Free Freezer Burn by Joe R. Lansdale Page B

held the moonlight and it fell butter smooth over her skin, delighted to be there. The white smoke from her cigarette was rising up into the night and floating over her like a venomous cloud. Somewhere off in the distant dark a cow bellowed sadly, as if it had just figured out its true purpose in life.
    Bill walked up behind Gidget. “Nice night, huh.” She didn’t turn to look at him. “Get lost, shithead. You ain’t gettin’ nothin’.”
    “I’m just being friendly.”
    “Howdy. Now fuck off, pencil dick.”
    “You ain’t very nice.”
    “No, I ain’t, and there ain’t no reason for you to be out here hustlin’ my ass. I don’t fuck freaks. Let me smoke my cigarette. It’s about all the fun I get.”
    “I just want to talk.”
    “Sure you do. Now fuck off, or I’ll tell Frost you were bothering me.”
    “You’re his woman, I wouldn’t try to hustle you none.”
    “Bad enough I got to be in this freak show. I don’t want to buddy up to a pomegranate head. Screw off. Now!”
    Bill turned and trudged back through the gap in the trailers, throwing up little heaps of pasture as he went. He thought: Hell, I ain’t no pomegranate head. I’m just bug-bit and allergic. Ain’t Frost told her that?
    For want of anything better to do, and to help nurse his trampled feelings, he went over to the Ice Man’s trailer and got in line. Conrad, on break, came strolling by on all fours. He saw Bill in line.
    “You ain’t got to stand in line you want to see somethin’,” Conrad said. “Go on in. You’re privileged.”
    “Hey, Fido,” said a guy in line dressed in a red and white barber pole jacket and rust-colored slacks. He had less grease on his hair than Phil, but he certainly had enough up there to do him and still deep-fry a chicken. “Everyone ought to wait in line, even pimple head here.”
    “He works for the carnival,” Conrad said.
    “It’s all right,” Bill said. “I don’t mind waitin’.”
    “You don’t have to wait,” Conrad said.
    “I say he does,” said Barber Pole.
    “Say what you want,” Conrad said.
    Barber Pole mentally flipped over a series of insults and finally arrived at: “Hey, Fido. You do it doggie style?”
    A man standing with Barber Pole, a jar-headed redneck with a tavern tumor and white shoes that were brand-new about 1968, snickered. “A face like that, he don’t do it any kinda style.”
    Conrad, accustomed to insults, sat back on hishaunches and fished for a cigarette. He gave Barber Pole and his pal a contemptuous look, like a cantankerous dog who won’t do a trick in front of his master’s friends. “Who the fuck dresses you, Ronald McDonald?” Conrad put the smoke between his lips. “I had a coat like that, I’d shit on it before I wore it.” He lit the cigarette. “It’d make it look about three times better.”
    “Why you freaky piece of trash,” said Barber Pole, moving toward Conrad.
    Conrad held up one leather-wrapped hand. “You’re gonna lose your place in line, you step out. And worse, you might get your funky redneck ass whipped.”
    Now everyone in the Ice Man line glanced apprehensively at Conrad and Barber Pole, tried to appear as if they weren’t really looking. Curious, but not wanting to be sucked into things.
    “I ought to kick you,” said Barber Pole, but he hadn’t come any nearer.
    Conrad plucked the cigarette from his mouth and flicked it away. “What you ought to do is get you a decent haircut and a better run of clothes from the Goodwill and maybe scrape a layer off your teeth and drain your hairdo, is what you ought to do. And if you folded some paper or cardboard thick enough in them shoes, they might give you a half inch of needed height.”
    The man came out of the line then, and Conrad, not really making any effort about it, reached into his red overalls and produced a razor and flicked it open with his left hand and brought out another pack of cigarettes with his right and used the razor to slice the top.