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

No one came out.

Longstreet licked his lips, eased over to Standers and moving quickly, stomping his feet, he reached in Standers's back pocket and pulled out his wallet.

Longstreet rushed back to his car and got up on the hood. He looked in the wallet. There were two ten dollar bills and a couple of ones. He took the money, folded it neatly and put it in his coat pocket. He tossed the wallet back at Standers, got down off the car and got his case and put it on the back seat. He got behind the wheel, was about to drive off, when he saw the little box near Standers's swollen hand.

Longstreet sat for a moment, then got out, ran over, grabbed the box, and ran back to the car, beating the ants off as he went. He got behind the wheel, opened the box and found another box with a little crude glass window fashioned into it. There was something small and dark and squiggly behind the glass. He wondered what it was.

He knew a junk store bought stuff like this. He might get a couple bucks from the lady who ran it. He tossed it in the back seat, cranked up the car and drove into town and had a drink.

He had two drinks. Then three. It was nearly dark by the time he came out of the bar and wobbled out to his car. He started it up and drove out onto the highway right in front of a speeding semi.

The truck hit Longstreet's car and turned it into a horseshoe and sent it spinning across the road, into a telephone pole. The car ricocheted off the pole, back onto the road and the semi, which was slamming hard on its brakes, clipped it again. This time Longstreet and his car went through a barbed wire fence and spun about in a pasture and stopped near a startled bull.

The bull looked in the open car window and sniffed and went away. The semi driver parked and got out and ran over and looked in the window himself.

Longstreet's brains were all over the car and his face had lost a lot of definition. His mouth was dripping bloody teeth. He had fallen with his head against an open bible. Later, when he was hauled off, the bible had to go with him. Blood had plastered it to the side of his head, and when the ambulance arrived, the blood had clotted and the bible was even better attached; way it was on there, you would have thought it was some kind of bizarre growth Longstreet had been born with. Doctors at the hospital wouldn't mess with it. What was the point. Fucker was dead and they didn't know him.

At the funeral home they hosed his head down with warm water and yanked the bible off his face and threw it away.

Later on, well after the funeral, Longstreet's widow inherited what was left of Longstreet's car, which she gave to the junkyard. She burned the bibles and all of Longstreet's clothes. The box with the little box in it she opened and examined. She couldn't figure what was behind the glass. She used a screw driver to get the glass off, tweezers to pinch out the hair.

She held the hair in the light, twisted it this way and that. She couldn't make out what it was. A bug leg, maybe. She tossed the hair in the commode and flushed it. She put the little box in the big box and threw it in the trash.

Later yet, she collected quite a bit of insurance money from Longstreet's death. She bought herself a new car and some see-through panties and used the rest to finance her lover's plans to open a used car lot in downtown Beaumont, but it didn't work out. He used the money to finance himself and she never saw him again.

This is one of my favorites of my own work. It's based on a number of true incidents, stories I heard, and damn lies. Certain kinds of stupidity amaze me, and I can't help but feel these types deserve exploring. I think the happily stupid, those people who are that way because they choose to be, or are too lazy or uninspired to be otherwise, are among the scariest people in the world. They are also, if you squint slightly, and can deal with a lot of sadness, pretty funny .

What amazes me about folks like this is the fact they can repeat the same bad mistakes time after time after time. Or if they avoid the repetition of a mistake, they have an amazing knack for choosing something just as, or even more stupid than their last choice. That really takes effort of a sort, don't you think? Or, maybe it doesn't.

Anyway, stupidity and adolescence, which, unfortunately, often go hand in hand, welded together with a rush of hormones often result in some of the most outlandish behaviors. This story is an example of all those elements at work .

BUDDY DRANK ANOTHER SWIG OF BEER AND when he brought the bottle down he said to Jake and Wilson, "I could sure use some pussy."

"We could all use some," Wilson said, "problem is we don't never get any."

"That's the way I see it too," Jake said.

"You don't get any," Buddy said. "I get plenty, you can count on that."

"Uh huh," Wilson said. "You talk pussy plenty good, but I don't ever see you with a date. I ain't never even seen you walking a dog, let alone a girl. You don't even have a car, so how you gonna get with a girl?"

"That's the way I see it too," Jake said.

"You see what you want," Buddy said. "I'm gonna be getting me a Chevy soon. I got my eye on one."

"Yeah?" Wilson said. "What one?"

"Drew Carrington's old crate."

"Shit," Wilson said, "that motherfucker caught on fire at a streetlight and he run it off in the creek."

"They got it out," Buddy said.

"They say them flames jumped twenty feet out from under the hood before he run it off in there," Jake said.

"Water put the fire out," Buddy said.

"Uh huh," Wilson said, "after the motor blowed up through the hood. They found that motherfucker in a tree out back of old Maud Page's place. One of the pistons fell out of it and hit her on the head while she was picking up apples. She was in the hospital three days."

"Yeah," Jake said. "And I hear Carrington's in Dallas now, never got better from the accident. Near drowned and some of the engine blew back into the car and hit him in the nuts, castrated him, fucked up his legs. He can't walk. He's on a wheeled board or something, got some retard that pulls him around."

"Them's just stories," Buddy said. "Motor's still in the car. Carrington got him a job in Dallas as a mechanic. He didn't get hurt at all. Old Woman Page didn't get hit by no piston either. It missed her by a foot. Scared her so bad she had a little stroke. That's why she was in the hospital."

"You seen the motor?" Wilson asked. "Tell me you've seen it."

"No," Buddy said, "but I've heard about it from good sources, and they say it can be fixed."

"Jack it up and drive another car under it," Wilson said, "it'll be all right."

"That's the way I see it too," Jake said.

"Listen to you two," Buddy said. "You know it all. You're real operators. I'll tell you morons one thing, I line up a little of the hole that winks and stinks, like I'm doing tonight, you won't get none of it."

Wilson and Jake shuffled and eyed each other. An unspoken, but clear message passed between them. They had never known Buddy to actually get any, or anyone else to know of him getting any, but he had a couple of years on them, and he might have gotten some, way he talked about it, and they damn sure knew they weren't getting any, and if there was a chance of it, things had to be patched up.

"Car like that," Wilson said, "if you worked hard enough, you might get it to run. Some new pistons or something. what you got lined up for tonight?"

Buddy's face put on some importance. "I know a gal likes to do the circle, you know what I mean?"

Wilson hated to admit it, but he didn't. "The circle?"

"Pull the train," Buddy said. "Do the team. You know, fuck a bunch a guys, one after the other."