Savage Season cap-1

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Savage Season

  ( Collins and Pine - 1 )

  Joe R. Lansdale

  Savage Season

  By Joe R. Lansdale

  Chapter 1

  I was out back of the house in the big field with my good friend Leonard Pine the afternoon it started. Me with the twelve gauge and him pulling the birds.

  "Pull," I said, and Leonard did, and another clay bird took to the sky and I jerked the gun up and cut it down.

  "Man," Leonard said, "don't you ever miss?"

  "Just on purpose."

  I'd switched to clay birds in favor of the real ones a long time back. I didn't like to kill anything now, but I still enjoyed the shooting. Getting the bead on something and pulling the trigger and feeling the kick on my shoulder and watching the target blow apart had its own special satisfaction.

  "Got to open another box," Leonard said. "The pigeons are all dead."

  "I'll load, you shoot for a while."

  "I shot twice as long as you did and I missed half those little boogers."

  "I don't care. My eye's getting off anyway."

  "Bullshit."

  Leonard got up, brushed his big black hands on his khaki pants, and came over and took the twelve gauge. He was about to load it and I was about to load the launcher, when Trudy came around the side of the house.

  We both saw her about the same time. I turned to open another box of clay birds, and Leonard turned to pick up a box of shells, and she was swinging our way in the sunlight.

  "Shit," Leonard said. "Here comes trouble."

  Trudy was about four years younger than me, thirty-six, but she still looked twenty-six. Had that long blond hair and legs that began at the throat—good legs that were full at the thighs and dark of skin. And she knew how to use them, had that kind of walk that worked the hips and gave her breasts that nice little bounce that'll make a man run his car off the road for a look. She had on a tight beige sweater that showed she still didn't need a bra, and a short black skirt that was the current fashion, and it made me think of the late sixties and her mini-skirt days—back when I met her and she was going to be a great artist and I was going to find some way to save the world.

  Far as I knew, closest she'd gotten to art was a drafting table and dressing mannequins in store windows, and the closest I'd gotten to saving the world was my name on some petitions, for everything from recycling aluminum cans to saving the whales. I put my cans in the trash now, and I didn't know how the whales were doing.

  "Watch her," Leonard said, before she was in earshot.

  "I'm watching."

  "You know what I mean. Don't come crying over to my place if she does it to you again. Mind what I'm saying, now."

  "I know what you're saying."

  "Uh-huh, and a hard dick knows no conscience."

  "It isn't that way and you know it."

  "Well, it's some kind of way."

  Now that Trudy was closer, the midday sun full on her face, I could see she didn't quite look twenty-six. The pores in her nose were a little larger and there were crow's feet around her eyes and laugh lines at the corners of her mouth. She always had liked to laugh, and she'd laugh at anything. I remembered best how she laughed when she was happy in bed. She had a laugh then that was pretty as the song of a bird. It was the kind of thing I didn't want to remember, but the memory was there just the same, like a thorn in the back of my brain.

  She smiled at us then, and I felt the January day become a little warmer. She could do that to a man, and she knew it. Liberated or not, she didn't fight that ability.

  "Hello, Hap," she said.

  "Hello," I said.

  "Leonard," she said.

  "Trudy," Leonard said.

  "What're you boys up to?"

  "Shooting some skeet," I said. "Want to shoot some?"

  "Sure."

  Leonard handed me the shotgun. "I got to go, Hap. I'll check you later. Remember what I told you, huh?"

  I looked at that hard face of his, black as a prune, said, "Sure, I'll remember."

  "Un-huh. See you, Trudy," and he went away then, mak­ing deep strides across the pasture toward the house where his car was parked.

  "What was that all about?" Trudy said. "He seemed kind of mad."

  "He doesn't like you."

  "Oh yeah, I forgot."

  "No you didn't."

  "Okay, I didn't."

  "You want to shoot first?"

  "I think I'd really rather go in the house and have a cup of coffee. It's kind of chilly out here."

  "You're not dressed like it's chilly."

  "I've got hose on. They're warmer than you think. Just not warm enough. Besides, I haven't seen you in a while—"

  "Almost two years."

  "—and I wanted to look good."

  "You do."

  "So do you. You could gain a few pounds, but you look good."

  "Well, you don't need to gain or lose an ounce. You look great."

  "Jazzercise. I've got a record and I do what it says. Us older ladies have to work at it."

  I smiled. "Okay, older lady. Why don't you help me gather this stuff, and we'll go on up to the house."

  She sat at the kitchen table and smiled at me and made small talk. I got down the coffee and tried to keep my mind off how it used to be between us, but I wasn't any good at it.

  When I had the coffee maker going, I sat at the table across from her. It was slightly warm in the kitchen from the gas heaters, and close enough I could smell the scent of her minty soap and the hint of some perfume, probably dabbed behind the ears and knees and below her belly button. That's the way she used to do it, and the thought of it made me weak.

  "Still working in the rose fields?" she asked.

  "We've been digging them, but not in the last few days. The man me and Leonard work for is through with that part. It'll be a few days before he'll need us for anything else."

  She nodded, ran one long-nailed hand through her hair, and I saw the glint of a small, gold loop in her earlobe. I don't know what it was about that gesture, about the wink of gold, but it made me want to take her in my arms, pull her on the table and make the two-year absence of her blow away.

  Instead I contented myself with a memory, one of my favorites. It was about the time we went to this dance and she had worn this zebra-striped blouse and mini-skirt. I was twenty-three and she was nineteen. The way she danced, the way she moved when she wasn't dancing, the smell of her, had made me manic with lust.

  I had whispered something to her and she had laughed and we had gone out to my Chevy and driven to our favorite parking place on a pine-covered hill. I stripped her and she stripped me, and we made slow, sweet love on the motor-warm hood of my car, the moon shining down on us like a personal love-light, the cool summer breeze blowing across us like a feathered fan.

  And the thing I remember best about that time, other than the act of copulation, was I had felt so goddamn strong and immortal. Old age and death were as wild and improbable as some drunken story about walking across the face of a star.

  "How's... what is it? Howard?" It wasn't a thing I really wanted to ask, but it came out anyway.

  "Okay. We're divorced. Have been for a year now. I don't think I'm cut out for marriage. I had you and I screwed that up, didn't I?"

  "No great loss."

  "I left you for Pete and Pete for Bill and Bill for Howard. None of them worked out, and neither did the ones I didn't marry along the way. None of them came close to what we had. And the kind of men that are anything like you are harder and harder to find."

  The flattery was a little thick, so I didn't have anything to say to it. I checked the coffee, poured a couple of cups.

  When I set hers on the table, s
he looked at me, and I started to say something brotherly, but it wouldn't come out.

  "I've missed you, Hap," she said. "I really have."

  I put my coffee cup on the table next to hers and she stood and I held her and we kissed. The earth didn't move and my heart didn't stop, but it was quite all right just the same.

  Then we had our hands all over each other, and we started moving toward the bedroom, molting clothes along the way. Under the covers we danced the good, slow dance, and she let loose with that laugh I loved so much, the one as sweet and happy as the song of a bird.

  And I did not care to remember then that even that most predatory of birds, the shrike, can sing.

  Chapter 2

  About two in the morning the phone rang. I got up, and went to the kitchen and answered it. I don't think Trudy even heard it.

  It was Leonard.

  "That bitch there?"

  "Yeah."

  "Shit. You're fucked again."

  "It's different this time. I'm only getting laid. Remember what you said about a hard dick not knowing a conscience? You were right."

  "Bullshit, don't give me that macho crap. I was just talking that way. You don't think like that and you know it. It's always got to be something to you. This is Leonard you're talking to here, Mr. Hap Collins, not some rose field nigger."

  'Leonard, you are a rose field nigger, and so am I. Only I'm a white version."

  'You know what I mean."

  "What are you doing up at two in the morning minding my business?"

  "Drinking, goddammit. Trying to get drunk."

  "How are you doing?"

  "I'd rate it about a five on a one-to-ten scale."

  "Is that Hank Williams I hear in the background?"

  "Not his ownself, but yes. 40 Greatest Hits, Volume 2, 'Setting the Woods On Fire.' "

  "What key's he singing in?"

  "You're not as funny as you think, Hap. Shit, I wish that whore wouldn't come around."

  "Don't call her that."

  "That's what she is. She comes around and you start acting funny."

  "How funny do I get?"

  "All moon-eyed and puppylike, talking about the good old days, giving me that self-righteous sixties stuff. I was there, buddy, and it was just the eighties with tie-dyed tee-shirts."

  "You numb nuts, you talk about the sixties as much as I do."

  "But I hated them. Shit, man, Trudy gets you all out of perspective. She gets to telling you how it was and how it ought to be now, and you get to believing her. I like you cynical. It's closer to the ground. I tell you, that bitch will say anything to get her way. She's fake as pro wrestling. She's out there on a limb, brother, and she's inviting you out there with her. When the limb cracks, you're both gonna bust your ass. Get down from the tree, Hap."

  "She's all right, Leonard."

  "In the sack, maybe. In the head, uh-uh."

  "No, she's all right."

  "Sure, and wow, the sixties, man, like neat."

  "This time is different."

  "And next time I shit it'll come out in sweet-smelling little squares. Goodnight, you dumb sonofabitch."

  He hung up, and I went over and got a glass out of the cabinet, filled it with water, drank it, leaned my naked rear into the counter and thought about things. What I thought about mostly was how cold it was.

  I went back to the bedroom to get my robe, and looked down at Trudy. There was enough moonlight that I could see her face. The blanket had fallen off of her and she was lying on her side with her arms cuddling her pillow. I could see a smooth shoulder, the shape of one fine breast and the curve of her hip. She looked so sweet and young there in the moonlight. Looked too innocent to have been the one in my bed a short time ago, grabbing her ankles, screaming and groaning, and finally singing like a bird.

  But she didn't look so innocent and I wasn't stirred. I thought about waking her, but didn't. I covered her gently, got my robe off the bedpost, went back to the kitchen and filled my glass with water again, took a chair at the table across from the window and looked out. With the curtains pulled back like they were, I could see the moonlit field where Leonard and I had shot skeet, could see the line of pines beyond it, looking oddly enough like the outline of a distant mountain range.

  I sat there and drank my water and thought about things, thought about Trudy and the sixties and what Leonard had said, and knew he was right. Last time she had come around and gone away, I had started on a monumental drunk that embarrassed the winos down at the highway mission, which was where Leonard found me—three months later. I had no idea where I'd gotten the money for the liquor, and I didn't know how much I'd drunk, couldn't even remember having started.

  Since that time I had sworn off. Trudy, not the liquor. But now she was in my house again, in my bed, and I was thinking about her, considering all the wrong things, knowing full well I had fallen off the wagon again.

  Until it had gone wrong between us (and it was a mystery to me as to when and how), our relationship had been as beautiful as a dream. And there were times when I felt it might have been just that.

  We met at LaBorde University. I had made a late start due to no money and lots of hard work at the iron foundry trying to get me some. The foundry was a hot, horrible job where you wore a hard hat, watched sparks jump and heard the clang of steel pipe all day.

  But it was money, and I thought it would allow me to go to college, get some kind of degree and find a way to make an easier living than my old man had; a way for me to get my slice of the American Dream.

  Pretty soon I was wrapped up in the learning, though, and not for what it could get me financially. There was something in the books and lectures that went beyond the sports page and the martial arts I practiced, the color article section of the TV Guide. There was more to life than a beer with the buddies, a gold watch and a pension. It was the sixties, the time of love and peace and social upheaval— contradictions that walked side by side. Women's rights. Civil rights. The Vietnam War. I got it in my head I could do some good out there, make things better for the underprivileged. I changed my major from business to sociology and went to anti-war rallies and sang some folk songs, collected Beatles albums, and let my hair grow long.

  At one rally held at a Unitarian church, I met Trudy. I looked across the heads of long, straight hair and Afros and saw her on the other side of the room talking to a pear-shaped girl in a flowered dress that belled and dragged the floor.

  God, but Trudy was beautiful. Painfully young, a proto type for Eve. Long gold hair rippled to her waist and her eyes were so bright green they looked supernatural. Spangles of silver hung from her ears. She was wearing a white midi-blouse, a blue jean mini-skirt and wooden clog shoes. Beneath the midi was a flat brown stomach and a marvelous belly button, and beneath the mini were legs like God would have given his very own woman.

  I got over there without running and introduced myself. We made shameless small talk, mostly stupid mumblings, some of it about the war.

  Pretty soon we had our arms around each other and we were out of there. We both lived in dorms then, and as the dorm mothers were furiously against fucking, I took her to the parking place that was to become our haven, and we did what we had wanted to do since the first moment we laid eyes on one another. We generated so much electricity upon that pine-covered hill, I'm surprised we didn't cause a forest fire. I feel certain we didn't do the shocks in my old Chevy much good.

  This went on for a time, and things got better and hotter. And on the night of my fondest memory, when she wore the zebra-striped outfit, we decided to rent an apartment and move in together.

  We pooled our money and found a little room on the grubby side of town and lived there for two months. It got better yet, and we decided to get married. It was a simple wedding with lots of flowers and barefoot guests and a female minister younger than Trudy.

  God, those were odd times. If you missed them, and you know someone who went through them, soaked it all in, and y
ou catch them late at night, after maybe a beer or two, or the kids are all in bed and the TV's dead, and you say, "Hey, what were the sixties really like?" There's a good chance they'll say, "It was magical," or "It was special."

  For a time it sure seemed that way. Peace and love seemed like more than words. We thought everyone could live in a world full of mutual respect, long hair, and cooperation. It was as if the sky had split open and God had given us a ray of light, and in its glow, wonderful things happened.

  An example being the sparrow incident the night after our wedding.

  We dropped the apartment and rented a small house on the edge of town. It wasn't much of a house. The ceiling in the living room was too low and the plumbing squeaked like giant mice.

  Trudy turned on the back porch light and went out there to toss some potato peels, and found a sparrow sitting on the porch. It was weak and nodding and couldn't fly. She called me and I looked at it. It was a baby, and as far as I could determine, there were no wounds on it. It seemed sick.

  I picked up the bird with some reluctance, because I had once been told if birds smelled the human scent on another bird they would peck it to death, and carried it into the house. I got an old shoebox and tore some newspaper up and put it in the bottom of the box and the bird on that. I got an eyedropper and used it to give the bird some cold beef bouillon.

  That was the procedure from then on. First thing in the morning, and between classes, we would give the bird bouillon and clean its box and put fresh paper in the bottom. At night we stood over it and looked at it and clucked our tongues like parents worried about a sick child.

  About this same time, I went to work part-time in a restaurant in LaBorde, and brought home scraps I thought the bird might eat. At first he wouldn't touch them, but after a while he ate them out of my hand. Noodles were his favorite. I suppose they were as close as he ever got to worms.

  The bird got stronger. He started flying around the house.

  You could open doors and windows and he wouldn't fly out. He liked it in there. He liked us. He'd light on our shoulders and our outstretched palms. He cheeped a lot, and because of that, we named him Cheep. The only time he showed distress was when we weren't wearing black. Guess because I had on a black tee-shirt and Trudy a black peasant dress the night we found him, and he bonded to black.