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

The living room was empty too. Not only of people, but furniture and roaches. The rest of the house was the same. Dust motes spun in the light. The front door was open.

Outside, Mr. Harold heard a car door slam. He limped out the front door and saw the station wagon. His wife was behind the wheel, and sitting next to her was the boy, and beside him the blind man, his arm hanging out the open window.

Mr. Harold beckoned to them by waving the weed-eater, but they ignored him. Mrs. Harold backed out of the drive quickly. Mr. Harold could hear the blind man talking to the boy about something or another and the boy was laughing. The station wagon turned onto the road and the car picked up speed. Mr. Harold went slack and leaned on the weed-eater for support.

At the moment before the station wagon passed in front of a line of high shurbs, the blind man turned to look out the window, and Mr. Harold saw his own reflection in the blind man's glasses.

This story was the namesake of my first collection. The title for the story came first. I had either heard something about someone having bizarre hands, or it just came to me out of the blue, I'm uncertain, but the story developed from the title. I just felt my way into it. When I was a kid, there were bums who went to houses, knocked on doors, and asked for food, or asked for work they could do to pay for food. Often, they claimed to be preachers. I guess, in their minds, this gave them more identity than a bum .

My mother was a sucker for this sort of thing, and she often fed them, no work involved. I think she did this because she enjoyed their stones. We were poor, but these folks were worse off than we were, and maybe there was a certain joy in that That business about, "I may be bad off, but this poor sonofabitch has it worse." It makes your position look better.

When my father heard about these folks coming by (he heard them from me because I always blabbed), he insisted my mother watch herself. In fact, he wanted her to leave them alone. Not because he was heartless, but because he feared who they might be, though fear of serial killers, robbers, and the conventional murderer was not as high as now. Knowing my mother, however, he insisted if she had to feed them, she give them something to go or let them eat on the porch.

This didn't make much difference, but sometimes my mother would hand them food, then lock the screen door and talk to them. They generally had stories of woe, and my mother always felt sorry for them and sometimes even gave them money. Considering we had very little ourselves, this shows how generous she was, and I loved her for it.

Still, most of these guys were just assholes who didn't want to work. And as I said, many of them claimed to be preachers. What they were doing mostly, or so it seemed to me, were hiding behind religion. When the title "By Bizarre Hands" began to grow in my mind, and a story gradually began to sprout from it, these wandering preacher bums came to mind, the bit of fear and tension they produced was remembered, and gradually this story developed.

Oh, I liked the idea of the lady of the house referring to mass murderers as «mash» murderers. I once heard an older woman use this term, having misunderstood what someone was saying on a newscast. I guess she was relating it to someone who killed their victims by mashing, or perhaps she just thought that was a broad term for these kinds of murderers.

Anyway, this story has also been adapted to play form. As a play, I found the old ending didn't work as well. Not because there was anything wrong with it, but because I couldn't make it play as well as I wanted. The play was supposed to be for a series of plays in the Grand Guignol tradition, and therefore it needed a kicker ending. It reads pretty good, but I still prefer this version .

WHEN THE TRAVELING PREACHER HEARD about the Widow Case and her retarded girl, he set out in his black Dodge to get over there before Halloween night.

Preacher Judd, as he called himself — though his name was really Billy Fred Williams — had this thing for retarded girls, due to the fact that his sister had been simple-headed, and his mama always said it was a shame she was probably going to burn in hell like a pan of biscuits forgot in the oven, just on account of not having a full set of brains.

This was a thing he had thought on considerable, and this considerable thinking made it so he couldn't pass up the idea of baptizing and giving some God-training to female retards. It was something he wanted to do in the worst way, though he had to admit there wasn't any burning desire in him to do the same for boys or men or women that were half-wits, but due to his sister having been one, he certainly had this thing for girl simples.

And he had this thing for Halloween, because that was the night the Lord took his sister to hell, and he might have taken her to glory had she had any bible-learning or God-sense. But she didn't have a drop, and it was partly his own fault, because he knew about God and could sing some hymns pretty good. But he'd never turned a word of benediction or gospel music in her direction. Not one word. Nor had his mama, and his papa wasn't around to do squat.

The old man ran off with a bucktoothed laundry woman that used to go house to house taking in wash and bringing it back the next day, but when she took in their wash, she took in Papa too, and she never brought either of them back. And if that wasn't bad enough, the laundry contained everything they had in the way of decent clothes, including a couple of pairs of nice dress pants and some pin-striped shirts like niggers wear to funerals. This left him with one old pair of faded overalls that he used to wear to slop the hogs before the critters killed and ate Granny, and they had to get rid of them because they didn't want to eat nothing that had eaten somebody they knew. So, it wasn't bad enough Papa ran off with a beaver-toothed wash woman and his sister was a drooling retard, he now had only the one pair of ugly, old overalls to wear to school, and this gave the other kids three things to tease him about, and they never missed a chance to do it. Well, four things. He was kind of ugly too.

It got tiresome.

Preacher Judd could remember nights waking up with his sister crawled up in the bed alongside him, lying on her back, eyes wide open, her face bathed in cool moonlight, picking her nose and eating what she found, while he rested on one elbow and tried to figure out why she was that way.

He finally gave up figuring, decided that she ought to have some fun, and he could have some fun too. Come Halloween, he got him a bar of soap for marking up windows and a few rocks for knocking out some, and he made his sister and himself ghost-suits out of old sheets in which he cut mouth and eye holes.

This was her fifteenth year and she had never been trick-or-treating. He had designs that she should go this time, and they did, and later after they'd done it, he walked her back home, and later yet, they found her out back of the house in her ghost-suit, only the sheet had turned red because her head was bashed in with something and she had bled out like an ankle-hung hog. And someone had turned her trick-or-treat sack — the handle of which was still clutched in her fat grip — inside out and taken every bit of candy she'd gotten from the neighbors.

The sheriff came out, pulled up the sheet and saw that she was naked under it, and he looked her over and said that she looked raped to him, and that she had been killed by bizarre hands.

Bizarre hands never did make sense to Preacher Judd, but he loved the sound of it, and never did let it slip away, and when he would tell about his poor sister, naked under the sheets, her brains smashed out and her trick-or-treat bag turned inside out, he'd never miss ending the story with the sheriffs line about her having died by bizarre hands.