The Elephant of Surprise

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Unfortunately for the dump-truck driver, he couldn’t slow in time to avoid the garbage truck. I looked behind me and saw them ram together, maybe six inches from the back of our ride. It was a hell of a smack and you could hear the brakes grinding on both trucks as they tried unsuccessfully to prevent a collision.

  In the bus taillights, I saw the passenger door on the dump truck spring open, and then I caught the driver’s circus act as he was thrown out of the truck by the impact, into the wet street.

  I blinked in amazement when he rolled and came up on his feet. It was that little kung fu fucker we had fought in the hospital. He looked devilish in the taillights. I had done martial arts all my life, and I didn’t think people like that were for real, just in the movies.

  He shot us the finger as we roared away and he disappeared into darkness behind us.

  Same to you, I thought.

  Leonard was no longer singing. He was whistling the shortening-bread tune.

  On up the road we rolled, and then we were on North Street. We turned left, went two streets down, and turned right.

  “Where’re you going?” Manny said.

  “Where am I supposed to be going?”

  “Tyler, that’s where we need to go now.”

  “I think I’m going to Hap’s house.”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  Leonard turned his head sharply, looked at me. “Am I out of my mind, Hap?”

  “No, sir, that’s exactly where you need to go. I need to be sure they got out.”

  “Oh,” Manny said. “Of course. I don’t have a family. Even my dog died.”

  The bus went along that way and we passed some houses, and then we turned right, hoping we could get back to my place.

  We made it all right for a while, and then it was obvious we couldn’t continue, not in that bus, not the way we were going. We came to where a house had been destroyed and the wind and rain had pushed much of it into the street. To turn right was to drive into a vast pool of water and risk being stuck, and to go left meant we would be blocked by trees and lumber.

  “Goddamn it,” I said.

  Leonard backed the bus into a driveway, turned it around without letting it slip too far into where water had gathered in an incline, and drove back the way we had come. He turned right, hit University, turned left on it. The road was open where it had been closed to us before, and where it had been open to us, now there were trees and cars and wooden debris. The water park and its water slides were gone.

  Leonard made a few false starts, took a variety of roads, wove the bus through all manner of messes, ran over people’s yards where they were clear, and finally made it to my place.

  When we got there, Leonard sprang the door open, and I leaped out and ran toward the dark house. As I neared, using my flashlight, I noted that most of the roof was gone and a tree from somewhere, a large tree, had gone through the right side of the house like a spear.

  I was going to use my key, but the door wasn’t locked. I went in fast, the flashlight in my left hand, my right holding the pistol.

  I called everyone’s name, including Buffy’s.

  No one came.

  I ran up the stairs with the light bobbing in front of me, and when I got to the top I pushed into our bedroom. The bed had collapsed under some fallen roof timbers, and the room was wet and smelled bad. I could see the dark sky through the hole in the roof and I could hear the wind and the rain. The world had gone to hell in a wet handbasket.

  I checked the other rooms upstairs. They were intact. I went downstairs, shone the light around, saw the kitchen window had been knocked out by something. Air whistled through it like wind in a cave. It was then that I saw there was a note on the table, held down by a salt shaker.

  I put the flashlight on it.

  It said: You know where, baby. Love, Brett

  I did know where. The first hotel or motel in Tyler that took dogs and was near the mall and Half Price Books. They had slipped away in time. I breathed a sigh of relief, shivered, and then I was okay. I went out to the bus.

  38

  We passed the one and only real hotel in LaBorde, saw there were some dim lights inside, most likely from a weak generator. Leonard pulled over there. We let out the dispatchers and the nurse. Manny and I got off with them, went inside, leaving Leonard at the wheel and Nikki still in her seat.

  We weren’t letting her out of our sight.

  We found a clerk sitting behind a desk. The only light there was a small lamp on the side of the long desk. The nurse and the dispatchers bunched up close to us. Our shoes made little puddles and mud marks on the tile.

  “Bad night,” said the clerk. He was a young black man with a tight haircut, a tight necktie, and a condom-tight suit. He looked a little excited in the lamplight.

  “Police,” Manny said, and pulled out her badge. She gave the clerk some info, but didn’t give him all the juice. The clerk explained they only had an old backup generator working. The facilities were inadequate. No elevator. No lights in the hallway. Limited light in the rooms. No room service, as if he thought we might be planning to order coffee and pie.

  “It’ll do,” Manny said. “Bill the department.”

  We spoke in a comforting manner to the dispatchers and the nurse, told them to sit tight until they got word to leave.

  The clerk started sorting out room keys.

  “We should go,” Manny said.

  “Good luck,” the female dispatcher said.

  “Yeah,” Jordan said. “Good luck.”

  “You done good with that generator,” I said.

  “I just flicked a switch.”

  “Still,” I said, “you done good.”

  “I really should stay with you,” the nurse said. “The girl is my patient.”

  “I don’t think that’s best,” Manny said. “We’ll take care of her.”

  The nurse hesitated. I could tell she was torn between duty and common sense. “Here,” the nurse said, opened her purse and gave me a couple bottles of pills. “I brought these with me. She needs this one about every four hours. The other, well, twice a day.”

  I took the pills and slipped them in my windbreaker pocket.

  Manny said to the clerk, “Hey, you got a hotel van?”

  “We do,” the clerk said.

  “You better put that on the bill too.”

  39

  Nikki and I rode together in the courtesy van from the hotel, following the big white bus with Leonard and Manny on it.

  “What are we doing?” Nikki said.

  It surprised me when she spoke. She hadn’t in a while. “We’re going to ditch the bus, which is what they’re looking for, try to get you to Tyler, to the cops there, some medical attention.”

  “Will that be any safer?”

  “We’ll be with you,” I said.

  “He may have paid someone off. That’s what the Keiths do.”

  “Not all cops are like that.”

  “Only takes one.”

  “We’re going to see that you’re protected. Manny will be there too. You’re her duty, and we’re making you ours.”

  “I am such an idiot. I believed Pretty Boy, and I should have known better. No. That’s a lie. I did know better. I wanted some adventure, a bad boy. Was that stupid?”

  “Yes.”

  She made a kind of snicker sound. “Yeah. It was. What’s with women and bad boys?”

  “I have no idea. What is with them?”

  “I had such a strange growing-up. My parents, they were fine, but me being albino, kids at school, they didn’t know what to do with that. And there have been some health issues, and there was no sunbathing or swimming during the day, and during the summer I didn’t go to camp…is this starting to sound like a poor-me rant?”

  “A little.”

  “Yeah, I know. Everyone has a story.”

  “Where you are now is due to bad choices, Nikki, but it’s not your fault that Pretty Boy turned out to be a
big shit and a coward. I got a list of bad choices, girl. I have a lot of blood on my hands.”

  “Some of it was for me.”

  “A lot of it is for other reasons. I’m all the things I never meant to be. You got a chance now to move on, to get in a better groove. This is your break.”

  “You bet I’m going to try. But Keith—all the energy and resources being put out to kill me, doesn’t make sense. I’ve already given enough evidence to get them in trouble even if I am killed. What’s the point?”

  “It’s not all about you,” I said. “It’s about Keith’s pride, about who’s the big boss, and with the weather like it is, I think he feels more powerful, a real renegade. It’s like the apocalypse, and it’s everyone for themselves. Thing is, though, he’s scared.”

  “Scared?”

  “His big show of power is about hanging on to the spot he’s got. Had his druthers, LaBorde would look like Juarez at the height of the drug war. Kind of guy that would decapitate folks and hang bodies off bridges and from trees. Knew some of the guys in the Dixie Mafia before him. They were trouble too. But they were mostly low-profile. It’s Keith’s posturing that will do him in. Or he’ll run up against someone he can’t handle.”

  “I hope so,” she said. “I better be quiet. My tongue is swelling.”

  I drove with one hand and used the other to fish out one of her bottles of pills. “Can you swallow like a chicken, without water?”

  “Yeah.”

  I gave her the bottle. “One pill,” I said.

  She took one out and gave me the bottle back. I put it back in my slicker pocket.

  “I can’t explain to you how grateful I am to you and Leonard. That’s right, isn’t it? Leonard. Manny told me, but I’m not sure I remember it right.”

  “Yeah, and just in case you don’t know for sure, when it comes to me, I’m Hap.”

  “You didn’t have to help me.”

  “Yes, we did.”

  Ahead of us, Leonard turned up a big hill with dark apartments perched on it, drove around a curve and then along a wooded road that was right in the middle of LaBorde. It looked like a country lane.

  He pulled over to the side of the road and parked the bus so it was leaning toward a ditch.

  He and Manny got out on the ditch side without falling into it, eased their way to us, and climbed into the van.

  “Take us to Tyler,” Leonard said. “And don’t spare the horses.”

  “Yes, boss,” I said.

  40

  It seemed simple enough, and I was starting to feel encouraged. All we had to do was drive to Tyler. Keith and his men weren’t looking for a white van. We had already reached North Street again, and the path was clear enough to navigate. There were few lights on along the street, and everything was quiet and still. No other cars were on the road.

  I checked the rearview mirror. Nope. No one was following us.

  We rode on out until we were at the end of LaBorde, near where the old abandoned LaBorde Bowling Center was. We passed it and drove up a rise in the highway and came down on the other side, and there was a disaster.

  There had been a bad pileup of trucks and there was a dead cow in the road. Trees that must have been two hundred years old had been uprooted by the wind and the rain and thrown into the pile of dead bovine and twisted metal.

  We parked the van, and me and Leonard got out in the rain, left Manny with Nikki. The rain had slowed and the wind was mild for a change, but we still weren’t much encouraged. We walked around and looked in the trucks, poking around with my flashlight, but there was no one there. It was obvious this had all happened some time back, maybe yesterday afternoon or last night, and whoever had been here had either walked off or been taken by ambulance to the hospital. At this point, there were probably no ambulances running, or they were running in a limited way. There was no way to call a wrecker to have this stuff moved. No way to do much of anything. And as far as the police went, well, the entirety of the available Laborde Police Department was behind us in a van.

  I felt odd right then, how prehistoric man must have felt when the night came and storms stirred up. The edge of the road was mostly forest, but it looked like a black wall, except at the top where the trees sighed in the wind and the sky was a little fainter, but if the rain came back and the wind picked up, then it would be solid black up there too, like being inside a bag of shadows.

  “You okay?” Leonard said.

  “No.”

  “Me either.”

  “The bowling center,” I said.

  “What?”

  “We hole up there, park the van around back, wait until daybreak. Maybe the repair crews will open up the road, some cops can come into work.”

  “In the old science fiction movies, they always called in the National Guard or the army.”

  “That’ll work too,” I said.

  “You know, it might even be the best plan. I don’t know about you, but I feel like I was whupped with a knotted plow line, buried in a bucket of shit, and brought back to life with a shot of electricity. I got the coffee jitters but at the same time I feel like I could lie down on broken glass and sleep.”

  “Yeah. I’m getting a little weak, not to mention hungry.”

  “Me too. My stomach thinks my throat’s cut.”

  We went back to the van and told Manny our plan, which she eagerly agreed to. Truth was, we were all starting to slow down as the fear and excitement wore off. We drove back to the bowling center and parked behind it.

  It was huge. There had not only been a bowling alley there but also a place for games, and there had been upstairs apartments where the owners lived.

  The back door was locked, of course, and neither Leonard nor I had our lock picks with us. We had misplaced them along the way.

  “Shall we kick it in?” Manny said.

  I got a straight tire iron out of the back of the van and went over and stuck it into the edge of the door, worked it a little, and popped the door loose. Everyone but me went inside. I went back to the van and pulled it up against the door sideways, so I could open the door, squeeze a bit, and step into the bowling alley. When I was inside, I closed the van door and then the bowling-alley door and hoped the van door would be a bit of a barrier if it came down to it.

  Right then, though, I felt snug and safe and thought it was highly unlikely Keith and his minions would find us. I felt that by that point, we’d shaken them.

  Manny was bouncing her flashlight beam around the bowling alley, and the place was massive. I got my own light out, started moving it about. The bowling alley had been closed for at least ten years, and for a couple of years, there was talk that it would be reopened. A For Sale sign went up, but no one bit. There was a rumor that a fellow was going to buy it and turn it into a skating rink, but that never happened. The potential buyer probably decided if people didn’t come to bowl, they wouldn’t come to skate.

  The air had been stirred by our arrival, and in the beam of the flashlights we could see dust moving, and the wood lanes were a muted gold, and the balls in the racks at the head of the alleys looked like little boulders.

  I shone my light down one of the lanes, and I could see some bowling pins turned over inside the open troughs where the balls fell through. The pin rack was halfway down, but it hadn’t picked up any pins, and I could almost hear bowling balls smacking them, like the story of Rip Van Winkle, where he discovered the old men in the mountains playing ninepins.

  In the other direction, there was a long row of seats in front of the alleys, and there were a dozen alleys, and there were honey-colored couches where you could recline while waiting your turn to bowl. Behind those was a short wall, and you could see over that to a long rack of small shelves where you picked up bowling shoes. There were still shoes in those shelves, covered in dust and linked by cobwebs. There was a stairway next to the rack that led to the second floor.

  I flashed my light on the stairway that went up, then turned left and out of
sight behind a wall. There was a long row of windows above the stairs, and it was broken up by some wood frames at eight-foot intervals all the way across, and it was like that over the shoe counter and all along the top of the bowling alley, and the windows ran on two sides. That way the managers could be upstairs and look down on the alley through the long row of windows and make sure no one was walking off with bowling shoes or a bowling ball while they had gone upstairs to grab a sandwich or use the toilet.

  Leonard came out of a doorless room next to the pin racks with his cell phone light on.

  We all went in there for a look, and there were still snacks inside the machines. Leonard used his windbreaker sleeve to wipe the dust off the glass of the closest machine so we could see inside more clearly.

  “Jesus,” Manny said, “that stuff is as old as Methuselah’s grandpa.”

  “I was hoping for a Twinkie,” Leonard said. “They say those last forever, all the preservatives in them. I’m about ready to look for mice to eat.”

  “That you could probably find,” Manny said, “and fresh, but that stuff in the machines, I wouldn’t suggest trying it, otherwise you might end up blowing out your bowels.”

  With food out of the picture, we went upstairs and moved the lights around. It was spacious up there, and there were several rooms, and there was a toilet, but it didn’t have any water connected to it, so that wasn’t going to be a plus, and worse yet, just seeing it made me want to pee or take a dump.

  After looking in all the rooms, we went down and gravitated without a word toward the couches. We laid our long guns on the floor in front of them.

  Nikki stretched out on one of the couches, and when she did, the dust from it stirred up and spun in my flashlight beam. Manny stretched out on another, and me and Leonard sat for a bit, and then suddenly I felt all fired up again, got up, and went to where I could walk behind the lanes and look at the racks for the bowling pins. Leonard came with me. We are adventurers.