Joe Lansdale - Freezer Burn

The summer rocked on and went away and fall came. The carnival made its new Oklahoma route, then dipped back to East Texas. A thing called El Nino, a kind of weather current, had, according to the meteorologists, messed things up. The weather was all haywire. There were floods and high tides on the West Coast of the U.S., hurricanes on the East. Water churned in the Gulf and washed the shores of Galveston with great violence. Wads of thunderstorms fell out of the sky at all times. Tornados tore across Texas. Near Corrigan, one even took away the whirligig, which Frost had never given up on, erecting it at each stop. The tornado carried the whirligig and one of the midgets around for a while, spat out the midget unharmed near a trailer park it didn’t spare, knotted up trailers and whirligig together, and deposited them just off Highway 59 next to a car dealership, as if the tornado had created and was displaying a modern work of weather art.

Winter eased in and so did ice. Hail flailed the land and the trees cracked and bent. No one was really that interested in a winter carnival. Not now. In the old days when the weather was just cold they got business. But now everything was canceled. People were nervous and a little scared. They had never seen it like this.

Many things changed.

The whirligig was long gone and the other rides had slowly fallen into disrepair.

The midget who had ridden the tornado had finally given it up and left them to work at a filling station in Mineola, Texas. The remaining midgets had turned to shoving people about and using bad language freely.

No one ate breakfast at the table outside anymore. Too damn cold.

One of the pumpkin heads, a fella called Bim, just up and died one morning on the Texas side of the Red River, and had been buried in a pauper’s grave in Paris, Texas, with nothing but his name on a cheap metal marker. Nobody wanted to stuff him, nobody claimed him. What he got was some dirt and a coffin so cheap it was pretty much a cardboard box, an appetizer for the worms.

Eventually the carnival, wounded from loss of personnel and morale, wound up at the spot where they had camped so many months previous. The spot where Conrad had fallen from the whirligig and the old Sabine roared by and the willows that hadn’t washed away waved in the gale, clattering now with icy wind chimes. The sky was full of pearly clouds glazed with what looked like soap scum. Hail banged the cabs, motor homes, cars, and trailers like it meant business.

And while they waited here for the bad weather to pass, there were rumbles throughout the carnival.

“The Old Days are gone.”

“Frost ain’t what he used to be.”

“I could make more money running a side show.”

“I could do better with a shell game.”

“I got some land, I can put up a sign. People would stop to look at me. And I could build a snake farm, get some Russian rats. Sew a fifth leg to a calf. Start my own business, stay in one place.”

“Blow me?”

“Uh uh.”

“Two heads better than one.”

Pause.

“Okay.”

Later.

“Now me?”

“Uh uh.”

“Pull me?”

Whack!

Some rumbles different, some the same.

Bill and Gidget were still playing it careful, and Bill dreamed about Gidget and wondered if she dreamed about him.

The Ice Man, as always, lay silent.

The carnival no longer buzzed. Frost paid money to the pasture owner so they could lay low by the Sabine for a while, and one day when it warmed a little and the ice melted, he became possessed with the idea it would be grand to perk spirits and order pizza from town for everyone. But when he called on the cell phone to order, no one would come out. He decided to send Bill and Gidget in for it.

Gidget, wearing her usual pissed-off look, the one that made you want to flatten her face, got in the car on the passenger side, and Frost, wearing only a T-shirt and light pants and slippers, stood on the ice next to Bill as if this were in fact his kind of weather.

“Get plenty pizza,” Frost told Bill. “Morale is low. Mine included. A little thing like this can lift it. Don’t get any of that stuff with little fishes on it. There’s maybe one midget and some pinheads will eat it. It’ll go to waste.”

“All right,” Bill said.

“Gidget’s got the money. She’s acting foul, but she always acts that way when you want her to do something. Don’t pay her no mind. Thing is, I don’t just want pizza, I want some time from her.”

“All right.”

“You doing okay, son?”

“I guess.”

“Still think about Conrad?”

“Not much.”

“I guess that’s good. Not that we want to forget him, do we?”

“No.”

“Well, you go on now, and be careful. Ice is starting to thin. I think today is going to be a hell of a nice day. Tomorrow, we move out.”

“We got gigs lined up?”

“One a couple weeks from now. But we got to leave here tomorrow. That’s all I’m paid up for, and the old man owns this land isn’t generous or worried about iced-in freak shows. He doesn’t care if we have to swim the river. He wants his money.”

“Frost. That story you told me, about the Ice Man. It true?”

“I never said it was true. I said it was a story I got. Sometimes I believe it, and there are days I don’t believe anything. But finally, in the end, you got to believe in something.”

Bill nodded, unconvinced. He had wanted Frost to come out and say the story was true, that he believed it, that there was something miraculous going on that could change everyone’s life. But he didn’t. And there wasn’t.

Bill took the keys and got behind the wheel. He backed out easy. As he turned the car around and made for the little road, he could hear ice crunching under his tires. Double Buckwheat, dressed in several shirts and a heavy coat and the bottoms to thermal underwear, wearing laced-up boots, was out by his trailer listening to rock and roll, dancing about.

“I wish that nigger would fall under the car,” Gidget said.

“You’re in a mood today,” Bill said. They moved out of the field and onto the slippery road. The ice wasn’t as melted as Frost had thought. It was hard, slow going.

“I’m just in a hurry, is all.”

“A hurry for what?”

“You know.”

“I figured that was done forgotten.”

“No you didn’t.”

“Maybe I was kind of hoping it was forgotten.”

“I don’t believe that neither. We got our time now, Bill.”

“How’s that?”

“You heard Frost. Tomorrow we move out. Way we do it, is tonight you mess this car up. Nothing too weird, just undo a brake line.”

“Cops will know right away.”

“You haven’t heard it all yet. You undo that brake line. You know how, don’t you?”

“Sort of.”

“Tomorrow, before we leave out, I’ll say: ‘Oh yeah, Bill says the brakes are going on the car. You ought not to drive it.’ I’ll throw a bit of a fit, like I’m trying to keep him from being hurt, you see. He’ll like that. I’ll get him to hook it up to the back of the motor home.”

“What does that do?”

“He’ll have to drive the motor home. I’ll sleep in the back like usual, only I won’t. He’ll go up front to drive, and I’ll tell him I’m taking a sleeping pill to get some rest, that I don’t feel good. Whatever. I’ll make up something. Before we leave I’ll get out of the motor home and you slip in the back. I’ll drive the Ice Man’s cab behind him.”

“You better make it farther back. He’ll see you behind him in the mirror.”

“I got a baseball hat, some sunglasses. I’ll put my hair up and wear them. Unless he’s looking for me, he won’t know. What we’re going to do is going to happen fast anyway and I got to be up front to do it.”