Edge of Dark Water (24 page)

The tunnel of briars was real narrow now, but that darn Skunk was getting through, coming close, smelling like an open grave. I kept scuttling, and finally the briars widened and there was room to move around, but I felt like one of those fish that had got in a trap and couldn’t go back.

Getting to my feet, I tried to run, but there was just enough vines to tangle and trip me up. I almost dropped my hatchet cause the thorns had gotten into me, cutting me up something horrible. I saw right in front of me was the riverbank, and I wasn’t no more than a step from it. It fell off there maybe twenty feet to a line of dirt running by the water. It was a good drop, but it seemed better than a cane knife in the head.

It didn’t matter, though. I was wound up tight in those vines and thorns and couldn’t pull free. I was like a fly in a spiderweb. I knew this was it. I was about to take the Big Siesta. I managed to get my feet under me, but those vines still had me. I leaped at them a few times, trying to break through, but they held me.

I glanced back. Skunk was hacking through the briar patch, getting closer. He had lost his bowler and the bird hanging from his hair had a lot of its feathers torn out. His face was as cut up as if he had been in a knife fight. He was grinning and right on top of me. He was so close I could see his skin was cracked up with wrinkles and scars; he looked ancient as Satan. He had the cane knife raised. I quit looking back and leaped at the briars again. I felt a terrible pain as the thorns ripped free and the vines broke, and I went tumbling over the riverbank.

I hit the bank hard on my stomach. The hatchet come loose of my hand and was lying nearby. I wanted to get to it, but couldn’t make myself move cause I couldn’t even breathe; the fall had knocked the breath from me.

I eventually got my knees under me, but all I could do was roll over on my back. Above me, Skunk was slashing his way through the briars at the edge of the bank, making a gurgling sound. He sprang off his toes to get a good jump, and down he come.

Well, almost. That big jump wasn’t to his good. His leap carried him up into a tangle of briars that wound around a tree limb and dipped down; they caught up in his hair. One wrapped around his neck. His leap snapped some of the vines loose of his hair, letting him fall and ripping the bird free, but it wasn’t a complete drop. The one around his neck was thick as a man’s wrist. It caught and held him as surely as if he had his head in a noose. He kicked his legs, trying to twist loose. He dropped the cane knife. It fell right between my legs and stuck in the ground, weaving a little back and forth before it stopped shaking. He grabbed at his throat, trying to rip the thick vine off, but it was so tight around his throat he couldn’t get his fingers under it.

I had my breath by then. I crawled toward the hatchet. I got hold of it, turned, and looked at Skunk. Due to all his kicking, he dropped some more—as far as the thick coil of vine around his neck let him. His eyes was bugged out and his mouth was open; the little nub of what was left of his tongue was thrashing around in there like a little man trying to climb out of a cave. His toes touched the ground, but not enough. He was hung good, and in a short time he quit gagging and moving.

With the hatchet cocked, I got closer to him, and all of a sudden, he shook a little. I damn near beaned him with that hatchet. But there wasn’t no need. He was dead, and like a chicken with its head cut off, all that had moved him was his nerves and muscles coming unknotted. I could not only smell his awful stink, but the fresh stink of what he had let go in his pants.

When I realized he was done for, I fell over right there. It was like that time when I had sat down on the log and cried cause I was so overweighted with all manner of business. I started to cry this time, too.

W
hen 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.