Joe Lansdale: Leather Maiden

I watched her for a while. She walked until she came to the end of the street, where it met the highway, then she turned around and started back. I pulled my chair over and sat at the window and watched her through the crack in the curtain. I thought about calling Child Protective Services, and then remembered Dad had done that.

I thought I might call anyway. I watched her walk back up the street, lifting her head to the heavens, spreading her arms, enjoying the rain like some kind of nature nymph. She stepped onto our lawn and crossed to hers.

I couldn’t see her after that, but I had an idea she might be climbing the elm, making her way to her platform in the boughs while her mother and her new daddy did whatever it was they were doing in the bedroom. Being uncharitable, my guess was they were passed out drunk. I started to go out and talk to Jazzy, to tell her to go to bed, that trees draw lightning. Or perhaps I just wanted to have her keep me company. But I didn’t do it. I didn’t do anything but watch the rain until it wasn’t raining anymore.

Finally I stood up and went over and looked at the shadow shapes of the taxidermy frogs and rats my brother had fixed up, and remembered how it had all smelled out in the garage when he was preserving them. Even then, as a kid, I thought it was a shitty hobby. I reached out with a finger and gently pushed at the heaped-together dead things. They tumbled over and one of the rats fell and went behind the desk. I didn’t bother to pick it up. Way it had been pumped full of chemicals, way the skin had been treated, it could lie there without odor for a century.

I looked up at his sash again. I had made Life Scout, not Eagle. I had gotten in a fight with the scoutmaster’s son and kicked him in the teeth, knocking a couple out, making myself persona non grata at the Scout hut. My swift kick didn’t affect Jimmy’s scouting at all. He was the kind of guy who could have shit in the middle of the Scout hut, set the crap on fire and burned the place down, and before anyone would say anything bad about him, it would have been blamed on arsonist rodents. He had the knack, Jimmy did.

I went to bed and thought about some of the things Dad and I had talked about, closed my eyes and went to sleep and dreamed immediately, saw all the dead I had seen in the war. Americans and Iraqis were lying in the middle of a blood-soaked street. There were so goddamn many.

As I watched, all of them crawled together into a bloody and mangled heap, made themselves into a zombie-style pyramid of writhing bodies, many of them missing limbs, dripping blood the color of oil. They wrapped their arms and legs around one another to hook up and form a moving mass, wide at the bottom, narrow at the top, with a headless baby at the peak; a pyramid of bloody, rotting flesh, acting as one, stalking toward me.

I awoke, sat up in bed, sweating. I got up, turned off the alarm, went into the bathroom with my suitcase, showered and shaved and brushed my teeth taking my sweet time.

I put on a loose blue shirt and some new blue jeans that I had to pull the tags off of. I went back to my room and put on my socks and shoes and sat at my desk and looked at my watch frequently and watched it grow lighter through the curtained window.

It had rained some more in the night and because of it the morning broke off cool. I went outside and enjoyed the cool as the sun came up and began to pour color into everything. Then the sun climbed up higher and it got hot and the wetness on the road in front of the house began to evaporate and rise up in a warm damp mist. There was a balmy, lethargic wind that came with it, and in a short time it blew the mist away. Then there was nothing but the heat, a kind of slow broil that turned everything sticky as the crack of a fat man’s ass.

I drove to work, made it there at a quarter to nine.

7

Belinda had done something different with her hair. It was evenly cut and short and she had dyed it honey blond. Something about that light blond hair and those freckles made her look like strawberries and cream.

We exchanged pleasantries, and I went to my desk.

I immediately turned on the computer and tapped into the file on Caroline Allison. It was the same thing I had already read, of course, and it wasn’t much, but it whet my appetite again. Francine’s intent had most likely been to write a breezy little column about the missing girl and how horrible it was, and move on to how to make tuna casserole with olives the next week. Article-wise, I had something similar—but a little more intense—in mind, though I didn’t intend to follow it with tuna casserole.

I hated to do it, but I got up and went over to Oswald’s desk.

When I told him what I wanted, he pointed, said, “The morgue. I’ll call down and introduce you.”

The newspaper morgue was tucked around a corner and down a few steps, in a kind of basement with lighting that might have been bright during the ice age on a starless night, but for modern times it was a little dim. Like Timpson’s office, unless someone told you where to look, you might never know the place was there.

It was a small room with a low ceiling and file cabinets and computers and little clear plastic boxes full of computer discs. There were old outdated machines that allowed you to flick through ancient newspaper text. There was dust in the air and the smell of slightly mildewed newspapers. I could imagine dust mites making their way up my nostrils the minute I entered, bringing in furniture, checking out the backyard.

There was a series of tables and desks, all of them covered in newspaper debris. There were several trash cans overflowing with refuse, a lot of it fast-food wrappers. Secret sauce on the wrappers had turned a little rank and the odor from it was muscling its way around in the air. There were printouts taped to file cabinets and pinned to boards. I leaned forward and looked at one. It was on some kind of weird cow mutilation in Kansas. I looked at the others. They all had to do with oddball events: strange murders, kidnappings, cats run up flagpoles. That last had taken place right here in Camp Rapture.

I looked up and saw a man coming around the file cabinets toward me. We introduced ourselves. His name was Jack Mercury. No joke.

Mercury was maybe thirty-five or thirty-eight, healthy-appearing, looked as if he might be able to bend a fireplace poker over his knee and on a good day bite the end off of it, but he wasn’t big on sunlight. He had blond hair and sharp blue eyes that seemed even bluer in his pale face. His clothes were rumpled, looked like he might have gone three rounds with a bear while wearing them.

He said, “Welcome to hell. I’m transferring all our old information from the files, from the microfiche, et cetera, to the computer and disc. It’s tedious, therefore, it’s hellish. As for you, well, you’re just visiting hell. It’s not a bad place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to work here.”

“Can I buy a souvenir?”

“Sorry. No concessions stand in hell. But you can take back our worst wishes. This place gets to some people. The tightness. Cut a fart, and you start a paper blizzard. Turn too quick, the edge of a table will castrate you.”

“All these things taped to the cabinets…This your personal interest?” I asked.

“Everyone thinks I’m nuts. Conspiracy nut they call me, paranoid. That’s why I’m down here by myself. I see connections where others don’t. All you got to do is pause and look and consider.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

“Ah, you’re humoring me. I do so hate that. What is it you want, fellow scribe?”

“I’m doing some research, and I was told you were the man to see…Mercury. That’s an unusual name.”