The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology (54 page)
Read The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology Online
Authors: Christopher Golden
So, this time I’m talking about, we walked over there from school to buy a couple of soda pops and shoot some pool and slip a cigarette and talk about girls and tail, like we’d had any, and when we got there, Rugger’s cousin, Ray Martin Winston, was there along with Rugger and a retarded kid who cleaned up and kept sodas in the soda machine. The kid always wore a red baseball cap and overalls, lived in the back, and Rugger usually referred to him as ‘the retard’. The kid went along with this without any kickback. He was as dedicated to Rugger as a seeing-eye dog, and about as concerned with day-to-day activities as a pig was about algebra.
Ray Martin was older than we were, but not by much. Maybe three years. He had dropped out of school as soon as he could, and I had no idea what he did for a living, though it was rumored he stole and sold and ran a few whores, one of which was said to be his sister, though any of it could have been talk. He was a peculiar-looking fella, one of those who seem as if their lives will be about trouble, and that was Ray Martin. He was lean but not too tall, had a shock of blond hair, which he took great care to lightly oil and comb. It was his best feature. It was thick and fell down on his forehead in a Beach Boy kind of wave. His face always made me think of a hammerhead shark. It had to do with his beady black eyes and the way his nose dropped straight down from his thick forehead and along the length of his face until it stopped just above lips as thin as razor cuts. His chin looked like a block of stone. He had chunky white teeth, all them about the size of sugar cubes. He would have made a great Dick Tracy villain. He had a reptilian way of moving, or at least that’s how it seemed to me, as if he undulated and squirmed. I guess in the back of my head there was a piece of me itching to find out just how dangerous he really was.
We shot a game at our table, while Ray Martin shot alone at one of the other three, knocking the cue ball around, racking and breaking and taking shots. Free time had given him good aim and a good arm for the table.
I was feeling my oats that day, and I looked over and said, ‘You’re pretty good playin’ yourself.’
Ray Martin raised his head and twisted it, cracked his neck as he did, and gave me a look that I had never seen before. Rugger came over quickly with a beer from the cooler, handed it to him, and said, ‘Ought to be someone comin’ in pretty soon. Maybe you can get a game up.’
Ray Martin nodded, took the wet beer bottle, sipped it, and examined me with the precision of a sniper about to pop off a shot. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘That could happen.’
He went over and sat in a chair by the wall and drank his beer and kept his eye on me, one hand in his baggy pants pocket. I turned back to the game, and Donald leaned over close and said, ‘He didn’t take that well. He thought it was some kind of crack.’
‘I meant it as a crack,’ I said.
‘I know. And he took it as a crack.’
‘You think I’m worried?’
Donald’s face changed a little. He licked his lips. I thought his lower jaw shook. ‘No. I’m not worried about you. I know you can take care of yourself.’
I didn’t believe him altogether. I had seen that spark of doubt in his eyes, and it annoyed me. I didn’t like him thinking I might not be as bad and tough as I thought I was. I saw the retarded kid glaring at me, his mouth hanging open, and it somehow hit me that the kid thought the same thing, though truth was, if that kid had two thoughts, they probably canceled each other out.
I gave Ray Martin a glance, just to show him my ball sack hadn’t shrunk, and his stare was still locked on me. I won’t lie to you, I was feeling brave, but there was something about the way he looked at me that clawed its way down inside of me. I had never seen anyone with that kind of look, and I wrote it off to the way his face was and that no matter what he was thinking and no matter where he was looking, he’d look like that. Hell, his old mother probably looked like that; she probably had to tie a pork chop around her neck to get fucked.
I peeked at Rugger. He was looking at me, too, but with a different kind of look, like someone watching a dog darting across the highway in front of an eighteen-wheeler, wondering how it was going to turn out. I thought maybe he was hoping I’d make it. When he and my father were kids, my daddy had been on his side in an oil-field fight that had become a kind of Marvel Creek legend. Him and dad against six others, and they had won, and in style, sending two of their foes to the hospital. I guess, through my dad, that gave me and the old man a kind of connection, though now that I look back on it, he wasn’t that old. Probably in his forties then, balding, with a hard potbelly, arms that looked as if they had been pumped full of air, legs too short and thin for the bulk of his upper body - a barrel supported by reeds.
This concern and Donald’s doubt didn’t set well with me, and it made me feel all the more feisty. I was about to say something smart to Ray Martin, when the front door opened and a man about thirty came in. He was wearing khaki pants and a plaid shirt and a blue-jean jacket and tie- up boots. He was as dark as Ray Martin was blond and pale. ‘How’re y’all?’ he said. He sounded like someone who had just that day stepped off the farm for the first time and had left his turnips outside. I looked out through the front door, which was glass with a roll-down curtain curled above it, and parked next to the curb I could see a shiny new Impala. It wasn’t a car that looked like it went with the fella, but it was his.
Rugger nodded at him, and the fella said, ‘I was wonderin’ you could tell me how to get to Tyler?’ Rugger told him, and then the hick asked, ‘You got any food to sell here?’
‘Some potato chips, peanuts,’ Rugger said. ‘Got a Coke machine. We don’t fry no hamburgers or nothin’.’
‘I guess I’ll just have some peanuts then.’
Rugger went over and pulled a package off the rack, and the hick paid for them. He went to the Coke machine and lifted the lid and reached down in the cold water and threaded a cola through the little metal maze that led to where you pulled it out after putting in your money. You don’t see those kinds of machines any more, but for a while, back in the sixties, they were pretty popular.
He pulled the cap off with the opener on the side of the box and turned around and said, ‘Ain’t nothin’ like a store-bought Co-Cola,’ as if there were any other kind. He swigged about half the drink in one gulp, pulled it down and wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and tore open his bag of peanuts with his teeth and poured them into the Coke bottle. The salt made the soda foam a little. He swigged that and chewed on the wet peanuts and came over and watched us play for a moment.
‘I’ve played this game,’ he said, showing me some crunched peanuts on his teeth.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Well, we got a full table.’
‘I see that. I do. I’m just sayin’ I know how. My old pappy taught me how to play. I like it. I’m pretty good too.’
‘Well, good for you,’ I said. ‘Did your old pappy teach you not to bother folks when they’re playin’?’
He smiled, looked a little wounded. ‘Yes, he did. I apologize. ’
‘Hey, you,’ Ray Martin called.
We all looked.
‘You want to play some pool?’ he said to the hayseed. ‘I’ll play you.’
‘Sure, I’ll play,’ the hayseed said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘But I warn you, sometimes I like to play for nickels and such.’
Ray Martin stretched his razor-thin lips and grinned those sugar-cube teeth. ‘That’s all right, yokel. We’ll play for such, as you call it.’
‘I reckon I am a bit of a yokel,’ said the fella, ‘but I prefer to be called Ross. That’s what my old mama named me.’
‘Say she did?’ Ray Martin said. ‘All right, then, Ross, I’ll ask you somethin’. You know how to play anything other than Stripes and Solids? You shoot straight pool?’
‘I know how it’s done,’ Ross said.
‘Good. Let’s you and me knock ’em around.’
It wasn’t a very exciting game. Ross got to break on the flip of a coin, and he managed to knock the cue ball in the hole right off, without so much as sending the ball’s shadow in the direction of any of his targets.
Ray Martin took his shoot, and he cleared about four balls before he missed. Ross shot one in with what looked like mostly a lucky shot, and then he missed, and then Ray Martin ran what was left. They had bet a dollar on the game, and Ross paid up.
‘You’re good,’ Ross said.
‘I’ve heard that,’ Ray Martin said. ‘You want to go again?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Sure you do. You want to get that dollar back, don’t you?’
Ross scratched the side of his nose then shifted his testicles with one hand, as if that would help him make a decision, and said, ‘I reckon . . . Hell, all right. I’ll bet you that dollar and two more.’
‘A high roller.’
‘I got paid; I can spare a little.’
Ray Martin grinned at him as if he were a wolf that had just found an injured rabbit caught up in the briars.
By now we weren’t shooting any more, just leaning against the wall watching them, not really knowing how to play straight pool but pretending we did, acting like we knew what was going on.
The game results were similar to the first. Ray Martin chalked his cue while Ross dug a few bucks out of his wallet and paid up. Ray Martin called out, ‘Hey, Retard, get over here and rack these balls. You keep them racked, I’ll give you a quarter. You don’t, I’ll give you a kick in the ass.’
The retard racked the balls. Ross said, ‘I don’t know I want to play any more.’
‘Scared?’ Ray Martin asked.
‘Well, I know a better pool player when I see one.’
‘How about one more?’ Ray Martin said. ‘Just one more game and we’ll throw in the towel.’
Ross pursed his lips and looked like he wished he were back on the farm, maybe fucking a calf.
‘Hell, you can spare another two or three dollars, can’t you?’ Ray Martin said.
‘I guess,’ Ross said, and did that lip-pursing thing again. ‘But I tell you what: you want to go another game, let’s go ahead and play it bigger. I ain’t been winnin’, but I’m gonna bet you can’t do three in a row. My pappy always said bet on the third in a row ’cause that’s your winner.’
‘He rich?’ Ray Martin asked.
‘Well, no,’ Ross said.
Ray Martin laughed a little, a sharp little laugh like a dog barking. ‘That’s all right; even someone mostly wrong has got to be right now and again.’
‘Very well, then,’ Ross said, ‘I’m gonna trust my old pappy. I’ll bet you . . . say, ten dollars.’
‘That’s bold.’
‘Yeah, and I’m about to change my mind, now that I think about it.’
‘Oh, no,’ Ray Martin said. ‘You made the offer.’
‘Now that I think about it, it was stupid of me,’ Ross said. ‘I guess I was feelin’ kind of full of piss and vinegar. How about we drop it? My old pappy ain’t even right when he says it’s gonna rain.’
‘No. You’re on. Retard’s got ’em racked. Come on, country boy, let’s shoot.’
Of course, when it got right down to it, we were all country boys, just some of us lived in town, as if in disguise, but this Ross, he was a regular turd knocker. He tried to get out of it, said, ‘Heck, I’ll pay you a dollar to forget it. I shouldn’t have bet anything. I ain’t really no bettin’ kind of man. I’m actin’ bigger than my goldarn britches.’
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