Waltz of Shadows (31 page)

I glanced at the nose of the plane, saw it lifting toward the sky, then it dipped down and we were diving into a line of trees that appeared to be dancing along the edge of the woods. Then they weren’t dancing at all, they were just close. We hit with a sound like a bat catching a home run, only louder. The prop chopped branches like a Vegematic doing celery. A limb reached out and politely plucked me off Snake and the cockpit. The Stearman came apart like a box kite being shoved through the whirling blades of a window fan.

I lost all the breath that could possibly be in me, dropped down through a couple of boughs hard enough to crack a limb against my thigh, then made a drop that seemed to me was a world record. I hit the ground so hard I realized I only thought I’d lost all my breath. Now I knew what that sensation was truly like, and I knew another sensation as well. That of going very fast and spinning about and not being on some kind of carnival ride.

I went sliding down a muddy slope, over branches that whapped my legs and face and poked a few other parts of me for good measure. I came to rest at the base of a pine in time to see the Stearman’s parts raining through the trees. The prop came whacking down the hill and bounced by me and crashed along, and from the sound of it, fetched up against something pretty solid. An oak was probably a good guess. An oak could stop a prop.

I lay there until my lungs came unglued and began to pump air. I used the tree I was lying against to help myself up, discovered my left wrist was broken, and my knee had a piece of tree branch in it about the size of a tent peg. I was bleeding profusely down my pants leg, and I had little desire to pull the chunk out, but I got hold of it and jerked and sat down again. The wood fragment was still in me and I felt a lot worse than I had a moment before. I gave it another jerk, and it came out this time. I tossed it aside and lay back until the pain quit churning around inside me.

My head a smidgen clearer, I was suddenly overcome with an overwhelming desire to know what Snake was doing. Decorating an assortment of trees, I hoped.

I looked up the muddy, leafy hill I’d slid down, and saw Snake at the top of it, pushing out of what was left of a clutch of young pines, all now broken off by debris of the plane. Something had caught the flesh on the top of Snake’s head and peeled back a big chunk of his cobra tattoo. I could see the bone of his bloodstained skull. He was limping like both legs were made of sticks and a chunk of canvas from the plane was draped around his neck like a scarf. He glared down on me with something less than admiration. He jerked the canvas fragment off and tossed it aside. He bent painfully and pulled up his pants leg and got a little gun, probably a .22, out of an ankle holster.

He was moving slow, but I figured it was time to move on just the same. I got a leg under me and put my back to the tree and got up. Snake fired the gun and a chunk of bark jumped out of the tree on my left.

Most definitely a .22.

I stumbled behind the tree, let myself fall on my butt so I could slide down the rest of the slope on the mud. At the bottom of the slope, it fell off dramatically and dropped through a thicker growth of brush and gave me up about six feet over a foot of creek water.

Splashing into the cold water charged me. I got my bad leg under me, which was about as supple and useful as a fence post, slopped down the creek and around a bend.

At the end of the bend, the creek went under a bridge, and it went under it through a metal culvert. The bridge supported a narrow dirt road that had given up to weeds and had probably once been a logging road.

I stumbled to the road and was about to climb out of the creek and cross it, when I saw the culvert the water was running into was mostly blocked by accumulated pine needles, leaves, and branches.

It occurred to me, that if I could ease that debris back, I could slip inside the culvert and pull it to me. If Snake wasn’t looking just right, he might not realize the culvert was as wide and deep as it was, and he’d go on by. That would give me a chance to sneak out later, and get back to Arnold and Price and the car.

It wasn’t a military plan up there with D-Day, but I didn’t feel all that good. In fact, I felt light headed and delirious from all the banging around I’d gone through and all the blood I’d lost.

I got hold of the debris and pushed it aside without pulling it up, and wiggled into the culvert head first, crawled on my hands and knees until only my feet were touching the refuse. I used the top of my foot to pull the stuff back down. It grew darker. The water sounded loud inside the culvert.

The pain in my leg was only a little worse than if it were being sawed off with a dull rock, and my wrist had taken on the appearance of a fleshy baseball. I used my good hand to palm the mud on the bottom of the culvert, and pulled myself forward, toward the other end, which was unblocked by nature’s dandruff.

When I got there, I cautiously stuck my head out and looked down. The water had eaten out a pretty fair drop on this side, ten feet maybe before you hit the creek and deeper water than the other side. Three or four feet perhaps.

I pulled back inside the culvert and listened to my breathing. It seemed stereophonic in there. I slowed and softened it by breathing deeply through my nose and letting it out easy through my mouth.

Back down the far end of the culvert I could hear Snake stumbling slowly along, the splashing of the creek water echoing up through the culvert like a megaphone. I hoped that the leaves and needles that had bunched there would fool him.

Closer he came, the dumber I felt. All I had done was climb into the mouth of a cannon with the fuse about to be lit. I felt about in the bed of the culvert for some weapon, but there was just cold water and mud. I checked my pockets and came up with the wadcutters and the pocket knife Arnold had given me. I dropped the wadcutters and opened the knife and held it. I noticed that the blood from my leg was coloring the water, running a dark stream over the lip of the opening and down into the creek. I hoped it had grown dark enough that if Snake looked he wouldn’t realize what he was seeing.

Snake stumped and splashed along until he reached the culvert and stopped.

I held my breath. I looked down past my legs, down the twelve foot length of the culvert. Through a rent in the debris, I could see Snake’s legs. He hesitated only a moment, then I heard him scrambling up the side of the bank and onto the road.

I listened for footsteps above me, but heard nothing. Was the road too thick to hear? Had I fooled him? Or was Snake standing up there thinking things over?

Then I knew what he was doing. He was leaning over the edge of the road, toward the open end of the culvert. I could smell him and I could see his shadow darkening the opening, blocking out the last red drips of the sun.

I scooted up close to the mouth of the culvert and cocked the knife back and held my breath. Snake hung his head over and down, looked inside. I could see the little dark caverns where his eyes lived, but not the eyes themselves. It was strange, being looked at that way and not seeing the eyes that were looking. He dropped the hand with the .22 in it into view and I pushed off with my good leg and went straight at him and jabbed the knife toward one of those dark spots where an eye lived.

Snake snapped his head to the side, and my blade went into this cheek, hit bone and ripped free of his flesh. He bellowed and the sound of it bounced about my close quarters and the .22 went off and put a shot into the bank around the culvert. He tried to get his hands back and under him to pull himself up, but I got my injured arm around his neck and tugged him, pulled him off the road and halfway over the lip of the culvert. I tried to hold him that way while I plunged the knife into the side of his neck, but he fell the rest of the way off the road and over the edge. The momentum of his fall, and me still holding him, jerked me out of the culvert and sent me banging into the bank beneath the culvert, tumbling into the water below, on top of him. As we fell, I saw the .22 pistol come free of him, heard it hit somewhere on the far bank, then we were underwater.

I came up as he did, pivoted on my good leg and got my bad arm around his neck from behind, tried to choke him with it. He got his chin down and I couldn’t do what I wanted to do. It was like trying to squeeze the bone out of the leg of a rhinoceros.

I brought the knife around and jabbed him in the side. He made a sound like a man straining to shit, swung his right elbow back and caught me in the side and made my legs buckle. But I hung on. I knew if I let go of him, he was going to be mad.

I put my foot in the back of one of his knees and pushed, keeping my grip on his throat with my arm. His leg bent and he went down again, face first under the shallow water. I went under with him a little, then he arched his back and lifted me into the air, raised his head slowly. I was losing my grip on his throat. He had his fingers buried into the ball that had once been my wrist and he was squeezing so hard it was giving me hemorrhoids. I brought the knife around, over my forearm, yanked my forearm away, and jerked back with the knife.

He twisted sideways and sent me backwards. I hit on my back in the water, got my good leg under me and rolled to my right, started climbing onto the bank, but it was too steep and too muddy for me to make it all the way. I turned on my back and held the knife cocked and ready.

Snake had wobbled to his feet. He stood in the middle of the creek with a hand over his throat. Wet darkness seeped between his fingers. The final redness of the dying sun bled over his already bloody head, the deep wound I had made in his cheek. He staggered toward me, almost reached me, then went to his knees in the water. He was making a sound like a pig with slop in its nostrils. He heaved and spat blood and crawled through the water and got up on the bank beside me, and lay on his belly. I turned my head to look at him, and he turned to look at me. He went to an elbow and pushed over on his back and slid down the bank until his feet were in the water. He lay there and held his throat and made a rasping noise, worked his mouth like a guppy.

Some part of me, a stupid part, felt sorry for the poor sonofabitch.

I shivered with the wet cold. I closed my eyes for a moment, or maybe it was a week. When I opened them, someone was easing down the creek bank above me. That someone was using a shotgun to support himself. That someone laid the shotgun down and bent over me, said, “Bubba.”

Arnold’s face seemed to be melting in front of me.

“I thought you weren’t up to it,” I said.

“I got bored,” Arnold said. “Besides, I couldn’t just leave it to you, little brother.”

“I think he’s still alive,” I said.

Arnold took the pocket knife from my hand and closed it carefully, leaned forward and pushed it into my pocket. He got the shotgun, rose up using it as a crutch, waded into the water and stood straddling Snake’s legs. He looked down at Snake’s face, watched his mouth open and close and bubble blood.

Arnold tossed the shotgun on the bank beside me, wobbled as he unzipped his pants and set himself free. He took a short breath and waited. Eventually, he began to pee in Snake’s face.

Snake turned his face only slightly. He didn’t have the strength to do any more than that.

Arnold said to me. “Used to be, I could put out a fire.” Then to Snake: “Piss on you, anyway, Stinky. This is for Bubba.”

Snake had quit moving. His hand was no longer pressed to his throat. It lay there loosely, blood streaming between the fingers, urine filling his dead eyes and his open mouth.

Arnold shook the dew off his lily and packed up and zipped up. He made slow cautious steps out of the water and onto the bank. His pants around his hip were dark with blood. He took a deep breath. He said, “Now, let’s see if I can haul your big ass out of here, Bubba-son.”

   If you enjoyed
Waltz of Shadows
, maybe you’ll like 
Freezer Burn
, too. It’s another novel by the inestimable Mr. Lansdale, now available as an e-book from Gere Donovan Press. It starts like this:

   
BILL ROBERTS DECIDED TO ROB THE FIRECRACKER STAND
on account he didn’t have a job and not a nickel’s worth of money and his mother was dead and kind of freeze-dried in her bedroom.

Well, not completely freeze-dried. Actually, she stunk, but she seemed to be holding her own, having only partially melted into the mattress, and if he kept the door closed and pointed a fan that way to blow back the smell, it wasn’t so bad.

The firecracker stand was out on the highway, and it was the week of the Fourth of July, and the stand stayed open reasonably late every night, so after a couple nights watching, seeing lots of people out there buying firecrackers, Bill decided it was a good place to heist.

He figured he ought to hit it kind of late in the night so there’d be plenty of money. He thought he might steal a few firecrackers too. He liked the teepee-shaped kind that spewed sparkles of colors all over the place, then finished by blowing up. Those were his favorites by far, and he thought if the stand had any, he might just take some, and if they didn’t have any, he thought some Black Cats and some Roman candles would do.

The stand was almost directly across the highway from where he lived with his mother’s body, so he didn’t want to just walk over and rob it, and he didn’t want to drive his car over there either, ’cause he figured someone sitting there all day in the stand looking across the highway might have noticed it parked under the sweet gum tree next to the house, and if they did, and he drove over there and robbed the stand, sure as shit,ހ8 someone would remember his car. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure that one.

Bill began to consider the angles.

One angle he was sure of was, now that his mother had died at the age of about ten million, there wouldn’t be any more checks signed by her for cashing. He had practiced writing her name until he had worn out about a half dozen ballpoint pens, but never could feel confident about the way he put it down. The checks had started to stack up now, all the way to seven, and he didn’t think he could get away with forgery. His mother had relished a distinct style in penmanship that only a chicken scratching in cow shit might duplicate with authenticity.