Joe Lansdale - Lost Echoes

Almost.

He wanted to get certain, thought four or five beers would make him certain.

The door was open and the sign read OPEN, so Seymour went right on in. It was cool and dark in there and smelled the way it always smelled, like beer and sweat and sexual anxiety stirred by air-conditioning. But there was something else. It was faint, but he knew that smell immediately.

Once, for a summer, he had worked in a slaughterhouse, and once you smelled that odor, you knew it fresh, you knew it dried, and in each form it smelled different, and yet somehow the same.

It was the smell of blood.

The hair on the back of Seymour’s neck poked up, and he thought—or imagined—that above the aroma of the tonk he could smell his own fear, a kind of sour stench of sweat and decay. And in the back of his mouth he could taste copper. He turned slowly, almost crouched, expecting someone to leap from the shadows like a goddamn gazelle.

And he saw someone.

But she wouldn’t do much leaping.

It was Evelyn Gibbons.

The formerly attractive, middle-aged Evelyn Gibbons. The owner of the tonk. The breezy little woman with the dark bobbing hair and the bouncy step and the bouncy ass, the latter usually tucked nicely beneath short black dresses, her buns jacked up by thick high heels.

She was sitting down by the jukebox, her head against it, leaning farther than it should have on a neck. That was because her throat was cut from ear to ear, and there was blood all over the jukebox, on her, and the wall behind her. Her hair was matted in blood and stuck to the jukebox like a big spit wad. The floor beneath her had plenty of blood too. Her dress was hiked up over her thighs, and Seymour could see her panties. They were dark, and had probably been white before they soaked up a lot of gore.

Seymour backed toward the door, looking over his shoulder carefully. He figured the blood, dried like it was, meant the murder had happened some time ago. But he looked about just the same, in case some madman armed with a blade should come for him.

He made it out into the blinding sunshine to his car, where he had a cell phone on the passenger’s seat. He called 911, and while he waited for the cops to arrive, he wished repeatedly that he had a beer. Maybe some whiskey. A little turpentine. Rubbing alcohol. A shot of piss. Damn near anything.

The cops showed up. They looked around. They took notes and photographs and fingerprints and such. They questioned Seymour until he really needed a drink.

Seymour was the prime suspect for about six months, but that died out. Even those who never gave up on him quit worrying about it when Seymour, full of gin, lost control of his vehicle, slammed on the brakes as he careened off the road, and was struck violently in the back of the neck by a case of gilt-edged Bibles thrown from the backseat. It was a good shot. It snapped his neck and checked him out.

After that, there wasn’t much shaking in the Evelyn Gibbons case. There were a few who didn’t think it was Seymour at all. They pursued leads, one or two in particular.

But it resulted in nothing.

No idea who.

No idea why.

A year passed.

6

So now Harry, he’s thirteen, and he’s got the horny on bad. If they rated how horny he was on a one-to-ten scale, he’d been about an eleven, maybe a twelve. So he’s got this horny on, and he doesn’t know shit from wild honey about such, but he’s got it going and he thinks he knows something, and what he doesn’t know, Joey Barnhouse tells him. Not that all of Joey’s information is right either, but it’s interesting, all this info from shithouse walls and the mouth of Joey and the technique of artful guessing.

One day Harry tries to steal a kiss from Kayla Jones, the pretty blond who lives down the road from him, on the other side of Joey, but she whips his ass soundly. After the ass whipping, he likes her even more. Kayla, she’s some sack of dynamite. Thin as a reed, hair yellow as the burning sun at high noon, fists like lead. Pissed off because her father yells at her mother a lot, and vice versa, and though Harry doesn’t know it at the time, he’d think back later and consider maybe they had, like, some kind of link.

Joey doesn’t like her, or says he doesn’t, thinks she’s too tall and too tough. This because he’s about four feet high and one foot wide and growing like dead grass. He’s got big feet, though, says that’s a sign he’s gonna grow, says he’s got a hammer like something Thor would carry, provided he could swing it between his legs.

Harry knows better. Joey, like him, darts about in the shower at PE, keeps his back to folks when he can, his hand over his privates, quick to grab a towel.

He ain’t showing nothing. Not like William Stewart, who has a goddamn python. Flaps it about like it might strike, maybe grab someone in the locker room, squeeze him dead, drag him up a tree for later consumption.

No, Harry figures Joey isn’t any better than him in that department. But it’s cold comfort.

He’s got that on his mind. Inadequacy. Stuff that his dad at thirteen probably didn’t think about at all, or didn’t have time to, working most of his kid life away, but there it was. His concerns. The worries of Harry Wilkes in all their glories. Late-night rambles over a girlie magazine Joey had given him and he kept hidden under his mattress.

Yeah, that was him. A magazine in one hand, himself in the other, doing the dirty deed, feeling guilty because of Sunday school and church, a bewhiskered, voyeuristic, smirking, self-righteous God peeking over his shoulder while he brought the juice to freedom.

It made a fella nervous.

No doubt about it, he thought as he lay there in bed. I’ve got one of them…what do they call it…?

Oh, yeah.

A complex.

That’s what I got.

A goddamn complex.

On the morning after Harry battled his complex, he awoke with a plan in mind.

Bravery. That was the thing.

Stand up against a ghost, do it in front of a girl. A girl like Kayla. You could show you were tough enough to be the boyfriend of a girl who could beat you like a circus monkey. Going after and seeing a ghost, that had to be worth points.

That said, he wasn’t that brave. Decided he would have to go down the road and find Joey first. Might be best to have reinforcements. He figured—hoped—he could make an impression with reinforcements. He liked to think it could be done.

’Cause, you see, there was a ghost, all woo-woo and ectoplasmic. He and Joey and Kayla had heard about it from other kids, older kids in the neighborhood, and he had even heard his mother talking to Joey’s mother about it. Down the hill and in the tonk. A specter.

Poor old Evelyn Gibbons’s spirit. Trapped in the abandoned honky-tonk, roaming about nights, her head hanging to one side, draped against her shoulder, her neck red as if she were wearing a scarlet scarf.

That was the story. There were those who claimed to have seen her. Some said you could hear her scream from time to time. Joey’s older brother, Evan, who beat them all up now and then, even Kayla, though she gave a good fight, said he had heard Evelyn Gibbons scream a couple times, and both times it had pricked the hair on his neck and made him run.

Evan could have been lying.

He liked to jack with them.

But on this matter Harry chose to believe him, because it suited his plans.

He had to believe in the ghost.

Mainly, Kayla had to believe in the ghost. Down there in the tonk, floating and moaning and screaming about.

Down there. Waiting.

The night was oozy-rich with velvet darkness, moonlight and moon shade. Their shadows darted across the ground as they ran, outlined by the silver rays of the moon.