Joe Lansdale: Cold in July

I brought the shotgun around again, and fired. The shot knocked the hell out of the freestanding fireplace and a section of it came off and hit the floor and the fireplace wasn’t freestanding anymore. But I didn’t hit Freddy.

Freddy shot at me as I pumped another load into the Ithaca, and the shot punched a hole in my side and my right arm went numb and the shotgun swung wide right as if on a gate and went to the floor. I tried to reach for the. 44 in the holster by cross drawing with my left hand, but knew damn well I’d never make it. I was looking down the barrel of Freddy’s gun, the mouth of death about to spit in my eye.

Russel’s ankle gun barked, and Freddy let out his air as if punched. He sat down on the floor and his gun fell between his legs. “Shit, I’m shot,” he said.

He looked at the gun on the floor in front of him and reached out to get it, but his fingers wouldn’t cooperate and take hold.›

Russel walked over to him. He had the little ankle gun in his left hand and his right arm was folded in front of him out of my sight

“I didn’t want it to hurt,” Russel said. “I wanted it done clean because I love you.”

Freddy smiled and looked up. “Love me? Man, you just put a hole in me. Shit, you really my daddy?”

“Uh huh,” Russel said.

“If that isn’t some kind of trip,” Freddy said, and Russel shot him through the forehead.

The numbness had mostly gone out of my side, though my arm, for some reason I couldn’t fathom, felt like a wet Kleenex. I reached across with my left hand and felt where the bullet had gone in and out through my shirt and flesh, but neither wound seemed particularly dreadful. I didn’t seem to be bleeding much. I let that give me some comfort.

I left Russel standing over his dead son, went in and knelt down by Jim Bob. The trip from one room to the other assured me all my parts were working, and more feeling was coming back into my arm; it felt like it had gone to sleep and was struggling to wake up.

Russel came in and got down on his knees by me and reached out and touched Jim Bob’s arm. Jim Bob opened his eyes and looked at us.

“I thought you weren’t going to do that,” Russel said.

“It seemed like the right thing at the time,” Jim Bob said. “I don’t think I’d do it again, though.”

“Bad?” Russel said.

“Bad enough that Rodriguez is going to make some money. You look a mite piqued yourself.”

“A mite,” Russel said.

“Dane?”

“I’m hit,” I said. “I feel okay though. I think it went through the fat meat on the side. I’m not even bleeding much.”

“You got a cut on your neck,” Jim Bob said.

I reached up and touched where a bullet had sliced me, came away with blood on my hand. “They seem to be shooting all around the edges,” I said.

Russel touched Jim Bob’s forehead. “No fever,” he said.

“I haven’t got the flu,” Jim Bob said. “God, did we get them all?”

“Uh huh,” Russel said.

“Damn, we’re better than I thought,” Jim Bob said.

“Can you get the truck?” Russel asked me. “I must be getting old. I feel winded.” His eyes were full of tears.

“Yeah,” I said.

“The girl seemed all right didn’t she?” Jim Bob said.

I glanced over at the bed. She hadn’t gone anywhere. Her face was turned toward us, those pecan-colored eyes taking us in.

“She’s okay,” I said. “Just scared shitless.”

I got the keys out of Jim Bob’s pocket and walked to the truck and drove it back. Upstairs, Russel had used the skinny man’s knife to cut off the side of the sheet the girl was lying on (I bet she enjoyed seeing him coming toward her with that wicked knife), and had used it to make bandages for Jim Bob. When I got there, Russel took off his shirt and I used some of the sheet to bandage him, then he did the same for me. We put our shirts on, and I went looking for our guns, including Jim Bob’s lost. 38 which he said the Mexican had swatted from him and knocked across the room. I found it twisted in the thin man’s white suit, which lay on the floor beside the bed.

I put all the guns in the truck, then Russel and I used our good arms to carry Jim Bob downstairs and over the dead bodies. We dropped him only once. He cussed until the air sizzled. We put him in the camper and gave him his hat to lay on his chest, then Russel and I went upstairs and cut the girl loose, found her clothes under the bed, and turned our backs while she put them on. When she was dressed, we led her downstairs. She didn’t say so much as one word and her eyes told me she still hadn’t figured us out. After what she’d been through, she was entitled to doubt and silence.

We put her in the back of the truck with Jim Bob and Russel climbed in there too and rested his back against the cab and found one of his cigarettes and lit it and coughed some smoke out.

“You sure you can drive?” he asked me.

“I’m not seeing spots or anything,” I said. “My side hurts, but my left hand is good. My right hand has more feeling than it had just a few minutes ago.”

“Get weak, we'll swap on the driving,” Russel said.

“I’ll go as fast as I can without bringing the law down on us,” I said. “I’ll try not to make it too rough a ride, Jim Bob.”

“Don’t pamper me,” Jim Bob said. “I ain’t gonna die or nothing. Long as they didn’t shoot my dick off, I’m gonna be okay.”

I closed the back of the camper and went around and got behind the wheel and drove us away from that big house full of death.

It was a hot Sunday afternoon in August and I was sitting at the picnic table out back of the house drinking a cold Lone Star, alternating between watching the condensation beads on the beer bottle and my son playing on his new swing set.

I had been sitting there thinking about my family.

About the things I had done. The hands that had hugged my son earlier were the same hands that had held guns that had been used to kill people. It didn’t seem right somehow. Even though the day was bright, when I thought about these things, I had the sensation of shadows moving behind my eyes. Perhaps the y were the sort of shadows Ru ssel had waltzed with, and now I had dancing partners of my own. And Russel had enough for hell’s own minuet.

It had been almost a month since the shoot-out, and not a day, a waking moment, had gone by without me thinking about it. It had replaced my thoughts about the burglar I had shot, and even the soft, little face of the daughter I had never known. The memory of that night was so strong I could sometimes smell the gunsmoke, blood, and fear. The experience had been exhilarating, like driving a car too fast, walking a high wire without a net. Better than either of those things could be. After those intense few moments of blood and thunder, I found myself wanting to do it again. Life now seemed remarkably tame and fearfully constant.

And when the desire to recall or repeat those moments of fibre and steel passed, I would fill up with a cold self-hatred and a longing for my soul. Not in a religious sense. I couldn’t believe there was anything on the other side of the void, not after what I had seen. But in the personal sense. I feared my humanity was threatening to ooze out of me, perhaps through a hole in the bottom like Russel had described.

My side and neck had healed nicely with only minor scarring, thanks to Rodriguez, and James and Valerie had been handling things at work quite well, during what I called my sabbatical.

I had gotten a card from Jim Bob saying he and Russel were “right as rain,” and I had read several newspaper accounts of the shoot-out. The Dixie Mafia was getting most of the blame. But Freddy Russel turning up again, dead for real this time, had proved most-embarrassing to the FBI. Especially since the local cop who identified the body through mug shots and the like, had turned this information over to the newspapers who grabbed it like a football and ran with it as far as they thought it would go, and that proved to be pretty far.