ONE DEATH, TWO EPISODES

First Episode:

"One minute he’s all right, then the little fucker cut a fart and he was out of here, gone for good, like the five-cent candy bar."

"Shit. He was what? Twelve. Kid like that, you’d think he could stand a kick or two to the head."

"You don’t know your own strength."

"That begging stuff. I couldn’t stand the begging."

"He ain’t begging now."

"Naw he ain’t. It just went all over me, him begging like that. Them cigarette burns wouldn’t have killed him. He didn’t have to beg like that."

"You always got to push your fun, son."

"I don’t know what it is. Guess him being a nigger and talking the way he did, all educated and everything, being young and talking better than a grown man, his family having all that money. It just went all over me. Hell, we’re the ones, the chosen people, not this jigaboo."

"I don’t know who’d choose him now. And the Jews that are chosen are Yankee Jews. It’s all right they hate niggers, long as they don’t talk with a Southern accent. They must think them Yankee vowels don’t hurt a person’s ear. Well, they hurt mine plenty."

"I guess I kissed twenty thousand goodbye, didn’t I?"

"Next time you kidnap somebody, don’t kidnap a nigger, no matter how much money they got. A nigger seems to get on your nerves worse than anybody. And stay away from women. I don’t think I’d like you to kidnap a woman."

"Oh hell, Mama, you know you’re the one for me. You’re always the one for me."

"Yeah, I’m all the woman there is when your root’s talking, and your root’s talking right now. Doing things to niggers, it always did get you hard."

"Oh, Mama, it ain’t that. It ain’t that way."

She goes into his arms and they kiss: "What kind of way is it, baby? Show Mama what kind of way it is."

Second Episode:

A big guy is bouncing a basketball, taking some shots. A younger guy comes out drinking a beer. He says: "There’s a nigger swelled up in the living room."

"Yeah. I killed him."

"Y’all kidnap him?"

"Uh huh."

"You know how you are about niggers. You should have got a white boy."

"I don’t care for gentiles all that much neither."

"Yeah, but their color doesn’t excite you."

"He died easy. Mama wasn’t too happy."

"Hell, she wasn’t. I bet you killed that nigger she got wet, probably fucked your brains out."

"Yeah, well, she did me pretty good."

"Where is she?"

(Grins) "Sleeping it off."

"Whatcha gonna do?"

"Thought we’d take the nigger and dump him."

"You could still get the money."

"Whattaya mean?"

"Tell ‘em he’s dead, but they want the body back, they still got to pay."

"I hadn’t thought of that. Hey, I take after daddy. I think a little."

"Yeah, he was a good thinker all right. He wasn’t thinking so good the night they cut his balls off."

"Well, he let the drink get ahead of him. Said some things to those Mexes when he thought he had a gun."

"I’d like to seen his face when he reached for it and didn’t find nothing."

"Yeah, that would have been something. He’s up there looking down on things now, I bet he’d think what happened to him was funny."

"I can just see the way his mouth used to do. You remember." (Mimics)... "But you’re right. A nigger dead ought to be worth as much as one alive."

"Don’t ask me what I’d pay. They ask me to pay for him he’d be a nigger in a ditch somewhere. I wouldn’t give you five cents for his pecker to feed my dog with."

© 1997 Joe R. Lansdale.
"One Death, Two Episodes" was originally published in 1997 in The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent, a collection of Lansdale’s short stories published in a limited-edition hardcover by Subterranean Press.