High Cotton: Selected Stories of Joe R. Lansdale

  “I was just tryin’ to help,” Mr. Harold said.

  “I was doin’ all right until he come over,” said the blind man.

  “He started tellin’ me how I was messin’ up and all and got me nervous, and sure enough, I began to lose my place and my concentration. You can see the results.”

  “You’d have minded your own business,” Sonny said to Mr. Harold, “the man woulda done all right, but you’re one of those thinks a handicap can’t do some jobs.”

  “The man’s blind,” said Mr. Harold. “He can’t see to cut grass. Not four acres with a weed-eater. Any moron can see that.”

  The Reverend Sonny Guy had a pretty fast right hand for a fat man. He caught Mr. Harold a good one over the left eye and staggered him.

  The blind man stepped aside so they’d have plenty of room, and Sonny set to punching Mr. Harold quite regularly. It seemed like something the two of them were made for. Sonny to throw punches and Mr. Harold to absorb them.

  When Mr. Harold woke up, he was lying on his back in the grass and the shadow of the blind man lay like a slat across him. “Where is he?” asked Mr. Harold, feeling hot and sick to his stomach.

  “When he knocked you down and you didn’t get up, he went in the house with his wife,” said the blind man. “I think he was thirsty. He told me he wasn’t giving me no five dollars. Actually, he said he wasn’t giving me jackshit. And him a minister. The kids are still out here though, they’re looking at their watches, I think. They had a bet on how long it’d be before you got up. I heard them talking.”

  Mr. Harold sat up and glanced toward the Dodge club cab. The blind man was right. The kids were still leaning against the truck. When Mr. Harold looked at them, the boy, who was glancing at his watch, lifted one eye and raised his hand quickly and pulled it down, said, “Yesss!”

  The little girl looked pouty.

  The little boy said, “This time you blow me.”

  They went in the house. Mr. Harold stood up. The blind man gave him the weed-eater for support. He said, “Sonny says the crippled nigger will be back next week. I can’t believe it. Scooped by a nigger. A crippled nigger.”

  Mr. Harold pursed his lips and tried to recall a couple of calming Bible verses. When he felt somewhat relaxed, he said, “Why’d you tell him it was my fault?”

  “I figured you could handle yourself,” the blind man said. Mr. Harold rubbed one of the knots Sonny had knocked on his head. He considered homicide, but knew there wasn’t any future in it. He said, “Tell you what. I’ll give you a ride home.”

  “We could watch some more TV?”

  “Nope,” said Mr. Harold, probing a split in his lip. “I’ve got other plans.”

  Mr. Harold got his son and the three of them drove over to where the blind man said he lived. It was a lot on the far side of town, outside the city limits. It was bordered on either side by trees. It was a trailer lot, scraped down to the red clay. There were a few anemic grass patches here and there and it had a couple of lawn ornaments out front. A cow and a pig with tails that hooked up to hoses and spun around and around and worked as lawn sprinklers.

  Behind the sprinklers a heap of wood and metal smoked pleasantly in the sunlight.

  They got out of the car and Mr. Harold’s son said, “Holy shit.”

  “Let me ask you something,” said Mr. Harold to the blind man. “Your place got a cow and a pig lawn ornament? Kind that sprinkles the yard?”

  The blind man appeared nervous. He sniffed the air. He said, “Is the cow one of those spotted kind?”

  “A Holstein?” asked Mr. Harold. “My guess is the pig is a Yorkshire.”

  “That’s them.”

  “Well, I reckon we’re at your place all right, but it’s burned down.”

  “Oh, shit,” said the blind man. “I left the beans on.”

  “They’re done now,” said the boy.

  The blind man sat down in the dirt and began to cry. It was a serious cry. A cat walking along the edge of the woods behind the remains of the trailer stopped to watch in amazement. The cat seemed surprised that any one thing could make such noise.

  “Was they pinto beans?” the boy asked.

  The blind man sputtered and sobbed and his chest heaved. Mr. Harold went and got the pig sprinkler and turned it on so that the water from its tail splattered on the pile of smoking rubble. When he felt that was going good, he got the cow working. He thought about calling the fire department, but that seemed kind of silly. About all they could do was come out and stir what was left with a stick.

  “Is it all gone?” asked the blind man.

  “The cow’s all right,” said Mr. Harold, “but the pig was a little too close to the fire, there’s a little paint bubbled up on one of his legs.”

  Now the blind man really began to cry. “I damn near had it paid for. It wasn’t no double-wide, but it was mine.”

  They stayed that way momentarily, the blind man crying, the water hissing onto the trailer’s remains, then the blind man said,

  “Did the dogs get out?”

  Mr. Harold gave the question some deep consideration. “My guess would be no.”

  “Then I don’t guess there’s any hope for the parakeet neither,” said the blind man.

  Reluctantly, Mr. Harold loaded the blind man back in the car with his son, and started home.

  It wasn’t the way Mr. Harold had hoped the day would turn out. He had been trying to do nothing more than a good deed, and now he couldn’t get rid of the blind man. He wondered if this kind of shit ever happened to Jesus. He was always doing good stuff in the Bible. Mr. Harold wondered if he’d ever had an incident misfire on him, something that hadn’t been reported in the Testaments.

  Once, when Mr. Harold was about eleven, he’d experienced a similar incident, only he hadn’t been trying to be a good Samaritan. Still, it was one of those times where you go in with one thing certain and it turns on you.

  During recess he’d gotten in a fight with a little kid he thought would be easy to take. He punched the kid when he wasn’t looking, and that little dude dropped and got hold of his knee with his arms and wrapped both his legs around him, positioned himself so that his bottom was on Mr. Harold’s shoe.

  Mr. Harold couldn’t shake him. He dragged him across the school yard and even walked him into a puddle of water, but the kid stuck. Mr. Harold got a pretty good sized stick and hit the kid over the head with it, but that hadn’t changed conditions. A dog tick couldn’t have been fastened any tighter. He had to go back to class with the kid on his leg, pulling that little rascal after him wherever he went, like he had an anvil tied to his foot.

  The teacher couldn’t get the kid to let go either. They finally had to go to the principal’s office and get the principal and the football coach to pry him off, and even they had to work at it. The coach said he’d once wrestled a madman with a butcher knife, and he’d rather do that again than try and get that kid off someone’s leg.

  The blind man was kind of like that kid. You couldn’t lose the sonofabitch.

  Near the house, Mr. Harold glanced at his watch and noted it was time for his wife to be home. He was overcome with deep concerns. He’d just thought the blind man pissing on his bathroom wall would be a problem, now he had greater worries. He actually had the gentleman in tow, bringing him to the house at supper time. Mr. Harold pulled over at a station and got some gas and bought the boy and the blind man a Coke. The blind man seemed to have gotten over the loss of his trailer. Sadness for its contents, the dogs and the parakeet, failed to plague him.

  While the boy and the blind man sat on the curb, Mr. Harold went a round to a pay booth and called home. On the third ring his wife answered.

  “Where in the world are you?” she said.

  “I’m out here at a filling station. I got someone with me.”

  “You better have Marvin with you.”

  “I do, but I ain’t talking about the boy. I got a blind man with me.”

  “You me
an he can’t see?”

  “Not a lick. He’s got a weed-eater. He’s the groundskeeper next door. I tried to take him home but his trailer burned up with his dogs and bird in it, and I ain’t got no place to take him but home for supper.”

  A moment of silence passed as Mrs. Harold considered. “Ain’t there some kinda home you can put him in?”

  “I can’t think of any. I suppose I could tie a sign around his neck said ‘Blind Man’ and leave him on someone’s step with his weed-eater.”

  “Well, that wouldn’t be fair to whoever lived in that house, just pushing problems on someone else.”

  Mr. Harold was nervous. Mrs. Harold seemed awfully polite. Usually she got mad over the littlest thing. He was trying to figure if it was a trap when he realized that something about all this was bound to appeal to her religious nature. She went to church a lot. She read the Baptist Standard and watched a couple of Sunday afternoon TV shows with preaching in them. Blind people were loved by Baptists. Them and cripples. They got mentioned in the Bible a lot. Jesus had a special affection for them. Well, he liked lepers too, but Mr. Harold figured that was where even Mrs. Harold’s dedicated Baptist beliefs might falter.

  A loophole presented itself to Mr. Harold. He said, “I figure it’s our Christian charity to take this fella in, honey. He can’t see and he’s lost his job and his trailer burned down with his pets in it.”

  “Well, I reckon you ought to bring him on over then. We’ll feed him and I’ll call around and see what my ladies’ charities can do. It’ll be my project. Wendy Lee is goin’ around gettin’ folks to pick up trash on a section of the highway, but I figure helping out a blind man would be Christian. Jesus helped blind people, but I don’t never remember him picking up any trash.”

  When Mr. Harold loaded his son and the blind man back into the car, he was a happier man. He wasn’t in trouble. Mrs. Harold thought taking in the blind man was her idea. He figured he could put up with the bastard another couple hours, then he’d find him a place to stay. Some homeless shelter with a cot and some hot soup if he wanted it. Maybe some preaching and breakfast before he had to hit the road.

  At the house, Mrs. Harold met them at the door. Her little round body practically bounced. She found the blind man’s hand and shook it. She told him how sorry she was, and he dropped his head and looked sad and thanked her. When they were inside, he said, “Is that cornbread I smell?”

  “Yes it is,” Mrs. Harold said, “and it won’t be no time till it’s ready. And we’re having pinto beans with it. The beans were cooked yesterday and just need heating. They taste best when they’ve set a night.”

  “That’s what burned his trailer down,” the boy said. “He was cooking some pinto beans and forget ’em.”

  “Oh my,” said Mrs. Harold, “I hope the beans won’t bring back sad memories.”

  “No ma’am, them was limas I was cookin’.”

  “There was dogs in there and a parakeet,” said the boy. “They got burned up too. There wasn’t nothing left but some burnt wood and a piece of a couch and an old bird cage.”

  “I have some insurance papers in a deposit box downtown,” the blind man said. “I could probably get me a couple of doublewides and have enough left over for a vacation with the money I’ll get. I could get me some dogs and a bird easy enough too. I could even name them the same names as the ones burned up.”

  They sat and visited for a while in the living room while the cornbread cooked and the beans warmed up. The blind man and Mrs. Harold talked about religion. The blind man knew her favorite gospel tunes and sang a couple of them. Not too good, Mr. Harold thought, but Mrs. Harold seemed almost swoony.

  The blind man knew her Sunday preaching programs too, and they talked about a few highlighted TV sermons. They debated the parables in the Bible and ended up discussing important and obscure points in the scripture, discovered the two of them saw things a lot alike when it came to interpretation. They had found dire warnings in Deuteronomy that scholars had overlooked.

  Mrs. Harold got so lathered up with enthusiasm, she went into the kitchen and started throwing an apple pie together. Mr. Harold became nervous as soon as the pie pans began to rattle. This wasn’t like her. She only cooked a pie to take to relatives after someone died or if it was Christmas or Thanksgiving and more than ten people were coming.

  While she cooked, the blind man discussed wrestling holds with Mr. Harold’s son. When dinner was ready, the blind man was positioned in Mr. Harold’s chair, next to Mrs. Harold. They ate, and the blind man and Mrs. Harold further discussed scripture, and from time to time, the blind man would stop the religious talk long enough to give the boy a synopsis of some wrestling match or another. He had a way of cleverly turning the conversation without seeming to. He wasn’t nearly as clever about passing the beans or the cornbread. The apple pie remained strategically guarded by his elbow.

  After a while, the topic switched from the Bible and wrestling to the blind man’s aches and miseries. He was overcome with them. There wasn’t a thing that could be wrong with a person he didn’t have.

  Mrs. Harold used this conversational opportunity to complain about hip problems, hypoglycemia, overactive thyroids, and out of-control sweat glands.

  The blind man had a tip or two on how to make living with each of Mrs. Harold’s complaints more congenial. Mrs. Harold said, “Well, sir, there’s just not a thing you don’t know something about. From wrestling to medicine.”

  The blind man nodded. “I try to keep up. I read a lot of braille and listen to the TV and the radio. They criticize the TV, but they shouldn’t. I get lots of my education there. I can learn from just about anything or anyone but a nigger.”

  Mrs. Harold, much to Mr. Harold’s chagrin, agreed. This was a side of his wife he had never known. She had opinions and he hadn’t known that. Stupid opinions, but opinions.

  When Mr. Harold finally left the table, pieless, to hide out in the bathroom, the blind man and Mrs. Harold were discussing a plan for getting all the black folk back to Africa. Something to do with the number of boats necessary and the amount of proper hygiene needed.

  And speaking of hygiene, Mr. Harold stood up as his bottom became wet. He had been sitting on the lid of the toilet and dampness had soaked through his pants. The blind man had been in the bathroom last and he’d pissed all over the lowered lid and splattered the wall.

  Mr. Harold changed clothes and cleaned up the piss and washed his hands and splashed his face and looked at himself in the mirror. It was still him in there and he was awake.

  About ten P.M. Mrs. Harold and the blind man put the boy to bed and the blind man sang the kid a rockabilly song, told him a couple of nigger jokes and one kike joke, and tucked him in.

  Mr. Harold went in to see the boy, but he was asleep. The blind man and Mrs. Harold sat on the couch and talked about chicken and dumpling recipes and how to clean squirrels properly for frying. Mr. Harold sat in a chair and listened, hoping for some opening in the conversation into which he could spring. None presented itself.

  Finally Mrs. Harold got the blind man some bedclothes and folded out the couch and told him a pleasant good night, touching the blind man’s arm as she did. Mr. Harold noted she left her hand there quite a while.

  In bed, Mr. Harold, hoping to prove to himself he was still man of the house, rolled over and put his arm around Mrs. Harold’s hip. She had gotten dressed and gotten into bed in record time while he was taking a leak, and now she was feigning sleep, but Mr. Harold decided he wasn’t going to go for it. He rubbed her ass and tried to work his hand between her legs from behind. He touched what he wanted, but it was as dry as a ditch in the Sahara.

  Mrs. Harold pretended to wake up. She was mad. She said he ought to let a woman sleep, and didn’t he think about anything else? Mr. Harold admitted that sex was a foremost thought of his, but he knew now nothing he said would matter. Neither humor nor flattery would work. He would not only go pieless this night, he would go assless as w
ell.

  Mrs. Harold began to explain how one of her mysterious headaches with back pain had descended on her. Arthritis might be the culprit, she said, though sometimes she suspicioned something more mysterious and deadly. Perhaps something incurable that would eventually involve large leaking sores and a deep coma.

  Mr. Harold, frustrated, closed his eyes and tried to go to sleep with a hard-on. He couldn’t understand, having had so much experience now, why it was so difficult for him to just forget his boner and go to bed, but it was, as always, a trial.

  Finally, after making a trip to the bathroom to work his pistol and plunk its stringy wet bullet into the toilet water, he was able to go back to bed and drift off into an unhappy sleep.

  A few hours later he awoke. He heard a noise like girlish laughter. He lay in bed and listened. It was in fact, laughter, and it was coming from the living room. The blind man must have the TV on. But then he recognized the laughter. It hadn’t come to him right away, because it had been ages since he had heard it. He reached for Mrs. Harold and she was gone.

  He got out of bed and opened the bedroom door and crept quietly down the hall. There was a soft light on in the living room; it was the lamp on the TV muted by a white towel.

  On the couch-bed was the blind man, wearing only his underwear and dark glasses. Mrs. Harold was on the bed too. She was wearing her nightie. The blind man was on top of her and they were pressed close. Mrs. Harold’s hand sneaked over the blind man’s back and slid into his underwear and cupped his ass.

  Mr. Harold let out his breath, and Mrs. Harold turned her head and saw him. She gave a little cry and rolled out from under the blind man. She laughed hysterically. “Why, honey, you’re up.”

  The blind man explained immediately. They had been practicing a wrestling hold, one of the more complicated, and not entirely legal ones, that involved grabbing the back of an opponent’s tights. Mrs. Harold admitted, that as of tonight, she had been overcome with a passion for wrestling and was going to watch all the wrestling programs from now on. She thanked the blind man for the wrestling lesson and shook his hand and went past Mr. Harold and back to bed.