When I was cried out, I walked along the bank, carrying my hatchet, kind of tiptoeing on my shoeless foot. I come to the spot where our boat had been, where the log I was going to ride was supposed to be. But the rain of the night before had lifted it up and washed it downriver. That gave me a bit of a chill, knowing if I had run down to the river slightly ahead of Skunk, I would have been trapped at its edge, and that even if I had jumped in, he could have swum after me and caught me good. Like it did for Brer Rabbit, that briar patch had saved my life.
When I got up over the rise and could see the house, I also saw Jinx, who was coming my way, toting the pistol.
I got closer to her, and then she started running, and so did I, at least a few steps, cause the foot that didn’t have no shoe was full of stickers, and my legs gave out under me like they had on the riverbank. I just sat down and went to crying again. Jinx got to me and threw her arms around me and kissed me on the head, and I kissed her, and we both cried.
“You got him, didn’t you?” she said. “I knew someone could get him, it would be you.”
“He got his ownself,” I said, and told her what happened.
“I started to come help, but then I was afraid if I got killed, wouldn’t be no one to take care of your mama and Terry. Finally, I couldn’t take it no more, and I was coming no matter what, then I seen you walking up.”
“You did fine,” I said. “It happened real quick. That shot in the leg slowed him down.”
“Lucky shot.”
“I figured as much.”
“You stink.”
“Skunk touched me.”
“Ain’t nothing soap and water won’t take care of,” she said, and helped me up. We walked back to the cabin, but I looked over my shoulder a few times as we went, just in case Skunk could come back from the dead. And I didn’t let go of that hatchet, neither.
We had quite a reunion when I got to the cabin, though they was anxious for me to heat up some well water and bathe, and after a bit of airing, most of Skunk’s smell went away.
We ended up staying at that house for a couple days. I found a pair of the old woman’s shoes, which was pretty run-down but better than mine, and took to wearing them. We kept talking about how we was going to bury her again, but I’m ashamed to say we left her leaning up against the house. We just kept them shutters at that window pulled to so as to keep her odor out.
Me and Jinx caught fish for us to eat, and each time we was out, we went and looked at Skunk hanging where I had left him, just to make sure he was good and dead. And dead he was. Birds had been at him. His eyes was just holes. The flesh around the end of his nose, and his lips, had been pecked at, too. If I thought he stunk before, he stunk twice as much now.
When Terry had his strength up enough we thought he wouldn’t be as much a burden to Mama, we laid in some squirrels we killed with the shotgun, knowing they wouldn’t last more than a couple of days before they went rancid. But they was good enough eating for three days in a row. We gathered up some berries and some wild grapes. We left Mama with the shotgun. She was the best choice to take care of Terry, provided she remembered how to be a mother. As of late, she’d been right good at it.
Me and Jinx took a bit of the money from the can in case we needed it. I carried the hatchet, Jinx carried the pistol, and we went walking out. It was a long ways before we come to a road; about two days. We slept out in the open under some trees, and woke up full of red bugs that had crawled up and nested in spots I don’t like to talk about. When we come to that road, we abandoned the pistol and the hatchet, as we felt these might not be the things to carry if we was going to try and bum a ride.
Well, that need not have been a problem, cause we walked all day and not one car came down that red clay road, least not until we was in sight of a town, and by then it was close enough to walk. The town was Gladewater.
“Here we be,” Jinx said.
“It ain’t much, is it?”
“No, it ain’t.”
But as we got closer we saw that it had some good streets and some buildings all along that street, and there were some dirt lanes that branched off of it, and we saw the bus station with a big bus parked out front.
We kept walking, and when we was in town good, the first thing we did was stop and talk to a man that had just finished parking his car in front of the general store. We asked him where the law was. He pointed out the police station, which was just a house with a battered black Ford in front of it.
There was a sign on the door that said COME INSIDE, and we did. There was a plump little man with a lot of black hair sitting behind a desk that was leveled out with some folded paper under the legs. He was holding a flyswatter and kind of batting it around at a fly, mostly out of entertainment, I figure.
There was a big white hat on his desk that looked like it would need a head about twice the size of his to fill it; maybe a pumpkin would have fit in that hat. There was a note tablet and a stubby pencil next to the hat. He had on regular work clothes, but there was a police badge pinned to his shirt, and he had a.45 in a holster on his hip. I saw it, because when we come in he stood up. He looked at us, said, “You girls need something?”
“You could say that,” I said. “We got something we need to tell you.”
He studied our faces, asked us to sit down. He adjusted his gun belt so his belly could live with it, sat back down, threw a boot heel with some straw-laced cow mess on the bottom of it over the corner of his desk, and leaned back in his chair. He cocked the flyswatter over one shoulder like it was a rifle. He told us his name was Captain Burke, which was an interesting title, cause it turned out he was all the policeman there was in Gladewater. I guess he was most likely the privates and the sergeants and all the in-?betweens, too.
I started to point out the cow mess, but decided it wasn’t worth it. I just watched the fly he had been chasing land on it.
“You look like you got wrapped up in some barbed wire,” he said. “Or got laid into by a big cat.”
“Thorns,” I said, and then I started telling what we had come there for.
Without explaining how May Lynn died, or bringing her up at all, we gave him some background. What we told him was me and my mama had run away from home cause the husband and stepfather was mean, and that Jinx was traveling with us as a help. We told him about Terry, too. How he had run away from a mean stepfather and had his finger chopped off. How it got infected, and about the old woman that sawed it off. We didn’t mention the money, and we held back the part about Skunk. We just said how Mama was waiting back in this cabin and an old woman had held us prisoner, and cut the arm off our friend, but that it needed doing. We stopped talking about there.
When we finished, Captain Burke almost jumped out of his chair, said, “Come here and look.”
We followed him back to where there was a room that had been made into a jail, with bars on the door and at the window, and sitting in there on a cot was none other than Don Wilson, my stepdaddy. He turned and stared at us. He looked thin and pitiful and his face had sunk in at the cheeks and his Adam’s apple poked out against his throat like a turkey wattle.
“Is this the fella you run off from?” Captain Burke asked.
Me and Jinx couldn’t do no more than nod.
“Hello, Sue Ellen,” Don said.
“Hello,” I said.
“How’s your mother?”
“Tolerable.”
“Good,” he said, then looked at the floor and didn’t try to catch our eye again.
Captain Burke said to Don, “I’ll get you supper soon, and you ought to eat it this time, not just play with it.”
Don didn’t say nothing, just kept staring at the floor.
“Come on back to the office,” Captain Burke said.
We did, and we all got back in our same chairs, except Captain Burke. He had an icebox in there, and he opened it up and got out three Co-Colas and used an opener from his desk drawer to pry the lids off. He set the Co-Colas in front of us, said, “There, now. Ain’t nothing like a good Co-Cola to kick the thirst.”
He sat down and we all sipped our drinks, as if on command. They were lukewarm, but right then I would have taken a big slug of spit if it had just a touch of sugar in it.
Captain Burke said, “That man back there, Don, he come into this town over a month ago. He come by and said he was looking for some kin, and had I seen them, or had any word. I told him no, and that I didn’t have papers on anybody that was a runaway.
“Well, then, he didn’t leave town. He just drove around in his truck, which had an old tarp over the bed. He’d sleep in the front seat of the truck, and now and again he’d go down to the river, where there’s a place for boats to tie up, and look around, then come back and stay about. Flies was all over the back of that truck, so finally, I made him give me a look. Know what was back there?” Burke said, eyeballing me and Jinx like we might actually have some idea.
“No, sir,” I said.
“It was the body of a man, and he was well rotted. He had a hole through his chest about big enough to drive a tractor through, even if it was dragging a pile of brush.”
“That’s a big hole,” I said.
“Yep, it was a big hole,” he said.
Captain Burke let that bloody, flyspecked picture he had painted settle on us, but there wasn’t a thing we knew to do with it. Jinx, as if to feed the story, said, “Dead man, huh?”
“Yep. He had been dead some time and had heated up good under that tarp. So you know what I done?”
We shook our heads.
“I arrested this Don fella, your stepdaddy. I arrested him and I asked him who that was in the truck bed.”
“That seems like a good way to go,” Jinx said.
“I thought the same,” Captain Burke said. “I said, ‘Who in hell is that and how did he get dead?’ He says to me, ‘Why, that there is Cletus, and I shot a hole through him with a shotgun.’” He paused and looked at us. “How do you like the story so far?”
Neither Jinx nor I knew what to say, so we just waited, like birds on a limb.
“So I say, ‘How come did you shoot him?’ And he says it was cause Cletus had paid a crazy nigger named Skunk to hunt y’all down-that would be you-and that he didn’t want none of you dead. He said there was some money involved.”
“He didn’t want us dead?” I said.
Captain Burke nodded. “What he said.”
“There ain’t no money,” Jinx said. “That was all some kind of pipe dream of his.”
“Say it was?” Burke asked.
“It was,” Jinx said. “Cletus told him a pipe dream and for a while there I figure he thought it was real.”
I wondered then if Jinx was being mighty clever, or just digging us a big hole to fall in.
“This Don Wilson says there was a girl got murdered, and that kind of set things off, though he didn’t know exactly how it started the ball rolling, or anything else about it. Just that his stepdaughter-that would be you-and a boy, who ain’t here, as I see it, and a little colored girl, which would be you, was all friends of hers. He said that girl drowned with a sewing machine fixed to her feet and that got things in motion.”
“But he didn’t know how it got things in motion?” I said.
“What he said,” Captain Burke said. “Don said he figured it was Cletus what killed her. Said they wasn’t a close family, and there was some kind of quarrel, maybe over some money, and Cletus killed her. Cletus claimed you had the money, and that brought this Skunk character into motion. I don’t know I believe there’s a Skunk character.”
“There is,” I said.
The Skunk part didn’t excite him that much. “And you say there ain’t no money?” He said that like he might like some of it.
“All we got is ten dollars between us,” Jinx said, and dug the money we had brought from the can out of her pocket and slapped it on the desk. “That’s it, and some pocket lint.”
“Your stepdaddy said this fellow Cletus put this crazy killer on you named Skunk, the one you say is real, and he didn’t want that. He tried to get Cletus to call it back. But that wasn’t the way Cletus wanted it. So Wilson shot Cletus, said he went looking for this killer Cletus had hired, but didn’t find him. He came here to see if you showed up to catch a bus or something. He was down at that bus depot, parked out front all day, until I noticed all them flies and had me a peek in the back of the pickup. I asked him why he didn’t just toss the body. And you know what he said?”
We shook our heads.
“He said after he killed him and tossed him back there and covered him up, he just didn’t think no more about him. Can you imagine that? That fella with a hole blowed through him, lying in the back of a truck smelling like an outhouse, flies all over the place, and he didn’t think no more about him. There’s a man with something on his mind, that’s what I can tell you.”
“There really was a hired killer,” I said, thinking he hadn’t paid attention the first time I mentioned it.
“This Skunk, you mean?” he said, and then it come to me that he might be circling around to see if we was going to change our story. I decided to add to it, and let the thing I added be the truth.
“Yes, sir. He killed two men that was working for Cletus, and caused another to get killed when a raft turned over on the river. The man on the raft was a preacher who tried to help us. His name was Reverend Jack Joy. He was an all-right fella.”
“My wife ran off with a preacher,” Captain Burke said. “So I don’t know I feel the loss all that heavy of a preacher.”
“We was running from Skunk. But he got his the other day. He’s dead by the river, hanging.”
“Hanging?” Captain Burke said.
I explained that part to him. When I finished up the story, I said, “What you going to do with my stepdaddy?”
“I don’t know,” Captain Burke said. “But your story and his kind of fit, except for the money.”
He kept coming back to the money, and by then I had him figured. He had already taken that ten dollars Jinx had put on his desk, folded it up, and put it in his shirt pocket.
“Cletus just thought there was money, but there wasn’t,” I said. “His boy, who died not long back. He spent it up. Word was he stole it from a bank.”
“Do say?”
“Yes, sir, that’s the story,” I said.
“So we can run all this by a judge if we like,” Captain Burke said. “But Don tells me Cletus ain’t got no next of kin to worry about things. Is that right?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “His whole family is deader than a doornail.”
“Well, then. You said this fella that was after you…Skunk. You said he’s dead and hanging?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “And Mama, and Terry, that boy with the one arm, they’re still in the cabin.”
I had told him this already, but he was a man that liked hearing a thing repeated, so I gave him his wish. I decided then to talk about how the old woman had died. I just mentioned before that she had cut Terry’s arm off cause it was bad infected, and that she had held us captive, but I hadn’t mentioned she had passed in her sleep. I told him now and told how Skunk had dug her up and we had left her leaning against the house.
When I finished, I wasn’t sure he believed all or any of our story, but he nodded at things while I talked, the way you will to someone you think may not have all their marbles.
When I finished with it, Captain Burke ran his hand through his hair, said, “We got pretty much a mess here, don’t we?”
Me and Jinx didn’t argue with that.
“What we going to do about it?” he asked.
We didn’t offer any words of wisdom.
“I guess I got to think on it before I decide,” he said. “First, though, I reckon we need to go get your mama and this Terry fella, and I want to see this Skunk, and that old woman you say you left leaning up against the house.”
I figured my criminal life was about to come to a bad end, but it didn’t work out quite like that.
Here’s what happened. Captain Burke hired a greasy trapper with three fingers missing (said a gator got them) and a motorboat; he motored us back up the river. Captain Burke looked silly sitting in the boat with his hat on, it being a ten-gallon. He had stuffed the inside of it with paper to make it fit, and it stood out from his noggin all the way around.
We stopped at where Skunk was hung up. They pulled the boat on shore enough so that it didn’t float away, got out, and stood there and looked at Skunk, who was even worse for wear than before. His neck had grown thin, and it was starting to rot.
Captain Burke got him a stick and poked Skunk a few times, causing him to swing back and forth. He poked him another time and darn if his head didn’t pop off, and let me tell you, that was a nasty sight.
“Who’d have thunk that there?” said the greasy trapper. “You’d think a head that big gonna have a neck that’s not gonna wear so quick, wouldn’t you?”
“He ain’t got no better neck than nobody else,” Captain Burke said.
“That there supposed to be that Skunk fella that comes to get folks and such?” the trapper asked, since Captain Burke-who, when it got right down to it, was kind of a blabbermouth-had told him the whole story.
“Yep,” I said.
“Ah, he don’t look like so much to me, he don’t. No, sir. Not so much.”
“Yeah, well,” Jinx said. “He ain’t alive. I don’t reckon the dead look like much no matter who they was.”
“Well, now,” said the trapper, “that’s a point you got there, it is. I’m just saying how he looks.”
They left Skunk where he fell, and we motored on up the river some more to where we had stopped when we first come to the old woman’s house. We went up the hill and to the house. I knocked on the door, and Mama answered it and let us in. Terry was able to get around better now, go to the outhouse proper, instead of going in a pan with the results thrown out one of the busted windows, as this was a thing he told us right away, right there in front of strangers. But I guess if I had had my arm cut off and had been having to do my business in a pan, I would have been pretty excited about the change as well. In the short time we had been gone, three days about, they had eaten up all the squirrels we had laid in, and the berries and grapes, too.
Captain Burke looked over Terry’s amputated arm and nodded his head at the work. “You say that a woman lived here done that?”
“Yes,” Terry said. “She’s leaning up against the house, with what’s left of my arm in a box.”
Mama went over and opened up the shutters, and there she was, still in the same place, but shrunk some in the blanket, and good and ripe, with that saw box still cradled and open on her forearms, the remains of Terry’s arm lying up in it.
“Uh-huh,” said the trapper, looking out the window. “I knowed this old woman some, a time back. She was like an old poison snake, but without the sweetness. Nobody had anything to do with her come these last ten years. She’d done got so sour wasn’t no one wanted anything to do with her. I thought she was done dead.”
Well, we buried the old woman again, and the trapper said a few words over her. About how she was mean as hell, but still she was dead and we ought to be polite, or some such thing. While he was talking I sort of drifted away, watching a blue jay in a tree.
Finished, we walked down to where Skunk was. The trapper and Captain Burke buried Skunk and his head in the side of the riverbank, which seemed foolish to me, as it wouldn’t be long before time washed him out of there. But to tell the truth, I didn’t really care. I wasn’t all that concerned about how Skunk had ended up, though there was moments when I’d consider how he had been treated when he was young; his tongue yanked out, hit over the head with a boat paddle, near drowned, and made to live in the woods. When I’d consider all that, I’d at least have a moment or two of some sad feelings for him. But they passed quicker than they came.
When they had Skunk buried, the trapper said to the bank where he had been tucked, “Good luck in hell,” then we walked back to where the boat was. It turned out the boat wasn’t big enough for all of us, which was a thing we had tried to tell Captain Burke from the start. But he had his mind set, so here we was. It was decided they’d take Mama and Terry to Gladewater, and it would be seen to that they got put up in a boardinghouse. Me and Jinx said we’d stay and wait our turn. When they was out of sight down the river, me and her went back up to the house and got the lard cans with the money and May Lynn’s ashes. We dug a hole near the briar patch and buried them, and made some little markers with rocks.
I guess it was near dark when Captain Burke and the trapper showed up, and we got loaded and made our way to Gladewater. Mama and Terry was over at the boardinghouse. Captain Burke went and got Mama but left Terry there, cause he was still feeling weak from all that blood loss. The trapper went away, and me and Jinx just waited around in the street until we seen Captain Burke and Mama coming our way.
Mama had had time to clean up and wash her hair, and she had been given a dress by the landlady; she looked good and fresh, and Captain Burke, like most men, was smitten.
When we all got to the jail, Mama went in back and talked with Don. When she came out, she said, “I talked to him like you suggested, Captain.”
“And?”
“He says he killed that man to keep him from having me and Sue Ellen killed. He said he doesn’t like Terry and doesn’t have any feelings for Jinx one way or the other.”
“Figures,” Jinx said.
Captain Burke looked at Mama. “Was he rough with you? Is that why you run off?”
Mama nodded. “Yes. Yes, he was, and that is why I ran off. But I think now he’s done. He was just trying to protect us in the end. It might not make him a good person, but it doesn’t make him evil. He was trying to do one thing right.”
That was our complete story. Reverend Joy didn’t come up again, and neither did Gene or Constable Sy. It didn’t seem to bother Captain Burke at all. None of the story we told would have been worth a damn for any solid law enforcement, even if it was mostly true, but Captain Burke seemed satisfied with it. I reckon when it comes to police matters, law is pretty much where and how you find it. And how much work there is to it for them, and how much money there is or isn’t in it.
In our case, there was too much work and no real money for Captain Burke, and at the bottom of it all, like lots of people in those kinds of positions, he didn’t really give a damn.
“I’ll cut him loose, then,” he said in a big way, spreading his hands. “We’ll call him killing that Cletus fella self-defense. Hell, we’ll just call everything even and not hurt our heads too much over it.”
“Sure,” Mama said, like any of it made sense.
Captain Burke told Mama he wouldn’t mind taking her to the cafe for dinner tomorrow if she was agreeable, and she said, “Maybe.”
Don was let loose, given his truck keys, wallet, and his greasy cap.
“Your truck is behind here,” Captain Burke said. “I think they buried that Cletus fella in the pauper’s section of the graveyard, if you or anyone cares. I guess being the shooter, you might not want to give him any prayers.”
Don looked in his wallet. It was empty. He said, “I had five dollars in there.”
“No, you didn’t,” Captain Burke said.
Don decided it was best to take the loss. He went outside, carrying his cap. When we went out he was waiting on us.
“I appreciate the way you helped me out in there, Helen,” he said to Mama. “I wouldn’t mind if you came home now.”
“You and I are divorced.”
“We wasn’t really never married by a preacher,” he said.
“That’s why we are divorced. Because I say so.”
“You wasn’t married?” I said.
“No,” Mama said.
“We just sort of took up together,” Don said.
“Mama,” I said. “What else ain’t you told me?”
But I didn’t say it like I really wanted to hear any kind of answer.
Don tried to sweet-talk her some, but Mama told him it was done, and she better not see him no more, or she would press charges with Captain Burke.
Don grinned at her. “I got a bottle of cure-all in the glove box of my truck, if Captain Burke didn’t drink it up. I know you must have been missing it. I’ll buy you another case soon as we get home and the trader comes around.”
“No more cure-all for me,” she said. “That’s what made me foolish. The river made me strong.”
“The river?” he said.
“Yes, the river. And these kids. And another one that isn’t here right now.”
“I saved your life,” he said. “I killed Cletus.”
“Cletus couldn’t find his elbow with a map,” she said. “You didn’t do anything to stop Skunk. Sue Ellen did that.”
“That’s right,” I said. “And that Sight you’re supposed to have hasn’t helped you much, has it? I don’t think you got any kind of future sight. I think you’re just a big donkey’s ass.”
I had been wanting to say something like that for a long time, and now it felt good to have done it.
Don glared at me.
“So you go on, now,” Mama said. “I won’t cry for Cletus, but Don, I won’t cry for you, neither. All I can say is I’m surprised you left the house and come this far. I’ll give you that.”
“I could take you home,” he said, acting a little bit tough. “I could make you.”
“I don’t think you can,” Helen said. “I’ll yell out for Captain Burke.”
“He ain’t going to be around all the time,” Don said.
“No, but he’s nearby right now,” she said. “And I am not afraid of you. You go get in your truck and you do what you want with your life, but I am done with you. I didn’t protect Sue Ellen like I should have, up there in that bedroom in my stupor. I’m protecting her now. I’d die before I’d let you touch her.”
“I didn’t mean nothing by that,” Don said. “I was just trying to compliment her.”
“You meant everything by it, and I should have stopped you,” Mama said. “If I see you around, I swear I’ll tell Captain Burke and say how I protected you with some lies but have changed my mind, and that you were in with Cletus to kill us and get the money.”
“Even though there ain’t no money,” I said.
“Yeah,” Mama said, picking up on what I was doing. “Even though there isn’t any money.”
“Cletus made that up on account of Jinx hitting him upside his head with a stick,” I said. “He wanted revenge.” Damn if I wasn’t getting to be a natural liar.
“And you did agree to have Sue Ellen hunted down and killed for seventy-five dollars,” Mama said. “I heard you agree to it.”
“I didn’t mean nothing by that,” he said. “Had I, I wouldn’t have killed Cletus. That’s just my way to talk like that. I wouldn’t have let nobody hurt Sue Ellen.”
“It’s your way that annoys me, Don,” Mama said. “You want me back so you can get me on the cure-all, keep me upstairs in that rotting house like a china-head doll. You won’t change. Never. You’ll hit me when you’re mad, then you’ll tell me how you didn’t mean it and you’ll change, but you won’t change. For all I know, one day you’ll do me like you did Cletus.”
Don studied Mama carefully to see if he could spot any weakness in her position, but there wasn’t any. He looked at me and Jinx. I stayed steadfast, and so did Jinx.
“You’ll regret it,” Don said. “You’ll miss me.”
“Haven’t so far,” Mama said. “I only helped you out here because you killed Cletus. That’s a murder you’re going to get away with. Now we’re all even, you and me, and we’re all done.”
Don put his greasy cap on, turned around, and walked away.
“That’s that,” Mama said.