Paradise Sky

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Thing that surprised me most was I was given plenty of time to myself at the end of workdays—or, rather, at the end of our dinners. We took plenty of time at those dinners, talking and such. Mr. Loving did most of the talking, but I was learning my way around a stack of words.

  When I wasn’t on my own time, me and Mr. Loving was working in the fields, bringing in this crop or that. While we worked he was telling me about something or another from one of his books. The books was stacked every which way in the house, and how he found what he was looking for I got no idea.

  Some nights after we’d done our chores we’d sit in the main room and he’d read aloud for an hour or two from one of his books. In spite of myself I was learning a thing or two about all manner of subjects, some of which I thought might be helpful in life. Others I couldn’t imagine being of use under any circumstance, but another thing I learned from Mr. Loving was that knowledge was a pleasure for its own sake and didn’t need to have no day-to-day purpose.

  I didn’t forget about Ruggert, but in time I began to relax somewhat, because it was rare anyone ever come down that road to Mr. Loving’s house. When they did, I was usually wearing my big hat and the clothes Mr. Loving had given me, so I wasn’t someone to immediately be taken for myself. Mr. Loving told me it was like a story by a fellow named Poe who wrote about hiding a letter in plain sight so those that was looking for it would overlook it. But it’s one thing to hide a letter and another to hide a large colored fellow with big ears.

  One afternoon when the chores was light and I had plenty of rest time, Mr. Loving climbed up to the loft in the barn at just about the time I was thinking of playing with my pecker. Fortunately he caught me at rest, right before I came to that part. He snuck up on me like a ghost. He was standing on the ladder to the loft, and all I could see of him was his hat and his face peeking over the edge.

  He said, “You got some time on your hands. I’d like you to meet me out at the sitting tree in about fifteen minutes.”

  Mr. Loving went away, and I got up and put on my boots and hat, climbed down the stairs, and drifted out to the sitting tree.

  I got there before he did, sat in one of the chairs, and waited. It wasn’t more than a minute when I seen him coming along from the house carrying a big wooden bucket in either hand. When he got to me, he set the buckets on the ground. I seen one of them was filled with what I thought at first was a bunch of mud balls, though I couldn’t figure on how or why that was. The other one had cardboard boxes of ammunition in it, and stacked on top of it was two pistols.

  “You rub up against Ruggert, or them that might support him, it may be good if you could hit something with a pistol without having to throw it. I studied on that old revolver you had, and if the ammunition in it had been good, which it wasn’t, and had the pistol been in good shape and well oiled and well cared for, which it wasn’t, you’d have probably got so much kick from it that it would have come back on you and the barrel would have smacked you in the face hard enough to turn you into a white man. It’s an old muzzleloader, cartridge-converted. Whoever done the job might have been a good farmer but was a lousy gunsmith.”

  “I don’t rightly know how it got set up,” I said, and that was true, though I suspected my pa might have been responsible.

  “All right,” Mr. Loving said. He plucked one of the mud balls from the bucket and flipped it to me. I caught it and realized it was a hardened ball of clay, not mud. I balanced it in my palm.

  “I made these myself. You got to bake them in the oven like a chicken after you get them all rounded out. Takes a lot of mud and a lot of time, so kind of watch any you might miss, see where they fall. We’ll try and collect what we can of them that don’t bust.”

  “What about the ones you miss?”

  “I don’t miss. Well, now and again, if I’m drunk or sick or blindfolded.”

  He took the pistols out of the bucket, held one in either hand. “This here,” he said, balancing one of the pistols in his left paw, “is a Colt Peacemaker, .45 caliber. Probably no one makes a better pistol, though Smith and Wesson has some fine ones. It’s easy to use. Single action, which is a surer cock and better to aim with. Double action jumps around more, though with a single you got to take time to thumb the hammer back, but it makes for a more regular aim. This other one,” he said, bouncing it in his right hand, “is rarer. Got issued to some of us in the Civil War. It’s a LeMat revolver.”

  “Do I really need to know what kind of pistol it is?”

  “It makes you less ignorant to actually know what you’re talking about, so listen to me.”

  I shut up then. Mr. Loving said, “The Colt .45 uses .45-caliber ammunition. That’s something even you can figure out, it being called a .45 and all.”

  “Yep,” I said. “I got that part.”

  “It’s a good gun, and this shorter barrel length is my choice, on account of it’s less likely to get snagged. Holsters tend to grab at it like a hand when you try to draw it quick. Regular holsters, that is. I got some that are hardened considerable by use of salt water and proper drying around a wooden frame; they hold a gun much better, and they got a hammer loop on them to help hold the pistols in, so you see some business coming your way, you got to get that loop off the hammer. You don’t like a holster, you can use a sash, but you got to file the sights off if you go that route. These pistols got their sights, so they wouldn’t be of much use that way. Another thing to do is to line your coat or pants pockets with leather, lightly grease the inside so you can get a smooth draw.

  “Now, this LeMat, this particular one, anyway, uses .44-caliber ammunition. The curious part about it is it’s a nine-shooter. This big barrel underneath—a shotgun load goes there, sixteen-gauge. It’s a little like holding a stick of dynamite and hoping all the juice comes out the end of the barrel. That actually makes it a ten-shooter.”

  “That sounds iffy,” I said, staring at its blue steel and what looked like polished hickory grips.

  “Naw, it isn’t iffy. I’m just talking it up, but it sure will give you a kick if you aren’t paying attention. The LeMat’s not as accurate as the Colt, but it’s got you three more shots and then one big shot. For self-defense, up close, which is pretty much how self-defense usually is, you can’t beat that shotgun load. Hard to miss at ten feet or less. You got a little striker here on the hammer. Have it up, like this, it’s going to hit them nine rounds. Push it down, and it’ll hammer the shotgun load. I’ve adjusted it some, cause I’ve made this one over from pin-fire to center-fire so as to modernize it. You might call it the Loving version of the LeMat revolver.”

  He went on like that for a while, telling me about the pistols and the loads and how I needed to pay attention on account of ammunition was expensive and he didn’t want it wasted on me just popping off shots.

  Mr. Loving was a good teacher. By the end of the lesson I had almost hit one or two of the balls. He, on the other hand, wasn’t kidding about his aim. After he got tired of instructing me, he took the Colt, said, “Toss ’em, Willie.”

  I went to doing that, and with that pistol held down beside his leg he’d wait till the ball I tossed got its full height and was just starting to drop, and quick as a tornado his hand would come up and he’d thumb that hammer and fire off a shot and knock that ball to shatters. He shot from the hip. He shot facing forward and standing sideways. About the only thing he didn’t do was stand on his head. He shot that fine with his left hand or his right. Way that man could shoot either of them pistols was like poetry.

  He’d say, “Thing to remember is it’s good to be fast, but it’s better to be accurate. You can fire six times and miss, and the other fellow can come slow as a turtle but be right on his shot, and you’ll wind up with a hole in your chest big enough to shove an apple through. The chest is the best place to aim in a real situation because it’s bigger and more likely for you to hit. Still, you ought to be able to shoot the hairy balls off an undersize squirrel if it comes to it. Hit the litt
le stuff in practice, you’re more likely to hit the big stuff in a real spot of trouble. Side vision is going to narrow some, get black on the edges, and you’re only going to see what’s right in front of you. Practice, some real experience, changes that. You don’t get killed the first time or two, you’ll get so you don’t have tunnel vision like before. During a gunfight you’ll be as alive as you ever were. Your hearing will most likely be extra sharp. Fact is your tongue will taste the air different. You’ll taste your own fear, and them that’s shooting at you, you’ll taste theirs, too, a sour copper taste. If you blow a hole in someone solid, you’ll smell shit and gut gas like it lived in your nose. You’ll have the taste of it on your tongue. That’s how alive your senses will be.

  “Don’t never draw a pistol on nobody that you don’t plan to shoot. You draw it, and you shoot, you shoot to kill. A wounded fellow can kill you same as one that isn’t wounded.”

  Over the next few months I was taught how to shoot a Sharps rifle and a brand-new Winchester he had bought last time he was in town. But the thing about that Winchester that he done was he put a loop cock on it, and on that loop he put a striker that could be flipped with a finger. The loop cock could be handled quickly, and that striker, if you pushed it down, would hit the trigger every time you closed the cocking loop. You could fire rapid-like. It was hard to hit anything that way, unless you was Mr. Loving, of course, but you sure could put a lot of lead in the air.

  By the end of them months I was not only good at shooting but the love of them weapons had also gone away from me. At first I adored them, but Mr. Loving kept telling me how they was tools, and they wasn’t in need of any more admiration than a hoe or a shovel. I took him at his word. If I didn’t love them pistols, I did respect them, and I was mighty respectful of the LeMat revolver in particular. It was, as Mr. Loving said, less accurate than the Colt, but I took to it. Pretty soon what natural accuracy it lacked I made up for by learning to know it and myself, and I liked them extra three shots. And then there was the shotgun load. He put a board up in the ground for that one, and I’d shoot at it at about a distance of ten feet and splinter it.

  It was a good life. I liked the work. I liked Mr. Loving, and I liked my loft. I liked all that he had been teaching me. I could read and write a little, but he improved me. He had me reading all manner of books. I liked the ones about geography and history, and I liked stories, mostly adventure. But math, I never could make any sense of it, outside of basic arithmetic. I could add, subtract, do fractions, and divide, but I could never get a handle on what was called geometry or algebra. I knew what a triangle was, a rectangle, a circle, and a square, but beyond that I was bewildered.

  I learned to ride a horse like a Comanche, which was another thing Mr. Loving could do. He said Texans in his day had learned it from watching the Indians. I could hang on the side of the horse, dangle under its neck and fire a pistol, cling to its belly, and swing back up with the pressure of my heels. I could grab its tail and run along behind it by making leaps like a rabbit. I also learned to grab the saddle, cling to it, and run that way for the long distance of Mr. Loving’s property.

  One thing I haven’t mentioned is amid all these good times was the dark moments when Mr. Loving was like someone else. Not mean, mind you, but there was times when he wanted to be alone and sit up there under that tree in a chair and look out at the sun setting or the moon rising, and he could sit there for hours. I never went up there to sit with him unless I was invited. Somehow I knew he needed that time alone. My guess was he was thinking about his son and wife, but for all I knew he missed the easy money of preaching.

  Within a day, sometimes within hours, he’d be his jovial self, discussing Polaris, Ursa Major, and Ursa Minor, who were supposed to be bears, and there was the Big and Little Dipper and Cassiopeia, who was supposed to have been the queen of Ethiopia. My geography lessons let me know Ethiopia was where dark people like myself lived, though with their ears closer to their head, or so Mr. Loving said, but I think he was pulling my leg.

  I think I could have gone on like that forever, but as I heard my pa say to a friend of his one day, “The good times, if you have any, eventually get shit in them.”

  5

  I had grown yet another inch by the time things started to come to an end. I didn’t know things was coming to an end, but one day me and Mr. Loving was walking back from the fields, both of us with a tow sack of taters, and I noticed Mr. Loving was lollygagging a bit, dragging behind, and I come up and tried to lift the sack of taters he was carrying. He wasn’t having any of it. I think I hurt his pride.

  Up at the house he had his dinner, which I fixed, having become more than a serviceable cook by learning from him. I got to say my pa was an all-right cook if it was something battered and fried and you was so hungry your belly thought your throat was cut. But Mr. Loving truly knew his way around a frying pan.

  This time I’m talking about, Mr. Loving thanked me for dinner and took himself to bed. That was the first day I came to realize he was starting to get old. It got so I was doing more of the work, making him stay up to the house, pride or no pride. I’d come in at sundown and fix supper and read to him, which was a reverse of how we started. It was along there I realized I had been with Mr. Loving about four years and had pretty much lost my worry about being found.

  Then one day I was slopping the hogs, and this fellow rode up. He tied up his horse and come walking past the house to where I was working. I recognized him right off. He was that town drunk I told you about earlier, one that rode that day with Ruggert. Hubert was his name, if you remember, and my first thought was I wanted to kill him. If I had decided on it, I’d have had to strangle him with my bare hands or beat him to death with one of Mr. Loving’s piglets. Or the slop bucket. I had that in my hand, and that’s what I decided on. He come strolling up to me with a grin on his face, said, “Hey, boy. Loving around?”

  I knew right then he didn’t know weasel shit from axle grease. It had been long enough for him to have forgot me, even if I hadn’t forgot him. I guess, too, I had changed a mite, except for those ears of mine, but the hat I had kind of fell down on them in such a way they didn’t quite look like swinging doors, and I had more hair. I had quit shaving it close to my head and was letting it grow out into a curly bonnet.

  “He’s up to the house,” I said, keeping my voice as even as I could, which was like a man walking along the edge of a cliff trying not to look down.

  “I want to talk to him about a matter of business,” he said.

  The only business I’d known Hubert to have was trying to get to the bottom of a bottle, but I did note he looked cleaner than I remembered. He had an air about him that was different. He carried himself like a wares salesman who had plans to con someone into buying a cheap set of pots for too much money.

  “He’s resting,” I said.

  “Well, you go get him, boy,” he said.

  I didn’t like the way he said “boy.” I didn’t like that he helped kill my pa. I didn’t like him. I went up to the house, trembling with anger, went in through the back door like I was supposed to do at a white man’s house, though me and Mr. Loving didn’t stand by that way of doing things. I should add, to keep it all on the up-and-up, I knocked first, then went inside.

  It was East Texas warm, yet Mr. Loving was sitting by the cookstove, had a fire going in it, and had a quilt thrown over him. I felt like a ham on slow bake in there, but he seemed fine with it. I said, “There’s a man to see you, and I know him.”

  “Oh,” Mr. Loving said.

  I told him quickly who he was.

  “He used to be the town drunk,” Mr. Loving said.

  “Used to?” I said.

  “He got the cure, took up with a widow that had money, and now he owns the Wilkes Mercantile and General Store and Emporium.”

  “Do tell,” I said.

  “Yeah, I’ve known about it for a while but didn’t see no need to mention it to you. It has nothing
to do with you being here. Knowing he’s prospering is of no importance. I been waiting for him to fall off the wagon and lose it all, actually. We go back out there, you think you can control yourself?”

  “I don’t want to,” I said. “But I will.”

  “All right, then. Help me up.”

  Before we went outside, Mr. Loving took the Colt pistol and stuck it in his back pocket, which was one of those lined with oiled leather. He slipped that blanket around him, sort of like a poncho, so that it covered his gun. He told me to get the bucket by the door we used for gathering eggs, put the LeMat in there, and throw a dinner napkin over it.

  I did that, and we went outside, Mr. Loving not making it too good but holding his head up, trying to act like he was ready to punch a bull in the face.

  Outside, Hubert was grinning like he’d just found a gold dollar in a pig track. He said, “You look all run-in there, Loving. And what the hell you got that blanket on for? It’s hot as a whore’s diddle out here.”

  “I got me a spat of something,” Mr. Loving said. “I’m a bit under the weather with it.”

  Hubert eyed me again. I could see he was starting to feel like he recognized me but hadn’t yet put a handle to me. I thought about going off to finish with the hogs but decided I’d stick. If Mr. Loving was nervous enough to put a gun in his back pocket and have me stuff one inside a bucket, I figured I should stay.

  “What can I do for you?” Mr. Loving said.

  “Well, sir. You and me done some business at the store, me buying vegetables from you and such. What I come to talk to you about is doing your hog killing for you. I started me a couple of services in town, and that’s one of them.”