The Best of Joe R. Lansdale (33 page)

He sailed way up and into the bleachers, went so high his fleas should have served cocktails and dinner on him. Came down like a bomb, hit between a crack in the bleachers with a yip. I didn’t see him come out from under there. He didn’t yip again.

The little boy behind me, said, “Is that a trick too?”

“Yes,” Mommy said. “It doesn’t hurt him. He knows how to land.”

I certainly hoped so.

Not everyone took it as casually as Mommy. Some dog lovers came out of the bleachers and there was a fight. Couple of cowboys started trying to do to Waldo what he had done to the poodles.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, so to speak, the two amorous mutts were still at it, the male laying pipe like there was no tomorrow.

Yes sir, a pleasant afternoon trip to the circus with my daughter. Another debacle. It was merely typical of the luck I had been experiencing. Even a free ticket to the circus could turn to shit.

Jasmine and I left while a cowboy down from the bleachers was using Waldo the Great as a punching bag. One of the ungrateful poodles was biting the cowboy on the boot.

Me and Jasmine didn’t have hot dogs. We ended up at a Mexican place, and Jasmine paid for it. Halfway through the meal Jasmine looked up at me and frowned.

“Daddy, I can always count on you for a good time.”

“Hey,” I said, “what were you expecting for free tickets? Goddamn Ringling Brothers?”

“Really, Daddy. I enjoyed it. Weirdness follows you around. At Mom’s there isn’t anything to do but watch television, and Mom and Gerald always go to bed about nine o’clock, so they’re no fun.”

“I guess not,” I said, thinking nine o’clock was awful early to be sleepy. I hoped the sonofabitch gave her the clap.

After dinner, Jasmine dropped me off and next morning I went down to Martha’s and she grunted at me and showed me the Harlequins and where they needed to go, in alphabetical order, so I started in placing them. After about an hour of that, it got hot and I had to stop and talk Martha into letting me go over to the drugstore and buy a Coke.

When I came back with it, there was a guy in there with a box of Harlequin Romances. He was tall and lean and not bad-looking, except that he had one of those little pencil-line mustaches that looked as if he’d missed a spot shaving or had a stain line from sipping chocolate milk. Except for a black eye, his face was oddly unlined, as if little that happened to him in life found representation there. I thought he looked familiar. A moment later, it came to me. He was the guy at the circus with the performing dogs. I hadn’t recognized him without his gold lamé tights. I could picture him clearly now, his foot up in the air, a poodle being launched from it. Waldo the Great.

He had a box of books on the desk in front of Martha. All Harlequin Romances. He reached out and ran his fingers over the spines. “I really hate to get rid of these,” he was saying to Martha, and his voice was as sweet as a cooing turtle dove. “Really hate it, but see, I’m currently unemployed and extra finances, even of a small nature, are needed, and considering all the books I read, well, they’re outgrowing my trailer. I tell you, it hurts me to dispense with these. Just seeing them on my shelves cheers me… Oh, I take these books so to heart. If life could be like these, oh what a life that would be. But somebody always messes it up.” He touched the books. “True love. Romance. Happy endings. Oh, it should be that way, you know. We live such a miserable existence. We —”

“Hey,” Martha said. “Actually, I don’t give a shit why you want to get rid of them. And if life was like a Harlequin Romance, I’d put a gun in my mouth. You want to sell this crap, or not?”

Martha always tries to endear herself to her customers. I reckon she’s got a trust fund somewhere and her mission on earth is to make as many people miserable as possible. Still, that seemed blunt even for her.

“Well, now,” Waldo said. “I was merely expressing a heartfelt opinion. Nothing more. I could take my trade elsewhere.”

“No skin off my rosy red ass,” Martha said. “You want, that man over there will help you carry this shit back out to the car.”

He looked at me. I blushed, nodded, drank more of my Coke.

He looked back at Martha. “Very well. I’ll sell them to you, but only because I’m pressed to rid myself of them. Otherwise, I wouldn’t take twice what you want to give for them.”

“For you, Mister Asshole,” Martha said, “just for you, I’ll give you half of what I normally offer. Take it or leave it.”

Waldo, Mr. Asshole, paused for a moment, studying Martha. I could see the side of his face, and just below his blackened eye there was a twitch, just once, then his face was smooth again.

“All right, let’s conduct our business and get it over with,” he said.

Martha counted the books, opened the cash register and gave Waldo a handful of bills. “Against my better judgment, there’s the whole price.”

“What in the world did I ever do to you?” Waldo the Great, alias, Mr. Asshole, said. He almost looked really hurt. It was hard to tell. I’d never seen a face like that. So smooth. So expressionless. It was disconcerting.

“You breathe,” Martha said, “that’s enough of an offense.” With that, Waldo, Mr. Asshole, went out of the store, head up, back straight.

“Friend of yours?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Martha said. “Me and him are fuckin’.”

“I thought the two of you were pretty warm.”

“I don’t know. I really can’t believe it happened like that.”

“You weren’t as sweet as usual.”

“Can’t explain it. One of those things. Ever had that happen? Meet someone right off, and you just don’t like them, and you don’t know why.”

“I always just shoot them. Saves a lot of breath.”

She ignored me. “Like it’s chemistry or something. That guy came in here, it was like someone drove by and tossed a rattlesnake through the door. I didn’t like him on sight. Sometimes I think that there’s certain people that are predators, and the rest of us, we pick up on it, even if it isn’t obvious through their actions, and we react to it. And maybe I’m an asshole.”

“That’s a possibility,” I said. “You being an asshole, I mean. But I got to tell you, I don’t like him much either. Kind of makes my skin crawl, that unlined face and all.”

I told her about the circus and the dogs.

“That doesn’t surprise me any,” Martha said. “I mean, anyone can lose their cool. I’ve kicked a dog in my time —”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“— but I tell you, that guy hasn’t got all the corn on his cob. I can sense it. Here, put these up. Earn your goddamn circus tickets.”

I finished off the Coke, got the box of Harlequins Waldo had brought in, took them over to the romance section and put them on the floor.

I pulled one out to look at the author’s name, and something fell out of the book. It was a folded piece of paper. I picked it up and unfolded it. It was a magazine fold-out of a naked woman, sort you see in the cheaper tits and ass magazines. She had breasts just a little smaller than watermelons and she was grabbing her ankles, holding her legs in a spread eagle position, as if waiting for some unsuspecting traveler to fall in. There were thick black paint lines slashed at the neck, torso, elbows, wrist, waist, knees and ankles. The eyes had been blackened with the marker so that they looked like nothing more than enormous skull sockets. A circle had been drawn around her vagina and there was a big black dot dead center of it, like a bull’s-eye. I turned it over. On the back over the printing there was written in black with a firm hand: Nothing really hooks together. Life lacks romance.

Looking at the photograph and those lines made me feel peculiar. I refolded the fold-out and started to replace it inside the book, then I thought maybe I’d throw it in the trash, but finally decided to keep it out of curiosity.

I shoved it into my back pocket and finished putting up the books, then got ready to leave. As I was going, Martha said, “You want a job here putting up books I’ll take you on half a day five days a week. Monday through Friday. Saves some wear on my bad leg. I can pay you a little. Won’t be much, but I don’t figure you’re worth much to me.”

“That’s a sweet offer, Martha, but I don’t know.”

“You say you want work.”

“I do, but half a day isn’t enough.”

“More than you’re working now, and I’ll pay in cash. No taxes, no bullshit with the employment office.”

“All right,” I said. “You got a deal.”

“Start tomorrow.”

I was lying naked on the bed with just the nightlight on reading a hard-boiled mystery novel. The window was open as always and there was actually a pretty nice breeze blowing in. I felt like I used to when I was twelve and staying up late and reading with a flashlight under the covers and a cool spring wind was blowing in through the window screen, and Mom and Dad were in the next room and I was loved and protected and was going to live forever. Pleasant.

There was a knock at the door.

That figured.

I got up and pulled on my pajama bottoms and put on a robe and went to the door. It was Jasmine. She had her long, dark hair tied back in a pony tail and she was wearing jeans and a shirt buttoned up wrong. She had a suitcase in her hand.

“Connie again?”

“Her and that man,” Jasmine said as she came inside. “I hate them.”

“You don’t hate your mother. She’s an asshole, but you don’t hate her.”

“You hate her.”

“That’s different.”

“Can I stay here for a while?”

“Sure. There’s almost enough room for me, so I’m sure you’ll find it cozy.”

“You’re not glad to see me?”

“I’m glad to see you. I’m always glad to see you. But this won’t work out. Look how small this place is. Besides, you’ve done this before. Couple times. You come here, eat all my cereal, start missing your comforts, and then you go home.”

“Not this time.”

“All right. Not this time. Hungry?”

“I really don’t want any cereal.”

“I actually have some lunch meat this time. It’s not quite green.”

“Sounds yummy.”

I made a couple of sandwiches and poured us some slightly tainted milk and we talked a moment, then Jasmine saw the fold-out on the dresser and picked it up. I had pulled it from my pocket when I got home and tossed it there.

She opened it up and looked at it, then smiled at me. It was the same smile her mother used when she was turning on the charm, or was about to make me feel small enough to wear doll clothes.

“Daddy, dear!”

“I found it.”

“Say you did?”

“Cut it out. It was in one of the books I was putting up today. I thought it was weird and I stuck it in my back pocket. I should have thrown it away.”

Jasmine smiled at me, examined the fold-out closely. “Daddy, do men like women like this? That big, I mean?”

“Some do. Yes.”

“Do you?”

“Of course not.”

“What are these lines?”

“I don’t know exactly, but that’s what I thought was weird. It got my mind working overtime.”

“You mean like the ‘What If’ game?”

The “What If” game was something Jasmine and I had made up when she was little, and had never really quit playing, though our opportunities to play it had decreased sharply over the last couple of years. It grew out of my thinking I was going to be a writer. I’d see something and I’d extrapolate. An example was an old car I saw once where someone had finger-written in the dust on the trunk lid: THERE’S A BODY IN THE TRUNK.

Well, I thought about that and tried to make a story of it. Say there was a body in the trunk. How did it get there? Is the woman driving the car aware it’s there? Did she commit the murder? That sort of thing. Then I’d try to write a story. After fifty or so stories, and three times that many rejects, I gave up writing them, and Jasmine and I started kicking ideas like that back and forth, for fun. That way I could still feed my imagination, but I could quit kidding myself that I could write. Also, Jasmine got a kick out of it.

“Let’s play, Daddy?”

“All right. I’ll start. I saw those slashes on that fold-out, and I got to thinking, why are these lines drawn?”

“Because they look like cuts,” Jasmine said. “You know, like a chart for how to butcher meat.”

“That’s what I thought. Then I thought, it’s just a picture, and it could have been marked up without any real motive. Absentminded doodling. Or it could have been done by someone who didn’t like women, and this was sort of an imaginary revenge. Turning women into meat in his mind. Dehumanizing them.”

“Or it could be representative of what he’s actually done or plans to do. Wow! Maybe we’ve got a real mystery here.”

“My last real mystery was what finished your mom and I off.”

That was the body in the trunk business. I didn’t tell it all before. I got so into that scenario I called a friend of mine, Sam, down at the cop shop and got him geared up about there being a body in the trunk of a car. I told it good, with details I’d made up and didn’t even know I’d made up. I really get into this stuff. The real and the unreal get a little hard for me to tell apart. Or it used to be that way. Not anymore.

Bottom line is Sam pursued the matter, and the only thing in the trunk was a spare tire. Sam was a little unhappy with me. The cop shop was a little unhappy with him. My wife, finally tired of my make-believe, kicked me out and went for the oil man. He didn’t make up stories. He made money and had all his hair and was probably hung like a water buffalo.

“But say we knew the guy who marked this picture, Daddy. And say we started watching him, just to see —”

“We do know him. Kind of.”

I told her about Waldo the Great and his books and Martha’s reaction.

“That’s even weirder,” Jasmine said. “This bookstore lady —”

“Martha.”

“— does she seem like a good judge of character?”

“She hates just about everybody, I think.”

“Well, for ‘What If’s’ sake, say she is a good judge of character. And this guy really is nuts. And he’s done this kind of thing to a fold-out because… say…say…”

“He wants life to be like a Harlequin Romance. Only it isn’t. Women don’t always fit his image of what they should be — like the women in the books he reads.”