“Raisa! You’re awake!”
A chair scooted close on a concrete floor, and a familiar face came into view: David. Clean-shaven, dark hair trimmed, infantry uniform pressed and buttoned, as if he was going to a parade and not visiting his sister in hospital. Just as he was in the formal picture he’d sent home right after he signed up. This must be a dream. Maybe this wasn’t a hospital. Maybe it was heaven. She wasn’t sure she’d been good enough.
“Raisa, say something, please,” he said, and with his face all pinched up he looked too worried to be in heaven.
“Davidya!” She needed to draw two breaths to get the word out, and her voice scratched surprisingly. She licked dry lips. “You’re alive! What happened?”
He gave a sheepish shrug. “My squad got lost. We engaged a Panzer unit in the middle of the forest, and a sudden spring snowstorm pinned us down. Half of us got frostbite and had to drag the other half out. It took weeks, but we made it.”
All this time … he really was just lost. She wished Sofin were here so she could punch him in the face.
“I’d laugh at all the trouble you caused, but my chest hurts,” she said.
His smile slipped, and she imagined he’d had an interview with someone very much like Sofin after he and his squad limped back home. She wouldn’t tell him about her own interview, and she would burn those letters she’d written him as soon as she got back to the airfield.
“It’s so good to see you, Raisa.” He clasped her hand, the one that wasn’t bandaged, and she squeezed as hard as she could, which wasn’t very, but it was enough. “Your Commander Gridnev got word to me that you’d been hurt, and I was able to take a day to come see you.”
She swallowed and the words came slowly. “I was shot. I had to bail out. I don’t know what happened next.”
“Your wingman was able to radio your location. Ground forces moved in and found you. They tell me you were a mess.”
“But I got my fourth kill, did they tell you that? One more and I’ll be an ace.” Maybe not the first woman fighter ace, or even the second. But she’d be one.
David didn’t smile. She felt him draw away, as the pressure on her hand let up.
She frowned. “What?”
He didn’t want to say. His face had scrunched up, his eyes glistening—as if he was about to start crying. And here she was, the girl, and she hadn’t cried once. Well, almost once, for her plane.
“Raisa, you’re being medically discharged,” he said.
“What? No. I’m okay, I’ll be okay—”
“Both your legs are broken, half your ribs are cracked, you’ve dislocated your shoulder, you have a concussion and been shot twice. You can’t go back. Not for a long time, at least.”
She really hadn’t thought she’d been so badly hurt. Surely she’d have known if it was that bad. But her body still felt so far away … She didn’t know anything. “I’ll get better—”
“Please, Raisa. Rest. Just rest for now.”
One more kill, she only needed one more … “Davidya, if I can’t fly, what will I do?”
“Raisa!” A clear voice called from the end of the row of cots.
“Inna,” Raisa answered, as loud as her voice would let her.
Her wingman rushed forward, and when she couldn’t find a chair, she knelt by the cot. “Raisa. Oh, Raisa, look at you, wrapped up like a mummy.” She fussed with the blankets, smoothed a lock of hair peeking out from the bandage around Raisa’s head, and then fussed with the blankets some more. Good, sweet Inna.
“Inna, this is my brother, David.”
Her eyes widened in shock, but Raisa didn’t get a chance to explain that, yes, “missing” sometimes really meant missing, because David had stood in a rush and offered his chair to Inna, but she shook her head, which left them both standing on opposite sides of the cot, looking at each other across Raisa. Belatedly, Inna held out her hand. David wiped his on his trouser leg before shaking hers. What a David thing to do.
“Raisa’s told me so much about you,” Inna said.
“And she’s told me about you in her letters.”
Inna blushed. Good. Maybe something good would come out of all this.
She ought to be happy. She’d gotten her wish, after all.
Raisa stood on the platform, waiting for the train that would take her away from Voronezh. Her arm was still in a sling, and she leaned heavily on a cane. She couldn’t lift her own bags.
Raisa had argued with the military about the discharge. They should have known she wouldn’t give in—they didn’t understand what she’d had to go through to get into the cockpit in the first place. That was the trick: she kept writing letters, kept showing up, over and over, and they couldn’t tell her no. In a fit of fancy, she wondered if that was what had brought David home: She’d never stopped writing him letters, so he had to come home.
When they finally offered her a compromise—to teach navigation at a training field near Moscow—she took it. It meant that even with the cane and sling, even if she couldn’t walk right or carry her own gear, she still wore her uniform, with all its medals and ribbons. She still held her chin up.
But in the end, even she had to admit she wouldn’t fly again—at least, not in combat.
“Are you sure you’ll be all right?” Inna had come with her to the station to see her off. David had returned to his regiment, but she’d overheard the two of them exchanging promises to write.
“I’m fine, really.”
Inna’s eyes shone as if she might cry. “You’ve gone so quiet. I’m so used to seeing you run around like an angry chicken.”
Raisa smiled at the image. “You’ll write?”
“Of course. Often. I’ll keep you up to date on all the gossip.”
“Yes, I want to know exactly how many planes Liliia Litviak shoots down.”
“She’ll win the war all by herself.”
No, in a few months Raisa would read in the newspaper that Liliia was declared missing in action, shot down over enemy territory, her plane and body unrecovered. First woman fighter ace in history, and she’d be declared a deserter instead of a hero. But they didn’t know that now.
The train’s whistle keened, still some distance away, but they could hear it approach, clacking along its tracks.
“Are you sure you’ll be okay?” Inna asked, with something like pleading in her eyes.
Raisa had been staring off into space, something she’d been doing a lot of lately. Wind played with her dark hair, and she looked out across the field and the ruins of the town to where the airfield lay. She thought she heard airplanes overhead.
She said, “I imagined dying in a terrible crash, or shot down in battle. I’d either walk away from this war or I’d die in some gloriously heroic way. I never imagined being … crippled. That the war would keep going on without me.”
Inna touched her shoulder. “We’re all glad you didn’t die. Especially David.”
“Yes, because he would have had to find a way to tell my parents.”
She sighed. “You’re so morbid.”
The train arrived, and a porter came over to help with her luggage. “Be careful, Inna. Find yourself a good wingman to train.”
“I’ll miss you, my dear.”
They hugged tightly but carefully, and Inna stayed to make sure Raisa limped her way onto the train and to her seat without trouble. She waved at Raisa from the platform until the train rolled out of sight.
Sitting in the train, staring out the window, Raisa caught sight of the planes she’d been looking for: a pair of Yaks streaking overhead, on their way to the airfield. But she couldn’t hear their thrumming engines over the sound of the train. Probably just as well.
Joe R. Lansdale
Prolific Texas writer Joe R. Lansdale has won the Edgar Award, the British Fantasy Award, the American Horror Award, the American Mystery Award, the International Crime Writer’s Award, and six Bram Stoker Awards. Although perhaps best known for horror/thrillers su
ch as The Nightrunners, Bubba Ho-Tep, The Bottoms, The God of the Razor, and The Drive-In, he also writes the popular Hap Collins and Leonard Pine mystery series—Savage Season, Mucho Mojo, The Two-Bear Mambo, Bad Chili, Rumble Tumble, Captains Outrageous—as well as Western novels such as Texas Night Riders and Blood Dance, and totally unclassifiable cross-genre novels such as Zeppelins West, The Magic Wagon, and Flaming London. His other novels include Dead in the West, The Big Blow, Sunset and Sawdust, Act of Love, Freezer Burn, Waltz of Shadows, The Drive-In 2: Not Just One of Them Sequels, and Leather Maiden. He has also contributed novels to series such as Batman and Tarzan. His many short stories have been collected in By Bizarre Hands; Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back; The Shadows, Kith and Kin; The Long Ones; Stories by Mama Lansdale’s Youngest Boy; Bestsellers Guaranteed; On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks; Electric Gumbo; Writer of the Purple Rage; A Fist Full of Stories; Steppin’ Out, Summer, ’68; Bumper Crop; The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent; For a Few Stories More; Mad Dog Summer and Other Stories; The King and Other Stories; Deadman’s Road; an omnibus, Flaming Zeppelins: The Adventures of Ned the Seal; and High Cotton: Selected Stories of Joe R. Lansdale. As editor, he has produced the anthologies The Best of the West, Retro Pulp Tales, Son of Retro Pulp Tales, Razored Saddles (with Pat LoBrutto), Dark at Heart: All New Tales of Dark Suspense from Today’s Masters (with his wife Karen Lansdale), The Horror Hall of Fame: The Stoker Winners, and the Robert E. Howard tribute anthology Cross Plains Universe (with Scott A. Cupp). An anthology in tribute to Lansdale’s work is Lords of the Razor. His most recent books are two new Hap and Leonard novels, Devil Red and Hyenas; the novels Deranged by Choice and Edge of Dark Water; a new collection, Shadows West (with John L. Lansdale); and, as editor, two new anthologies, Crucified Dreams and The Urban Fantasy Anthology (with Peter S. Beagle). He lives with his family in Nacogdoches, Texas.
Here he introduces us to the best bad girl ever, a woman who has the mojo, the black doo-doo, and the silent dog whistle over every man she meets; a woman like a bright red apple with a worm in the center, one who could make a priest go home and cut his throat if he saw her walking down the street. In short, a character that only Lansdale could write.
WRESTLING JESUS
First they took Marvin’s sack lunch, then his money, and then they kicked his ass. In fact, he felt the ass whipping, had it been put on a scale of one to ten, was probably about a fourteen. However, Marvin factored in that some of the beating had been inconsistent, as one of his attackers had paused to light a cigarette, and afterwards, two of them had appeared tired and out of breath.
Lying there, tasting blood, he liked to think that, taking in the pause for a smoke and the obvious exhaustion of a couple of his assailants, points could be taken away from their overall performance, and their rating would merely have been nine or ten instead of the full fourteen.
This, however, didn’t help his ribs one little bit, and it didn’t take away the spots swimming before his eyes just before he passed out from the pain. When he awoke, he was being slapped awake by one of the bullies, who wanted to know if he had any gold teeth. He said he didn’t, and the thug insisted on seeing, and Marvin opened his mouth, and the mugger took a look.
Disappointed, the thug threatened to piss in his mouth or fuck him, but the thug and his gang were either too tired from beating him to fuck him, or weren’t ready to make water, because they started walking away, splitting up his money in fourths as they walked. They had each made about three dollars and twenty cents, and from his backpack they had taken a pretty good ham sandwich and a little container of Jell-O. There was, however, only one plastic spoon.
Marvin was beginning to feel one with the concrete when a voice said, “You little shits think you’re something, don’t ya?”
Blinking, Marvin saw that the speaker was an old man, slightly stooped, bowlegged, with white hair and a face that looked as if it had once come apart and been puzzled back together by a drunk in a dark room with cheap glue. His ear—Marvin could see the right one—contained enough hair to knit a small dog sweater. It was the only visible hair the man had that was black. The hair on his head was the color of a fish belly. He was holding up his loose pants with one hand. His skin was dark as a walnut and his mouth was a bit overfull with dentures. One of his pants pockets was swollen with something. Marvin thought it might be his balls: a rupture.
The gang stopped in their tracks and turned. They were nasty-looking fellows with broad shoulders and muscles. One of them had a large belly, but it was hard, and Marvin knew for a fact they all of them had hard fists and harder shoes. The old man was about to wake up dead.
The one who had asked Marvin if he had any gold teeth, the hard belly, looked at the old man and said, as he put down Marvin’s stolen backpack, “You talking to us, you old geezer?”
“You’re the only shit I see,” said the old man. “You think you’re a real bad man, don’t you? Anyone can beat up some pussy like this kid. My crippled grandma could, and she’s been dead some twenty years. Kid’s maybe sixteen; what are you fucks—twenty? You’re a bunch of cunts without any hair on your slit.”
Marvin tried to crawl backwards until he was out of sight, not wanting to revive their interest in him, and thinking he might get away while they were killing the old man. But he was too weak to crawl. Hard Belly started strutting toward the old man, grinning, preening.
When he was about six feet away, the old man said, “You gonna fight me by yourself, Little Shit? You don’t need your gang to maybe hold me?”
“I’m gonna kick out any real teeth you got, you old spic,” said Hard Belly.
“Ain’t got no real ones, so have at it.”
The boy stepped in and kicked at the old man, who slapped his leg aside with his left hand, never taking the right away from holding up his pants, and hit him with a hard left jab to the mouth that knocked him down and made his lips bleed. When Hard Belly tried to get up, the old man made with a sharp kick to the windpipe. Hard Belly dropped, gagging, clutching at his throat.
“How’s about you girls? You up for it, you little cunts?”
The little cunts shook their heads.
“That’s good,” said the old man, and pulled a chain out of his pocket. That had been the bulk in his pocket, not a ruptured nut. He was still holding his pants with his other hand.
“I got me an equalizer here. I’ll wrap this motherfucker around your head like an anchor chain. Come over here and get Mr. Butt Hole and take him away from me, and fast.”
The three boys pulled Mr. Butt Hole, aka Hard Belly, to his feet, and when they did, the old man pushed his face close to Hard Belly’s and said, “Don’t come back around here. I don’t want to see you no more.”
“You’ll be sorry, spic,” said Hard Belly, bubbling blood over his lips and down his chin.
The old man dropped the chain on the ground and popped Hard Belly with a left jab again, breaking Hard Belly’s nose, spewing blood all over his face.
“What the fuck you got in your ears?” the old man said. “Mud? Huh? You got mud? You hear me talkin’ to you? Adios, asshole.”
The three boys, and Hard Belly, who was wobbling, made their way down the street and were gone.
The Old Man looked down at Marvin, who was still lying on the ground.
“I’ve had worse beatings than that from my old mother, and she was missing an arm. Get the hell up.”
Marvin managed to get his feet under him, thinking it a feat equal with building one of the Great Pyramids—alone.
“What you come around here for?” the old man said. “Ain’t nobody around here but shits. You look like a kid might come from someplace better.”
Marvin shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m from around here.”
“Since when?”
“Since a week ago.”
“Yeah? You moved here on purpose, or you just lose your map?”
“On purpose.”
“W
ell, kid, you maybe better think about moving away.”
There was nothing Marvin wanted to do more than move. But his mother said no dice. They didn’t have the money. Not since his father died. That had nipped them in the bud, and quite severely, that dying business. Marvin’s dad had been doing all right at the factory, but then he died and since then their lives had gone downhill faster than a little red wagon stuffed full of bricks. He and his mom had to be where they were, and there was nothing else to be said about it. A downgrade for them would be a cardboard box with a view. An upgrade would be lifts in their shoes.
“I can’t move. Mama doesn’t have the money for it. She does laundry.”
“Yeah, well, you better learn to stand up for yourself, then,” said the old man. “You don’t, you might just wake up with your pants down and your asshole big as a dinner plate.”
“They’d really do that?”
“Wouldn’t put it past them,” said the old man. “You better learn to fight back.”
“Can you teach me?”
“Teach you what?”
“To fight.”
“I can’t do it. I have to hold my pants up. Get yourself a stick.”
“You could teach me, though.”
“I don’t want to, kid. I got a full-time job just trying to stay breathing. I’m nearly eighty fucking years old. I ought to been feeding the worms five years ago. Listen up. You stay away from here, and if you can’t … well, good luck, boy.”
Holding his pants with one hand, the old man shuffled away. Marvin watched him go for a moment, and then fled. It was his plan to make it through the week, when school would turn out for the summer, and then he’d just stay in the apartment and never leave until school started up in the fall. By then, maybe he could formulate a new plan.
He hoped that in that time the boys would have lost interest in punching him, or perhaps been killed in some dreadful manner, or moved off themselves. Started a career, though he had a pretty good idea they had already started one—professional thugs.