The girl watched them go and then looked at her palm. That cold wet touch a brand now in her heart. She looked up from her hand. The tatters of night sky visible through the overarching trees washed of stars by the full moon light. The moon that so recently had bound her to its cycle. The moon whose light had called her up from sleep.
On The Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks
Joe R. Lansdale
1
After a month’s chase, Wayne caught up with Calhoun one night at a little honky-tonk called Rosalita’s. It wasn’t that Calhoun had finally gotten careless, it was just that he wasn’t worried. He’d killed four bounty hunters so far, and Wayne knew a fifth didn’t concern him.
The last bounty hunter had been the famous Pink Lady McGuire—one mean mama—three hundred pounds of rolling, ugly meat that carried a twelve-gauge Remington pump and a bad attitude. Story was, Calhoun jumped her from behind, cut her throat, and as a joke, fucked her before she bled to death. This not only proved to Wayne that Calhoun was a dangerous sonofabitch, it also proved he had bad taste.
Wayne stepped out of his ’57Chevy reproduction, pushed his hat back on his forehead, opened the trunk, and got the sawed-off double barrel and some shells out of there. He already had a .38 revolver in the holster at his side and a bowie knife in each boot, but when you went into a place like Rosalita’s it was best to have plenty of backup.
Wayne put a handful of shotgun shells in his shirt pocket, snapped the flap over them, looked up at the red-and-blue neon sign that flashed ROSALITA’S: COLD BEER AND DEAD DANCING, found his center, as they say in Zen, and went on in.
He held the shotgun against his leg, and as it was dark in there and folks were busy with talk or drinks or dancing, no one noticed him or his artillery right off.
He spotted Calhoun’s stocky, black-hatted self immediately. He was inside the dance cage with a dead buck-naked Mexican girl of about twelve. He was holding her tight around the waist with one hand and massaging her rubbery ass with the other like it was a pillow he was trying to shape. The dead girl’s handless arms flailed on either side of Calhoun, and her little tits pressed to his thick chest. Her wire-muzzled face knocked repeatedly at his shoulder and drool whipped out of her mouth in thick spermy ropes, stuck to his shin, faded and left a patch of wetness.
For all Wayne knew, the girl was Calhoun’s sister or daughter. It was that kind of place. The kind that had sprung up immediately after that stuff had gotten out of a lab upstate and filled the air with bacteria that brought dead humans back to life, made their basic motor functions work and made them hungry for human flesh; made it so if a man’s wife, daughter, sister, or mother went belly up and he wanted to turn a few bucks, he might think: “Damn, that’s tough about ole Betty Sue, but she’s dead as hoot-owl shit and ain’t gonna be needing nothing from here on out, and with them germs working around in her, she’s just gonna pull herself out of the ground and cause me a problem. And the ground out back of the house is harder to dig than a calculus problem is to work, so I’ll just toss her cold ass in the back of the pickup next to the chain saw and the barbed-wire roll, haul her across the border to sell her to the Meat Boys to sell to the tonics for dancing.
“It’s a sad thing to sell one of your own, but shit, them’s the breaks. I’ll just stay out of the tonics until all the meat rots off her bones and they have to throw her away. That way I won’t go in some place for a drink and see her up there shaking her dead tits and end up going sentimental and dewy-eyed in front of one of my buddies or some ole two-dollar gal.”
This kind of thinking supplied the dancers. In other parts of the country, the dancers might be men or children, but here it was mostly women. Men were used for hunting and target practice.
The Meat Boys took the bodies, cut off the hands so they couldn’t grab, ran screws through their jaws to fasten on wire muzzles so they couldn’t bite, sold them to the honky-tonks about the time the germ started stirring.
Bar owners put them inside wire enclosures up front of their joints, staffed music, and men paid five dollars to get in there and grab them and make like they were dancing when all the women wanted to do was grab and bite, which, muzzled and handless, they could not do.
If a man liked his partner enough, he could pay more money and have her tied to a cot in the back and he could get on her and at some business. Didn’t have to hear no arguments or buy presents or make promises or make them come. Just fuck and hike.
As long as the establishment sprayed the dead for maggots and kept them perfumed and didn’t keep them so long hunks of meat came off on a man’s dick, the customers were happy as flies on shit.
Wayne looked to see who might give him trouble, and figured everyone was a potential customer. The six foot two, two-hundred-fifty-pound bouncer being the most immediate concern.
But, there wasn’t anything to do but to get on with things and handle problems when they came up. He went into the cage where Calhoun was dancing, shouldered through the other dancers and went for him.
Calhoun had his back to Wayne, and as the music was loud, Wayne didn’t worry about going quietly. But Calhoun sensed him and turned with his hand full of a little .38.
Wayne clubbed Calhoun’s arm with the barrel of the shotgun. The little gun flew out of Calhoun’s hand and went skidding across the floor and clanked against the metal cage.
Calhoun wasn’t outdone. He spun the dead girl in front of him and pulled a big pigsticker out of his boot and held it under the girl’s armpit in a threatening manner, which with a knife that big was no feat.
Wayne shot the dead girl’s left kneecap out from under her and she went down. Her armpit trapped Calhoun’s knife. The other men deserted their partners and went over the wire netting like squirrels.
Before Calhoun could shake the girl loose, Wayne stepped in and hit him over the head with the barrel of the shotgun. Calhoun crumpled and the girl began to crawl about on the floor as if looking for lost contacts.
The bouncer came in behind Wayne, grabbed him under the arms and tried to slip a full nelson on him.
Wayne kicked back on the bouncer’s shin and raked his boot down the man’s instep and stomped his foot. The bouncer let go. Wayne turned and kicked him in the balls and hit him across the face with the shotgun.
The bouncer went down and didn’t even look like he wanted up.
Wayne couldn’t help but note he liked the music that was playing. When he turned he had someone to dance with.
Calhoun.
Calhoun charged him, hit Wayne in the belly with his head, knocked him over the bouncer. They tumbled to the floor and the shotgun went out of Wayne’s hands and scraped across the floor and hit the crawling girl in the head. She didn’t even notice, just kept snaking in circles, dragging her blasted leg behind her like a skin she was trying to shed.
The other women, partnerless, wandered about the cage. The music changed. Wayne didn’t like this tune as well. Too slow. He bit Calhoun’s earlobe off.
Calhoun screamed and they grappled around on the floor. Calhoun got his arm around Wayne’s throat and tried to choke him to death.
Wayne coughed out the earlobe, lifted his leg and took the knife out of his boot. He brought it around and back and hit Calhoun in the temple with the hilt.
Calhoun let go of Wayne and rocked on his knees, then collapsed on top of him.
Wayne got out from under him and got up and kicked him in the head a few times. When he was finished, he put the bowie in its place, got Calhoun’s .38 and the shotgun. To hell with the pigsticker.
A dead woman tried to grab him, and he shoved her away with a thrust of his palm. He got Calhoun by the collar, started pulling him toward the gate.
Faces were pressed against the wire, watching. It had been quite a show. A friendly cowboy type opened the gate for Wayne and the crowd parted as he pulled Calhoun by. One man felt helpful and chased after them and said, “Here’s his hat, Mister,” and dropped it on Calhoun’s k
nee and it stayed there.
Outside, a professional drunk was standing between two cars taking a leak on the ground. As Wayne pulled Calhoun past, the drunk said, “Your buddy don’t look so good.”
“Look worse than that when I get him to Law Town,” Wayne said.
Wayne stopped by the ’57, emptied Calhoun’s pistol and tossed it as far as he could, then took a few minutes to kick Calhoun in the ribs and ass. Calhoun grunted and farted, but didn’t come to.
When Wayne’s leg got tired, he put Calhoun in the passenger seat and handcuffed him to the door.
He went over to Calhoun’s ’62 Impala replica with the plastic bull horns mounted on the hood—which was how he had located him in the first place, by his well known car—and kicked the glass out of the window on the driver’s side and used the shotgun to shoot the bull horns off. He took out his pistol and shot all the tires flat, pissed on the driver’s door, and kicked a dent in it.
By then he was too tired to shit in the back seat, so he took some deep breaths and went back to the ’57 and climbed in behind the wheel.
Reaching across Calhoun, he opened the glove box and got out one of his thin, black cigars and put it in his mouth.
He pushed the lighter in, and while he waited for it to heat up, he took the shotgun out of his lap and reloaded it.
A couple of men poked their heads outside of the tonk’s door, and Wayne stuck the shotgun out the window and fired above their heads. They disappeared inside so fast they might have been an optical illusion.
Wayne put the lighter to his cigar, picked up the wanted poster he had on the seat, and set fire to it. He thought about putting it in Calhoun’s lap as a joke, but didn’t. He tossed the flaming poster out of the window.
He drove over close to the tonk and used the remaining shotgun load to shoot at the neon Rosalita’s sign. Glass tinkled onto the tonk’s roof and onto the gravel drive.
Now if he only had a dog to kick.
He drove away from there, bound for the Cadillac Desert, and finally Law Town on the other side.
2
The Cadillacs stretched for miles, providing the only shade in the desert. They were buried nose down at a slant, almost to the windshields, and Wayne could see skeletons of some of the drivers in the cars, either lodged behind the steering wheels or lying on the dashboards against the glass. The roof and hood guns had long since been removed and all the windows on the cars were rolled up, except for those that had been knocked out and vandalized by travelers, or dead folks looking for goodies.
The thought of being in one of those cars with the windows rolled up in all this heat made Wayne feel even more uncomfortable than he already was. Hot as it was, he was certain even the skeletons were sweating.
He finished pissing on the tire of the Chevy, saw the piss had almost dried. He shook the drops off, watched them fall and evaporate against the burning sand. Zipping up, he thought about Calhoun, and how when he’d pulled over earlier to let the sonofabitch take a leak, he’d seen there was a little metal ring through the head of his dick and a Texas emblem dangling from that. He could understand the Texas emblem, being from there himself, but he couldn’t for the life of him imagine why a fella would do that to his general. Any idiot who would put a ring through the head of his pecker deserved to die, innocent or not.
Wayne took off his cowboy hat and rubbed the back of his neck and ran his hand over the top of his head and back again. The sweat on his fingers was thick as lube oil, and the thinning part of his hairline was tender; the heat was cooking the hell out of his scalp, even through the brown felt of his hat.
Before he put his hat on, the sweat on his fingers was dry. He broke open the shotgun, put the shells in his pocket, opened the Chevy’s back door and tossed the shotgun on the floorboard.
He got in the front behind the wheel and the seat was hot as a griddle on his back and ass. The sun shone through the slightly tinted windows like a polished chrome hubcap; it forced him to squint.
Glancing over at Calhoun, he studied him. The fucker was asleep with his head thrown back and his black wilted hat hung precariously on his head—it looked jaunty almost. Sweat oozed down Calhoun’s red face, flowed over his eyelids and around his neck, running in rivulets down the white seat covers, drying quickly. He had his left hand between his legs, clutching his balls, and his right was on the arm rest, which was the only place it could be since he was handcuffed to the door.
Wayne thought he ought to blow the bastard’s brains out and tell God he died. The shithead certainly needed shooting, but Wayne didn’t want to lose a thousand dollars off his reward. He needed every penny if he was going to get that wrecking yard he wanted. The yard was the dream that went before him like a carrot before a donkey, and he didn’t want any more delays. If he never made another trip across this goddamn desert, that would suit him fine.
Pop would let him buy the place with the money he had now, and he could pay the rest out later. But that wasn’t what he wanted to do. The bounty business had finally gone sour, and he wanted to do different. It wasn’t any goddamn fun anymore. Just met the dick cheese of the earth. And when you ran the sonofabitches to ground and put the cuffs on them, you had to watch your ass ’til you got them turned in. Had to sleep with one eye open and a hand on your gun. It wasn’t any way to live.
And he wanted a chance to do right by Pop. Pop had been like a father to him. When he was a kid and his mama was screwing the Mexicans across the border for the rent money, Pop would let him hang out in the yard and climb on the rusted cars and watch him fix the better ones, tune those babies so fine they purred like dick-whipped women.
When he was older, Pop would haul him to Galveston for the whores and out to the beach to take potshots at all the ugly, fucked-up critters swimming around in the Gulf. Sometimes he’d take him to Oklahoma for the Dead Roundup. It sure seemed to do the old fart good to whack those dead fuckers with a tire iron, smash their diseased brains so they’d lay down for good. And it was a challenge. ’Cause if one of those dead buddies bit you, you could put your head between your legs and kiss your rosy ass goodbye.
Wayne pulled out of his thoughts of Pop and the wrecking yard and turned on the stereo system. One of his favorite country-and-western tunes whispered at him. It was Billy Conteegas singing, and Wayne hummed along with the music as he drove into the welcome, if mostly ineffectual, shadows provided by the Cadillacs.
My baby left me,
She left me for a cow,
But I don’t give a flying fuck,
She’s gone radioactive now,
Yeah, my baby left me,
Left me for a six-tittied cow.
Just when Conteegas was getting to the good part, doing the trilling sound in his throat he was famous for, Calhoun opened his eyes and spoke up.
“Ain’t it bad enough I got to put up with the fucking heat and your fucking humming without having to listen to that shit? Ain’t you got no Hank Williams stuff, or maybe some of that nigger music they used to make? You know, where the coons harmonize and one of ’em sings like his nuts are cut off.”
“You just don’t know good music when you hear it, Calhoun.”
Calhoun moved his free hand to his hatband, found one of his few remaining cigarettes and a match there. He struck the match on his knee, lit the smoke and coughed a few rounds. Wayne couldn’t imagine how Calhoun could smoke in all this heat.
“Well, I may not know good music when I hear it, capon, but I damn sure know bad music when I hear it. And that’s some bad music.”
“You ain’t got any kind of culture, Calhoun. You been too busy raping kids.”
“Reckon a man has to have a hobby,” Calhoun said, blowing smoke at Wayne. “Young pussy is mine. Besides, she wasn’t in diapers. Couldn’t find one that young. She was thirteen. You know what they say. If they’re old enough to bleed, they’re old enough to breed.”
“How old they have to be for you to kill them?”
“She got loud.
”
“Change channels, Calhoun.”
“Just passing the time of day, capon. Better watch yourself, bounty hunter, when you least expect it, I’ll bash your head.”
“You’re gonna run your mouth one time too many, Calhoun, and when you do, you’re gonna finish this ride in the trunk with ants crawling on you. You ain’t so priceless I won’t blow you away.”
“You lucked out at the tonk, boy. But there’s always tomorrow, and every day can’t be like at Rosalita’s.”
Wayne smiled. “Trouble is, Calhoun, you’re running out of tomorrows.”
3
As they drove between the Cadillacs, the sky fading like a bad bulb, Wayne looked at the cars and tried to imagine what the Chevy-Cadillac Wars had been like, and why they had been fought in this miserable desert. He had heard it was a hell of a fight, and close, but the outcome had been Chevy’s and now they were the only cars Detroit made. And as far as he was concerned, that was the only thing about Detroit that was worth a damn. Cars.
He felt that way about all cities. He’d just as soon lie down and let a diseased dog shit in his face than drive through one, let alone live in one.
Law Town being an exception. He’d go there. Not to live, but to give Calhoun to the authorities and pick up his reward. People in Law Town were always glad to see a criminal brought in. The public executions were popular and varied and supplied a steady income.
Last time he’d been to Law Town he’d bought a front-row ticket to one of the executions and watched a chronic shoplifter, a redheaded rat of a man, get pulled apart by being chained between two souped-up tractors. The execution itself was pretty brief, but there had been plenty of buildup with clowns and balloons and a big-tittied stripper who could swing her tits in either direction to boom-boom music.