Joe Lansdale - Waltz of Shadows

One time he gave me a pocket knife with a yellow handle that he’d burned my name into with a woodburning set, I kept that knife until the night my life got a thorn in it.

When I turned fourteen Arnold started coming around more, and Mama didn’t like it period. She saw what she called “a hole” in Arnold, and thought maybe she could hear the beat of leathery wings when he was around. She said to me, “You hang around with Arnold, you’re gonna catch something bad, and I don’t mean a cold.”

I listened like most kids listen. Not at all. One fall night, a few days short of Halloween, I went out with Arnold in his truck when I was supposed to cs sten have gone to the skating rink. He had some homemade hooch, and he gave me some in a paper cup. I got tight quick, because I’d never had any, and while we were sitting in his truck drinking the stuff, he said, “Let me show you something,” and he reached under his seat and pulled out a. 38 revolver, said, “You know, we’re about out of liquor, and I ain’t got no money. But if we went over to ole Ben’s liquor store and I stuck this in his face, I bet we could get both from him.”

I remember thinking that idea was the funniest thing in the world, because I didn’t think he meant it. I was drunk and didn’t know it.

We drank some more and Arnold talked some more and smiled some more, and pretty soon we were on our way over to Ben’s liquor store, positioned just over the county line where drink was legal. I thought we were just playing a game. I figured Arnold had lied about not having any money.

Arnold had worked at Ben’s one summer stacking liquor crates, and he knew just where to go. There was a little road went off in the woods and came out at the back of Ben’s place. You could park out there behind some trees and walk up the back circle drive. Near the door was a key in a wide-mouthed pipe stuck down in the ground with a rock over it.

We parked in the trees and sat and waited for a while, looking at the dark store, because it had been closed an hour by the time we got there. Finally Arnold said, “He don’t go home for a while after he closes. Has some things he does after the stock boys leave. He counts his money and takes it home with him. He makes pretty good money.”

I still thought he was kidding, but he kept drinking until all there was to drink was gone, and I said, “You’re just funnin’. Take me home, Arnold. I’ve got nothing against Ben. You used to work for him. You don’t want to do nothing to him.”

“He skimmed on my hours some. I reckon I got a hundred, maybe hundred-and-fifty dollars coming. I could take a hundred-and-twenty-five and call it even.”

“He’ll know you,” he said.

“Not if we tie these shop rags over our faces, way they do in cowboy movies.”

We got out of the truck, and Arnold tied a rag around my face and another around his. We got the key from the pipe, and Arnold unlocked the door, quiet like. We slid inside, moved through the stock room, pushed open the swinging door that went into the store itself. There at the counter, sitting on a stool, bent over the register, a little gooseneck lamp beside him, was Ben, scrawny and birdlike with a nose the size of a hammer handle. He was rolling pennies into paper rollers. When he heard us come in, he looked up.

Arnold pointed the gun, said, “Give it up.”

Ben looked at Arnold and said, “Arnold Small. I know you. That mask don’t do you no good. You don’t want to do this. You go on now, I’ll forget this.”

Arnold jerked his mask down and said, “You owe me money. You owe me money.” Then Arnold said to me: “Git what’s in the register, up to a hundred-and-twenty-five.”

I moved toward the register as if in a dream. Arnold went around front of the counter, pointed the gun at Ben. Then the old man moved. He pushed ced. ist me back with one hand and with the other pulled a pistol from under the counter, thumbed back the hammer, pointed it at Arnold. I grabbed a bottle of whisky off the shelf and brought it down hard on his gun arm. The gun went down and hit the register drawer, went off. Bills flew up like butterflies.

I swung the bottle again, hit Ben solid across the forehead. The bottle broke this time, and down he went, unconscious, me standing there looking at whisky and blood flowing over his head and onto the floor.

Arnold got hold of me, grabbed a roll of pennies from the counter, and we were out of there, in the pickup, roaring away before Arnold realized he’d left his pistol on the counter, like an offering.

Arnold took me to the skating rink and parked out back. From where we sat we could see the skaters in the open rink, and the lights flashing out from the spinning bulbs didn’t seem like lights at all, but strips of brightly colored foil, and the skaters were musicbox figures, wound up tight, going round and round to a grating noise that was supposed to be music. The shrieks and laughter of the skaters mocked us.

Arnold said, “Git out, squirt. Don’t say you been with me. You came here to skate, but stayed out here and watched before going in. Let some people see you. Ben didn’t know you. Your face was covered.”

I untied the shop rag, which was pulled down around my neck, and tried to fold it, but my fingers wouldn’t do the job. Arnold snatched the rag from me, reached across and opened the door. I got out of the truck, and Arnold drove off slow and easy. Gradually, the world slowed down. The music in the skating rink became defined, the lights flashed as lights are supposed to flash, and the shrieks and laughter from the rink no longer seemed directed at me.

It was all over.

Mostly.

Arnold took the rap. The old man recovered with nothing more than a scar, and he couldn’t name Arnold’s accomplice, and Arnold wouldn’t name me. The judge liked the way Arnold had thrown the football in high school, liked the way he had run with the ball on his powerful legs, and he liked Arnold’s loyalty to his unnamed partner. The gun Arnold left on the counter turned out not to have been loaded, and the roll of pennies was worth fifty cents, not exactly big money. Arnold got six months on the county farm instead of a few years in prison.

I went my way, free and easy, and when I saw old Ben on the street from then on, I crossed away from him to keep us from passing, least he recognize the eyes that had looked at him over the top of a shop rag mask. I was secretly glad when he passed on some years later, attacked by another robber, but this time one with a loaded gun and a more severe design.

When Arnold’s time was up, I couldn’t face him. I couldn’t thank him for being silent, because I had come to believe that was exactly as it should have been. That he owed me because I wouldn’t have been in on the deal had he not taken advantage of my age, got me drunk and drove me over there. I came to believe I was better than Arnold. That I always had been, and had only been slumming. I put the knife he gave me in a Prince Albert tobacco can and buried it out back of our house and dismissed him from my life.

I have felt that way since, except on dark nights when it’s three a.m., an chren a d I view myself in a different light. A light that shows me to be less than the man I pretend to be. A man who has never quite taken responsibility for his own actions.

If the thing with Arnold was bad, there was another whammy to come. My father began to sleep less, drink and brood and argue with my mother. But Dad’s guilt and dissatisfaction didn’t last long. One afternoon on his way home from work at a construction site, he stopped off for a beer in his favorite bar on the other side of the county line. While he was having his beer, a drunk pulled a gun on the bartender for some reason, and my Dad lost his temper because the bartender was a friend of his.