Joe Lansdale - The Best of Joe R. Lansdale

Wilson hated to admit it, but he didn’t. “The circle?”

“Pull the train,” Buddy said. “Do the team. You know, fuck a bunch of guys, one after the other.”

“Oh,” Wilson said.

“I knew that,” Jake said.

“Yeah,” Wilson said. “Yeah sure you did.” Then to Buddy: “When you gonna see this gal?”

Buddy, still important, took a swig of beer and pursed his lips and studied the afternoon sky. “Figured I’d walk on over there little after dark. It’s a mile or so.”

“Say she likes to do more than one guy?” Wilson asked.

“Way I hear it,” Buddy said, “she’ll do ‘em till they ain’t able to do. My cousin, Butch, he told me about her.”

Butch. The magic word. Wilson and Jake eyed each other again. There could be something in this after all. Butch was twenty, had a fast car, could play a little bit on the harmonica, bought his own beer, cussed in front of adults, and most importantly, he had been seen with women.

Buddy continued. “Her name’s Sally. Butch said she cost five dollars. He’s done her a few times. Got her name off a bathroom wall.”

“She costs?” Wilson asked.

“Think some gal’s going to do us all without some money for it?” Buddy said.

Again, an unspoken signal passed between Wilson and Jake. There could be truth in that.

“Butch gave me her address, said her pimp sits on the front porch and you go right up and negotiate with him. Says you talk right, he might take four.”

“I don’t know,” Wilson said. “I ain’t never paid for it.”

“Me neither,” said Jake.

“Ain’t neither one of you ever had any at all, let alone paid for it,” Buddy said.

Once more, Wilson and Jake were struck with the hard and painful facts.

Buddy looked at their faces and smiled. He took another sip of beer. “Well, you bring your five dollars, and I reckon you can tag along with me. Come by the house about dark and we’ll walk over together.”

“Yeah, well, all right,” Wilson said. “I wish we had a car.”

“Keep wishing,” Buddy said. “You boys hang with me, we’ll all be riding in Carrington’s old Chevy before long. I’ve got some prospects.”

It was just about dark when Wilson and Jake got over to Buddy’s neighborhood, which was a long street with four houses on it widely spaced. Buddy’s house was the ugliest of the four. It looked ready to nod off its concrete blocks at any moment and go crashing into the unkempt yard and die in a heap of rotting lumber and squeaking nails. Great strips of graying Sherwin-Williams flat-white paint hung from it in patches, giving it the appearance of having a skin disease. The roof was tin and loved the sun and pulled it in and held it so that the interior basked in a sort of slow simmer until well after sundown. Even now, late in the day, a rush of heat came off the roof and rippled down the street like the last results of a nuclear wind.

Wilson and Jake came up on the house from the side, not wanting to go to the door. Buddy’s mother was a grumpy old bitch in a brown bathrobe and bunny rabbit slippers with an ear missing on the left foot. No one had ever seen her wearing anything else, except now and then she added a shower cap to her uniform, and no one had ever seen her, with or without the shower cap, except through the screenwire door. She wasn’t thought to leave the house. She played radio contests and had to be near the radio at strategic times throughout the day so she could phone if she knew the answer to something. She claimed to be listening for household tips, but no one had ever seen her apply any. She also watched her daughter’s soap operas, though she never owned up to it. She always pretended to be reading, kept a Reader’s Digest cracked so she could look over it and see the TV.

She wasn’t friendly either. Times Wilson and Jake had come over before, she’d met them at the screen door and wouldn’t let them in. She wouldn’t even talk to them. She’d call back to Buddy inside, “Hey, those hoodlum friends of yours are here.”

Neither Wilson or Jake could see any sort of relationship developing between them and Buddy’s mother and they had stopped trying. They hung around outside the house under the open windows until Buddy came out. There were always interesting things to hear while they waited. Wilson told Jake it was educational.

This time, as before, they sidled up close to the house where they could hear. The television was on. A laugh track drifted out to them. That meant Buddy’s sister LuWanda was in there watching. If it wasn’t on, it meant she was asleep. Like her mother, she was drawing a check. Back problems plagued the family. Except for Buddy’s pa. His back was good. He was in prison for sticking up a liquor store. What little check he was getting for making license plates probably didn’t amount to much.

Now they could hear Buddy’s mother. Her voice had a quality that made you think of someone trying to talk while fatally injured; like she was lying under an overturned refrigerator, or had been thrown free of a car and had hit a tree.

“LuWanda, turn that thing down. You know I got bad feet.”

“You don’t listen none with your feet, Mama,” LuWanda said. Her voice was kind of slow and lazy, faintly squeaky, as if hoisted from her throat by a hand-over pulley.

“No,” Buddy’s mother said. “But I got to get up on my old tired feet and come in here and tell you to turn it down.”

“I can hear you yelling from the bedroom good enough when your radio ain’t too high.”

“But you still don’t turn it down.”

“I turn it down anymore, I won’t be able to hear it.”

“Your tired old mother, she ought to get some respect.”

“You get about half my check,” LuWanda said, “ain’t that enough. I’m gonna get out of here when I have the baby.”

“Yeah, and I bet that’s some baby, way you lay up with anything’s got pants.”

“I hardly never leave the house to get the chance,” LuWanda said. “It was Pa done it before he tried to knock over that liquor store.”

“Watch your mouth, young lady. I know you let them in through the windows. I’ll be glad to see you go, way you lie around here an’ watch that old TV. You ought to do something educational. Read the Reader’s Digest like I do. There’s tips for living in those, and you could sure profit some.”

“Could be something to that all right,” LuWanda said. “Pa read the Reader’s Digest and he’s over in Huntsville. I bet he likes there better than here. I bet he has a better time come night.”

“Don’t you start that again, young lady.”

“Way he told me,” LuWanda said, “I was always better with him than you was.”

“I’m putting my hands right over my ears at those lies. I won’t hear them.”

“He sure had him a thrust, didn’t he Mama?”

“Ooooh, you… you little shit, if I should say such a thing. You’ll get yours in hell, sister.”

“I been getting plenty of hell here.”

Wilson leaned against the house under the window and whispered to Jake. “Where the hell’s Buddy?”

This was answered by Buddy’s mother’s shrill voice. “Buddy, you are not going out of this house wearing them nigger shoes.”

“Oh, Mama,” Buddy said, “these ain’t nigger shoes. I bought these over at K-Woolens.”

“That’s right where the niggers buy their things,” she said.

“Ah Mama,” Buddy said.

“Don’t you Mama me. You march right back in there and take off them shoes and put on something else. And get you a pair of pants that don’t fit so tight people can tell which side it’s on.”

A moment later a window down from Wilson and Jake went up slowly. A hand holding a pair of shoes stuck out. The hand dropped the shoes and disappeared.