Joe Lansdale - Waltz of Shadows

I started out with home in mind, but didn’t keep thinking that way. It was like I didn’t know what I was doing, least not on a conscious level. I begin to feel the way Bill said he had felt. Driven. Not really wanting to do what I was doing, but doing it anyway.

The direction I took wasn’t even near home. I live east and I went west, right on out of Imperial City, out into the country.

The trees thickened and the roads narrowed. It had started to drizzle and the wind had picked up. Oak and maple and sweetgum leaves blew across my path so thick it was like a colorful snow storm. The wet ones stuck to my windshield, and I turned on my wipers to bat them away, but that only bunched them up.

I drove until I came to the blacktop I had been looking for all along, went down it until it broke into an unpaved road that wound its way into the depths of the east Texas woods.

I cruised along for a short ways until the trees grew thick enough to drape over the road and wind their limbs together. I went along that way for a while, then pulled over to the side of the road underneath a massive oak. I sat for a moment with my hands on the wheel, letting the lint inside my head spin around, then I looked at the photo album lying on the seat beside me and felt a chill jump up my spine and spread to the base of my skull.

I got out of the truck and didn’t slam the door. I walked around front and got hold of the leaves bunched on the windshield and removed them, even as more swirled out of the woods and twisted over the truck and planted themselves on the glass.

I pulled my collar up against the wind and drizzle and leaned on the bumper of the truck. About a hundred yards in front of me the trees were less thick and there was a partial clearing. In the center of the clearing was an ugly double-wide mobile home with a shiny aluminum skirt that went all the way aroun ^’atal cd the bottom, except for a large gap beside and underneath a set of black iron steps that led up to the front door. Jutting out of the opening at an angle to the steps was the rusty handle of a lawn mower.

Arnold’s place.

The home had once been brown, but was now grey with weathering and age and the little flagstone walk out front of it had dried weeds sticking up on either side of the stones. Underneath a carport/shed that had been built against the home was a dirty white Dodge pickup and a hooded barbecue grill that looked well used.

Hung by string, dangling like fruit from the branches of a barren iron wood tree at the edge of the car shed, was a batch of beer bottles. When the wind blew and went into the bottles, they gave out with a shake and a sound like haints moaning.

I had seen trees fixed up like that before. Mostly in the yards of old black people. Someone had told me the story behind the bottles when I was a kid, but now I couldn’t quite remember what it was all about. Something to do with spirits. I certainly hadn’t a clue why Arnold had fixed his tree up that way. That seemed out of place for him.

Beyond the double-wide, I could see the woods. It was very thick near Arnold’s place, because that’s where the creek ran through. I figured, come summer, the mosquitoes would rise off the water and muddy banks in a mass so thick and black they’d look like a fishing net being lifted, about to be dropped over the property.

Behind, and to the left of the trailer, at an angle from the woods, was a couple of acres of junk cars and car parts.

Way out back was a large, old-fashioned red barn that looked newer and cozier than the mobile home. That would be where Arnold’s wrecker lived.

I wondered what Arnold was doing inside his double-wide. Most likely sitting around in his underwear drinking beer, watching the wrestling matches, maybe racing the dial with his channel changer, scratching his belly, listening to the wind blowing through his bottle tree.

Or maybe he was having an early supper. Eating beanie-weenies out of a can. Spearing the weenies with his pocket knife, sucking the beans and juice straight from the container, wiping his mouth with the back of his arm as he watched thumb-sized roaches run out and around an oily-bottomed, brown paper sack at which he tossed his garbage.

I was taken aback by these thoughts. If that’s how I thought of him, then why had I driven out here to spy through the trees on Arnold’s trailer and suddenly wonder what he was doing after not speaking to him for ten years and not having the urge to?

When I was a kid, Arnold had been my hero, and I grew to love him the way a younger brother should love an older brother. He came around to our house some, but my mother was never relaxed with him. She tried to treat him right because of my father, but you could tell she wasn’t comfortable with the idea. My father didn’t know what to do about it. He loved Arnold, I know, but his firstborn was from a time when Dad had been a boy himself; hadn’t had the experience then that he had with his new family. I think seeing Arnold made Dad feel like a failure. When they talked to each other, it was around things, and Dad always had a kind of desperate look about him when Arnold was about, as if there was something he wanted to say, but c togs, the language in which it needed to be said was unknown to him.

One night, when I was twelve, a noise in the kitchen woke me up, and I got up and found Dad in there breaking up some cornbread in a half glass of milk, eating it with a spoon.

I got a glass, went over and sat down by him and took cornbread from the pan and broke it into my glass and chunked it up with the spoon and poured milk on it. He put a big arm around me while I sat there and ate the cornbread and drank the crumbed milk, and I saw then that he had a bunch of old school pictures of Arnold spread out on the table and was looking at them. I didn’t know where he got them or kept them, but they were well-creased and a little greasy.

I didn’t say anything to him, but all of a sudden, he said: “I keep thinking I’ll learn to do something right. You think you live long enough, you ought to learn something right. You have a kid, you got this pure little thing, and a chance to do everything right by it, and every day you just screw things up ’cause you don’t know nothing worth a damn in the first place. You end up teaching this pure little thing everything you don’t know, and nothin’ you do know, ’cause you don’t really know nothin’. You’re just putting dirt on a snowflake, and the harder you try to clean it up, dirtier it gets. Goddamn, Baby-man, I hope I ain’t making you and Rick so dirty.”

I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, and it worried me some because he had milk on his breath and not beer. Beer might make you talk like that, but milk and cornbread? It was as if he were speaking Greek. He had tears in his eyes, and I’d never seen that before. I didn’t know he could cry. I thought he was stone and wisdom rolled into one, and that night I knew he was neither. He was human as the next person, and I loved him all the more for it.

What he meant that night came to me later, of course, when I had kids of my own and saw that they were snowflakes that I was handling with dirty hands.

All I knew was what he said had something to do with me and Arnold, and mostly Arnold, but I didn’t know what that something was, except there was some kind of regret buried in his words.

When I was twelve, Arnold looked and seemed pretty neat with his greasy ducktails, tight pants, souped up Chevy pickup with the flame licks on the side, and he had money from little jobs he did here and there, and now and then he came over and had dinner with us, and afterwards he’d treat my little brother like a kid and me like a man. Me and Arnold would go out back of the house and throw knives in the dirt and he’d tell me about the girls he was seeing, and then he’d wink at me, just like I knew what he was winking about.