Collectibles, page 13
She kept driving a little further until we pulled over at a small hill with a metal structure like the kind cows hide under in the heat of day. Cathy Day seemed to know the spot well. I didn’t inquire.
We waited a moment to gather our thoughts, and by that I mean for Cathy Day to light up a cigarette. She instructed me to grab the shovel from the trunk as she remained seated and fussed about with her lighter. I opened the passenger side door, delicately situated the banjo in my place, then got out.
The dry desert air whipped across my skin and I wished now I had remembered to grab a sweater from back at the cabin. I pulled the trunk handle and the hatch rose with a sound like a whooshing of air.
“You just carry this thing around with you?”
I held the shovel up towards the rearview mirror where I knew Cathy Day could see me, watched her take a long drag, then blow little ringlets from her ruby lips.
“As a matter of fact,” she yelled over her shoulder.
She took a final drag, then tossed the cigarette on the ground, opened her own car door and got out. She walked around the back to where I stood and stared at me for a moment longer than what was comfortable. She was like that.
She finally broke gaze and closed the trunk. We walked around to the back door pointed away from the roadside in the very far off distance and yanked it open. There was Jerry, still wrapped up like King Tut. I thought for a moment of my childhood mummy fascination, then drifted to Steve Martin on Saturday Night Live. I considered saying something, but thought better of it.
I peeked over the body towards the front passenger seat, noted the banjo where I had left it, decided to transfer it to the trunk, then went back to the matter at hand.
“You grab his feet,” she said.
“Why me? Why are you in charge here?”
Cathy Day didn’t answer and I didn’t push it. We both knew why.
I crawled over Jerry’s body. Cathy Day pulled and I pushed with as much finesse as was warranted until he was out of the back seat and onto the desert earth. He was no heavier than a herd of pregnant elephants. I made an ouch face when his head bounced on the step rail, then again when he hit the dirt.
“Goddamnit,” I said.
A small bloom of red spread across my high thread count sheet where the back of his head rested.
“What?” Cathy asked. “Were you actually planning to use it after this?”
I didn’t answer.
She had him from underneath the shoulders, more or less, with my hands wrapped awkwardly around his swathed ankles. As we struggled against his weight, his left hand slipped out from an opening in the sheet and flopped towards the ground like a flaccid penis. His fingertips grazed the dirt as we walked, leaving a small trail. We had made it several minutes down a dark path before I realized we’d left the shovel back at the car.
As though she were reading my mind, she said, “We’ll make a second trip.” It was that kind of eerie shit that made me wonder who she really was.
“Are you worried about the banjo?” I asked.
“Nope.”
We made it to a dip in the terrain and put Jerry on the ground next to some shrubbery like we were setting aside our morning coffee mug on the kitchen counter. There were no clear markers around, but this didn’t seem to bother Cathy Day.
“I’ll go back and get it,” I said. But I knew it would be me whether I offered or not.
“I’ll make sure this asshole stays put.”
“Tough job,” I said, and turned back towards the car.
∗ ∗ ∗
We arrived back at my place just before sunrise, went inside and sat at the kitchen table. I held the banjo, not too keen to let it far from my sight.
“So what now?” I asked.
“Nothing. It’s done. Jerry got what he deserved and no one’s going to be crying over his absence.”
“I know that. I mean us. The banjo.”
“You should keep it.”
“I’m not so sure that’s a good idea,” I said.
She smirked, and shifted in her seat. “Maybe we take this little act on the road. Just like you wanted.”
“Maybe,” I said.
She pushed her chair back, stood from the table and walked around next to me. She patted me on the shoulder, then left.
I sat there for the rest of the day thinking. About Jerry. About the stories of his in-laws. About what Cathy Day had said about hitting the road. I wondered what would become of Jerry’s Mustang. If there really was something to the banjo knowing good from bad and why it had spared me and taken him.
By the afternoon I decided I’d done enough thinking and took the banjo to the bedroom. I positioned it gingerly on my lap, this time with a new appreciation for all it had seen. I wished I could know what really happened that day at the school auditorium with Cathy Day’s aunt.
“Can you really tell the soul of someone?” I asked this out loud, in the voice that had been given back to me.
No answer.
I strummed the strings gently and hummed. I guess there was only one way to find out.
The Skull Collector
Joe R. Lansdale
* * *
There were three of them, but the guy in front of me did most of the talking.
“What I’m thinking here, sweetie, is you aren’t telling us all you know.”
“You’re thinking that, are you?” I said. “That’s where you’re wrong. You do all this, hurt me enough, scare me enough, then I’ll tell you something, but it won’t be the truth. I don’t know the truth. You’re wasting your time, and mine.”
That was a lie. I knew where what they wanted was, but I figured once they knew, I could kiss my ass goodbye.
“Like I care about your time, sister.”
“I like to get my nails done on Wednesday, so time matters to me.”
“You’re a tough broad, I’ll give you that. Here’s what I’m thinking, though, about that lie part. We find out you told us a lie, then we got to make it harder on you. Being tied to a chair and slapped around, that isn’t going to be all of it. We think maybe we might have to start carving you up. Oh yeah. This is Wednesday, and Wednesday is done.”
I wasn’t actually that tough. I was hoping to die of a heart attack. I feared what they might do to me, feared it to the point of a possible surprise bowel movement, but there’s something in me besides shit, and it makes me a smart mouth when I’m in danger. And frequently when I’m not. It’s like the skunk that when frightened sprays stink. I’m frightened, I run my mouth.
“You can look all kinds of places, but I don’t have it. Turned out there wasn’t anything in the grave. And by the way, where’d you get that aftershave? It’s making my eyes water.”
“Oh,” said the tall one leaning against the wall, “she’s got a sharp tongue.” This guy was probably six-one and he was a guy went in heavy for the hair product. He had enough oil in his dark locks to soothe all the squeaky hinges in creation with enough left over to grease a transmission.
“Tongue won’t be so sharp if I cut it out,” said the main one, the talker.
“Then you won’t get to know what I know is nothing, not unless I lie to you in sign language. And I don’t know sign language.”
“Oh, shut up,” said the man in front of me, the talker. “You’re not funny.” He had on what at first looked like an expensive suit, but the way it hung on him proved different. It was more like a man tent without the mosquito net. I had just noticed that. When he had been hitting me my powers of observation had been limited.
“I think she’s funny,” said the third man, a fat fellow with a crew cut and checkered pants that he must have bought via a time machine trip to the nineteen seventies. He had on a shirt so green Irish grass would have been embarrassed to grow.
“Just shoot her, cut her throat, get it over with,” said the tall one leaning against the wall. “She don’t know nothing. She’d have said by now.”
The tall one eyed me carefully. I believed him when he threatened to carve me up. After hours of being tied to a chair in the basement of an abandoned high school, I feared that heart attack wasn’t coming to put me out of my misery. I was way too healthy for that.
“I say we get right to cutting her,” the fat man said. “A little at a time. Everyone talks when you do that. We can get lies out of the way quick. She don’t know nothing, well, we get to carve her anyway. How do you like that idea, baby?”
“Not all that appealing,” I said.
The main talker nodded. “What I think we’re going to do, missy, is do just that. We’re going to cut those clothes off of you, put you on the floor there, and start carving. But we’ll do it slow, just in case maybe you do have something to say. You talk, well, we can get it over with quick.”
“What a treat,” I said.
That’s when I heard the door open and Ruby stepped in. Her dark hair was done up in a bun. She was wearing jeans and a droopy brown sweatshirt, holding a sawed off ten-gauge shotgun. She looked like she could eat floor tacks and crap an anvil. Ruby’s about five-five, but in that moment, she was Wonder Woman carrying a cannon.
My interrogator, who was focused on me, looked up just as Ruby cut down with that sawed off ten-gauge. There was a roar like a lion and my interrogator’s head went away, and what looked like a flight of bloody bees smashed into the wall. The body dropped right in front of me, getting blood on my tennis shoes. I liked those shoes.
The tall one against the wall started to rock forward, reach under his coat. I heard the sharp snap of the shotgun being pumped, and the lion roared again, and suddenly the tall man had a wet, red hole in his middle. Like my interrogator, he collapsed.
The fat one made a dash for the door on the far side, but the lion roared, and the shot caught him in the lower back. He hit the floor and tried to crawl, but he couldn’t do it. Ruby pumped the shotgun, walked over to him and fired. Pieces of him and the shot from the load bounced around the room like someone had dropped a box full of ball bearings and a can of red paint.
Ruby put the shotgun on the floor and took out her pocket knife. She cut the ropes around my ankles and feet, then the one around my neck that was fastened to the back of the wooden chair. Oddly, it wasn’t until then that I realized my ass hurt.
When I tried to stand up, I had a hard time. I didn’t know if it was from being tied so long, or if it was fear. I decided it was both.
“You nearly shot me,” I said. When I spoke, I could hardly hear myself. My ears were ringing from all that shotgun fire.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Did too.”
“Don’t start crying, Crystal. We haven’t time for that.”
“Screw you. You took long enough.”
By then we were already moving toward the door.
∗ ∗ ∗
Most of my Wednesdays aren’t like that.
I guess I ought to not start in the middle of a true-life story, or maybe it’s not the middle. Hell. I don’t know. But let me tell you how I got to that chair, and then I’ll move beyond.
What I do for a living is I work—worked—for a fence. What the fence does—Ruby is her name—is she buys stolen goods and resells them for a profit. She works out of a pawn shop she owns, does legitimate business too. But when it’s the right stuff, she does another kind of business. She knows what’s stolen and what isn’t, of course, and though there are some things she won’t deal in (stolen show dogs), there are a lot of things she’s glad to buy and resell, and she’s been known to act as a go-between and do all manner of things having nothing to do with pawn shops or fencing.
Weirdly, she once fenced some stolen bull semen from a prize bull, and this rancher guy bought it, came back later, said it turned out to be a dud. The heifer didn’t fatten with calf. He wanted his money back. He was a tough old guy, Ruby said. Big, could crack walnuts with harsh language, chase a squirrel up a tree with bad breath. She had to use an axe handle to sort the guy out a little. It wasn’t too bad. He was able to leave on his own, though not without a certain amount of pain and difficulty, one hand on his bleeding head, the other pressed against his broken ribs. That’s when I realized not only does Ruby deal in stolen goods, she deals in violence, if the need arises. Her and her brothers, Pooty and Boo-boo.
Actually, that’s not their real names. Their names are Arnold (Arnie), he’s Pooty, and Benjamin (Ben), and he’s Boo-boo. They’re two big guys, arms like Popeye, faces like car wrecks. They were always nice to me, though. I should point that out. Of course, Ruby and the boys, as she calls them, are my cousins, so they feel a bit obligated. Cousins once removed; I think. Hell, I don’t know exactly. I get lost in the weeds when you get that far into family backgrounds. Dad once said, “In our family tree about the only thing you’ll find is monkeys and broken limbs.”
Here’s how it started.
∗ ∗ ∗
So, I’m hanging out at the house trying to read War and Peace and learning I didn’t like it, when the phone rang, and it was Ruby. That’s how it started, with a phone call and my boredom with War and Peace.
“Hey, want to make some money?” she said.
I was as broke as my ethics, so I said, “Does a bear shit in the woods?”
“What if they live in the zoo?”
“Yes, Ruby, I want to make some money.”
“This is a special job. It doesn’t require contacts or even a lot of smarts.”
“Then I’m perfect for it,” I said.
“It’s really not a biggie. It’s not a fence, and it’s not a pawn.”
“Is it big enough for me to get out of bed, leave the house?”
“I meant what you have to do is no biggie, but yeah, it’s big enough to get out of bed, go out to the graveyard in the middle of the night and make a whole lot of money for a short amount of digging.”
I laughed.
Ruby was silent.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You’re serious? A graveyard?”
“Serious as a yeast infection.”
∗ ∗ ∗
That night Ruby picked me up in her black van and away we went. I was, as Ruby suggested, wearing work clothes. Had on boots, jeans, and a chambray shirt, hair tied back.
I looked over my shoulder to see what was rattling in the back of the van. Two shovels. A ten-gauge shotgun, a couple of beer cans.
“This is kind of out of my line of work,” I said.
“I can do it by myself, but what I thought, while I’m digging, you hold the shotgun, you’re digging, I hold it.”
“Shotgun? What the hell, Ruby? This seems more like a job for Pooty and Boo-boo, not your petite cousin. I was thinking digging was out of my line, but gun work, way out of my line. I think you can take me back to the house.”
“First, my brothers are out of town. And I take you back, you’ll be giving up five thousand dollars for one night’s work. Not even a whole night.”
I thought about what five thousand dollars could do. Keep the lights and water on, pay the rent, buy some real food. And I needed new underwear. I washed mine much more I’d be wearing lint.
“As long as we don’t have to shoot the caretaker, groundskeeper, whatever they call those folks, then I guess I’ll stick.”
“It’s nothing like that. It’s just that, well, there could be competition, and I like to be able to discourage them. Also, there’s no groundskeeper. I did some research. There’s a lot of old stones and some weeds, and Etta Place.”
“Etta Place?”
“You know, Butch and Sundance. At the end of the Old West days. They had this pretty school teacher with them when they were robbing banks and trains. Or maybe she was a prostitute. No one really knows. Maybe she was a palm reader and a part-time ukulele player for all I know. Anyway, the skull collector wants her head.”
“Wait a minute. Katherine Ross?”
“She played her in the movie, yeah. But Etta, she was real. She left them in South America and came back to the States, disappeared. It’s one of history’s mysteries. Like why people used to wear turtlenecks with medallions the size of hubcaps.
“Anyway, she came back, and no one had a lead on her. Not the Pinkertons, who looked all over, not the historians. No one. But there was a rumor she had ended up in Texas, where she may have been from originally. That her name was really something else, that she went back to that name and worked in a brothel, later became a school teacher. All kinds of stories. And then the diary turned up. Not hers, but her sister’s. There were answers inside.”
In a nutshell, this is what Ruby told me. What Ball told her, and what she surmised.
Seems Etta Place, whose real name was Ethel Dodgers, was actually a former music teacher who got bored with teaching brats to play “Chopsticks,” and ran off with Butch and Sundance, then returned to Texas. She told her sister, Eunice, about her adventures with the robbers. Started teaching music again, died of what might have been the Spanish flu, and was buried in a cemetery just outside of Tyler, Texas, which was not too far from where we lived.
After her death, Eunice’s diary ended up in a pawn shop, was bought by one Seabury Ball, who collected such things. Ball read it, and believed it. Knew from reading it that there was something he wanted. He wasn’t called the Skull Collector for nothing. He wanted Etta’s skull, one of the most renowned lost-to-history individuals there ever was, and he might be the only person in the world at that moment in time who knew where she was buried, and he wanted her dug up and delivered.
This, by the way, is also called grave robbing and it’s not legal. But Ball had the money to buy his collector’s items from the right people, and he was good at hiding his purchases. For example, rumor is he has the skulls of the Apache warrior, Geronimo, the noggins of Billy the Kid and Jimmy Hoffa, and rumor was someone ought to check Lincoln’s tomb.
Problem was, Ball, an elderly gentleman, had a sugar baby, and one night when he was working on greasing the weasel, his enthusiasm for her, and for the skull, led him to make with too much pillow talk.
