Joe Lansdale - Freezer Burn

“You took him in your mouth?” Conrad said.

“It didn’t go in far,” she said. “There wasn’t enough of it to reach the back of my throat.”

Conrad groaned. Phil cussed and said, “It’s just cold is all. It wasn’t cold you’d see some dick, that’s what I’m tryin’ to tell you.”

One of Double Buckwheat’s heads said, “That ain’t no half-hard dick.” The other said, “We got dicks bigger’n that.”

“Go to hell,” Phil said, getting up.

“It didn’t mean nothing,” U.S. Grant said to Conrad, stroking his head. “It didn’t mean a thing.”

Conrad made a sound in his throat like someone trying to swallow a golf ball. U.S. Grant tried to help him to his feet, but couldn’t quite do it, and Conrad didn’t have the will to manage.

Bill went over and got Conrad onto all fours. Conrad nodded at him, then without a word he and U.S. Grant made for her trailer. She had a big patch of mud and grass on the back of her nightgown, and Bill was surprised to find himself feeling sorry for her. He had never really thought he could be concerned with a bearded lady’s problems.

Conrad looked like he’d just been in the dogfight to end all dogfights, but his head was up, and he looked proud enough to drop his pants, lift a leg, and piss on a trailer tire. Instead he went up and inside and U.S. Grant closed the door.

Frost put a hand on Bill’s shoulder. “Good man,” he said.

Bill felt a warmth rise inside him. It was a feeling he didn’t entirely understand.

“You boys,” Frost said to Double Buckwheat, “turn off that music and go to bed. And you’ve been drinkin’, I can tell. Tomorrow, we get rid of all your booze. You two can’t drink. You know that.”

“We can we want to,” said one head.

Frost gave him a look. The other head replied promptly, “But we don’t want to.”

“Better,” Frost said.

The music playing now was “Blue Moon,” and “the boys” followed its notes into their trailer, closed the door, and just as the Temptations began to sing “Can’t Get Next to You,” the music went off.

Bill watched Frost head back to his trailer, the hand flapping, his huge white body floating across the wet night grass. He saw Gidget standing in the doorway of the motor home, framed by a light from inside. She had on a pair of panties so brief they might have been made out of strip of black Christmas ribbon. You could see the dark outline of blond hair trimming the edges of the cloth. She wore a matching top that only went over the tops of her breasts. The smooth bottoms of her breasts were like two beautiful moons dipping out of cloud cover. She stared at Bill, then went inside.

Frost went up the steps and into the trailer. A moment later, Phil, with a towel around his waist and bleeding from his superficial wounds, went after him, looking for all the world like a boy on his way to the principal’s office. As he passed, Bill said, “Reckon when you jumped out of that trailer something rejogged your brain.”

“What?”

“Knocked something loose in there so you don’t have to suffer from a half-hard dick all the time.”

“Fuck you.”

“What with?”

Phil was defeated now, his head dropped another degree toward his chest. It was obvious he wouldn’t be able to collect money from deadbeats and no one was wondering about the size of his half-hard dick anymore. He couldn’t even control U.S. Grant the bearded lady, didn’t have enough dick to fill her mouth, so how was he going to run a string of whores? It was the whirligig and hair grease for him, and that was it.

Next morning it was discovered the whirligig was still in place, but the whirligig owner was not. Phil had departed in his truck and trailer without bothering to take the ride with him.

Before decamping Phil had decided on a change of career after all. He had broken into the Pickled Punk trailer, causing the fold-out wall to collapse, exposing the interior to the light of day and the population of the carnival.

Phil had departed with all the Punks, forty-eight dollars and fifty-two cents of bread and egg money, a canned ham, and two bags of M amp;Ms. With the exception of the Punks, all this belonged to Conrad, who Bill discovered lived in the Pickled Punk trailer with a small refrigerator, a hot plate, a pallet on the floor, a greasy pillow, and a wrinkled magazine picture of Jesus’s face taped to the wall.

The picture was one of those where Jesus was on the cross, but you couldn’t see the cross or his body, just the face. The face looked swollen. There was a crown of thorns on his head, tears on his cheeks, blood leaking down from his forehead. The picture looked to have been wadded up at one time and straightened out, maybe with an iron. In the harsh sunlight all the little creases made the Savior look not only in pain, but old and tired and disappointed, as well as in need of a good sunlamp. On the floor next to Conrad’s pallet were scattered playing cards. One of them, a Joker, was turned face up and had a heel print on it, presumably Phil’s.

“It ain’t much, but I call it home,” Conrad said. He sat by Bill’s side smoking a cigarette. The pinheads and Double Buckwheat were behind them, peeking into the ravaged room that had been home to Conrad and assorted fucked-up babies in alcohol.

“You ought to not have to sleep on the floor,” Bill said.

“I don’t have to,” Conrad said. “It’s what I like. Some reason, messed up like I am, a bed doesn’t work as well. I get some serious backaches, and a chiropractor doesn’t know what to do with me. I think they figure I ought to go to a vet. I sleep on the floor or on the roof of Frost’s motor home. It’s the most comfortable of the trailers and such.”

The pinheads and Double Buckwheat grew bored looking at the pallet, the picture, and the empty space where the Punks had been, so they wandered off.

“Hey, thanks for helping me last night.”

“That wasn’t anything. I just helped you up.”

“It was enough… Hell, I don’t blame her.”

“Beg pardon?”

“She couldn’t help herself. She wanted something normal. I reckon I had a normal woman would go to bed with me, I’d go. Even if she was ugly enough to have to sneak up on a glass of water. It’d make me feel like I wasn’t on the outside lookin’ in. Like I was just another fella out there doin’ what other fellas did. I was mad last night, but I forgive her. I don’t take it personal. You can’t take something like that personal.”

Bill felt he could, but he changed the subject, nodded at the picture on the wall. “I see you’re religious.”

“Just liked the picture. Kid wadded it up and tossed it at me one night. Out of curiosity, I unwadded it and it was that guy. It being up there on the wall makes me feel I got company. Play myself a game of cards now and then, I try to imagine he’s playin’ against me and the Pickled Punks are watchin’. You know, bunch of interested bystanders watching two card sharpies work. I have to take it off the wall when the Punks are on display… Were on display… Damn, I’m gonna miss them M amp;Ms. And that forty dollars or so is all I’ve been able to save. I spend too much money on those damn M amp;Ms. They’re kind of like catnip to me. And U.S. Grant likes ’em.”

Out of the corner of his eye Bill could see Conrad’s eyes had watered up. Without really knowing he was going to do it, he reached out and patted Conrad on the shoulder.

Conrad coughed and looked at the ground. To give him a semblance of privacy, Bill looked out at the whirligig. The cottony fog was rapidly being burned off by the heat of the morning sun and already deep shadows were forming around it. Wasn’t long, though, before black clouds, like skin cancers, began to appear on the face of the sky, and off in the distance was a rumbling sound like a hungry belly wanting to be filled.