A Pair of Aces

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Riley didn't look at me.

  Albert grinned at Riley. "We'll have a whiskey, Riley. Set us up a bottle."

  "I don't serve niggers. Ain't never. Ain't going to."

  Albert whipped the Springfield around and fired. The shot hit the sign that said: WE DON'T SERVE NIGGERS, FREED OR OTHERWISE, and knocked it off the wall.

  The crowd found places under tables and Riley turned several shades of white, including one that matched Texas Jack's belly.

  Riley swallowed, turned, got a bottle and two glasses, put them on the bar, and stepped back.

  "No, you pour, Riley," Albert said. "In fact, get you a glass and have one with us."

  Riley's face did all manner of tricks, but he got another glass and put it on the bar. Albert went over to the bar and motioned to me. Riley poured us all a drink:

  I needed that shot of whiskey like I needed a railroad spike in the head, but I drank it. Albert lifted his with Riley, making sure it went down about the same time as the barkeep's.

  "Now wasn't that good?" Albert said. "Me and my old friend, Riley, taking a drink together. We'll do it again, won't we?"

  Riley's lip jumped a little.

  "Well, it's been fun, but we got to go shoot us some boys," Albert said. He went down the bar, got the Mex's gun, put it in his belt.

  We backed out of the bar and through the bat wings, stood out on the boardwalk looking at the storm and the street. Across the way I could see Sled Driver. He'd given the message and got out of there. He was leaning against a building looking at us. I reckon he wanted to see how it all came out and still be a distance from it. When he seen I was looking at him, he gave me a little wave from the hip, like maybe I ought to be glad to see him.

  Why not? He did help me out of the mud. I waved back.

  "Well," said Albert, "it's going to take the edge off things if we have to go back in there and ask where the church is."

  "I know where it is," I said.

  We didn't talk as we walked down the boardwalk. In fact, it was about all I could do to stand. I felt like someone was building a brush fire inside me.

  Across the way, pacing us step for step, was Sled Driver. Once I looked back and seen that the crowd from the saloon was following us.

  Albert pulled the Mexican's pistol out of his belt and shot at the boardwalk in front of them a few times, and they disappeared down it, and into the saloon like rabbits being chased by a hound.

  "They just like to watch," Albert said. "They ain't so much for getting shot at."

  "Me neither," I said.

  We passed the sled with the horseless carriage on it. The mules had been taken away, but the sheriff was still there, though someone had gone to the effort to set him in the seat of his rig. His head was slumped, and he just looked like he was resting in the rain.

  By the time we come to the end of the boardwalk and the overhang, there wasn't nothing but rain and wind and darkness, and that big yellow lightning cutting now and then, and once when it flashed bright we saw the church.

  We were almost on top of it. It was small with a cross on the steeple, shutter doors at the top, and a white picket fence around it. At the gate, holding two pistols, was a man.

  Albert pushed me away with his elbow, out of the line of them pistols, and the Springfield fell off his shoulder and into his hands, neat as you please, and he fired.

  The shot hit the man in the head, and the head went to pieces, like a sack full of straw. It caught on the wind and was whirled away.

  The headless man did not fall.

  We eased over there, and seen what we should have known. It was Wild Bill Hickok. Billy Bob had tricked us. We had announced ourselves and come into pistol range.

  The shutters at the top of the church flung open, and there was Blue Hat. I seen him good in the lightning flash, just before everything went dark, and in that instant he fired, and I jerked my pistol up and fired at where I thought he was.

  Blue Hat's shot was a good one. It hit Albert in the shoulder and he dropped the Springfield and went to his knees with a groan.

  When lightning flashed again, I seen that I had missed Blue Hat. I probably hadn't even hit the church.

  I tried to fire again, but before I could, Albert had pulled that Mex's pistol and took a shot.

  Blue Hat's head popped back, his hat tossed off, then he rocked forward out the window, his pants legs catching on the sill, keeping him hanging until they ripped and he dropped on his head with a sound like a washer-woman slapping out wet laundry on a rock.

  The wide, double doors were kicked open then, and there was Billy Bob, looking just like one of them jaspers in a dime novel. He had a pistol in either hand and he was blazing.

  Albert had just got back on his feet, and now he was hit a bunch of times. He went backwards, dancing on one foot before he fell in the mud. As he fell, the pistol flew out of his hand and hit me in the side of the head.

  I did a little crawfish shuffle, and it was like that lick woke me up, made me crazy.

  When lightning flashed again and I seen Billy Bob, I yelled, "Wild Bill," and jerked a shot at him.

  Then things went dark again. I stood there with my pistol pointing it where he had been, waiting, and when there was another flash, I seen him. He was lying on the ground. Somehow, I'd hit him.

  He got up on his knees and started screaming at me, something about the head of his father and death to all niggers.

  Then, before it could go dark again, there came a cut of lightning so thick and long, it was darn near bright as high noon.

  I shot at him again.

  And missed.

  But he didn't.

  He fired twice, and had he not been hurt, I don't figure they'd have been wounds but kill hits. One shot tore my right shoulder and the other hit me low and in the left side. I sort of melted to the ground.

  That long chain of lightning finally played out, and while it was dark, I wallowed around in the mud, trying to get turned back toward the church, and trying to find my pistol or the one Albert had tossed.

  Then there was lightning again.

  Billy Bob wobbled to his feet, staggered for the gate. He was coming to finish me at close range. It seemed just as well to me right then. I hurt something awful.

  The storm turned wilder and the lightning did like before, only really noisy this time, sizzling like bacon in a hot pan, and it was so bright it hurt my eyes.

  And then there was someone beside Billy Bob. I didn't see where he came from, probably out of the woods and leaped the gate, but I thought at first it was a man in a buffalo coat. But it was Rot Toe.

  Rot Toe hooted and slapped his chest with both hands, stretching tall as he could. Billy Bob stepped back, shot the ape in the chest.

  Rot Toe didn't even slow down. He ran at Billy Bob and grabbed him in a hug, pinning Billy Bob's arms and pistols to his sides.

  Finally the light went away, and it was dark for some time before it flashed again, and now it came in short bursts, one right after the other.

  Rot Toe had Billy Bob by the back of the collar now, and was dragging him. He reached the vine-covered latticework beside the door and started up it, dragging Billy Bob with him.

  Wild Bill Daniels still had his pistols, and he was trying to turn and get a shot at Rot To but the way the ape was holding him, he couldn't get twisted for it.

  When the ape had him halfway up the church, Billy Bob finally managed to get turned enough to shoot Rot Toe in the foot.

  Rot Toe went wild, scuttled on up the latticework, some of it cracking beneath him, then he jumped for the open loft doors, hit with one foot on the sill, and caught the roof with his other hand. He never let go of Billy Bob with the other, and Billy Bob never let go of them damn pistols.

  Rot Toe swung hard and up onto the roof, cranking Billy Bob up after him. When Billy Bob's boots touched the roof, he tried to get them under him, but he couldn't. Rot Toe, using one arm and his feet, started climbing the steeple.

  Th
ey reached the top, and hanging by one hand to the cross, Rot Toe began to flap Billy Bob against the steeple with all his might, screeching all the while. The wind was so high, I reckoned it would blow them off, but Rot Toe held.

  The sky got full of lightning again, that long-lasting, sizzling kind, and the wind howled louder than Rot Toe could screech.

  Billy Bob's head slipped down inside his shirt, and it looked like he was going to drop out of it. I could just see the top of his head and his eyes.

  Trying for a shot, Billy Bob arched his back against the steeple, pressed the soles of his boots against it, and pointed his pistols over his shoulders.

  They clicked empty.

  Billy Bob cussed.

  And a long, ugly streak of lightning reached out of the sky and hit those pistols, turned them silver, lit up Rot Toe and Billy Bob bright as a harvest moon.

  Then it was over. The smoking meat that had been Rot Toe and Billy Bob fell to the churchyard.

  That was all for Wild Bill Daniels and Rot Toe the wrestling chimpanzee, and when I closed my feverish eyelids and heard the sound of thunder in my head, smelled the sulfur of lightning, I reckoned that it was all for me too.

  CHAPTER 8

  I reckoned wrong.

  I wasn't dead, just wished I was.

  "You still alive?" It was Sled Driver.

  "I think so," I said. "What about Albert?"

  "I don't know," Sled Driver said. "He didn't get hit in the head this time."

  He dropped me back in the mud. A moment later he was back.

  "Sucker's still alive," he said. "Toughest damn nigger I ever seen. And you ain't so bad yourself, boy."

  Things got sort of hazy after that, but what pretty much happened was Sled Driver got us out of the rain and someone did some doctoring on us, and neither of us went belly up.

  And the crowd didn't hold no grudge. Them vultures had them a new hero to suck after.

  Me.

  Didn't make no never mind that I hadn't killed Billy Bob or Blue Hat, it was enough I'd outdrawn them—or that's the way Sled Driver told it. He'd been lying on his belly across the way and said he'd seen it all. I reckon he had his face down in the mud most of the time hiding from hot lead, but what the hell, he wanted to tell it that way, that was okay with me. Mud Creek liked its heroes, and right then I was just glad to be in out of the rain and patched up.

  Riley was even friendly. He came over next day and had me carried outside in a wicker chair and put up against the wall. They took my picture with that Mex's pistol, which I'd never used, then they took pictures of what was left of Billy Bob and Rot Toe, and the best looking of the group 'cause he wasn't burned up, Blue Hat. They even dragged old Jack over for a picture, then they took him out of there quick, as he wasn't smelling any better than before. Worse maybe.

  You see, that storm had gone on its way about the time Billy Bob died, and it had turned off sunny and hot. And the next day, the day they-took the pictures, it was even sunnier and hotter. It was darn near turning the mud to powder, and it was heating up Jack something awful. Well, you know what I mean.

  Some might say that it turning off clear that quick wasn't nothing more than East Texas weather, but I'd say that curse played its self out after it got what it came for. Billy Bob.

  Wasn't a whole lot of praise given Albert, as you might figure. They didn't even let him stay where I was staying, as it was for white folks. But they treated him good, and Albert said later that where he was didn't have near as many rats as you'd expect.

  Riley even went over and seen how he was doing and told him to get well soon. He didn't go as far as to ask him to have a drink with him or invite him to hang around the saloon when he was well, though. Riley had to cling to some standards, even if I was the hero of the hour and Albert, as Riley said, "belonged" to me.

  Isn't much more to tell. I just lived out the lie for about a week until I was over the pneumonia—which was why I'd had such a fever—and my wounds had healed a mite. When I could get around on a cane, I talked some townsfolk into going out to the garbage dump and bringing back the bodies of Rot Toe and Skinny. When Skinny started stinking the Magic Wagon up, and finally the town, they had had all they wanted of him and hauled him off to join the garbage.

  Billy Bob and Hickok—minus his head—they bothered to bury in the clearing where we'd had our show that day.

  I don't know what they done with Homer, Blue Hat, and Texas Jack, but I sort of figure on the garbage dump.

  I paid a grave digger some bottles of Cure-All to put Skinny and Rot Toe down next to Billy Bob, and I gave him some more to dig Billy Bob up so I could put all his dime novels in there with him. I also put in a couple of Billy Bob's spare pistols, and I made sure the books about Hickok were set on what was left of his chest.

  When Albert was healed up enough to travel, we got out of there, least another gunfighter come to town or Riley set me up against some fool with a pistol.

  Me and Albert never did go back to Mud Creek, but once we were back in East Texas doing our show—doing it without a wrestling chimpanzee and a shooting act—we heard that one night the town caught fire and burned slap to the ground. That seemed fair.

  Oh, I forgot to tell you. On the day Albert and me left Mud Creek, we stopped off at the graves as we went out. I made a cross out of those sideboards that had the Indian spirits in them, and I put it at the head of the mounds, dead center. On it I scratched deep with my pocketknife all their names, though I didn't know Skinny's real one, and wrote:

  HERE LIES A BUNCH OF FOLKS AND ONE CRITTER THAT LIVED OUT A DIME NOVEL.

  I don't know about you, but that seems about right to me.

  PREVIEW

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

  Acknowledgments are hereby given to all the drive-ins that have influenced this book. Among them The Lumber Jack, The River Road and The Apache, as well as a little sleaze drive-in that showed bad porno movies (perhaps a redundancy in terms, but these were really bad) across from the Baptist church in Turnertown, Texas.

  Also, all the movies I’ve seen at drive-ins, good or bad: horror movies, motorcycle flicks, women in chains, the whole nine yards. And though many of the incidents in this book are influenced by things that happened at these drive-ins, the influence only goes so far, and it should go without saying that nothing here is meant to represent any individual or specific drive-in theater. The Orbit is a creature of this writing creature’s imagination.

  THE DRIVE-IN

  (A B-Movie with Blood and Popcorn, Made in Texas)

  Fade-in/Prologue

  I’m writing now about the time before things got weird and there was high school to kiss off, college to plan, girls, parties and the All-Night Horror Show come Friday night at The Orbit Drive-in off I-45, the largest drive-in in Texas. The world, for that matter, though I doubt there are that many of them in, say, Yugoslavia.

  Think about it for a moment. Set your mind clear and see if you can imagine a drive-in so big it can hold four thousand automobiles. I mean, really think about it.

  Four thousand.

  On the way to The Orbit we often passed through little towns with fewer people listed on the population sign than that.

  And consider that each of those cars generally contained at least two people, often more—not counting the ones hiding in the trunks—and you’re talking a lot of cars and people.

  And once inside, can you imagine six monstrous drive-in screens, six stories high, with six different movies running simultaneously?

  Even if you can imagine all that, there’s no way, unless you’ve been there, that you can imagine what goes on inside come Friday night and the tickets are two bucks each and the cars file in for The All-Night Horror Show to witness six screens leaking buckets of blood and decibels of screams from dusk to dawn.

  Picture this, brethren:

  A cool, crisp summer night, the Texas stars shining down like rattlesnake eyes showing in a deep, d
ark wood. A line of cars like a tacky necklace trailing from the paybooth to the highway, stretching alongside it for a mile or better.

  Horns are honking.

  Children are shouting.

  Mosquitoes are buzzing.

  Willie Nelson is singing about blue eyes crying in the rain from a tape deck, competing with Hank Williams, Jr., Johnny Cash, ZZ Top, The Big Boys, The Cars and Country Bob and The Blood Farmers, groups and singers you can’t identify. And it all rolls together into a metal-velvet haze until it’s its own kind of music; the drive-in anthem, a chorus of cultural confusion.

  And say your car is about midway in line, and clear as your first good wet dream, standing tall, you can see The Orbit’s symbol—a big silver globe with a Saturn ring around it, spinning on a gradually tapering concrete pole jutting up to over a hundred feet above the concession stand; little blue and white fairy lights flittering out of it, alternating colors across your windshield. Blue. White. Blue. White.

  God Almighty, it’s a sight. Like being in the presence of The Lord of Razzle-Dazzle, The Dark Crown Prince of Blood and Mayhem and Cheap, Bad Popcorn. The All-Night Horror Show God, his own sweet self.

  You drive on into this Friday-night extravaganza, this Texas institution of higher partying, sex education and madness, and you see people dressed out in costume like it’s Halloween night (and it is Halloween night every Friday night at The Orbit), yelling, talking, cussing and generally raising hell.

  You park your car, go to the concession stand. Inside it’s decorated with old horror-movie posters, plastic skulls, rubber bats and false cobwebs. And there’s this thing called bloody corn that you can buy for a quarter more than the regular stuff, and it’s just popcorn with a little red food coloring poured over it. You buy some and a king-size Coke to go with it, maybe some peanuts and enough candy to send a hypoglycemic to the stars.

  Now you’re ready. The movies begin. B-string and basement-budget pictures. A lot of them made with little more than a Kodak, some spit and a prayer. And if you’ve watched enough of this stuff, you develop a taste for it, sort of like learning to like sauerkraut.