Edge of Dark Water (23 page)

T
here’s no describing how I felt then, because I knew not only that someone was on the roof but that—of course—it was Skunk. I couldn’t figure why he would choose to do that, out there in the rain, and in such a way we could all hear him and know where he was, but then it come to me. He knew how fearful we would be, and he was someone who sucked off misery.

I got up and wandered into the big room. Mama glanced at me. I couldn’t see her face there in the dark, but I knew she was scared, like me. Jinx was walking around the room, following the sound of Skunk on the roof. She held the pistol and looked at the ceiling. The board roof heaved a bit in one spot. Jinx snapped up the gun and fired. It was loud as the crack of doom, and my ears rang. Sawdust drifted down from the ceiling. I heard footsteps moving quickly across the roof, and then they ceased.

“I think he jumped off,” Jinx said.

“You think you hit him?” Mama asked.

“If I did, he was mighty spry afterwards,” Jinx said.

We stayed right where we was, waiting to hear him climbing back on the roof, but that didn’t happen. Instead I heard a creaking sound in the bedroom. Grabbing Jinx by the elbow, I led her in there. The creaking was coming from a window that was to one side of Terry’s bed. He was up now, the shot having awakened him. His head was turned toward the window. There was a big blade stuck between the edge of the window and the shutter, and there was broken glass on the floor; the blade was prying the shutter, causing it to creak, and then crack. Skunk’s stink was easing through that crack along with the blade.

Jinx lifted the pistol, holding it tight with both hands, and fired. It was such a big pistol, the shot made her take a step back. The shot hit the shutter and cracked it, went through, slammed into some glass, and broke it. The big blade was jerked away.

“You might have got him,” I said.

“Yeah,” Jinx said, “but I don’t want to go open that shutter and look out and see.”

“Me neither,” I said.

“That means me, too,” Mama said. She was standing behind us, holding the shotgun.

“I haven’t any plans for an examination, either,” Terry said, sitting up in bed, his good hand holding his arm above the amputation. I could feel Jinx shaking where her shoulder was pushed up to me, or maybe it was me shaking.

“We’re safe enough in here,” I said. “With all that rain, he can’t burn us out. We’re all right if we don’t startle like quail. That’s what he wants, for us to startle and make a break for it so he can pick us off. We just got to stay alert.”

“If he’s out there,” Terry said, “and we’re in here, he has the advantage. Not us. He can just wait us out. That bastard can live off the land. We can’t even go out now to pick berries.”

Me and Jinx pushed an old dresser with a tall, cracked mirror in front of the busted window to make it safer, and then we all sat up that night, listening. Now and again one of us would drift off, but there was always someone awake. Jinx stayed in the bedroom with Terry. Me and Mama sat in the big room. During the night, at least a couple times, I heard Skunk try the doorknob, rattling it so as to shatter our nerves.

Rattling the door, breaking the glass out of the windows, bits of it falling down between the window frames and shutters in little clinks, went on for most of the night; then a couple hours before dawn it quit.

When light come, I was scared and starving. It was still raining, though less savage than before. We dug the fish guts and that blackened head out of the fireplace and wiped it off, and the four of us had pieces of it. It wasn’t much to eat and it tasted nasty. My stomach acted at first like it might not manage to wrap around it, but it did.

Mama found a tin with a little coffee in it, and she heated the water and made us some. It tasted like dirty water, but it was something to put in the belly to make you think you’d eaten.

About two hours after we was up, I ventured, against Mama and Jinx’s will—Terry had fallen back into a wounded sleep—to open a shutter and look out. From that window I could see the woods. They was shadowy in the rising light. I checked as good as I could, but didn’t see Skunk. I didn’t see nothing but those dark trees and rain falling.

I locked up, went from shutter to shutter, checking to see if I could see anything. I opened one on the other side of the big room, and there was a face staring in at me, the nose poking through a broken pane of glass, the eyes dry and stiff. I jumped back and screamed. It was the old woman. She was still wrapped in the rug, but it had been peeled back so her face was free of it. Her white hair was wet as a fresh-born calf, and she was propped against the window by having her arms pulled up and bent at the elbow, pressed to the window frame. In her arms was the saw box. It was open, and everything that had been in it was gone except Terry’s arm—the hand that went with the arm was gone, though. And the old woman’s arms that held the box in front of her was stumps; her hands had been chopped off, too.

“He dug her up,” I said.

“Hell,” Jinx said, standing near me with the pistol. “We can see that.”

“He’s a monster,” Mama said, easing over to take a look.

“You just now figuring that?” Jinx said.

“Jinx,” Mama said, “you should be careful. I might knock the shit out of you.”

Me and Jinx both looked at Mama.

“I’ve said it now,” Mama said, “and though it makes me feel better, I prefer not to say it again, and would like to ask you to not remember I said it the first time.”

The rain had started to slacken, and we could see the sun real good from that window, rising up in a thin gold line, dragging more blood-red light behind it. I closed the shutters and locked them.

I said, “There ain’t no pattern to him. He’s on deck all the time. Any other body would sleep sometime. But night or day, rain or dry, it don’t affect him. How are we to deal with someone like that?”

I was starting to get a little crazy, and I had to make myself quit chattering like a squirrel.

Jinx went over and sat down cross-legged on the floor, laying the pistol across her lap. “There ain’t but a couple ways for us to do, Sue Ellen,” she said. “Someone has to go on into Gladewater and get help, or we all need to go. Or maybe there’s a third idea, and that one is we split up and strike out in different directions, but that idea only works if Terry can go along, and he can’t.”

“So that brings us back to the first two,” I said.

“It does,” Jinx said.

“But if someone stays here with Terry,” Mama said, “Skunk will eventually get in the house. One person can’t watch both rooms and go without sleeping.”

“Or the house will dry up and he’ll set fire to it, burn it down,” Jinx said.

“I believe I have a say in this,” Terry called from the bedroom, throwing back the covers with his good hand. He was wearing only his shorts, trying to put his feet on the floor.

He started to walk toward us, but didn’t get too far. He had to go back and sit on the bed. Jinx went in there and laid the pistol on the bed, helped him swing his feet back up, and covered him. We all went in there and sat on the bed by him.

“You couldn’t whip a kitten if we tied one of its paws behind its back and put out one of its eyes,” I said. “Lay down and rest some.”

“All I do is rest,” Terry said.

“All you’re up for just right now,” Jinx said.

I thought for a moment, said, “That log down there by the river. That could be a way.”

“Log?” Mama said.

“It was there when we found the fish,” I said. “We could use it to sail down the river. Me and Terry did a similar thing.”

“I had two arms then,” Terry said.

“That’s true. But I think someone walking out—that’s not so good, provided they’re trying to get to Gladewater. I don’t think it’s real far by river, but on foot it might be a distance. All of you could stay here, and I could take the pistol and make a break for it, get to that log, push off and make it downriver to Gladewater, get some help. One person can make it easier than a bunch.”

“That doesn’t sound like that good a plan,” Jinx said.

“I have to agree,” Terry said.

“Me, too,” Mama said.

“I’m a fast runner, and if I can get down to the river and push the log off, and if Skunk ain’t right on top of me, and the water is running swift, I can get away.”

“That’s a lot of ifs,” Mama said.

“If we stay here, we’re all dead,” I said. “I’ll take the hatchet. I’m more likely to hit something with that, since I ain’t a good shot. And the hatchet ain’t so heavy.”

I went over and grabbed up the hatchet by the fireplace. Mama said, “Now? You’re going now?”

“Time ain’t going to get no better,” I said. “I figure Skunk ain’t going to expect me running for the river when I got a perfectly good cabin to hole up in. That gives me an edge.”

“That’s not much of an edge,” Terry said.

I hugged Mama and Jinx, and went into the bedroom and hugged Terry.

“You don’t have to do this,” Mama said as I came back into the main room.

“Yeah, I do,” I said.

I went to the door and Jinx and Mama followed.

“Be alert,” Terry called out from the bedroom.

I took a deep breath, told Jinx, “You open it, and I’m going to take off running.”

She opened it, and I broke like a wild mustang, heading straight for the river, carrying that hatchet. It looked like good free running. I didn’t see any sign of Skunk. All I saw was the slope of the hill that led down to the water. The grass was green and the wind was cool on account of last night’s rain. I was almost enjoying myself. I was beginning to think things was going to be hunky-dory. That I was going to make that river and that log without so much as a grasshopper smacking into me, but right about then, coming out of the woods on my right, I seen him.

Now, it generally figures that things are scarier in the dark, which is how I had seen him before, at night, running along the bank, carrying a hatchet, same as I was now. But in the daylight, I got to tell you, he looked even scarier.

He was big and stout and was carrying the cane knife. He had on that derby and his hair was all coiled out from under it, twisted up and full of pine needles and leaves and dirt and such; that bird was there, too, dangling. There was a wink of light on his hat, which I seen now had a string fastened to it and was tied under his chin. That wink of light was Constable Sy’s badge pinned to the front of the hat. He had a necklace made out of the hands he had recently chopped off, them that was Constable Sy’s and Gene’s, and the old woman’s, and the blackened hand that had belonged to Terry; all of them had a strand of leather run through them, and they flapped against his chest as he run, like they was birds attacking him. He didn’t have his pack on his back, having laid it aside somewhere, and there wasn’t nothing to slow him down. His mouth was open and he had surprisingly good white teeth, and plenty of them. He was making a sound like someone trying to gargle with a turnip; that made the whole story about him having his tongue pulled out make sense. But that wasn’t my concern then. My concern was the path in front of me and the river beyond that and that damn log. I could tell right away I wasn’t going to make it.

I knew, too, if I turned around and tried to run back to the house I wouldn’t make it there, either. He’d be on me with that cane knife.

I veered off toward the briar patch. It wasn’t a good idea, but when I seen Skunk coming fast, I didn’t have no more thought than that. I had to dive in or take that cane knife twixt the ears.

Just before I got to the briar patch, I looked back and seen Skunk with his cane knife raised, and glory hallelujah, he was right on me. And then there came a crack, and all of a sudden Skunk stiffened and then went down. I hesitated, looked toward where the sound had come from. I could see shutters thrown back on the house, Jinx’s shiny black face at the window, that big revolver propped on the windowsill. That was a far and good and unlikely shot, considering she hadn’t been able to hit him on the roof or at the window. It wasn’t no more than blind luck, and it just as easily might have hit me.

Still, it wasn’t a finisher. It was a flesh wound. Skunk got up and started after me again, walking like he had one foot hung up in a bucket of mud. I heard another shot crack, but this one didn’t hit Skunk. It whined off toward the river.

I dove into them briars, swinging the ax, trying to chop a way through. All that was doing was slowing me down. I ducked and went through that shallow spot in the briars I had seen before, thinking that might get me away from him, but I could hear him coming, breathing heavy, making a sound that was godawful. I thought at first it was from pain, but it come to me that it was from anger. He was trying to yell at me with no tongue.

The briars and vines and bushes got thick, and I had to duck more than before to go through, and soon as I ducked, I heard a whistling sound pass over where my head had been. I knew by just sheer luck I had missed getting my head chopped off.

I hustled on through that low place on my hands and knees. Skunk grabbed one of my feet, tried to pull me to him. I kicked back, and my old shoe come loose of me, and I escaped.