Joe Lansdale: Devil Red

When we were done eating, Leonard said, “You want to go home, or you gonna stay?”

“Drive me home,” I said. “Brett will be waiting. Besides, I don’t want to get eaten by roaches.”

“You have gotten so persnickety,” Leonard said. “I remember a time when you would have named them, made them each little hats, and called them your friends.”

On the drive to my place, Leonard shifted his eyes over to me and sighed. He said, “You’re sitting there all forlorn.”

“I feel forlorn,” I said.

“Some things you do, not because they’re pleasant, but because they have to be done.”

“But I’m not sure that was one of them.”

“You got way too many feelings, Hap.”

“I suppose.”

“Look at it this way, brother. I got feelings too, but they’re for those who deserve feelings. There are some people don’t have feelings, and don’t deserve yours. The only kind of feelings they got are pain and fear.”

“Governments use that tactic. Never seems to work too well.”

“We ain’t governments,” Leonard said, as he pulled into my drive. I got out and walked around on his side and looked at him through his open window. He said, “I’ll see you tomorrow at Marvin’s.”

I nodded. He looked at me for a while longer, almost said something, but didn’t. He backed the car into the street and I watched him drive away.

I went inside and locked up and went as quietly as I could upstairs and into the bedroom. I could see Brett’s shape in the bed. I took off my clothes and pulled on my pajama bottoms and got in bed as carefully as possible. When I was positioned, Brett said, “What you been doin’?”

“Killing what’s left of my soul, baby.”

Brett rolled over and put her arm across my chest. She smelled good. “You got the old woman’s money back, didn’t you?”

“We did.”

“I figured you were gonna do that.”

“Last thing I said when I went out was I wasn’t gonna do it. I told myself that when I met up with Leonard. Told myself that when we parked out front of the house where those guys were, and I told myself that up until the moment I swung the baseball bat and took out a kneecap.”

“I knew you were gonna do it.”

“But what is it about me that made you know that? What’s wrong with me?”

“You think things ought to be fair, and they aren’t, and you try and make them fair.”

“I broke a guy’s kneecap. Leonard, he broke the other guy’s hand and maybe a rib, and we scared a young woman who was there. I don’t know how fair that was. We were so mean our mean wore a hat and tie.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Brett rubbed my chest a little, said, “Was he a good guy? Guy’s knee you broke?”

“Not in the least.”

“Did you hurt the girl that was there?”

“No reason to… No. Of course not.”

“Okay. Guy’s hand that Leonard broke. Was he a good guy?”

I knew where this was going, but I went ahead with the ritual. “He’s the guy broke the old lady’s hand, took her money.”

“There you go. If he’s the bad guy, you got to be the good guy.”

“Who says?”

“Me. I just did.”

“Yeah, well, you’re sort of on my side.”

“Big-time. A guy takes an old woman’s money and breaks her hand and she goes to Marvin for help, what are you gonna do? She deserves her money back. It’s not the first time you’ve helped someone and had to get rough. Hell, I’ve had to get rough.”

“I know that. But this wasn’t self-defense, and it wasn’t personal.”

“Anytime you can help someone get back at a bully, it’s personal enough. Baby, you got to learn how to tell the good guys from the bad guys.”

“You sound like Leonard.”

“He can be wise when he sounds like me,” Brett said. We lay there for a while. Brett stroked my chest. “I got to leave tomorrow.

Early.”

“Damn. I forgot.”

“Figured you did. You been kind of preoccupied with your morality and your mortality… But it’s okay. I won’t be gone long. A week maybe.”

“That’s too long,” I said.

“Poor baby. You’re in the dumps.”

“Big-time.”

“Because you got shot a while back?”

“Well, duh, that has something to do with it,” I said.

“Would some sympathy pussy help?”

“Well,” I said. “I don’t know I’ll feel any more right about what I did, and I won’t miss you any less when you’re gone, but it certainly would improve my spirits.”

“I thought it might,” Brett said, shifting to slip off her panties.

I slept a short while after we made love, and then I woke up and got out of bed gently and went to the bathroom. I came back and sat in the chair by the window. I looked out at the yard where a fence rose up and another house swelled on that side slightly covered by a large tree and its shadows. The darkness from the tree made the house look like a natural formation. There was moonlight in the next-door neighbor’s backyard, which was clear of trees, and there was a kid’s swing set back there; it looked like some kind of Martian insect lurking.

I turned and watched Brett while she slept. The window was framed in such a way that it had four panes and the panes were filled with moonlight and the light lay across the bed and the thin slats that held the panes in place divided her like dark straight cuts. Her face was at peace and her mouth was open and she was snoring slightly. I could see her white teeth and the way her long red hair, which looked dark as the shadows, curled around her chin and spread out on the pillow like an oil spill.

I loved the way she looked and the way she made love and the way she made me feel. But there was nothing she did or could do that would make me feel good about what I had done. Not tonight, anyway.

I thought about going downstairs and reading, maybe listening to music with the earphones, but I didn’t feel strongly enough about it to do it. I went back to the bathroom and closed the door and turned on the light and found a magazine on the back of the toilet, picked up the pair of Wal-Mart glasses I kept in there-I kept several pairs around the house-and put them on and sighed because I needed the damn things to read close-up print. I was too tired and too old to be beating people up. A man who was old enough for reading glasses should have a job in some place air-conditioned and his most violent activity should be sliding his zipper down.

I read from the magazine, but nothing I read stayed with me. I finally gave it up and took a couple of light sleeping pills and went back to bed, and when I woke up it was late morning and Brett was gone.

It hadn’t been that long since I had healed up from a bullet wound, and in the process of getting that wound, I had ended up splitting some good money with Leonard, so I wasn’t sure why I was working. It wasn’t my style to do something when there was money already to be had. I preferred desperation and overdue bills as a work incentive.

I showered and got ready for work and thought about Brett and her whore of a daughter. Brett had gone off to see her before and had come back blue and not so friendly for a couple of days, and then she would see it all for what it was, come around, and be okay for months. Then some idea would strike her, or the daughter would e-mail her, or some such thing, and the blues would open up again like a deep hole in the sea, and down Brett would go. I couldn’t do a thing for her when she was that way. She had to deal with the depths and what was down there in her own manner and in her own time, same as me. She got like that, she was nothing like she was the rest of the time, and it was really best she did leave me for a while. That way they wouldn’t find my decapitated head on my pillow.