Nightrunners by Joe R. Lansdale Read Free Book Online Page A

Cramped and stacked in corners. Nothing was neatly aisled or arranged. Most everything was covered with a thin skin of dust. A large number of items were derelicts of a distant and simpler time: hair, oil was in abundance—all brands, some of which were now defunct—and there was toothpaste so old it had probably soured in the tube, and a cardboard comb display with a logo in the under left-hand corner that read: "5 Cents, Look Your Best!" Only three combs were missing out of a dozen.
    "Got some old stuff here, Pop ... All right if I call you Pop?"
    The old man was just coming in the door, wiping his hands on a rag. "What's that?" he said.
    "I said you have some old stuff here. It is all right if I call you Pop?"
    "Sure, call me most anything, long as you call me for dinner. Car didn't need much, by the way."
    "Volkswagens are good on gas."
    "Well, nothing personal, but I wouldn't own one of them foreign sonofabitches,"
    Montgomery smiled. "I said you got some old stuff here."
    "Sure do, some of it twenty years old or better." Pop moved behind a dusty glass counter, sat down on a stool. Montgomery walked over to look at what was beneath the glass.
    There were plastic fishing flies—most of them sun-faded—
    and nestled uncharacteristically among the flies was a giant peanut pattie that looked old enough to have been whipped up from the peanut crop of '48.
    "You a fisherman?" Pop asked.
    "Yes, thought I'd get a bit of line time in today or tomorrow, in fact."
    "Here." Pop reached under the counter, brought out one of the flies. "Try this.
    They don't make them anymore, some reason or another, but they sure used to bring in the fish. I still got one and I'm still catching fish on it. Here, take it, you can have it."
    "That's kind of you."
    "Not really. Nobody is going to buy this shit anyway."
    "Well," Montgomery said, slipping the fly in his pocket, "I hope no one buys that peanut pattie anyway."
    Pop laughed. "Wouldn't let nobody buy that sonofabitch. Talk about knocking your dick in the dirt. That thing is as old as I am, and that ain't thirty-nine, friend."
    Montgomery smiled.
    "New around here?" Pop asked.
    "Kinda ... I mean we aren't permanent. Just vacationing. Friends, Eva and Dean Beaumont, loaned us a cabin down by the lake."
    "Yeah, I know the Beaumonts. They come down here just about every summer.
    That Beaumont feller likes to talk fishing."
    "That he does."
    "You know, pretty soon, won't be nothing but goddamned cabins down by that lake. All of them built by city folks trying to get a whiff of clean air. No offense."
    "None taken."
    "You from Galveston too, like your friends?"
    "Yeah."
    "I hear the fucking ocean out there isn't nothing but a damned oil slick anymore.
    That right?"
    "Afraid so. Mostly anyway."
    "Damn cities. I hate the sonofabitches. They bleed the man right out of a feller. No offense."
    "None taken." Not too much anyway, Monty thought.
    "Like that goddamned Houston. Bastard's too close for me. All that killing and such. It's gonna spread, like some kind of goddamned disease. Be at our back door before long."
    "There are a lot of people who like it, Houston, not the killing."
    "God knows why. It's a fucking sewer . . . You want a basket to push around?
    There's some at the back of the store , . . Damn cities and newfangled shit, that's why I let the peanut pattie rot."
    "Somehow, I don't see the connection."
    "Damn thing may be old and rotten, but it reminds me of a time when a man could eat cheaper and a man's handshake was better than ten contracts and all the courts in the land.
    Reminds me of a time when I could sit on my front porch and not worry about getting my ears shot off by some crazy. Hell, I don't even feel safe out here in the sticks anymore."
    "Times change, Pop."
    "That supposed to be an answer for all this shit?"
    "Guess not."
    Montgomery walked to the rear of the store, pulled out one of the three shopping carts.
    Above them, hanging on nails, were two rows of Halloween masks;