Joe R. Lansdale - The Bottoms (Vintage Crime Black Lizard Original)

ALSO BY JOE R. LANSDALE

Leather Maiden
Lost Echoes
Sunset and Sawdust
A Fine Dark Line
Freezer Burn

In the Hap and Leonard Series

Savage Season
Mucho Mojo
The Two-Bear Mambo
Bad Chili
Rumble Tumble
Captains Outrageous
Vanilla Ride

JOE R. LANSDALE
The Bottoms

Joe R. Lansdale is the author of more than a dozen novels, including Sunset and Sawdust, Lost Echoes, Leather Maiden, and Vanilla Ride. The Bottoms and Mucho Mojo were New York Times notable books. He has received the British Fantasy Award, the American Mystery Award, the Edgar Award, the Grinzane Cavour Prize for Literature, and seven Bram Stoker Awards. He lives with his family in Nacogdoches, Texas.

www.joerlansdale.com

FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION, DECEMBER 2010

Copyright 2000 by Joe R. Lansdale

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Book a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by the Mysterious Press, a division of Warner Books, Inc., New York, in 2000.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lansdale, Joe R., 1951
The bottoms / by Joe R. Lansdale.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-74266-7
1. Serial murdersFiction. 2. Race relationsFiction. 3. Texas, EastFiction. I. Title.
PS3562.A557B68 2010
813.54dc22
2010032273

www.blacklizardcrime.com

v3.1

This is dedicated to the loving memory of my mother and father, A.B. (Bud) Lansdale and OReta Lansdale. They weathered the Great Depression, recessions, plain old hard work, and difficult times without complaint. I wish there were more like them.

N ews didnt travel the way it does now. Not back then. Not by radio or newspaper it didnt. Not in East Texas. Things were different. What happened in another county was often left to that county.

World news was of importance to us all, but we didnt have to know about terrible things that didnt affect us in Bilgewater, Oregon, or even across the state in El Paso, or up northern state way in godforsaken Amarillo.

All it takes now for us to know all the gory details about some murder is for it to be horrible, or it to be a slow news week, and its everywhere, even if its some grocery clerk murder in Maine that hasnt a thing to do with us.

Back in the thirties a killing might occur several counties over and you might never know about it unless you were related, because as I said, news traveled slower then, and law enforcement tried to take care of their own.

On the other hand, there were times it might have been better had news traveled faster, or traveled at all. Then again, maybe it wouldnt have made one whit of difference.

Whats done is done though, and even now in my eighties, as I lie here in the old folks home, my room full of the smell of my own decaying body, awaiting a meal of whatever, mashed and diced and tasteless, a tube in my shank, the television tuned to some talk show peopled by idiots, Ive got the memories of then, nearly seventy years ago, and they are as fresh as the moment.

It all happened, as I recall, in the years nineteen thirty-three and thirty-four.

Part One

I suppose there were some back then had money, but we werent among them. The Depression was on. And if we had been one of those with money, there really wasnt that much to buy, outside of hogs, chickens, vegetables, and the staples, and since we raised the first three, with us it was the staples, and sometimes we bartered for them.

Daddy farmed some, and where we lived wasnt so bad for growing things. The wind had blown away most of North and West Texas, along with Oklahoma, but the eastern part of Texas was lush with greenery and the soil was rich and there was enough rain so that things grew quick and hardy. Even during dry periods the soil tended to hold some moisture, and if a crop wasnt as good as it might be, it could still turn out. In fact, when the rest of Texas was tired out and gone to dust, East Texas would sometimes be subject to terrific rainstorms and even floods. We were more likely to lose a crop to dampness than to dryness.

Daddy had a barbershop as well, and he ran it most days except Sunday and Monday, and was a community constable because nobody else wanted the job. For a time he had been justice of the peace as well, but he finally decided it was more than he wanted, and Jim Jack Formosa took on the justice of the peace position, and Daddy always said Jim Jack was a damn sight better at marrying and declaring people stone cold dead than he ever was.

We lived back in the deep woods near the Sabine River in a three-room white house Daddy had built before we were born. We had a leak in the roof, no electricity, a smoky wood stove, a rickety barn, a sleeping porch with a patched screen, and an outhouse prone to snakes.

We used kerosene lamps, hauled water from the well, and did a lot of hunting and fishing to add to the larder. We had about four acres cut out of the woods, and owned another twenty-five acres of hard timber and pine. We farmed the cleared four acres of sandy land with a mule named Sally Redback. We had a car, but Daddy used it mostly for his constable business and Sunday church. The rest of the time we walked, or me and my sister rode Sally Redback.