Joe Lansdale - Bad Chili

Well, he could always go down to Burger King.

When the waiter came back with our drinks we ordered a dozen oysters, steaks, and salads. The oysters came and Brett ate hers with lots of lemon and sauce, and I ate mine with just the lemon. The salad came and it was a good salad, or as good as salads get in Texas. A Texan’s idea of a salad is a few bananas and strawberries inside a mold of lime Jell-O.

The baked potatoes had all the fixings. Cheese, sour cream, butter, bacon bits. The steaks weren’t bad either, both of them cooked medium rare. I drank a nonalcoholic beer, and Brett had another mixed drink. And if I could remember the roster of all the songs that talentless sonofabitch in the dinner jacket sang, I’d go to my grave a happy man.

As we ate we blocked out the singer’s frantic organ playing and tired voice and talked about ourselves. My side of the story was pretty easy to tell. It was mostly about bad jobs, growing up, this and that, but I left out the part about being an ex-con because I was a draft resister; that would come later when we knew each other better.

Brett told me she had been raised in Gilmer, Texas, had been a cheerleader and later a majorette, and that she’d once had a fantasy she might like to fuck the football team. But the fantasy wore off before she got the opportunity, and in the long run, after knowing a few of them, she decided the knob on the end of her baton was about as stimulating. Real lady talk.

“When I was eighteen,” she said, “even without the football team, I was a walkin’ sperm bank. A psychologist will tell you it’s because there was something wrong with me, and who am I to argue. They’ll tell you my parents beat me or fucked me or doodled with my asshole while I slept, or a next-door neighbor liked to pay me nickels and ice cream to have me strip naked and sit on his coffee table while he beat off to violent Bugs Bunny cartoons. And I’m sure it happens, but I had a good home life and was well loved and was popular in school, went to church, got baptized, and even attended charm school.”

“I take it you didn’t get a diploma from charm school.”

The great smile again. “Actually, I did, smart ass. But as I was sayin’, ain’t none of that bullshit applies to me. I do have a sneakin’ suspicion what my problem was and is, however.”

“What?” I asked.

“I got on the pill when I was sixteen because I think I just simply and dearly loved to fuck. I still do. Though I’ve got morals now.”

“You don’t do it on the first date.”

“That’s it. That’s the moral. And I make the man wear a rubber. But I suppose that’s nothing to do with morals. You could call that disease control. Has to be, because I hate those goddamn rubbers.”

“So do men. Go on, tell me more.”

Brett told me she had a twenty-seven-year old son named Jimmy who lived in Austin and was into Taoist philosophy and the martial art of aikido. Jimmy believed the source of his energy came up from the center of the earth and moved through his colon and all around inside of him. He had lots of internal energy. What the Japanese call ki power. Three people couldn’t lift Jimmy off the ground because of his ki. He could hold his arm out and you could swing on it. For all this internal energy, however, he lacked common sense and didn’t have a bank account. He wrote to Brett at least twice a month for money, and last time she heard he was in love with a former cocaine addict turned Christian Scientist who was healing an unexplained open wound on her leg – more of a running sore, actually – with prayer. Jimmy said he was certain in time his girlfriend could cure it right up. For the time being, however, she had also consented to the use of gauze, peroxide, and adhesive tape, though this was not common knowledge she shared with her church.

Brett had a young daughter named Tillie, who lived in Denver. She said the last letter she got from Till, as Brett called her, was encouraging. Till said her pimp didn’t beat her as much these days and most of her old injuries had gone away, though she did sport a small white scar over her right eye, and on cold days she walked with a limp. She had bought a new spitz puppy she named Milo, but her pimp didn’t like it and shot it and she was kind of happy about that now because she didn’t really need a dog in a small apartment where she had to entertain men.

The apartment, Brett told me, was a room over an all-night garage, and most of her customers were brought there by taxi after reading her name off a Fina station’s shit-house wall. The pimp lived uptown in a condo. Brett finished by saying, “Guess I can’t be too hard on Tillie, she’s just doin’ for money what I used to do for free, though admittedly I didn’t advertise in the Fina station toilet.”

“I always felt bad about not having kids,” I said. “But I’m feeling better now.”

“I must admit, I’ve come to understand why certain animals eat their young,” Brett said. “But I wouldn’t have missed them growin’ up. I love them. The problem was their father was an asshole and I was too young to raise babies. It’s our fault they both turned out to be worthless pieces of shit. I had the first one when I was sixteen. The second one when I was eighteen. I did the best I could but I was a kid myself. Earl didn’t do a goddamn thing except suck the end of a bottle and hump truck-stop waitresses. After we were married for a while, Earl decided he liked to toss me over the TV set on Friday nights, bounce me around the bedroom, punch me, then butt-fuck me as a little treat when his arms got tired. This went on longer than I like to admit. I kept thinking I could change him.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“That’s all right,” Brett said. “Nineteen eighty-five I finally got tired of it. I hit him in the head with a shovel while he was digging for fishing worms in the backyard. I seen him out in the yard digging, and just the night before he’d given me one of them beatings I was tellin’ you about, and he put a beer bottle up my ass and poured the beer into me, and I was not in a cheery mood about it. Anyway, I seen him out there, so I made my plans. I hit him in the head with that shovel and I’d brought some lighter fluid and kitchen matches with me, and after I hit him I set him on fire. You might call it premeditated. You may have seen something about it back then. It made all the papers and TV. I burned the back of my hand a little when I was doing it, but Earl got the worst of it. He’s in some kind of home now in Houston, a ward of the state, and he can’t do things for himself and has trouble with simple math problems. Stuff like, if you have two apples and you eat one, how many are left?”

“Jesus, Brett. Did you do some time?”

“Judge let me off. There was plenty of evidence Earl had it coming. I dressed nice that day, best hot pants I had – you remember hot pants, don’t you? Well, I wore pink hot pants and a tight top, and as the judge was a known lecher, he let me off on a kind of self-defense thing. Earl’s relatives tried to sue me, came back on me for every kind of thing there was for about six months, but after a while they got to feelin’ good about Earl being gone too. He was always borrowin’ money from ’em and he was known to conk the sisters now and then, and I figure he’d been fuckin’ the youngest one, ’cause she had a kinda twitch to her eye and didn’t like men much. Earl’s mama thought Earl was a lot like her husband, Earl’s daddy, who used to beat her. Her husband, Earl Senior, died of a heart attack one morning in a moment of fury over runny breakfast eggs. So, his family kinda got to respect me a little, ’cause down deep they didn’t like that sonofabitch Earl Junior neither. I’m not sayin’ they exactly thanked me for settin’ Earl’s head on fire and bangin’ his brain around, but they began to feel fortunate he didn’t have anything upstairs left to use for devious means. Instead, he was tryin’ not to mess himself too often and learn not to lick his fingers when he got single square breakthrough. That’s kind of his lifetime career now. Keepin’ shit off his fingers.”