Joe Lansdale - Freezer Burn

“Yeah, or he’s just some fella died and got put in a freezer,” said the man who had remarked about the possums.

The woman with him, as if to stay in Frost’s good graces, said, “You can tell he ain’t no regular man.”

“Might be Big Foot,” the man with her said. “And talkin’ about feet, he’s got something between his toes too. Dog poo maybe.”

The woman took the man by the arm and hustled him out with the others, and in between the next group, Bill eased forward and took a peek.

At first he saw nothing other than finger writing on the frosty glass where someone, the talkative man perhaps, had written Alley Oop.

Then Frost turned on the hair dryer and let it blow across the top of the glass, warming it. The condensation peeled away and the writing retreated. Bill was startled at what he could see. He was clearly looking at a man, but it was not a withered tar-colored husk as he had expected. Here was a naked man near six feet tall with pink skin and very clear features. He had a large forehead and wide jaws, a long slightly crooked nose and lips like fat fishing worms. There were little wounds on his forehead, and another beneath the short ribs on the left side. He had a thick black beard and a full head of hair and the hair was thick on his shoulders, chest, groin, and legs. The eyes were wide open and blue without pupils, slicked over by the cold, but those eyes, so blue, so strange, seemed to see right up and through the glass into Bill’s head. Those eyes made him think about things, all manner of things, and all at once.

The glass filmed over again, and Frost waved the dryer over the lid once more, chasing the icy curtain away. This time Bill took note of the corpse’s short, yellow teeth, touched by a gloss of refrigerated winter and the bright light, giving them the appearance of being carved from dirty soap and greased with Vaseline. He looked at the rough hands and feet, the man’s penis and testicles. He was pleased to discover the man’s sexual apparatus was not as large as his own; it was neither an acorn nor a hose, but in shape and size like peckers and nuts on white marble statues made by the ancients, uncircumcised and covered by a flap of skin like a pantyhose pulled over a face, huddled silent in a patch of wiry black hair, a masked creature bent on filling station robbery that had died in its nest.

Bill and Frost exchanged glances, and a slow smile came over Frost’s lips and Bill turned and went out alongside the line which was now three times as long as before and still growing. He did not see Conrad. He didn’t see anyone he knew from the carnival. He went out and through the gap in the trailers and walked across the pasture to where Gidget had been. She was gone now, and he was glad, because something inside of him was all turned around, and he thought if she were there he might hit her. He felt as he had felt when his mother died and he realized no more checks were forthcoming. He felt as if he had awakened for the first time only to discover that permanent sleep was better.

He sat where Gidget had sat, and the spot was damp with her, and warm, and the night was warm and the sky was clear. Way off in the distance he heard the cow moo again, long and harsh, like a plea for help, and he wished to hell it would die and everyone else would die and just leave him alone in the pasture, in the warm night, under the clear sky, and then he would fade and fade until he was nothing but a dot in the dark, then not even that.

Bill’s days and nights rolled one into another, same into same, driving from town to town, helping set the carnival up, then hanging out until it was time to do it all over again.

He hated it. Work had never agreed with him, but at his most down-and-out moment he had never considered working with a dog-man, a bearded lady, assorted ruined heads, damaged bodies, and a pleasant man with a hand growing out of his tit. He had never thought of himself as way up on the food chain, but had felt he was above such as this, and now he was more than slightly troubled to discover he was wrong.

Mama was right again. He was not only stupid, he was a loser. Everywhere he turned he was socked with the mallet of stupidity, kicked in the balls by fate, given a dunce hat and the finger.

He considered leaving, then he’d run his hand over his face and dismiss the idea. Where would he go? He was a freak himself. He no longer found himself able to look in the mirror and had finally quit touching his face, even when it itched, and it had really begun to itch.

Sometimes at night when the carnival was in swing, he loitered outside the Ice Man’s trailer, like a boy whose former lover was dating someone else, so he parks his car near her house, watching, mooning, not knowing what to do. He had not been back in to see the Ice Man, but the image of those eyes was burned into the back of his head as deep as a radiation wound.

Sometimes when he lay down at night he felt as if the Ice Man’s eyes were falling out of the blackness toward him, then he would feel it was he who was falling. Diving down toward those two dark pools, then, just before he was drowned by them, he would wake up.

When he wasn’t thinking about that, he was thinking about Gidget and about what was behind the zipper of those shorts she wore. He thought about that more than the Ice Man, especially every night at bedtime.

He had been moved out of Frost’s bed and into the kitchen where Frost and Gidget had been sleeping. Now he could really hear their bed squeak at night, lots of grunts and groans. He thought old guys weren’t supposed to get it up as much, but Frost was certainly doing something in there with Gidget, and he doubted he was teaching her wrestling holds.

When he was not asleep he thought less about Gidget and less about the Ice Man. Then he would lie awake on his cot and think about his mother, the house, his dead friends, and the cop in the creek. He wondered if Officer Cocksucker had been discovered yet. He wondered if the car he and his friends had stolen had been found at the bottom of the swamp, and if Fat Boy’s car had been located.

Most likely. Skid marks would trace the car’s demise as sure as railroad tracks would show the direction a train would take, and Fat Boy’s own car would eventually be stumbled upon. He wondered if he had left some kind of DNA in the cars that would lead the cops to him. Sonofabitches were always finding DNA somewhere. Spit on your gum. Cum or shit stains in your shorts. Boogers in Kleenex.

That DNA crap always hung you unless you were a famous nigger football player.

One morning Frost knocked on the kitchen door and slid it back and came in carrying a flat black bag with a zipper. He sat on the bed next to Bill and said, “I got this for you.”

Bill sat up and watched Frost unzip the bag. Inside were some pill bottles and some little bottles with liquid in them and two hypodermic needles.

“Hey,” Bill said. “I don’t do that shit.”

“No, no,” Frost said. “This isn’t drugs. Well, it isn’t illegal drugs. It’s medicine.”

“I didn’t know I was sick.”

Frost laughed. “You’re infected with mosquito bites, my boy. I have a friend who supplied me with this stuff. A doctor. Did I tell you I was an RN for a time?”

Bill shook his head.

Frost took out one of the bottles and unscrewed the lid. Underneath there was a soft rubber cap stretched over the top of the bottle. Frost took one of the hypos and stuck the needle right through the rubber cap and drew some of the liquid into the hypo.

“I was lots of things before I was an owner of this carnival. But this is the only place I’ve ever really felt at home. With this hand on my chest I’ve always felt like an impostor to the outside world. This should help clear up some of the swelling, the low-grade infection. I have a couple of pills here I want you to take. We’d have done this sooner, my boy, but the truth be told, I had to wait until I came to the town where I had a doctor friend I used to know. He helped me out. I guess that does make them illegal drugs, doesn’t it?”