I dedicate this dark entertainment to my wife, Karen, who through thick and thin has proved her love and devotion.
You are more than I deserve, darling. I am truly blessed.
Preface
Waltz of Shadows has a somewhat odd history. It was originally called Mucho Mojo. I wrote it for my then-publisher Mysterious Press, which was an arm of Warner Books, now Hachette.
I worked hard on it and spent almost a year writing it. It was a difficult book, and it seemed to go in all directions at once, or at least that was the case with the first draft. When I finished, I was unhappy with it, and wrote another book bearing the title Mucho Mojo. Totally different book, but I brought some of the themes from Waltz to it.
Mucho Mojo was published and was the second novel in my popular Hap and Leonard series. I was proud of that book, and it was a New York Times Notable book, and this led to several other novels about that duo, all currently available from Vintage and in e-book form.
Waltz, however, lingered in my files. I had worked so hard on it, and had felt so disappointed in it at the time, I decided it was a busted flush. In time, I gave the original manuscript to a university and pretty much forgot about it. But then a small press called Subterranean, which is now a major publishing house, asked me if I had something they might publish.
I didn’t.
Or I didn’t think so.
And then I remembered Waltz. I guess it had been in the back of my mind for some time, my subconscious most likely working on it without me knowing it. That’s the way I write best, when I’m not consciously trying to figure out what comes next, but instead let my subconscious sort things out while my conscious mind goes about the everyday business of living. Still, this book was different. I think at my core I knew I had something, but it was unusual for me in that whatever that something was, it hadn’t jelled early. Most of my work does. It hits me suddenly, and I start writing. It’s not that everything is clear. Quite the contrary; I am struck by a mood and the mood grows until I start writing. I usually have no idea what I’m about to write until I write it, and when I quit for the day, I seldom have any great idea of the next scene in my head. Perhaps a spark here and there, a bit of music, a rhythm to the story, but that’s it. I don’t know any other way to describe it.
I had a spare copy of the manuscript. I got it out and started reading, and saw right away what the problem was. It was too lonscrg and too busy and too wordy. I took a pen and started to cut. As I cut away the debris, like a sculptor chiseling away at a fine but oddly-shaped hunk of granite, a form began to reveal itself. I knew immediately what the problem had been. I had been trying too hard. I had written too much. I had tried to cover all the bases and had attempted to make it too complex. I cut out entire scenes and stretches of description. I realized that the novel was at heart exactly what I did well, that it encompassed themes that I’m passionate about, like brotherhood and friendship and family, duty and honor. But there was a lot of flack there too.
I was really brutal with the book’s editing, but as I said before, like a sculpture, it began to present itself, and when I finished cutting it, I was astonished to see the results. I liked it. I liked it even better after I read it in page proofs, and better yet when I reread it a few years later after it had come out as a novel. Oh, by the way. It was now called Waltz of Shadows, a very accurate title, I think.
Even though I have published many novels with Subterranean, as well as mainstream New York presses, this one I have always felt was one of those that fell between the cracks. Therefore, I’m excited for it to appear in print now, and for it to have the opportunity for a completely new readership.
It’s fast paced. It’s dark. It’s full of those themes I mentioned. And I hope it’s as entertaining as I believe it to be. So here it is. The leaner, meaner, harder-hitting version of that novel I wrote some years ago.
I’m glad to have it back out there in the world.
Acknowledgments
My respect and gratitude to my good friend and agent, Barbara Puechner, as well as Neal Barrett, Jr., Andrew Vachss, Jeff Banks, David Webb, and Ardath Mayhar for their kindness, advice, and support. But most of all, for their friendship and kinship.
Author’s Note
Just because I felt like it, I have played fast and loose with the geography of East Texas by blending the names of real towns and cities and rivers and lakes with those of my creation. I did this for story purposes. The character and terrain of East Texas, my favorite spot in the world, however, remains true to reality. Or at least reality as I see it.
Waltz of Shadows
Joe R. Lansdale
Part One
The Disaster Club
1
All the blood and disaster began on a Saturday morning when I thought everything was going just right. It was late October in East Texas, and from my recliner I could see out the tall glass that makes up two of our living room walls, and it was beautiful outside. A little cool looking, leaves gone gold and red and brown and starting to fall. Clouds white as angel’s panties could be glimpsed through the tops of the tall pines and oaks that made up most of our two acres. A cat squirrel jumped from one oak limb to another, then leaped out of sight. I felt like I was in a Disney movie.
Then I got the call.
I heard the phone ring, and was about to answer, assuming it would be some minor problem at one of the videos stores I own, when Beverly started downstairs.
I could see her through the stair railing. She was wearing her shorty white bathrobe and flip-flops and had a white towel wrapped around her head from having just washed her hair. Her legs were fairly pale since she didn’t go in much for the sun, and they were lightly freckled, the way redheads sometimes are, but they were long and smooth and muscled and I never tired of looking at them.
She was carrying the upstairs cordless phone, talking and looking at me over the railing and motioning me over, which meant she wanted me to rescue her and talk to whoever it was.
I put the paper down and got out of the chair and met her at the bottom of the stairs.
Our black German shepherd, Wylie, got up like it was part of his job, came over and sniffed my crotch, then went after Beverly, who popped him on the head with her hand. He went back to his spot and laid down with a groan. Crotch sniffing was hard work for a dog, but it was his duty, even if no one liked it.
“Well,” she said into the phone, “let me let you talk to him.”
She handed me the phone and shook her head.
Upstairs I heard the kids yell again about something on a cartoon show they were watching, and I put the phone to my ear and stood at the foot of the stairs and watched Beverly climb back up, enjoying the way her bottom moved beneath her bathrobe. Twenty years of marriage hadn’t changed that for me.
“Hello,” I said.
“This is Bill,” said the voice. I knew then why Beverly had wanted off the phone and why she had the sour face when she gave it to me.
“Hey, how you been?” I tried to sound as happy as possible.
“Not so good.”
He always said that. He’d go six months and I wouldn’t hear from him, then something went rancid, first person he called was Uncle Hank.
But he’s my brother’s boy, so what you gonna do? It’s not like he’s got anyone else. My brother, Rick, got killed in an auto accident when Bill was seven, and when Bill was a teenager his mother remarried and Bill didn’t get along at all with her new husband, then his mother got some kind of weird disease you read about in the back of medical books, and died.
Bill was in many ways like his father. Always certain he was merely a day short of the big success, though you couldn’t seem to put your finger on what it was he was doing to acquire it. And, l
ike my brother, he had a passion for women that sent his judgment and sense of decency packing.
On top of all that, he was a bullshitter and had no more true ambition than a frog.
I hated to get it started, but I said: “Tell me about it.”
Silence hung in the air for a time.
I sat down on the bottom step of the stairs and waited. Wylie got up again and ambled over, nodded his head in the direction of my crotch, but it was just a feint, to keep me honest. He laid down at my feet.
Bill said, “I got to talk to you in private. I don’t want to do it over the phone. I need to see you. Can I come over? I’ll have to take a taxi, but I think I can swing it. We can have a couple of drinks in the study.”
I thought about that one. I wasn’t in the mood to get Beverly stirred up. Telling her Bill was coming over was like telling her I was going to stack and store a wheelbarrow load of fresh pig manure in the house.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Beverly doesn’t like me, right?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Don’t have to. She talks to me like I’m a bill collector.”
“You two just don’t click.”
“We don’t click all right.”
“Look, what she’s got against you is ten thousand dollars you haven’t paid back. Ten thousand you don’t plan to pay back. Some of us work, Bill. Come over with the ten thousand in your hand, Beverly’ll meet you at the door in her panties playing a bass drum.”
“Uncle Hank, you know I’m going to pay that money back.”
“No, I don’t. You got a job? You’re twenty-four years old. It’s time you started footing your own bills.”
“Really, Uncle Hank. I’m not trying to borrow money. I need your help.”
I was going to tell him to find someone else, but the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth. All I could think of was Bill at seven years old, right after my brother was killed.
“Listen,” I said. “Here’s the score. I got plans this morning, and I don’t want to get in dutch with Beverly.”
“I hear that.”
“I’m gonna take a shower and take the family to lunch, then I’ll meet you at your place.”
“I’m not at my place, and I’m not going back there. And if I did go back, you wouldn’t know where to go, because I don’t live where I used to.”
“What?”
“The place I moved to is the place I’m not going back to… Forget all that, okay. I have to see you now.”
“After lunch, Bill, or get someone else. Call Arnold, see what he says.”
Silence again. Arnold was my older half-brother from my Dad’s earlier marriage. Arnold’s mom had died in childbirth. My father was young then and hadn’t done so well with Arnold. Arnold didn’t so much grow up as he got jerked up.
“All right,” Bill said. “Let’s do this. I’m at a motel. Calls itself a tourist court, actuallyem"rt, act. I got it on a match book here… Christ, how could I have forgotten a name like this? Sleepy Time Tourist Courts. I’m in room forty. This place is a hole.”
“I know where it is. Another year or two without paint and repairs, they’ll be holding that place up with a stick. Couldn’t you have found something better?”
“Money.”
“Yeah, well, you did okay then. Listen up. We finish lunch, I’ll drive over. Might be as late as two or two-thirty. We go by one of my stores and pick up a movie for the night on Saturdays. Sometimes we goof around a little. Run a few errands. I’ll move things quickly as possible.”
“What I’m talking here is more important than fucking lunch and a movie. I’m talking some desperate shit.”
“It’ll hold,” I said. “See you after lunch.”
I didn’t give him time to complain. I hung up. I didn’t really think what he had to say would amount to much, figured no matter what he said, in the end it would all come down to borrowing more money.
I was mistaken.
2
I finally got the family home and swapped the van for my pickup, I drove over to Sleepy Time Tourist Courts. It was about two o’clock then.
Beverly hadn’t been too happy about me saying I was going over to see Bill, and threatened me with castration with the edge of a credit card if I loaned him any money.
The only thing I felt good about right then was driving my truck. I love that ugly bastard. It’s old and grey and scratched and runs like the proverbial scalded dog. Has a gun rack against the back window that sports a double barrel twelve gauge and a baseball bat, a loaded .38 in the glove box.
Before I started out for the illustrious Sleepy Time Tourist Courts, I had put the shotgun and the ball bat on the right side floorboard and thrown my old man’s hunting coat over them. The coat lived in the car, same as the twelve gauge and the ball bat.
I didn’t hunt anymore, not since I was a kid, and I didn’t carry either the shotgun or pistol out of fear, but I had a respect for those guns, as well as the baseball bat and the old hunting coat.
The coat, truck, guns, and baseball bat had been my Dad’s, and it was the all of my inheritance, that and the skills of a woodsman, which had now grown dim and rusty, but were still appreciated.
For his inheritance, my brother’s boy, Bill, Mr. Hard Luck, had gotten three-hundred-and-sixty dollars and thirty-eight cents, long spent.
Arnold, half-brother and redneck, had inherited my dad’s six bird dogs, ten acres of land and a mobile home, a fishing shack on two acres out at Imperial Lake, and my Dad’s bad temper. Except for the temper, you could say Arnold got the best deal, but then, the way my Dad saw it, he owed Arnold more.
· · ·
Sleepy Time Tourist Courts didn’t strike me as a place you/divali d get much sleep. Unless you’re talking about the permanent kind. It’s on the side of Imperial City where the poor people live, made mostly of blacks and Mexicans and poor whites, and on some nights, especially summer nights when the heat’s way up, and the desperation gets so high a fellow can hear himself sweat, guns and knives come out and someone gets hauled away to a pauper’s grave. I pulled up in front of the place and got out and locked the pickup.
The motel had been built in the fifties and remodeled to fit the more modern motel concept of the mid-sixties, which was about the last time I figured the rooms had been swept out. The place was painted asshole pink and the pink was peeling. It dripped and scaled all over. All the curtains on all the windows were drawn, lest a little sunshine get in.
Room forty was upstairs. I could see the door number plain enough from where I stood by my truck. It was one of the few rooms that still had a number on it. The metal railing shook as I climbed. Pigeon shit was all over the landing and there was a used prophylactic lying beside a hypodermic needle. Come next hard rain, however, things might be cleaner.
I knocked on the door and Bill answered. His dark blond hair was rumpled and greasy and his face was oily and set with lines.
His shirt was stuck to him and his pants had a snotty shine. He was banged up and a little bloody.
“Goddamn, Bill,” I said.
“Get in,” he said. “Hurry up.”
I went inside and he closed the door. It was dark and the odor of his body in there was strong enough to go buy groceries and lube my truck.
“Turn on a light,” I said.
“I prefer the dark,” he said, “but I’ll give you a little light.”
There was an old stuffed chair by the window, and I went over there and sat down. At my elbow, on the table, was a lamp with a towel draped over it. Next to the lamp was an open bottle of cheap wine with most of the wine gone. Next to that was a stack of newspapers.
Bill turned on the lamp, almost knocking over the wine in the process. The light, muted beneath the towel, looked like the glow from a jack-o-lantern.
“What now?” I asked. “Spooky noises, a flashlight under our chins?”
“I’m depressed and scared, Uncle Hank. Too much light makes me fee
l kind of sick. Don’t jack with me, all right?”
“What have you done?” I asked. “Cut through the bullshit and get to it.”
“It’s not that easy, Uncle Hank. There’s a lot to it… First, look at this. Tell me what you think it is.”
He went on the other side of the bed and picked a long, narrow, black photo album off the nightstand and tossed it to me.
I caught it and looked at it. There was no writing on the outside. It had a copper-colored clasp holding it together, and I unsnapped that.
Inside were cellophane windows and about a third of the book w Cof eigas filled with photographs. Two wide, six deep. At the top of the page was a photograph of a young man smiling, and beside that photograph was another of the same man, only he wasn’t smiling. He had a small hole in the center of his forehead and his right eye bulged out of its socket. His face was as white as bleached rice. His mouth was closed, but one broken top tooth hung over his bottom lip like a stalactite.
Below those photos, on the left, was one of a middle-aged man, very much alive. On the right was, I presume, the same man, only you couldn’t tell for sure. His face was a hole. A human jelly doughnut. Shotgun blast, I figured.
Below those, an elderly sour-mouthed woman sitting in a wheel chair, and on the right, the wheel chair overturned, the woman beside it in a pool of blood and scattering of brains.
Next page, a man’s face on one side, the other a close up rear view of a naked man with his ass facing out, something jammed up it. A poker, or a thin, lead pipe maybe. I couldn’t make it out. The object and the guy’s ass were smeared with blood.
The rest of the book was the same sort of thing.
I said, “What in the hell is this?”
“I don’t know exactly,” Bill said. “It’s how I got it that’s important. I mean, does that look like special effects to you?”
“No.”
“Because it isn’t. That woman on the bottom of the first page. Recognize her?”