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

MY DEAD DOG, BOBBY, DOESN'T DO TRICKS anymore. In fact, to look that sucker in the eye I either have to get down on my knees and put my head to the ground or prop him up with a stick.

I've thought of nailing his head to the shed out back, that way maybe the ants won't be so bad. But as my Old Man says, "ants can climb." So, maybe that isn't such a good idea after all.

He was such a good dog, though, and I hate to see him rot away. But I'm also tired of carrying him around with me in a sack, lugging him into the freezer morning and night.

One thing though. Getting killed broke him from chasing cars, which is how he got mashed in the first place. Now, to get him to play with cars, I have to go out to the edge of the Interstate and throw him and his sack at them, and when he gets caught under the tires and bounced up, I have to use my foot to push on one end of him to make the other end fill up with guts again. I get so I really kind of hate to look in the sack at the end of the day, and I have to admit giving him his good night kiss on the lips is not nearly as fun as it used to be. He has a smell and the teeth that have been smashed through his snout are sharp and stick out every which way and sometimes cut my face.

I'm going to take Bobby down to the lake again tomorrow. If you tie him to a blowed-up inner tube he floats. It's not a bad way to cool off from a hot day, and it also drowns the ants and maggots and such.

I know it does. We kept my little brother in pretty good shape for six months that way. It wasn't until we started nailing him to the shed out back that he got to looking ragged. It wasn't the ants crawling up there and getting him, it was the damn nails. We ran out of good places to drive them after his ears came off, and we had to use longer and longer nails to put through his head and neck and the like. Pulling the nails out everyday with the hammer claw didn't do him any good either.

My Old Man said that if he had it do over, he wouldn't have hit my brother so hard with that chair. But he said that about my little sister too when he kicked her head in. She didn't keep long, by the way. We didn't know as many tricks then as we do now.

Well, I hope I can get Bobby back in this sack. He's starting to swell and come apart on me. I'm sort of ready to get him packed away so I can get home and see Mom. I always look at her for a few minutes before I put Bobby in the freezer with her.

This is considered atypical of me. Maybe it is. I think the truth is most readers remember the stories you do that they like, and the ones they like most often fit into one niche. Those outside of it they discard from their memory.

I think this one actually fits comfortably into a larger niche of my work than some realize. If I'm anything, it's varied.

I have always loved science fiction, and it was my original plan to write it. Problem was, I didn't know much science. I was more of the Bradbury school. Still, there were plenty of science fiction stories that didn't use real science, and I always presumed this would be where I ended up: a full-time science fiction writer. It wasn't.

I began to write crime and honor, which I also loved. And then other things: Westerns, etc. In fact, when I first started writing, I wrote non-fiction articles. Those took off and I lost interest in being a full-time science fiction writer.

I still love the genre, and now and then I like to dabble in it, but I have no regrets about how things turned out.

Anyway, my favorite kinds of science fiction, or science fantasy, or speculative fiction, if you prefer, were alternate universe, time travel, and apocalyptic. This is one of the former .

I love the Old West and it's no surprise to me that when I sat down to write an alternate universe story I used the West as the background. I knew what I was talking about for one, and knew I could tweak it in different directions if I so chose to make it interesting, and yet, maintain some resemblance to real history.

This story first appeared in a literary magazine, and has been reprinted numerous times. Funny thing, I've had some believe it's true history. Where were they during American History class? Smoking a joint in the bathroom?

On the other end of the spectrum, I had one reader dislike it because the history was wrong.

Bill Hickok wasn't a clerk. William Cody wasn't a diplomat.

Say they weren't?

Lack of imagination amazes me.

Not even a general idea of the events of American History amazes me.

I'm not talking dates and figures here, even names. But the broad knowledge that we really weren't colonized on the West coast by the Japanese and that the Europeans and the Japanese didn't really war with one another in North America until they joined hands to fight Native Americans.

That, my friends, is the part that didn't happen.

On the other hand, if you believe in alternate universes, maybe everything here did happen. Somewhere.

DAPPLED SUNLIGHT DANCED ON THE EASTERN side of the train. The boughs of the great cherry trees reached out along the tracks and almost touched the cars, but not quite; they had purposely been trimmed to fall short of that.

James Butler Hickok wondered how far the rows of cherry trees went. He leaned against the window of the Pullman car and tried to look down the track. The speed of the train, the shadows of the trees and the illness of his eyesight did not make the attempt very successful. But the dark line that filled his vision went on and on and on.

Leaning back, he felt more than just a bit awed. He was actually seeing the famous Japanese cherry trees of the Western Plains; one of the Great Cherry Roads that stretched along the tracks from mid-continent to the Black Hills of the Dakotas.

Turning, he glanced at his wife. She was sleeping, her attractive, sharp-boned face marred by the pout of her mouth and the tight lines around her eyes. That look was a perpetual item she had cultivated in the last few years, and it stayed in plate both awake or asleep. Once her face held nothing but laughter, vision and hope, but now it hurt him to look at her.

For a while he turned his attention back to the trees, allowing the rhythmic beat of the tracks, the overhead hiss of the fire line and the shadows of the limbs to pleasantly massage his mind into white oblivion.

After a while, he opened his eyes, noted that his wife had left her seat. Gone back to the sleeping car, most likely. He did not hasten to join her. He took out his pocket watch and looked at it. He had been asleep just under an hour. Both he and Mary Jane had had their breakfast early, and had decided to sit in the parlor car and watch the people pass. But they had proved disinterested in their fellow passengers and in each other, and had both fallen asleep.

Well, he did not blame her for going back to bed, though she spent a lot of time there these days. He was, and had been all morning, sorry company.

A big man with blonde goatee and mustache came down the aisle, spotted the empty seat next to Hickok and sat down. He produced a pipe and a leather pouch of tobacco, held it hopefully. "Could I trouble you for a light, sir?"

Hickok found a lucifer and lit the pipe while the man puffed.

"Thank you," the man said. "Name's Cody. Bill Cody."

"Jim Hickok."

They shook hands.

"Your first trip to the Dakotas?" Cody asked.

Hickok nodded.

"Beautiful country, Jim, beautiful. The Japanese may have been a pain in the neck in their time, but they sure know how to make a garden spot of the world. White men couldn't have grown sagebrush or tree moss in the places they've beautified."