Stories (2011) (88 page)

No doubt about it, he wanted to die that way.

After the inquest a lot of stuff came out. Seems Gardner had
been a lot worse off than I'd known. Before moving to Nacogdoches he had been a
psychiatrist, but he'd also spent time in a mental institution; even back then
the idea of a soul ghoul had eaten away his rationality. They released him as
cured eventually, but...

It doesn't matter now. Those horrible murders stopped. I put
his paintings in the fire the night he died. Couldn't see much use in
slandering the man's reputation further. There was some hullabaloo about me
murdering him, but that didn't stick. The psychiatric stuff worked in my favor,
and some others who knew him said he'd been acting awful strange.

Poor Gardner, he was as crazy as a moth in a jar. But the
other day I read the paper, and they think they got the Yorkshire Ripper, a
fellow more ghoulish than Jack ever was. Thirteen brutal murders to his credit.

What got me about the article was what was said by those who
knew him. "He was a model son, a perfect husband."

Why do normal people fall off the horse?

I don't have any answers, but Gardner's idea, the ghoul ...
just too fantastic. Stuff like that just couldn't be.

Could it?

The beautiful woman had no eyes, just sparkles of light
where they should have been—or so it seemed in the candlelight. Her lips, so
warm and inviting, so wickedly wild and suggestive of strange pleasures, held
yet a hint of disaster, as if they might be fat red things skillfully molded
from dried blood.

"Hit me," she said.

That is my earliest memory of her: a doll for my beating, a
doll for my love.

I laid it on her with that black silk whip, slapping it
across her shoulders and back, listening to the whisper of it as it rode down,
delighting in the flat pretty sound of it striking her flesh.

She did not bleed, which was a disappointment. The whip was
too soft, too flexible, too difficult to strike hard with.

"Hurt me," she said softly. I went to where she
kneeled. Her arms were outstretched, crucifixion style, and bound to the walls
on either side with strong silk cord the color and texture of the whip in my
hand.

I slapped her. "Like it?" I asked. She nodded and
I slapped her again . . . and again. A one-two rhythm, slow and melodic, time
and again.

"Like it?" I repeated, and she moaned, "Yeah,
oh yeah."

Later, after she was untied and had tidied up the blood from
her lips and nose, we made brutal love—me with my thumbs bending the flesh of
her throat, she with her nails entrenched in my back. She said to me when we
were finished, "Let's do someone."

That's how we got started. Thinking back now, once again I
say I'm glad for fate; glad for Gloria; glad for the memory of the crying
sounds, the dripping blood and the long sharp knives that murmured through
flesh like a lover's whisper cutting the dark.

Yeah, I like to think back to when I walked hands-in-pockets
down the dark wharves in search of that special place where there were said to
be special women with special pleasures for a special man like me.

I walked on until I met a sailor leaning up against a wall
smoking a cigarette, and he says when I ask about the place,

"Oh, yeah, I like that sort of pleasure myself. Two
blocks down, turn right, there between the warehouses, down the far end. You'll
see the light." And he pointed and I walked on, faster.

Finding it, paying for it, meeting Gloria was the goal of my
dreams. I was more than a customer to that sassy, dark mamma with the sparkler
eyes. I was the link to fit her link. We made two strong, solid bonds in a
strange cosmic chain.

You could feel the energy flowing through us; feel the iron of
our wills. Ours was a mating made happily in hell.

So time went by and I hated the days and lived for the
nights when I whipped her, slapped her, scratched her, and she did the same to
me. Then one night she said, "It's not enough. Just not enough anymore.
Your blood is sweet and your pain is fine, but I want to see death like you see
a movie, taste it like licorice, smell it like flowers, touch it like cold,
hard stone."

I laughed, saying, "I draw the line at dying for
you." I took her by the throat, fastened my grip until her breathing was a
whistle and her eyes protruded like bloated corpse bellies.

"That's not what I mean," she managed. And then
came the statement that brings us back to what started it all: "Let's do
someone."

I laughed and let her go.

"You know what I mean?" she said. "You know
what I'm saying."

"I know what you said. I know what you mean." I
smiled. "I know very well."

"You've done it before, haven't you?"

"Once," I said, "in a shipyard, not that long
ago."

"Tell me about it. God, tell me about it."

"It was dark and I had come off ship after six months
out, a long six months with the men, the ship and the sea. So I'm walking down
this dark alley, enjoying the night like I do, looking for a place with the
dark ways, our kind of ways, baby, and I came upon this old wino lying in a
doorway, cuddling a bottle to his face as if it were a lady's loving
hand."

"What did you do?"

"I kicked him," I said, and Gloria's smile was a
beauty to behold.

"Go on," she said.

"God, how I kicked him. Kicked him in the face until
there was no nose, no lips, no eyes. Only red mush dangling from shrapneled
bone; looked like a melon that had been dropped from on high, down into a mass
of broken white pottery chips. I touched his face and tasted it with my tongue
and my lips."

"Ohh," she sighed, and her eyes half-closed.
"Did he scream?"

"Once. Only once. I kicked him too hard, too fast, too
soon. I hammered his head with the toes of my shoes, hammered until my cuffs
were wet and sticking to my ankles."

"Oh God," she said, clinging to me, "let's do
it, let's do it."

We did. First time was a drizzly night and we caught an old
woman out. She was a lot of fun until we got the knives out and then she went
quick. There was that crippled kid next, lured him from the theater downtown,
and how we did that was a stroke of genius. You'll find his wheelchair not far
from where you found the van and the other stuff.

But no matter. You know what we did, about the kinds of
tools we had, about how we hung that crippled kid on that meat hook in my van
until the flies clustered around the doors thick as grapes.

And of course there was the little girl. It was a brilliant
idea of Gloria's to get the kid's tricycle into the act. The things she did
with those spokes. Ah, but that woman was a connoisseur of pain.

There were two others, each quite fine, but not as nice as
the last. Then came the night Gloria looked at me and said,

"It's not enough. Just won't do."

I smiled. "No way, baby. I still won't die for
you."

"No," she gasped, and took my arm. "You miss
my drift. It's the pain I need, not just the watching. I can't live through
them, can't feel it in me. Don't you see, it would be the ultimate."

I looked at her, wondering did I have it right.

"Do you love me?"

"I do," I said.

"To know that I would spend the last of my life with
you, that my last memories would be the pleasure of your face, the feelings of
pain, the excitement, the thrill, the terror."

Then I understood, and understood good. Right there in the
car I grabbed her, took her by the throat and cracked her head up against the
windshield, pressed her back, choked, released, choked, made it linger. By this
time I was quite a pro. She coughed, choked, smiled. Her eyes swung from fear
to love. God it was wonderful and beautiful and the finest experience we had
ever shared.

When she finally lay still there in the seat, I was
trembling, happier than I had ever been. Gloria looked fine, her eyes rolled
up, her lips stretched in a rictus smile.

I kept her like that at my place for days, kept her in my
bed until the neighbors started to complain about the smell.

I've been talking to this guy and he's got some ideas. Says
he thinks I'm one of the future generation, and the fact of that scares him all
to hell. A social mutation, he says. Man's primitive nature at the height of
the primal scream.

Dog shit, we're all the same, so don't look at me like I'm
some kind of freak. What does he do come Monday night? He's watching the
football game, or the races or boxing matches, waiting for a car to overturn or
for some guy to be carried out of the ring with nothing but mush left for
brains. Oh yeah, he and I are similar, quite alike. You see, it's in us all. A
low-pitch melody not often heard, but there just the same. In me it peaks and
thuds, like drums and brass and strings.

Don't fear it. Let it go. Give it the beat and amplify. I
tell you it's love of the finest kind.

So I've said my piece and I'll just add this: when they
fasten my arms and ankles down and tighten the cap, I hope I feel the pain and
delight in it before my brain sizzles to bacon, and may I smell the frying of
my very own flesh. . . .

Where I grew up there were lots of junkyards along the
highway. This was before Ladybird Johnson insisted (and probably with good
reason) that all junkyards be contained behind fences, and that wildflowers be
planted over the entire state of Texas—well, at least along the highways.

My dad was a mechanic, and as a child I often rode with him
out to junkyards to buy parts.

Back then, something broke on a car you had to fix it, or
replace it, usually with a used part.

There's less and less of that these days. It's actually
cheaper to just throw a broken part away and put in a new one than to fix it,
and besides, most parts now, like ballpoint pens, can't be fixed.

In these junkyards car parts weren't the only things you
saw. There were overturned washers, smoking tires and burning mattresses. This
was because when someone bought some junk he wanted from someone who was
tossing it out, he often had to buy the whole pile. Meaning then he had to get
rid of the stuff he didn't want. Like tires and mattresses.

Sometimes in these junkyards people lived with this mess
around them, and to be honest, growing up, a lot of people I knew who didn't
run junkyards looked like they lived in one. I seemed to circulate amongst
folks with at least one overturned and grass-surrounded washing machine in the
yard. Or a car wheel buried in the weeds so that you could bang your ankles on
it.

I remember one junkyard trip in particular, though I'm sure
since I was a very young child I've made more of it than there was. Way I
remember there was this big place full of all manner of junk and a skulking dog
that seemed to just want you to turn your back for a moment. I was with my dad,
however, so I wasn't overly afraid.

And before I go farther, let me say something about my dad.
I know this doesn't fit in exactly, but since this is my book, I don't give a
shit. I'm going to talk about my dad, Bud Lansdale. He was, and is, my hero. He
wasn't a perfect man. He was flawed like all of us, but he was bigger than life
and had about him a sort of Old Testament sense of justice, though not being
able to read he had never read the Bible, and to the best of my knowledge had about
as much interest in it as a pig does machinery.

My dad was born in 1909 and grew up during the Depression.
He made money from hard work and sometimes from traveling town to town to
battle in what would now be called Tough Man Contests, or the original Ultimate
Fighting Contests. These events primarily took place at fairs back then.

He had a knowledge of boxing and wrestling and had the
opportunity to do both professionally, but had to help take care of his
father's family. My dad's mother died when he was eight. I don't know which
number wife this was for my grandfather Lansdale, but by all accounts he was an
asshole who married several times, once to a stepdaughter. He beat my father
with a whip when he was a child of eight or nine and made him pick cotton. The
scars were visible on my dad's back, like razor cuts. I think it's interesting
that my father never so much as spanked me. He was known to raise his voice,
but he never spanked me. I can't say the same about myself and my children. I
have spanked. Not beaten, but spanked. I don't regret doing it. I think it was
the only way to accomplish immediate punishment, and warnings to not do things
that could do greater damage to them than a spanking. But my dad never spanked
me, and my brother who was seventeen years older was only spanked once for
chasing a fire engine.

My mother didn't believe in spanking, though she once lost
her cool when I was about eleven and whipped my ass severely with a fly
swatter. This was a whipping I not only remember, but deserved. My mother and I
laughed about this until the day she died. Which goes to prove spanking isn't
necessarily the thing that turns a child to drugs, animal mutilation and voting
Republican.

My father believed in spanking, he just never did it. He
couldn't bring himself to do it. One look from him was enough. I hated to disappoint
my father because I admired him so much. He was honest to a fault, a guy with a
Puritan work ethic. Kind as he was to us, he could be violent.

Never improperly, I thought. But he didn't beat around the
bush when violence raised its head.

Perhaps my first real memory of my father was him giving me
a dog I named Blackie and my dad called Honkeytonk because the dog had belonged
to the owner of a honkeytonk just down the hill from where we lived, out by the
highway. Across the highway was a drive-in theater. When I was a child my
mother and I used to sit at night at the tall windows of our old rickety house,
high up on that hill overlooking the honkeytonk, the highway and the drive-in
theater beyond, and we'd watch whatever was on at the theater. I only remember
the cartoons.