Bullets and Fire
A Short Story
by Joe R. Lansdale
I was asked if I would like to write a really hardboiled story for a magazine, and I thought, why yeah. The story idea popped into my head in a flash. I was trying to write a story that dealt with revenge, and how far anger and the desire for revenge could take you, but mostly what I wanted was to be entertaining. BULLETS AND FIRE is, I hope, just that. Fast paced, dark, redemptive, and full of action.
I don’t remember a lot about the writing of this one, only that it came fast and furious. I couldn’t put the words down fast enough. I was typing so fast, I thought I was going to break a finger. I love it when I get a gift from the gods like that. It doesn’t always happen that way. But when it does, I embrace it.
I HAD HIT the little girl pretty hard, knocking her out, and maybe breaking something, messing her nose up for sure, but for me, it was worth it.
I sat at the table in the bar and smelled the sour beer and watched some drunks dance in the thin blue light from behind the bar. I was sitting with Juan and Billy, and Juan said to me, “You see our reasoning, you gonna get in with us, you got to show what you got, and fighting a guy, that shows you’re some kind of tough, but hitting a girl like that, her what, twelve or thirteen, way you smoked her, now that shows you don’t give a damn. That you ain’t gonna back up if we say what needs to be done you’ll just do it. That’s the way you get in with us, bro.”
“Yeah,” Billy said, “it makes you tough to fight a guy, brave maybe, but to hit someone like that you don’t know, just someone we pick on the street, and to savage her up like that, my man, that’s where the real stones is cause it goes against… What is it I’m looking for here, Juan?”
“What mommy and daddy taught?” Juan said.
“Shit,” Billy said, “my daddy hit me so much, I thought that was how you started and ended the day.”
“Hell,” Juan said. “I don’t know. You guys want some more beers?”
I sat there and thought about what I had done. Just got out of the car when they told me, and there was this young girl on the sidewalk, a backpack on. I could still see how she looked at me, and I was just going to hit her once, you know, to knock her out, a good blow behind the ear, but nothing too savage, and then I got to thinking, these guys are going to take me in, they want to see something good. I did what had to be done. I beat her up pretty good and then I took her wallet. I started to take the backpack, but I couldn’t figure on there being anything in that I’d want. But she had little wallet that was on a wrist strap, and she ought not to have been wearing like that, where it could be seen. Someone should have told her better.
Juan came back with some beers and a bowl of peanuts and we sat and drank some beer and ate the peanuts. I like peanuts.
I touched my shirt and felt something wet, and started to wipe it, but then I realized it was sticky. The girl’s blood. I wiped it on my pants. It was dark in there, and wasn’t anyone able to see much that mattered.
I watched some more couples get up and start dancing to the music on the jukebox, moving around in that blue light to a Smokey Robinson tune. My dad had always liked that song, about seconding and emotion. Billy said, “You know, even being a black man myself, I don’t like it when they play that old nigger music. How about you, Tray, you like that old nigger shit?”
I did, and I didn’t lie about it. “Yeah. I like soul fine. I like it a lot.”
Billy shook his head. “I don’t know, it’s all kind of mellow and shit. I like a nigger can talk some shit, you know, rap it out.”
“All sounds like a hammer beating on tin to me,” I said. “This stuff, it’s got some meat to it, cooked up good, plenty of steak, not just a bunch of fucking sizzle.”
“He told you,” Juan said. “One nigger to another. He told you good.”
“Yeah, well, I guess nothing says we got to like the same stuff, but that’s all Uncle Tom jive shit to me. A little too educated, not street enough.”
I remembered what my brother Tim said to me once, “Don’t let these neighborhood losers talk you down. Education hasn’t got a color. Money, it’s all green, and education, it gets you the money. It gets you something better than a long list of stick ups and stolen money. You got to have pride, brother. Real pride. Like daddy had.”
Daddy had worked some shit ass jobs to help us make it. Mama died when we were young, fell down some stairs, drunk, broke her neck. Daddy, he didn’t want us to end up drinking and fighting and getting our selves in trouble the same way. He tried to raise us right, told us to get an education. That’s what Tim had done, got an education. He’d gone straight, done good. I loved Tim. He was a proud man. Well, boy, really. He wasn’t much older than me. Twenty-two when it was all over for him. When I thought of him, what I thought of was a proud man, and I hated he was gone.
Me, tonight, I wasn’t so proud. I’d beat that girl good and taken her little pink wallet from the pocket of her dress. A pink wallet, that when you opened it and folded it out, had some pictures, some odds and ends and five dollars.
“So, you guys, to get in with the gang, you do something like you had me do tonight,” I said.
I knew the answer to that, but I was just making conversation.
“Yeah, well, we did one together,” Juan said. He was Mexican and almost as dark skinned as me, and that’s pretty damn dark. All I could see of him really was his teeth in the blue light from behind the bar. He said, “We did a guy, me and Billy. Did him good.”
“So you do a guy, and then you have me do a girl, and you tell me that’s the way to do it? What about the rest of the gang? Any of them do like I did?”
“Sometimes, something like it,” Billy said. “We had one boy who loved dogs, we had him shoot his own dog. Pet it on the head and open its mouth and stick a gun in there and shoot him. Shot came out that dog’s ass, ain’t kidding you. Went through that dog’s ass and through a wall in the guy’s house and knocked a lamp over.”
“I think the bullet went in there and hit the end table,” Juan said. “I think the table jarred and the lamp fell off.”
“Whatever.” Billy said. “You know what, that guy, he don’t stay in the gang long. He shoots himself. Found him dead, laying over his dog’s grave. That’s no shit. Can you imagine that, getting that way with a dog? You got your gang, and your family, and everything else, that’s just everything else, and that includes dogs or the fucking kitty.”
“So I beat up a girl and this guy shot a dog, and you guys did a guy, so now we’re all equal. That the way it works?”
Juan shook his head. “Well, you got to do something to get in, but we did something big, and that made us kind of lieutenants. You, you’re just like a private. But you’re in, man. You’re in.”
“Mostly,” Billy said.
“The gang, they still got to have a look at you, and our main man, he’s got to give you the okay.”
“So what did you do?” I said. “I’ve heard around, but I was wondering I could get it from you.”
Juan sipped his beer. “Sure,” he said.
Billy said, “Way we did the guy was the thing.”
