Joe Lansdale - Lost Echoes

Somehow the story, true or not, made the place more exciting, that and the tale that a flying saucer had burned the place black.

So when Harry parked, he did it at the peak of the hill, just before it dropped away, his headlights pointing at the sky. And when he killed the beams, there was the moonlight, and after a moment their eyes adjusted and the stars seemed to pop out, sharp, like shiny spear tips falling toward them.

Harry was thinking: She’s been here before. Do I say: “Have you been here before?” No. That’s not good. ’Cause if she has, I know what she was doing, and she’ll know I know, and maybe she just likes it up here, and this lonely place has got nothing to do with passion, maybe she’s just a goddamn nature lover, and—

She put her hand on the front of his pants.

—maybe not.

“Get me naked,” she said. “Show me the moon.”

It was the first time they made love, and it was constructed of writhing flesh, flowing moonlight, and cool fall air; it was ripe with the smell of pine needles and drying leaves and red clay and the acid sweetness of clashing sexual organs.

They changed positions a number of times, went from sweater-cool to naked-warm, and one time, when he was behind her, her head out the window, her midnight hair jumping as he went into her, back and forth, she said, quite loud, “You’re my poor boy, aren’t you? Fuck me, baby. Fuck me, baby.”

Poor boy?

He thought that one over and it tumbled in his head like junk falling down attic stairs, but the feeling was so good and the night was so fine, and the really bad noises, the ones that hid in the texture of this and that, that clanged and whanged and bammed and whammed, had been absent from him for some time now, at least in a big way, and the universe, it was his (when he didn’t tangle his feet in roots), and he was long gone from being who he was and how he was, so it didn’t matter.

Not at all.

35

Next day, in his apartment, lying on the couch, hands behind his head, contemplating the date with Talia, running it over and over in his mind, especially the parts out there on Humper’s Hill, the phone rang. Slowly he got up from the couch, went over, and looked at the caller ID.

It was Joey.

It rang three times and the answering machine kicked in.

There was a pause.

No message was left.

“Damn,” Harry said. He picked up the phone and dialed Joey.

“I just called,” Joey said.

“I know. I saw your name. I couldn’t get to the phone in time.”

“Must have been taking a shit. Small as your place is, you can get anywhere under, say, oh, I don’t know, two seconds.”

“You’re right. I was on the toilet.”

“The other night, your friend—he don’t like me much, Harry.”

“Figured as much.”

“He tell you about it?”

Harry lied. “No.”

“Want to know about it?”

“No.”

“He hurt my feelings, man. He didn’t treat me like I was your friend.”

“Got to admit, Joey, sometimes I got to look real hard to find the love.”

“Come on, man. Don’t go homo on me. This all got started over some girl. We don’t want shit like that to come between us. Thing is, though, I wanted to ask you. You really end up seeing her? Talia?”

“Yeah.”

“No joke?”

“No one laughing here.”

“She a good fuck?”

“Come on, Joey.”

“Is she?”

“I got nothing to say about things like that.”

“You must be lousy. That must be the thing.”

“Joey?”

“Yeah.”

“Blow me.”

Harry hung up.

36

A week passed.

It went by like a bullet, because he was seeing Talia, a lot. And all over, and in all kinds of positions. Next to a nonstop flight to heaven with free peanuts, things couldn’t have been better.

“You should meet Daddy,” Talia said.

“Daddy?” Harry said, not knowing what to think of this. Was it that they were so serious he should meet Daddy? Or was it that Daddy thought anyone dating his little girl should be met?

What was up?

As for himself, was he serious? He certainly thought so. Felt high all the time, way he felt when he drank, but without the hangover.

She had surprised him this morning, when he’d been sleeping in, and he answered the door in his boxer shorts.

“When?”

“Today.”

“Today?”

“Now.”

“Now.”

“Harry. Are you a parrot?”

“Parrot?”

“Now stop. He’s out at the shooting range.”

He looked at her, sitting on the edge of the couch so only a pinpoint of her fine ass was actually making contact with it. She never seemed comfortable there, but it was what he had. And he wasn’t nuts about going to her parents’ house. He didn’t know what it was like, but he knew she had money, and he knew he did not.

“I should clean up then.”

“No. You look fine. I like you like you are.”

From past experience, he knew his hair was sticking up like a rooster comb, ’cause it always was when he woke up, and he had a couple days of whiskers going, breath that would melt a wax block, and this was brought all the more home because she looked like a million bucks and change. It was a good bracer to meet a girl in a black miniskirt first thing in the morning, a halter top so tight you could tell her religious affiliation, but it also brought home the fact that he looked like a cardboard-box wino.

“I thought you should meet him, and now’s the time. He’s out at the gun range.”

“Gun range?”

“There’s that damn parrot again.”

“I don’t know, meeting a girl’s father at a gun range—it tends to make a man nervous. Especially since we’ve been doing more than swapping stories.”

“He’s very cosmopolitan.”

“Yeah, but I’m not. Guess I get to comb my hair and put on some clean undershorts.”

“If you hurry. Don’t bother to shave.”

Harry brushed his teeth, changed underwear and combed his hair, and put on the best pair of jeans he had. They were only moderately faded, and the cuffs were ragged where he had been stepping on them with his boots. As he pulled on his socks and tied his tennis shoes, he wondered what in hell Talia saw in him. What made him so lucky?

He took one more trip to the bathroom, looked in the mirror, said, “Sure I don’t have time to shave?”

“He’ll only be there awhile, then he’s so hard to find. He has all kinds of meetings and the like, and he doesn’t always answer his cell phone.”

“This shooting place. They haven’t killed…anything out there, have they?”

“What?”

“Killed anything. Been any accidents?”

“Harry, sometimes you can be so strange.”

She drove them over in a very new and very nice and very red sports car. That was good. New cars were good. They hadn’t had a lot of chances to get wrecked, not as much time to conceal bad memories.

The shooting place was a field, really, not far out in the country. There was a gate you went through, and to get through it you had to push code buttons.

Talia did just that, and they cruised in.

They parked near a long, low building, and walked out back. There were three men out there with shotguns, and three younger men pulling the skeet launchers.

They walked back that way, and Harry stole glances at Talia, way she walked, way the short dress sheathed her thighs, and how she stood tall with her breasts jutted out like high beams.

As they neared, Harry saw the young men at the skeet launchers turn to look at her. Two of the older men looked as well. One was a slightly heavy guy with a jet-black caterpillar mustache, hair gone slightly south, wearing clothes that could be called sporting clothes if you could keep them ironed while in the woods. He looked about fifty, but as he got closer, Harry realized he was much older. Sixty-five, maybe even right at seventy. Well preserved. Money could do that. The man gave them a brief glance.