Free Freezer Burn by Joe R. Lansdale

a cigarette, looking across the field, through a barbed wire fence, at a bunch of trees and some cows milling about.
    He decided right then wasn’t any way she had a dick. She was all woman. Bill thought about trying to make small talk, but the way he looked he didn’t want to do it. He walked back into the camp and waited for nightfall and thought about how things might be going with the law.
    He wondered if they were on to him or if he could go home. He wondered how his Mama was doing in the bedroom. If any more of her had melted down and if some kind of bugs had gotten into the house and were crawling all over her.
    He got home, and everything was all right, first thing he had to do was get rid of Mama. Maybe drag her out back on that mattress and set her on fire or something. Pick up what was left with a yard rake, bag it, and send it to the dump.
    Shit, Bill thought. I can’t do anything right. Can’t even do a simple robbery without it going bad. That goddamn string on the mask breaking, the flat tire, the deputy, Fat Boy and Chaplin biting the big one. AndMama dying and having the kind of handwriting she did and me not being able to copy it. There is the source of my entire problem. Her stinginess and her bad handwriting.
    Way things were going, he was going to end up in jail, or if that didn’t happen and he got away with things, then he might have to get a job.
    The thought of that made him weak in the knees. This damn freak show was work enough and already he didn’t like it, but it beat the alternatives.
    Whatever they were.

Fourteen

    The night arrived and Frost came back. He called out this and he called out that. He pointed and nodded, shook his head and stood with hands on his hips. Things began to happen.
    Trailers and cars were pulled in a tight circle. Battery trailers powered up the lights and made them bright. The lights were white and yellow, red and blue, a tossing of green and gold. The whirligig in the glow of the lights became fresh and new, an alien craft waiting to take on passengers.
    The crude paintings on the sides of the trailers changed as well. They became sexual, alluring. There was cheap carnival music playing, and barkers, or talkers as they called themselves, stood in front of tents and trailers and called out as cars parked and people entered the carnival through the gap in the wall of trailers where the tickets were sold.
    Bill didn’t have his own place as a freak, as Frost had suggested, and he didn’t want one. The idea disgusted him. He was ashamed enough to walk about with his face messed up the way it was, so he pushedhimself back into the shadows by the Ice Man’s trailer and waited there and watched.
    It was strange to see what the trailers and tents had become. How it all seemed so fine and rare. Children laughed and ate cotton candy from the stands, and young women in short-shorts and tight-fitting shirts walked about and laughed and seemed impressed and amused by everything. Boys with acne and greasy hair poked each other with elbows, looked at girls and grinned, then laughed one to the other.
    The freak tents and trailers were busy, but the Ice Man’s business was slow. However, as people came and left the Ice Man’s trailer, the word spread, and the same people who had been came back, and new ones came, and as the night went on the line grew and stayed long.
    Two middle-aged policemen, one slim and one fat, came strolling through. On duty, probably, sent to see that all was well and the freaks weren’t planning a hostile takeover of the town. The cops seemed to be enjoying the women in shorts as much as the acne-faced boys. They had the same grins and elbow motions.
    From time to time men and women stopped and watched Bill in the shadows, his face looking all the more strange there, holding darkness behind knots and grooves of mosquito injury. But no one spoke to him, until the cops.
    One of the cops, the slim one, saw him in the shadows and said, “What’re