Joe Lansdale - Sunset and Sawdust

“You shot him?” Jones said. “You shot my boy?”

“Right upside the head.”

“My God,” he said.

“Didn’t have no choice. He was raping me.”

“Man can’t rape his wife,” Jones said.

“Sure seemed like rape to me,” Sunset said.

Jones drew back his hand, and as he did, Sunset lifted the pistol. “I ain’t gonna have no man beat on me again, I can help it.”

“You’re on a spree, that’s what you are,” Jones said. “You and that nigger. A spree.”

“Uncle Riley don’t have nothing to do with it. And if we were on a spree, you think we’d have come here? I didn’t know no other place to go. I come for Karen.”

“But why did you do it?” Jones said.

“Pete come home drunk. Guess one of his girlfriends over in Holiday, probably that whore Jimmie Jo French, didn’t give him what he wanted. So he decided he wanted it from me. Even if I was second, or maybe third, choice. And he wanted it rough. He started beating on me, ripped off my clothes, and the storm come and blew the house away. Just took it out of there like it was made out of newspaper. I got hold of his gun and shot him. Walked off without no clothes on. Just these shoes and a curtain I found. Uncle Riley gave me his shirt.”

“He was your husband, girl,” Jones said.

“Sometimes.”

Mrs. Jones had begun to shriek and run about the house like a chicken being pursued by a fox. She came to one wall, hit it with her palms, turned, ran to the other side, repeated the process.

“I didn’t want to kill him and I didn’t mean to. But I thought he might kill me.”

“My own daughter-in-law. What have we done to you?”

“It’s what your son done to me,” Sunset said. But thought: I still remember your hand patting my bottom more than once when no one was looking.

“He was the constable,” Jones said.

“Ain’t no more,” Sunset said. “Ain’t nothing no more.”

Jones pulled up a chair and sat down. It was as if a great sack filled with potatoes had been tossed onto the chair. He seemed to droop over the sides and shift all over.

Mrs. Jones had finally collapsed to the floor and was pulling her hair. “Pete. Pete. Pete,” she said, as if he might answer. “Goddamn you, Sunset,” Jones said. “A man’s got urges.”

“Where’s Karen?” Sunset asked.

Mrs. Jones wailed and Mr. Jones sat in his chair. Neither responded. Sunset got up, put on her shoe, sat back down.

After a while, Mr. Jones said, “You know for sure he’s dead?”

“He’s dead, all right.”

“Might still be alive.”

“Not unless he’s been resurrected.”

Mrs. Jones let out another screech. This one shook the glass in the windows. She had begun to roll around on the floor.

“Where is he?” Mr. Jones asked.

“At what’s left of our house with his pants down and his ass in the air.”

Jones sat for a while, trying to swallow a lump in his throat. When he managed, he said, “Reckon I got to go over there and get him. You, missy, you’re gonna pay for this. There’s the law, and they’re gonna make you pay.”

“He was the law,” Sunset said, “and he made me pay every day, and I hadn’t even done nothing.”

Jones got up and went out the door. Sunset sat and held the pistol in her lap. She looked at Mrs. Jones, who was lying on the floor heaving.

Slowly her mother-in-law put her feet under her and got up and walked over to Sunset. Sunset knew what was coming, but unlike with Mr. Jones, she didn’t move. She figured she ought to take just a little for what she had done, and if she was going to take it, she’d take it from her mother-in-law, Marilyn Jones. The woman had always treated her good. She could take a slap.

But just one.

Mrs. Jones slapped Sunset with all her strength. So hard it knocked Sunset onto the floor and overturned the chair.

Sunset thought: Maybe I could have skipped that one after all. The slap struck her where Pete had hit her, and it burned like hell.

“You killed my boy,” Marilyn said.

“I didn’t mean for it to happen,” Sunset said, then started to cry.

Slowly, she got up and righted the chair, pushed the shirt down over herself best she could, sat down again. She still had the revolver in her hand. She held on to it like a drowning man to a straw.

Marilyn stood over her and looked down, her hair loose now and hanging. She drew her hand back as if she might hit Sunset again.

“No,” Sunset said.

Marilyn’s face became less clouded. She studied Sunset for a long moment, opened her arms wide, said, “Come here, darling.”

“Say what?” Sunset said.

“Come here.”

Sunset studied her mother-in-law for a time, stood cautiously.

“It’s all right,” said Marilyn. “I ain’t crazy as I was.”

“About half that crazy could be too much.”

“It’s all right,” Marilyn said, and took a step toward Sunset. They embraced. Sunset continued to hold the gun, just in case. She was hoping she wouldn’t end up shooting the whole damn family. Maybe the chickens too.

“I lost a son,” Marilyn said. “I ain’t gonna lose no daughter, too.”

“I didn’t want to do it.”

“I know.”

“No. No, you don’t,” Sunset said.

“You might be surprised what I know, girlie.”

The cyclone that tore up Sunset’s house swirled on through the trees, carrying away her roof and goods, headed east, and was still kicking by early nightfall, tossing fish, frogs, and debris. It even threw a calf against a house and killed it.

The westbound train into Tyler caught the tail end of the storm, and the wind tossed fish against it and shook the boxcars and made them rattle like a toy train shaken by a mean child.

For a moment, it seemed as if the train might be sucked off the track, but shaking was the worst of it. The locomotive and its little boxes chugged on and so did the storm, which finally played out near the Louisiana border. The last of it was just a cool, damp wind for some hot people night-fishing on the banks of the Sabine River.

In one of the boxcars, Hillbilly sat with his guitar and his little tote bag and eyed the two fellas squatting across from him. They had climbed on when the train slowed in Tyler, and now as it clunked through the countryside and the storm was over, they began to eye him.

They pretended to ignore him at first, but he caught them sneaking glances. He hadn’t liked them from the start. He had greeted them as they climbed into the car, and they hadn’t said so much as eat shit or howdy.

They kicked a couple of sun perch out of the open doorway, shook the rain off themselves dog style, hunkered down like gargoyles opposite the open sliding door, and said nothing, just sneaked peeks.

Although Hillbilly looked younger than his thirty years, he had lived a full thirty. He had been around and seen much. He had played his guitar and sung in every dive in East Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. He had ridden trains all over the place, supped in hobo camps, boxed and wrestled for money at county fairs, where his wiry thinness and soft good looks had fooled many a local tough into thinking he was a pushover.

From experience, Hillbilly knew these fellas were studying him a little too intently. Like hungry dogs looking at a pork chop. One of them was short and stout and wore a wool cap. The other was taller, leaner, and hatless, with a thick growth of beard.

“You got the makings?” Hillbilly asked, even though he didn’t smoke as a matter of course. But sometimes, you broke the ice, it could save you trouble. A cigarette could do that, break the ice.

The man with the cap shook his head, said, “You’re a young’n, ain’t you?”