Freezer Burn by Joe R. Lansdale Page B

beast itself. Her breasts were revealed, and she made no effort to cover herself. Slowly, she leaned forward and took hold of the sliding bedroom door. Her breasts fell forward, as if about to dive-bomb from her chest and bounce his way. Then she pulled the door closed.
    Bill caught his breath and brought the motor home back between the lines.
    About fifteen minutes later, for the first time in over a month, it began to rain. Gently at first, then a real gully-washer.

Eighteen

    Couple days later, one night after the suckers had left, Bill, unable to sleep, as usual, was outside the Ice Man’s trailer pissing in the dirt. He could have pissed inside in the toilet, but here he was out in the night with an urge to go. It was a cool night, still damp from all the rain they had been getting, and there was a low fog over everything. Bill felt as if he were in a bottle with a cotton stopper, like those killing bottles they used for bugs, where you put the bug in and soaked the cotton in alcohol or something and stuck it in the bottle top and the bug died from the fumes.
    There were still some lights left on from the carnival and there were a couple porch lights burning on trailers, and everything looked hot out there, even if it wasn’t. The whirligig had not been dismantled, and wouldn’t be until tomorrow. It looked like a wheel that had come off one of God’s toys and been forgotten.
    Bill could hear the two-headed nigger playing juke and soul music tapes in their trailer. They did that a lot and sometimes turned it up too loud and had to be gotten on to, but tonight he could hear it and it was just loud enough and he liked the song. “Soul Man.”
    He listened while he drained his lizard, then packed up and was about to step inside and crack open a J.D. Hardin Western book with fucking in it, when the tune changed and the music cranked up with the Isley Brothers singing “Shout.” He listened to that a few seconds, then the two-headed nigger’s trailer door burst open and the two-headed nigger danced out.
    Or sort of danced. Bill couldn’t rightly decide if it was dancing. He, or they, were falling all over the pasture, dipping here, jerking there. Two pea brains caught up in rhythms that a single body couldn’t define.
    They tried to go different ways and the heads were singing and weren’t very good at it. Eventually they fell down in the pasture and ended up doing what they did at meals, writhing in the wet grass, screaming and yelling, slapping at each other with their hands, causing as much damage to themselves by striking as by getting hit. They sounded drunk.
    The yelling and the music popped heads out of trailers, and Bill saw one of the heads was U.S. Grant. She was in a short nightie, and she was standing in a crack in the door, looking out to see what was going on. Bill could see a face behind her, lit up by the little porch light on her trailer. It was Phil of the Constant Half-Hard Dick. His head seemed to be floating just behind her shoulder, like a helium-filled balloon on a string. Phil’s arm was visible too, around U.S. Grant’s ample waist. He probably thought he couldn’t be seen, but Bill could see him.
    And so could Conrad.
    Due to the rain, Conrad had not been at his post on top of Frost’s trailer. Where he had been Bill was uncertain, but Conrad suddenly crossed the gap betweenthe Pickled Punk trailer and U.S. Grant’s trailer; the music and the yelling had stirred him the way it had everyone else.
    Conrad loped on all fours up the steps to U.S. Grant’s trailer and between her legs, knocking her backwards inside. In the next instant there was a bloodcurdling scream and Phil came leaping out of the trailer butt naked, a gash in his buttock, his greasy hair rolling all over his head. Blood flew out of the wound as he hopped and the drops seemed to rise up in slow motion and hang in place and become like jewels in the odd cotton-covered night and the carnival lights, then the drops fell