Joe Lansdale - Lost Echoes

Without asking, Harry knew he was her father.

Talia leaned to Harry, said, “He dyes his mustache, you know.”

The others were almost in a trance, watching Talia come toward them.

When they were close, Mr. McGuire said, “And who’s this?”

“Harry,” Talia said.

“Harry, huh?” the father said.

“Hello, Mr. McGuire.” Harry stuck out his hand and Mr. McGuire rested his shotgun on his shoulder and held the stock with his left and shook with his right.

“Nice to meet you. You out of razors?”

“Well, I—”

“I just love him like he is,” Talia said. “And he’s not like us, Daddy. He doesn’t worry about money. Or appearances.”

“I don’t know I’d say—” Harry started.

“He and I are quite fond of one another,” Talia said.

“Say you are?” Mr. McGuire said.

“Very fond.”

“That’s very nice, dear.” McGuire turned his attention to Harry, studied him, said, “You will drop by and visit with us sometime, won’t you?”

Before Harry could respond, Talia said, “He works at a bookstore.”

“That right?” Mr. McGuire said.

“He may come to our party, Daddy.”

“Really,” Mr. McGuire said, shifting his shotgun, looking off at a ridgeline of trees as if he might have seen a flying saucer pass over them.

“What party?” Harry asked.

Neither Talia nor Mr. McGuire bothered to explain. They were looking at each other now the way gunfighters would, waiting for someone to make the next move.

“Well, nice meeting you, Henry,” Mr. McGuire said.

“Harry,” Harry said.

“Of course.” Mr. McGuire turned his head, said, “Pull.”

The man near him, on the ground, looking up at Talia as if she were a work of art, took a moment to understand. McGuire repeated himself, and the young man pulled.

The skeet sailed, and Mr. McGuire effortlessly exploded it.

As they walked back across the field, past the building, Harry looked back. Everyone but Daddy was eyeballing Talia’s ass.

Harry said, “That was odd.”

“Think so?”

“Well, yeah.”

“It wasn’t really. He takes his shooting seriously. He’s killed animals all over the world. A few endangered species even. He likes to preserve them himself.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Really. He’s not very strict, you know. I think he liked you.”

“Liked me?”

“Sure.”

She drove away from there quickly and dropped him off out front of his place.

“You going to come in?” Harry asked.

“No. I have some errands. Be a dear and call me later.”

“Sure.”

Harry got out and closed the door.

For a long time he stood on the curb looking in the direction in which Talia and her fine red sports car had departed, trying to figure out exactly how he felt about things. Had he just been a dirty pawn in a dirty chess game, or were Talia and her father just odd, like the rich could be?

And if he was a pawn, what exactly was his role in the game?

There was an answer in there, and he thought maybe it bounced up against his head once, but he didn’t catch it, and whatever might have been there didn’t bounce back in his direction again.

He did ask himself a question, however, and he asked it aloud:

“What party?”

37

EXCERPT FROM HARRY’S JOURNAL

My little friendly composition notebook, I come to you having been sharply centered, to now being off the plumb line, maybe two bubbles.

I’m not sure how I have come to be where I am….

No. That’s not true.

I don’t like how I have come to be, don’t like how I am, and yet I don’t know what to think or do about it, so pardon me as I write, for this will be, to put it bluntly, a little bit mixed and undecided.

There are upsides to my position. Mostly Talia’s backside, bent up and ready, but that’s not a way I like to think or a thing I want to live my life for, though, to be honest, it’s such a fine thing that one can’t help but consider, and I fear—shit, I know—that little pleasure may have departed.

Look at that.

May I say, I’m still clinging to hopes that are unwarranted.

Elvis, my friends, has left the building, and that’s all there is to it.

So here I sit. In darkness, except for this one lamp and my journal and pen, and this strange feeling of remorse and sadness, and the awareness that my old demons, the ghosts in the machine, have not gone away and I have heard and seen something horrible, and that true love isn’t always true and isn’t always love, and that love at first sight is sometimes a harsh light in the eyes.

Most of what plagued me before, the goddamn sounds, has not gone away, but I have been able to frequently put them aside, or, to be more exact, they activate and swim about me like sharks. It is as if I am in a large aquarium, a piece of kelp on the bottom of the goddamn thing, and the sharks are set loose, and as they move the water moves and the kelp moves, and I drift amongst them.

Not a good feeling. But I try to shove it back. Tad says not to do that, not to shove it back, because then I become a depository for those feelings. I am to be like a filter, let them drift through me and out of me. I am to accept our sameness and oneness and move on.

Easier said than done. I’m still trying to figure how they and I are the same. Or even how we’re one.

Zen, baby. It do be confusing.

On a good day it is less like the sharks and more like noise heard from construction work ten blocks away. That is a good thing.

But that is not why I come to you today, my composition friend. No, sir. That ain’t it. I come to you to tell you of a very bad thing and how sometimes the sounds and images are not from far away, nor are they swimming by you, making you nervous. Sometimes they are close as your skin, your intestines, your brain cells, in there with the beat of your heart.

Alas, I avoid. And for good reason.

Best way to put this, best way to explain this to you, is to start where it starts, not behind some rock looking from afar, wishing for a Winchester rifle.

Here it is, then.

So things were going really well, with a stress on the well, but there were signs, dear friend. Signs and portents, and the advice of Tad, right out there in front of me in my lessons, and all of it has come back to me now, and all I can think is: Weren’t you paying attention, asshole?

Once upon a time a poor boy who was afraid of sounds—and for good reason, I might add—got drunk and felt better, but felt less good when sober, and he met a drunk who didn’t feel so good himself, so they decided that together they would not be drunk.

Something like that.

Plans were made, deals were struck.

And, sure enough. They began to find the center they had lost. The wobble stopped.

Well, for me, Composition Notebook Journal (I give that to you as a title now), the wobble is back, because I forgot who I was and what was inside me, and I forgot who Talia is and how it’s her world, not mine.

Hell. I did not forget. I refused to remember.

My world is the dirt beneath her feet, and her world is the clouds. Way up there in the misty white, spotted with clear blue and all manner of hope and fortune and future.

Me, I’m down here with the worms, maybe loony as a rat in a paint shaker, for in spite of my thought-to-be-centered life, I was always listening and waiting for the trumpet blow, the one that announced betrayal.