Lizard World by Terry Richard Bazes Read Free Book Online Page A

in the Beauregard graveyard. People might laugh at him, but Lemuel Lee wasn’t ashamed to admit that he had a real feeling about Billy Angel. Channelin’, like UFO’s, was a real fact that most people just wasn’t strong enough to face.
           He’d finished writin’ Creep on a hot summer night, sweatin’ like a goddamn pig on his back porch while mosquitoes the size a crop-dusters raised huge welts all over his body, cause during the act of composition he never wore nothin’ but his jockey shorts. Sittin’ in his BVD’s like that was good for the ideas, cause it made him feel closer to the deep sweat and sap of things. Another thing that was good for the ideas, he’d found, was to use his genuine army surplus binoculars. You’d be surprised by the kinds a things you see when you look into people’s windows. Binoculars, they’re a whole lot safer than climbin’ up a drainpipe the way he’d done with Darlene Frummer, and they’re almost just as good: one night, for example, when he was stuck for ideas, he’d seen Zeke Snider’s wife, the teacher, foolin’ around in her bra and panties with one of her ninth graders. That was good for a whole chapter, especially after he’d thrown in all that stuff about chains and leather.
                          

    Chapter VII.
    In which an Okeechobee White is captured
    and the Dentist is taken to his prison.

    Nowadays , since it was smack dab in the middle of the swamp, almost nobody went to the old perfume factory, except if you was huntin’ gators or you was in high school and wanted to find a place to screw. Lemuel Lee himself had gone there for both reasons -- once, when he was sixteen, with Taffy Clapp, drinkin’ beer and doin’ it on a blanket in the old furnace room where the juice vats was kept (mostly like big old rusty bathtubs, they was), but him and Taffy was bit so bad by mosquitoes and she was so scared by the cottonmouths that even a girl like Taffy wouldn’t take his money when he asked her to go back. So now mostly he went there on business, for the gators and the snakes -- cause besides supplyin’ his Uncle Earl’s place, there was the pet shops and the diners and the buyers who was talent scouts for pocketbooks and shoes.
           Ever since old Caesar’s alligator wife had made the ultimate sacrifice so as the Komodo could have a brain and snowbird brats could have a treat, Lemuel Lee had been lookin’ to find a new wife for Caesar’s harem. That was why today he’d gone to the wharf where the boat was kept and gassed it up and loaded on all the supplies like Uncle Earl had told him -- the nets, the nooses, the sedative, the goat, the ho-hos and bologna sandwiches, the flashlights, the rifle just in case they needed it, and the precious six boxes a White Owl cigars which they couldn’t never forget to bring whenever they paid a visit to Old Hattie. Somethin’ about cigar smoke always soothed Lemuel Lee’s nerves the day after he’d had one a his horsefly episodes. That was why right now, turnin’ his head back and forth to make sure that Uncle Earl wasn’t watchin’, he was reachin’ under the tarpaulin and openin’ a box. Quickly he grabbled a handful and shoved them in his pocket.
           “Sure looks like she’s all ready now,” he shouted.
           “Well, shove off then, you little jackass” said Uncle Earl, feeling damned pissed off that he’d allowed himself to be bullied into this little expedition. That nephew a his was a certifiable idiot. But worse than that, his sister Ligeia was up to somethin’: there was no question about that. Always gripin’ about her damn kidney. Always beggin’ for a transplant. But when she started doin’ his laundry and makin’ those nauseating pigs’ feet, that was somethin’ to worry about. Earl spat once into the river just to show who was boss. Then he went to see that the goat was securely tethered and that the tarpaulin over the