Stories (2011) (2 page)

I thought about that, added in another story told me by a
friend. Supposedly, back in the late fifties or early sixties, there was a
small town where a black man's car broke down and he was captured and made to
pull a wagon around the town square, and was fed axle grease on crackers.
Finally, he escaped.

I swear. That's the story. I'm not saying it's true, but it
was told to me as the truth and it was given to the teller as the truth. If it
did happen, I have no idea where this took place. North, South, East, or West.
But it got the story wheels turning. My thoughts about dog fighting, boxing,
and this supposed incident, all came crashing together, and became "The
Pit." This was about 1982 or 1983. I sent it out, and no one bought it.
They didn't know what the hell it was. All the standard honor markets -- there
were a number of them then -- thought it wasn't horror, and they were probably
right. Some wanted it to have a twist ending, or another ending. One editor
wanted me to give it a positive spin. I wouldn't. I pulled it. It lay in a file
drawer for several years.

By the mid-eighties I was beginning to develop a name, and
when I was asked for a story for a crime/mystery anthology being published by
Black Lizard, I sent the editor this. He accepted it and later it appeared in
my first short story collection,  
By Bizarre Hands
. That's been many
years ago and though it's been reprinted several times, it still hasn't gotten
the exposure I modestly think it deserves. Maybe this collection will help.

Joe R. Lansdale

Nacogdoches, Texas

Created for this custom
eBook from multiple “Author’s Notes” and “Forwards”

Flyboy707

September, 2011

Bower pulled the sun visor down and looked in the mirror
there and said, "You know, hadn't been for the travel, I'd have done all
right. I could even shake my ass like him. I tell you, it drove the women wild.
You should have seen 'em."

"Don't shake it for me," Kelly said. "I don't
want to see it. Things I got to do are tough enough without having to' see
that."

Bower pushed the visor back. The light turned green. Kelly
put the gas to the car and they went up and over a hill and turned right on
Melroy.

"Guess maybe you do look like him," Kelly said.
"During his fatter days, when he was on the drugs and the peanut
butter."

"Yeah, but these pocks on my cheeks messes it up some.
When I was on stage I had makeup on 'em. I looked okay then."

They stopped at a stop sign and Kelly got out a cigarette
and pushed in the lighten

"A nigger nearly tail-ended me here once," Kelly
said. "Just come barreling down on me." He took the lighter and lit
his smoke. "Scared the piss out of me. I got him out of his car and popped
him some. I bet he was one careful nigger from then on." He pulled away
from the stop sign and cruised.

"You done one like this before? I know you've done it,
but like this?"

"Not just like this. Hut I done some things might
surprise you. You getting nervous on me?"

"I'm all right. You know, thing made me quit the Elvis
imitating was travel, cause one night on the road I was staying in this cheap
motel, and it wasn't heated too good. I'd had those kinds of rooms before, and
I always carried couple of space heaters in the trunk of the car with the rest
of my junk, you know. I got them plugged in, and I was still cold, so I pulled
the mattress on the floor by the heaters. I woke up and was on fire. I had been
so worn out I'd gone to sleep in my Elvis outfit. That was the end of my best
white jumpsuit, you know, like he wore with the gold glitter and all. I must
have been funny on fire like that, hopping around the room beating it out. When
I got that suit off I was burned like the way you get when you been out in the
sun too long."

"You gonna be able to do this?" "Did I say I
couldn't?"

"You're nervous. I can tell way you talk."

"A little. I always get nervous before I go on stage
too, but I always come through. Crowd came to see Elvis, by god, they got
Elvis. I used to sign autographs with his name. People wanted it like that.
They wanted to pretend, see."

"Women mostly?"

"Uh huh."

"What were they, say, fifty-five?"

"They were all ages. Some of them were pretty young.

"Ever fuck any of 'em?"

"Sure, I got plenty. Sing a little 'Love Me Tender' to
them in the bedroom and they'd do whatever I wanted."

"Was it the old ones you was fucking?"

"I didn't fuck no real old ones, no. Whose idea is it
to do things this way, anyhow?"

"Boss, of course. You think he lets me plan this stuff?
He don't want them chinks muscling in on the shrimping and all."

"I don't know, we fought for these guys. It seems a
little funny."

"Reason we lost the war over there is not being able to
tell one chink from another and all of them being the way they are. I think we
should have nuked the whole goddamned place. Went over there when it cooled
down and stopped glowing, put in a tucking Disneyland or something."

They were moving out of the city now, picking up speed.

* * *

"I don't see why we don't just whack this guy outright
and not do it this way,"

Bower said. "This seems kind of funny."

"No one's asking you. You come on a job, you do it.
Boss wants some chink to suffer, so he's gonna suffer. Not like he didn't get
some warnings or nothing.

Boss wants him to take it hard."

"Maybe this isn't a smart thing on account of it may
not bother chinks like it'd bother us. They're different about stuff like this,
all the things they've seen."

"It'll bother him," Kelly said. "And if it
don't, that ain't our problem. We got a job to do and we're gonna do it.
Whatever comes after comes after. Boss wants us to do different next time, we
do different. Whatever he wants we do it. He's the one paying."

They were out of the city now and to the left of the highway
they could see the glint of the sea through a line of scrubby trees.

"How're we gonna know?" Bower said. "One
chink looks like another."

"I got a photograph. This one's got a burn scar on the
face. Everything's timed.

Boss has been planning this. He had some of the guys watch
and take notes. It's all set up."

"Why us?"

"Me because I've done some things before. You because
he wants to see what you're made of. I'm kind of here as your nurse maid."

"I don't need anybody to see that I do what I'm
supposed to do."

They drove past a lot of boats pulled up to a dock. They drove
into a small town called Wilborn. They turned a corner at
Catlow Street
.

"It's down here a ways," Kelly said. "You got
your knife? You left your knife and brought your comb, I'm gonna whack you.

Bower got the knife out of his pocket. "Thing's got a
lot of blades, some utility stuff. Even a comb."

"Christ, you're gonna do it with a Boy Scout
knife?"

"Utility knife. The blade I want is plenty sharp,
you'll see. Why couldn't we use a gun? That wouldn't be as messy. A lot
easier."

"Boss wants it messy. He wants the chink to think about
it some. He wants them to pack their stuff on their boats and sail back to
chink land. Either that, or they can pay their percentages like everyone else.
He lets the chinks get away with things, everyone'll want to get away with
things."

They pulled over to the curb. Down the street was a school.
Bower looked at his watch.

"Maybe if it was a nigger," Bower said.

"Chink, nigger, what's the difference?"

They could hear a bell ringing. After five minutes they saw
kids going out to the curb to get on the buses parked there. A few kids came
down the sidewalk toward them. One of them was a Vietnamese girl about eight
years old. The left side of her face was scarred.

"Won't they remember me?" Bower said.

"Kids? Naw. Nobody knows you around here. Get rid of
that Elvis look and you'll be okay."

"It don't seem right. In front of these kids and all. I
think we ought to whack her father."

"No one's paying you to think, Elvis. Do what you're
supposed to do. I have to do it and you'll wish you had."

Bower opened the utility knife and got out of the car. He
held the knife by his leg and walked around front, leaned on the hood just as
the Vietnamese girl came up. He said, "Hey, kid, come here a minute."
His voice got thick. "Elvis wants to show you something."

Six months earlier they had captured him. Tonight Harry went
into the pit. He and Big George, right after the bull terriers got through
tearing the guts out of one another. When that was over, he and George would go
down and do the business. The loser would stay there and be fed to the dogs,
each of which had been starved for the occasion.

When the dogs finished eating, the loser's head would go up
on a pole. Already a dozen poles circled the pit. On each rested a head, or
skull, depending on how long it had been exposed to the elements, ambitious
pole-climbing ants and hungry birds. And of course how much flesh the terriers
ripped off before it was erected.

Twelve poles. Twelve heads.

Tonight a new pole and a new head went up.

Harry looked about at the congregation. All sixty or so of
them. They were a sight. Like mad creatures out of Lewis Carroll. Only they
didn't have long rabbit ears or tall silly hats. They were just backwoods
rednecks, not too unlike himself. With one major difference. They were as loony
as waltzing mice.

Or maybe they weren't crazy and he was. Sometimes he felt as
if he had stepped into an alternate universe where the old laws of nature and
what was right and wrong did not apply. Just like Alice plunging down the
rabbit hole into Wonderland.

The crowd about the pit had been mumbling and talking, but
now they grew silent.

Out into the glow of the neon lamps stepped a man dressed in
a black suit and hat. A massive rattlesnake was coiled about his right arm. It
was wriggling from shoulder to wrist. About his left wrist a smaller snake was
wrapped, a copperhead. The man held a Bible in his right hand. He was called
Preacher.

Draping the monstrous rattlesnake around his neck, Preacher
let it hang there.

It dangled that way as if drugged. Its tongue would flash
out from time to time.

It gave Harry the willies. He hated snakes. They always
seemed to be smiling.

Nothing was that fucking funny, not all the time.

Preacher opened his Bible and read:

"Behold, I give unto you the power to tread on serpents
and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing will by any
means hurt you."

Preacher paused and looked at the sky. "So God,"
he said, "we want to thank you for a pretty good potato crop, though
you've done better, and we want to thank you for the terriers, even though we
had to raise and feed them ourselves, and we want to thank you for sending
these outsiders our way, thank you for Harry Joe Stinton and Big George, the
nigger."

Preacher paused and looked about the congregation. He lifted
the hand with the copperhead in it high above his head. Slowly he lowered it
and pointed the snake-filled fist at George. "Three times this here nigger
has gone into the pit, and three times he has come out victorious. Couple times
against whites, once against another nigger. Some of us think he's cheating.

"Tonight, we bring you another white feller, one of
your chosen people, though you might not know it on account of the way you been
letting the nigger win here, and we're hoping for a good fight with the nigger
being killed at the end.

We hope this here business pleases you. We worship you and
the snakes in the way we ought to. Amen.

Big George looked over at Harry. "Be ready, sucker. I'm
gonna take you apart like a gingerbread man."

Harry didn't say anything. He couldn't understand it. George
was a prisoner just as he was. A man degraded and made to lift huge rocks and
pull carts and jog mile on miles every day. And just so they could get in shape
for this--to go down into that pit and try and beat each other to death for the
amusement of these crazies.

And it had to be worse for George. Being black, he was
seldom called anything other than "the nigger" by these psychos.
Furthermore, no secret had been made of the fact that they wanted George to
lose, and for him to win. The idea of a black pit champion was eating their
little honkey hearts out.

Yet, Big George had developed a sort of perverse pride in
being the longest lived pit fighter yet.

"It's something I can do right," George had once
said. "On the outside I wasn't nothing but a nigger, an uneducated nigger
working in rose fields, mowing big lawns for rich white folks. Here I'm still
the nigger, but I'm THE NIGGER, the bad ass nigger, and no matter what these
peckerwoods call me, they know it, and they know I'm the best at what I do. I'm
the king here. And they may hate me for it, keep me in a cell and make me run
and lift stuff, but for that time in the pit, they know I'm the one that can do
what they can't do, and they're afraid of me. I like it."

Glancing at George, Harry saw that the big man was not
nervous. Or at least not showing it. He looked as if he were ready to go on
holiday. Nothing to it. He was about to go down into that pit and try and beat
a man to death with his fists and it was nothing. All in a day's work. A job
well done for an odd sort of respect that beat what he had had on the outside.