Joe Lansdale - Lost Echoes

“Damn. You’re going to have a bruise,” she said.

“I’ll say.”

“Not quite the way I wanted our first meeting after all these years to turn out.”

“Oh. It’s all right. It’s good to see you.”

“You too.”

“You signing up for courses?” Harry tried not to rub his head, but couldn’t help himself. It hurt.

“No.”

“Come to look at books?”

“No.”

“Can I help you with something?”

“I came to see you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. You know. Just to say hello.”

“How’d you know I work here?”

“I’m a cop, Harry. I find things out…. I called your mother.”

“Oh.”

“She sounded well.”

“She’s all right.”

“You look good,” she said.

“Thanks. You too. Yeah. I’m fine. You’re fine?”

“Yeah. Still have…the sounds?”

“Oh, that. No. Nothing like that anymore. A phase with me. You know, kid stuff. Imagining.”

“Imagining?”

“Sure.”

“You imagined the ghost in the honky-tonk? You remember that?”

“I remember…I don’t know. Not really.”

“Not really what?”

“I mean, I don’t know.”

Kayla nodded. “Well, it’s good to see you.”

“You too.”

She laughed. “Didn’t we just do this?”

“Some.”

“I was thinking, Harry. It’s been a while, but maybe—”

“Friend of yours, Harry?” It was Talia. She had appeared as if she were an apparition. She came and stood close to him and put an arm around his waist. She looked as if she had just been pulled off the front of a fashion magazine, all hipped up in tight pants and a top, thick-heeled shoes that made her ass stand up as if it were peeking over a fence.

“What happened to your head?” Talia asked.

“I bumped it.”

What Harry noted, however, was Talia was not spending that much time looking at his injury. She was looking at Kayla.

“Oh,” Harry said. “This is Kayla. She used to live near me. We went to school together. Grade school. She moved away.”

“That right?” Talia said. “Just moved back, I suppose?”

“A little while now,” Kayla said.

“Catching up on old times?” Talia asked.

“Some,” Kayla said. “Nothing big. Just a word or two.”

“It’s great Harry can reconnect with his little friends,” Talia said.

“Little friends?” Kayla said.

“It’s nice to look back at your past,” Talia said. “You know. See where you’ve been, think about where you’re going.”

Kayla scratched the side of her head a little. Harry noted that she still had those long, lean muscles that she had used in youth to beat the shit out of him.

“Or to consider that maybe you’ve gone too far,” Kayla said. “Sometimes, you know, you can be in a good place, and then, before you know it, you can make some wrong choices. End up in a cesspool.”

Talia smiled, but it seemed to hurt her to do so. She said, “So you’re not someone who believes a person like, say, Harry should think about moving on. Learning from his past mistakes.”

“I think you have to be careful you don’t, how shall I put this, fuck up any future plans.”

“You’re so thoughtful.” Talia sniffed the air. “That perfume. Nice. Strong stuff. But very nice. Dime store?”

Before Kayla could respond, Harry said, “Kayla’s a cop.”

“No shit?” Talia said.

Kayla’s grin widened. “Yeah. No shit.”

“You could arrest us, you wanted,” Talia said.

“You’d have to do something.”

“Like insult an officer?”

“That would work. Or, if you did that, and we’re just talking here, I could just forget I’m a cop and beat the living shit out of you.”

Talia was silent for a time. Finally she spoke. “My daddy knows lots of cops. He knows your boss. The chief.”

“That right?”

“Oh, that’s right. Well, it’s been so good to meet you,” Talia said. “I hope your moving back to our little town won’t be a disappointment, and maybe, who knows, you might get a chance to—how did you put it?—beat the living shit out of someone.”

“Well, there’s always a turd or two you have to step over, no matter where you are. But I think, on the whole. I’ll be fine. And, who knows, I might just get my chance to beat the shit out of someone. Harry, nice seeing you.”

“I must get the name of that perfume,” Talia said.

Kayla smiled at Talia, but didn’t speak to her. She turned to Harry. “We’ll talk later.”

Harry, feeling as if he had just been run over by a truck, said, “Sure, Kayla. Real good to see you.”

“That toilet water she was wearing,” Talia said. “Where in hell would you find that? And darling, it was almost attracting flies.”

“It was a little strong, but it was okay.”

It was Harry’s lunch break, and they were walking from the bookstore to the little hamburger joint not far away. Harry walked very carefully, aware of staying on the path he knew, hoping nothing had changed recently. Like, say, since last night.

Cars drove by and Harry heard every motor, every backfire, music coming out of car windows, sometimes causing cars with windows rolled up to throb like an excited penis.

In the hamburger joint, they ordered, took a table. Talia reached out and gently touched the bump on Harry’s head. “Oh, that’s going to look really bad when we’re out. Maybe you should put some ice on it, see if you can get it to go down.”

“It hurts some.”

“You should get it to go down. It would look better if you used some ice.”

“Right. Ice.”

Talia turned slightly, looked across the way. Harry looked too. He saw she was looking at a guy over by the counter. Harry had seen him before. He was one of the guys he had seen with Talia the second time he had taken her for coffee.

“Good friends?” Harry asked.

“What?”

“That guy and you?”

“Are you jealous?”

“Might be.”

“Oh, not at all. We used to date. It wasn’t much. He wasn’t much. That girl. You and her, did you used to be—”

“We were kids, Talia. I mean, kids.”

“When I was twelve, a fifteen-year-old boy showed me how the eel went into the cave. It wasn’t so bad, even if I was twelve. So kids, that doesn’t mean a thing, dear.”

Harry didn’t know what to say to that. So he said, “Kayla’s all right. She and I grew up together. She’s all right.”

“I’d rather you not see her, though, hon. People will think she’s upstaged me. And I’m not used to that. I don’t like to share my men.”

“Men?”

“Figure of speech.”

“She’s all right,” Harry said again. He felt all messed up inside, as if everything he had just learned to understand had suddenly gotten scrambled.

“Oh, that’s our number,” Talia said.

Harry got up to get the burgers.

It was a sweater night up in the hills, or what served as hills in East Texas. Up there, where the night was closer and the stars were brighter and the thick pines surrounded the narrow clay road, they sailed along in his car as if propelled not by the engine and gasoline, but by air.

They went to a little place blatantly named Humper’s Hill, way up in the trees where there was a clearing from what appeared to be the landing of a great spaceship, but was most likely the result of a once-terrific lightning blast that blew out the trees and burned a circle.

Talia knew the place, led him up there. He pulled into the empty circle. The moonlight, from a half-eaten moon, was bright and silver and clean.

There was a slight rise, and near the front of the car the rise fell off and there was a dip. Not a cliff exactly, just a slope, and Harry had heard that a car had actually gone off of it once, down into the brush, and no one knew it was there for some three, four years. It was a couple, and sometimes the story said they had been shot, pushed over the side in their car. But no one knew they were down there until years later when hikers found the car and discovered their remains inside.