Joe R Lansdale - Leather Maiden (doc).doc

Leather Maiden

Joe R. Lansdale

Alfred A. Knopf New York 2008

For Keith, Scoop Dog

Life is full of holes. The trick is to try to live between them.
—Jerzy Fitzgerald

In Preparation

1

When you grow up in a place, especially if your childhood is a good one, you fail to notice a lot of the nasty things that creep beneath the surface and wriggle about like hungry worms in rotten flesh. But they’re there. Sometimes you have to dig to discover them, or slant your head in just the right direction to see them. But they’re there all right, and the things that wriggle can include blackmail, mutilation and murder. And I can vouch firsthand that this is true.

But the day I arrived back in town there was no evidence of anything wriggling under the surface or anywhere else, unless you count my head, which seemed to be wriggling a lot. I was coming off a lowball drunk and felt as if someone had borrowed my skull to bowl a few frames.

As I drove through Camp Rapture, over the railroad tracks and past the dog food factory, I told myself I would never drink again. But I had told myself that before.

It was a bright day, the sunlight like a burst egg yolk running all over the sidewalk and through the yards, almost snuffing out the grass with its heated glory, and causing everything to be warm and appear fresh, even the houses on the poor side of town from which ancient coats of basic white peeled like stripping sunburn.

I tooled along with my eyes squinted to keep out some of the summer light, eased by Gabby’s veterinarian office and tried not to rubberneck too much, and passed on. I finally drove up to the Camp Rapture Report, got out and stood by my aging car and looked around and hoped maybe this time things were going to go better.

Night before, I had driven over from Houston after leaving Hootie Hoot, Oklahoma, and my crazy Iraq war buddy, Booger, but only got as far as a bar, and later a motel on the outskirts of town, where I drank myself into a stupor in front of the TV set, watching who knows what. For all I cared it could have been a program on tractor repair or how to give yourself a lobotomy.

Next morning, I awoke feeling like something had died in my mouth and something else had crawled up my ass. I showered and brushed the dead thing out of my mouth and decided to live with whatever was up my ass, and drove to my scheduled interview for a possible position on the Camp Rapture Report.

Standing there beside my car, sweating from the late summer heat like a great ape in an argyle sweater, I took in a big breath of hot air. I checked to make sure my zipper was up, then examined the bottoms of my shoes for dog crap, just in case. I went along the sidewalk, strolled past the bee-laden, flowered shrubbery, the smell of which made my stomach roil, and went inside.

The Report looked pretty old-fashioned. Like a place where male reporters ought to wear fedoras with press cards in the hatbands and the female reporters ought to chew gum and talk snappy dialogue through bright red lipstick.

At the front desk I was greeted by a cute blond lady. She smiled and showed me some braces. I think she was in her mid-twenties, possibly even a little older, closer to my age, but the braces and the hairdo, which was too short and not evenly cut, along with a scattering of freckles that decorated her flushed cheeks, made her look like a spunky 1950s schoolkid as seen under a huge magnifying glass.

“Mr. Statler,” she said. “How are you?”

“You remember me?”

“We went to school together.”

“We did?”

“Belinda Hickam. I was a year under you. You were in the journalism club and you wrote for the high school paper. I think you wrote about chess.”

“Actually I only wrote one article about chess.”

“I guess that was the one I read. You’ve been hired to do a column, right?”

“I haven’t been hired yet.”

“Well, I’m going to be optimistic about it. Mrs. Timpson is waiting to see you.”

“Which way?” I said.

She pointed at a foyer where I could see a heap of stacked boxes, advised me to start in that direction and she would buzz Mrs. Timpson that I was on my way back.

“Any advice?” I asked.

“Keep your hands and feet on the visitor’s side of the desk, don’t make any sudden moves, and try not to make direct eye contact.”

 

2

I weaved around some stacked boxes and a couple of chairs and into the dark end of a foyer where there was light coming from behind a frosted glass door that had the moniker MRS. MARGOT TIMPSON, EDITOR, stenciled on it in black letters.

I tapped gently on the door and a voice that was well practiced at yelling asked me to come in.

Mrs. Timpson was sitting behind her desk and she had pushed back from it in her office chair and was studying me carefully. She had hair too red on the sides and too pink in the thin spots. Her face was eroded with deep canals over which a cheap powder had been caked, like sand over the Sphinx. Her breasts rested comfortably in her lap; they seemed to have recently died and she just hadn’t taken time to dispose of them. I took her age to be somewhere between eighty and around the time of the discovery of fire.

“Sit down,” she said, and her dentures moved when she spoke, as if they might be looking for an escape route.

I took the only chair and looked as intelligent as you might when you’re trying to shake Jim Beam and way too many cold beer chasers.

“You look like you’ve been drinking,” she said.

“Last night. A party.”

“I’ve heard you have a drinking problem.”

“Where would you hear that?”

“From the owner of Fat Billy’s Saloon. He’s my husband. You know, the little shithole just outside of town?”

“I was drinking, but I’m not a drunk.”

“I thought you said it was a party.”

“A party of one. It’s not a habit. I just tied one on a bit. You own a bar, so you know how it is. Now and then, you just drink more than you should.”

“The husband owns the bar,” she said, capturing her teeth with her upper lip as they moved a little too far forward. “He and I are separated. Have been for twenty years. We just never got around to divorcing. We get along all right, long as we don’t live together, or see each other that often, or communicate in any way. But he called and told me about you. He knew you, of course, knew you were trying to get on here at the paper. He said you mentioned it quite a few times between drinks.”

“Guess I was a little nervous.”

“He said you used to play football, quarterback for the Bulldogs. I looked you up. You lost most of your games, didn’t you?”

“But I threw some good passes. I think I have a high school record.”

“No. It got beat two years ago by the Johnson boy. What’s his name? Shit. Can’t think of it. But he beat you. Colored fella.”

I thought to myself: Colored? I hadn’t heard that used in many a moon.

“You were in the service?”

“Signed up for Afghanistan after the towers went down. I was there, but I ended up in Iraq. I kind of felt snookered on that end of the deal.”

“You’re not messed up in the head from being over there, are you?”

“No,” I said, “but the whole thing left me feeling like a cheap date that had been given cab fare and a slap on the ass on the way out the door.”

Timpson twisted her lips, and lined me up with a watery eyeball. “That was humor, right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Just checking.” She swiveled her chair and looked at me from another angle. “I hire you, you don’t have to sit behind a desk all the time, but I like to think you’re working. That your time is my time, and my time is my own. You know this job doesn’t pay much?”

“It’s a start. I can work my way up.”

“Hell, you’re almost at the ceiling now, boy. Thing is, you come from skyscraper material. You had that job in Houston, a Pulitzer nomination. What was it, something about some murder?”

“That’s right. It was luck I was nominated.”

“I was thinking it might have been. Still, you didn’t last in Houston.”

“I came back here for a while, then joined the military.”

“Could there have been a reason you suddenly dropped that job in Houston? What was the problem there?”

“My boss and I didn’t get along.”

“Because you drank?”

“No, ma’am.”

“You know I can call him and ask.”

“You call him, I don’t know he’ll have much to say about the drinking, but whatever he says I doubt any of it will be good, even after several years. He doesn’t like me.”

“You can be straight with me. Nothing you say will embarrass or shock me.”

“I was banging his wife. And his stepdaughter. The daughter, by the way, was thirty, the mother forty-eight.”

“No teenagers in the mix?”

“No, ma’am.”

“And I assume your indiscretions do not include the family dog.”

“No, ma’am. I believe you have to draw a line somewhere.”

“You think you’re quite the player, don’t you, boy?”

“I did then.”

Mrs. Timpson pursed her lips. “Go on out there and have Beverly, that’s the receptionist—”

“We met,” I said. “And I believe it’s Belinda.”

“Have her show you your desk. Working for a newspaper is like riding a bicycle or having sex, I suppose. Once you’ve done it, you should be able to do it again. But you can fall off a goddamn bicycle and you can fail to pull out in time when you’re doing the deed. So experience isn’t everything. Use a little common sense.”

“I will.”

“I hope so. Won’t be much in the way of Pulitzer Prize material to write about here, though. Last thing we had in the paper, outside of world news, that was anywhere near exciting was a rabid raccoon down at the Wal-Mart garden center last week. He chased a stock boy around and they had to shoot him.”

“The stock boy or the raccoon?”

“There’s that sense of humor again.”

“Yes, ma’am. And I promise, I’m all done now.”

“Good. I’m putting you on a column. That’s the job you wanted, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Maybe it was a skunk.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“The animal in Wal-Mart. Now that I think about it, it was a skunk, not a raccoon…Your column. It’s for the Sunday features. Most of the time you’ll be out of the office, but you got a desk. Still, you’ll report to me regularly. Get a taste today. Leave when you want to. Tomorrow morning, nine sharp, we’ll toss you into the fire.”

I got up and smiled and stuck out my hand to shake. She gave me a dismissive wave of the hand.

I started for the door.

“Varnell Johnson,” she said.

I turned. “Ma’am?”

“That was the colored boy’s name—one that broke your passing record. He could throw like a catapult and run like a goddamn deer.”

 

3

When I came out of Timpson’s office one of the reporters at one of the few occupied desks, a twentyish black guy in a bright yellow shirt with the sleeves rolled up, waved me over. It was like the president summoning a lackey, but I started over there anyway, went to his desk as he stood up and pushed his chair aside. He was short and broad-shouldered, with his hair cropped close, a crisp part cut into it. I stuck out my hand and we shook. He had one of those determined handshakes, not so brisk, but really strong, like it was more of a contest than a greeting.

“Cason Statler,” I said.

“I know who you are. I’m Oswald, like the guy that shot Kennedy.”

“Glad to meet you, Oswald.”

“How did it go in there?” he asked.

“I’m part of the team.”

“Oh, there are no team players here. We’re all pretty much out for ourselves. Trust me on that. Bend over and you’ll feel an intrusion. Look, I know Timpson seems old and grumpy and pretty much out of date, but I want you to know, she doesn’t just seem that way—she is that way.”

“We had a particularly pithy exchange about the colored.”

He grinned at me, and this time it seemed genuine. “Welcome to nineteen fifty-nine.”

“Actually, I’m from here, and I’d put this place more about late nineteen seventy. So don’t go putting it down.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Oswald said. “I didn’t move here until last year.”

“Why?”

“I’m asking myself that every day. But people are always telling me how it was wonderful in the old days. Probably not so wonderful for black folk, though.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Wouldn’t you love to come home to a shack out back of a white man’s plantation and sing some Negro spirituals after a hard day of picking cotton? Kind of kick back to let your whip lashes cool?”

That actually got a snicker out of him. “The only thing I’ve ever picked is my nose. I heard you were in the military.”

“That’s been a little while back. I had an accident and they had to let me leave.”

“You look fine now.” He said that like I had never been hurt.

“Accident was bad then, but I healed quicker than they expected. I haven’t made a big point of telling the military that.”

“I heard you got some medals,” he said.

“They were passing them out that day,” I said. “See you, Oswald.”

I saw Belinda putting down the phone, and as I walked away from Oswald’s desk, she rose from hers and intercepted me.

“That was Mrs. Timpson. She said I should show you your desk.”

She led me over to it and I was chauvinistic enough to watch her walk and decide she really was more than cute. She was a major looker, a little out of style in the hair and makeup department, but she dressed all right and I liked the way her skirt fit; it was tight enough and right enough to make the world seem like a happy place for at least a few moments.

“This is it,” she said.

It looked like everyone else’s desk. There was a computer on it and there was a drawer in the center and drawers on the sides. I opened them. The ones on the sides were empty. The one in the center had pencils and pens and paper clips and half a pack of Winterfresh gum. I took a stick, peeled it and put it in my mouth. It was like trying to chew a Band-Aid.

Belinda showed me her braces. “Good, huh?”

I took the gum out of my mouth, wadded it up inside the wrapper, dropped it in the trash can. “Not so much.”

“It’s been in there since the creation of gum.”

“I believe that.”

“So, how did you like our fearless editor?” Belinda asked.

“Very colorful.”

Belinda smiled her mouthful of braces at me. “That’s not what the others here call her.”

“No?”

“No.” She looked over her shoulder at Oswald, who had returned to his seat behind his desk. “What about the assassin of John F. Kennedy?”

“I can’t decide if he’s just testy or an asshole.”

She smiled. “Actually, Cason, he’s a testy asshole.”

* * *

I went around and met some of the reporters, folks in the advertising office, and was told a lot of them were out on assignments and I would meet them later. I made a few promises of lunch, went over to my desk and sat for a while and moved a pencil around.

It wasn’t as good as the desk I had in Houston. It wasn’t as good a newspaper. The pencil was even cheap. But here I was. I had screwed things up so I could arrive at just this spot. I was deep into having myself a pity party when Oswald, the testy asshole, came over. I had hoped me and him were through for the day. But no such luck.

“Timpson just called me,” he said. “She wants me to help you get your feet wet.”

“Go ahead, dampen me.”

“Well, Francine, the previous columnist, had a bunch of ideas she was working on, and Timpson thought you might want to look over those, see if you could get a running start before you had to come up with your own. You’re not obligated to use any of them, but she told me to tell you to take a look…You know, I thought I was going to get this job.”

“I was beginning to suspect that,” I said.

“But no, she wanted a certain cachet. She thought it would be nice PR having someone who had been nominated for the Pulitzer.”

“If it’s any consolation, a nomination eats your heart out.”

“No. No consolation. I’m used to getting screwed.”

“I hope you don’t think this is some kind of racial thing, because if you do, I just want you to know, sincerely, and I say this pleasantly and from the bottom of my heart, you are full of shit.”

Oswald sat on the edge of my desk. “I don’t. I’m just one of those people born to be screwed and to be bitter about it, but with a slight and engaging sense of humor, of course.”

“You really believe that?”

Oswald nodded. “I believe some of us are born with a target on our butt, and dead center of it is a slot with a sign above it that says: Insert dick here.”

“Do you look both ways when you cross the street?”

“I see this coming,” Oswald said.

“That’s what you can say if you look both ways…Do you?”

“Of course.”

“Then you believe your destiny is at least partly up to you, otherwise you wouldn’t be worried about being a hood ornament. It would be pre-ordained. So I suggest you remove the target from your ass.” Oswald gave me an irritated look. I said, “Let’s change the subject. What happened to Francine?”

“She was either fired, or she died. I don’t quite remember. Does it matter?”

“Suppose not. Where do I find those ideas of Francine’s?”

Oswald patted my computer. “In yon machine. Francine’s codes and information are on a pad in the desk drawer. So now my duty is done, and I go back to work.”

The testy asshole went back to his desk. For all his talk, I had a feeling Oswald really felt more entitled than ambitious. I figured, you got right down to it, his greatest ambition was teaching his dog to lick peanut butter off his balls.

I looked in the drawer and found the little notebook with the information I needed, went to work. Most of the stuff I found in Francine’s computer notes was about as exciting as counting the hairs in an armpit. There were terse investigations into the ingredients for Snickers Bar Pie, the major ingredients being the Snickers themselves and lots of butter. I was surprised the recipe didn’t come with a funeral plan. There were bits on flower arranging and how to get stains out of damn near anything. Nothing that really grabbed me by the lapels, but I persevered.

And then I came across it. A six-month-old mystery.

Caroline Allison. A university student. History major. Age twenty-three. She disappeared on a late-night run to a fast-food place, Taco Bell. A week later her car was found just outside of town, near the old rail station, not far downhill from the Siegel home. It was a creepy place to disappear.

The Siegel home had been a kind of legend for years. It had belonged to two sisters. Story was they had been high-tone in the 1920s. They were in their teens at the time. Then came the Great Depression, and their family lost money when the stock market fell. As the sisters grew into their fifties, their parents died, and the ladies knew nothing about how to survive. Soon people saw them digging in trash cans, and since they wouldn’t take charity, folks put food in the cans for them to find. Finally, the ladies sold their home place and moved into another house where they lived upstairs. That place caught on fire and the firemen put a ladder up to the window, but the women, in their sixties now, were in their nightgowns and wouldn’t come out the window dressed that way. It was not what ladies did. What ladies did was burn up like cotton wicks; death by fire and modesty.

The house the sisters had originally lived in had been bought, but nothing was done with it. It stayed abandoned, sitting on top of a hill spotted with trees, the yard a wad of greenery maybe three feet deep. The house was almost consumed by the vines until the whole thing looked like a large clump of vegetation with a couple of rectangular glass eyes.

Jimmy and I had played there as kids and gone parking up there behind the house with girls many years ago.

Had Caroline been there, near the old house, with someone? Had things gotten out of hand?

Had someone driven her car there, left it, gone away on foot? Did the person have an accomplice?

I scrolled down Francine’s notes. Caroline’s fast-food order had been found in the car, untouched. So had her shoes. The old train station had been searched, along with the house. The vines had been mowed down to see if her body was under them. Nothing.

I scrolled down some more.

There was information on Caroline, on her past. She had been raised as a foster child. She was as bright as a blast of nuclear light, according to the information Francine had gathered. In fact, Francine had a lot of meticulous notes. Perhaps even she had bored of Snickers pie and flowers in a vase, thought she was on to something.

No one could think of a single reason why anyone would want to hurt Caroline. Her only brush with the law was an overdue library fine that she refused to pay for some reason. The book was by Jerzy Fitzgerald, called And the Light Is Bright Glancing Off the Fangs of the Bear.

Francine had found one girl who knew her pretty well, Ronnie Fisher. Ronnie said she had known Caroline back in their hometown, that they shared a foster parent and had moved to Camp Rapture about the same time.

I leaned back in my chair and thought, what if I did a series of articles for the paper about her disappearance? About the illusion of safety in a small town? Then I could write a more ambitious article based on my columns, but with material I had left out of the local newspaper. I could get some interviews with the people who knew her, maybe a few shots of the car and that Taco Bell sack from the files, a photo of the young lady, then send the piece to some place like Texas Monthly. I had a few contacts there. The Pulitzer nomination still had some clout. Like a guy who had played in the Super Bowl and missed a pass, but had still played. I could probably slide the article right in.

If I set it up right, made sure the right people saw it, it might be just the sort of thing that would boost me into the big time. I had it all together once, until I started letting the little head think for the big head. Why couldn’t I pull it together again?

* * *

When I went out the bees were still at work and the flowers still smelled strong, and they still made my stomach churn. But now I had a job and I was pretty sure my shoes were still clear of dog shit and that the Caroline Allison story could be big, so life wasn’t sucking quite so much.

I thought about Caroline Allison for a while, then got out my cell, called Mom and Dad, told them I got the job, which they seemed dutifully excited about. I wanted to call someone else, but didn’t really know anyone. My brother and his wife, maybe. But Jimmy was at work, and I hadn’t seen them in a while, and I was working up to the moment.

Then there was Booger. I don’t know why I thought of him. I was trying to get rid of him, lose all the old connections from the war. But I knew he’d like to hear how I had turned out, even if he did think it was kind of a weird job for a grown man, writing for a newspaper. Booger thought man had been put on earth to find out if he was ruler or slave, and to eat meat, especially anything chicken-fried. He liked women too, but they came third in his business plan, and then there was nothing romantic about it to him. It was all just a service.

It was Gabby I really wanted to call. And not about the job, either. I just wanted to hear her voice. I drove by the veterinarian office. Her car was there. The same one she had owned when I left for Afghanistan. There were two other cars and a pickup. A big black mixed-breed dog was in a cage in the back of the truck, and a lady who looked as if she might wrestle alligators for a living was letting the dog out, placing a leash around its neck.

As I drove on, I looked back in the side mirror. The door to the office opened and the alligator wrestler and the dog started through it. I thought I got a glimpse of Gabby, but the truth of the matter is, it was so quick, and I was out of sight so soon, I couldn’t be sure. It could have been a dancing bear or a nude man carrying a slide trombone. It could have been anyone.

 

4

I drove over to Mom and Dad’s house, parked at the curb, sat in the car and looked at the place. There was a new, white wooden plank fence between their house and the next-door neighbor’s house. It was straight and freshly painted, so I knew it was my dad who had put it up. The vines that ran up twine runners all along the fence I recognized as my mother’s work. The sun-yellowed grass that was ankle-high in the next-door neighbor’s yard was all the work of nature.

When I lived at home, there wasn’t a house next door. Just an empty lot with a couple of big elms, one of which grew next to the fence and extended boughs into Mom and Dad’s yard, splashing shadow onto the roof.

When I got out of the car with my suitcase, I locked the car doors and walked up in the yard. A small voice from over the fence and from the boughs of the elm called down to me.

“You don’t live here.”

I turned and looked up. There was a little platform tree house up there in the elm, hidden behind smaller limbs and lots of leaves, and on the platform was a little girl about nine or ten with blond pigtails, wearing a sloppy T-shirt and blue jean shorts and no shoes. She was cute in a rawboned sort of way, would probably grow up and fill out her features and be quite beautiful. She sat on the edge of the platform and let her feet dangle. She had a lot of tomboy bruises and scratches on her legs, a couple of scabs.

I smiled up at her, said, “I used to live here. Long ago when I was your age.”

“Are you Mr. Statler’s little boy?”

“I was once. I mean, I’m still his boy, but I’m not so little.”

“You’re big. Are you six foot tall?”

“Six-two if I have on good shoes and I hold my shoulders straight.”

“Why do you wear your hair so long?”

“Because for a long time I had to wear it real short.”

“Oh. Did you know your daddy beat my daddy up?”

I took a moment to regroup. “And why was that?”

“He wasn’t really my daddy. I was just supposed to call him that. He drank. He hit my mama and run her out in the yard with the leg off a chair, and your daddy knocked the shit out of him.”

“You shouldn’t talk like that.”

“That’s what your daddy did. Daddy Greg, that’s what I called my daddy your daddy beat up. Daddy Greg messed himself and me and Mama could smell it standing out in the yard. It run down one of his pants legs. Mama thought it was funny. You should have heard her laugh.”

“Well, don’t say that word, okay?”

“What word?”

“About what got knocked out of him.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Your dad, what happened to him?”

“Oh, he run off for a while. But he comes back sometimes. Mama’s got me a new daddy now. Daddy Bill. Daddy Bill isn’t home a lot, and when he is, he and Mama stay in the bedroom most of the time. They don’t fight as much as her and Daddy Greg. Daddy Bill is kind of funny-looking.”

“My name is Cason. It was nice to meet you…What’s your name?”

“Jasmine. People call me Jazzy.”

“Glad to meet you, Jazzy.”

“You too. Did you know there isn’t any ladder? I climb the tree to get up here. Like a squirrel, Mama says. Daddy Greg used to say like a goddamn monkey. I liked Daddy Greg better than Daddy Bill, even though he was kind of mean, but don’t say I said that.”

“I’m sure you’re a very good climber.”

Jazzy jumped to a new topic.

“I used to stay at Mee-maw’s before I stayed here.”

“Is Mee-maw your grandma?”

“No. But she let me call her that. She lives in Houston. Do you want to go play dead?”

“Dead?”

“There’s a graveyard out back, and me and Mama go out there and lie on the graves sometimes. We play like we’re inside them, and we’re dead.”

“Not a very active game.”

“We do it at night sometimes and look at the stars.”

I thought, Swell. A Gothic mother.

“You be careful up there,” I said.

“I will,” she said.

* * *

Inside Mom hugged me and said all the good things moms say when you get a job and they think maybe things are finally on track and maybe you’re not going to end up living in a cardboard box and cruising Dumpsters.

Mom looked good. Healthy and a little thicker and there was no doubt she dyed her hair, but she still moved the way she always did, quickly. I put my suitcase down, gave her a better hug and this time a kiss on the cheek. She said she’d make a sandwich.

“That sounds good,” I said.

“Turkey on rye, your favorite.”

“Good.”

She patted my shoulder. “We’re going to put you in your and Jimmy’s old room.”

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