Joe Lansdale - The Best of Joe R. Lansdale

I liked to go down to Martha’s from time to time and browse the books, and if I had a little spare change, I’d try to actually buy something now and then, or get something for Jasmine. I was especially fond of detective books, and Jasmine, bless her little heart, liked Harlequin Romances. She’d read them four or five a weekend when she wasn’t dating boys, and since she was dating quite regularly now, she’d cut back mostly to one or two Harlequins a weekend.

Still, that was too many. I kept hoping she’d outgrow it. The romance novels and the dates. I was scared to death she’d fall in love with some cowboy with a cheek full of snuff and end up ironing Western shirts and wiping baby asses before she was old enough to vote.

Anyway, after I didn’t find any jobs and nobody died and left me any money, I went home and brooded, then went downstairs to Martha’s to look for a book.

Jasmine had made out a list of the titles she was looking to collect, and I took the list with me just in case I came across something she needed. I thought if I did, I might buy it and get her a detective book too, or something like that, give it to her with the romance and maybe she’d read it. I’d done that several times, and so far, to the best of my knowledge, she hadn’t read any of the non-romance novels. The others might as well have been used to level a vibrating refrigerator, but I kept on trying.

The stairs went down from my place and out into the street, and at the bottom, to the left of them, was Martha’s. The store was in front and she lived in back. During business hours in the summer the door was always open since Martha wouldn’t have put air conditioning in there if half the store had been a meat locker hung with prize beef. She was too cheap for that. She liked her mustache sweat-beaded, her bald head pink beneath her cap. The place smelled of books and faintly of boiled cabbage, or maybe that was some soured clothing somewhere. The two smells have always seemed a lot alike to me. It’s the only place I know hotter and filthier than my apartment, but it does have the books. Lots of them.

I went in, and there on the wall was a flyer for a circus at three o’clock that day. Martha had this old post board just inside the door, and she’d let people pin up flyers if they wanted, and sometimes she’d leave them there a whole day before she tore them down and wrote out the day’s receipts on the back of them with a stubby, tongue-licked pencil. I think that’s the only reason she had the post board and let people put up flyers, so she’d have scratch paper.

The flyer was for a circus called THE JIM DANDY THREE RING CIRCUS, and that should have clued me, but it didn’t. Truth is, I’ve never liked circuses. They depress me. Something about the animals and the people who work there strike me as desperate, as if they’re living on the edge of a cliff and the cliff is about to break off. But I saw this flyer and I thought of Jasmine.

When she was little she loved circuses. Her mother and I used to take her, and I remembered the whole thing rather fondly. Jasmine would laugh so hard at the clowns you had to tell her to shut up, and she’d put her hands over her eyes and peek through her fingers at the wild animal acts.

Back then, things were pretty good, and I think her mother even liked me, and truth to tell, I thought I was a pretty good guy myself. I thought I had the world by the tail. It took me a few years to realize the closest I was to having the world by the tail was being a dingle berry on one of its ass hairs. These days, I felt like the most worthless sonofabitch that had ever squatted to shit over a pair of shoes. I guess it isn’t hip or politically correct, but to me, a man without a job is like a man without balls.

Thinking about my problems also added to me wanting to go to the circus. Not only would I get a chance to be with Jasmine, it would help me get my mind off my troubles.

I got out my wallet and opened it and saw a few sad bills in there, but it looked to me that I had enough for the circus, and maybe I could even spring for dinner afterwards, if Jasmine was in the mood for a hot dog and a soda pop. She wanted anything more than that, she had to buy me dinner, and I’d let her, since the money came from her mother, my darling ex-wife, Connie — may she grow like an onion with her head in the ground.

Mommy Dearest didn’t seem to be shy of the bucks these days on account of she was letting old Gerald the Oil Man drop his drill down her oil shaft on a nightly basis.

Not that I’m bitter about it or anything. Him banging my ex-wife and being built like Tarzan and not losing any of his hair at the age of forty didn’t bother me a bit.

I put my wallet away and turned and saw Martha behind the counter looking at me. She twisted on the stool and said, “Got a job yet?”

I just love a small town. You fart and everyone looks in your direction and starts fanning.

“No, not yet,” I said.

“You looking for some kind of a career?”

“I’m looking for work.”

“Any kind of work?”

“Right now, yes. You got something for me?”

“Naw. Can’t pay my rent as it is.”

“You’re just curious, then?”

“Yeah. You want to go to that circus?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Is this a trick question too?”

“Guy put up the flyer gave me a couple tickets for letting him have the space on the board there. I’d give them to you for stacking some books. I don’t really want to do it.”

“Stack the books or give me the tickets?”

“Neither one. But you stack them Harlequins for me, I’ll give you the tickets.”

I looked at my wrist where my watch used to be before I pawned it. “You got the time?”

She looked at her watch. “Two o’clock.”

“I like the deal,” I said, “but the circus starts at three and I wanted to take my daughter.”

Martha shook out one of her delicate little cigarettes and lit it, studied me. It made me feel funny. Like I was a shit smear on a laboratory slide. Most I’d ever talked to her before was when I asked where the new detective novels were and she grumped around and finally told me, as if it was a secret she’d rather have kept.

“Tell you what,” Martha said, “I’ll give you the tickets now, and you come back tomorrow morning and put up the books for me.”

“That’s nice of you,” I said.

“Not really. I know where you live, and you don’t come put up my romance novels tomorrow, I’ll hunt you down and kill you.”

I looked for a smile, but I didn’t see any.

“That’s one way to do business,” I said.

“The only way. Here.” She opened a drawer and pulled out the tickets and I went over and took them. “By the way, what’s your name, boy? See you in here all the time, but don’t know your name.”

Boy? Was she talking to me?

“Plebin Cook,” I said. “And I’ve always assumed you’re Martha.”

“Martha ain’t much of a name, but it beats Plebin. Plebin’s awful. I was named that I’d get it changed. Call yourself most anything and it’d be better than Plebin.”

“I’ll tell my poor, old, gray-haired mother what you said.”

“You must have been an accident and that’s why she named you that. You got an older brother or sister?”

“A brother.”

“How much older?”

Earning these tickets was getting to be painful. “Sixteen years.”

“What’s his name?”

“Jim.”

“There you are. You were an accident. Jim’s a normal name. Her naming you Plebin is unconscious revenge. I read about stuff like that in one of those psychology books came in. Called Know Why Things Happen to You . You ought to read it. Thing it’d tell you is to get your name changed to something normal. Right name will give you a whole nuther outlook about yourself.”