Other Worlds, Better Lives, A Howard Waldrop Reader Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003

by Howard Waldrop

  We were in the high grass again an hour later. We’d wiped all our footprints out under the bridge and come back up through the creek to the high grass back of the bar ditch.

  The trucks were coming down the road. The first one slowed to a stop in the middle of the bridge. The guard leaned over the driver and honked the horn five or six times.

  “A.T.! A.T. Last? You still down there?”

  “Yes, Cap’n.”

  “I’ll be damned. Well, last part of this lesson’s the hardest. You ready A.T.?”

  “Ain’t got much choice, Cap’n.”

  The guards climbed out. He waved the other trucks onto the bridge with the first. The dogs went crazy smelling the convicts.

  “Jump, boys,” said the guard. “Jump. Don’t worry. Truck falls in, you get to spend soft time in the hospital. Jump!”

  The chain gang started jumping up and down in the trucks. The dogs were barking and bouncing around in the cages. The bridge shook.

  “Cap’n. Cap’n. That’d kill a weak man,” yelled A.T.

  “Well, well A.T. Good for you. I know your shoulder’s pretty tired. Same two boys get the hammers. Three more of you come down to wrestle this piling into place. A.T., you thinking of dropping the bridge on me, you’re gonna be disappointed.” He waved the trucks off the bridge. “I ain’t gonna get under there, you’d just be killing your grab-ass buddies.”

  “Never considered it, Cap’n.”

  “Some have, A.T. You done thought about back-sass down there?”

  “Powerful lot, Cap’n.”

  “That was my only object.”

  The convicts had reached the creek bed. Two of them fell down laughing.

  “I come up now, Cap’n?”

  “I wouldn’t advise it till they get that piling back up, A.T.”

  The other three convicts fell down, hands on their mouths.

  A.T. stepped around the outer piling, looked up at the guard.

  “You won’t believe it, Cap’n, but that damn thing jumped back up about two minutes after you left, all by itself.”

  “What? What? What!” yelled the guard, running down the embankment. The five other convicts was rolling on the ground. The guard looked at the ground, the creek, at the piling jammed back up on its foundation, the bare ground empty except for A.T.’s footprints. “What! What!”

  The men in the trucks started laughing.

  “What! What!”

  We crawled back through the grass with our sack of apples and headed home.

  XII

  Boss Eustis himself drove Houlka into town, and Miz Rio and me was waiting for them there.

  We went to the sheriffs’ office.

  Mr. Manfred, Mr. Maurice and Mr. Jack was setting behind the big long desk at the front looking at us.

  Boss Eustis pulled out the papers. “Today is Mr. Lee here’s end of term. Far as I’m concerned he’s a free man.”

  All three looked at Houlka, Boss Eustis, the papers.

  Then Mr. Manfred pulled out a rubber stamp, Mr. Maurice tore off two of the four forms, Mr. Jack pulled another out of the desk. They passed the rubber stamp back and forth in a flurry of pounding and pen scratching.

  When they were through, Houlka had his release, Boss Eustis had a carbon, one was in the file drawer beside the table and the other was in an envelope ready to be mailed to the Governor.

  Mr. Manfred, Mr. Maurice and Mr. Jack folded their hands.

  We all went back outside.

  “Them Euminides Brothers ain’t very talkative,” said Boss Eustis, “but you gotta admit they’re efficient.”

  Mizzus Luvsey had had Coretta load Houlka down with food and a bundle of clothes, and Miz Rio had her suitcase with her and had on a new green dress.

  “Can I give you a ride down to the depot?” asked Boss Eustis.

  “We’re catching the bus over in Anatolia County.”

  “Why would you wanta do a damnfool thing like that?”

  “I walked into this county under my own power, I’d like to walk out the same way.”

  “Miss Rio is gonna ruin her new pretty dress,” said Boss Eustis.

  “I want to make the walk,” she said.

  “Carrying that damn suitcase?”

  “I.O.’s going to help carry stuff to the county line.”

  “Is that right? Well, well, well.”

  He reached in his pocket, pulled out a fifty dollar bill, started to hand it to Houlka.

  “You’ve already paid me, Mr. Eustis, two dollars a month and keep. I’ve still got six dollars of that.”

  The boss stood there with his jaw open, closed it, put the money back up.

  He held out his hand. “Mr. Lee, you’re a good ’un.”

  They shook. “You ever want a real job making real money, you just come on back here, you hear?”

  “I won’t, but thanks all the same.”

  Then Boss Eustis climbed in his car. “I.O., you be home by dark. With Mr. Lee gone, you’re gonna have to take up all the slack around the place.” He roared off back toward home.

  We started walking northwest on the highway that led to Acedia. Emzee was waiting where it cut past the railroad track turn, and me and her held hands and took turns carrying the suitcases and bundles.

  Nobody said much. When we got to the boat camp cutoff road, we took it, since if you’re walking, it’s the quickest way to the county line. It crosses the Dardus River just before it enters Lake Yuksino, and the main highway’s three or four miles longer.

  Should have been more cars and wagons than there was on the road, coming and going. When we got a quarter mile from the river, we saw why. They was cars backed up, and two state highway trucks, and one from Spunt County.

  The low water bridge was down in the middle span. The river was still up. People was turning their cars around and going back out to the highway. “We’re getting the bridge crews out. This thing’ll be closed for a week,” said one of the guys who ran the fishing camp.

  “Well,” said Houlka. “Looks like we get to walk some more.”

  Then, from back toward the fishing camp I saw the Riding Club coming up from down the lake. I told Houlka. I sure would hate for there to be trouble for him on his first day free.

  “Where?” asked Miz Rio. “I’m sure there won’t be any trouble. Chuck is over all that now. And maybe we can save some time walking. There’s a ford about a half mile up—it’s too deep to walk with this much water in the river, but horses can walk it easy. I’ll ask Chuck and the others if they can give us a ride across.”

  Houlka looked at her. “That’s up to you,” he said. “I’d just as soon walk back to the highway.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. She ran back to the boat camp waving her arms. She stood there in the new green dress talking to Mr. Ness. He looked at her, looked up at Houlka, at the ruined bridge. He nodded.

  He and another man rode up to the road while the others went back toward Anomie.

  Mr. Ness had a fishing rod sticking from a saddle boot, and he was wearing that vest with all those fish plugs and lures hanging all over it. The pockets bulged with them. It musta had forty dollars worth of them on it, all shining in the sun. He wore an old felt hat.

  The other man leaned his fish pole up against a tree.

  “They’ll take me and Houlka up there and over,” said Miz Rio. “It’s real muddy. We’ll have to say goodbye to you here,” she said. She hugged Emzee, then me. She smelled like trees. In her new dress she about the prettiest woman (white woman) I’d ever seen.

  “Take care of him,” said Houlka to Emzee.

  Then he looked at me for a moment. He stepped forward, hugged me real hard, then knuckled my head, nearly knocking my glasses off. “Come to
Mt. Oatie as soon as you can get out from under the Boss. Just come to Corinth and turn left, can’t miss it. Thank you, I.O.”

  “I’ll do that Mr. Houlka. I sure will.”

  Then we handed over the food and suitcase, and me and Emzee stood there and watched them walk up the edge of the old trail with the two men riding behind. Last thing I saw was the sun shining off Mr. Ness’s vest, then they was all four out of sight upriver.

  Emzee and me watched the Spunt County and Anatolia County crews yelling back and forth at each other for awhile, then that got old.

  “I sure will miss him,” I said. “Let’s get on back.”

  We stood up. I thought I saw an old hat go floating by on the water along with the sticks and leaves, but I didn’t think too much about it.

  * * *

  It was six years later when we got to Mt. Oatie and it wasn’t a happy journey.

  They’d had five kids in the six years. Miz Rio had committed suicide day before yesterday. Houlka’s folks, poor country people, had laid him out on a big brush pile on the side of the mountain.

  His twin brother Mr. Al Lee didn’t look a thing like him. He was standing there with a torch in his hand while the kids and family was all crying. Miz Rio’s new grave was about ten feet away from the brush pile.

  Mr. Houlka was laid out in his boots and some new leather coveralls, but something I didn’t understand, he was wearing Mr. Ness’s old fishing vest with all them plugs on it over that. They’d laid his lion-head skin over his head and draped it back off the brush and crossed his bow and arrows and the big stick on his chest.

  His brother handed me the torch. I walked over to the pile, stuck it in in three or four places around the bottom, then lit up the lionskin and the vest. I watched until his beard started to burn, then I turned away.

  Mr. Lee’s wife held out something to me. It was the old Lion Feed cap he’d had on the day he’d walked from Parchman to Anomie, and the one I’d worn when he was figuring out the lie of Mr. Augie’s land. “He wanted you to have it,” she said.

  I put it on—it probably looked funny over my Sunday suit—and handed my hat to Emzee.

  “Them poor children,” she said, looking at the kids—they were too young to know what was really going on, the youngest two being carried by relatives; one of them was being wetnursed right that moment.

  “We came to do what we can,” I said to Mr. Lee.

  “Well. We’ll just have to figure things out as we go along, same as everybody’s always done, I guess,” he said.

  “Oh!” said Mr. Lee, then breaking down. “It’s too sad a story to tell.” He was sobbing and his wife held him.

  “Then I don’t want to know it,” I said. Emzee came and stood beside me.

  Together, we watched the smoke rise up in a curtain, twist once, and hang high into the skies above Mt. Oatie and Corinth and north Mississippi.

  AFTERWORD

  I’ll tell you where this one came from, one day in 1988.

  I was on the toilet in a house I shared with Warren and Caroline Spector and Richard Steinberg (who’s also the syndicated columnist Mr. Smarty-Pants). Richard woke up in his room in the back of the house and to lively himself up, put on Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere.”

  I immediately had a vision of a guy in bib overalls with a club over his shoulder coming down a country road. I knew that this was Hercules and that this was 1920s Mississippi. The Twelve Labors of Hercules were going to happen there.

  About this time, Mark V. Zeising (who’d been sending me literary mash-notes for a couple of years) asked me for a novella he could publish, along with the hardcover edition of my solo paperback Ace SF Special novel Them Bones, from 1984.

  “Sure thing,” I said. “It’s called A Dozen Tough Jobs.” Just like that.

  I wrote it between March 5, 1988 (when I received the advance) and January 29, 1989, on and off. (The problem was typing it up—yes, I still write longhand and type my stuff up on the last Adler manual portable typewriter ever built, out of West Germany.) I sent it off to Andy Watson, Mark’s production guy, in two batches, January 30th and 31st.

  The signature plates arrived on March 16, 1989, and the book was published April 10th (the limiteds were delayed due to a slipcase error, it says here in my notes).

  The history of this gets a little weird after that. First it was up for a couple of awards (the Nebula and World Fantasy Award) and came in second in the annual Locus Poll.

  Then, when the paperback edition of my Ursus Books hardcover second collection (All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past, 1987) came out as just Strange Monsters of the Recent Past from Ace Books in 1990, they put A Dozen Tough Jobs in there. Over in Britain, Legends printed the trade paperback edition of my third collection, (Night of the Cooters, Ursus/Zeising 1991) it put A Dozen Tough Jobs in there. So where you read it in paperback depends on what collection you read it in what country.

  There was also some fol-de-rol (having to do with contracts between Zeising and Ace) whereby Zeising was paying Ace 10% of the royalties on Them Bones, and Ace was paying Zeising 10% of the royalties on A Dozen Tough Jobs. You’d think they just would, have called it a draw. . . .

  Years later, a movie enters the picture . . .

  * * *

  I started getting letters from England (where it opened, first) about two weeks before it came out over here. The tenor of the letters was “Sue the Bastards!”

  The “bastards” in this case were Joel and Ethan Coen and the movie was O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a version of The Odyssey set in 1930s Mississippi. I said I’d wait until I saw it and make up my own mind. I had to wait for the video release, since at the time I was living in the unincorporated village of Oso, Washington.

  I watched the movie.

  “No,” I wrote back to my English, and now American, friends who’d joined the mob-cry. “What they did in the movie was their own version of The Odyssey, which has of course been lying around for the taking for 2800 years or so. By setting it in 1930s Mississippi, they used many of the same things I did—the prison-release stuff; if the hero visits the Underworld, it of course has to be a Ku Klux Klan meeting, etc. It comes out of the materials and the setting. Trust me. And if,” I said, “You’re ripping off a writer named Howard Waldrop, you don’t name one of your characters Vernon T. Waldrip, do you?”

  The Coens did a fine job on the movie. So have other people. Martin Scorsese, for instance. In his 1985 movie After Hours, which is about a guy trying to get across Manhattan one night. There’s an Aeolus episode (his only money, a $20 bill, blows out a cab window): anytime he does anything that keeps him from getting home immediately, he ends up in deep kim-chee, wanted for rape, etc. An ice-cream truck driven by Katherine O’Hara is a symbol of the Furies, etc.

  As I said, the classics are there for the grabbing, from James Joyce to a 1930s Robert Armstrong movie about a crippled railroad engineer and his beautiful wife, called Danger Lights (1932, I think). At one point—if I’m lyin’ I’m dyin’—Armstrong passes by a Vulcan stove in the kitchen.

  Neither me nor the Coens could have made that up if we tried.

  FIN DE CYCLÉ

  I. Humors in Uniform

  A. Gentlemen, Start Your Stilts!

  There was clanking and singing as the company came back from maneuvers.

  Pa-chinka Pa-chinka, a familiar and comforting sound. The first of the two scouts came into view five meters in the air atop the new steam stilts. He storked his way into the battalion area, then paused.

  Behind him came the second scout, then the cyclists in columns of three. They rode high-wheeled ordinaries, dusty now from the day’s ride. Their officer rode before them on one of the new safety bicycles, dwarfed by those who followed behind.

  At the headquarters he stopped, jumped off his
cycle.

  “Company! . . .” he yelled, and the order was passed back along by NCOs, “. . . company . . . company . . . company! . . .”

  “Halt!” Again the order ran back. The cyclists put on their spoon-brakes, reached out and grabbed the handlebars of the man to the side. The high-wheelers stood immobile in place, 210 of them, with the two scouts standing to the fore, steam slowly escaping from the legs of their stilts.

  “Company . . .” again the call and echoes, “Dis—” at the command, the leftward soldier placed his left foot on the step halfway down the spine of the bicycle above its small back wheel. The others shifted their weight backwards, still holding to the other man’s handlebars.

  “—mount!” The left-hand soldier dropped back to the ground, reached through to grab the spine of the ordinary next to him; the rider of that repeated the first man’s motions, until all three men were on the ground beside their high-wheels.

  At the same time the two scouts pulled the levers beside the knees of their metal stilts. The columns began to telescope down into themselves with a hiss of steam until the men were close enough to the ground to step off and back.

  “Company C, 3rd Battalion, 11th Bicycle Infantry, Attention!” said the lieutenant. As he did so, the major appeared on the headquarters’ porch. Like the others, he was dressed in the red baggy pants, blue coat and black cap with a white kepi on the back. Unlike them, he wore white gloves, sword, and pistol.

  “Another mission well done,” he said. “Tomorrow—a training half-holiday, for day after tomorrow, Bastille Day, the ninety-ninth of the Republic—we ride to Paris and then we roll smartly down the Champs-Élysées, to the general appreciation of the civilians and the wonder of the children.”

  A low groan went through the bicycle infantrymen.