Sunset and Sawdust

by Joe R. Lansdale

  But they walked on and the road kept stretching. Lee wanted to stop, lie down. He was exhausted with the weight and the heat, but he kept plodding. He thought: I’m damn glad Goose ain’t a fat boy or I’d go straight down and never get up. But then, if he was a fat boy, he probably wouldn’t run like a goose and the name Goose wouldn’t fit him. They’d call him Pig, something like that.

  His legs grew heavy and his arms grew tired, but he tried to focus on the road ahead, thinking that around each far ahead curve he would see Camp Rapture. He wondered what Camp Rapture was like now. When he left it, it had just become a camp and it had the name all fresh and new and it wasn’t much to see. Goddamn. How long ago was that? Thirty? Thirty-three years? He couldn’t really remember. He was in his early twenties then. He was in his early fifties now. No. What was he thinking? Time had slipped by him. He was fifty-four. Was that early or middle fifties? Oh, Christ, this boy is heavy. And it’s hot, so goddamn hot, and the boy is hot. So hot.

  Lee stumbled, went down. The boy slipped off his shoulder and struck the road.

  “Jesus, son, I’m sorry,” Lee said. But the boy was unaware of the fall or the fact that he was being spoken to.

  With the effort of Atlas lifting the world, Lee managed the boy up again, switching this time to holding one leg and one arm and slinging the boy across his back. This was better for a while, but soon his arm ached and his leg ached and he thought: I must lay down a while. But no. Can’t do that. Every second counts. He glanced at the boy’s hand, which was now dangling. It was black and large and didn’t look like a hand at all. It looked like some kind of creature.

  “We’ll make it, Goose,” he said, and wondered if they would or even if the boy was still alive. As he plodded on, he relaxed, tried to feel the boy breathing, and could. Could feel the slight and strained movement of the boy’s body as his lungs labored.

  “For God sakes, Jesus,” Lee said. “I know I done some wrong. But don’t take it out on this boy. Help me help him.”

  Jesus didn’t reach out of the heavens to offer a hand.

  God didn’t provide a chariot or a doctor.

  The Holy Ghost didn’t cheer him on.

  Lee pushed on, stumbled, went to a knee, got up, kept going, said to God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost, “You sonsofbitches. All three of you.”

  Then he heard the sound.

  He turned, almost falling as he did.

  Coming down the road was a truck with side boards. Lee stepped to the center of the road.The truck swerved and pulled to the left side of the road, something clattered in the truck bed as it came to a stop. A woman was driving. She looked about his age. Nice looking with a gray stripe down the center of her hair. She had eyes like icy blue fire. She reached over and rolled down the window.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “Boy got snakebit.”

  “Poisonous snake?”

  “His hand is swole up big as my head. He said it was a copperhead.”

  “Get in.”

  Lee got in, laying the boy across his legs. He removed the boy’s tightfitting cap and wiped his hair out of his eyes, used the cap to wipe the sweat from his face. He laid the bitten hand across the boy’s chest. The hand was black and very huge. It looked as if if it were tapped lightly it might explode. Lee rolled up the boy’s sleeves. There were runs of red and blue lines going up his snakebit arm.

  “See how it’s done him,” Lee said.

  Marilyn glanced at the boy’s arm and hand, started onto the road.

  “Thought I could get him to Camp Rupture, to a doctor, he’d have a chance,” Lee said.

  “He’s got a better chance we go see Aunt Cary. She’s a midwife, but she knows about snakebites and all manner of things a doctor don’t. Guess she’s a kind of a doctor herself.”

  “Hope you’re right.”

  “She’s closer.”

  “Camp Rapture ain’t as close as I remember it.”

  “When do you remember it? How long ago?”

  He told her.

  “There used to be a straighter road to it,” she said, “but it kept getting washed out from the creek, so they reworked it. This one winds a mite, but it don’t get flooded as much.”

  “You sure about this Aunt Cary?”

  “Done a lot of people good,” Marilyn said. “Seen her do all manner of things. Seen her come into Camp Rapture once and deliver a baby by cutting the mother’s belly open. Baby lived, and so did the mother. Aunt Cary sewed her up with fishing line and she got all right. Something like that, or something like this, I trust her more than a doctor. Besides, she’s closer, and this boy needs whatever he’s gonna get right now.”

  They took a turn off of the main road, down a narrow trail. The truck bumped and thumped along, the junk in the bed clattered. Lee looked over his shoulder through the back window. Saw posthole diggers and a shovel and axe leaping about back there.

  He wished they would bounce out. The noise was giving him a headache.

  At first Marilyn drove fast, but the trail was too bad for that kind of driving, so she slowed.

  “He’s breathing funny,” Lee said.

  “Snakebite affects the lungs,” Marilyn said. “All kinds of things, but the lungs is one thing. Get so you can’t breathe, then it pumps poisons to the heart.”

  The woods grew denser. There were long vines hanging from dark twisty trees with thorns. They bounced along a path even more narrow than the one they had been on and pulled into a clearing where an old house set. The house was small and the porch sagged. The yard was littered with wagon parts, plows, a chopping block with an axe in it, and assorted chicken feathers.

  Marilyn parked near the porch, got out, called to the house: “Aunt Cary. You in there? It’s Marilyn Jones. You in there? Got us an emergency.”

  The door opened and Uncle Riley came out on the porch, followed by his son, Tommy.

  “That’s her husband, Uncle Riley,” Marilyn said. “And that’s their son, Tommy.”

  Lee noted that Uncle Riley looked younger than he was, hardly like an uncle. He was a big, powerful man with a shaved head. He was wearing too short pants and a too tight, stained white T-shirt. The boy was barefoot, wearing overalls. His hair was long and the kinks went up in the air like springs that had sprung.

  “How are you, Miss Marilyn?” Uncle Riley said. “Can I help you?”

  “We got a boy snakebit, Uncle Riley. Copperhead. He’s swole up good. We need Aunt Cary.”

  “She out gathering some roots. Tommy, go find her, tell her get back here quick as she can.”

  Tommy darted back into the house and out the back. They heard the back screen door slam as he went, snappy as a rifle shot.

  “Let’s get him on in here,” Uncle Riley said.

  Lee and Uncle Riley carried Goose into the one bedroom and laid him on the bed. Uncle Riley put a pillow under Goose’s head and looked at the hand.

  Lee looked around. There were a number of shelves and on the shelves were jars and sacks, and in the jars he could see roots and what looked like dirt and some colorful powders and in one jar he saw several water moccasin heads floating in a liquid the color of urine. Some of the jars with snake heads had streaks of red in them like sticky runs of blood.

  Uncle Riley bent over Goose, looked at the hand. “He was bit good.”

  “Said it was a small snake,” Lee said.

  “If it was a young’n, them’s the worst kind. They all hot with sap.”

  The back door slammed, and a moment later a very pretty, slightly heavy woman with reddish skin and little black freckles on her cheeks entered the room. She had a red-and-black-checkered rag tied around her head. She didn’t pay any attention to Lee or Marilyn, but bent directly over the boy, looked at his hand, poked it with her finger.

  “Tommy,” she said, “go in there and get me the little sharp knife. One I use on them pears. Bring it here with some of my medicine and a glass.”

  Tommy left, came back momentarily w
ith a glass, a pocketknife, and a jug.

  Aunt Cary laid the glass and knife on the edge of the bed and used her fine white teeth to pull the cork from the jug. She poured a bit of what was in the jug into the glass.

  “This here is some of Mr. Bull’s best,” she said.

  Lee could smell that it was white lightning. Aunt Cary took a swig from the glass, poured a little more into the glass, set it on the floor and knelt down by it. She opened the pocketknife, dipped it into the booze and drank what was in the glass after she did. She sat on the side of the bed and took hold of the boy’s hand and poked the wound with the knife. She didn’t cut across or make slashes, just poked straight into the bite marks. Dark pus squirted out. She picked up the jug, splashed some of its contents onto the punctures.

  “Get me my stone,” she said.

  Tommy scrambled away, came back carrying a white knotty stone that filled his fist. Aunt Cary took it, pressed it against the wound.

  Lee watched as the stone darkened.

  “Is it sucking out the poison?” he said.

  “It is.”

  “That’s a rock?”

  “I call it a milk stone. Tommy, go pull the milk jug up from the well.”

  Tommy darted away. While he was gone, the stone became darker yet.

  “I don’t know it’s really a stone,” she said, “but it sucks that poison out all right.”

  Tommy came back with the damp milk jug. It had been hung down the well on a rope and the jug and the milk were cool. Aunt Cary poured the glass half full of milk. She set the glass on the floor, said, “Look at this.”

  She dropped the stone in the milk and the milk turned dark as a thundercloud.

  “Comes out best in milk. I done it in water some, but it don’t work as good. Seems to get sucked out by that milk.”

  When the glass was so dark with poison and pus you couldn’t see the rock, Cary gave the glass to Tommy, said, “Pour that out and don’t get it on your hands. Bring it back to me. Mind you don’t pour it near the vegetable garden, you hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Once again, Tommy disappeared. He came back with the glass empty of milk and full of stone. The stone looked larger, like a sponge that had swollen, but now it was as white as in the beginning.

  Aunt Cary poured white lightning into the glass, shook it gently, plucked out the stone and put it back on the bite. It filled with poison again.

  Aunt Cary pulled a Bible off a shelf, flipped it open, rapidly found what she wanted. She read a couple verses aloud. When she finished, she said, “Them’s healing verses.”

  “I recognize them,” Lee said. He reached out and touched the boy’s head. It was sweaty and hot, but not as hot as before.

  “I’m gonna fix him up something to drink now,” Aunt Cary said. “It’ll cut that fever down some.”

  “Will he be all right?” Marilyn asked.

  “That’s up to the Lord,” Aunt Cary said. “But I think he will. Yes, ma’am. I think he will.”

  Lee noted another surprising thing. The swelling in Goose’s hand had gone down and it was no longer black. It had turned a light blue and the lines that had been running up his arm had lost length. The punctures were oozing blood now, not poison.

  “Riley,” Aunt Cary said to her husband, “reach there behind the stove, see if you can find some cobwebs.”

  Uncle Riley went to the cookstove, looked behind it, scooped up a batch as if he were gathering the strands of a weave. He brought them back and Aunt Cary wadded them up and pushed them on the punctures. They turned dark red and clotted up.

  “Stops the blood from runnin’,” Aunt Cary said. “I don’t never clean behind the stove. Don’t never know when you’ll need the webs.”

  Lee reached out and touched Goose’s hand gently.

  “I’ll be damned,” Lee said. “Fever’s near gone.”

  “Cause the poison is out of him,” Aunt Cary said. “And we’ll all be damned, we don’t change our ways.”

  18

  A little later that day, Henry, already feeling slaphappy from having found out something that would make Sunset look like a killer, got another bit of news that was like fine egg-white icing on a double-layer chocolate cake, even if in retrospect, he had been forced to spread the icing a bit himself.

  He had gone to work, and bored of it, sitting in his office with nothing really to do, decided to get out of there, drive over to Holiday and look up a little honey he knew who would do the dirty deed for five dollars and two bits. It was an odd price, but it was her price, and she was worth every bit of it. Blond and buxom with enough ass for two, but tight and nice just the same, prone to heat rash pimples on her inner thigh.

  Driving over, passing the drugstore, he noted, as always, the apartment above it. It was a curious place. Painted bright red with only two little windows facing the street, looking like square eyes in a heatstroked face. At the back of the place were a lot of windows. They looked out at a wall of dirt and grass that was part of a huge wooded overlook that hung above the drugstore and the apartment. Up there lived John McBride. Henry did business with McBride, but when he wasn’t doing business with him, he tried not to think about him. He wasn’t the kind of guy you wanted to think about you didn’t have to. He had come from Houston by way of Chicago, at Henry’s request, and sometimes he wished he had never taken that step, because McBride, he was a guy started out working for you, then after a time, you got the feeling you were working for him, that you couldn’t get rid of him. He was suddenly all over your business and a part of it. Then you wished you didn’t know him, even if he could be handy about some things, because he seemed to have come from a place much more South than Houston, or Mexico, for that matter. Way South.

  And with him came the other one. The black one. The one who said little and talked as if he were speaking to someone unseen standing just to your left and behind you. Yeah. The black one. Looked like a big beetle in his hat and Prince Albert coat. McBride’s bad shadow.

  Henry didn’t like to think about that one at all. Didn’t even like to think his name for fear it might bring him around. If McBride was from far South, the other one, he came from deeper down than that.

  Henry turned his attention back to the whore he had come to see, but when he arrived on Dodge Street, he was disappointed to find she had an appointment elsewhere.

  It looked liked the beginning of a bad day. Henry wasn’t interested in going back to the mill, and he wasn’t really all that interested in going home to watch his wife drink, but it struck him that he had a little black book hidden in a panel inside his desk drawer at home, and in that book were the addresses and a few numbers of whores with telephones or some connection to someone who had a phone. They were women he had not used but knew about, had been given their information by associates. He had not really planned to use them because of already having the blond honey he liked, but that hadn’t worked out, and he still had the urge to clean out his pipes, and now, disappointed, he wanted to see if there was someone else he might contact, so he drove home on a mission for that little black book.

  As he went in the house, Henry didn’t call out for his wife. That was never profitable, as she might appear at any moment, a big stack of flesh, looking like heaped-up mashed potatoes moving about on their own accord, topped by hair as greasy as a leaky oil filter.

  As he entered the house, he saw, sticking up over the sofa, a fat white foot. He eased over there, called his wife’s name, but she didn’t answer.

  He peeked over the couch. She was naked, as usual, and her other leg was on the couch and turned awkward, and he had a bird’s-eye view of the thing that made her a woman and not mashed potatoes, and the sight of it, like some kind of hair-lined wound, made him jump.

  Then he noticed the rest of her wasn’t looking too good either. Her breasts, thick with fat, had fallen back to cover her face—mercifully, he thought—and the fat that made up the rest of her flowed over the couch and floor in heaps
.

  He called her name a couple of times.

  No answer. He went around and took a look. Not much to see. He started to reach out and move one of her breasts so he could see her face, but the thought of it gave him a shiver. He hadn’t touched one of those things in years, and he wasn’t excited about starting now.

  He went to the fireplace, got a poker, used it to lift the breast up, held it there for a moment, like some kind of vicious animal he had shot but feared might still be alive. Under her tit was an arm, bent across her face, and in her fist was a glass and the open end of the glass was pressed against her face.

  And then he got it.

  She had been standing on the other side of the couch, and in her usual drunken stupor she had thrown her head back to toss down a drink, and the movement had caused her to go over backwards. She had fallen over the couch, gaining momentum when her breasts hit her in the face like sacks of flour, then the rest of her got going and she hit the floor hard.

  Or maybe she had a heart attack.

  It didn’t matter. She was dead.

  Or was she?

  She had fooled him before. To the point where he thought he might talk to McBride about some business, but he didn’t want to push his luck, not with the mayor gone and McBride the reason and hired by him.

  Henry looked at his wife carefully. There was vomit all around her mouth and on the floor, and her mouth was wide open, the glass halfway in it.

  Henry lowered her breast with the poker, then used it to jab her in the side a couple of times, just to make sure. He gave her pretty good pokes, but she didn’t get up or move or make any noise.

  He laughed. He hadn’t expected to laugh. It just came out of nowhere, like a summer storm. He started and couldn’t stop. He jigged around in a circle.

  Lately he had begun to doubt the existence of God, but now he knew he was wrong. Not only was there a God, but the sonofabitch was on his side.

  He put the poker back, found a glass and her bottle on the fireplace, poured himself a strong shot of whisky, drank it, drank another. It had no effect on him.

  He was giddier than whisky could make him. He couldn’t have been happier than if a fairy godmother had granted him six more inches on his dick.