Joe Lansdale - Lost Echoes

For Karen, again

Our echoes roll from soul to soul,

And grow for ever and for ever.

—Tennyson

FROM THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE

MYSTERY IN EAST TEXAS

Bodies were found in a car at the bottom of a vine and brush-covered hill in the heart of Mud Creek, Texas. The hill, a scenic overlook, was once a popular parking spot for young couples, but is now considered off-limits by most area teenagers, even though the bodies were no more than skeletal remains and the car and remains appear to have been there for several years.

Due to the slope of the hill and a sharp lower drop-off, the car could not be seen from above. It was also stated by one area resident that most people who visited the spot “came there at night, and sightseeing wasn’t their purpose.”

The car was discovered by hikers who decided to climb down the slope. “We didn’t know what it was at first,” said one of the hikers, who wishes to remain unnamed. “It looked like a bump of dirt up against a tree, but it was a car, covered up in vines and brush.”

Originally, authorities thought it might have been an accident, that the car slipped off the cliff, but the skulls of the victims both revealed gunshots to their foreheads. The couple, a young male and female, have been tentatively identified by the license plate and names in a wallet and a purse, but the names are being withheld by authorities until the next of kin can be notified.

1

Later, as an adult, Harold Wilkes would remember the childhood events that started it all, and he would think: If only I had slept through the night.

It wasn’t much to hang on to. In fact, it was nothing. It was the old “had I but known” cliché from cheap paperback novels. But he thought about it from time to time, and wondered.

Because the way things turned out, hearing what he heard, seeing what he saw, knowing what he knew, it was no way to live.

2

Inside the living room, the way the windows were arranged, it was as if Harry were looking out of the compound eye of a bee. At six years old he didn’t know about the compound eye of a bee, but he loved the way the world looked through those windows.

High up there on an East Texas hill, with the blue curtains pulled back, the windows tall and plenty, running all across one side of the room, he could see the road, and down from that a honky-tonk, then the highway and a drive-in theater surrounded by a shiny tin fence.

Wonderland.

If the windows were the eyes of a bee, they were filmy eyes, because they were coated in dust as fine as talcum powder on a baby’s ass. At first his parents made an effort to clean them, but with the sandy road out front, the way the cars threw it up when they traveled by, it was an impossible task. They took a whack at it from time to time, and that was it.

Wonderland through dust.

There were the same sort of windows on the west side of the room as well, but they only went halfway across and were less dusty. The remaining room was dirty white, and the windows on the west wall faced a wrecking yard and the woods beyond, and at night Harry thought the cars looked like the bugs that ran across the floor when he turned on the bathroom light. Only they were bigger. Much bigger. Big, rusted, humped-back bugs moving in extreme slow motion toward the concealment of the woods. Or at least he liked to play that way, even though he knew they were cars, frozen in automotive death.

But they didn’t look like his daddy’s car, and they didn’t look like the cars he saw on the road. In the daytime they were red with rust and they sat heavy on their wheels, their tires long worn out or stolen. In the daytime they just looked tired.

Harry had no idea the cars were from the years 1948 through the early fifties. The youngest machine out there was from 1959, and it was banged up worse than the rest and the windshield was starred and cracked from some accident.

He didn’t know about those things, the models of cars. They were just part of his wonderland.

The house itself was also a source of awe to Harry.

It was huge and had at one time been fine, but now it was not so fine, and if it had been, he and his family would not have been living there.

As his father said, “If it cost a nickel to shit, we’d have to throw up.”

The place still had some class. It was large and there was a broad porch that ran out from the front door and took an L turn and ran alongside the house, then fell off into a set of stairs that matched the set near the front door. Both stairs were askew and you had to walk slightly to starboard to navigate them.

When the wind blew hard the roof shook, sagged a bit, hung low over the porch like an old man’s hat. The back end of the house had lost some of its boost, as the stones that held it up had settled into a gopher run. The kitchen didn’t have running water, except for a hose that was poked through the window and into the sink. There was an old woodstove that had been converted to gas about the time Eisenhower was learning to wear civvies again.

None of this meant anything to Harry. Not really. He didn’t know about being poor. He was six years old and everything was magical and the house to him was home and it was swell.

Especially those windows.

He had been sick that day, the day it began, a Saturday, and that was bad. You got sick, you didn’t want it to be a Saturday. He had slept all day in a deep fever, a kind of slow bake in blankets, and suddenly he had awakened, feeling cooled, energized, and bored, and angry that he had missed morning cartoons. Worse yet it was already night.

Tomorrow, he thought, he would play in the apple tree out back of the house, pretend it was a spaceship. He knew about spaceships. His mother had read him a book about a spaceship, and his older cousin had read a book about a spaceship under an apple tree, like the apple tree in his backyard.

The house was quiet. His parents were asleep. He looked out the windows, saw the honky-tonk with its lights and voices, could hear country music floating up from down there, songs about drinking and leaving. Across the highway he could see over the tin fence and watch what was showing on the big white screen of the drive-in.

He didn’t know they were having an old-time cartoon festival; he only knew there were cartoons and he had missed them on TV this morning, so he pulled a chair to the window, sat there, and watched the Warner Bros. characters—Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the like—go through their antics. He couldn’t hear them. No speakers. His sound track was from the honky-tonk, an old Loretta Lynn tune at the moment, about blue Kentucky girls, soon to be followed by similar ditties.

Normally, weeknights, when his father had to work on the big trucks, he and his mother sat here in chairs and watched movies. Mostly old movies. Spaghetti Western festivals. Old crime dramas. Sometimes something new. But mostly old. That’s what the drive-in was about. It was built new and lit up with the old; the owners were trying to bring back some of that past magic.

He and his mother would watch, and she would tell him what the characters were saying. Which meant she made it up. He thought she had some kind of super mojo going, could read minds, or just knew everything. She was his mother, after all. She would know everything there was to know, including what the tall people on the screen were saying, what the cartoon characters yelled as they fell off cliffs.