Joe Lansdale - Freezer Burn

Bill was raked along the bank and he tried to grab it and get up on it, but the river wasn’t having any of that. He finally got his arm twisted into some roots and they held. When he looked up, Gidget was washing toward him. He tried to lash out at her with his good arm, but he missed her, and her body slammed against his and she swung over and grabbed the same roots he was holding. The roots slowly began to rip loose from the bank.

“Bitch!” he screamed. “Bitch!”

She reached out and raked his face with her nails, and suddenly there was a shadow. He and Gidget turned. It was the freezer bearing the Ice Man, and the bend of the river had propelled it, like them, toward the bank with tremendous speed.

Gidget kicked off of Bill with her foot and the freezer slammed against Bill and when it popped back, Bill was pushed way into the mud of the bank, one arm clinging to the roots, his face a ruin. Bill’s hand slipped and he went under. He was barely aware of being alive. The water swirled him along the bottom, and he reached out with his one good arm and tried to clutch on to something out of reflex, and did. It was something heavy and it wasn’t attached to anything. He churned along the bottom with it in his hand, and as the river filled his lungs, he knew, and found almost amusing, that what he had grabbed was the wrench he had tossed so long ago. The wrench that had sent Conrad to his death. He tried to laugh out loud and the water filled him and finished him and took him away.

The freezer coursed on and the roots Gidget was holding broke loose and she washed after it, grabbed it, and with hands so numb she could hardly feel them, pulled herself on the bobbing freezer and straddled it. The force of the water and all the banging and twisting about had ripped her tight blue jeans until they were nothing more than blue bands around her calves. Her T-shirt was washed up over her back.

She put her face to the glass. She could see the Ice Man in there. He had been knocked about, and lay on his side, his head turned as if to look at her with one eye.

Up on the bank two old men had backed their pickup close to the water and were out illegally dumping their garbage in the river. They were pulling bags of trash out of the truck one at a time and tossing them in the water, telling each other stories about things they had done.

They saw the freezer and the blonde go by. One of the men, a black plastic bag of trash in his hand, said, “Goddamn, Willy, I can see her ass.”

“You betcha,” said the other.

Gidget floated rapidly on down and away, the two old men watching until she made a turn in the river and was twisted out of sight.

“So, you just sort of slipped on the ice and ran into the motor home?”

“Yes. It’s all my fault.”

“Naw. Naw. It happens.”

The sheriff poured Gidget another cup of coffee and made to adjust the blanket, trying to steal a look at the front of the wet black shirt, the two nipples poking at the fabric. As he moved the blanket, Gidget shifted in the chair and crossed her long legs. The blue jean pieces still clung to them. Her legs were coated with dirt and little bits of sticks and leaves, but she looked all right to him.

“This your carnival?”

“My husband’s. I’m afraid it’s all over now. I don’t want anything to do with it. Jesus, not after…”

“The other fella?”

“He worked for my husband. They were supposed to discuss business. It’s all my fault. Jesus. Did they find him?”

“Not yet. And it isn’t your fault. It’s the weather’s fault. You remember that, little lady. It’s the weather. You’re not responsible for anything.”

“Thanks, Sheriff… I can’t thank you enough.”

“Don’t thank me. The river’s to thank.”

“I don’t remember much.”

“It washed you and that freezer up near a fish camp. You was clinging to that freezer like nobody’s business. Couple niggers seen you and brought you in. By the way, that two-headed nigger. That real or some kind of made-up thing?”

“It’s real. He’s a Siamese twin.”

“I didn’t think that stuff was real. This freezer, we got it out back. That man in there. That a real man?”

“I don’t think so.”

“That could cause some problems.”

“Listen, Sheriff, you got to do what’s right, but my husband bought that thing from another carnival. He’s had it for a long time. It’s just an exhibit. If it was ever anybody it was somebody long ago and ain’t nobody to anyone now.”

“We ought to take fingerprints.”

“I know. And you can. But I’m telling you. It ain’t nothing to nobody but me. If it gets confiscated, I wouldn’t have any way to make a living.”

“Then you’re going to keep the carnival?”

“No. Just the exhibit, if you’ll let me.”

Gidget moved her shoulder slightly and the blanket slid off and showed not only her nipples against the shirt but more of her long legs and the bottoms of her buttocks.

“I’d do almost anything to keep from the red tape, Sheriff.”

“Yeah?” the sheriff said.

“Yeah,” Gidget said, and pushed the blanket completely off and let it rest on the back of the chair.

The sheriff went over and locked the door.

Bill’s house wasn’t hard to find, even by moonlight. He had given her a good description. Across from it was a clapboard shack that had once housed a firecracker stand.

Gidget parked the van she had bought in the backyard. She had purchased it with savings Frost had kept in a bank in Enid, Oklahoma. The freezer sat in the rear of the minivan, housing the Ice Man without electricity.

Gidget slipped on gloves, got out with a crowbar, and worked up the back window of the house. When she slid the window open a smell came out that made her swoon. She took deep breaths and went back to the car and got a handkerchief, put it over her nose, and climbed through the window.

Inside, Gidget moved her flashlight around. The bed in there was black with something greasy. She moved over closer and the smell got worse. It was not only a dead smell, but a sweet smell, like decay and sugar boiled together.

In the light of the flash Gidget could see there was a skull bathed in the black goo. Gray hairs were twisted about at the top of the skull. The corpse had been wrapped in trash bags at one point, but rats had gotten into it and ripped them open and exposed the body and eaten parts of it.

Gidget went into the living room. She poked around for thirty minutes before finding a desk drawer with the old woman’s checks in it. She poked around some more until she found an old checkbook and some things with Bill’s mother’s signature on them.

She put the copies of the signature and the checks in the coat pocket and went out the way she had come, closed the window.

She checked the mailbox for grins. Someone had stuck a phone book in there.

She tossed the phone book back inside the mailbox and drove away.

After a few months the weather got good and warm and the insurance policies Frost had taken out on himself naming her the beneficiary came through. She cashed the checks at a bank in Tyler, Texas, on a hot day in July. She had already forged the old lady’s name and managed to get those checks cashed at a pawn shop in Beaumont. She hadn’t gotten the full of the money, but the pawn shop hadn’t asked questions. She had worn a black wig during the process and had glued some small, but obvious, black hairs to her upper lip. Under her dress she had slipped her slim waist through a couple of old rubber inner tubes she had purchased at a junkyard. The pawnbroker might remember her, but he would remember a fat black-haired lady with a light mustache, not a blond bombshell.