Joe Lansdale - The Best of Joe R. Lansdale

“You’re right,” I said. “Otherwise, if he’s disposed of all the evidence, we’ve got nothing.” I was thinking too of my record at the police station. Meaning, of course, more than my word would be needed to start an investigation.

Martha cranked the van and put on the park lights and began to ease along, giving Waldo the time he needed to get out of the trailer park and ahead of us.

“I’ve got a pretty good idea where he’s going,” Martha said. “Bet he scoped the place out first day he got to town.”

“The dump,” Jasmine said. “Place they found those other bodies.”

We got to the street and saw Waldo was headed in the direction of the dump. Martha turned on the van’s headlights after the pickup was down the road a bit, then eased out in pursuit. We laid back and let him get way ahead, and when we got out of town and he took the turnoff to the dump, we passed on by and turned down a farm-to-market road and parked as close as we could to a barbed wire fence. We got out and climbed the fence and crossed a pasture and came to a rise and went up that and poked our heads over carefully and looked down on the dump.

There was smoke rising up in spots, where signs of burning refuse had been covered at some point, and it filled the air with stink. The dump had been like that forever. As a little boy, my father would bring me out to the dump to toss our family garbage, and even in broad daylight, I thought the place spooky, a sort of poor-boy, blue-collar hell. My dad said there were fires out here that had never been put out, not by the weight of garbage and dirt, or by winter ice or spring’s rain storms. Said no matter what was done to those fires, they still burned. Methane maybe. All the stuff in the dump heating up like compost, creating some kind of combustible chemical reaction.

Within the dump, bordered off by a wide layer of scraped earth, were two great oil derricks. They were working derricks too, and the great rocking horse pumps dipped down and rose up constantly, night or day, and it always struck me that this was a foolish place for a dump full of never-dying fires to exist, next to two working oil wells. But the dump still stood and the derricks still worked oil. The city council had tried to have the old dump shut down, moved, but so far nothing had happened. They couldn’t get those fires out completely for one thing. I felt time was against the dump and the wells. Eventually, the piper, or in this case, the pipeline, had to be paid. Some day the fires in the dump would get out of hand and set the oil wells on fire and the explosion that would occur would send Mud Creek and its surrounding rivers and woodlands to some place north of Pluto.

At night, the place was even more eerie. Flames licking out from under the debris like tongues, the rain seeping to its source, making it hiss white smoke like dragon breath. The two old derricks stood tall against the night and lightning wove a flickering crown of light around one of them and went away. In that instant, the electrified top of the derrick looked like Martian machinery. Inside the derricks, the still-working well pumps throbbed and kerchunked and dipped their dark, metal hammerheads then lifted them again. Down and up. Down and up. Taking with them on the drop and the rise, rain-wet shadows and flickers of garbage fire.

Waldo’s truck was parked beside the road, next to a mound of garbage the height of a first-story roof. He had peeled off the tarp and put it away and was unloading his boxes from the truck, carrying them to a spot near one of the oil derricks, arranging them neatly, as if he were being graded on his work. When the boxes were all out, Waldo stood with his back to us and watched one of the derrick’s pumps nod for a long time, as if the action of it amazed or offended him.

After a time, he turned suddenly and kicked at one of the boxes. The head in it popped up like a Mexican jumping bean and fell back down inside. Waldo took a deep breath, as if he were preparing to run a race, then got in his truck, turned it around, and drove away.

“He didn’t even bother to bury the pieces,” Jasmine said, and even in the bad light, I could see she was as white as Frosty the Snowman.

“Probably wants it to be found,” Martha said. “We know where the corpse is now. We have evidence, and we saw him dispose of the body ourselves. I think we can go to the law now.”

We drove back to town and called Sam from Martha’s bookstore. He answered the phone on the fifth ring. He sounded like he had a sock in his mouth.

“What?”

“Plebin, Sam. I need your help.”

“You in a ditch? Call a wrecker, man. I’m bushed.”

“Not exactly. It’s about murder.”

“Ah, shit, Plebin. You some kind of fool, or what? We been through this. Call some nuthouse doctor or something. I need sleep. Day I put in today was bad enough, but I don’t need you now and some story about murder. Lack of sleep gives me domestic problems.”

“This one’s different. I’ve got two witnesses. A body out at the dump. We saw it disposed of. A woman cut up in pieces, I kid you not. Guy named Waldo did it. He used to be with the circus. Directed a dog act.”

“The circus?”

“That’s right.”

“And he has a dog act.”

“Had. He cut up a woman and took her to the dump.”

“Plebin?”

“Yes.”

“I go out there, and there’s no dead body, I could change that, supply one, mood I’m in. Understand?”

“Just meet us at the dump.”

“Who’s us?”

I told him, gave him some background on Waldo, explained what Martha and Jasmine found in the LaBorde newspapers, hung up, and me and my fellow sleuths drove back to the dump.

We waited outside the dump in Martha’s van until Sam showed in his blue Ford. We waved at him and started the van and led him into the dump. We drove up to the spot near the derrick and got out. None of us went over to the boxes for a look. We didn’t speak. We listened to the pumps doing their work inside the derricks. Kerchunk, kerchunk, kerchunk.

Sam pulled up behind us and got out. He was wearing blue jeans and tennis shoes and his pajama top. He looked at me and Jasmine and Martha. Fact is, he looked at Martha quite a while.

“You want maybe I should send you a picture, or something?” Martha said.

Sam didn’t say anything. He looked away from Martha and said to me, “All right. Where’s the body?”

“It’s kind of here and there,” I said, and pointed. “In those boxes. Start with the little one, there. That’s her head.”

Sam looked in the box, and I saw him jump a little. Then he went still, bent forward and pulled the woman’s head out by the hair, held it up in front of him and looked at it. He spun and tossed it to me. Reflexively, I caught it, then dropped it. By the time it hit the ground I felt like a number one horse’s ass.

It wasn’t a human head. It was a mannequin head with a black paint mark covering the stump of the neck, which had been neatly sawed in two.

“Here, Jasmine,” Sam said. “You take a leg,” and he hoisted a mannequin leg out of another box and tossed it at her. She shrieked and dodged and it landed on the ground. “And you that’s gonna send me a picture. You take an arm.” He pulled a mannequin arm out of another box and tossed it at Martha, who swatted it out of the air with her putter cane.

He turned and kicked another of the boxes and sent a leg and an arm sailing into a heap of brush and old paint cans.

“Goddamn it, Plebin,” he said. “You’ve done it again.” He came over and stood in front of me. “Man, you’re nuts. Absolutely nuts.”

“Wasn’t just Plebin,” Martha said. “We all thought it. The guy brought this stuff out here is a weirdo. We’ve been watching him.”