Joe Lansdale - A Fine Dark Line

Jewel and Margret? Girlfriends? Real girlfriends?

I went over to Greene’s and looked at the comics. They had three long shelves and they were full of comics and other kinds of magazines. I found several that looked good, checked to see how many dimes were in my pocket. I had a dollar’s worth.

I bought an Adventure Comics, Challengers of the Unknown, and a thing called Strange Worlds. I even broke down and bought Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane.

I checked the back of the store where the five-cent comics were. The ones with half the cover cut off. Some of them were fairly recent, but many were old. Maybe as much as two or three years. I guessed everyone but me and Richard Chapman were picky about the state of our comics.

I picked out three or four, including a dust-covered one called Captain Flash. Like all those on the back table, the top half of the cover had been cut off, and the cutting had decapitated a dinosaur. It left a fellow in a red and blue suit with a big rock in his hand. A masked companion in yellow lay knocked down at his feet. The bottom logo read: “The Beasts From 1,000,000 B.C.”

I bought the comics, and an RC, went out to sit on the curb and read.

It was warm out, but not uncomfortable. A light wind was blowing and there was the smell of honeysuckle with it.

After a while, the comics did the trick. They took me out of the world I lived in, which had within a matter of weeks become more baffling than I could have ever imagined. At that moment, I preferred the world with bright color panels and superheroes.

By the time I read two of the comics, the real world had drifted back in. I thought of Margret and Jewel.

I had been flustered enough about male and female relations, and now this. I’d have to ask Callie about it. She seemed to be a fountain of information. So was Buster, but sometimes his fountain gushed a little too powerfully for me.

I heard a car horn honk. Looked up. Near the curb was a fine-looking blue Cadillac. It had fins like a spacecraft. The window on the passenger’s side was rolled down, and Callie, in her ponytailed exuberance, was leaning out of the window yelling at me.

I thought: Think of the devil.

Drew Cleves was at the wheel.

“Come ride with us, Stanley,” Callie said.

I gathered up my comic books and pop bottle, went over to the car.

“You got to watch that pop,” Cleves said. “My father’s car. He’d kill me if I got anything on the seats.”

“Sure,” I said. “One minute.”

I drained the RC, took the bottle into Greene’s store, traded it for two cents.

Outside, in the Cadillac, Callie said, “Isn’t this divine?”

“Daddy says it’s like driving your living room,” Drew said.

It was the biggest, most luxurious car I had ever been in. The seats were soft leather. I was tempted to stretch out and go to sleep.

Callie said, “We’re driving out to the lake.”

“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” Drew said. “I could drive you around the block or so and let you out back here.”

“He can’t get a feel for it just around the block,” Callie said. “Come on, Stanley.”

“I don’t know how long we’re going to be out there,” Drew said. “It could be a while.”

“That’s okay,” I said.

“It’s pretty hot,” he said.

“Oh, not with this nice wind blowing,” Callie said. “And the lake will be even nicer.”

“I suppose,” Drew said, but he didn’t look very happy. He leaned over the seat and looked at me as if pleading. “You’re sure you want to go?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Well, all right,” he said, and drove us away.

———

NEAR THE LAKE the trees were thinner because the bulldozers that had made the lake had knocked them down. Where they had done their scraping, red clay sloped into the water. There was no sand on the shore, just clay. I mentioned this.

“They have to haul it in,” Drew said, as we got out of the car.

“It would have been a lot nicer,” Callie said, “if they had left more trees. Maybe the shore wouldn’t be falling off into the water if they had.”

“My father owns the company that made the lake,” Drew said.

“He could have still left more trees,” Callie said, never one to waffle on an opinion if she sincerely held it.

Drew didn’t really care, however. He was holding Callie’s hand as they walked. He moved like his feet weren’t touching the ground.

It was awfully mushy to me at the time, and I hated seeing it, Callie holding hands and cooing, Drew falling all over himself. It was hard to believe he had the grace to run with a football.

The cool wind blew for a time, and we walked, and talked. None of it was about murder and whores and girls liking girls or headless bodies on railroad tracks.

We went along the edge of the lake for some distance, but it was too muddy to get up close, and though we had had plenty of rain, it had been compensated for by the heat, which had sucked away a lot of the water. You could see a couple of little islands out in the center of the lake, maybe thirty or forty feet apart, and the vegetation on them had died flat-out and turned the islands to mounds of dirt. There was a smell in the air of dead fish, and the kind of smell that makes the skin crawl, the kind associated with water moccasins who have lain in slick, smelly river mud gone sour and stale.

After an hour or so, we started back. Partly because the wind had stopped blowing and it was now hot as a baker’s oven. We stopped at a log near the car and sat and scraped our shoes free of mud with sticks.

“Daddy says they’re going to put in some tables and benches, cooking areas, boat ramps. Maybe plant some trees.”

“Like the ones that were here?” Callie said.

“Fast-growing trees. There’s going to be a colored section too. On the other side of the lake.”

“How convenient,” Callie said.

“I haven’t a thing against coloreds,” Drew said. “Really.”

He sounded like he meant it.

“Why don’t we go back to town,” Drew said, “get a burger and soda?”

By this time, I was actually starting to get hungry. That’s the way kids are. Bottomless pits.

“Callie, you got any money?” I asked.

“I’ll take care of you,” Drew said.

“You can take care of me,” Callie said, “but I have Stanley’s money. He’s not your responsibility. You’re not dating both of us.”

“Well,” Drew said, “that’s true. But I don’t mind.”

“You’re sweet,” Callie said, in that syrupy voice she uses when she wants something from Daddy, “but it’s not a problem.”

We tooled back into town in the Cadillac, and I must admit I felt pretty special when we stopped in front of the drugstore and climbed out of that fine machine, stood on the hot sidewalk like three gods descended from heaven.

———

WE HAD HAMBURGERS and malts at the drugstore, and I might add Drew paid for all of it. Timothy was working again, and he looked less than happy to see Callie with Drew. He put our food on the table like he was delivering bubonic plague. He had his soda hat pulled down close to his eyes, and his mouth was held so tight the thin line it made could have been used to thread a needle.

“What’s with him?” Drew said.

“Don’t pay him any mind,” Callie said.

“He wants to date her,” I said.

“Stanley!” Callie said, as if this revelation shocked her.

“You want me to take care of him?” Drew said.

“What? Hit him because he wants to date me?”

“Tell him to leave you alone.”

“No, Drew. I want to eat, then maybe we can go to the movie. It starts at one. I’ve already checked.”