Joe Lansdale - Cold in July

I went back outside and saw that I had dropped my coffee cup in the grass. I picked it up and went over to the oak and leaned on it, trying to draw some strength from the big old thing, but it wasn’t working. I felt weaker than ever.

When I looked down, I saw what had become of my blackbird. It lay dead next to the trunk of the oak, its beak open as if the fall had taken it by surprise.

While Russel lay in a sort of stupor on the couch and Jim Bob sat by him, I got a beer and went out back and walked down to the hog house. Raoul, a stringy man with oversized clothes and a straw hat that looked as if it had gone through a fan, was there. I had seen him from a distance a couple of times, but had never spoken to him. He would come and go like a ghost, leaving garden and hogs attended to.

I went out there and found a lawn chair by the hog house and watched Raoul go about his paces of turning on the irrigation system Jim Bob had devised, and then going into the hog house to do whatever he did there.

He looked at me suspiciously a few times, but if he thought I didn’t belong, he kept it to himself. When he was finished, he gave b8me a kind of shy wave, and I waved back. He got in a pickup with one door tied on with baling wire and drove off leaving at least a quart of K-Mart’s cheapest oil transformed into a dark, poisonous cloud behind him.

I sat there with an empty beer bottle and blew air into it, trying to strike up a jug band tune without any success. A blue bottle fly big enough to need air clearance flew around my head a few times and I swatted at him with the bottle, but he got away. He was big, but quick. I finally quit blowing in the bottle and the fly didn’t come back. It was getting hot. I felt paralyzed. Sweat ran down my face and into my collar. I wondered what the weather was like on Maui.

Then Jim Bob called to me, “Come on in the house, Dane.”

I didn’t want to, but I did. When I stepped inside, Russel was at the table and he had a bottle of Jim Beam, and a little glass. I hadn’t seen the whiskey before, and figured Jim Bob had brought it out. Russel looked at me and tried to smile, but the muscles in his mouth weren’t cooperating.

“Ben wants to say something,” Jim Bob said. “Sit down, would you?”

I went over to the couch and sat. Jim Bob poured some of the Jim Beam in a little glass and brought it over to me. I hated the stuff, but I sipped at it anyway. I would have drunk cherry dog piss right then. I felt as if I had been hit with a mallet. It could have been the beer on an empty stomach, and it could have been poor Russel or the video. All those things most likely.

“Freddy,” Russel said in an uncharacteristically low voice, “is out of control. An understatement. He’s off the end. He’s my son, and I feel responsible.”

“You’re not responsible,” I said.

“Shut up… please,” Russel said. “I feel responsible. He’s flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, and all that shit. But he’s no good. There’s nothing about that boy worth saving. He’s not a petty criminal, he’s the dredge at the bottom of the sewer.”

A tear ran out of Russel’s right eye and went down his face quick as a bullet and gathered in the bristle of whiskers on his cheek. He tossed off his whiskey and poured himself another.

I looked at Jim Bob. He looked very old. He was leaning against the bar holding a glass of whiskey and he was looking at Russel, and he looked like he might cry at any moment.

I drank some of my whiskey. I wished I hadn’t. It was hot and nasty, but I sipped it again. It was something to keep my hands from flying around.

“I think when a man has lost the things that make him a man,” Russel said. “Then he doesn’t need to live. Jim Bob says the law would be reluctant to do it. I don’t understand that. I’m a goddamn thief and I don’t understand that. If the law won’t do it, I have to.”

“You can’t do that,” I said. “He’s your son.”

“That’s why I have to do it. I brought him into this world, and now, I have to take him out of it. It’s the only thing I can do for him as a father. He might not know it, but it’s a goddamn gift. Shit, he’s dead already.”

“You could hire someone,” I said

“No,” Russel said.

“I offered to do it,” Jim Bob said.

“No, I’ve got to do this thing.”

“You do,” I said, “and you won’t be able to live with yourself.”

“I can’t live with myself now. Not knowing this.”

We sat there in silence and sipped our whiskey. A clock ticked somewhere and there was a hum I hadn’t noticed before. Probably the refrigerator.

“What is it you want to do, Ben?” Jim Bob said. “I mean, how?”

“I don’t know yet,” Russel said. “Just walk up and do it, I guess.”

“There’s the big Mex,” Jim Bob said, “he might be with Freddy.”

“I guess I’ll shoot him too,” Russel said.

“Might not be that easy,” Jim Bob said.

Russel looked at Jim Bob. “You trying to count yourself in?”

“Yeah,” Jim Bob said. “Backup. Help you scope things out. If you’re going to do it, I want you to come out of it alive and away from the law. They might not want to come down on Freddy, but they would you. You’d end up making them look bad. It’ll be said the FBI can’t take care of their charges, or that they’re double-crossers. They won’t like that, and they’ll clobber you but good.”

“You know you could get your ass shot off,” Russel said.

“I know,” Jim Bob said. “I’m not an ignoramus. But I won’t get my ass shot off. I’m fucking immortal.”

Slowly they turned their attention to me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I got a family.”

“And a good one,” Russel said. “Go back to them and take care of them. This isn’t a thing for you, and I wouldn’t want it to be. Something were to happen to you, and I’d have it on my head from here on out. Things are bad enough without me adding that.”

“I think maybe if I didn’t have a family-”

“You don’t need to explain yourself,” Jim Bob said. “We won’t think the worse of you.”

“And what if we did?” Russel said. “We’re just a thief and a hog-raising private eye.”

“You’re sure this is something you want to do?” I asked Russel.

“It’s the first thing I’ve ever been sure of in my life,” Russel said. “Bad as it is.”

Jim Bob came over and poured me some more whiskey I didn’t want, poured Russel and himself another.

“What I’ll do,” I said, “is stay with you guys until you've looked things over, seen ho w it’s to be done. You might need me for something. When it comes time for… when it’s time, take me to the bus station.”

“Fair enough,” Russel said. “And thanks.”

“This here,” Jim Bob said introducing us to the man, “is Manuel Rodriguez. He’s in the country legal, but he ain’t a legal doctor.”

“That was a nice introduction,” Rodriguez said shaking our hands, “I hope to do the same for you another time, Jim Bob.”

“Important here everyone knows how we stand,” Jim Bob said.

“Ah, business,” Rodriguez said. He was a little guy, maybe four feet eight with black hair going gray at the temples. His eyes threatened to close even as he looked at you, as if he had been awake too long. He had some ill-fitting dentures, and I kept wanting to hold my hand under his chin lest they fall out while he talked. We were at his house. A hot little wood-frame place he shared with Raoul, three other women and a little girl. The place smelled of sweat and cabbage, and mildew that came from the old straw that backed the almost worthless water fan in the living room window. Two of the women looked to be in their thirties, the other, perhaps Rodriguez’s wife, was closer to fifty. They all wore clothes that were too small or too large. Jeans and blouses and flat-heeled shoes fresh from garage sales. The little girl wore a stained yellow dress and had a doll without any clothes. She sat on the floor and looked at me. I smiled at her. She smiled back, but she didn’t come over to see me.