Joe Lansdale: Waltz of Shadows

“Okay, okay,” Arnold said. “I took one. I’m all right. Shit. No I ain’t. My fucking hip’s on fire. Goddamn you, Snake shit! Come see me, motherfucker! Come see me!”

Snake fired another shot from above. I heard it strike the dirt floor over by Arnold with a dead thud. This time Arnold didn’t ask him to visit. I heard running above us, sagging, squeaking boards, then the dreaded silence.

I got some ammo out of my pocket and filled all the chambers in the. 38, then I came out from behind the saw and darted to the right behind a heap of crates. From there, I slid up to a wooden ladder that led to the landing. I looked up. It was awfully dark, and Snake could have been lurking anywhere, though I felt certain from the sound of the movement I had heard, he had traveled on a ways, possibly to a more pro?to a mortected position.

“Arnold?” I said.

“Yeah.”

I slipped across to where his voice was coming from. He was behind a heap of crates lying on his side. The shotgun lay beside him. One of the crates had exploded, scattering pornographic debris about like chicken feathers.

“Crates and photographs, they don’t block slugs too well,” Arnold whispered. “Actually, it wasn’t a bullet I caught, it was a chunk of wood from one of the crates.”

I bent down and touched him on the shoulder and dragged him behind a deeper stack of boxes. “Shut up and stay here,” I said. “I’ll get him.”

“I certainly hope so,” Arnold said. “I don’t think I’m up for it right this moment.”

I left him and started up the ladder, holding the. 38 before me, using one hand to take myself up. I kept watching for the face of Snake, that tattooed moon, to rise over the horizon of the wooden platform above so I could put a crater in it. But the moon didn’t rise. I sniffed. I could smell him, but it wasn’t overwhelming. I became convinced that he wasn’t right above me. But he wouldn’t have to be. He could be off to the left or the right somewhere, waiting, sighting down the barrel of the. 38.

I made the top of the landing and Snake didn’t strike. I looked to my left and saw that the landing played out into a mass of thin, sagging boards that couldn’t have supported anything heavier than a spider or a cockroach.

He had gone right, across a path of stronger boards that lay across the rafters, through a doorless doorway that led onto a kind of loft.

I crouched on the landing and figured on things. I was him, I’d be on either side of that opening, waiting in the dark.

I took a prone position on the rickety landing and borrowed a trick from Snake’s book. I lifted my. 38 and shot through the wood, two shots in succession on the left side of the doorway, about three feet up, two on the right, the same height. The wood crackled and heaved and there was a grunt, and a silhouette moved in front of the doorway and red blasts of light jumped out of both his fists and bullets sang all around me. Had I been standing, as he suspected, I’d have had more holes in me than a cheese grater.

Even as Snake realized he’d missed, he turned his back to me, and ran straight into the darkness and the darkness was split by a thud of shutters and a burst of daylight and Snake leaped into the light and fell out of sight.

I bounded up, charged for the room, and a board gave and my leg went through, scaring about ten years off my life. I got my leg out of the break, and moved on into the room. The light from outside was faded, but it was enough to show me it was Snake’s headquarters. There was a TV up there and a VCR, some personal items, and a shelf containing a smattering of bones, like a child’s collection. There were pictures of naked children nailed to the wall.

I went over to the opening made by the thrown back shutters, and looked down. Snake had made a drop of about thirty feet. I could see him limping away in the distance, holding a revolver in either hand, struggling toward the clu?oward thtch of blackgum trees and the biplane beyond.

I fired two shots at him and neither hit. I was still sharp with a rifle, but with a handgun I was so-so. I made my way back to the ladder without falling or catching my balls on a nail, went out of the mill and ran toward the blackjacks and the branch.

Snake wasn’t making great time. That jump had caused him injury. It was a wonder he wasn’t wearing his knee caps under his earlobes. Still, he was going to make the plane well ahead of me. I got to the copse of trees, and slid on my ass down the side of the creek branch, stepped in the three or four inches of water there, and climbed up on the other side.

Snake was thirty feet away, in the cockpit of the Stearman. I heard an electric starter spark up, and the prop began to spin. The plane turned slightly to the right, then suddenly made a complete circle, then made it again.

Snake got it straight finally, just about the time I got close, and he started trying to take it for a run across the field. I knew by then he didn’t know how to fly. Fat Boy had probably been the pilot, and Snake only had some idea of how it was done.

I lifted the. 38 and pulled the trigger. The hammer clicked on an empty chamber. I started to reach in my pocket for a load, but Snake actually had the plane moving now, starting down the field.

I ran after the plane, which was not gaining much speed because it was bouncing and sawing left and right, and I got hold of the bottom wing and it jerked forward and I fell in the dirt and lost the. 38. I leaped to my feet and ran after the plane again, got the wing just before the speed picked up. I tugged myself onto the bottom wing and used it as a platform to spring at Snake in the open cockpit. I came down on him and hammered his head with the side of my fist and held to his neck with my other arm. The plane went crazy, and Snake lifted back on the throttle, and the plane went up and came down with a hard bounce that nearly threw me, then it went up again. I got a tighter grip on his throat and hit him again and he tried to pick one of his. 38’s from his lap and shoot me with it. The process caught his sleeve in the throttle, and as he pulled around to shoot, he jerked back on the throttle and we went up again, higher this time.

I glanced at the nose of the plane, saw it lifting toward the sky, then it dipped down and we were diving into a line of trees that appeared to be dancing along the edge of the woods. Then they weren’t dancing at all, they were just close. We hit with a sound like a bat catching a home run, only louder. The prop chopped branches like a Vegematic doing celery. A limb reached out and politely plucked me off Snake and the cockpit. The Stearman came apart like a box kite being shoved through the whirling blades of a window fan.

I lost all the breath that could possibly be in me, dropped down through a couple of boughs hard enough to crack a limb against my thigh, then made a drop that seemed to me was a world record. I hit the ground so hard I realized I only thought I’d lost all my breath. Now I knew what that sensation was truly like, and I knew another sensation as well. That of going very fast and spinning about and not being on some kind of carnival ride.

I went sliding down a muddy slope, over branches that whapped my legs and face and poked a few other parts of me for good measure. I came to rest at the base of a pine in time to see the Stearman’s parts raining?parts ra through the trees. The prop came whacking down the hill and bounced by me and crashed along, and from the sound of it, fetched up against something pretty solid. An oak was probably a good guess. An oak could stop a prop.

I lay there until my lungs came unglued and began to pump air. I used the tree I was lying against to help myself up, discovered my left wrist was broken, and my knee had a piece of tree branch in it about the size of a tent peg. I was bleeding profusely down my pants leg, and I had little desire to pull the chunk out, but I got hold of it and jerked and sat down again. The wood fragment was still in me and I felt a lot worse than I had a moment before. I gave it another jerk, and it came out this time. I tossed it aside and lay back until the pain quit churning around inside me.