Joe Lansdale - Devil Red

“I know a guy works doing special effects in movies,” she said. “I’m thinking about having plastic trees put in. These are so messy.”

Leonard looked at me out of the corner of his eye. I looked back and tried not to laugh. Plastic trees?

Underneath one of the pesky real trees was a stone table with a bench on either side. We sat down there.

June rattled the ice in her glass, looked at what was left of her drink as if it were the last of all sunshine, and said, “This is what I know, and all I know. And when I tell you what I know, I don’t want to talk about it again. I’m all through. Just thinking about her and her nutball friends makes my ass tired.”

She shifted her tired, but very nice, ass on the bench and looked at the pond. There was a big insect, a dragonfly, cruising over the water. She put her focus on that for a while. Maybe she was thinking about having it killed and crucified on the edge of the pond as an object lesson, then having the yard sprayed with insecticide. She could always get her special effects friend to make her a robotic dragonfly, maybe some birds. She drank and moved the liquid around inside her mouth in case her teeth were in need of a whirlpool bath. The man with the pointed stick and the bag full of leaves moved across the yard and around a corner of the house and out of sight.

June swallowed loudly, said, “Mini hooked up with Ted because they were both a little freaky. Ted, he was into anal, and she didn’t mind it. His girlfriend before, Lori, not so happy about it. She had two kids, and she told me all Ted wanted to do was crawl up her poop chute. It’s all he talked about. Had videos and magazines and a game plan in bed that always, if you’ll pardon the pun, ended the same way.”

I wasn’t sure where this was going, and maybe it was going a little too far south, but Leonard and I let it go. I kind of like nasty stories.

June said, “She started thinking, from the way the kid’s toys smelt and felt, that while she and the kids were out, Ted was greasing up and shoving toys up his ass.”

“Ouch,” Leonard said. “Hope one of those toys wasn’t a bicycle.”

“So, she confronts him, and he admits it, and she is major pissed off, and he says, ‘Hell, just wash them off.’ He wasn’t concerned. It was all about his ass, his fetish.”

“And that was, rim shot, so to speak, the end of the relationship,” I said.

“Not yet. She thought maybe he could change. We always think our men can change, and they can’t. Assholes at birth, assholes at death. A motto I live by. Anyway, one day she comes home, and she’s got the children with her, and what does she find but a drunk and drugged-out Ted passed out in the living room on the rug, naked, with the engine of a hard plastic toy train up his ass, the rest of it dangling out, all the way down to the caboose, like it couldn’t make the hill.”

“Oh, hell,” I said. “That had to hurt.”

“Yep. Bled on the carpet. Children were traumatized, and no one wanted to play with the train thereafter. And she’d already dealt with him and a rubber duck and a twirler’s baton, so she’d had enough. The train set was expensive. You can buy a duck or a baton anywhere and mostly cheap, but not those buddies. She was fed up with him, and she liked that carpet. Moroccan. Way more expensive than the train. So, it was choo-choo-choo-cha-boogie, you are gone, baby. So, that leads him to Mini, who is connected to Godzilla and a couple other girls who drink blood. Good thing for Ted is, Mini didn’t have a problem with the ass business.”

“Will there be more trains and tunnels in this story?” Leonard asked.

“No. We’re switching tracks,” June said. “I’m just trying to say nuts attract nuts. Now we’re going to the Children of the Night. That’s what they called themselves. Is that hokey or what?”

The maid, as if on cue, came out with another drink, set it on the table in front of June, and without a word went back to the house. I watched her swing away with more than a bit of pleasure. Being male is a full-time, and sometimes tiring, job.

“You like that maid outfit?” June said to me.

“I don’t think it would fit me,” I said, “but it’s very nice. I don’t have the legs for it either.”

“You ought to see me in one,” she said.

“And what days do you wear it?” I asked.

She snorted and sipped her fresh drink. She was starting to get pretty lit, though she was an experienced drunk and wasn’t losing her focus on the story, and the words came out clear, if slightly spaced, as if they had to stop and rest before going on.

“I don’t know why Mini felt she could talk to me, but she did. Maybe she needed to get away from all weird all the time. Also, she was drunk and at a party here at my house, and she was fresh out of jail and no one else wanted to talk to her. Word gets around. Had I not been drunk, I wouldn’t have wanted to talk to her myself. She told me she and these other girls, Godzilla, as ringleader, would go out to the cemetery and have ceremonies, reading spells out of witchcraft books, lighting candles, that kind of crap, calling on Satan to come on up and see them sometime. Then one night, Godzilla’s girlfriend… Let’s see… She was called Trip. I don’t know what her real name was, but she was called that… So, one night, they’re in the cemetery, and they’re doing some ceremony or another, and it leads to Trip letting Godzilla cut her neck a little with a pocketknife and suck blood from the wound. And then everyone has to have a taste, so there’s more cutting. Everyone giving up a little blood, except Godzilla. They all take turns sucking neck, which I figure is pretty damn unsanitary.

“Godzilla and Trip, who were lesbian lovers, end up making out. Then the nonlesbians say what the hell, and they’re all making out, followed by more blood sucking. Anyway, they’re sucking blood and suckin’ whatever, and Godzilla, who was a pretty tough-lookin’ broad, or seemed that way the time I saw her… I figured about three feet of chain and two stiff drinks and I could have whipped all of them.”

“And without the chain?” I said.

“Might have been touch and go,” June said.

“So you were saying?” I said.

“Well, they were doing vampire things, I guess. But Mini, she tells me that the night in the graveyard when everyone got naked and tried to find a place to bite, Godzilla started talking about killing people. Feasting on their blood, as she put it. Mini thought it was cool talk, but just talk. Like you know, when you say you’re putting a band together in your garage and you’re going to cut a record and go all the way to the top, and you know you’re not, and the best that happens is you end up playing a bad version of ‘Wipe Out’ or ‘Free Bird’ at a bar for tips. Anyway, Mini claimed she was just playing along. Told me she thought she was a vampire on the weekends and late at night, and the rest of the time, she had to work at RadioShack. The other girls, they all had money and time to waste. Harder to be a vampire when you have to be nice to customers and earn a paycheck.”

June took a long ice-rattling drink from her glass. When she started talking again her tongue had grown a little thick.

“What happened was, one night they’re driving along in Godzilla’s car, four of them, Godzilla, Trip, Mini, and this other goober I can’t think of, and they come across this drunk frat-rat on a bicycle. Mini said they could see him pedaling along ahead of them. He was all over the road, like a sidewinder snake trying to drive a tricycle. So they pull over and get out, and this guy, he thinks he’s hit the jackpot. Four hotties giving his drunk ass attention. Well, three hotties and Godzilla.

“They get him to abandon his bicycle, which he tells them he stole off a front porch, and he climbs into the car. Mini said Trip showed him some tit and a bottle of whiskey, and now this sap thinks he’s died and gone to heaven.”