold. I closed my eyes for a moment, or maybe it was a week. When I opened them, someone was easing down the creek bank above me. That someone was using a shotgun to support himself. That someone laid the shotgun down and bent over me, said, “Bubba.”

  Arnold’s face seemed to be melting in front of me.

  “I thought you weren’t up to it,” I said.

  “I got bored,” Arnold said. “Besides, I couldn’t just leave it to you, little brother.”

  “I think he’s still alive,” I said.

  Arnolۀ="left">d took the pocket knife from my hand and closed it carefully, leaned forward and pushed it into my pocket. He got the shotgun, rose up using it as a crutch, waded into the water and stood straddling Snake’s legs. He looked down at Snake’s face, watched his mouth open and close and bubble blood.

  Arnold tossed the shotgun on the bank beside me, wobbled as he unzipped his pants and set himself free. He took a short breath and waited. Eventually, he began to pee in Snake’s face.

  Snake turned his face only slightly. He didn’t have the strength to do any more than that.

  Arnold said to me. “Used to be, I could put out a fire.” Then to Snake: “Piss on you, anyway, Stinky. This is for Bubba.”

  Snake had quit moving. His hand was no longer pressed to his throat. It lay there loosely, blood streaming between the fingers, urine filling his dead eyes and his open mouth.

  Arnold shook the dew off his lily and packed up and zipped up. He made slow cautious steps out of the water and onto the bank. His pants around his hip were dark with blood. He took a deep breath. He said, “Now, let’s see if I can haul your big ass out of here, Bubba-son.”

  Excerpt

  If you enjoyed Waltz of Shadows, maybe you'll like Freezer Burn, too. It’s another novel by the inestimable Mr. Lansdale, now available as an e-book from Gere Donovan Press. It starts like this:

  Freezer Burn

  BILL ROBERTS DECIDED TO ROB THE FIRECRACKER STAND on account he didn’t have a job and not a nickel’s worth of money and his mother was dead and kind of freeze-dried in her bedroom.

  Well, not completely freeze-dried. Actually, she stunk, but she seemed to be holding her own, having only partially melted into the mattress, and if he kept the door closed and pointed a fan that way to blow back the smell, it wasn’t so bad.

  The firecracker stand was out on the highway, and it was the week of the Fourth of July, and the stand stayed open reasonably late every night, so after a couple nights watching, seeing lots of people out there buying firecrackers, Bill decided it was a good place to heist.

  He figured he ought to hit it kind of late in the night so there’d be plenty of money. He thought he might steal a few firecrackers too. He liked the teepee-shaped kind that spewed sparkles of colors all over the place, then finished by blowing up. Those were his favorites by far, and he thought if the stand had any, he might just take some, and if they didn’t have any, he thought some Black Cats and some Roman candles would do.

  The stand was almost directly across the highway from where he lived with his mother’s body, so he didn’t want to just walk over and rob it, and he didn’t want to drive his car over there either, ’cause he figured someone sitting there all day in the stand looking across the highway might have noticed it parked under the sweet gum tree next to the house, and if they did, and he drove over there and robbed the stand, sure as shit,ހ8 someone would remember his car. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure that one.

  Bill began to consider the angles.

  One angle he was sure of was, now that his mother had died at the age of about ten million, there wouldn’t be any more checks signed by her for cashing. He had practiced writing her name until he had worn out about a half dozen ballpoint pens, but never could feel confident about the way he put it down. The checks had started to stack up now, all the way to seven, and he didn’t think he could get away with forgery. His mother had relished a distinct style in penmanship that only a chicken scratching in cow shit might duplicate with authenticity.

  The old gal had been right enough and mean enough six months earlier, but one night, after watching Championship Wrestling, perhaps due to excitement over a particularly heated contest, or an overly vigorous inhalement of gummy bears, which she stuffed into her bony body as if they were the fruit of life, she had gone to bed and hadn’t gotten up again.

  Bill thought at first he ought to report it. Then it came to him that if he did he’d lose the house and wouldn’t have any place to live. His mother owned everything, and except for a bit she doled out to him on check-cashing day, providing him with a roof and food to eat, there was nothing else. She hadn’t left anything to him in her will. She had donated it all to some kind of veterinarian research thing so cats could be saved from bad livers or some such shit.

  Frankly, Bill didn’t give a flying damn about a bunch of cat livers or any part of a cat. The little bastards could die for all he cared. He’d certainly taken care of all his mother’s cats after her death. Unless the fuckers had sprouted gills, or had scissors to get out of those rock-weighted tow sacks he put them in, he figured they were resting pleasantly at the bottom of the Sabine River. No liver trouble, no problems whatsoever.

  No, he didn’t think he ought to call the authorities and tell them his mother was dead. It seemed wiser to turn up the air conditioner in her room and keep that fan blowing and be quiet. Only thing was, now the electricity bill had come twice, then a notice, and then it had been cut off, and with no juice Mama began to stink something furious. He put a big black trash bag over her feet, up to her waist, and pulled one over her head, tied them together where they met at the waist with one of her robe belts. But that didn’t hold the stink in worth a damn. He poured a whole bottle of Brut cologne over her, and that helped some. She smelled like a sixteen-year-old boy on his way to his first date.

  Finally the cologne fermented with Mama and gave off an even more intense aroma. But
eventually that passed. Between all the air-conditioning, the Baggies, the heat, and the stale air, the old gal semi-mummified. Not so much she didn’t still smell dead, but enough it didn’t run him out of the house anymore. It was now like a dog had died under the porch and was almost rotted away.

  Worse than the odor was the lack of electricity. All the food in the refrigerator had spoiled and he had to sit in the dark at night and smoke his mother’s cigarettes and look at a dead TV set and eat vegetables out of cans. There were plenty of cans, but he didn’t really want any of it. There were goddamn beets, and goddamn green beans, and goddamn corn, and goddamn new potatoes. Not a shred of meat, except for some Beenie-Weenies, and he’d jumped on those scamps two days after the old fter thelady bit the big one. So now it was nothing but canned vegetables, and they were running low and he’d foolishly pushed the beets back until the last, so now that’s all he had to eat. Beets. He wished he’d doled those boogers out.

  Sometimes he sat on the front porch with his can of vegetables and watched bugs fly across the light of the moon, and sometimes he just sat and watched people pull up at the stand across the highway and buy firecrackers. He started counting the people and figuring from the size of their sacks about how much they were spending, and that got him thinking about how much was back there in the stand each night before they closed and took it home.

  Each day, as it got closer to the Fourth of July, the traffic increased. He thought if he waited until the Fourth to hit the place that would be the biggest night, and he might clean up good. He thought maybe he did, he could pay the electric bill, phone, all the rest, and manage to pay the water bill before it got turned off. It was the one thing that he’d had enough cash to pay, and he’d kept it up, but he couldn’t afford it again. He was down to his last few dollars and he knew he’d miss that water. He liked to take baths, even if they were cold, and drink lots of water to keep from thinking about eating. He had paid the post office box bill for a year so he wouldn’t have to worry about the mailman coming around. Not that he did any more than stuff mail in the box out by the highway, but he figured the less people he could have near the house the better, just in case he was so used to Mama that others might be able to get a sniff of her all the way out to the mailbox.

  Since his mother didn’t have any family other than him that would have anything to do with her, and she didn’t have any friends, he figured he might could go on indefinitely, provided he learned to sign her checks or found someone willing to do it for a little cut of the money.

  ‘Course, that plan had limits. After a bit, Social Security might figure out his Mama wasn’t over a hundred years old and still living. But since she was in her eighties when she died, he thought he might could get ten years out of her checks before anyone got wise and came around to throw her an Oldest Person In America birthday party. By then, he’d have plans. Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, he might go off to Bolivia.

  The whole thing, trying to figure out what to do, made Bill’s head hurt. But one thing he was certain of, a good place to start was knocking over that firecracker stand.

  He thought of a couple fellas he knew might be up for the job, and though he wasn’t big on cutting them in, the idea of doing it alone didn’t appeal to him. Besides, they needed a getaway car, and Chaplin, one of the fellas he was thinking about, could hot-wire a waffle iron he took a mind to. And Fat Boy Wilson could drive a waffle iron if that’s all they had to drive.

  A few days later after all this considering, Bill drove into town on the last of his gas and found Chaplin and Fat Boy working on a car in Fat Boy’s garage. Chaplin was under it and having Fat Boy pass down wrenches.

  “How’s the boy?” Fat Boy asked Bill.

  “I’m fine. That Chaplin under there?”

  “Naw, I’m Raquel Welch,” Chaplin called from beneath the car, “and I’m givin’ the car a blow job. How you doin’?”

  “Okay.”

  “How’s your mom, Bill?”

  “Fine. Who’s Raquel Welch?”

  “One of the big-tittie actresses. She’s a little long in the tooth now, I reckon. Hell, she might be dead.”

  “That don’t matter none to Chaplin,” Fat Boy said. “Long as her titties ain’t rotted off and there’s some kind of hole in her.”

  They laughed. Bill said, “You boys want to do a little somethin’? You know, a little job.”

  “You don’t mean illegal, do you?” Fat Boy said. “I mean, I don’t do nothing illegal.”

  All three laughed, and Chaplin, who had been lying on a wheeled board, a creeper he called it, slid out from under the car and got a rag and wiped his hands.

  “Well,” Chaplin said, “it illegal?”

  “Yeah,” Bill said, “it’s some illegal.”

  “Long as it ain’t killin’ nobody,” Fat Boy said.

  “We’re gonna have to have guns, but that’s just for show.”

  “Man, I don’t know,” Fat Boy said. “I did that filling station over in Center with you, and you’re kind of nervous when there’s guns. Chaplin, he likes guns too much. I thought we might end up shootin’ someone. I don’t want to shoot no one. I mean, they’re gonna shoot me, I might shoot ’em, but I don’t want to shoot nobody I don’t have to.”

  “You don’t got to shoot anybody,” Bill said. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt. It’s just for show.”

  “I might shoot somebody, it’s worth the money,” Chaplin said.

  “It’s a firecracker stand,” Bill said. “I figure they take in several thousand a day. I’m sayin’ we split it three ways.”

  “How many guys run the stand?” Fat Boy asked.

  “One most of the time. Sometimes two. We hit it at closing time, take the money and run. Piece of cake. We’ll need to heist a car to do the job, ditch it somewhere, have our own waitin’. We wear masks. We don’t say much. We wave a pistol around. We get the money and we’re gone.”

  “Them firecracker stands,” Fat Boy said, “they’re out of the city, easy targets.”

  “It’d be a whole lot easier than a convenience store,” Chaplin said.

  “That’s right,” Bill said. “This one is across from my house. Easy pickin’s.”

  About the Author

  With more than thirty books to his credit, Joe R. Lansdale is the Champion Mojo Storyteller. He’s been called “an immense talent” by Booklist; “a born storyteller” by Robert Bloch; and The New York Times Book Review declares he has “a folklorist’s eye for telling detai怅l and a front-porch raconteur’s sense of pace.”

  He’s won umpty-ump awards, including sixteen Bram Stoker Awards, the Grand Master Award from the World Horror Convention, a British Fantasy Award, the American Mystery Award, the Horror Critics Award, the Grinzane Cavour Prize for Literature, the “Shot in the Dark” International Crime Writer’s Award, the Golden Lion Award, the Booklist Editor’s Award, the Critic’s Choice Award, and a New York Times Notable Book Award. He’s got the most decorated mantle in all of Nacogdoches!

  Lansdale lives in Nacogdoches, Texas, with his wife, Karen, writer and editor.

  Find him online at www.JoeRLansdale.com.

  Other Books by Joe R. Lansdale

  “Hap Collins and Leonard Pine” mysteries

  Savage Season (1990)

  Mucho Mojo (1994)

  Two-Bear Mambo (1995)

  Bad Chili (1997)

  Rumble Tumble (1998)

  Veil’s Visit (1999)

  Captains Outrageous (2001)

  Vanilla Ride (2009)

  Hyenas (a novella) (2011)

  Devil Red (2011)

  Blue to the Bone (TBD)

  The “Drive-In” series

  The Drive-In: A “B” Movie with Blood and Popcorn, Made in Texas (1988)

  The Drive-In 2: Not Just One of Them Sequels (1989)

  The Drive-In: A Double-Feature (1997, omnibus)

  The Drive-In: The Bus Tour (2005) (limited edition)

  The “Ned the Sea
l” trilogy

  Zeppelins West (2001)

  Flaming London (2006)

  Flaming Zeppelins: The Adventures of Ned the Seal (2010)

  The Sky Done Ripped (TBD)

  Other novels

  Act of Love (1980)

  Texas Night Riders (1983) (as Ray Slater)

  Dead in the West (1986) (written in 1980)

  Magic Wagon (1986)

  The Nightrunners (1987)

  Cold in July (1989)

  Tarzan: the Lost Adventure (1995) (with Edgar Rice Burroughs)

  The Boar (1998)

  Freezer Burn (1999)

  Waltz of Shadows (1999)

  Something Lumber This Way Comes (1999) (Children’s book)

  The Big Blow (2000)

  Blood Dance (2000)

  The Bottoms (2000)

  A Fine Dark Line (2002)

  Sunset and Sawdust (2004)

  Lost Echoes (2007)

  Leather Maiden (2008)

  Under the Warrior Sun (2010)

  …And that’s not counting the pseudonymous novels, the short stories, the chapbooks, anthologies, graphic novels, comic books and all the rest.

  Get the full story at www.JoeRLansdale.com.

  Copyright

  Waltz of Shadows was first published by Subterranean Press in 1999.

  This digital pause (v1.0) was published in 2011 by Gere Donovan Press.

  If you downloaded this book from a filesharing network, either individually or as part of a larger torrent, the author has received no compensation. Please consider purchasing a legitimate copy—they are reasonably priced, and available from all major outlets. Your author thanks you.

  Copyright © 1999 by Joe R. Lansdale.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.