Joe Lansdale: Leather Maiden

I sat on the stool next to her and looked at her and showed her the smile my mother always said was electric. I said, “Can I buy you a drink?”

“Actually,” she said, “I’d rather just have the money.”

“That’s funny,” I said, but from the way she looked at me, I suspected that my electric smile was short of wattage today.

I reached in my pocket and got out five dollars and put it on the bar, and said, “Okay. There’s your money.”

She turned her head without moving her body, said, “Francis, this fuck is bothering me.”

A guy about the size of three guys came out of the back: The bartender. The bouncer. The owner.

He said, “You giving some trouble?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I just offered to buy the lady a drink.”

“And I don’t want it,” she said.

“She don’t want it,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, and picked up my five and went out. I went to a liquor store and bought a lot of beer and some Wild Turkey, drove around thinking about all sorts of things and none of them good.

I had a licensed conceal-carry pistol in the glove box of my car, and I remembered when I was in Iraq a soldier friend told me he thought about his piece all the time. Said he had read where Hemingway had called death a gift. I told him, if it is, you won’t have time to open that little present, it’ll happen so fast. But there I was driving around thinking of the pistol in the glove box and what that soldier had told me not so long ago about Hemingway’s gift.

I drove out past the old abandoned sawmills. There were still a couple where the center of Camp Rapture had once been, back when it was a timber town, back when my great-grandmother Sunset Jones had been the first woman constable in the history of East Texas, and until recent times, only one of two.

Driving out there, I felt lonely and strange, like when you hear the sound of a distant train whistle, the cry of a bird as night falls down, or see a sad face on a passing bus.

Maybe I just needed to get drunk.

I drove back along the edge of town. I could see the clock tower on the campus, standing tall and majestic. The lights were bright behind the great glass that showed not only the face of the clock, but the stylized gear work inside. And there were other lights, little quarter-moon windows full of gold that ran all the way down the face of the tower. I turned and put the clock tower in the rearview mirror.

I drove out to where the last of the motels were, scattered about like cracker boxes blown into place by a wild tornado. I parked at a motel that had a jumping frog on a neon sign; it leaped forward and back as I watched. I got a room that was a slot in the wall. It was hot even as the air conditioner struggled loud as a car wreck to cool it.

It was a room full of flies and mosquitoes that had slipped in through a cracked window that was frozen that way by a lousy paint job that had dried it tight and incapable of shutting. I sat in a chair in my underwear and watched TV and drank, and then I made my way to the bed and drank some more. When I awoke the TV was still on and I was lying on top of the sheets, having pissed myself. The room smelled of urine and alcohol and it seemed as if I had been lathered in Wild Turkey; basted was more like it. It was furnace-hot in there and I was baking in my juices and the flies and mosquitoes were loving me for a landing pad.

It took me half a day to get out of bed. I was followed by flies into the shower. I let the water run hot and long while I sat in the tub and it rained down on me. I would have been in there longer, but the hot water ran out and turned cold. I took that for a few seconds, got out and dried off with shaky hands.

I threw the pissy underwear in the waste can, got dressed and left. I felt as prideless and empty of heart as a Thanksgiving turkey.

I parked at the curb and saw another car parked in the drive behind Mom and Dad’s blue PT Cruiser. A black Hummer. Not new, but damn nice. I knew that would be my brother. Great. Mr. Successful, and now me, Mr. Drunk, soon to be under the same roof.

For a moment I thought about driving off, but there was really nowhere to go. I had some mints in my glove box. I got them out and put a few in my mouth and chewed them up and swallowed them, then popped another and sucked on it.

Just before I got out of the car, I realized that lying on the seat, where I had left it, was the mass of material Mercury had put together for me, all of it tucked into a kind of accordion file. I took a deep breath, picked up the file and got out of the car.

As I walked up the drive toward the front door, Jazzy called out.

“Hi.”

I looked up in the tree at her. She was wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt today, still no shoes. Her hair looked matted. “I didn’t notice you up there,” I said.

“I fool you all the time,” she said.

“Trust me,” I said, “you’re not the only one.”

“I’m pretty sneaky. My mama says it’s not bad to be sneaky. That part of life is being sneaky.”

Jazzy was certainly getting a special education.

“You don’t look so good,” Jazzy said.

“I don’t feel so good.”

“Did you get beat up?”

“Nothing like that. Unless you count life as the thug.”

“Do what?”

“I was attacked by a wild turkey and a big part of Milwaukee.”

“What?”

“I’m joking. I’m just tired.”

“You’re not funny.”

“I get that a lot too.”

“If you got beat up, you can tell me,” she said. “I been beat up.”

That’s all I needed to hear to top off a perfect day, something to charge on into the weekend with. Knowing the little girl that lived next door to us had had beatings. And my guess is she didn’t mean spankings, but exactly what she said. Beatings.

“Who beat you up?” I asked.

“I’m not supposed to tell.”

I understood exactly why my dad had knocked the shit out of Daddy Greg.

“You got bumps on your face,” she said. “Do you have pimples?”

“I have mosquito bites…Have you eaten, Jazzy?”

“I had a banana this morning.”

“You must be hungry.”

“We don’t have nothing but cornflakes and some beer. There’s not any milk to put on the cornflakes. Mama puts beer on hers, but I’m too young for that, she says.”

Thank goodness for small favors.

“She don’t cook much, but she can do a Rubik’s Cube. She’s real smart.”

“Are you going to school?”

“It’s summer, silly.”

“Did you go before summer?”

“Some. Mama slept late a lot and I didn’t always get a ride. She had places to go a lot of the time. Mostly I wasn’t here. I went all the time when I lived in Houston with Mee-maw. She died.”

I got it then. Foster care. And now with Mee-maw out of the picture, the mother had once again ended up with the child.

“Why don’t you come in with me, see if my mom can fix you something?” I said. I looked at my watch. It was after five. My folks ate dinner early. It was perfect timing.

“Your mama is nice. So’s your daddy.”

“They are at that. Come on. It’s all right when you’ve been invited.”

10

Jazzy climbed down and reached out and took my hand. I hoped that wasn’t something she did with any stranger. She smiled at me and I smiled back. Jazzy smelled a little like the elm, a pleasant smell that comes from broken leaves.

I walked her through the open garage and to the side door that led into the kitchen. I wanted to make sure she got a meal, and I thought if she was with me, Mom and Dad might be less inclined to ask me where I was the night before. At least it would help me avoid a thorough investigation: fingerprints, a urine specimen, a cavity search and a DNA swab.