Stories (2011) (22 page)

He got his pants and underwear peeled down to his ankles,
but he couldn't get them over his boots. He began to hop about the room. He hit
the light switch and saw the ants all over the place. They had followed the
stream of syrup, and then they had found him on the couch and gone after him.

Standers screamed and slapped, hopped over and grabbed the
box from the floor and jerked open the front door. He held the box in one hand
and tugged at his pants with the other, but as he was going down the steps, he
tripped, fell forward and landed on his head and lay there with his head and
knees holding him up. He tried to stand, but couldn't. He realized he had
broken his neck, and from the waist down he was paralyzed.

Oh God, he thought. The ants. Then he thought. Well, at
least I can't feel them, but he found he could feel them on his face. His face
still had sensation.

It's temporary, the paralysis will pass, he told himself,
but it didn't. The ants began to climb into his hair and swarm over his lips.
He batted at them with his eyelashes and blew at them with his mouth, but it
didn't do any good. They swarmed him. He tried to scream, but with his neck
bent the way it was, his throat constricted somewhat, he couldn't make a good
noise. And when he opened his mouth the furious little ants swarmed in and bit
his tongue, which swelled instantly.

Oh Jesus, he thought. Jesus and the Virgin Mary.

But Jesus wasn't listening. Neither was the Virgin Mary.

The night grew darker and the ants grew more intense, but
Standers was dead long before morning.

* * *

About ten A.M. a car drove up in Standers's drive and a fat
man in a cheap blue suit with a suitcase full of bibles got out; a real bible
salesman with a craving for drink.

The bible salesman, whose name was Bill Longstreet, had his
mind on business. He needed to sell a couple of moderate-priced bibles so he
could get a drink. He'd spent his last money in Beaumont, Texas on a double,
and now he needed another.

Longstreet strolled around his car, whistling, trying to put
up a happy Christian front. Then he saw Standers in the front yard supported by
his head and knees, his ass exposed, his entire body swarming with ants. The
corpse was swollen up and spotted with bites. Standers's neck was twisted so
that Longstreet could see the right side of his face, and his right eye was nothing
more than an ant cavern, and the lips were eaten away and the nostrils were a
tunnel for the ants. They were coming in one side, and going out the other.

Longstreet dropped his sample case, staggered back to his
car, climbed on the hood and just sat there and looked for a long time.

Finally, he got over it. He looked about and saw no one
other than the dead man. The door to the trailer was open. Longstreet got off
the car. Watching for ants, he went as close as he had courage and yelled
toward the open door a few times.

No one came out.

Longstreet licked his lips, eased over to Standers and
moving quickly, stomping his feet, he reached in Standers's back pocket and
pulled out his wallet.

Longstreet rushed back to his car and got up on the hood. He
looked in the wallet. There were two ten dollar bills and a couple of ones. He
took the money, folded it neatly and put it in his coat pocket. He tossed the
wallet back at Standers, got down off the car and got his case and put it on
the back seat. He got behind the wheel, was about to drive off, when he saw the
little box near Standers's swollen hand.

Longstreet sat for a moment, then got out, ran over, grabbed
the box, and ran back to the car, beating the ants off as he went. He got
behind the wheel, opened the box and found another box with a little crude
glass window fashioned into it. There was something small and dark and squiggly
behind the glass. He wondered what it was.

He knew a junk store bought stuff like this. He might get a
couple bucks from the lady who ran it. He tossed it in the back seat, cranked
up the car and drove into town and had a drink.

He had two drinks. Then three. It was nearly dark by the
time he came out of the bar and wobbled out to his car. He started it up and
drove out onto the highway right in front of a speeding semi.

The truck hit Longstreet's car and turned it into a
horseshoe and sent it spinning across the road, into a telephone pole. The car
ricocheted off the pole, back onto the road and the semi, which was slamming
hard on its brakes, clipped it again. This time Longstreet and his car went
through a barbed wire fence and spun about in a pasture and stopped near a
startled bull.

The bull looked in the open car window and sniffed and went
away. The semi driver parked and got out and ran over and looked in the window
himself.

Longstreet's brains were all over the car and his face had
lost a lot of definition. His mouth was dripping bloody teeth. He had fallen
with his head against an open bible. Later, when he was hauled off, the bible
had to go with him. Blood had plastered it to the side of his head, and when
the ambulance arrived, the blood had clotted and the bible was even better
attached; way it was on there, you would have thought it was some kind of
bizarre growth Longstreet had been born with. Doctors at the hospital wouldn't
mess with it. What was the point. Fucker was dead and they didn't know him.

At the funeral home they hosed his head down with warm water
and yanked the bible off his face and threw it away.

Later on, well after the funeral, Longstreet's widow
inherited what was left of Longstreet's car, which she gave to the junkyard.
She burned the bibles and all of Longstreet's clothes. The box with the little
box in it she opened and examined. She couldn't figure what was behind the
glass. She used a screw driver to get the glass off, tweezers to pinch out the
hair.

She held the hair in the light, twisted it this way and
that. She couldn't make out what it was. A bug leg, maybe. She tossed the hair
in the commode and flushed it. She put the little box in the big box and threw
it in the trash.

Later yet, she collected quite a bit of insurance money from
Longstreet's death. She bought herself a new car and some see-through panties
and used the rest to finance her lover's plans to open a used car lot in
downtown Beaumont, but it didn't work out. He used the money to finance himself
and she never saw him again.

Buddy drank another swig of beer and when he brought the
bottle down he said to Jake and Wilson, "I could sure use some
pussy."

"We could all use some," Wilson said,
"problem is we don't never get any."

"That's the way I see it too," Jake said.

"You don't get any," Buddy said. "I get
plenty, you can count on that."

"Uh huh," Wilson said. "You talk pussy plenty
good, but I don't ever see you with a date. I ain't never even seen you walking
a dog, let alone a girl. You don't even have a car, so how you gonna get with a
girl?"

"That's the way I see it too," Jake said.

"You see what you want," Buddy said. "I'm
gonna be getting me a Chevy soon. I got my eye on one."

"Yeah?" Wilson said. "What one?"

"Drew Carrington's old crate."

"Shit," Wilson said, "that motherfucker
caught on fire at a streetlight and he run it off in the creek."

"They got it out," Buddy said.

"They say them flames jumped twenty feet out from under
the hood before he run it off in there," Jake said.

"Water put the fire out," Buddy said.

"Uh huh," Wilson said, "after the motor
blowed up through the hood. They found that motherfucker in a tree out back of
old Maud Page's place. One of the pistons fell out of it and hit her on the
head while she was picking up apples. She was in the hospital three days."

"Yeah," Jake said. "And I hear Carrington's
in Dallas now, never got better from the accident. Near drowned and some of the
engine blew back into the car and hit him in the nuts, castrated him, fucked up
his legs. He can't walk. He's on a wheeled board or something, got some retard
that pulls him around."

"Them's just stories," Buddy said. "Motor's
still in the car. Carrington got him a job in Dallas as a mechanic. He didn't
get hurt at all. Old Woman Page didn't get hit by no piston either. It missed
her by a foot. Scared her so bad she had a little stroke. That's why she was in
the hospital."

"You seen the motor?" Wilson asked. "Tell me
you've seen it."

"No," Buddy said, "but I've heard about it
from good sources, and they say it can be fixed."

"Jack it up and drive another car under it,"
Wilson said, "it'll be all right."

"That's the way I see it too," Jake said.

"Listen to you two," Buddy said. "You know it
all. You're real operators. I'll tell you morons one thing, I line up a little
of the hole that winks and stinks, like I'm doing tonight, you won't get none
of it."

Wilson and Jake shuffled and eyed each other. An unspoken,
but clear message passed between them. They had never known Buddy to actually
get any, or anyone else to know of him getting any, but he had a couple of
years on them, and he might have gotten some, way he talked about it, and they
damn sure knew they weren't getting any, and if there was a chance of it,
things had to be patched up.

"Car like that," Wilson said, "if you worked
hard enough, you might get it to run. Some new pistons or something . . . what
you got lined up for tonight?"

Buddy's face put on some importance. "I know a gal
likes to do the circle, you know what I mean?"

Wilson hated to admit it, but he didn't. "The
circle?"

"Pull the train," Buddy said. "Do the team.
You know, fuck a bunch a guys, one after the other."

"Oh," Wilson said.

"I knew that," Jake said.

"Yeah," Wilson said. "Yeah sure you
did." Then to Buddy: "When you gonna see this gal?"

Buddy, still important, took a swig of beer and pursed his
lips and studied the afternoon sky. "Figured I'd walk on over there little
after dark. It's a mile or so."

"Say she likes to do more than one guy?" Wilson
asked.

"Way I hear it," Buddy said, "she'll do 'em
till they ain't able to do. My cousin, Butch, he told me about her."

Butch.

The magic word. Wilson and Jake eyed each other again. There
could be something in this after all. Butch was twenty, had a fast car, could
play a little bit on the harmonica, bought his own beer, cussed in front of
adults, and most importantly, he had been seen with women.

Buddy continued. "Her name's Sally. Butch said she cost
five dollars. He's done her a few times. Got her name off a bathroom
wall."

"She costs?" Wilson asked.

"Think some gal's going to do us all without some money
for it?" Buddy said.

Again, an unspoken signal passed between Wilson and Jake.
There could be truth in that.

"Butch gave me her address, said her pimp sits on the
front porch and you go right up and negotiate with him. Says you talk right, he
might take four."

"I don't know," Wilson said. "I ain't never
paid for it."

"Me neither," said Jake.

"Ain't neither one of you ever had any at all, let
alone paid for it," Buddy said.

Once more, Wilson and Jake were struck with the hard and
painful facts.

Buddy looked at their faces and smiled. He took another sip
of beer. "Well, you bring your five dollars, and I reckon you can tag
along with me. Come by the house about dark and we'll walk over together."

"Yeah, well, all right," Wilson said. "I wish
we had a car."

"Keep wishing," Buddy said. "You boys hang
with me, we'll all be riding in Carrington's old Chevy before long. I've got
some prospects."

It was just about dark when Wilson and Jake got over to
Buddy's neighborhood, which was a long street with four houses on it widely
spaced. Buddy's house was the ugliest of the four. It looked ready to nod off
its concrete blocks at any moment and go crashing into the unkempt yard and die
in a heap of rotting lumber and squeaking nails. Great strips of graying
Sherwin Williams flat-white paint hung from it in patches, giving it the
appearance of having a skin disease. The roof was tin and loved the sun and
pulled it in and held it so that the interior basked in a sort of slow simmer
until well after sundown. Even now, late in the day, a rush of heat came off
the roof and rippled down the street like the last results of a nuclear wind.

Wilson and Jake came up on the house from the side, not
wanting to go to the door. Buddy's mother was a grumpy old bitch in a brown
bathrobe and bunny rabbit slippers with an ear missing on the left foot. No one
had ever seen her wearing anything else, except now and then she added a shower
cap to her uniform, and no one had ever seen her, with or without the shower
cap, except through the screen-wire door. She wasn't thought to leave the
house. She played radio contests and had to be near the radio at strategic
times throughout the day so she could phone if she knew the answer to
something. She claimed to be listening for household tips, but no one had ever
seen her apply any. She also watched her daughter's soap operas, though she
never owned up to it. She always pretended to be reading, kept a
Reader's
Digest
cracked so she could look over it and see the TV.

She wasn't friendly either. Times Wilson and Jake had come
over before, she'd met them at the screen door and wouldn't let them in. She
wouldn't even talk to them. She'd call back to Buddy inside, "Hey, those
hoodlum friends of yours are here."

Neither Wilson or Jake could see any sort of relationship
developing between them and Buddy's mother, and they had stopped trying. They
hung around outside the house under the open windows until Buddy came out.
There were always interesting things to hear while they waited. Wilson told
Jake it was educational.