Joe Lansdale - Lost Echoes

“You are the biggest goddamn loser since losers were invented, and you’re like a fucking disease. You spread your loser, withered-white-dog-turd sensibilities wherever you go, just hoping you’ll drag everyone else down into the sewer with you, you piss-and-turd-gulping piece of glorified dog shit that almost walks like a man. Now, I’ve got that off my chest. I got one more thing to say, a question really. Would you like your steak to go, you fucking odoriferous weasel ass?”

Joey started to open his mouth.

“Oh. One last thing. You speak loudly, cuss me, act nasty in any way, you will wake up with a fucking tube in your nose and one in your dick. You’ll think you’re a spaceman, so many tubes will be running out of your body. I will beat you and slam you and toss you and kick you and stomp you and just about anything I can think of, up to hitting you with some of these chairs, and possibly some of the patrons. So don’t. Don’t say anything. Not a goddamn word, even if it’s in Greek.”

Joey closed his menu, slid out of the booth, and walked briskly toward the door.

The waitress, Sandy, appeared.

“Hi,” Tad said. “Uh, there will just be two of us after all. Our friend remembered he left the stove on.”

In the bathroom Harry washed his hands carefully and looked around and felt nervous, but there were no sounds that had sounds beneath them, light and shadow, images and pain.

No. He was cool.

So far.

He dried his hands under the blower, took a deep breath, went back out into the restaurant.

When Harry came back to the booth, Tad was reading the menu. Harry said, “Where’s Joey?”

“He left.”

“On foot?”

“Sure looked that way.”

“Where to?”

“I’m not certain. Liquor store would be my guess.”

Harry picked up his menu, said, “He coming back?”

“I don’t think so…. I would say no.”

“You two get into it?”

“Heavens, no. We just talked.”

Later, back at home, in the dark, Harry took off his clothes and sat naked on the couch. He sat there for a long time. Slowly he got up and went to the trash can and took out the wine bottle and held it near the window so the outside light could shine through it. There wasn’t even a drop left. He set it on the bookshelf and looked at it for a while, then he put it in the trash can again.

He sat on the couch and looked at the trash can.

He sat that way for about five minutes, then got up and got the bottle out of the trash and held it against his nose and smelled it. It smelled like strawberries and a back rub. He ran his tongue just inside the bottle neck. He began to work his tongue savagely along the outside of the bottle. There was just the faintest taste of wine.

He noted he had an erection.

Holy shit. I’m so fucking horny for liquor, I’ve got a hard-on.

That old dog won’t hunt.

Harry broke the bottle in the bathroom sink and picked out the glass and put it in the bathroom trash. He cut himself in the process. He sucked his finger and looked at his face in the mirror. The light was off, so he could not see himself well. He could see enough to notice a man with his hand in his mouth, sucking. All of this over a goddamn wine bottle.

He washed his hands and his face and put on a fresh pair of shorts and got his pillow and blankets out of the closet and lay on the couch and covered up.

He thought about how the wine had looked in the jelly jar, and how Joey had acted as he drank it. How he had smacked his lips and how the wine had beaded on his lips, how he had licked at it when it splashed onto the sides of his mouth.

Harry got up and found the jelly jar Joey had drunk out of. There was just the faintest bit of wine in the bottom.

This is silly, Harry told himself. I want a drink, I can have a drink. Hell, one drink, that isn’t anything. Maybe I could go to the store, get a beer. Just one.

In Rio Bravo , the drunk in the movie had quit drinking the hard stuff, just had a beer now and then. That worked for him. He could drink a beer. It was the hard liquor he couldn’t have. A beer. That would be cool. Just one. A cold one.

Shit, Harry thought. Dean Martin was an actor. He didn’t have to get over being a drunk. He was playing drunk. In my case, Harry thought, I am not playing.

He washed out the jelly jar, in case he should start trying to drink the dregs, and went to bed. After a long while of thinking about drink and thinking about the sounds that made him drink, the faces he had seen, the pain he had felt, he drifted off to sleep.

29

So Harry, he’s doing his center-of-the-universe thing with Tad, and he’s got a lot of spare hours (drinking took up more time than he realized), and he’s spending the rest of the time going to school, studying, working, not drinking, not missing Joey, trying to find that damn center, and then, surprise, he finds the center of the universe. Easy. It’s right in front of him.

And its name is Talia.

She’s looking just two beats above movie starrish. Hot mama on a cool fall day. A dream a-loose in the world of mortals. All in white, and the light loves her. Her skirt is not that short, but looks short because her perfect legs are so long, and the white top is frilly, and her breasts, dark as if touched with cool shadow, are plenty full and plenty showing, and her face is alight with a smile, teeth so white and full an orthodontist would bow to them as if to a shrine.

It was then that Harry noticed the pack of folks with her.

Four boys, dressed to the nines, bodies by health club, clothes by designer wear, hair by stylists, combed perfect and not subject to the wind.

Harry wore faded jeans—and not fashionably faded—a loose shirt, and his hair was a twist and wisp that crawled all over his head. He was whiter than typing paper seen in a bright light. It got that way when you hid from the world.

There were a couple of nice-looking girls with Talia as well—one of them may have been with one of the boys, the other solo—but that left three guys to be with Talia. If the other girl only appeared to be solo, and was in fact with one of the other guys, that still left two.

Harry thought: Unless all the unfettered guys are gay, odds are bad for our hero.

And then Talia looked at one of the boys and smiled, and then, the universe be praised, she looked directly at him.

He felt a movement in his pants that wasn’t shifting pocket change.

“I didn’t mean to separate you from your friends,” Harry said, taking a sip of his coffee, watching her over the top of his cup.

“That’s all right,” Talia said. “I’ve wondered about you.”

“Me?”

“Sure. I’ve been looking for you.”

“You have?”

“Yes, I have…. This could be called our spot, couldn’t it?”

They were sitting and having coffee in the same place as before. “Yes,” Harry said, “I suppose it could. I’ve thought about you a lot too.”

Talia looked pouty. “If you have, where have you been?”

“Busy.”

“You haven’t been coming to class. I waited. I went by where you were supposed to be. I thought you dropped out.”

“I missed a couple classes. Been helping a friend.”

Talia smiled, and Harry thought: Wow. She left her pack to be with me. That’s pretty damn cool.

Now it was just him and her.

And, of course, everyone else in the place.

Still, it meant something, way she acted. She had to really like him, leaving her friends like that. She had looked back at the guys when she came over, before he asked her to coffee, and he wondered about that, her looking back, but, shit, you could read something into everything, and that was his problem.

Take it as it is, he told himself. Take it as it is.