Joe Lansdale - Leather Maiden

About eight we drove to the far side of town and got breakfast and coffee in a filling station that had a few tables and some stuff you could buy from behind the counter. All of it was deep-fried. It didn’t matter if you were having doughnuts, catfish or pigs in the blanket, it all tasted like greasy batter and crackled to the touch.

We sat inside the little place and ate and drank. It was all I could do to not get up and run out and jump in the car and drive over there without Booger. I no longer gave a damn about Judence, or Jimmy. All I cared about was Belinda. I was starting to think like Booger, about killing because it was an easy way to solve your problems, and the thought of that began to crawl up inside my gut and squirm around and make my stomach growl. I bought some chewable stomach tablets, took those and had another cup of bad coffee, and tried not to look at my watch every thirty seconds.

I thought some more about killing, and the idea of it bothered me, but mostly it bothered me because I was getting used to it. When I left Iraq, I thought that was over with, and now here I was, having not so long ago watched Booger not only torture but kill a man, and now we were planning on killing another, a woman too, and we were having breakfast and drinking coffee. If we only had a board and some checkers.

A girl in a tight T-shirt and white shorts came in, and Booger looked her over like he was inspecting her for the USDA. She paid for some gas and went out. I looked at my watch. Twenty minutes had gone by.

We sat and sipped coffee and then my stomach started to hurt, so I went to the bathroom. My bowels were loose from nerves. When I was through in there I washed my hands and looked at myself in the mirror.

I didn’t look like a killer.

I went out and sat back down, said, “Man, I hate this.”

“I love it,” Booger said.

When it was a couple minutes until nine, we went out to the car and started over there, down the main highway, and just as we passed Wal-Mart, the car started acting funny, and then I realized what had happened. A flat. We had a goddamn flat.

I pulled over to the side of the road and got out and went around and looked. The back right tire was blown. I looked at my watch. Five after nine. I opened the trunk as Booger got out of the car, and pulled out the spare tire.

“Take it easy,” Booger said. “We still got it made.”

But we didn’t have it made. I had a spare tire and a jack, but there wasn’t anything to take the tire off with or to jack the jack up. I remembered I had the tires replaced a year or so back, and probably someone at the tire place had left the tire iron out. I didn’t have a way to change the tire.

A man and his young daughter stopped and he asked if we needed help, but he didn’t have the right tool to take the tire off. He was the only person who stopped, and he discovered to his surprise that he too was missing a tire iron. What were the odds?

I thanked him and he left and I walked over to Wal-Mart, leaving Booger with the car.

It was nine-fifteen when I went inside. I walked as fast as I could without running over to the automotive section and looked around. At first I thought there weren’t any tire irons to be found, but then I stopped one of the workers and he located them for me. They came as part of a set with a jack. I wasn’t sure the jack was right for my car, but I was pretty certain the tire iron would work as both handle and lug bolt remover; the directions said that was its purpose. I thought I might also be able to go faster if one of us worked the lug bolts loose and the other jacked. I took a flier and got two different kinds of jacks and went to the checkout counters.

All twelve registers had lines. I went over to the one that was supposed to be a dozen items or less, but there were two people in line with buggies full of groceries. I was the third in line.

I looked at my watch.

Nine-twenty-two.

I yelled up to the checker. “Hey, isn’t this supposed to be twelve items or less?”

The checker, a lanky, greasy-haired white kid with acne, looked at me in desperation. I had opened a can of worms, something he hadn’t had the courage to deal with. He turned to the fat man who was first in line and said, “It is supposed to be just twelve items.”

“I don’t give a shit,” said the fat man. “I’m first in line. I’m a paying customer. It’s no set rule, is it?”

“Well,” the lanky kid said, “it’s supposed to be twelve items.”

“Just check me out,” said the fat man.

“Hey,” I said. “And this lady in front of me. She’s got a buggyful too.”

The lady had already turned to look at me, perhaps sensing she was my next target. “Well, I never,” she said. She was a short lady with a nice face and an ass about the size of a travel trailer.

“Let me go first,” I said. “I only got these jacks.”

The fat man looked at me. “Maybe if you had been nicer.”

“I certainly wouldn’t let him go,” said the woman to the fat man.

“How about this,” I said, calling past the lady to the man. “How about I give you twenty dollars to let me go first. I got a car broke down on the side of the road, and not in a safe place.”

“Then you should have moved it to a safer place,” the fat man said.

“All right, then,” I said, looking at my watch, seeing it was nine-thirty, “what would you say to moving your buggy before I kick that package of frozen peas so far up your ass you’ll have to get a pair of salad tongs to pull them out of your throat?”

“Well, I never,” the trailer-ass woman said again.

“I bet you haven’t,” I said.

“I think the customer with the fewer items should go first,” said the checker.

“Fuck you, pimple face,” the fat man said and gave his buggy a boost that sent it sliding past the counter and over into the wall next to the photo shop. It hit so hard a box of crackers and a can of chili hopped out of it and landed on the floor. The can of chili rolled along and out of sight, as if on a mission.

The trailer-ass woman left her buggy and went on past the counter, heading for the door. Maybe the two of them could commiserate in the parking lot.

I went up and paid for my jacks and went out, and there in the parking lot near the door were the fat man and the trailer-ass woman, doing exactly what I thought they might be doing, commiserating. She said, “You shouldn’t talk like that,” as I walked by.

“You’re right,” I said. “Sorry.”

“He doesn’t mean it,” said the fat man, as I kept walking, talking louder so I could hear him. “He doesn’t mean it at all. He’s not the kind of person that cares about anything.”

I didn’t pay any more attention to them. I liked to think I had put a fat man and a trailer-ass woman together on the road to romance. I darted rapidly across the lot, which was no small stretch of real estate, and on out to the side of the road where the car was. The morning had already turned hot and I was red-faced, and sweating.

Booger said, “Give it here.”

I dropped the jacks by the car and used my knife to cut them out of the packaging and gave one to him. He put it under the car and starting working it. “It doesn’t fit exactly right. It’ll scratch your car up some. It’s not tapered enough on the end.”

“I don’t give a shit,” I said. “Do I look like a man who gives a shit about scratching a car?”

I looked at my watch. It was twenty-six minutes until ten.

Booger went to work on the jack while I turned the lug bolts with my spare tire iron. I got them loose just before the tire was off the ground, and then I twisted them the rest of the way off with my fingers. I pulled the tire off and got the spare and slipped it on and twisted the lug bolts back as Booger lowered the car. I used the lug iron to tighten the bolts better when the tire was settled on the ground. I put the wrecked tire in the trunk and closed it and was behind the wheel again.