Joe Lansdale - Sunset and Sawdust

“Sorry,” Clyde said sitting up, turning off the light.

“I thought you were asleep,” Sunset said.

“No. Just lying here. Listening to you and Lee and Bull talk.”

“That’s eavesdropping.”

“It wasn’t on purpose. I was sleeping here.”

Sunset opened the truck door and slid in beside him as he sat up behind the steering wheel.

“You got a place of your own,” she said.

“Sort of. If you count burned-up lumber.”

“You saw Bull?”

“I rose up for a peek. He’s large.”

“I’ll say.”

“Do you think you can trust him?”

“He came to me. He told me to put a strip of cloth on that tree when I needed him, and he came. So, yeah. Clyde?”

“Yeah.”

“I been pretty stupid-about Hillbilly, I mean.”

“I agree.”

“Sometimes, well… you can have something beautiful right in front of you, not see it because you’re looking around it, trying to see something else.”

“You’re not talking about me, are you?”

“I am.”

“Listen, Sunset… if I thought you meant that… I mean, I know you don’t mean it… that way. But if you meant something good by it. Anything. It would make me happy. But I don’t want pity.”

“Don’t make me mad, Clyde. I’ll borrow that slap jack of yours and hit you with it. I’m an idiot. That’s all I’m saying. I’m not proposing or anything. I’m not saying I’m in love. But I’m saying I was an idiot and you tried to tell me. You’re a good friend.”

“Again,” Clyde said, “I got to agree with you.”

“Be all right if I give you a kiss?”

“Just friendly, you mean?”

“Sure.”

Sunset leaned over and kissed Clyde on the cheek.

“That kiss wasn’t pity, was it?” Clyde asked.

“Don’t be silly, Clyde. There’s nothing to pity about you.”

“You’re not just saying that?”

“I’m not. It was what it was.”

“Whatever it was, it was good enough. Good night,” Clyde said.

Next morning, when Zendo got his mules out of the shed out back of his house, fed them, dressed them in harness and took them to the field, he found Bull sitting under his oak where he stopped for lunch every day. He had seen Bull only a few times before, but now, up close, he was frightened by him. He was huge and his hair was wild and he had a kind of dead look in his eye, way a fish does when it’s laid out of water too long.

Zendo had been leading the mules with their lines, ready to hook them to the plow he had left in the field, but when he saw Bull he stopped by calling “Whoa” to the mules.

“You Zendo?” Bull asked.

Zendo nodded.

“How you doing, Mr. Bull?” Zendo said, walking around from behind the mules, standing to the side of one, holding the long lines.

“Oh, I’m making it. Ain’t no reason to complain, I reckon, as it don’t change much if I do.”

“Well, me too, I reckon.”

“Naw,” Bull said, “you ain’t doing so good.”

Zendo felt a sensation akin to someone suddenly poking a stick up his ass. If there was one thing he didn’t want, it was having the legendary Bull Stackerlee mad at him. It amazed him Bull even knew who he was.

“How’s that, Mr. Bull?” Zendo said, surprised at how high his voice sounded.

“Well, now, let me say on that different,” Bull said, standing up from the tree. “In one way, you doing so good the angels would sing, and you don’t even know it, and in another, you got your dick in a wringer and whitey, he’s got his hand on the crank.”

“That’s quite some difference, one from the other,” Zendo said.

“It is,” Bull said. “You want the good news first, or you want the shit?”

Zendo, as confused as if he had awakened in another town and found himself naked, said, “Well, Mr. Bull, I think it would be best to get the bad news out of the way, then have the sugar.”

Hillbilly half filled a cup with water from a pitcher, held the cup under his balls, and by spreading his legs and bending his knees, lowered them into it. It helped ease the pain a mite. He stood like that, as if riding an invisible horse, his left hand holding the cup of water and his balls, and with his other hand, he drank directly from a bottle of whisky.

Last night he had been drunk, and he awakened this morning feeling terrible, had to have enough of the hair of the dog to take the edge off the buzz, but he wasn’t drunk now and he wasn’t going to get drunk today. What he was going to do was get dressed, go over to see this McBride fella.

It took him a while to scrape his life into a heap, but he finally got dressed and went out. It was a hot day and the sky, though blue, looked heavy, as if it might fall and crush him. There were a few strands of clouds, like strips of cotton torn from a blue mattress, stretched out across the sky.

The street was full of dust and grasshoppers. Hillbilly had never seen that many on a street before. In a field maybe, but not like this, leaping all over and in the middle of town.

Hillbilly, walking slightly bowlegged, grasshoppers jumping about as he went, waddled to Main Street, over to the red apartment above the drugstore. It took him a while to get there, and when he went up the stairs it was sheer pain. He hurt everywhere, but the small of his back, from the fall, and his balls, from the kick, were the worst. Every step, those two places felt as if they were being struck with an iron rod.

When he reached the landing he knocked on the door, and after a while it was answered by the blond whore he had had with him when Sunset’s old man broke in.

“Well,” he said, “you get around.”

She looked at him for a long moment, said, “I am a whore, you know.”

“Oh, I know,” Hillbilly said.

“How are you?”

“Never better.”

“You looking for me?”

“I wouldn’t have known where to look. And no. I wasn’t.”

“Why are you here?”

“At least that’s a question I don’t have to ask you, is it?”

“No,” she said, “I suppose not. I still owe you a finish.”

“Sure,” Hillbilly said. “McBride, he in?”

She nodded. “Go now, and I’ll tell him you were a salesman.”

“Why would I do that?”

“I got some ideas about what you want to do,” she said. “I don’t know all of it, but I know enough from hearing things here, know what happened to you, and I can put some of it together. Like maybe you want to get back at that woman constable, her father through these men. But these people, they’re bad, Hillbilly.”

“You do pick up a lot of information.”

“I get around.”

“I bet you do,” he said. “But, darling, I’m bad too.”

“Not really.”

“Oh, yeah,” Hillbilly said. “Really.”

She took a deep breath, let it out.

“You answer the door along with selling ass?” he asked.

“I do pretty much what I’m told to do.”

“I’m telling you, get the man.”

“You aren’t paying me. I do it for money, Hillbilly. You, you haven’t given me a dime.”

“But I gave you a good time.”

“You and everyone else. I thought, you and me…”

Hillbilly grinned. “Every woman I know thinks that.”

The blonde’s face got tough. She said, “Wait here.”

It was a great patch of land and once it had been covered in trees, but they had long since been cut, gone to the mill, except for three. The three were two oaks and a sweet gum, and the oaks were at the front of the house, and the sweet gum was to one side. The house was two-story and it had a porch around the bottom that went all the way around, and it had the same on the second floor. It was painted white as hope and the grass that had been planted had been cut close to the ground by enough negroes with push mowers to form a tribe. Dry as it was, the short grass was well watered and pretty green.