Joe Lansdale - Sunset and Sawdust

“I got a little salt and pepper on me, too,” Hillbilly said, and he removed the little bag he had tied to his belt and opened it again. He took out the little boxes of salt and pepper. “Give it a pinch of these here.”

When the stew was cooked up, Hillbilly took his cup from the bag and the patched clothes man poured him up some. Then Patches poured some into a tin can the black man had, a metal plate the other man had, and he himself drank out of the cook can.

As they sat and ate, they talked about this and that, and then the important stuff. Where they could get handouts and who was an easy mark on up the road. Patches said, “There’s this woman over near Tyler. She ain’t got no man. She’ll give you food if you’ll come in the house and service her. I don’t know she’d screw a nigger, though, Johnny Ray.”

Johnny Ray shook his head. “I don’t want me none of that. No trouble like that. No, sir.”

“How does she look?” the dressed-up man asked.

“Look at her straight on, you might turn to stone,” Patches said. “And her cunt hairs are all gray. Ain’t so bad when you ain’t had none in a long time. And then she’s got that food. But don’t kiss her. Her mouth tastes like sin.”

“She looks like that, I wouldn’t think of kissing her,” said the well-dressed man. “Least, I don’t believe I would. It’s hard for me to know what I might do these days.”

“What I need is work,” Hillbilly said. “And I need a guitar. Mine got busted.”

“You play guitar?” said Patches.

“That’s why I need one,” Hillbilly said. “I sing too. I don’t have a guitar, I feel like half a man. I don’t feel the half that’s left is my good half neither.”

“Hell, I play the spoons,” said Patches.

“I got me a Jew’s harp and a harmonica,” said the colored man.

“I play them too, if that’s all I got,” Hillbilly said. “But I’m a guitar man.”

“I can’t play anything,” said Well-Dressed. “Formerly I was a school-teacher. Can you believe that? Now I don’t know a thing I need to know. Goddamn Depression. Goddamn Hoover.”

“You can listen,” said Patches. “Me and Johnny Ray, we play good together. I get them spoons going, and he comes in on that Jew’s harp or the harmonica, we get a lively tune playing. It would sound real good if you can sing. Me and Johnny Ray sound like two old frogs a-blowing.”

“I can sing,” Hillbilly said.

“Do you know ‘ Red River Valley ’?” said Patches.

“You strike it up, and I’ll come in singing.”

Patches got out the spoons and went to it. Johnny Ray went to blowing his harmonica, and pretty soon Hillbilly began to sing.

He was good too, and his voice rang through the woods, and they played and sang tunes well into the night.

Pete’s father and a colored man named Zack Washington brought Pete back. They went to Pete’s house, or what was left of it, found Pete the way Sunset said they would. At first, in the early moonlight, Zack thought the man on the floor was colored, but as they neared, the black on him rose up and flew away with a furious buzz.

Pete had his pants down, his head on the floor, his ass to the wind. There was a strip of shit in the crack of his butt that had jumped out when Sunset shot him. Blood had run down his face, into his mouth, onto the floor, and had dried.

Zack held the lantern close to Pete’s face and thought Pete’s expression was one of mild surprise, as if he had just spooned up a bug in his breakfast mush. One eye seemed more surprised than the other.

Zack tugged him up, and when he did, the blood that had dried on Pete’s face and the floor made a sound like someone tearing a piece of sandpaper in half.

They pulled Pete’s pants up, rode with him propped on the truck seat between them, Mr. Jones holding Pete up, Zack driving, trying to keep his mind on the road, trying not to let the smell of feces and decaying flesh overwhelm him. Due to the heat, even on the short ride to Camp Rapture, even though the day was now cooler, Pete had turned choke-your-nose ripe, and after they had gone a little ways, ants that had gathered in Pete’s clothing crawled out and got on Zack and bit him on the wrists and hands and ankles.

Zack had not volunteered to get Pete’s body, but Jones, who was called Captain by the colored workers because he was a main man at the mill, made him volunteer. Had he not gone, he knew he would have been out of work, looking to pick cotton for a fart and a song, hoeing between rows when he wasn’t dragging a sack, so there wasn’t a whole lot of saying no even considered.

Secretly, Zack was glad Pete was dead. Pete had pistol-whipped him once for not calling him Mister. Zack had referred to the constable as Pete, like the white men he knew.

“You done forgot your place, nigger,” Pete said, and the pistol came out and the whipping commenced. It was a pretty brisk whipping, just a few blows, and Zack thought it was a good thing it wasn’t the beating Pete had given Three-Fingered Jack. If it had been that bad, he would be pushing up grass and feeding the worms.

So Zack thought it was damn funny finding Mr. Pete the way he was, pants down, that silly look on his face, his crack full of mess, a bullet in his head, put there by his own gun, fired by a little redheaded woman.

Jones and Zack brought Pete home and made a cooling board by taking a door from the closet. They placed the door between two chairs and put Pete’s body on it. Zack said a few kind words, then stepped out, without Mr. Jones so much as saying thank you or go shoot yourself.

If things weren’t bad enough, Pete’s daughter, Karen, arrived from having gone fishing with friends. Showed up shortly after Mr. Jones brought back the body, opened the door with a smile on her face and a lie on her lips. At fourteen, it wasn’t the first lie she had told. She had picked up some fish after the storm to pretend she had caught them.

Instead of fishing with friends, she had been with a boy. Jerry Flynn. They had gone down by the creek to spoon, then the storm came up. They spent the time they had meant to spend kissing with their faces in the dirt, the storm howling all about them.

When the tornado passed, they started home immediately, in Karen’s case to the Jones’ house, where she had been visiting her grandparents.

When Karen came in the door the lie was lost. She saw her father stretched out on the cooling board. His hair was in his face, his tongue hanging out. His clothes were wet from the storm and his left eye was bulging from its socket like someone was inside his head pushing it out of his skull with his finger.

Karen dropped the fish, screamed, said, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.”

Sunset, who had gotten some of her energy back and borrowed an oversized dress from her mother-in-law, came out of the back room when Karen screamed. She was still carrying the revolver. She took hold of Karen and dragged her out of there.

Marilyn wondered where Sunset and Karen had gone, but was too weak and too sad to find out. She hoped they were okay out there in the dark.

She knew only that her husband was happy about Sunset leaving, said he was going to get his shotgun and when he saw her next he was going to cut those long legs out from under her. And Marilyn knew he would too, and probably get away with it.

It was in that moment, sneaking in between her other thoughts, that Marilyn realized she had been worried to death about her granddaughter during the storm, but the worry had been tucked away when Sunset arrived wearing only a shirt, toting a gun, saying she’d killed Pete. Now she was thinking about Karen again, and she was thinking about Sunset too.

She thought about all this as she lay in bed, not able to sleep. She kept seeing things over and over in her mind, and the thing she saw the most was her son and the little hole in his head.