When the ladies left the room, Leonard said, “Think I’m going to give John one more chance.”
“You said that four chances ago,” I said.
“I mean it this time.”
“Did you not mean it the other times?”
“Not enough.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You don’t fucking think I ought to, do you?”
“It’s not about what I think. It’s about what works—”
“Shut the hell up. Be straight with me. No psychology horseshit. Should I or shouldn’t I?”
“You don’t, you’ll feel miserable,” I said. “You do, you’ll feel miserable.”
“No opinion, then?”
“Frankly, Leonard, I’m fed up with the motherfucker.”
“I should be.”
“You were last time we talked, I think. I lose count. I think you’ve kicked him to the curb for good, next thing I know he’s back greasing your asshole.”
“I get fed up, and then I get over being fed up. Right now I’m over it. One more time into the breach, and you know what I mean, and if it don’t work this time, seriously, I’m out.”
“Brother, you got to make yourself happy if you can. Go for it.”
“Thing is, I don’t know I can. I’m starting to think the best relationship for me is a fresh box of Kleenex and a bottle of baby oil.”
“Eeew.”
The women came back then, and Leonard picked up his coffee and sipped it.
We all visited awhile, talked nonsense, mostly, and then the talk died down and our energy died with it. I decided to take the garbage out before I took Leonard home. I carried the bag out the back door, toward the garbage can. My mind was so engaged with the pleasantries of the evening I didn’t sense the presence of someone in the yard until it was too late. He rose up from between the two garbage cans by the redwood fence, and as he did, I dropped the garbage bag and turned toward him. I was pretty quick for being distracted, but he was quicker.
There was a glint of light on an edge of steel, and I tried to use both hands to catch the man’s wrist, but I was late and the blade was long, and it got me. It went into my stomach, and I groaned. I felt as if a cold wind had washed over me, and there was a numbness followed by a sensation like an electric shock, and then I stumbled backwards and fell against the garbage cans, knocking them over with a loud clatter, but somehow I managed to stay on my feet. The knife, a bayonet, actually, came loose of his hands, and I sort of melted backwards until my back came up against the fence. I clutched at the blade, cutting my hands, making them slick with blood.
He came at me again, bare-handed. I felt strange and detached, like I ought to do something but suddenly didn’t know how. And then there was a great shadow looming behind my attacker, and the shadow struck out with two ridge hands to the man’s temples and dropped him. The shadow was Leonard. The man on the ground turned and grabbed at Leonard’s legs, and took him down. The man tried to scuttle onto Leonard’s chest, but Leonard grabbed him by his jacket and jerked him down close and slapped a palm over one of the man’s ears, a man I now realized had to be Number Eight, the last Canceler.
Number Eight screamed with pain, and then Leonard rolled him over and was on top of him. Leonard hit him in the throat, I think, because I heard a gasp from the man and then a gurgle, and then Leonard’s hand went down two more times, the last in a clawing motion and then a ripping-back movement.
I saw all this as I eased down to the ground with my back against the fence. I so wanted to get up, but my legs weren’t working and my mind seemed to have hit the Pause button. Next thing I knew Brett was bending over me, and she was screaming in a way I had never heard before, and then there was Chance bawling and Buffy was licking my face and whimpering.
Leonard reached down and picked me up and carried me out the redwood gate as if I were nothing more than a small sack of feathers.
Leonard lifted me into the back of the car with Brett, and away we went, Leonard at the wheel. Me holding my stomach with both hands, the bayonet still in me, my head in Brett’s lap, Chance up front beside Leonard. Chance leaned over the seat and touched my face. Her hand was cool.
Number Eight had found out Leonard and I were involved, no mean feat if anyone from the car company had escaped arrest. Hell, Frank, from behind bars, might have given them the word to make it less likely they would pay someone in prison to stick her. It could as easily have been Leonard who had been stabbed. I was glad it wasn’t him. I hoped Jim Bob was okay. Vanilla, I knew, would be long gone and damn near impossible to trace. And Booger. Well, fuck Booger.
As he drove, Leonard yelled from time to time, just some kind of wild exclamation full of fear and disappointment. I thought, happy fucking birthday, Hap.
61
By the time we got to the hospital I was weaving in and out, and as the folks came out with the stretcher and loaded me onto it, they began to do something to my stomach—apply pressure, I guess. I couldn’t really feel much by then. The pain had gone away. I realized I wasn’t wearing a shirt anymore because I felt the cool October wind. I wasn’t wearing a bayonet, either.
As we entered the hospital hallway and Leonard raced alongside me, I saw an odd thing on his shirt. I couldn’t figure what it was at first. Some kind of sea creature, maybe. It had a small, bulbous body and lots of bloody tentacles. I was studying on that when we went through some swinging doors, and one of the ladies pushing the stretcher said, “You’ll have to leave, now, sir.”
And I heard Leonard say, “Screw you. I’m here to stay.”
“We’ll call security,” said the nurse.
“Tell them to bring a couple days’ rations. They’re going to be here awhile,” Leonard said.
I realized then what was stuck on Leonard’s shirt. It was Number Eight’s eyeball. That clawing and ripping motion he had made, he had tore it right out of that bastard’s head.
* * *
The lights came and went, and I closed my eyes and felt weaker and more tired than I had ever been. When I opened my eyes I was in a big white room, not unlike the one Lilly Buckner had been in, and by my bedside were Leonard, Brett, and Chance. The only one missing was Buffy, and I’m sure she would have liked to come.
I might have laughed at that thought. It’s hard to be sure.
And then I blinked, or it seemed that way, and the only one in the room was Leonard. He was in a chair pulled up close to the bed and he had my hand in his and his head was dipped, and I knew he had fallen asleep. I tried to speak to him, but the effort of it sent me spiraling again, down into blackness, around and around, and I came out I knew not where. But sometime down in that place of no recognition, I heard a voice I didn’t know, a nurse, maybe, a doctor, say, “He probably won’t make it past another night.”
I went away again, and there was a tunnel of light, but I went backwards, away from it, and when I came out of the unknown place with its tunnel of white light, I was glad to be back, not thinking that long, white tunnel was any goddamn path to heaven, knowing full well it was merely my brain trying to die, my focus narrowing, the kind of tunnel vision beginners get in a fight. I told myself that I was no beginner, and I would not go gently into that good night.
I fought hard, and I came back, and I was glad to be back. I rose up from the darkness like a ship on the peak of a wave, and when I did, there were Leonard and Chance and Brett, all by my side, and I think I said, “It’s okay. Doesn’t matter anymore,” but maybe I just thought it.
I looked at them and loved them, and I thought, there stands my brother, who ripped a man’s eye out of his head for me, and I love him as if he were my own blood. It was him I hated to leave the most, the way you think you’d like to keep both legs, because in that instant I knew I was leaving. The tunnel of white light was beckoning. I felt my ship on its wave starting to go down on the other side, my timbers squeaking with stress, my sail folding with pain.
I heard Leonard say, “You’re just ge
tting even cause last time it was me in the hospital. Let’s just call it even.”
He smiled when he said it, but he couldn’t hold the smile, and I heard him say, “Goddamn it,” and I continued to sail away on those dark waters, and then I felt calm, as if I had made it to the dock. I felt good. It was a strange kind of good. Free of all pain except regret. And then I felt those dark waters stir again, and my ship slipped loose of its moorings, sailed away from the pier toward what could have been the rising or the dying of the sun.
I looked up and saw Brett’s face again, crying, then Chance, trembling, and finally Leonard. He was bawling like a child. My hand couldn’t feel his hand anymore, but I knew he was holding it.
Then my ship sailed out farther into deep, dark water, toward that great light. I was having trouble breathing. I heard Leonard yell like he was trying to get my attention from across a great distance.
The bright sky beyond the black sea went as dark as the waters that were carrying me away, and I wasn’t sure I could make it back.
About the Author
Joe R. Lansdale is the author of more than three dozen novels, including Paradise Sky, the Edgar Award–winning The Bottoms, Sunset and Sawdust, and Leather Maiden. He has received eleven Bram Stoker Awards, the American Mystery Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Grinzane Cavour Prize for Literature. He lives with his family in Nacogdoches, Texas.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Epigraph
1
2
3
4
5
6
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About the Author
Newsletters
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2016 by Joe R. Lansdale
Cover design by Lauren Harms
Cover photograph by Wendy Stevenson / Arcangel Images
Author photograph by Karen Lansdale
Cover copyright © 2016 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permission
[email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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ISBN 978-0-316-32938-5
E-3
Joe R. Lansdale, Honky Tonk Samurai (Hap and Leonard)
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