The Bottoms (35 page)

Daddy’s theory was Mrs. Canerton was bringing me out two new books to read, and that whoever killed her had followed in his car, and either coaxed or ran her off the road. It could have been someone she knew. Someone she would easily stop for.

From there, whoever it was killed her and dumped her
and her car. Most likely his own car was nearby, and it was easy enough then for him to return home in his own car.

It seemed logical, and it made me ill.

If Mrs. Canerton had been bringing books out to me, then I felt partially responsible. Everything seemed to be coming down on me like an anvil.

Just a short time before I had been a happy kid with no worries. I didn’t even know it was the Depression, let alone there were murderers outside of the magazines I read down at the barbershop, and none of the magazines I read had to do with killers who did this kind of thing. And Daddy, though a good man, sincere and true, if briefly distracted, was no Doc Savage.

In the detective magazines the cops and private eyes saw a clue or two, they put it together. Cracked the whole case wide open. In real life, there were clues a plenty, but instead of cracking the case open, they just made it all the more confusing.

Bottom line was, no one really knew any more than they did the night I found that poor woman bound to a tree with barbed wire.

I had learned too that the people I knew, or thought I knew, had problems and lives. Mama and Daddy had a past. I had seen Daddy fall off the wagon, and suspected at one time Mama had fallen off as well, only it was a different wagon; the fall from it recorded by a tattoo on the missing Red Woodrow’s forearm.

I found out my Daddy had a terrible temper. I found out Mr. Nation could beg and cry and his boys could run fast.

Miss Maggie was Red’s mother and Red might be a killer. But had he killed Miss Maggie and Mrs. Canerton? And if so, why? And where was he now?

People I knew had turned out to be strange and savage. They had hung Mose and kicked and hit me and my father.

I wouldn’t have been surprised right then to discover the moon could be reached by climbing to the top of the highest tree, and with a good pair of scissors you could snip it in half.

W
e all went to Mrs. Canerton’s funeral. Me and my family stood in the front row at the Bethel Baptist Church. Cecil was there. Just about everyone in town and around about, except the Nations and some of the people who had been in the lynch mob that killed Mose.

Even Doc Stephenson showed up, stood in the back and looked more disappointed than sad. Doc Taylor showed up as well. He sat next to Doc Stephenson with his hands in his lap, his face as blank as the wind. It was said he was taking it very hard; that he and she had recently become a serious item.

Within a week Daddy’s customers at the barbershop returned, among them members of the lynch party, and the majority of them wanted him to cut their hair. He had to go back to work regularly. I don’t know how he felt about that, cutting the hair of those who had beaten me and him that day, that had killed Mose. But he cut their hair and took their money. Maybe Daddy saw it as a kind of revenge. Maybe he was easy to forgive and forget. And maybe we just needed the money.

Mama took a job in town at the courthouse. She rode in and
back with Daddy. That left Grandma with us, and she had developed a habit of driving into town a couple times a week to annoy the men at the barbershop and to go over and visit with Mr. Groon.

They rode around town and throughout the country together. He sometimes drove her all the way over to Tyler just to eat dinner at a cafe and go to a show.

As was the habit with things, talk about the murders died down. Daddy dried out the pulp paper he had removed from Mrs. Canerton, but like the others it was too far gone. And even if it hadn’t been, it was hard to see how it could mean anything.

Mose was no longer mentioned. It was as if the poor man never existed. Some still wanted him to be the killer, in spite of Mrs. Canerton turning up like she did. The most common story now was Red had done it, then gone off somewhere, never to return. No one claimed to be getting postcards from him anymore. Just goes to show you how fickle people are.

The world slipped back to about as normal as it would ever be again, though to my eyes it was never as sharp and clean and clear as it had been, and nothing I could do would ever completely bring it back.

As for the murderer, me and Tom weren’t so convinced it was Red, or that it was over. We still had it in our heads it was the Goat Man. And on a day when Mama and Daddy were at work and Grandma had spiffed up and gone into town to flirt with Mr. Groon, we decided to head out to Mose’s shack, carrying the shotgun.

That’s where the Goat Man had last been seen, and I was determined to find out more about him, maybe capture him. There was a part of me that wanted to be a hero. To that end we took along the shotgun and some good strong rope.

Looking back on all this, it seems damn foolish. But at the time it made perfect sense. We thought we could hold the Goat
Man at bay with the shotgun, or maybe wound him, then tie him up and bring him in.

Then again, could the Goat Man talk? Could he confess? Did he speak English? Did he have supernatural powers? We suspected he might, and to that end, we also took along the Bible. I had read somewhere, probably in one of those magazines at the barbershop, if you held up the Word, evil would cringe.

Me and Tom had made this plan to kill or capture the Goat Man the night before, after sitting around for days thinking about it.

As soon as Grandma’s car had rolled out of sight, we lit out for the woods. I carried the shotgun. Toby slinked along with us, and even with his injured back, he made pretty good time.

We also had a notion the Goat Man didn’t have any powers by day, and if we could find his lair, he could be killed. How this notion had been formed is hard to say, but we had come to believe it as certain as we believed Daddy would crack a stick over Nation’s noggin faster than a chicken can peck corn, and that the Word could be held up against evil.

We worked our way deep into the woods where the river twisted wild and loud between high banks and higher trees, where the vines and brush wadded together and became next to impenetrable.

We walked along the bank, looking for a place to ford near the Swinging Bridge. Neither of us wanted to cross the bridge, and we used the excuse that Toby couldn’t cross it, but that was just an excuse.

We walked a long ways and finally came to the shack where Mose had lived. We just stood there looking at it. It had never been much, just a hovel made of wood and tin and tarpaper. Mose mostly set outside of it in an old chair under a willow tree that overlooked the river.

It looked to have weathered badly since that time Grandma and I had been trapped in it and we had seen the face of the Goat Man at the window.

The door was wide open.

“What if the Goat Man is waitin’ inside?” Tom asked.

“I’ll cut down on him with this here shotgun,” I said. “That’s what.”

“Maybe we ought to peek in a window first.”

That sounded like good advice, but we couldn’t make out much in there, just enough to assure us the Goat Man wasn’t lurking about.

It was a bigger mess inside than before. Toby went inside and sniffed and prowled about till we called him out of it. We went inside and looked around. Light came through the yellow paper over the paneless window, and wind whipped in with it. The window that had glass had been broken out, probably by kids, and from that direction the light was weak.

The framed photograph with the Sears picture stuck in the frame was knocked off the table, and I picked it up. With the door open rain had run in and ruined it, meshing the Sears photo to the photograph, blurring the whole thing into a kind of mush. I put it on the table, laying it face down this time.

“I don’t like it in here,” Tom said.

“Me neither.”

When we went out, I made sure to close the door good.

We walked around the house, to the side facing the river, and finally down to the water. Looking back at the house, I noted there was something hanging on a nail on the outside wall. It was a chain, and from the chain hung a number of fish skeletons, and one fresh fish.

We went over and looked at it.

“It looks like it’s just been hung up there,” Tom said. “There’s still water drippin’ off of it.”

The fish bones along with the fresh fish showed me someone
had been hanging fish there on a regular basis, and for some time, like an offering to Mose.

On another nail, strings tied together, was a pair of old shoes that had most likely been fished from the river. Hung over that was a water-warped belt. On the ground, leaning against the side of the house, below the nail with the shoes, was a tin plate, a bright blue river rock, and a mason jar. All of it laid out like gifts.

I took the dead fish down, all the old bones, and cast them into the river and put the chain back on the nail. I tossed the shoes and belt, the plate, rock, and mason jar into the river.

“What’d you do that for?” Tom asked.

“I think that fish was still alive. It don’t need to suffer. Ain’t no one gonna come get it and cook it.”

“We could.”

“But we ain’t.”

“You throwed all that other stuff away too. That seems kinda mean, Harry. Someone is hanging it here like a gift.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s why I done it. Not out of meanness, but so the gifts would seem to be taken.”

I couldn’t really explain it. It just seemed like the thing to do.

Mose’s old boat was still by the house, laid up on rocks so it wouldn’t rot. A paddle lay in its bottom. We decided to take it and float it downriver to where the briar tunnels were. We loaded Toby in the boat, along with our shotgun, pushed it into the water and set out. We floated the long distance back to the Swinging Bridge and under it, watching to see if the Goat Man might be lurking about. Our idea that he was afraid of daylight was fading, and we had begun to feel nervous, and just a bit foolish.

We had been a lot braver planning than doing.

In shadow, under the bridge, deep into the bank, was a dark
indention, like a cave. I imagined that was where the Goat Man lived, waiting for prey.

The thing to do, of course, was beard him in his lair. But we didn’t. We didn’t say a word. We just paddled on by.

We paddled gently to the riverbank where we had found the woman bound to the tree. There was no real sign she had ever been there. It seemed like a dream.

We pulled the boat onto the dirt and gravel bank and left it there as we went up the taller part of the bank, and into the briars. We hadn’t discussed this, but we wanted to see the spot where we had found the first body, where we had been frightened in the tunnel of briars.

The tunnel was the same, and it was clear in the daytime that the tunnel had, as we suspected, been cut into the briars. It was not as large or as long a tunnel as it had seemed that night, and it emptied out into a wider tunnel, and it too was shorter and smaller than we had remembered.

There were little bits of colored cloth hung on briars, like decoration. There was a red strip and a blue strip and a white strip with little red flowers on it. There were pictures from the Sears and Roebuck catalogue of women in underwear and there were a few of those playing cards like I had heard about. The briars were poked through the pictures where the women’s crotches were.

In the middle of the tunnel was a place where someone had built a fire, and above us the briars wrapped so thick and were so intertwined with low-hanging branches you could imagine much of this place staying dry during a rainstorm.

We hadn’t seen all those pieces of cloth and paper that night, but they, or ones like them, might have been there. Dry as the place was, during all that raining and flooding, it couldn’t have remained completely dry. Someone would have to have been adding fresh material to it from time to time.

Toby was sniffing and running about as best his poor old
damaged back and legs would allow him. He was peeing on one spot, then another, leaving his mark all over. He was as agitated as if the briars were full of squirrels.

“It’s like some kind of nest,” Tom said. “The Goat Man’s nest.”

A chill came over me and it occurred to me that if that was true, and if this was his den instead of the cave under the bridge, he might come home at any time. I told Tom that, and we called up Toby and got out of there, tried to paddle the boat back upriver, but couldn’t.

We finally got out and made to carry it along the bank, but it was too heavy. We gave up and left it by the river. We walked past the Swinging Bridge and for a long ways after that till we found a sandbar. We used that to cross, went back home, finished the chores, cleaned ourselves and Toby up before Mama and Daddy and Grandma came home.

We thought about what we had seen all day, and considered telling Daddy, but since we weren’t supposed to have gone anywhere, our young minds were at an impasse. What would have seemed obvious to someone older didn’t seem all that obvious to us.