Joe Lansdale: Cold in July

“You going to work?” Ann asked.

She could see that I was shaved and dressed, but she was giving me an invitation to stay home. It was an idea that did not appeal to me, however. Being in the house all day with her gone and Jordan at day school would just cause me to replay last night endlessly in my head. Every-time I looked at the couch or at the brighter spot on the wall where the painting had hung, it would come back to me.

“Sure, I’m going.”

“Feel like it?”

“Close enough. It’s better than staying here.”

“Did you sleep?”

“Some.”

“Sorry I was asleep when you came to bed.”

“That’s all right. I was too tired anyway.”

“That’s why you go to bed, Daddy, cause you’re tired,” Jordan said.

I smiled at him. “You’re right. I should have known that.”

“I know everythang,” he said.

I winked at Ann.

“What you doing with your eye, Daddy?”

“Something in it.”

“Gid it out?”

“Think so.”

Jordan turned back to his breakfast, and I found there really was something in my eyes.

Tears.

I excused myself before they could notice, went to the bathroom, washed my face and stared in the mirror. I thought maybe I should see a different face looking back at me, but it was the same goon I saw in there every day. Killing a man had not altered my appearance in the least I still looked like a fairly healthy, not too bad-looking, starting to bald, thirty-five-year-old man.

Jordan appeared in the doorway.

“God to go bad.”

“Come in.”

“You gid out.”

I patted him on the head, closed the door and went out The tears started again. Goddamn, I’d never been this weepy before. But then it hit me what the tears were all about. It wasn’t just that I had killed a man. It was that I was suddenly aware of Jordan’s mortality. I had accepted my own some time back, but not his. After the loss of the first child I felt that I had paid my dues. But I knew now that was ridiculous. There are no such things as dues. Nothing’s promised.

I got to thinking about what might have happened had Ann not heard the noise and alerted me. What if Jordan had heard the sound, got up to investigate, wandered into the living room in his feeted Superman pajamas, clutching his teddy bear?

A grim scenario formed in my mind. The burglar hearing Jordan, turning, drawing the gun, firing without consideration, a red blossom opening in my son’s chest…

I heard the toilet flush, and I went into our bedroom and closed the door, sat on the edge of the bed and hoped Jordan wouldn’t come in. I tried to dismiss all thoughts of mortality from my mind, my family’s mortality and my own. I sat there for a few minutes until the lie of permanence and absolute happiness was once again real enough to hold and my inner eye was blind enough not to see it slipping between my fingers like sand.

After Ann left for work, I let Jordan watch a few minutes of cartoons while I had a last cup of coffee, then I drove him to his day school at the Baptist church and took myself to work.

I parked behind my frame shop and got out. It was only eight-thirty and the air was already sticky. July in East Texas is like that. The trees hold the heat and smother you with it. Sometimes it’s so bad the humidity seems to have weight, and walking through it is like trying to wade through gelatin.

I stood by my car and breathed in the warm, small-town air. In spite of the heat, it was times like this that I was glad I lived in a town of forty thousand (counting ten thousand transient college students) instead of a place like Houston. Ann and I had lived there briefly when we were newly married, and we hated it. It was ugly, hurried and depressing. And there was all that crime.

Crime. That was a hoot. Even a small town like LaBorde wasn’t free of that. Just ask me, the burglar killer.

I got my key and went in the back and started coffee. At eight-forty-five the hired help showed. Valerie and James.

Valerie is a bright, attractive woman and a good frame builder, if a little impatient with customers. James, on the other hand, is a so-so frame builder, and a master at knowing what the customer really wants. But he hasn’t figured out what Valerie wants. She snubs him. He spends a lot of his time with his eyes stuck to her ass, like a mountain climber mooning over a cherished but unattainable summit.

I hoped plenty of work would come in today so I could stay busy, and maybe not have to talk too much. I knew if I talked very long about anything, I’d talk about last night, and I didn’t want to do that. Word would get around soon enough without my help. There hadn’t been any reporters last night, but it would certainly make the paper, if only in the abbreviated crime report section of the LaBorde Daily, which is as close to being a real newspaper as a water hose is to being a snake.

While Valerie and James poured themselves cups of coffee, I went up front, turned the Closed sign around to Open and unlocked the door.

· · ·

About nine-thirty Ann called during her break at the high school.

“Just a minute,” I said. I glanced at James and Valerie in the back of the shop. Valerie was working on a frame. She was bent over the table giving James a nice view of her buns; the red dress she wore was stretched over them tight as a bongo skin. James was gesticulating wildly, giving her a line of prattle between flashes of his teeth and puffs of his cigarette. I was somehow reminded of The Little Engine That Could. “Go ahead,” I said.

“You doing okay?” Ann asked.

“I’m not in the mood for a parade or anything. But yeah, I guess I’m all right. How about you?”

“I’m getting off next period to go talk to the police. Richard, it’s all over school. I don’t know how, but it is. Some of the teachers have asked me about it. I tried to talk to them, but I c N="1em"0emouldn’t communicate too well. Even some of the kids have asked.”

“Shit. Maybe you should go home.”

“Got to deal with it sometime, and I guess now is as good a time as any… You’re sure you’re okay?”

“Fine,” I lied.

“All right. I got to go, baby. Love you.”

“You too.”

· · ·

About ten-thirty Jack Crow, the mailman, showed up. He came in out of the July heat and it seemed to follow him, hung in the doorway like warm dog breath for a full fifteen seconds.

Jack is one of those big men who thinks his size, rugged face and disregard for intellectuals makes him a man. He can’t just deliver the mail and say hello, he’s got to spend a few minutes each morning making catty remarks to Valerie about how he likes redheads, and how she’s a looker, all the usual routines men like Jack think are charming. He also likes to talk about his hunting, fishing and war experiences. To hear him tell it, Hemingway was a perch fisher and Audie Murphy was a windup soldier. And he’s the real thing.

“Man, that air-conditioning feels good,” he said. “Cushy job you got here, folks. But tell you, wouldn’t trade. Mine keeps me in shape.” He slapped his stomach. “Course,” he said looking at Valerie, “you look in shape.”

“TV dinners,” she said.

He laughed. It sounded like something strangling. Well, one could hope.

He came over to the counter and leaned on it and looked me square in the eyes, like we were secret comrades, but said loudly, “I hear you got you one last night.”

The bottom fell out of my stomach. I knew it had to happen, but the fact that the first person who brought it up to me was Macho Jack seemed like cruel and unusual punishment. I didn’t know what to say back so I didn’t say anything. Jack was doing all the talking anyway.