Bad Chili

by Joe R. Lansdale

  “Shut up. I got a headache. I’ll do the talkin’.”

  “That looks like a bite,” I said, nodding toward the wound on his arm.

  “Fox. I was campin’. Livin’ in the woods in Pierre’s Mercedes. I got out to take a piss. Fox came at me. Leaped at me. Bit me. I strangled it. I never seen one do like that before.”

  “It was rabid, Big Man. You’ve been bitten by a rabid fox.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. A rabid squirrel bit me, so I should know!”

  Big Man burst out laughing. “A rabid squirrel! What’s your game, Mr. Collins?”

  “Big Man, I don’t have the video or the notebook. Your job is over.”

  “It’s over when I say it’s over. And if you don’t have the video or the notebook, well, I’ll know for sure after we try out a few of these instruments. A corkscrew twisted into the knee, just above the knee joint. You wouldn’t believe—”

  “Yes, I would.”

  “Oh, no. Experiencing it is the only way to believe it. I’ve tried it on myself. It really hurts. Of course, I didn’t go as deep into my flesh as I’m going to go into yours. I’m going to screw it right into your leg and through the muscle and nerves and into the bone. Then I’m going to do your triceps tendons. Now there’s some pain, my man.”

  The house rattled. The rain slammed harder and harder.

  Big Man took the aspirin bottle and unscrewed it and shook several aspirin into his mouth. He picked up the glass of water, tried to sip it. He tossed it across the room, spat the aspirin in my lap.

  “I can’t swallow,” he said. “Hell of a cold.”

  “It’s the water. Hydrophobia. You have rabies, Big Man. You need a doctor. It may not be too late.”

  Big Man stood up violently, causing the chair he had been sitting in to fall backwards to the floor. “I do not have rabies. I startled a fox, that’s all. You’re not going to frighten me.”

  “I got bit by the squirrel, doctor told me a story about a boy got bit and died screaming in bed, gnashing his teeth. Finally his father smothered him. Whatever you do to me, it won’t be half of what’s going to happen to you. Call the doctor, Big Man. Get some help. This rabies stuff, it’s got you half out of your mind. Maybe more.”

  “Oh, you think you’re clever. Well, you aren’t. I’m gonna start with the coat hanger.” Big Man closed up the Swiss Army knife and jammed it in his pants pocket. He grabbed the straightened wire hanger off the chair. “What we’re gonna do is, I’m gonna pull down your pants, Collins, then I’m going to insert this up your asshole slowly, twisting, pushing, and you are gonna talk like a sonofabitch. You’re gonna—”

  The front door came open suddenly, and standing in the doorway, soaked to the skin, was Brett. Water was running out of her hair and into her eyes, and she was scared-looking and talking as the door came open. “Truck ran off in a ditch. I—”

  Then she saw Big Man.

  “Come on in, honey,” Big Man said. “You’re just in time to see me screw this up your lover’s ass. Maybe up the pee-hole in his dick. Fact is, that sounds better. I haven’t tried that.”

  Brett’s face went slack and her right hand smoothed the side of her thigh and dropped lower and took the hem of her dress. She lifted it, and I could see her panties, all wet and sticking to her like cobwebs, and I could see her beautiful legs. One of them had a belt around it with a holster strapped to it and a .38 in the holster. I had forgotten about that. She didn’t go anywhere without it anymore.

  She came up with the .38 and fired three times, so goddamn quick it was almost like one shot.

  Big Man looked down at his chest. Three small red spots appeared on his filthy T-shirt. He looked at Brett, said, “You’re first, split tail. Right up the cunt.”

  He stepped toward her, holding the coat hanger, which wobbled like a giant insect antennae. Brett fired twice more.

  Big Man paused, as if he had been strolling and decided not to cross at a certain traffic light, but to go the other way. He stepped back once, turned around, started walking toward the back door. He fell and grabbed the counter that separated the living room from the kitchen and held himself up. Brett fired again, and Big Man reached behind him, fanned at his spine like he was trying to swat a wasp.

  He kept his feet, went out the back door walking briskly, but not running.

  “Brett,” I said. “You all right?”

  “I guess so,” Brett said, stepping out of the doorway and into the house.

  “There’s pliers on the chair here. Get them, undo these coat hangers.”

  Brett got the pliers and started twisting my ankles and wrists free.

  “That must have been Big Man,” she said.

  “In the flesh,” I said. When I was free I rushed to the bedroom, came back with my shotgun, a flashlight, and my .38. I gave Brett the shotgun. “He comes back, cut down on him with this.”

  “You bet,” she said. I kissed her. Her lips trembled, and so did mine.

  I took my .38, went out the back way, into the rain and the dark and wind so stout it could have blown Jesus off the cross.

  There was no trail to follow in the blasting rain, but I went the path of least resistance into the woods. It was the way he would have gone, hit like he was. I found an animal trail and went along that, and once in the glow of my flashlight I saw blood on the leafy ground, being washing away by the rain. Fast and hard as it was raining, that meant Big Man was a very short space ahead of me.

  As I went, I heard limbs cracking under the stress of the wind, and the tops of trees nodded down and lashed above me like mad women wailing. I went along until the trees broke and there was a clearing where there had been a bit of forest fire, and next to the clearing was a dirt road, more of a trail really, and in the clearing was what had to be Pierre’s red Mercedes. It had been lashed by limbs and splattered with mud, which had dried so hard even the rain wasn’t knocking it off. The windshield was cracked in several places. It was easy to figure Big Man had been using it like a tank, driving down the wooded backroads and sometimes over no roads at all, trying to avoid the cops. Looking for me, trying to finish some mad mission made madder by the bite of a rabid animal.

  I looked around and didn’t see Big Man. I walked carefully around the Mercedes. On the other side the back door was open. I could see Big Man’s feet sticking out through the opening.

  I eased over there and looked in. Big Man lay on his back on the seat, looking at the roof with eyes wide open. He had the Swiss Army knife in his fist, and it was open to a small blade, and the blade was buried in his jugular. He had managed to start at the center of his throat and pull the blade all the way through the artery.

  Somewhere in the back of his jumbled brain maybe he believed what I said about the rabies. Or the .38 slugs were too much. Or he was just tired. It was hard to say, and it didn’t matter. He was dead. His blood ran down his neck and over his chest and puddled beneath his head on the leather seat, dripped off the side and onto the floorboard, where his jacket and dozens of candy-bar wrappers and soda cans lay.

  I put the .38 in my belt. I got hold of his feet and bent his legs and pushed him all the way inside and closed the door.

  I started back for the house and for Brett, ready to start yelling soon as I broke the woods, lest she shoot me with the shotgun.

  But the wind picked up and trees began to crack and fall. All around me they fell, and I tried to maintain the flashlight, but lost it. I was knocked to the ground, then the rain stopped and the wind stopped and the sky lightened, but when I crawled out from under a clutch of small limbs and looked upwards through the trees, the sky was green.

  Then there came a howl. I had heard it before, and my blood chilled.

  Tornado.

  I dropped to the ground in a little indentation and the trees began to whip, and directly to my right I could see an oak being pulled up by the roots. I tucked my face into the wet leaf mold and tried to become one with the earth, and all around came th
e howling and the lashing of rain, and there was a tugging at me, as if I might be pulled from the ground like a farmer jerking a turnip from the dirt, but I was low enough, and clinging to the earth like a goddamn lizard, and I held.

  And the great storm raged and screamed around me and Mixmastered the forest, filled my nostrils with leaf mold and soil, and still it churned, and still I held, and after what seemed like the proverbial eternity the wind died down and there was a gentle breeze and a light rain and the air was filled with the aroma of damp earth and raw tree sap from twisted pines.

  I stood up slowly. My pants were around my ankles and my shoes were gone and so was one sock. A vast expanse of the woods had been annihilated. I stood amongst twisted stumps and shattered limbs. My shirt fell forward, and I realized the storm had twisted the damn thing off my back. I tried to pull my pants up, but the backs of the legs and the seat of the pants were gone.

  I pulled the shirt off and threw it down and stepped out of the ruin of my pants. Wearing my underwear and one sock, I started back for my house, but as I went I found that I could see a great distance now because the storm had taken away the natural barrier between me and my house, and where it ought to have been was only a bathtub and some bits of wreckage. Across the way, over the little dirt road and the barbed-wire fence and into the pasture there, I could see what was left of my house, sitting on the tip of its roof, the walls spread out and shattered like the staves of a barrel.

  I tried to run but couldn’t. There were limbs and stumps everywhere, and I was barefoot. I hopped and stumbled my way into the clearing that had been my backyard, tiptoed through the grass burrs that had grown up from me not mowing. I started yelling for Brett.

  My stomach turned to acid. This was my life. Murder and storms and destruction, the loss of loved ones. I started to cry. I stumbled to where my house once stood and called for Brett as if I could scream her down from the heavens into which she had been blown, or perhaps call her up from beneath the sickening pile of lumber.

  Then I heard, “Hap.”

  I turned. Rising out of the bathtub, which had held to the ground because of the deeply buried pipes, was Brett. She was holding the shotgun and her hair was cluttered with plaster and splinters.

  I blundered over to her and she laid the shotgun beside the tub, stood up and hugged me. We both began to cry. I held her and held her, then I was in the tub with her, the two of us clinging to each other as if we were two parts of a whole.

  We held like that for hours and hours, crying and kissing and not really talking, and finally the gentle rain stopped, and we lay there sopping wet in the cool tub, watching the light of the sky die out slowly and the night creep in. The stars poked at the velvety blackness, like the tips of pins being stabbed through dark fabric. The moon rose up then, quartered and weak, but lovely just the same.

  There in the dampness, the tub our bed, the night our roof, overwhelmed with a strange sense of peace, we fell asleep, holding each other.