Joe Lansdale - The Best of Joe R. Lansdale

She found her purse and panties, went out of the hut and up the trail, and after a few wrong turns, she found the proper trail that wound its way up the mountainside to where her car was parked. When she climbed over the railing, she was exhausted.

Everything was as it was. She wondered if anyone had seen the cars, if anyone had stopped, then decided it didn’t matter. There was no one here now, and that’s what was important.

She took the keys from her purse and tried the engine. It turned over. That was a relief.

She killed the engine, got out and went around and opened the trunk of the Chevy and looked down at Bruce’s body. His face looked like one big bruise, his lips were as large as sausages. It made her happy to look at him.

A new energy came to her. She got him under the arms and pulled him out and managed him over to the rail and grabbed his legs and flipped him over the railing and onto the trail. She got one of his hands and started pulling him down the path, letting the momentum help her. She felt good. She felt strong. First Bruce had tried to dominate her, had threatened her, had thought she was weak because she was a woman, and one night, after slapping her, after raping her, while he slept a drunken sleep, she had pulled the blankets up tight around him and looped rope over and under the bed and used the knots he had taught her, and secured him.

Then she took a stick of stove wood and had beat him until she was so weak she fell to her knees. She hadn’t meant to kill him, just punish him for slapping her around, but when she got started she couldn’t stop until she was too worn out to go on, and when she was finished, she discovered he was dead.

That didn’t disturb her much. The thing then was to get rid of the body somewhere, drive on back to the city and say he had abandoned her and not come back. It was weak, but all she had. Until now.

After several stops for breath, a chance to lie on her back and look up at the stars, Ellen managed Bruce to the hut and got her arms under his and got him seated in one of the empty chairs. She straightened things up as best as she could. She put the larger pieces of the baby back in the crib. She picked Moon Face’s knife up off the floor and looked at it and looked at Bruce, his eyes wide open, the moonlight from the roof striking them, showing them to be dull as scratched glass.

Bending over his face, she went to work on his eyes. When she finished with them, she pushed his head forward and used the blade like a drill. She worked until the holes satisfied her. Now if the police found the Buick up there and came down the trail to investigate, and found the trail leading here, saw what was in the shack, Bruce would fit in with the rest of Moon Face’s victims. The police would probably conclude Moon Face, sleeping here with his “family,” had put his bed too close to the cliff and it had broken through the thin wall and he had tumbled to his death.

She liked it.

She held Bruce’s chin, lifted it, examined her work.

“You can be Uncle Brucey,” she said, and gave Bruce a pat on the shoulder. “Thanks for all your advice and help, Uncle Brucey. It’s what got me through.” She gave him another pat.

She found a shirt — possibly Moon Face’s, possibly a victim’s — on the opposite side of the shack, next to a little box of Harlequin Romances, and she used it to wipe the knife, pan, all she had touched, clean of her prints, then she went out of there, back up to her car.

Looking back on it, I wouldn’t have thought something as strange as all this, full of the real coincidence of life, would have begun with a bad circus, but that’s how it started, at least for me.

My luck had gone from bad to worse, then over the lip of worse, and into whatever lower level it can descend into. My job at the aluminum chair plant had played out and no rich relatives had died and left me any money. Fact was, I don’t think the Cooks, least any that are kin to me, have any money, outside of a few quarters to put in a jukebox come Saturday night, maybe a few bucks to waste on something like pretzels and beer.

Me, I didn’t even have money for beer or jukeboxes. I was collecting a little money on unemployment, and I was out beating the bushes for a job, but there didn’t seem to be much in the way of work in Mud Creek. I couldn’t even get on at the feed store carrying out bags of fertilizer and seed. All the sixteen-year-olds had that job.

It looked like I was going to have to move out of Mud Creek to find work, and though the idea of that didn’t hurt my feelings any, there was Jasmine, my teenage daughter, and she still had a year of high school to finish before she went off to Nacogdoches to start her degree in anthropology at Stephen F. Austin State University, and I planned to follow her over there and find a place of my own where we could be near, and improve our relationship, which overall was all right to begin with. I just wanted more time with her.

Right then Jasmine lived with her mother, and her mother doesn’t care a damn for me. She wanted to marry a guy that was going to be a high roller, and believe me, I wanted to be a high roller, but what she got was a guy who each time at the mark throws craps. No matter what I do, it turns to shit. Last break I felt I’d had in life was when I was ten and fell down and cracked my ankle. Well, maybe there was one good break after all. One that wasn’t a bone. Jasmine. She’s smart and pretty and ambitious and the love of my life.

But my marital problems and life’s woes are not what this is about. I was saying about the circus.

It was mid-June, and I’d tried a couple places, looking for work, and hadn’t gotten any, and I’d gone over to the employment office to talk to the people there and embarrass myself about not finding any work yet. They told me they didn’t have anything for me either, but they didn’t look embarrassed at all. When it’s you and the employment office, better known as the unemployment office, feeling embarrassed is a one-way street and you’re the one driving on it. They seem almost proud to tell you how many unemployment checks you got left, so it can kind of hang over your head like an anvil or something.

So, I thanked them like I meant it and went home, and believe me, that’s no treat.

Home is a little apartment about the size of a washroom at a Fina Station, only not as nice and without the air conditioning. The window looks out over Main Street, and when a car drives by the window shakes, which is one of the reasons I leave it open most of the time. That and the fact I can hope for some sort of breeze to stir the dead, hot air around. The place is over a used bookstore called MARTHA’S BOOKS, and Martha is an all right lady if you like them mean. She’s grumpy, about five hundred years old, weighs two-fifty when she’s at her wrestling weight, wears men’s clothing and has a bad leg and a faint black mustache to match the black wool ski cap she wears summer or winter, on account of her head is as bald as a river stone. I figure the cap is a funny sort of vanity, considering she doesn’t do anything to get rid of that mustache. Still, she always does her nails in pink polish and she smokes those long feminine cigarettes that some women like, maybe thinking if the weeds look elegant enough they won’t give them cancer.

Another thing about Martha, is with that bad leg she has a limp, and she helps that along with a golf putter she uses as a cane, putter-side up for a handle. See her coming down the street, which isn’t often, you got to think there’s not much you could add to make her any more gaudy, unless it’s an assful of bright tail feathers and maybe some guys to follow her playing percussion instruments.