Joe Lansdale - Leather Maiden

Inside, the house was a little warm, the kitchen full of the smell of something cooking and the smell was a good smell and it made my stomach roll both from too much liquor and not having anything to eat for some time. Mom was at the stove with a long wooden spoon, turning something in a boiling pot. She looked at me, and though she smiled, her eyes told me she had been worried about me. Of course, she knew I had been drinking.

“Jazzy’s come to visit,” I said.

“Oh, good,” Mom said, as if it was the best idea she had ever heard. “Come in, Jazzy. Why don’t you go to the bathroom and wash your face and hands. Supper is almost on the table.”

Jazzy darted for the bathroom. I went over and kissed Mom on the cheek.

“Hello, sweetie,” Mom said. “When Jazzy gets out, brush your teeth. I think there’s a hops farm in your mouth, maybe a nest of wild turkeys, if you know what I mean. And those mints you chewed, they just make your breath all the more nasty.”

“You still have that super nose, don’t you?”

“I do. And you might put some alcohol—the rubbing kind—on those bites. Did you sleep under a tree?”

“Just a place with open windows.”

Mom studied me for a moment, then patted my arm. “Go in and see your brother and Trixie. I’ve got a chicken in the oven, and it’ll be ready soon.”

In the living room, Dad was on the couch next to Jimmy. He was laughing about something Jimmy was telling him. Jimmy was thin and looked as if he worked out. He had strips of white hair over his ears. It gave him an air of sophistication.

Trixie, looking fetching in blue jeans and a loose green jersey, a silver-white necklace lying against her dark brown skin, sat with her legs crossed, flip-flops on her feet. She smiled when I came in. Her hair was like a golden helmet and she seemed to have more teeth than a human should have, but they were good and bright and straight teeth. She was so good-looking if you stared at her for long you might need a trip to the ER for heat exhaustion.

I went over as she got up and gave her a big hug, making sure I kept my brewery breath behind her shoulder.

I shook hands with my brother, smiled at my dad, sat down on the end of the couch, laying my file folder on the coffee table.

“Abducted by aliens last night?” Dad said.

“Yeah,” I said, “but they gave me back.”

“The anal probe,” Jimmy said. “They didn’t like what they found.”

Dad nodded at the file on the coffee table. “Homework?”

“Kind of,” I said.

“You look like you been in a fire-ant hill,” Trixie said, in that peculiar voice of hers. It was Southern as all get-out, and it sounded as if it came from a throat that had just swallowed broken glass and followed it with a hundred-proof whiskey chaser.

“Mosquitoes,” I said. Then to Jimmy: “See you got a big ride out there, brother.”

“Gas-guzzler,” Dad said. “Just supporting the goddamn oil companies. Don’t they make enough money without you helping them?”

“Now they’re making more,” Jimmy said, “and off of me. I got it slightly used. We don’t run it all the time. Trixie has a smaller car. We use it most of the time. That make you feel better, Dad?”

“Just a fraction.”

The conversation changed then. We talked about this and that. Jimmy and I laughed about some past events. Trixie, making sure Jazzy was with Mom, told a very off-color joke, which I loved. We did all this as sounds and smells from the kitchen filled the background.

I finally went and brushed my teeth, then messed them up again because we ate chicken and dressing, mashed potatoes and gravy, had gallons of ice tea to drink, pies for dessert, apple and pear.

When we finished eating we spent some time bragging properly on how good the meal was, then me and Jimmy slipped off and went to our old room. He looked at the planes hanging from the ceiling. “I used to lie on the top bunk and look at those planes, pretend I was in them, and that I was flying away,” he said.

“Where were you going?”

“Everywhere. Anywhere. Sometimes I was flying through a hole at the South Pole, going into the center of the earth where there was a world full of dinosaurs and cavemen and beautiful women who couldn’t live without my intense manly loving.”

“At the Earth’s Core.”

“We read the same books.”

“And played the same games,” I said.

“You played Tarzan,” Jimmy said. “Remember that? I had to be the monkey, and you were Tarzan. I don’t know how you worked that out, but that was the way it was. You remember.”

“I do,” I said. “I climbed up in that elm where Jazzy stays, in my underwear, and got the sunburn from hell.”

“You kept giving the cry of the bull ape, demanding all apes come to your aid. But none of them would.”

“The bastards.”

“But that didn’t stop you from calling. You called all day long, and Mom couldn’t get you to come down, and she called Daddy at work, and he said, he gets ready to come down he will, but it didn’t much look like you were gonna get ready. You called until your voice played out and you sounded less like a bull ape and more like a dying goose. And you had on those loose underwear and your balls hung out, and you got sunburned there. Remember?”

“How can I forget? I still have a scar from when the skin started peeling off. Wanna see?”

“No thanks. I’ll take your word for it.”

We moved around the room as we talked, kind of time traveling. Jimmy came to his frogs and rats, and a feeling of guilt ran through me. I had purposely pushed them over the other night, and I suppose if you were a Freudian, you could find some deeply disturbing reason for that.

“I ought to throw this crap away,” he said. “It really looks rough.”

He opened the drawers on his desk, looked at the contents. He shut the drawer, said, “It’s good to have you back in town, Cason.”

“Thanks.”

“The newspaper job is probably just the thing,” he said.

“To tell you the truth, my feelings are mixed about being back in town.”

“Gabby?”

“Part of it.”

“You know she called me about you. She said you keep sending her notes, calling. It upsets her.”

“It’s just that I find it hard to believe.”

Jimmy turned and looked at me as if he had just realized I had two heads. “Do you remember when we were kids, and you found out there was no Santa Claus?”

“Yeah.”

“Thing is, you wouldn’t accept it. You went for months believing it anyway. Persistent. You had fights with kids at school that told you there wasn’t any Santa Claus. Dad finally sat down and talked to you. So you know what you did?”

“I do, but you’re going to tell me anyway.”

“You thought you were being tested. That Dad had been told by Santa Claus to test your faith.”

“I remember quite clearly. And I hope this isn’t something you tell to the faculty at the university.”

“You believed this so much, you just wouldn’t accept there wasn’t a Santa Claus. You fixated on it. For you, January on until the next December, it was going to be all about Santa Claus and how you knew he existed and were going to prove it, and you could meet the challenge. No matter how many times you were told it wasn’t true, that there was no such thing, you would not fold. You hung in there, thinking, in the end, you would be especially rewarded for keeping the faith. And you know what? One day, about mid-June, you came in here, and you had all this stuff on Santa Claus, books, comics, I don’t remember. But all manner of stuff. And you put it all in a box and had Mom put it up in the attic for you. Remember?”

“I remember. I didn’t make it until December.”