The Time Traveller's Almanac by Ann & Jeff Vandermeer

Author:Ann & Jeff Vandermeer [Vandermeer, Ann and Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781853894
Publisher: Head of Zeus Ltd.

FISH NIGHT

Joe Lansdale

Joe R. Lansdale is an American writer who has published over thirty novels and numerous short stories. He has received the Edgar Award, nine Bram Stokers, the Grinzani Cavour Prize for literature, and many others. His novella Bubba Hotep was filmed by Don Coscarelli, starring Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis, and has become a cult classic. He lives and works in Nacogdoches, Texas. This story was first published in the Arbor House Books anthology Specter! in 1982.

It was a bleached-bone afternoon with a cloudless sky and a monstrous sun. The air trembled like a mass of gelatinous ectoplasm. No wind blew.

Through the swelter came a worn, black Plymouth, coughing and belching white smoke from beneath its hood. It wheezed twice, backfired loudly, died by the side of the road.

The driver got out and went around to the hood. He was a man in the hard winter years of life, with dead brown hair and a heavy belly riding his hips. His shirt was open to the navel, the sleeves rolled up past his elbows. The hair on his chest and arms was gray.

A younger man climbed out on the passenger side, went around front too. Yellow sweat-explosions stained the pits of his white shirt. An unfastened, striped tie was draped over his neck like a pet snake that had died in its sleep.

Well? the younger man said.

The old man said nothing. He opened the hood. A calliope note of steam blew out from the radiator in a white puff, rose to the sky, turned clear.

Damn, the old man said, and he kicked the bumper of the Plymouth as if he were kicking a foe in the teeth. He got little satisfaction out of the action, just a nasty scuff on his brown wingtip and a jar to his ankle that hurt like hell.

Well? the young man repeated.

Well what? What do you think? Dead as the can-opener trade this week. Deader. The radiators chicken-pocked with holes.

Maybe someone will come by and give us a hand.

Sure.

A ride anyway.

Keep thinking that, college boy.

Someone is bound to come along, the young man said.

They seated themselves on the hot ground with their backs to the car. That way it provided some shade but not much. They sipped on a jug of lukewarm water from the Plymouth and spoke little until the sun fell down. By then they had both mellowed a bit. The heat had vacated the sands and the desert chill had settled in. Where the warmth had made the pair snappy, the cold drew them together.

The old man buttoned his shirt and rolled down his sleeves while the young man rummaged a sweater out of the backseat. He put the sweater on, sat back down. Im sorry about this, he said suddenly.

Wasnt your fault. Wasnt anyones fault. I just get to yelling sometime, taking out the can-opener trade on everything but the can-openers and myself. The days of the door-to-door salesman are gone, son.

And I thought I was going to have an easy summer job, the young man said.

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