Joe Lansdale - Freezer Burn

“I’ve never seen him like that,” Bill said.

“Well, he gets like that when it comes to the carnival, and especially when it comes to the Ice Man. Normally he’s all right, but now and then he’ll go into a snit. This stuff with Phil didn’t do him any good neither. I always hated Phil. He was more full of shit than a compost pile.”

“Petrified? He said the Ice Man was petrified.”

“That’s what the man said.”

“He don’t look petrified.”

“First I’ve heard of it, and I’ve known Frost for a long time now, and he’s always had the Ice Man exhibit. Then again, I’m not that inquisitive about the Ice Man. Personally, I don’t fuck around with it. I don’t care if he’s petrified or putrefied. Hauling a dead body around seems crazy to me. It ought to be buried. It gives me the willies.”

“Try sleeping with him.”

“Does he give good head?”

Bill turned and looked at Conrad, and slowly he smiled, and they both laughed.

Late in the day, Frost gathered everyone in the center of the camp and made a talk. A single cloud overhead darkened and the dipping sun fell westward into the Sabine, struggling as if about to drown, throwing out color like yells for help.

“First off, I want to apologize for the way I came in here today.”

Mostly no one had noticed, but everyone nodded, more out of respect that this was important to Frost, if not to them.

“I was angry. I had to deal with the police. They found Phil. He was drunk and parked in a truck stop, sleeping it off in the cab of his trailer with a woman he had hired who turned out to be man in a skirt, wig, and pantyhose.”

“What color wig?” someone asked. Some snickers followed.

“In place of pressing charges we worked some things out, me and Phil. He gave me the papers on his trailer, and the trailer of course. And the whirligig, which I’ve hired some men to load this very night. All of it will arrive here tomorrow morning – along with my children – courtesy of Phil. We’ll set up, stay here until the weekend, and make a couple nights of it then.

“One of the children was destroyed. Phil turned a corner too fast and he hadn’t made any attempt at proper packing. Celeste’s jar fell over and her head came off.”

Bill remembered that Celeste had been a female baby with a vagina, a pecker, and a swollen head.

“I ended up burying her beside the road. Ever since her birth, and simultaneous death, she has been in that jar. And not long after, on the road. All these years, on the road. I thought it appropriate she was buried by the highway.”

Bill thought probably about a half hour later some dog had dug her up and was making a meal of her in a thicket somewhere.

“Anyway, the whirligig is ours, it’ll be here tomorrow. Phil is shipping it in.”

There wasn’t exactly a murmur of enthusiasm. Setting up that whirligig was a pain in the ass. Even Conrad, who could be easygoing about most things, had said one day he’d rather drink a bucket of runny rat shit than help put that bolt-rattling sonofabitch up.

Usually, it came time for putting together the whirligig, Phil got drunk to do it and called for volunteers to help. It was then that the carnivalites began to suffer minor ailments. Anything from a paper cut to a bad back surfaced. But somehow, every time they camped, the damn thing got put up so unsuspecting folks could risk their lives.

Bill wished Phil had just gone off with his whirligig and not stolen anything. Everyone would have been a lot happier. Now, with that damn whirligig coming back, Bill thought he’d like to hunt Phil down with a pack of dogs, a rifle, and a few angry peasants with torches.

“Who says he’ll show?” asked Conrad.

“Well, I had him write out what he’d done on a piece of paper, and I said he didn’t show in the morning, I’d give the paper to the cops. Now, I understand a number of you had some trouble yesterday. I’m glad no one was hurt. I was rude earlier today, and I hope Bill and Conrad can forgive me for my loss of temper, and my seeming lack of interest in the living. I assure you, I care about all of you, very much.”

“We gonna eat now?” Double Buckwheat asked.

Frost smiled. “I suppose so.”

Night settled in, gray at first with strands of the sun ripped up and strewn through it, like orange confetti. Bill, who had been interested in the dark cloud that had settled over them, looked up. It was no longer distinguishable, it was just part of the starless night, like a sack had been pulled over everything.

Everyone went off to their spot to eat. Bill wished it were breakfast, when they ate together at the picnic tables. He felt lonely going back to the Ice Man’s trailer. Lonely and confused. He hadn’t had such an unsettling day since his mother died. Well, since the firecracker stand robbery. Well, since Deputy Cocksucker and the discovery of the freak show and carnival.

Come to think of it, lately most of his days were unsettling. But today was unsettling in a different way. He wasn’t sure if it had been a good day or a bad one. He felt he had truly become friends with Conrad, and he liked the feeling. He had never had a real friend before, just people he could do small crimes with.

And Gidget. Jesus, she was something. And there was that stuff about James Dean. He had to see one of his movies sometime. He had to find out more about him, now that he knew he and the Sausage Man weren’t one and the same.

And there were other feelings. Guilt feelings. He had betrayed Frost, one of the first people in his life to truly do something for him out of the goodness of his heart. Before, he had seen Frost as a sucker, now he wasn’t so sure. Things inside him were being stirred he didn’t even know he had.

Serious rain was thumping down and the river outside sounded as if it were running through the Ice Man’s trailer.

Bill was eating a mustard-dipped corn dog he’d warmed in the trailer’s little microwave. He was eating it and pondering about the Ice Man being not only frozen, but petrified. Was he petrified because he was frozen, or was he petrified and then frozen, and what was the point of freezing him if he was petrified?

Bill was working these mysteries about in the great room of his head when there was a scratching at the door, like a cat wanting in. At first he thought it might be coming from inside the freezer itself, made by the nails of a petrified hand. He jerked when he heard it and dropped the corn dog. It rolled across the glass and stopped, smearing mustard so that it looked like a great bug collision on a windshield.

Glancing at the Ice Man, he discovered the old boy hadn’t moved a smidgen. The scratching was coming from the door and it made the hairs on his upper back and neck salute. He was suddenly brought to mind of all those cats of his mother’s he had bagged and drowned. He had a vision of the raging river having washed them free and brought them back to seek him out.

Bill went over to the door, put his ear to it, heard Gidget’s voice say, “Bill?”

When he opened the door she was dressed in a yellow rain slicker with a hood. She looked like a plastic monk. He let her in and she took off the raincoat immediately and tossed it on the floor. Water ran out from under it. She said, “I thought you weren’t ever going to open the door.”

“I didn’t hear you out there at first. Or I didn’t know what it was.”

“I’m soaked to the bone. Damn water ran inside the slicker. It’s blowing ass over tea kettle.”

Gidget was wearing blue jean shorts and a man’s white T-shirt. Her shirt was wet and her breasts were visible through it.

“I don’t know you should be here.”

“Hell, Frost is out. I slipped him a Mickey. He won’t wake up until tomorrow morning. I said I was going to fix us drinks, and I did, but mine didn’t have a Mickey in it.”