Darker Masques Read online

  Then these particular tales will be time-honored as well.

  Ed Gorman

  DRIFTER

  ED Gorman, who writes original and laconic horror novels under the pseudonym Daniel Ransom, won a Private Eye Writers of America nomination in 1987—for Best Novel—with his gripping The Autumn Dead (St. Martin’s Press). The San Francisco Examiner called it a “serious novel” with “a wonderful writing style” allowing Ed to “say things of substance in an entertaining way.” He does a lot of that, also, as co-publisher (with Bob Randisi) of one of the most readable writers’ mags ever, Mystery Scene. As a postscript to that, MS is also for horror readers; among the periodic contributors are James Kisner, Dean Koontz, Charles de Lint, and Richard Laymon. It’s worth noting that Ed is also the editor of two Black Lizard Anthologies of Crime Fiction and is working on a third.

  As Ransom, Gorman’s The Forsaken and Night Caller displayed writing that was “strong, fast and sleek as a bullet,” according to Dean, “lean and mean and red-blooded,” according to Joe Lansdale. This new yarn by that nice guy happens to exemplify all those qualities.

  DRIFTER

  Ed Gorman

  for Michael Seidman

  THE DENVER RIG DRIVER DUMPED ME fast when he caught me trying to stuff a pint of his whiskey down the front of my pants. I’d figured that with the dark and the rain and the way even this big mother was getting blown around on the two-lane blacktop, he’d be too busy to notice. He flipped me his middle finger as he pulled away.

  So I landed around seven o’clock that night in some town named Newkirk ten miles south of the Nebraska border, with half a pack of Luckies, two Trojans, and maybe three dollars in change to my name. I had a pocketknife, one of those babies that will do the job but that the law can’t bust you for in most states, and a backpack filled with my one change of clothes, which was exactly like the ones I was wearing except they were more or less clean.

  Newkirk had a single main street three blocks long. In the October night only two lights glowed, one for a DX station, one for Chet’s cafe. No doubt about which one I needed first.

  The kid at the DX station was trying real hard to grow a mustache—you could almost hear him trying to will that sucker into existence—and he had already grown an attitude.

  “You ain’t got no car,” he said when I asked him for the restroom key.

  “So?”

  “You’re some stranger and you ain’t got no car.”

  “I need to pee real bad, friend. I figure you’d like me to do it in your rest room rather than your street.”

  The kid had spooked blue eyes. “Strangers never been good for Newkirk. Just last year—”

  I interrupted him. “Friend, if I was a bad sort, I would’ve already hauled out my piece and stuck this little joint up. “Ain’t that about right?”

  He relaxed, but not much. Over his grease-stained coveralls he wore a brand-new high school letter jacket. He I probably had a girlfriend with a nice creamy body and they J got to spend a lot of time in front of the TV, out of the wind and cold, watching horror flicks and having the kind of sex only teenagers can have. At thirty-one, I felt old and envious. I also felt filthy. It had been four or five days now. I said something I rarely do. “Please, friend. Please.”

  I put my hand out and he filled it with one of those keys that are attached to two-pound anchors so you won’t steal them.

  “Thanks, friend.”

  He didn’t say anything, just sort of nodded.

  October had stripped the trees and put a coat of frosty silver over everything. The cold only made the dimly lit rest room smell all the worse. It was more in need of a cleaning than I was. The mirror had been shattered by somebody’s fist and I saw myself in a dozen fragmented pieces. There I was a brown lump floating in the john. I didn’t need to ask what that was. I flushed the john. Or tried to. It didn’t work.

  Laid over everything was this sickly sweet smell from I this black-and-white air-freshener deal hanging off the edge I of a condom machine. The air freshener was in the shape of I a cute little skunk.

  I got to work. On the road this way—the last real job I’d had was back in Cincinnati just before the ’82 recession, when I’d been working construction—you learn how to sponge-bath yourself fast. You take a rough paper towel and you soak it with cold water (they never have hot or even warm water) and then you soap it till it’s nice and silky almost like a real washcloth and then you do your face first and then you do under your arms and then you do down in your crotch and then you do down in your behind and then you take the BIC and you careful-like shave your face. I say careful-like because the road leaves you looking rough enough. You don’t need any help with cuts on your face.

  I finished off by combing my dark hair and brushing dust from my denim jacket and dousing a little Old Spice on the collar of my black turtleneck. There’d been a time when I’d done all right with the ladies and, looking at myself fragmented in the shattered mirror there, I thought about those days as the wind screamed outside and the light in the small, filthy rest room wavered. I used to always think, You’re a long way from home, sonny boy. But lately I’ve realized I was always kidding myself. I wasn’t a long way from home—I’d never had a home. Never.

  I was two steps out of the rest room when I saw the guy. I should have known what the kid would do. Small town, distrustful of strangers, me walking in out of the night.

  He wore a kind of baggy dark suit and a gray business hat like they always wear in ‘40s movies. He had white hair and a nose that looked almost proud of how many times it had been broken. The only thing different about him from any other cop in any other town was his eyes. You rarely saw cops with eyes sad as his.

  He came right up to me and said, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you for some identification.”

  I shrugged. “Sure.” I pulled out my wallet and showed him my driver’s license.

  “Richard Anderson. Six feet. One hundred fifty-two pounds. Blue eyes. Black hair. Place of residence, Miami.” As he read each of these off in the light on the drive, he’d look up at me to verify that what the license claimed was true. “You’re a long way from Miami.”

  As if to prove what he’d said, a dirty truck filled with bawling cattle on the way to the slaughterhouse went rumbling by.

  “Miami was a long time ago,” I said.

  “You doing anything special here?”

  “Thought I might get something to eat.”

  “And then?”

  “Then push on, I guess.”

  “That’d be a good idea.” He handed me back my wallet. “I’m Jennings, the Chief of Police.”

  I wanted to laugh. The Chief? How big a force could he command in a place like Newkirk? People’s fondness for titles always gripes me. It makes them feel like somebody. Me, I know I’m nobody and I’ve learned to face it.

  He made a big production out of looking at his watch. “You see Chet’s over there?”

  Chet’s was the diner. From here you could see a counter and a row of seats with only one guy in a Pioneer Seed Corn hat sipping coffee and forking off big chunks of what looked to be apple pie. Other man that the place was empty.

  “Yep,” I said.

  “Good. You go over there and you tell Mindy that you’re a friend of mine and that I told her to give you the special tonight—that’s Swiss steak and peas and mashed potatoes and apple pie—and let me tell you, Mindy’s apple pie is a pisser—and then I want you to have her put it on my tab.”

  “Hey,” I said, “that’s damn nice of you.”

  He stared at me with those sad eyes of his—so sad they made me a little nervous—and then he said “Then I want you on the road. You can pick up the highway about a quarter mile east of here and you can get a ride in no time. You understand me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He was just about to say something else when a pack of kids, dressed up variously as Freddie in Nightmare on Elm Street, Darth Vader, Spock, and se
veral others I didn’t quite recognize, pushed past us.

  “Hi, Chief Jennings!” several of them called. And then, “Trick or treat!”

  They encircled him.

  From his trouser pocket he took a fistful of change and then, standing right there on the DX drive with gasoline fumes strong on the bitter night wind, he gave each of them a quarter.

  He also gave them a small lecture. “Now you be sure to all stay together, you hear me? And I want you in by”—he glanced at his watch—“seven-thirty.” He nodded to the one who looked like Freddie. “Walter, I’m making you responsible, you understand?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Seven-thirty.”

  “Yessir.”

  Then they were off again, caught up in themselves and the chill night.

  I saw how he watched the kids. He looked sadder than ever.

  “You don’t want to be a stranger in this town tonight, son,” he said softly. He sounded almost as if he was going to cry. Then he corrected himself by clearing his throat and said, “You go have Mindy fix you up.”

  “Yessir,” I said, watching him wave to the kid in the DX and then walk back to his squad car.

  “Yessir,” I whispered again.

  I sounded like one of those kids he’d given a quarter to.

  The food was just as good as he’d said it’d be: big chunks of Swiss steak floating in tomatoes and so tender you could cut it with a fork, whipped potatoes with big yellow pats of butter, and some juicy green peas; all capped off with a wide wedge of apple pie and a cup of fresh coffee. It was one of those moments when you didn’t want to leave, when you wanted to freeze the world in just one place, when you regretted things you’d been and done, and never wanted to be or do those things again.

  The place smelled pleasantly of frying grease and cigarette smoke as I sat there finishing up my after-dinner coffee and talking some with Mindy, a short woman with unnaturally red hair and a grease-spattered pink uniform and horn-rimmed glasses that kept slipping down her nose.

  She was saying, “You sure can’t beat the Chief now, can you?” She wanted me to be grateful and a part of me resented that, but another part of me understood, so I said, “You sure can’t. You sure can’t.”

  I was about to say more when the door opened up and two farmers leading a bunch of kids got up in Halloween costumes came in. They all took over the place instantly, some of the kids to the johns, others sitting along the counter or at the tables.

  I’d been planning on shooting the breeze with Mindy before taking off. I knew she figured me for scum, just another drifter, but it was just one of those times when I needed some conversation and I didn’t much care about what or who it was with.

  In lieu of talk, with her making a big fuss over all the cute little kids, I pointed to the coffeepot, and she nodded and even gave me a little smile, and then I had me some more java and another Lucky and took to staring out the front window.

  Which was when I saw the little red VW bug all shiny sitting just outside, with the young blond girl—I figured her for eighteen or so—sitting there and staring inside Chet’s. She seemed to be staring at me, even though I knew better. She was just as shiny as her car and there was no way she’d be looking at me.

  Then she sort of grinned and took off. But her image stayed on the night air—her blondeness and her quick girl grin—long after she was gone.

  I finished my coffee and Lucky and got up to go. Mindy was so busy with the kids that all I could do was kind of wave and mouth a big thank-you. She nodded back to me.

  One bite of the cold night and I was right back to being me again. My heels crunched through ice as I moved down the street, hefting my backpack, heading for the highway.

  I walked from one streetlight to another, and in between it was as dark as nights ever get, and for a minute or two I felt like a kid sort of scared of how vast and black the night was. I touched the pocketknife in my jeans.

  I had just reached the highway when I heard a familiar straining engine noise. I’d just come up a steep grade and the motor was laboring to climb the same grade. Tiny VW engines always make that particular sound.

  She whipped across the center line and pulled in right in front of me, cutting me off.

  She rolled down the window and said, rock V roll blaring on the radio inside, “You look just about as lonely as I am.

  “You don’t look like the kind of girl who has to be lonely if she doesn’t want to be.” Up close she was even better-looking. The only slightly disturbing thing was that she looked familiar somehow.

  “The men around here are strictly dull.”

  I smiled. “I guess we’ve all got our crosses to bear.”

  She said “What’s your cross?”

  There was something serious in her question, and again, for a reason I couldn’t explain, I felt disturbed. I shrugged and said “I ain’t got it half as bad as some people I know. It just gets a little wearying sometimes.”

  “You going to get in?”

  “Can I ask you a dumb question?”

  She laughed. “People ask me dumb questions all the time. Why should you be any different?”

  “You legal?”

  “Huh?”

  “You legal? Age, I mean.”

  “You asking if I’m jailbait?”

  “Yeah.”

  She laughed again. She had a real nice laugh even above the loudly idling engine. “Honey, you do wonders for a woman’s ego. I’m twenty-four years old.”

  “Oh.”

  “So get in.”

  “Where we going?”

  “How’s my place sound?”

  “Right now that sounds about as nice as any place in the world.”

  She lived in a trailer court out on the highway, in one of those long silver jobs that was now almost white with frost in the cold moonlight.

  The last stragglers of Halloween ran up and down the dirt roads between the trailers. Hers was set off from the rest by a good city block, over by a grove of elms forming a windbreak.

  I know it’s not supposed to happen this way but it did. We went inside her trailer and she didn’t even turn a light on. We just stood there in the moonlight coming through the window and she put her arms around me and kissed me with a mouth that was warm and tender and frantic, and it had been so long for me that I nearly went crazy.

  It didn’t take long before she was undoing my shirt and leading me back to the bedroom.

  We were spreading out, getting ready, when I said, “You smoke cigars?”

  “You’re so romantic,” she said, reaching behind her with slender graceful arms and undoing her bra.

  “I mean it smells like cigars in here,” I said.

  “My dad’s. He comes over sometimes.”

  “Oh.”

  “Why? Who’d you think they’d belong to?”

  “I wasn’t sure. I mean, this . . .” I paused.

  “This what?”

  “Well, this sort of makes me nervous.”

  “Why? I thought you’d be having a good time. I am.”

  “So am I. Just . . .”

  “Just what?”

  “Well. Why would you just sort of—”

  “—pick you up?”

  “Yeah. Pick me up.”

  “Because today my divorce from Larry is final and I need to do something to make it real and I don’t happen to want to do it with anybody from Newkirk. If it’s any of your goddamn business, I mean.”

  “I didn’t mean to make you mad.”

  “Well, you did.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She was naked from the waist up. She sat there in the moonlight, letting me look at her, and believe me, I did look at her.

  “You don’t like guys or anything, do you?”

  “No. I just kind of wanted to know where you were coming from,” I said.

  “Well, I guess you know now, don’t you?”

  “I sure do,” I said. “I sure do.”

  The funny t
hing was, the first part of it was as sweet as doing it with your girlfriend back in high school, you know, when you really love somebody and do it as much to convey your feelings as to get rid of your needs. Her hair there in the darkness smelled wonderful and so did her perfume, and her flesh was soft and beautiful and there were nooks and crannies in her body that almost made me cry, they were so wonderful, and we went very slow then and her breath was pure as a baby’s and her fingers on the back of my neck were gentle as any woman’s had ever been, making me feel wanted and important and somebody.

  And then, just as we were rolling over to the other side of the bed she said, “Now I’m going to ask you to help me.”

  Something in the way she said it made me real nervous. “Help you?”

  In the shadow I saw her nod.

  I tried to make a joke of it. “And just what if I don’t help you?”

  She didn’t move or speak. I saw the lift of her breasts as she sighed. “Then I’ll kill you,” she said. “And you’ll be dead, just the way I am.”

  He came home, just as she said he would, ten minutes later. Now I knew who the cigar smoke belonged to.

  She had the tape recorder set up for me and she had me set up in the chair next to the recorder. She also had a .38 Smith and Wesson, a policeman’s gun, to put in my hand.

  I sat there in the darkness listening to the gravel crunch as his heavy car pulled up to the trailer. The car door squeaked open and a big engine trembled into silence and then his shoes snapped through ice and then he put a key in the door and then he came on inside and turned on the light and then he said, “Jesus Christ! Just who the hell are you?”