Joe Lansdale - High Cotton - Selected Stories of Joe R. Lansdale

She turned suddenly and shot the unconscious Mulroy behind the ear. Mulroy's hat, which had maintained its position on his head, came off as he nodded forward. A wad of tobacco rolled over his lip and landed in his lap. Blood ran down his cheek and onto his nice Western coat.

Babe smiled again, spoke to Standers. "Now I just got you. And I need you to carry those bars out of here."

Standers said. "Why should I help?"

"Cause I'll let you go."

Standers snorted.

"All right then, because I'll shoot you in the knees and leave you here if you don't. That way, you go slow. Help me, I'll make it quick."

"Damn, that's a tough choice."

"Let's you and me finish up in a way you don't have to suffer, babycakes."

Standers nodded, said, "You promise to make it quick?"

"Honey, it'll happen so fast you won't know it happened."

"I can't take the strain," Standers said. He pointed to the room adjacent to the bedroom. "There's a wheelbarrow in there. It's the way I haul stuff out. I get that, we can make a few trips, get it over with. I don't like to think about dying for a long time. Let's just get it done."

"Fine with me," Babe said.

Standers started toward the other room. Babe said, "Hold on."

She bent down and got Mulroy's gun. Now she had one in either hand. She waved Standers back against the wall and peeked in the room he had indicated. There was a wheelbarrow in there.

"All right, let's do it," she said.

Standers stepped quickly inside, and as Babe started to enter the room, he said sharply, "Don't step there!"

Babe held her foot in mid-air, and Standers slapped her closest gun arm down and grabbed it, slid behind her and pinned her other arm. He slid his hands down and took the guns from her. He used his knee to shove her forward. She stumbled and the floor cracked and she went through and spun and there was another crack, but it wasn't the floor. She screamed and moaned something awful. After a moment, she stopped bellowing and turned to Standers, she opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

Standers said, "What's the matter? Kind of run out of lies? There ain't nothing you can say would interest me. It's just a shame to have to kill a good-lookin' piece like you."

"Please," she said, but Standers shot her in the face with Mulroy's gun and she fell backwards, her broken leg still in the gap in the floor. Her other leg flew up and came down and her heel hit the floor with a slap. Her dress hiked up and exposed her privates.

"Not a bad way to remember you," Standers said. "It's the only part of you that wasn't a cheat."

Standers took the box containing the hair out of the closet, put the closet back in shape, got the wheelbarrow and used it to haul Babe, her purse, and the guns out of there and through the woods to a pond his relatives had built fifty years ago.

He dumped Babe beside the pond, went back for Mulroy and dumped him beside her. He got Mulroy's car keys out of his pocket and Babe's keys out of her purse.

Standers walked back to Babe's car and drove it to the edge of the pond, rolled down the windows a little, put her and Mulroy in the back seat with her purse and the guns, then he put the car in neutral. He pushed it off in the water. It was a deep, dirty pond. The car went down quick.

Standers waited at the shack until almost dark, then took the box containing the hair, walked back, found Mulroy's car and drove it out of there. He stopped the car beside a dirt road about a mile from his house and wiped it clean with a handkerchief he found in the front seat. He got the box out of the car and walked back to his trailer.

It was dark when he got there. The door was still open. He went inside, locked up and set the box with the hair on the counter beside the sink. He opened the box and took out the smaller box and studied the hair through the smeary glass.

He thought to himself: What if this is the Virgin Mary's hair? It could even be an ass hair, but if it's the Virgin Mary's. well, it's the Virgin Mary's. And what if it's a dog hair? It'll still sell for the same. It was time to get rid of it. He would book a flight to Germany tomorrow, search out the right people, sell it, sock what he got from it away in his foreign bank account, come back and fence the gold bars and sell all his land, except for the chunk with the house and pond on it. He'd fill the pond in himself with a rented back hole and dozer, plant some trees on top of it, let it set while he lived abroad.

Simple, but a good plan, he thought.

Standers drank a glass of water and took the box and lay down on the couch snuggling it. He was exhausted. Fear of death did that to a fella. He closed his eyes and went to sleep immediately.

A short time later he awoke in pain. His whole body ached. He leaped up, dropping the box. He began to slap at his legs and chest, tear at his clothes.

Jesus. The fire ants! His entire body was covered with the bastards.

Standers felt queezy. My God, he thought. I'm having a reaction. I'm allergic to the little shits.

He got his pants and underwear peeled down to his ankles, but he couldn't get them over his boots. He began to hop about the room. He hit the light switch and saw the ants all over the place. They had followed the stream of syrup, and then they had found him on the couch and gone after him.

Standers screamed and slapped, hopped over and grabbed the box from the floor and jerked open the front door. He held the box in one hand and tugged at his pants with the other, but as he was going down the steps, he tripped, fell forward and landed on his head and lay there with his head and knees holding him up. He tried to stand, but couldn't. He realized he had broken his neck, and from the waist down he was paralyzed.

Oh God, he thought. The ants. Then he thought. Well, at least I can't feel them, but he found he could feel them on his face. His face still had sensation.

It's temporary, the paralysis will pass, he told himself, but it didn't. The ants began to climb into his hair and swarm over his lips. He batted at them with his eyelashes and blew at them with his mouth, but it didn't do any good. They swarmed him. He tried to scream, but with his neck bent the way it was, his throat constricted somewhat, he couldn't make a good noise. And when he opened his mouth the furious little ants swarmed in and bit his tongue, which swelled instantly.

Oh Jesus, he thought. Jesus and the Virgin Mary.

But Jesus wasn't listening. Neither was the Virgin Mary.

The night grew darker and the ants grew more intense, but Standers was dead long before morning.

About ten A.M. a car drove up in Standers's drive and a fat man in a cheap blue suit with a suitcase full of bibles got out; a real bible salesman with a craving for drink.

The bible salesman, whose name was Bill Longstreet, had his mind on business. He needed to sell a couple of moderate-priced bibles so he could get a drink. He'd spent his last money in Beaumont, Texas on a double, and now he needed another.

Longstreet strolled around his car, whistling, trying to put up a happy Christian front. Then he saw Standers in the front yard supported by his head and knees, his ass exposed, his entire body swarming with ants. The corpse was swollen up and spotted with bites. Standers's neck was twisted so that Longstreet could see the right side of his face, and his right eye was nothing more than an ant cavern, and the lips were eaten away and the nostrils were a tunnel for the ants. They were coming in one side, and going out the other.

Longstreet dropped his sample case, staggered back to his car, climbed on the hood and just sat there and looked for a long time.

Finally, he got over it. He looked about and saw no one other than the dead man. The door to the trailer was open. Longstreet got off the car. Watching for ants, he went as close as he had courage and yelled toward the open door a few times.