In his advance review in Booklist, Wes Lukowsky gives special mention to “Joe R. Lansdale’s chilling ‘The Senior Girls Bayonet Drill Team,’ which depicts a high-school competition in which sport and butchery have joined hands.” And Publishers Weekly echoes the sentiment, calling Joe’s story “a dystopian tale of a new arena blood sport, in which even Joe Lansdale—famed for gonzo excess—holds back on gore and piles on implication.”
With his new Hap & Leonard novel, The Elephant of Surprise, waiting in the wings—it’s already hat-tricked its way to raves in PW, Booklist, and Kirkus—you know you want to read his latest story. Here’s a taste of it:
THE SENIOR GIRLS BAYONET DRILL TEAM by Joe R. Lansdale
The bus ride can be all right, if everyone talks and cuts up, sings the school fight song, and keeps a positive attitude. It keeps your mind off what’s to come. Oh, you don’t want to not think about it at all, or you won’t be ready, you won’t have your grit built up. You need that, but you can’t think about it all the time, or you start to worry too much.
You got to believe all the training and team preparation will carry you through, even if sometimes it doesn’t. I started in Junior High, so I’m an old pro now. This is my last year on the team, and my last event, and if I’m careful, and maybe a little lucky, I’ll graduate and move on. It’s all about the survivors.
I was thinking about Ronnie. She was full of life and energy and as good as any of us, but she’s not with us anymore. She got replaced by a new girl that isn’t fit to tie Ronnie’s war shoes, which her parents bronzed and keep in their living room on a table next to the ashes of Ronnie’s pet shiatzu. I saw the shoes there during the memorial. The dog had been there for at least three years before Ronnie died. It bit me once. Maybe that’s why it died. Poisoned. I remembered too that it slept a lot and snored in little stutters, like an old lawn mower starting.
Ronnie has a gold plaque on the wall back at the gym, alongside some others, and if you were to break that plaque apart, behind it you’d find a little slot, and in that slot is her bayonet and her ashes in an urn. I guess that’s something. Her name is on the plaque, of course. Her years on the team, and her death year is listed too.
There have been a lot of plaques put in the gym over the years, but it still feels special and sacred to see them. You kind of want to end up there when you’re feeling the passion, and the rest of the time that’s just what you don’t want.
Ronnie also has a nice photo of her in her uniform, holding her bayonet, over in Cumshaw hall, which is named after the girl they think was the greatest player of all, Margret Cumshaw. Cumshaw Hall is also known as the Hall of Fame.
To be in both spots is unique, so I guess Ronnie has that going for her, though it occurs to me more than now and again, that she hasn’t any idea that this is so. I’m not one that believes in the big stadium in the sky. I figure dead is dead, but because of that, I guess you got to look at the honor of it all and know it matters. Without that plaque, photo, ten years from now, who’s to know she existed at all?
Sometimes, though, the bus ride can be a pain in the ass, and not just because you might get your mind on what’s to come and not be able to lose your thoughts in talk and such, but as of late, we got to put up with Clarisse.
Clarisse thinks she’s something swell, but she’s not the only one with scars, and she’s not the only one who’s killed someone. And though she sometimes acts like it, she’s not the team captain. Not legitimately, anyway.
It’s gotten so it’s a chore to ride with her on the bus to a game. She never shuts up, and all she talks about is herself. She acts like we need a blow by blow of her achievements, like the rest of us weren’t there to perform as well. Like we didn’t see what she did.
She remembers her own deeds perfectly, but the rest of us, well, she finds it hard to remember where we were and what we did, and how there have been a few of us that haven’t come back. She scoots over the detail about how our teammate’s bodies, as is the rule of the game, become the property of the other team if we aren’t able to rescue them before the buzzer. You’d think she saved everyone, to hear her rattle on. She hasn’t. We haven’t.
We managed a save with Ronnie’s body, but we’ve lost a few. That’s tough to think about. The whole ritual when you lose a team member to the other side. The ceremony of the body being hooked up to a harness that the other team takes hold of so they can drag the body around the playing field three or four times, like it’s Hector being pulled about the walls of Troy by Achilles in his chariot. And then there’s the whole thing of the other team hacking up the body with bayonets when the dragging is done, having to stand there and watch and salute those bastards. That happens, the dead team mate still gets a plaque, but there’s nothing behind it but bricks.
When we end up dragging one of theirs and hacking on it, well, I enjoy that part immensely. I put my all into it and think of team mates we’ve lost. We yell their names as we pull and then hack.
Thing was, Clarisse’s bullshit wasn’t boosting me up, it was bringing me down, cause all I could think about were the dead comrades and how it could be me, and here it was my last game, and all I had to do was make it through this one and I was graduating and home free.
A number of us were in that position, on the edge of graduation. I think it made half the team solemn. Some of the girls don’t want it to end. Me, I can’t wait to get out. There’s a saying in the squad. First game. Last game. They’re the ones that are most likely to get you killed.
First time out you’re too full of piss and vinegar to be as cautious as you should be, last time out you’re overly cautious, and that could end up just as bad.
Clarisse thinks she’s immortal and can do no wrong, but sometimes you go left when you should go right, or the girl on the other team is stronger or swifter than you. Things can change in a heartbeat.
Clarisse, for all her skill, hasn’t learned that. For her, every day is Clarisse Day, even though that was just one special day of recognition she got some six months back. It was on account of her having a wonderful moment on the field, so wonderful she was honored with a parade and flowers and one of the boys from the bus repair pool; the usual ritual. Me, I have always played well, and I’m what they call dependable. But I’ve never had my own day, a parade, flowers, and a boy toy. I’ve never had that honor. That’s okay. I used to think about it, but now the only honor I want is to graduate and not embarrass my team in the process, try to make sure no one gets killed on my side of the field. Especially me.
We may be the state champions, but the position can change in one game…
The Senior Girls Bayonet Drill Team by Joe R. Lansdale is one of 17 outstanding and uncompromising stories in At Home in the Dark NB: Ebook and paperback editions are on sale now for immediate delivery. DON’T try to order the hardcover, as it’s sold out at the publisher, and while Amazon is still taking orders they’ll be unable to deliver.
