Edge of Dark Water by Joe R. Lansdale, an excerpt

An excerpt from
Edge of Dark Water
by Joe R. Lansdale

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1

That summer, Daddy went from
telephoning and dynamiting fish to poisoning them with green walnuts. The
dynamite was messy, and a couple years before he’d somehow got two fingers
blown off, and the side of his face had a burn spot that at first glance looked
like a lipstick kiss and at second glance looked like some kind of rash.

Telephoning for fish worked all right, though not as good as
dynamite, but Daddy didn’t like cranking that telephone to hot up the wire that
went into the water to ‘lectrocute the fish. He said he was always afraid one
of the little colored boys that lived up from us might be out there swimming
and get a dose of ‘lectricity that would kill him deader than a cypress stump,
or at best do something to his brain and make him retarded as his cousin
Ronnie, who didn’t have enough sense to get in out of the rain and might
hesitate in a hailstorm.

My grandma, the nasty old bag, who, fortunately, is dead now,
claimed Daddy has what she called the Sight. She said he was gifted and could
see the future some. I reckon if that was so, he’d have thought ahead enough
not to get drunk when he was handling explosives and got his fingers blown off.

And I hadn’t ever seen that much sympathy from him concerning
colored folk, so I didn’t buy his excuse for not cranking the phone. He didn’t
like my friend Jinx Smith, who was colored, and he tried to make out we was
better than her and her family, even though they had a small but clean house,
and we had a large dirty house with a sagging porch and the chimney propped up
on one side with a two-by-four and there were a couple of hogs wallowing out
holes in the yard. As for his cousin Ronnie, I don’t think Daddy cared for him
one way or the other, and often made fun of him and imitated him by pretending
to bang into walls and slobber about. Of course, when he was good and drunk,
this wasn’t an imitation, just a similarity.

Then again, maybe Daddy could see the future, but was just too
stupid to do anything about it.

Anyway, Daddy had these tow sacks—about ten of them—and
he and Uncle Gene had them full of green walnuts and some rocks to heavy them
up, and they had them fastened on ropes and thrown out in the water, the ropes
tied off to roots and trees on the shore.

Me and my friend Terry Thomas had gone down there to watch and
help, because we didn’t have nothing else we wanted to do. Terry didn’t want to
go when I told him what I wanted to do and where we were going and that I
wanted him there with me, but he broke down finally and went and helped me toss
bags and pull up fish. He was real nervous about the whole thing because he
didn’t like either my daddy or my uncle. I didn’t like them, either, but I
liked being outside and doing things that men do, though I think I would have
been more happy with a line and a hook than bags of walnut poison. Still, I
liked the river and the outdoors better than I liked being at the house with a
mop in my hand.

My grandma on Daddy’s side always said I didn’t act like a girl at
all, and I ought to stay home learning how to keep a garden and shell peas and
do women’s work. Grandma would lean forward in her rocker, look at me with no
love in her gooey eyes, and say, “Sue Ellen, how you gonna get a husband
you can’t cook or clean worth a flip and don’t never do your hair up?”

Course, she wasn’t being fair. I’d already been doing woman’s work
for long as I could remember. I just wasn’t no good at it. And if you’ve ever
done any of it, you know it ain’t any fun at all. I liked doing what the boys
and men did. What my daddy did. Which, when you got right down to it, didn’t
seem like all that much, just fishing and trapping for skins to sell, shooting
squirrels out of trees, and bragging about it like he’d done killed tigers.
Most of that bragging took place after he got liquored up good. I’d had me a
taste of liquor once, and I didn’t like it. I can say the same for chewing
tobacco and cigarettes and anything that’s got lettuce in it.

As for putting my hair up, she was really talking about certain
religious ways, and I couldn’t figure that God, with all he had to worry about,
would be all that concerned with hairdos.

This day I’m telling you about, Daddy and Uncle Gene was drinking a
little and tossing those sacks, and the water was turning dark brown where the
walnuts went in. After a while, sure enough, a bunch of brim and sun perch come
floating belly up.

Me and Terry stood on the shore and watched while Daddy and Uncle
Gene got in the rowboat and pushed off and went out there with nets and
gathered them fish like pecans that had fell on the ground. There was so many I
knew we’d be eating fried fish not only tonight, but tomorrow night, and after
that we’d be eating dried fish, which is another thing I forgot to put on my
list of stuff I don’t like. Jinx says dried fish tastes like stained shorts
smell, and she won’t get an argument from me. If they were smoked proper, that
was all right, but dried fish are a lot like trying to chew on a dead dog’s
tit.

Walnuts didn’t really poison the fish to death, but it stunned them
up a mite and made them float to the surface, white bellies showing, working
their gills. Daddy and Gene gathered them up with nets on a stick and put them
in a wet tow sack for gutting and cleaning.

The sacks was tied to the shore with ropes, and me and Terry went
down there to start pulling them in. The walnuts still had enough green in them
they could be used downriver to stun more fish, so we was supposed to save
them. We got hold of a rope and started pulling, but it was real heavy and we
couldn’t do it.

“We’ll be there d’rectly to help out,” Daddy called from
the boat.

“I think we should cut this one loose,” Terry said to me.
“No use straining our guts out.”

“I don’t quit that easy,” I said, and looked up to see
what was going on with the boat. It had a hole in the bottom, so Daddy and
Uncle Gene couldn’t stay out long. Uncle Gene had to bail it out with a coffee
can while Daddy paddled the boat back to the bank. When they had it pulled out
of the water, they came over to help us.

“Damn,” Daddy said, “either them walnuts has got
heavy as a Ford or I’ve gotten weak.”

“You’ve gotten weak,” Uncle Gene said. “You ain’t
the man you once was. You ain’t the strapping example of prime manhood I am.”

Daddy grinned at him. “Hell, you’re older than me.”

“Yeah,” said Uncle Gene, “but I’ve took care of
myself.”

Daddy let out with a hooting sound, said, “Ha!”

Uncle Gene was fat as a hog, but without the personality. Still, he
was a big man in height and had broad shoulders and arms about the size of a
horse’s neck. Daddy didn’t even look kin to him. He was a skinny peckerwood
with a potbelly, and if you ever saw him without a cap it was cause it had
rotted off his head. He and Uncle Gene had about eighteen teeth between them,
and Daddy had most of them. Mama said it was because they didn’t brush their
teeth enough and they chewed tobacco. There were times when I looked at their
sunken faces and was reminded of an old pumpkin rotting in the field. I know it’s
a sad thing to be so repulsed by your own kin, but there you have it, straight
out and in the open.

We all pulled on the rope, and finally, just about the time I
thought I was going to strain my guts out, up come that bag. Only it wasn’t
just the bag. There was something caught up in it, all swole up and white, and
dangling long strands of wet grass.

“Now, wait a minute here,” Daddy said, and kept pulling.

Then I seen it wasn’t grass at all. It was hair. And under that
hair was a face big around as the moon and white as a sheet and puffy-looking
as a feather pillow. I didn’t know who it was right off, till I seen the dress.
It was the only dress I’d ever seen May Lynn Baxter wear. A dress spotted with
blue flowers and so faded you could barely tell what color the flowers had been
in the first place, and it had gone a might short on her as she had grown tall.

Only time I’d seen her not wearing it that I could remember was
when me and her and Terry and Jinx slipped out one night and went to the
swimming hole for a dip. I had thought she was so pretty there in the
moonlight. Not a stitch on, well formed, with moon-blond hair to her waist, and
that dress hanging on a limb next to the river. She moved like she was hearing
music we couldn’t. I knew then she was gonna be the kind of girl that made
single men turn their heads and take a deep breath and married men wish their
wives would catch on fire. Fact was, she already was that kind of girl.

Terry didn’t pay her no mind, and I think it’s because he might be
a sissy. There’s a rumor he is, and part of the rumor has to do with a boy from
the far end of the river that come up one summer to visit relatives. I don’t
know if it’s true, but I don’t care one way or the other. I’ve known Terry
since we was babies, and from what I’ve seen of man-and-woman love, it mostly
has to do with Daddy lying around and not doing much, getting drunk, and
hitting Mama in the eye. One time, after he’d beat her up pretty good and went
out fishing, a rainstorm come up, and I lay on my bed hoping a bolt of lightning
would shoot out of the sky and hit him in the top of the head, knock them few
teeth out of his skull and kill him, leaving nothing behind but his cap. I know
that’s mean, but that’s how I was thinking.

I didn’t like that Mama thought she deserved that ass-whipping. She
thought a man was the one ran things and had the say. She said it was in the
Bible. That put me off reading it right away.

So there lay May Lynn, partway on the shore, that dress having
grown smaller on her over the years, and smaller yet on account of how she had
puffed up.

“Her eyes is swole shut,” Uncle Gene said. “She’s
been in the water a bit.”

“It don’t take no time at all to look like that,” Daddy
said. “You get drowned and don’t float up overnight, that’s how you get.”

All of a sudden May Lynn started to flutter and leak. Gas coming
out of her, and it smelled real bad, like a giant fart. Her hands was tied
behind her, twisted up in rusty wire, and so were her feet, which was pulled up
to meet her hands. Her skin had swelled around the wire—the wire that had
gotten tangled up in our bag.

When we pulled her completely up and laid her out, we seen there
was a Singer sewing machine fastened around her feet with more wire, several
pieces of it twisted together to make it strong. The wire had gone deep into
her wet flesh, all the way to the bone. The weight of that Singer was why all
four of us was needed to pull her up.

“Ain’t that May Lynn Baxter?” Daddy said.

He had just figured who it was, his ability to see into the future
dragging its feet until the future had arrived. He turned to me for an answer.

I could hardly get the words out of my mouth. “I reckon that’s
her.”

“She was only a girl,” Terry said. “She was our age.”

“Age ain’t got nothing to do with living or dying,” Uncle
Gene said. “But no doubt about it, she’s twisted her hips for the last
time.”

“I reckon we ought to do something,” Daddy said.

“I think we ought to cut our rope free and push her back in,”
Uncle Gene said. “She ain’t gonna get no deader if she ain’t found, and
her daddy won’t have to know she’s dead. He can think she run off to Hollywood
or something. Wasn’t that what she was always saying she was gonna do? I mean,
it’s like a dog dies and you don’t tell the kid, and they think the dog is
living with someone else, or something like that.”

“She doesn’t have any real family,” Terry said, not
looking at her, but looking out at the river. “We were her only friends,
me and Sue Ellen and Jinx. She isn’t a dog.”

Daddy and Uncle Gene didn’t look at him. It was like he hadn’t said
a thing.

“We could do that,” Daddy said. “We could push her
back. She wasn’t known to be of much account anyhow. And they’re right. She ain’t
got no real family, with her mama and brother dead, and her daddy in love with
the bottle. It wouldn’t do no harm to just let her sink. Hell, he didn’t miss
her much when she was alive, and with her dead, he still won’t miss her.”

“You ain’t pushing her back,” I said.

Daddy took note of that. He turned and looked at me. “Who you
talking to, little girl? You ain’t talking to your elders like that, are you?”

I knew it might mean I was going to get a thrashing, but I stood by
my guns.

“You ain’t pushing her back in.”

“She was our friend,” Terry said, and I saw tears in his
eyes.

Daddy reached out and slapped me on top of the head with the palm
of his hand. It hurt. It made me a little dizzy.

“I’ll make the decisions around here,” Daddy said, and
leaned his face close to me. I could smell the tobacco and onions on his
breath.

“You didn’t have any reason to strike her,” Terry said.

Daddy glared at Terry. “Don’t be talking above your raising.”

“You aren’t my daddy,” Terry said, stepping out of range,
“and if you push May Lynn back in the water, I’ll tell about it.”

Daddy studied Terry for a moment. Probably judging distance,
wondering how fast he could reach him. It would have required too much work, I
reckon, because the tension drained out of him. Daddy Don Wilson wasn’t one for
expending energy if he didn’t have to, and sometimes even if he had to.

Daddy twisted his withered mouth a little, said, “We was just
funning. We ain’t going put her back, are we, Gene?”

Uncle Gene looked Terry over, then me.

“I suppose not,” he said, but the words sounded to me as
if they had been burned real good and were mostly charred.

Daddy sent Terry into town to get the constable, but didn’t let him
take the truck. He made him walk. It would have been easy enough to have loaded
the body in the back of the truck and driven us all into town, but that would
have been too damn convenient, and that wasn’t Daddy’s way. And he didn’t like
Terry on account of he figured he wasn’t the way he thought a man ought to be.
Uncle Gene had a truck, too, but he didn’t offer it, either. I think he just
didn’t want a dead gal in the back of it.

I sat on the shore and looked at May Lynn’s body. It was gathering
flies and starting to smell and all I could think of was how she was always clean
and pretty, and this wasn’t a thing that should have happened to her. It wasn’t
like in the books I had read, and the times I had been to the picture show and
people died. They always looked pretty much like they were when they were
alive, except sleepy. I saw now that’s not how things were. It wasn’t any
different for a dead person than a shot-dead squirrel or a hog with a cut
throat hanging over the scalding pot.

Shadows came tumbling through the trees and over the water and you
could see a bit of the moon shining on the river; it looked like a huge face
floating up from the bottom. The crickets had started to saw at their legs
pretty seriously, and there was a louder gathering of frogs that came with the
dark. If I hadn’t been staring mostly at a dead body, it would have been kind
of pleasant. As it was, I felt numb, the way your arm will get if you sleep on
it, but I felt like that all over.

Daddy built a fire a ways from the body to sit by while we waited
on Terry and the law, and Uncle Gene gathered up the fish and carried them up
to his truck. He took them to be split up with us, and to take the rest over to
his house and his wife. Since he and Daddy had gone to pulling at a jug before he
left, he was lit up good, and I figured if he didn’t wrap the pickup around a
tree in the dark, when he got home he’d make his wife, Evy, clean the fish, and
then he’d give her a beating. Uncle Gene said he liked to give her one a day
when he could, and one a week when he was busy, just to let her know her place.
He had even offered to give me one a couple of times, and Daddy thought it
might be a good idea. But either Mama was there stop it, and ended up getting
beat on by Daddy instead of him beating on me, or he eventually played out on
the idea because it got in the way of his drinking.

Anyway, Uncle Gene decided it was best to go home, and left Daddy
to his business.

Daddy tried to get me to come over and sit by him near the fire,
but I stayed where I was. In dark places he liked to touch, and it made me feel
strange and uncomfortable. He said it was a thing fathers did with daughters.
Jinx told me that wasn’t true, but I didn’t need her to explain it to me,
because I could tell inside of me it wasn’t good. I sat away from the fire, and
though it was a warm enough night, the fire did look inviting. But all I could
think about was how Daddy was. How his breath smelled of whiskey and tobacco
most of the time. How when he was really drunk, the whites of his eyes would
roll up from the bottom like a frightened horse. How if he tried to touch me he’d
start breathing faster, so I just kept my place in the shadows, even when the
mosquitoes started to show up.

“You and that sissy boy going to stir things up don’t need
stirring,” Daddy said. “We’d pushed her back in the water, we’d be
home by now. Most things you decide to deal with you could skip.”

I didn’t say anything to that.

“We should have kept a fish or two to fry on the fire,”
he said, like maybe it was my fault Uncle Gene had packed them all up and toted
them off. There were still a few that had washed up to the bank, but he wasn’t
willing to leave the fire and go get one to clean and cook. And I wasn’t about
to do it. All I could do was think about May Lynn and feel sick, and I had to
keep my eye on Daddy cause the drunker he got the bolder he got, and the harder
he talked. You never knew when he might do something stupid or scary. That’s
how he was. He could be laughing and having a good time, and the next thing you
knew he’d pull a pocketknife and threaten to cut you. He didn’t look like much,
but he was a known hothead and knife fighter, and was supposed to be good with
his fist, and not just when he was hitting women and children. He was also
known to tire out quick and start looking for a place to nest.

“You think you got it hard, don’t you, baby girl?”

“Hard enough,” I said.

“I tell you what hard is, that’s when your own father sets you
out the door and locks it and won’t let you come back for a night or two. And
when he does, it’s just because cows needed milking and eggs needed gathering,
and he wanted someone to hit.”

“Well, now,” I said. “The apple didn’t fall far from
the tree, did it?”

“You ain’t never milked a cow in your life,” he said.

“We ain’t never had one.”

“I’m going to get one, and when I do, you’ll milk it. You’ll
do same as I did.”

“It’s a thing to look forward to,” I said, and then I
shut up. The way he twisted his head and turned the jug of hooch in his hand
told me it was time to be quiet. Next thing I knew that jug would be flying
through the air, and he’d be on me, his fist swinging. I just sat there and
kept watch and let him suck his liquor.

The moon was high and the night was settled in heavy as stone by
the time we seen a light coming over the hill on the trail that split down
between the thick woods that led to the river. Along with the light came the
rumble of a truck, the crackling of tires over a pocked road, and the swish of
close-hanging limbs dragging alongside of it.

When the truck was down the hill and still a good ways from the
water, it stopped, and I could hear Constable Sy Higgins pulling on the parking
brake. He left the motor running and the lights on. He got out of the truck
like a man climbing down from a tall tree with a fear he might fall. Terry got
out of the other door and came down quickly. When he was close to me, he said
so no one else could hear, “He’s drunk. I had to get him out of bed, and
he didn’t want to come. He said it wouldn’t have hurt to just push her back in
the water.”

“That’s the law for you,” I said. “Now if we could
get the clergy here and the mayor, we’d have the perfect pile to smell.”

Constable Sy sauntered down the hill with a flashlight shining in
front of him, even though the headlights on the truck were bright enough to see
how to thread a needle. He made toward the fire, his belly bouncing before him
like a dog leaping up to greet him. Daddy got to his feet, staggering a little.
They were drunks together.

“Where is she?” Higgins said, pushing his fedora up on
his head. When he did, I could see his hard face and the patch over his eye.
Way the shadows fell, it made that eye look like a black tunnel. Rumor was he’d
had it scratched out by a black woman he raped. The holster that held his gun
was said to be made out of an Indian’s hide, and had been passed on to him by
Indian-fighter relatives. It was probably just a story.

Constable Sy hadn’t even bothered to look around and find May Lynn.
It wasn’t like she was hidden in the woods under a tarpaulin. All you needed
was one good eye to find her. A blind man would have noticed her right off.

Daddy led him over to the body while me and Terry watched.
Constable Sy shined the light around on her and the sewing machine lying
nearby. He said, “She’s squatted to pee for the last time, but I think
maybe the sewing machine can be salvaged.”

Daddy and Constable Sy snickered together.

“Wasn’t nothing wrong with her,” I said. “She’s the
one murdered. She’s the one that’s had something done to her. There ain’t a
thing funny about it.”

The constable shined his flashlight on my face. “Girl, you
ought to know children ain’t supposed to speak unless spoken to.”

“That’s what I tell her,” Daddy said.

“I ain’t a child,” I said, dipping my head and squinting
my eyes against the light. “I’m sixteen.”

“Yeah, well,” the constable said, moving the light from
my head to my toes. “I can see you ain’t as much a kid as I remember.”

I don’t know how to explain it, but that light running up and down
me wasn’t any different than a hot yellow tongue; it made me feel kind of sick.

“Why don’t you and your girlfriend there go sit down out of
the way?” Daddy said.

That made Constable Sy snicker, and Daddy liked that. I could tell
the way he stood a little straighter and his chest went out. There wasn’t
nothing made him feel better than belittling somebody, unless it was hitting
somebody upside the head that didn’t expect it.

Terry sighed, and me and him went over and sat down on the ground
by the fire. Constable Sy went to his truck and got an old blanket out of the
bed, and then he and Daddy, using the toes of their boots, sort of kicked poor
May Lynn onto it, wrapped her up, carried her, and put her in the constable’s
truck bed. When they dropped her back there, it sounded like someone tossing a
big dead fish on a smooth flat rock.

“You could have done this yourself,” Constable Sy said. “You
could have brung her in and we could have looked at her in the morning.”

“I’d rather your truck stank than mine,” Daddy said.

2

May Lynn didn’t have a mama anymore, cause her mama had drowned
herself in the Sabine River. She had gone down with some laundry to soak, and
instead wrapped a shirt around her head and walked in until the water went over
her. When she came up, she wasn’t alive anymore, but she still had that shirt
around her noggin.

May Lynn’s daddy was someone who only came home when he got tired
of being any other place. We didn’t even know if he knew his daughter was
missing. May Lynn used to say after her mama drowned herself her daddy was
never the same. Said she figured it was because the laundry around her mother’s
head had been his favorite snap-pocket shirt. That’s true love for you. Worse,
her brother, Jake, who she was close to, was dead as of a short time back, and
there wasn’t even a family dog to miss her.

The day after we found her, May Lynn was boxed up in a cheap coffin
and buried on a warm morning in the pauper section of the Marvel Creek Cemetery
next to a dried patch of weeds with seed ticks clinging to them, and I suspect
some chiggers too small to see. Her mother and brother were buried in the same
graveyard, but they hadn’t ended up next to one another. Up the hill was where
the people with money lay. Down here was the free dirt, and even if you was kin
to someone, you got scattered—you went in anyplace where there was room
to dig a hole. I’d heard there was many a grave on top of another, for need of
space.

There were oaks and elms to shade the rest of the graveyard, but
May Lynn’s section was a hot stretch of dirt with a bunch of washed-down
mounds, a few with markers. Some of the markers were little sticks. Names had
once been written on them, but they had been washed white by the sun and rain.

The constable ruled on matters by saying she had been killed by a
person or persons unknown, which was something I could have figured out for
him. He said it was most likely a drifter or drifters who had come upon her by
the river. I guess they had been carrying a sewing machine under their arm.

He didn’t make any effort to search out her murderer or find out
why she was down there. For that matter, there wasn’t even a doctor or nobody
that looked at her to be sure exactly how she was killed or if she had been
fooled with. Nobody cared but me and Terry and Jinx.

The service was conducted by a local preacher. He said a few words
that might have sounded just as insincere if they had they been spoken over the
body of a distant cousin’s pet mouse that had died of old age.

When he was through talking, a couple of colored men put the plain
box down in the ground using ropes, then started shoveling dirt in the hole.
Outside of the colored men, and the preacher and the seed ticks, we had been
the only ones at the funeral, if you could call it that.

“You’d think they was just taking out the trash, way that
preacher hurried up,” Jinx said, after they left.

“Way they saw it,” I said, “that was exactly what
they was doing. Taking out the trash.”

Jinx was my age. She had her hair tied in pigtails that stood out
from her head like plaited ropes of wire. She had a sweet face, but her eyes
seemed older, like she was someone’s ancient grandma stuffed inside a kid. She
wore a dyed blue flour-sack dress that had some of the old print faintly poking
through, and she was barefoot. Terry had on some new shoes, and he had gotten
from somewhere a man’s black tie. It was tied in a big knot and pulled up tight
to his neck, making him look like a bag that had been knotted near the top. He
had enough oil in his black hair to grease a truck axle, and it still wasn’t
quite enough to hold his wild mane down. His face was dark from the sun, and
his blue eyes were shiny as chunks of the sky. None of us was happy with what
had happened, but he was taking it especially hard; his eyes were red from
crying.

“No one will make a concerted effort to discover what happened
to her,” Terry said. “I think a search for the truth is out of the
question.”

I loved to hear Terry talk, because he didn’t sound like no one
else I knew. He hadn’t dropped out of school like me, as I was having problems
with it being so far and no way to get there and I didn’t like it much anyhow.
My mother, who was pretty good educated, didn’t like that I had quit, but she
didn’t get out of bed to make much of a complaint against it; that might have
required her putting on her shoes.

Terry liked school. Even the math part. His mother had been a
schoolteacher and gave him extra learning. His father had died when he was
young, and as of recent his mother had taken up with and married an oilman
named Harold Webber. Terry didn’t get along with him even a little bit. Webber
made Terry’s mother quit teaching school to be home with the kids, and then she
started a seamstress business, but he made her kill that, too, and toss out all
her goods, because he believed a husband took care of his wife and she shouldn’t
work, even if she liked the work she did. In the end it was all about the same
anyhow, as jobs, especially for women, had become as rare as baptized
rattlesnakes.

Since that marriage, Terry had a look in his eye like a rabbit that
was about to run fast and far.

Jinx could read and write and cipher some, same as me, but she hadn’t
learned it in school. Coloreds didn’t have a school in our parts, and she had
been taught by her daddy, who had gone up north to work for a while and learned
to read there. He said it was better in the north for coloreds in some ways
because people acted like they liked you, even if they didn’t. But he come back
because he missed his family and being in the South, since he knew right off
who the sons of bitches was; there wasn’t as much guesswork involved in
figuring who was who.

But when times got bad, that didn’t keep him from heading north
again. He hated to do it, he told Jinx, and meant it, but he had to go up there
and make some money and mail it back to her and her mother.

None of us was happy in East Texas. We all wanted out, but seemed
stuck to our spots like rooted trees. When I thought about getting out I couldn’t
imagine much beyond the wetlands and the woods. Except for Hollywood. I could
imagine that on account of May Lynn talking about it all the time. She made it
sound pretty good, even though she had never been there. Still, that’s where I
wished to be. But as I had learned from Jinx, shit in one hand and wish in the
other and see which one fills up first. She said the same thing about prayer,
but I had never taken it on myself to test the notion.

We decided to go to May Lynn’s house and see if her daddy was there
so we could let him know the bad news, tell him he missed the funeral. Our
guess was if he was home, he would know by now, but it was something to do, and
to tell it true, if he wasn’t home, we wanted to take a look around. I can’t
explain it, but I guess we didn’t want to let go of May Lynn just yet, and
going where she lived seemed a way to keep her memory warm.

With her dead, a lot of hopes I had were gone. I always figured May
Lynn just might go off to Hollywood and be a movie star, and then she’d come
home and take us back with her. I never could figure why she would do that, or
what we might do out there, but it beat thinking I was just gonna grow up and
marry some fellow with tobacco in his cheek and whiskey on his breath who would
beat me at least once a week and maybe make me keep my hair up.

None of this kind of thinking mattered, though, because May Lynn didn’t
become a star. Truth was, as of late, we hadn’t known her very well ourselves.
By the time she showed up in the water wired to that Singer sewing machine, I
reckon I hadn’t seen her for a month. I figured it was similar for Terry and
Jinx.

Jinx said she thought May Lynn had come of the age to think hanging
with colored kids might not lead to stardom. Jinx said she didn’t hold it
against her, but I had doubts about that. Jinx could hold a grudge.

As to what happened to May Lynn, I had ideas about that. Nobody
loved a picture show the way she did, and she’d hitch a ride with anyone if
they’d get her into town on Saturdays to catch a show. Men were always quick to
pick her up. Me, I’d have had to lay down in the middle of the road and play
dead to have them stop, and even then they might have run over me, same as they
would a dead possum. Could be May Lynn got a ride with the wrong person; an
angry Singer sewing machine salesman. It was a stretch, but I figured it was
better detective work than Constable Higgins had done.

To get to May Lynn’s house from our side, you either had to walk
ten miles up to the bridge and cross over and walk about ten more on the other
side along the edge of the river, or you could cross by boat to the far bank
and walk right up to her house. It would save you hours.

We used Daddy’s boat, the one with the little hole in the bottom,
and while me and Terry rowed, Jinx used a coffee can to bail the water out.
After a while, I took a turn and she rowed.

Trees leaned way out over the river and there were long vines and
dangles of moss hanging near the surface of the water. There was the usual
turtles and water snakes swimming about, long-legged birds diving down to take
fish out of the water, and those little bugs that flittered along the water’s
surface like dancers.

We had been going along for a ways when Jinx said, “You hear
that?”

“Hear what?” Terry said. He was still wearing his knotted
tie, but he had slid the knot down so that it was no longer tight against his
neck.

“That knocking sound,” Jinx said.

We stopped rowing and listened. I faintly heard it.

“That’s trees striking and rubbing together in the wind,”
Terry said. “They’ve grown up too close to one another, and that’s the
sound they make. See how brisk the wind is?”

I looked at the trees, and they were blowing right smart. The water
was wind–rippled, too.

“It might be the wind doing it,” Jinx said, “but
that ain’t trees knocking together. Them’s bones.”

“Bones?” I said.

Jinx pointed toward the riverbank, where briars and brambles
twisted tight around the trees. “Somewhere back in the thicket there is
where Skunk lives. He hangs out bones on strings, and when the wind blows, they
bang together. Human bones. That’s that sound you hear, them bones.”

“There isn’t any Skunk,” Terry said. “That’s an old
wives’ tale. Like the goat man that’s supposed to live in the woods. It’s just
a tale to scare children.”

Jinx shook her head. “Skunk is real. He’s a big old colored
man that’s more red than black, with twisty red hair; he wears it wild, like it’s
a bush. They say he keeps a dried-up bluebird hanging in it. He’s got dark eyes
as dead and flat as coat buttons. They say he can walk softer than a breeze and
can go for days without sleeping. That he can live for weeks sipping water from
mud holes and eating roots and such, and that since the only baths he ever had
was when he fell in the river, or when he got caught out in the rain, he stinks
like a skunk and you can smell him coming a long ways off.”

Terry let out a laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“He’s part Indian—Seminole or Cherokee or
something—and that’s why he’s red-touched. He’s a tracker used to live in
the Everglades over in Florida. He’s a stone killer. Ain’t nobody bothers Skunk
unless they want someone caught, or dead is more likely. He chops off hands and
takes them back to prove he’s done the business he was hired to do.”

“Even if there is a fella with a bird in his hair, and his
name is Skunk,” I said, “I don’t think that’s bones from his place
rattling. Terry’s right; that’s treetops knocking together. I’ve heard that
sound before, and not just in this place.”

“Well,” Jinx said, “he moves his place around. And
if that is trees, not bones, it don’t mean Skunk ain’t out there. I know people
that have seen him. I know one man told me he hired Skunk because his wife run
off and he wanted Skunk to find her. He said Skunk must have misunderstood or
didn’t care. All he brought back was her hands, chopped off right at the wrist
with a hatchet. Old man told me the story said he didn’t ask where the rest of
her was, and he paid up, too. What Skunk wanted from him wasn’t money. He
wanted all the man’s blankets and the food he canned for the winter, and his
biggest, fattest hunting dog. Old man gave it to him, too. Skunk carried that
stuff off in a wheelbarrow, the dog tied to a rope, walking alongside him. Old
man said Skunk didn’t use no hunting dogs because he was better than any of
them. He figured the dog was for dinner.”

“And he’s got a big blue ox named Babe,” Terry said. “And
he can rope a tornado and ride it like a horse.”

Jinx was so mad she almost stood up in the boat.

“He ain’t like no Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill,” she said. “You’re
making me mad. He ain’t no story. He’s real. And you better watch out for him.”

“It wasn’t my intention to make you angry, Jinx,” Terry
said.

“Well, you done made me angry,” Jinx said. “Big
angry.”

“Sorry,” Terry said.

“Go on, Jinx,” I said, soothing her ruffled feathers. “Finish
telling about him.”

“He don’t talk much, unless it’s to who he’s gonna kill. They
say then he can’t talk, just makes funny sounds. I know cause Daddy told me he
knew a fella had got away from Skunk, just by accident. That Skunk had been
hired to get him, found him, tied him to a tree, and was gonna cut his throat
and chop off his hands. The tree this fella was tied to was up against the bank
next to the river. It was an old tree, and though this fella wasn’t thinking
about it on purpose, he was pushing with his feet to get away from Skunk. The
tree was more rotten than it looked, because there was ants at the base, and
they had gnawed it up. This fella told Daddy he could feel them ants on him,
biting, but he didn’t hate them none, because they had made that old tree
rotten, and with him pushing with his feet, pressing his back into the trunk,
it broke off. He went backward into the water. When he hit, the log floated,
spinning him around and around, him snapping breaths every time he was on top
of the river. Finally the log come apart altogether, and that loosened the
ropes and he swam out to a sandbar and rested, and then he swam across to the
other side. Course, none of it done him any good. Daddy said that later, after
he told him about it, he wasn’t seen no more. Daddy said it was because he didn’t
have sense enough to go up north or out west, but had stuck around. He figured
Skunk finally got him. Skunk ain’t no quitter, though he can wander off from a
trail for a while if he gets bored. He gets interested again, he comes back. He
always comes back, and there ain’t no end to it until he’s got whoever he’s
after.”

“Why was Skunk supposed to be after this man?” Terry
asked.

“I don’t know,” Jinx said. “Someone hired Skunk to
get him, and Skunk got him. Reckon he chopped off his hands and gave them to
whoever hired him, or maybe he kept them himself. I don’t know. As for what was
left of the fella, I bet he rotted away in the woods somewhere, never to be
seen again.”

The boat was drifting lazily toward the bank. We started paddling
again.

“He’s in them woods,” Jinx said, not through with her
Skunk business. “In the dark shadows. He don’t do nothing but wait till
someone wants to hire him. He’s out there somewhere, in his tent made of skins,
all them bones hanging around it, rattling in the breeze. He wraps all those
bones in that tent and straps it to his back and moves about, sets up camp
again. He’s waiting till someone wants him. They got to talk to one of his
cousins to go up in there and find him, because he won’t let no one else come
close, and they say even his cousins are afraid of him.”

“How did he get the way he is?” I asked her.

“They say his mama couldn’t stand him no more cause he was
crazy, and so when he was ten, for his birthday, she took him out in the river
and threw him out of the boat and hit him in the head with a paddle. He didn’t
die. He just got knocked out good and floated up on shore. He took to living ‘long
the riverbank, and in the woods. Later, his mama was found with her hands
chopped off and her head had been stove in with a boat paddle.”

“How perfect,” Terry said, and he laughed.

“You laugh, you want,” Jinx said. “But you better
believe it. Skunk’s out there. And you run up on him, it’s the last running you
gonna do.”

3

Finally we come up on the spot by the river where May Lynn had
lived, paddled the boat up there, and leaped out on the bank. Terry had hold of
the rope that was tied to the front of the boat, and he looped it around a
stump by the water. Then for insurance we all dragged the front end of the boat
out of the water so the hole in the bottom was on dirt.

Just before we started up to the house, Jinx looked out over the
river and pointed. Jinx was a big pointer. She was always pointing out this and
pointing out that. Every time we were there Jinx would point out that spot. It’s
where May Lynn’s mother went into the river with a shirt wrapped around her
head.

“It was right there,” she said, as if we didn’t know.

We walked up a hill, which was slick with pine needles. The house
was on top of the hill and it was raised on a bunch of leaning creosote posts;
it was up high like that so that when the river rose it wouldn’t float away.
With the way it leaned, I reckoned it wouldn’t be long before the whole shebang
was shoved off and went tumbling downhill and into the river, about where May
Lynn’s mama had gone down.

When we got to the top of the hill, just so we wouldn’t surprise
May Lynn’s daddy and get our teeth filled with shotgun pellets, I called out, “Hallo
the house.”

No one answered, but we waited a minute anyhow. Just in case he
might be napping off a drunk. There was an outhouse farther up the hill, and
there was a ditch that ran off from it out into the water, which was the
plumbing. What went in the hole in the outhouse went down the hill through that
open ditch, and into the water. Terry studied the toilet for a while, then
said, “That isn’t very sanitary. You should keep your body leavings away
from water. It’s standard knowledge. You dig a pit, not a runoff. That’s lazy.”

“Her old man is lazy,” I said. “What else can you
say?”

We had been standing below and near the house, waiting to see if
anyone came out. When they didn’t, we called out again, all three of us calling
at the same time. Still no one answered.

There were some steps going up the ten-foot rise to the weathered,
sagging porch, and we walked up them. They shook as we climbed. The sides of
the steps were fixed onto the platform by wooden rails, and where there should
have been a step at the top there wasn’t one. You had to stretch your leg out
and climb carefully onto the landing, which wobbled when we climbed up on it.

We called out one more time, but still no one answered. Except for
Cletus Baxter, there wasn’t anyone left to answer. There had been May Lynn’s
brother, Jake, but he came to an end about a year back. Word was he robbed
banks, but according to most he knocked off filling stations. He hid out down
in the Sabine bottoms between station jobs and nobody would tell the cops on
him. It wasn’t that he was all that well liked, but he was one of the river
people, and he had a gun and bad temper and at any moment either one of them
could go off.

Course, Constable Sy Higgins knew he was there, but he didn’t care
because Jake kept him paid up. Constable Sy, according to folks I heard talk,
was always glad to hear Jake was about a new job of stealing, cause it meant
the constable was going to have a fresh supply of whiskey, or a new eye patch.

As for Jake, before the real law could close in on him, if they
were ever going to, he come down with a cold and got pneumonia and died right
in the house.

When no one came to our knock at the door, Terry said, “What
in the world are we doing here? May Lynn is back at the graveyard.”

I was the only one that had ever actually met Cletus Baxter. All of
us had been in the house a few times to see May Lynn, but when Terry and Jinx
were with me, Cletus was never there. When I had seen him, he hadn’t so much as
acknowledged me with a fart or a nod. Her mama we had all known; a quiet, thin woman
with hair the color of damp wheat, a face like all the sadness in the world.

Even Jake we had all seen, a dark-eyed man with a handsome face
marred by a scar across his right cheek where an old shotgun had blown apart on
him when he was about our age. He was friendly enough, but always eyed us like
we might be young feds out to gun him down for stealing twenty-five bucks from
a filling station.

“It is funny,” I said. “Here we are, and I don’t
know what for.”

“We is just plain nosey, that’s what for,” Jinx said.

I knocked on the door again, and this time it moved. We all stood
there looking at the crack that was made when it did, then I reached out and
pushed at it, and went inside just like I had been invited.

Terry and Jinx followed.

“This isn’t right,” Terry said.

“It sure ain’t,” Jinx said.

Neither of them turned around, though. They kept coming after me.

The house was just one big slanting room that was sectioned off by
blankets hung up on ropes so the blankets could slide back and forth. The
biggest section was for May Lynn’s daddy, and there were several blankets
stretched across the house for his part. One of his blankets was pulled back
and I could see a cot in there and a little table with a Bible on it that was
stuffed full of papers. When I looked more closely, I saw they were cigarette
papers for rolling. There was a tin of Prince Albert on the stand, too, and all
over the place—the table, the bed, the floor, and even on the one wooden
chair—there was specks of tobacco, like dirty dandruff flakes. I
remembered I had watched him roll a cigarette once, and his hands shook so bad
from being on the end of a weeklong drunk, he scattered tobacco everywhere.

Part of the room had been divided for a cooking place, which was a
woodstove with a pipe that ran out a hole cut into the wall by a window. Over
the window was curtains made of the same blue flowers that had been on May Lynn’s
dress.

May Lynn’s part was sectioned off by blankets, and it wasn’t much.
If Jake had ever had a section, it had been taken over by his old man. It was
hard to believe four people had ever lived there.

We moved May Lynn’s blankets aside and took a peek. She had a
little feather mattress on the floor, and it was stained by water and sweat.
There were two near-flat pillows on the mattress. One of them had a pillowcase
made of the same material as her dress and the kitchen curtains. The other didn’t
have a case. There was a dresser with a cracked mirror up against the wall. It
had belonged to May Lynn’s mother, and it was the only piece of real furniture
in the house.

On top of the dresser was a huge stack of movie magazines. There was
a chair by the dresser and one at the end of the bed. May Lynn used to sit in
one chair and I would sit in the other, and she would show me the magazines and
the people in them. They seemed like people from a dream, like angels descended
from heaven. They didn’t look like anyone I knew except May Lynn, even if she
didn’t have the clothes for it.

Jinx touched the magazines, lifted them, said, “These here all
put together is heavy enough to sink a boat.”

“She certainly loved them,” Terry said.

“I figured she’d go off someday and become a movie star,”
I said. “I figured anyone could do it, it was her.”

Terry sat down in the chair at the end of the bed and picked up one
of her pillows. He said, “It smells like her. That drugstore perfume she
wore.” He put the pillow down and looked at us. “You know, May Lynn
really ought to go to Hollywood.”

“She’s a whole lot dead,” Jinx said, sitting down on the
mattress.

“She should still make the journey,” Terry said, and
crossed his legs. “It’s all she ever wanted, and now she’s ended up buried
in a hole like a dead pet. I don’t think that’s how it ought to end for her.”

“And I don’t think I ought to stink when I’m straining in the
outhouse,” Jinx said, “but so far it don’t work no other way.”

“We could take her to Hollywood,” Terry said.

“Say what?” I said.

“We could take her.”

“You mean dig her up?” Jinx said.

“Yes,” Terry said. “She won’t dig herself up.”

“That’s certainly true,” I said.

“I mean it,” Terry said.

Me and Jinx looked at one another.

Jinx said, “So we dig her up and carry her and the coffin all
the way to Hollywood on our backs, and when we get there, we go over to see the
movie people and tell them we got their next star, a dead body that don’t look
nothing like May Lynn used to look and has a smell about her that could knock a
bird out of a tree and kill it stone dead?”

“Of course not,” Terry said. “I’m merely stating the
obvious fact that we haven’t got so many friends that we should not care about
a dead one. I think we have to dig her up, give her a funeral like they used to
give heroes in ancient Greece. You know, burn her on a funeral pyre and gather
up her ashes; the ashes can go to Hollywood.”

“She ain’t a Greek,” Jinx said.

“But she was a kind of goddess, don’t you think?” Terry said.

“What she was was a river-bottoms kid that was very pretty
that came up dead with a sewing machine tied to her feet,” I said. “You’re
crazy, Terry. We can’t dig her up and set her on fire, take her ashes to
Hollywood.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” Terry said.

“How’s that?” Jinx said.

“It won’t mean anything to her, you’re right,” Terry
said. “Being dead takes the fun out of things. I know. I once had a dog
that died and I prayed that he’d come back to life, but he didn’t. And I
finally decided God had brought him back, but hadn’t let him out of the hole. I
went out and dug him up to help him out, only he was still dead and not looking
very good.”

“I could have told you how that was going to turn out,”
Jinx said.

“It isn’t like any of us want to remain here,” Terry
said.

“That’s true,” Jinx said. “I do, I’m gonna end up
wiping white baby asses and doing laundry and cooking meals for peckerwoods the
rest of my life. And if that’s what I got coming, I might do like Mrs. Baxter
and wrap a shirt around my head and go in the river.”

“Don’t even say that,” I said.

“I just did.”

“Well, don’t say it again.”

“There isn’t anything for us here,” Terry said. “You
can’t really grow here. Not the way we should. We stay here, there will always
be some kind of weight on our heads, holding us down. I like the idea of taking
May Lynn’s ashes to Hollywood and sprinkling them around where she’ll always be
a part of it. May Lynn had an adventurous spirit about her, and I think she was
no more than a few months shy of departing from this place.”

“She should have hurried up,” Jinx said.

“We have a chance to leave,” Terry said. “All we
have to do is reach out and embrace it. Together we can make it work. We can
help each other achieve that goal.”

“What you need is a good meal and some sleep,” I said,
looking at Terry.

Terry shook his head. “No. What I need is a shovel and some
friends to help me dig her up. Then we burn her and the magazines together. It’s
symbolic that way.”

“Symbolic?” Jinx said.

“Then we put the combined ashes in a jar—”

“A jar?” Jinx said.

“Or some kind of container,” Terry said. “Then we
float down the river to a good-sized town, catch a bus, and head for Hollywood.”

“A bus?” Jinx said.

“Stop being a mockingbird,” Terry said, frowning at Jinx.

“That sounds crazy,” I said.

“I like crazy better than I like being around here,”
Terry said.

“That’s two of us,” Jinx said.

They both stared at me, waiting for agreement, I suppose.

“Let me think about it,” I said.

“I know you,” Terry said. “You aren’t really going
to consider it. You’re just saying that so I’ll shut up.”

“While you think about it,” Jinx said, “me and Terry
are gonna be setting May Lynn on fire with them magazines, and by the time you’ve
decided one way or the other, we’ll be in a boat, maybe one without a hole in
the bottom, on our way to Hollywood with that gal in a jar.”

“I know this much,” I said. “The Sabine River don’t
go to Hollywood.”

“Yeah, but we’ll arrive there somehow,” Terry said.

I could almost see the wheels in his head turning.

He lifted his head and his lips curled at the edges. “There’s
the barge. We could take the barge. It’s big enough to live on.”

“It’s too big for some of the narrow spots,” Jinx said. “We
might go better by patching up the boat, or getting some other one.”

“I bet we can get it through those spots if we put our backs
into it,” Terry said.

“The barge, as you call it, ain’t nothing more than a raft,”
I said.

“You could actually dock it against the bank at night and
sleep on it,” Terry said.

“I want to think about it,” I said, feeling the pressure,
hoping the whole thing would go out of his and Jinx’s head by the time we got
back across the river.

“What’s to think on?” Jinx said. “You told us you
can’t even sleep good for watching for your daddy coming into your room.”

I nodded, thinking about how I usually slept with a piece of stove
wood in the bed next to me, my door locked, one eye open and an ear cocked. “That’s
true.”

“Well, then,” Terry said.

“I got some things to do at home first,” I said, still
thinking it was all going to be forgotten in a short time, but actually
beginning to warm to the idea.

“All right, then,” Terry said. “We can all go home
and prepare, and if either of you have any money, now would be a good time to
bring it.”

“I have a quarter,” I said. “That’s it.”

“I got the teeth in my head,” Jinx said.

“I have a few dollars,” Terry said. “But what we
really need is a plan.”

4

We gathered up the magazines, and decided it was okay because May
Lynn told us her daddy always thought her wanting to be in the movies was
silly, told her wanting to be on a screen dressed up like a hussy in tight
clothes and wearing makeup like war paint wasn’t any plan for a grown woman.
That meant those magazines would soon be burned up for fire starter or tossed
out to rot when he came back and found out she was dead. I figured that portion
of the house would become his, too, littered with cigarette papers and tobacco
crumbs.

Anyway, we took them, and as we was stuffing them into a couple of
pillowcases, a writing tablet with a red cardboard cover fell out and hit the
floor. Jinx picked it up and said, “Look here.”

Scrawled on the front of it in May Lynn’s handwriting was the word diary.
The writing was in pencil, and it was so rubbed over, and the cover so dark to
begin with, you could hardly see the word.

“You think we should peek inside?” Jinx said.

“We shouldn’t,” I said, “but I know we will.”

“If we’re going to steal her body and set her on fire and take
her ashes to Hollywood,” Jinx said, “I think we must go in for the
whole hog, including the squeal.”

“Not here, though,” I said, switching my viewpoint
instantly. “We can go somewhere, sit, and read it. I don’t want her daddy
showing up, and us having been housebreakers and thieves right out here in the
open. Criminals, I think, should act in privacy or the dark.”

“Perhaps we ought to burn it with the magazines,” Terry
said, taking the diary from Jinx’s hands so deftly I figured it was a full
minute before she realized she wasn’t holding it no more. “She isn’t here
to say we can look at it.”

“That’s the proper thing to do,” I said. “Burn it.
But is that what we’re gonna do?”

Jinx said, “We all know we’re gonna look at it, so we should
get on with it.”

“I thought it might be good manners to at least act like we
wasn’t,” I said.

Going home right then went out of my mind like a bird that had been
let loose from a cage. We decided to go someplace private and read the diary.
But when we went out of the house, Terry, still clutching the diary, left me
holding the pillowcase full of magazines and went to the outhouse.

“Don’t you read none of it in there,” Jinx said.

“I won’t,” Terry said.

“Leave it,” I said.

“Nope, cause I trust me not to read it,” he said. “But
you two, I don’t.”

“That wasn’t very nice,” Jinx said, as Terry went into
the outhouse and closed the door.

Not too far down river there’s the barge, the one Terry said we
ought to steal. It’s staked out like a Judas goat to an old cypress stump in
the middle of the water. It’s really just a big raft, but everyone calls it a
barge. There’s a tree branch that has spouted off the stump and it grows tall
and green and puts out shade at one end of the barge. Midday and dead summer,
the shade looks green because of the way the sun shines through the leaves and
lays on the rough planks nailed over the logs. The barge is tied to the stump
with thick twists of weathered rope, replaced from time to time by someone with
fresh rope and the desire to do it. Where the barge sits, the water is wide.
The barge can hold a fair number of people on it, and it was put there by someone
long ago that’s been forgotten. Whoever built it made it solid, and the wood
has held and hasn’t rotted. The bottoms of the logs and boards used to make it
are coated in creosote. Everyone uses it, and no one has moved it for at least
ten years. Storms and high water have been unable to tear it up, even if on
occasion the water has risen higher than the rope that binds it. Sometimes when
the water is way up, the roped end of the barge stays down, and the loose end
floats to the top and you can see that end sticking out of the water. When the
water settles, it’s like nothing ever happened. Sometimes when I walk along the
river and look out at it, I can see frogs on it, or long yellow-bellied water
snakes and sometimes water moccasins, looking thick and stumpy and evil and
ready to bite.

Whoever gets there first uses it as a place to picnic, fish, and
swim. At night, kids skip the shorts and skinny-dip there. It’s said there’s
been a few babies made there on blankets when the night is deep and the water
is smooth and the moon is shining a silvery love light. And I don’t doubt it.

There have been a lot of drownings around the barge, and there’s
been talk about setting fire to it so folks won’t go out on it. But the thing
is, people will always go in the water, and they’ll always drown, and they don’t
need a barge to do it. Some even do it on purpose, something May Lynn’s mother
proved without a barge. As for wearing a shirt over your head, you can do it or
not—it’s not expected.

We paddled and bailed our boat on down the river until we came to
the barge. There was no one there, only the shade.

We climbed out of the boat onto the barge and pulled the boat up
behind us. It was tough work, but we did it. Under the shade of the leafy limb
we sat down, and Terry opened the diary. There were a number of pages torn out
of it, and doodles in the margins. Terry started reading it aloud. It wasn’t
written the way she talked, but instead she had tried to make it proper. It
made me sad. It had some truth to it, but it also had a lot of things that
might not have happened—things that May Lynn felt certain would occur
someday. Like going to Hollywood and being discovered in some soda shop or
such, and then becoming a big star. She told how this had happened, when I knew
it hadn’t. She hadn’t never got out of East Texas, let alone to Hollywood.

She talked about us in passing, like you might point out you seen a
redbird the other day. I won’t kid you, that bothered me a little. I figured we
was worth more than a spotty mention. Here we was going to her funeral and
planning on burning her up and taking her out to Hollywood, and we didn’t get
no more consideration than that. I felt the story of her life, even with lies,
might have given us a bigger role.

The shadow was spreading wider by the time Terry came to the part
in the diary that made our plans, everything we had talked about, real. It was
a part that caused me to cry inside and made me scared a little, though I can’t
tell you exactly why. It was the part that sealed the deal about us going to
Hollywood. It was the part that would change our lives and make it so nothing
would ever be the same again.

It was a page or two about her brother, and there was a photograph
of her stuffed inside the diary. It was a good one, but she had ways about her
a photograph couldn’t hold; even in that old faded flower dress she looked like
a million bucks. And there was another thing inside of the diary, a little map
put down on thin paper. This map, along with things we read in the diary, let
us know that her brother, who we knew to be a thief, was a bigger thief than we
thought; though I guess she could have made the whole thing up, like some of
the other stuff she had written down.

May Lynn wrote about her brother: “This isn’t something I
should put down, because it is a scandal to the family.” But she was doing
it anyway, because it was her diary, she said, and she could write what she
wanted. There was no one to see it but her and the lamplight.

Her take on Jake’s theft wasn’t what I expected. She said Jake gave
her some of the money he stole. Her daddy got some of it, too, and that she was
always glad to see Jake coming, not only because she loved her brother, but she
liked that he had money. She thought soon he’d give her more than just enough
for perfume and a picture show; maybe enough for some new clothes and a bus
ticket to Hollywood.

The diary said Jake had mostly centered his attentions on service
stations and little stores until he took in a partner named Warren Cain, and
because of that he got his courage up. They came to a little town that had a
bank, and he and Cain went in there and robbed it at pistol point, jumped in
the car and drove off, and came here to the river bottoms to hide away. There
wasn’t any more mention of Warren Cain, but a few pages later, May Lynn wrote
how before Jake got the chest sickness and died, he buried all the money he
stole cause her daddy kept sniffing around, trying to lay his hands on it, and
Jake knew he’d drink it up, quicker than a cat can jump.

“Jake gave me a map,” she wrote,

so I could find the money. He may just be out of his head and none
of what he says is true, and the money may be all gone. And what he says about
how I need to be careful may not be anything to worry about. I asked what it
was I should be careful of, and he said getting killed. When I asked by what,
or who, he began to roll his eyes up in his head, as if something might be
standing on the ceiling. I guess it was. I guess it was the Angel of Death that
he saw, because it wasn’t more than a minute after he done that, that his eyes
glazed over and I realized he had quit breathing and was gone on.

If the money really is there, I’m going to try and find it and go
off to Hollywood to get my start. I think God must want me to have this money,
or he would not have let my brother rob banks and bury it and then die. I thank
God left this money for me.

 

When Terry quit reading, he said, “That is an interesting
conclusion.”

“Sounds to me like stealing,” I said. “And if God
left her the money, then he’s a thief, too.”

“It sounds to me like a way to get out of this hellhole,”
Jinx said. “And though I ain’t no thief under normal situations, I knew
where that money was, I’d be on it like stink on a dead possum.”

“We can follow the map,” Terry said.

“What if it’s just one of her tales?” I said. “The
diary is full of them. And it’s even missing pages, for some reason.”

“I presume that was her way of editing it,” Terry said. “Writing
things about yourself and putting them in a diary can even be difficult. There’s
always some part of you, I suppose, that fears someone will see it.”

“Like three friends who stole it from her house,” Jinx
said.

“Like that,” Terry said. “I think a lot of this is
more like a novel, or a long short story. Maybe she started out to write a
diary and there just wasn’t enough to talk about that was interesting.”

It certainly had in it all manner of nonsense about how she had
been writing big movie stars and they had been writing her back, and how she
had sent a picture of herself in and a producer liked the way she looked and
wanted her to come on out. All of that was just foolishness, and nothing else,
but some of it I knew to be true. Some of it was about things I knew had
happened.

“Well, now,” Terry said, “we know Jake was a robber,
isn’t that correct? And she has written down a detailed map that she said she
got from her brother on his deathbed, so—”

“All we got to do,” said Jinx, “is take that map and
follow it, see if it leads somewhere, and then split up the money and run like
bastards.”

“Not exactly what I had in mind,” Terry said. “But
it has occurred to me that with Sue Ellen’s quarter, and your ‘nothing but
teeth,’ Jinx, and me having a few dollars, we might not get far, or however far
we manage to go there might be very little comfort to it. But once we get
downriver, to a town, money can make things a lot better. So if we go and see
if the stolen money is there, and if it is, we take it. Then we do what I said
about the body. Burn it up and carry her ashes out to Hollywood. It’s what she
wanted.”

“It’s stolen money,” I said.

“We don’t even know what bank it came from if we wanted to
give it back,” Terry said.

“See there?” Jinx said, nodding quickly several times. “We
ain’t really got no other choice.”

“We could give it to the authorities,” I said.

“Constable Sy?” Terry asked.

“There’s bound to be someone else,” I said.

“There might be,” Jinx said, “but I don’t want to
find them suckers. Constable Sy would just take it for his own self. I want to
do what Terry wants to do, and I say we do it on the cheap, and if there’s
money left over we split it. And if you’re all that bothered about it, Sue
Ellen, I’ll take your cut.”

“Say there was bank money,” I said. “Why didn’t May
Lynn take it and go off on her own?”

“Maybe she wasn’t ready,” Jinx said. “Maybe she
couldn’t figure out the map. That don’t mean the money ain’t there and that she
didn’t plan to take it. Now that I think on it, we ought to take a bus. I don’t
like water all that much. I can swim, but not so good, and there’s snakes and
such. On a bus, I have to ride in the back in the colored part, like dirty
laundry, but at least I’m a whole lot less likely to drowned or get snakebit.”

“And where do we catch that bus?” Terry said.

“Gladewater,” Jinx said. “That’s how Daddy goes. He
walks across the Sabine River bridge, catches a ride to Gladewater, then gets
the bus there, takes it up north to Yankee land. We’d take our bus out west.”

“Your daddy has a car,” I said.

“Now he does,” Jinx said. “But that’s how he went
the first time. By bus.”

“Best way for us to arrive in Gladewater is to take the river,”
Terry said. “It’s quicker than walking, and more certain than a ride, and
we don’t have to wonder who it is we’re riding with. Catching a ride might be
why May Lynn’s dead. She may have caught it with the wrong kind of person. I
say we take the money and steal her body and burn it up, and jar it up, and
then float down near Gladewater, walk in and buy tickets at the bus station, and
proceed to Hollywood.”

“There’s some sense in that,” Jinx said. “And when
we get to Gladewater and take the bus, we can use some of the money to buy
lunches to tote with us. I’ve always wanted to buy a lunch. Though you’ll have
to buy it for me. There’s that whole colored thing about going into cafès and
such.”

“Don’t worry,” Terry said. “It’ll be taken care of.”
He looked at me. “You aren’t saying much.”

“I’m sitting here considering on my life of crime and how it
could help me buy a lunch for a bus trip.”

“It’s money that has already been stolen,” Terry said. “It’s
not like you stole it.”

“If I take it, it would be like stealing, because that’s
exactly what I’d be doing. Stealing from a thief wouldn’t make me any less a
thief.”

“The thief is dead, and so are his heirs,” Terry said.

“There’s the father,” I said.

“He doesn’t count,” Terry said.

“Why’s that?” I said.

“Because I don’t like him, and if you get right down to it,
you can’t be an heir to stolen money. Not legally, anyway.”

“I’m glad that puts us on such solid legal ground,” I
said.

5

We pushed our boat off the barge—or what I call a
raft—back into the river, and paddled it to land. After we got on ground,
we pulled the boat up under a tree and found some dried brush to lean on it. It
wasn’t much of a hideaway, but it’s what we had.

Before we left out of there, we sat down under a tree and got out
the map and turned it ever which way trying to figure out what it meant. It
might as well have been written in Greek. We could make out what must have been
May Lynn’s house and the river drawn on it in a squiggly line, and above it a
rise in the land that was familiar. Finally there was a couple of thick lines
with little lines drawn between them. We figured that had to be railroad
tracks. Beyond the tracks, there were some humps, and there was a line written
out that said Malcolm Cuzins. Neither the humps or
the name meant anything to us.

We walked away from the river and the bottom land, made our way
back to where May Lynn’s house stood. We went wide of it toward the woods.

The woods were thick and it took us a while to thread through them
and climb up a big hill. We finally got on the trail that went out of the
bottoms, ending us up on a field where cane grew. It was highland cane and it
wasn’t as good as bottom cane, but it was still good enough. It was a big patch
that covered a lot of acres, and the stalks were thick and tall. The cane had
turned slightly purple, and I knew once it was stripped the sugar inside of it
would be sweet.

I had a pocketknife, and I cut down a stalk next to where the field
started, then cut it into three pieces. It took some work, but we all got our
pieces frayed and that gave us the pulp to chew on. It was sugary, and it was
something to keep us happy and busy while we walked. I figure when you got
right down to it, we weren’t fresh thieves after all, but had had plenty of
practice in the cane fields and watermelon patches. Heck, I had started my life
of crime sometime back, but had just then realized it. The natural move forward
would be to take stolen bank money and spend it on a trip to Hollywood with a
dead girl burnt up in jar.

We followed the map and came to a low cut of pines, and on the
other side of the pines was the train tracks. On the far side of the tracks was
more trees. Most of them was pecan and hickory nut and might have once been
part of an orchard, but were now wild and unpruned. There was a nice breeze
blowing, and we could smell the scent of the trees on the wind, and there were
birds in the trees, mostly red-winged blackbirds; they were as thick there as
leaves.

There was a rumble and the train rails began to vibrate. We stepped
back in the pines, in the shadow, and waited. A train came chugging by,
screeching on top of the rails. I thought maybe that ought to be the way we
should get out of there, by hopping a train. But it was traveling fast as it
went by, and none of the boxcar doors was open; it was an idea that passed from
my mind quickly. I figured if I grabbed at the train my arms would get jerked
off.

Still, it was mighty pleasant watching the train go by, all those
boxcars clacking along, and while it rolled I thought of May Lynn. I guess it
was the train moving away from us, heading anywhere but where we was, that made
me think of her. That and our plans, of course.

I remember once sitting in her house on her mattress on the floor,
and she had been talking about the movies and her plans to star in them, and
then she said something to me that dove out of the air like a rock and felt
like it hit me in the back of the head.

“Sue Ellen,” she said, “what is it you want to do
with your life?”

Until she asked that, I didn’t even know I had the chance to think
about anything different than what I was doing at the moment, but with her
telling me all her plans, and then asking me that question, certain feelings I
had started rising up to the surface like a dead carp. I knew then I wanted out
of what I was in, and I wanted something else other than what I had, but the miserable
thing was, I didn’t know where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do.

We laughed and talked about this and that, about some boys we knew,
none of them particularly interesting, and May Lynn said she sure thought Terry
was cute, but there was that whole sissy problem. We combed each other’s hair,
and her mama, a few months short of her dip in the river and moving like she
was some kind of animal dying slowly, cooked us some grits, and we had them
with no butter and no milk. I remember thinking then that May Lynn was the most
wonderful person in the world, and certainly the most beautiful. But what made
me feel really good while eating grits with no butter and no milk was that she
had spoken to me like I could have plans and ought to have plans, and that my
life could be better. Right then and there I believed it myself a little. Not
so much you could write a song about it, but some. I didn’t know what I was
going to do, but I knew it would be something. I can’t say that stealing money
and going by raft down the dirty Sabine with May Lynn’s ashes in a jar had been
any part of those plans, but I knew then that I wasn’t going to be settled with
life as I knew it; wasn’t going to end up like Mama, drinking cure-all and
taking a whacking from her husband and thinking it was as natural as the course
of the river.

I looked up from thinking about all this, and saw the train moving
on down the line and out of sight. We stood there looking where it had gone,
and then we looked at the map again and determined that we at least knew where
the tracks were. Beyond that it was all mighty confusing. The little
humps—and there was bunches of them in several rows on the
paper—and the name Malcolm Cuzins didn’t make no sense whatsoever.

As we crossed the tracks and went under the trees, the red-winged
blackbirds took flight. They looked bloodied as they rose in a whoosh, and they
filled the sky like a cloud, then they was gone.

“Well,” Terry said, looking at the map. “I fail to
make sense of it. I can’t determine what these humps mean. And the name written
on the map is a mystery to me.”

Jinx and I were equally baffled, and we kept looking at the map
like it would all come to us eventually, but it didn’t. Fact was, I was getting
a bit of a headache.

“There’s nothing out here but a few trees,” I said. “I
think there’s an old graveyard over there, and beyond that there’s a road.”

“I remember that ole graveyard,” Jinx said. She nodded at
me. “We was up here once, when we was little kids. We seen some of them
graves then.”

“I barely remember,” I said.

“I told you there was haints there and that they’d grab you up
and pull you down in the ground,” Jinx said. “I thought you was gonna
pee your pants.”

“That wasn’t very nice,” I said.

“That’s what made it funny,” she said.

We looked around for a while, then gave up and went back down to
the cane field and cut us another piece of cane.

As we ate the pulp from the cane and walked, I said, “I think
our Hollywood plans would be on the too-early side without that money. So I think
we don’t burn May Lynn up and put her in a jar and head out just yet. My guess
is we might make Gladewater, but beyond that we’d be hard-pressed to go on.”

No one said anything for a long while, but I’m pretty sure, like
me, they could hear our plans crackling away like dry paper on fire.

By the time we worked our way back to the boat, the sun was
starting to drop out of sight behind the trees, and the shadows were long and
dark across the ground and on the water. Frogs was getting louder and so were the
crickets. We paddled our way across the water current, and by the time we got
to the other side, the water was high in the leaky boat, in spite of me and
Jinx taking turns bailing.

As we got out of the boat, pulled it on shore, and pushed it under
some trees, Jinx said, “One thing we gonna have to say for sure. This boat
ain’t no damn good. We go downriver, we’ll have to take the barge, otherwise we’ll
be tuckered out in a couple hours. The boat will fill up and sink to the bottom
of the river. Catfish will be living in our skulls before a week passes.”

This statement went uncontested. Everything we talked about seemed
like so much wind now. Talk is cheap and exciting, but when you get right down
to doing something, money is usually needed. Planning is often better than
going through with the actual plan. Expectations, I once heard an old man say,
were a little like fat birds: you might as well kill them before they fly away.

We split up and headed our own ways. As I walked, the shadows
stretched. I realized it would be dead dark long before I got home. Even though
I had grown up in the bottoms, there was lots of tales about things down in
them that gave me a case of the nerves. Mostly they was stories about things
that came out at night and was angry and hungry and carried you off and sucked
the centers out of your bones. Ever hoot of an owl or crack of a limb or the
scratching of brush moved by the wind made me jump a little. To top things off
nicely, it began to lightning in the east, stitching up the pit-black sky like
a drunk seamstress with bright yellow thread. The wind rose and made the trees
sigh and whip even more, and before long, drops of rain were falling on me. By
the time I got near enough to our house to see a light in the window, the rain was
coming down hard as tossed gravel, and the wind was whipping the willows along
the riverbank like a teacher smacking a rowdy student’s butt with a switch.

In the yard, I was startled by one of the free-ranging hogs that
came around the side of the house and grunted at me, perhaps hoping I had an
apple or something. It was the big black-and-white one. I started to reach out
and pet it, but since it was gonna be eaten in the fall, I hesitated. It never
set well with me to get friendly with something I planned to have on a plate
with a side of new potatoes and collard greens. I felt it was proper to have a
solid understanding between person and hog that no friendship was involved,
though if the hog had known the true nature of its arrangement, I’m sure it would
have found reason to depart for parts unknown, maybe taking the other hog and
chickens with him. Besides, petting a wet hog, be it friend or supper, is
stinky business.

Daddy was home. I could see his banged-up pickup parked in the
yard. I walked up on the porch and it creaked, and that made me nervous. It
wasn’t that Daddy cared when I came in, and much of the time he might not know
I was gone. But to wake him could set him in a bad temper, and then the razor
strop would come out. I wasn’t up for dodging his blows, or, for that matter,
dodging his grabbing hands.

On the porch there was a stack of firewood piled close to the
house. I picked me up a good stout piece that fit my clenched fist, opened the
door, and stepped inside. Our house wasn’t no kind of showplace, but it was
big. It had been built long before the river changed course. Daddy had it
handed down to him when his father died—who, according to word I had
heard, was no better a person than he was. But Daddy’s grandfather was a solid
gentleman with money he had brought down from the North back in the eighteen
hundreds. Word was he had earned it in shipping somehow, and then decided he’d
had enough and had gone down south. He had built a sturdy house and barn and
sheds that his son, and now grandson, had let go to ruin by neglect.

Some years back the river changed and it had taken away a lot of
the outbuildings. I had heard about the flood of 1900, and how it had killed
families, and how back then our house sat high on a hill. Then the river rampaged
through like a pack of wild Indians. It stole the soil and carried it off, and
the water had climbed up to where there was once high ground. Where solid earth
had stood, there was a bend in the river now, rising high on the bank, maybe a
hundred feet from our two-story house. I liked to imagine that the water that
had carried those outbuildings away had put them back together at the bottom of
the river with the help of the catfish, and that the barn I had never seen had
mermaids living in it; and that the outhouse was being used by water monsters
with lots of long, sticky legs and whip-like tongues that was forked at the
tips.

It was a shame, really, what Daddy and his daddy had let happen to
the place. Now the big house squeaked when you went up stairs, and you had to
watch your step where it had rotten spots. In the main room, which was large,
it was too cold to be there in winter. The fireplace leaned away from the wall,
and outside it was held up by a big stick that looked ready to break at any moment.
Around the cracks in the bricks the wind came through like a burglar, and in
the summer, so did the snakes and frogs and all manner of vermin.

There was only three of us in the house, and Daddy and Mama mostly
avoided one another. They had little to say except simple stuff about chicken
and hogs, and as of late, there was less of that. Daddy spent a lot of his time
somewhere else, and Mama didn’t care. She took to bed often, lay propped
against cotton-stuffed pillows drinking cheap cure-all she bought from a man
that traveled the country in a dusty black car. He always wore a big black hat
and had black clothes and boots, and his shirt was the color of flour paste. He
had been around for years and looked the same. Some said for twenty years, but
others said a son had taken over the father’s position. There were even those
who said he was the devil. I had seen him, a tall, whip-lean man in a black  hat and a smooth black suit. His face
looked like it had been cut out of wood, and his chin was long and pointed.

“Devil don’t need no car that runs on gas,” Jinx had
said. “So he ain’t no devil. And there ain’t no devils or angels anyhow.”

Jinx was certain on the matter. Me, it depended on if it was
Tuesday or not. I had a tendency to believe all manner of things on a Tuesday.
I know this: what the salesman sold to Mama was certainly devilish. It was a
mixture of alcohol and most likely laudanum. It went for a quarter, and may
have cost him a dime. It was money we couldn’t afford, but she bought the stuff
by the box and sucked it like a baby will suck a bottle.

Daddy had his whiskey. Mama had her cure-all. It made her deep
dream, she said, and the dreams were fine and bright and there was no river
near the door. In those deep-down dreams, she said, me and her lived in a good
way in a clean white house on high, dry land. Daddy was shaved and dirt-free
and upright, wasn’t missing so many teeth, and lived the way he should. When
she woke, she said, it was like she was in a nightmare, and everything that
mattered was stepped on and messed with or mistreated, but a few long swigs of
the cure-all took her back to where she liked to live. It hurt to think I was
losing Mama to twenty-five cents a bottle and a lying dream.

The light in the house was a lantern burning on a nightstand near
the window. Mama had lit it and left it for me. I was glad for the light, but
thought it was damn dangerous to let it burn like that, being near the
curtains. Then again, Mama’s judgment was missing a step these days. I blew out
the lantern and looked out the window. The rain had gone away as swift as it
had come, and the clouds had parted, and the apple-slice moon was giving out
shiny light that looked greasy through the glass; it made the yard shimmer like
a wet nickel.

I started upstairs with my stove wood, feeling my way along the
rail by experience. Daddy didn’t leap out on me. I watched the bad boards, and
made it to the top of the stairs without one of the steps breaking and dropping
me through like a gallows. Upstairs, it was musty where the old carpet had
rotted. Rain came through a hole at the end of the hall, and sometimes so did
pigeons. Daddy was always planning to fix it, but when it came time to buy
boards, he bought whiskey instead.

The thing I did like was having a room of my own with a lock on the
door. Most river people didn’t have such a thing, and even Terry, who had come
from better circumstances, slept on a pallet in their living room, along with
four other kids, who had come as a package with his mama’s new husband.

I started to go in my room, but stopped and went down the hall,
where Mama stayed. The door was cracked. When I looked in, I could see her
shape on the bed, and I was surprised to see another. Even in the dark, I could
tell it was Daddy. The moonlight, though thin, lay on his face and made it look
as if he was wearing a mask. He was halfway under the covers and had his head
turned toward me.

Mama had had far too much laudanum, and that was a fact. Otherwise
she would never have let him in to sleep with her, even if it was only to lie
at the foot of the bed as a foot warmer.

As I stood there looking, Daddy opened his eyes and saw me. He didn’t
move. He just kept looking at me. After a while, he smiled, and the few teeth
he had held the moonlight.

I frowned, smacked the stove wood against my open hand until his
smile went away, and then I closed the door and walked off.

I dug in my overalls for my key, unlocked my door, pushed it shut,
and locked it. I took off my clothes, pulled on my nightgown, shoved back the
covers, and crawled in bed with the stove wood beside me. I lay there with the
moonlight poking through the thin curtains over my window. I patted the stove
wood like it was a bark-covered cat. I thought about Mama and Daddy together,
something that ought to have been right, but wasn’t. They had been as distant
from one another in recent months as the moon is from the earth, and now this.

I came to the conclusion that on this night, in Mama’s laudanum
dreams, he may have been a white knight on a white charger, and she had, so to
speak, opened the castle doors and let him in. Bless her heart, the laudanum
lied. Yet who was I to judge? Even a root hog has its needs, and I suspect even
a root hog has its dreams.

The bed was soft and I was tired. I lay there half awake, half in
dream. I dreamed of me and Jinx and Terry, sailing down the Sabine River until
we came to Hollywood, sailing right out of darkness and into light, gliding
down a wide, wet street of water. On either side of us, standing on golden
bricks, were handsome men and beautiful women, all movie stars, people we had
seen in films. They waved at us as we drifted by and we waved back, sailing
along on our stolen raft with a big white bag of stolen money with a black
dollar sign on it. Next to the bag was May Lynn’s ashes in a golden urn.

Along the street, on either side, all the people—knowing who
May Lynn was and what she might have been, knowing all the movies she didn’t
make, the life she didn’t live—stopped waving and started to cry. We
sailed quietly down the street, out of their sight, into shadows black as
crows.

 

 

Joe R. Lansdale’s latest
novel, Edge of Dark Water, will be
published by Mulholland Books on March 25, 2012. If you want to find out what
happens to Sue Ellen, Terry, and Jinx (and their dead friend May Lynn), you can order
your copy of the book here. ” Excerpt from Edge of Dark Water ” © 2012 Joe R. Lansdale.