Joe Lansdale: Freezer Burn

Bill and Fat Boy turned and swam and clawed in the other direction. The shots hopped all around them, like corn popping. They kept swimming, made some thick grass that grew high out of the water, grabbed hold of it and pulled themselves into a maze of cattails, then onto a spur of land and into a nest of trees.

The deputy had reloaded and was firing again. Lead danced across the water, but after a moment, Bill and Fat Boy realized the lead was only dancing so far.

“We’re out of range,” Fat Boy said.

At that moment, the deputy waded into the water and started calling them “cocksuckers.” They could hear his voice loud and clear across the water. He was wading and holding the hand with the pistol up out of the water and firing toward them. “Cocksuckers!” he kept saying over and over.

Before the deputy could bring them into range, they turned and went through the trees, back into waist-high water, and started wading toward an isle where great roots stuck out from the shore and plunged into the water like anacondas frozen on film. On the island itself, gnarly willows twisted amongst cypress stumps. There were high weeds beyond that and more cattails and thick brush and plenty of darkness.

The swamp smelled like an outhouse, and the moonlight on the water made it silver. In spots near the shore the water boiled, and pretty soon they were close to the boiling, and Bill could see there were little heads sticking out of the water, and the moonlight caught the dead eyes planted on the little heads and made them no brighter, but showed them for what they were. The flat black eyes of the devil, multiplied and trapped in the triangular-shaped faces of about twenty-five cotton-mouth water moccasins.

“By Jesus’s blue-veined dick!” Fat Boy yelled.

Bill backpedaled, trying to return to the bank behind him. Then he heard, “Cocksuckers… Cocksuckers,” and the water grew hot with pistol shot. Bill floundered back toward the snakes and to the right, and Fat Boy panicked, screamed, began to slap at the water to scare the snakes. But the snakes didn’t scare. The slapping excited them. They swam toward Fat Boy, their heads standing out of the swamp like malignant periscopes.

Fat Boy ducked under the water, possibly trying to swim under the snakes, or hoping the old story about how snakes couldn’t bite underwater was true, but the snakes dove down after him, and in the next moment he rose up wearing several of them, dispelling the myth. He screamed and screamed and the snakes struck up and out of the water and buried their fangs in him.

Fat Boy quit fighting them. He swam toward shore with the snakes dangling from his body. He made the bank by taking hold of a root and pulling himself up. Just before he was completely on shore, the deputy yelled “Cocksucker” again, and fired, and perhaps by accident, put a load in Fat Boy’s back.

Bill, who had made shore, was watching Fat Boy from behind the cypress stump. Fat Boy crawled onto shore and the snakes let go and bit him again and slithered away into the water. Fat Boy rolled onto his back and lay beneath willow shadows and a rich slice of lime-colored moonlight on his face.

The deputy, who was halfway across, partly wading, partly swimming, saw the little heads coming his way, gave out with a couple more “cocksuckers” and retreated. He made the shore ahead of the snakes and snapped a half dozen bullets across the water into the woods where Fat Boy lay and Bill cowered. He just kept firing and reloading, and Bill realized the deputy actually had two pistols. However, his marksmanship proved no better than his language, and Bill was certain the shot that had caught Fat Boy was an accident.

The deputy began to snap an empty revolver at them. He yelled. “Cocksuckers. I’m gonna get the shotgun. Hear me cocksuckers!” Then the deputy moved out of their sight, and Bill could hear him across the way, cussing and thrashing through the water back to his car.

Bill came out from behind the stump and looked at Fat Boy. Fat Boy had a head like a watermelon now. He looked much fatter all over and the steering wheel indentation and the knot made him look like some kind of space monster.

Fat Boy turned his head toward Bill. Fat Boy’s eyes were barely visible. His face had puffed up all around them. Fat Boy said, “One of ’em bit me on the balls. You got to get the poison out.”

“They bit you all over,” Bill said.

“But one bit me on the balls.”

“It don’t matter where they bit you. They bit you all over. You got shot too.”

“But one bit me on the balls. Oh shit. I ain’t gonna make it.” Then Fat Boy’s eyes went as flat and black as the eyes of the water moccasins. A cloud moved over the moon.

The moon stayed behind clouds for a while, and Bill left Fat Boy where he lay and struck out into the swamp water. He felt like a sewer rat wading through a shit-clogged drain. The swamp seemed to rise up out of nowhere. One moment you were walking on land, the next you were up to your neck in water and grass and maybe water moccasins.

Bill tried not to think about the water moccasins. He understood how Fat Boy had felt about being bit on the balls. You got to go, you don’t want to get it in the balls. The Old Man had told him once you could do a lot of things, but you shouldn’t let nobody get their hands on your balls. Bill was uncertain if this had been street fighting or sexual advice. It was about the only real advice his father had ever given him, because when Bill was twelve the Old Man did a fade. Considering the Old Man had to deal with Bill’s mother all the time, it left the boy with less hurt and a world of understanding. Actually, he was proud of the Old Man for bailing. He had never had the guts to leave. He had to wait until his mother left him. It felt odd now not to be bossed about by an overbearing woman. He had grown so accustomed to it, he thought it was natural, like trips to the bathroom.

Bill heard something slither by him in the water. His bowels loosened, but he kept wading. Soon the clouds around the moon faded or rolled away, leaving only tufts of mist across its face, like an adolescent wearing cotton whiskers.

Eventually Bill climbed on a little island and lay down to rest. He could hear things moving around him in the brush and among the willows and the old cypress stumps that had once been great trees but had been cut out years ago. He could hear something else.

“Cocksucker! Cocksucker! Cocksucker!” drifted over the swamp water as clear and clean as if shouted through a bullhorn. The bastard was nuts. Maybe when he wrecked he’d banged his head and sort of lost it. Bill remembered what the deputy had said about going back to his car to get his shotgun. It was Bill’s guess that if the deputy had the ammunition, he had reloaded both pistols as well.

Bill lifted up and peered in the direction he thought the last “Cocksucker!” had come from. A light was dancing in the darkness amidst the willows and cattails. The deputy had gotten a flashlight. But there was no way the bastard could be following him. You couldn’t follow anyone in this muck. The sonofabitch was just lucky. Or maybe the deputy was pursuing the most logical path… the little islands situated between patches of swamp water.

Crawling on his hands and knees, sweating so badly his face felt as if it had been buttered, Bill crossed the narrow little strip of land and slithered off into the water on the other side like a moccasin himself. He swam hard, but as quietly as he could, out to the center of the swamp and got hold of a cypress stump with a hole in it. While he was clinging to it, in the moonlight, he saw eyes looking out of the hollow at him. The stump was the home of a possum. The possum bared its fangs. Bill moved around to the other side of the stump and got up close to it and hoped for the best.