By now the sun was pretty high and the air was hot and windless and sticky as molasses. I didn’t know where I was going right then, but I seemed to be getting there fast, and was pretty sweated up over doing it.
I walked for hours, and eventually came to the spot where we had found May Lynn. I don’t know if I went there on purpose, or if I just ended up there, but I came to it.
I walked close to the bank and looked down at the Singer sewing machine that had been left there. I bent down and had a closer gander at it. Where the wire had been tied was bits of gray flesh with flies on it. The killer had bent the two ends in such a way as to tie a knot and then a little stiff bow. It was like what he had used was ribbon, not wires.
I wondered if the murderer thought that was funny. I kept thinking how the man I thought was my daddy, and Constable Sy Higgins, had jerked her feet loose from the wire and hadn’t bothered trying to untwist it off of her. I could still hear the bones in May Lynn’s feet snapping. I remembered how the wet skin stripped off her feet like sticky bread dough and stayed on the wire.
I shooed the flies away, and as I did something moved inside of me that made me feel funny; something that felt like a wild animal trying to find a place to settle down. I started walking again.
I walked until the trees and brush thinned and there was a wet clay path that went up a grass-covered hill like a knife cut in a bright orange sweet potato. When I got to the top of the hill, there was another clay road that wound off of it, and it led to the top of another hill, and on top of that hill was a small white house that looked as fresh as a newborn calf. There was a small green garden out to the side of it with a fence around it to keep out the deer and such, and way out back was a little red outhouse. It looked so bright and perky I had the urge to go up there and use it, even if I didn’t have to go.
The red clay, being wet from the night before, stuck to my shoes and made my feet heavy. I got off the path and took off my shoes and wiped their bottoms across the grass until they were clean. I put them back on and stayed on the grass as I climbed the hill. On the top of the hill it was flat and there wasn’t any grass. The ground had been raked, and there were bits of gravel in the dirt that Jinx’s daddy had hauled in. In front of the house there was a horseshoe drive and no car in it. The car would be up north with Jinx’s daddy.
The house was very small, maybe two rooms, but unlike our huge house, it was in fine shape and the roof looked to have been shingled not too long ago. The shingles were made of good wood, split perfect, laid out and nailed, tarred over to keep out the rot. I knew Jinx’s daddy had done it before he went back north. It was always his way to keep things fresh and tight.
There were a few chickens in the yard, but there wasn’t any livestock. Jinx’s daddy mailed money home to them, and unlike most anyone else around the bottomland, they bought all the meat they ate, except for chicken now and again, and some fish. They mostly had the chickens for eggs, and since they didn’t have any kind of set place for them to nest, they had to be alert as to where the eggs had been laid, or otherwise, you wanted an egg for your breakfast, you might have a bit of a treasure hunt before you could crack one in the pan. I knew that for a fact, as I had to do exactly the same thing at home.
I was almost to the door when I saw Jinx come out of the house carrying a basket with laundry piled high in it. She had her hair out of her usual braids and knotted up behind her head in a thistle-like pile and tied off with a piece of white cord. She was wearing a man’s blue work shirt, overalls, and shoes that looked as if they had room for another pair of feet in them.
She called out to me and I followed her to the backyard and the wash line, which was strung between two tall posts. There were clothespins in the basket, and I helped her hang the wash. We hung it carefully and neatly, and while we moved down the line, we talked.
“I’m wanting to go on that trip we talked about,” I said.
“I wanted to,” Jinx said. “Then I get to thinking about Mama here with just my little brother. Now that I’m home and not out there on the river, this seems all right to me.”
“Not me. What I got is a big house that’s about to fall down around my ears, a drunk mother, and a jackass I have to fight off with a piece of stove wood that I thought was my daddy, but he ain’t. So I reckon I’m coming from a place now that I wasn’t coming from yesterday.”
“What’s that you say?” Jinx said, pausing with a clothespin she was about to clamp to a pair of underpants. “That part about he ain’t your daddy.”
“That’s it. He ain’t my daddy. There’s a fellow named Brian Collins in Gladewater, and he’s my daddy. He’s a lawyer.”
“Shut your mouth.”
“It’s true.”
“Ain’t that something,” Jinx said.
“It’s the best thing that’s happened to me in a long time, finding out that old son of a bitch ain’t my kin.”
“He did raise and feed you, though,” Jinx said.
“No, Mama did what there was of that, then she took to bed and hasn’t done much since I been big enough to tote my own water. I guess what I’m saying, Jinx, is I’m going away, even if I have to go by myself.”
Jinx let that comment hang in the air like the wash on the line. We moved along, hanging clothes, and when we got to the end of the hanging, she said, “When you leaving?”
“Soon as possible. What I want is to look at that map another time, see I can figure out where that money is, nab it, burn May Lynn to a cinder, stick her ashes in a jar, and head out. I get through here, I’m going to find Terry and talk to him, get the map, and see what I can do from there. For me, it’s die dog or eat the hatchet. I’m heading out quick. I want away from here and soon as I can go. Mama has pretty much given up. She told me as much. Gave me her blessing to light out. Besides, right now I’m feeling a little less than friendly toward her, her waiting till now to let me know Don ain’t kin. It’s like she told me, ‘Oh, by the way, those legs, they don’t belong to you. I stole those from someone when you were born, and now they’re asking for them back.’”
“Maybe she thought you’d handle it some better when you was older,” Jinx said.
“All I know is it’s a good thing to know he’s not my kin, and Mama says my real daddy is a good man.”
Jinx nodded, picked up the empty wash basket, started back toward the house with me following. “You ought to keep in mind you ain’t never seen your real daddy, and your mama ain’t seen him in sixteen years. He might be same as Don. Might be worse. Might even be dead.”
“Don’t say that,” I said.
“I’m not trying to mess up where your heart is right now, but as your friend, I’m just giving you a warning. Sometimes when things are bad, they don’t get better. They get worse, and when you think they can’t get no worse, they do.”
“That’s not a very forward way of looking at things,” I said.
“No. But it’s a way that often comes to pass.”
“I hope that isn’t true.”
“By the way,” Jinx said, grinning at me, “you giving them back?”
“What?”
“The legs your mama borrowed.”
Terry lived in town, which wasn’t much more than a handful of buildings that looked to have been stolen away by a tornado and set down on a crooked street so that they didn’t line up good. His house was off the main street and down a blacktop road. It was a pretty nice house, good as Jinx’s, and larger. There was a house on either side of it, and unlike the downtown, they were lined up even and similar in the way they looked. All the houses along there had a little front yard and a backyard and some flowers out front, and on this day, in Terry’s front yard, there was a kid. He was a short, fat kid with carrot-colored hair and green snot on his face that had dried in a long trail that reached to the corner of his mouth, like the runoff from an outhouse.
There was a white fence around the yard and a swinging gate. I pushed through the gate and waved at the kid. It was one of Terry’s stepbrothers. Terry hated all his step-kin. I think what he mostly hated was that he was no longer the center of attention since his mama got remarried. After that, he always had a feeling of being left out in the rain without a hat. I didn’t think he had it so bad myself, but I guess it’s what you compare it to.
The kid in the yard was called Booger by Terry and most everyone else, including his daddy and his stepmother. I figure it was a thing that would follow him even when he was grown up, like a cousin of mine who was called Poot. I suppose it beat being called Turd, especially if the tag had some kind of truthful connection.
“Is Terry here?” I asked Booger.
Booger eyed me as if he was sizing me up for a meal. “He’s out back with a nigger.”
The apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Terry said his new daddy was the sort of man that was still upset he had to pay colored people a nickel for a couple hours’ work and thought he should be able to find them for jobs at the same place he bought mules.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Did you know boys and girls got different thangs?” the boy said.
“Yep,” I said.
I went out back. There was a big pile of wood near the fence, and next to the wood was Terry. Closer to it yet, with ax in hand, was a big colored man. He was splitting a piece of stove wood in half over a log, and he was doing it with the ease of a fish swimming in water. I stood and watched while he did it, it was such good work. He had his shirt off and he was well muscled, and his skin was the color of sweaty licorice. I had been noticing a lot of things about men lately, white and colored, and some of what I noticed made me nervous and anxious.
Terry wasn’t wearing a shirt, either, and I noticed that right off as well. He wasn’t as muscled as the colored man, but he looked pretty good, and I remember thinking in that moment that it wasn’t such a good thing he was a sissy.
Terry was grabbing the pieces as they were halved and piling them on a wheelbarrow. He was doing this quickly and with great skill to avoid the rising and swinging of the ax. He looked around and saw me and nodded. I knew he had chores to finish, so I went and sat on the back porch. I heard the door open behind me, and Terry’s mama came out. She was a fine-looking person with dark, short hair that had a perm in it. She sat down on the steps beside me, said, “Sue Ellen, how are you?”
“I’m fine, ma’am.”
I didn’t look at her direct, as I figured if I did I would look guilty, considering the plans I had might include her son.
“It’s been so long since I’ve seen you,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
I had to look at her now. It was manners. I put on my best lying face and turned it to her. When I did I saw she looked a little less full of juice than when I had seen her last; still pretty, but something she needed had been sucked out of her, and I had the impression that if I touched her hard she might fall apart, like a vase that had been badly glued back together. Still, compared to my mama, she was as solid as a mountain.
According to Terry, what was sucking out the juice was his stepdaddy, who he said was well-heeled but had all the personality of a nasty dishrag. He told me once, “Stepdad didn’t become rich by charm. He became rich by discovering oil on some land he bought and by building a brick-firing company that hires most of the people in town that are being hired. After that, he didn’t need to be charming. He just had to have his wallet with him.”
“How do you think Terry is?” she asked me.
“Ma’am?”
“Do you think he’s okay?”
“Yes, ma’am. I guess so.”
“I think the new arrangements bother him.”
That was like saying I think the selling of one of our children to buy a pig might have been a bad idea. But since I was thinking about even newer arrangements for him, I didn’t know what to reply, other than, “I suppose that’s so.”
After a bit, the colored man stopped chopping and picked his shirt off the woodpile and wiped his face and chest with it and then put it on. Terry pushed the wheelbarrow over to the porch and started unloading it, piling wood under the porch’s overhang.
The colored man came over, smiling and shuffling. Jinx said that was how colored did if they didn’t want to have a visit from the Ku Klux Klan. She said you never knew when it would be decided you were being uppity in the presence of a white, and being uppity could cause you to come to grief. To add to that, it was probably pretty well known that Terry’s stepdad had a white robe and hood hanging in his closet.
The colored man didn’t say anything, just stood there smiling, like a jackass waiting for a carrot. It made me feel funny, seeing a grown man act like that.
Terry’s mama stood up and smiled and handed him something she had in her hand. He took it without looking to see what it was, and went away. When he was gone, she looked down at me and said, “I think that was worth more than a nickel, don’t you? He chopped a lot of wood and it’s hot.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“I gave him a quarter.”
“Well worth it,” I said.
Terry finished up with the wood and came over and sat by me on the porch steps. I could feel the heat off his body and I could smell his sweat.
“Well,” his mama said, still standing on the steps. “I’ll leave you two to visit. But don’t forget your other chores, Terry. You know how your daddy gets when they’re not done.”
“He’s not my real father,” Terry said.
“You don’t mean that,” she said.
“I do mean it.”
“Well, it’ll take a little time to adjust.”
“By the time I adjust, the world will be made anew,” Terry said.
“We won’t discuss it right now…Sue Ellen, it’s good to see you.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
She went in the house.
I said, “You hurt her feelings.”
“I know,” he said. “I didn’t mean to. It’s not her I don’t like. It’s that man she married and all his kids. The smartest one of them barely knows to get in out of the rain, and only does so with considerable encouragement.”
“I’m wanting to look at that map again,” I said. “I’m wanting to find that money.”
“You sure?”
“I am. Jinx might come, and she might not. But I want to go.”
“When?”
“Tonight.”
“I think I got in too big a hurry the other day,” Terry said.
“You don’t want to go now?”
“No. I want to go. But I think we should find the money, and then we have to dig up May Lynn and burn her, and I need to do some work on that barge so it can run cleaner down the river.”
“You know how to do that?”
“I know how to do a lot of things. My real daddy taught me things, and he taught me how to teach myself about things I don’t know. He taught me how to study, and my mama taught me the same.”
“How much studying you need?”
“For what we have in mind, little to none. But I need time. Burning a body takes more time and work than you might think. You need a real serious fire, and we have to have it someplace where we won’t be seen. I have an idea for that, but I’d rather not discuss it until I’ve had time to consider on it awhile. Thing we should do first is determine if the map is real, and if it is, we have to find out if there’s any money buried out there.”
“Then we steal it.”
“You’re reconciled with that idea now?” he said.
“If ‘reconciled’ means I’m fine with that idea, I am.”
“That’s about the size of it,” Terry said.