Joe Lansdale - Edge of Dark Water

We followed the map and came to a low cut of pines, and on the other side of the pines was the train tracks. On the far side of the tracks was more trees. Most of them was pecan and hickory nut and might have once been part of an orchard, but were now wild and unpruned. There was a nice breeze blowing, and we could smell the scent of the trees on the wind, and there were birds in the trees, mostly red-winged blackbirds; they were as thick there as leaves.

There was a rumble and the train rails began to vibrate. We stepped back in the pines, in the shadow, and waited. A train came chugging by, screeching on top of the rails. I thought maybe that ought to be the way we should get out of there, by hopping a train. But it was traveling fast as it went by, and none of the boxcar doors was open; it was an idea that passed from my mind quickly. I figured if I grabbed at the train my arms would get jerked off.

Still, it was mighty pleasant watching the train go by, all those boxcars clacking along, and while it rolled I thought of May Lynn. I guess it was the train moving away from us, heading anywhere but where we was, that made me think of her. That and our plans, of course.

I remember once sitting in her house on her mattress on the floor, and she had been talking about the movies and her plans to star in them, and then she said something to me that dove out of the air like a rock and felt like it hit me in the back of the head.

“Sue Ellen,” she said, “what is it you want to do with your life?”

Until she asked that, I didn’t even know I had the chance to think about anything different than what I was doing at the moment, but with her telling me all her plans, and then asking me that question, certain feelings I had started rising up to the surface like a dead carp. I knew then I wanted out of what I was in, and I wanted something else other than what I had, but the miserable thing was, I didn’t know where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do.

We laughed and talked about this and that, about some boys we knew, none of them particularly interesting, and May Lynn said she sure thought Terry was cute, but there was that whole sissy problem. We combed each other’s hair, and her mama, a few months short of her dip in the river and moving like she was some kind of animal dying slowly, cooked us some grits, and we had them with no butter and no milk. I remember thinking then that May Lynn was the most wonderful person in the world, and certainly the most beautiful. But what made me feel really good while eating grits with no butter and no milk was that she had spoken to me like I could have plans and ought to have plans, and that my life could be better. Right then and there I believed it myself a little. Not so much you could write a song about it, but some. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew it would be something. I can’t say that stealing money and going by raft down the dirty Sabine with May Lynn’s ashes in a jar had been any part of those plans, but I knew then that I wasn’t going to be settled with life as I knew it; wasn’t going to end up like Mama, drinking cure-all and taking a whacking from her husband and thinking it was as natural as the course of the river.

I looked up from thinking about all this, and saw the train moving on down the line and out of sight. We stood there looking where it had gone, and then we looked at the map again and determined that we at least knew where the tracks were. Beyond that it was all mighty confusing. The little humps-and there was bunches of them in several rows on the paper-and the name Malcolm Cuzins didn’t make no sense whatsoever.

As we crossed the tracks and went under the trees, the red-winged blackbirds took flight. They looked bloodied as they rose in a whoosh, and they filled the sky like a cloud, then they was gone.

“Well,” Terry said, looking at the map. “I fail to make sense of it. I can’t determine what these humps mean. And the name written on the map is a mystery to me.”

Jinx and I were equally baffled, and we kept looking at the map like it would all come to us eventually, but it didn’t. Fact was, I was getting a bit of a headache.

“There’s nothing out here but a few trees,” I said. “I think there’s an old graveyard over there, and beyond that there’s a road.”

“I remember that ole graveyard,” Jinx said. She nodded at me. “We was up here once, when we was little kids. We seen some of them graves then.”

“I barely remember,” I said.

“I told you there was haints there and that they’d grab you up and pull you down in the ground,” Jinx said. “I thought you was gonna pee your pants.”

“That wasn’t very nice,” I said.

“That’s what made it funny,” she said.

We looked around for a while, then gave up and went back down to the cane field and cut us another piece of cane.

As we ate the pulp from the cane and walked, I said, “I think our Hollywood plans would be on the too-early side without that money. So I think we don’t burn May Lynn up and put her in a jar and head out just yet. My guess is we might make Gladewater, but beyond that we’d be hard-pressed to go on.”

No one said anything for a long while, but I’m pretty sure, like me, they could hear our plans crackling away like dry paper on fire.

By the time we worked our way back to the boat, the sun was starting to drop out of sight behind the trees, and the shadows were long and dark across the ground and on the water. Frogs was getting louder and so were the crickets. We paddled our way across the water current, and by the time we got to the other side, the water was high in the leaky boat, in spite of me and Jinx taking turns bailing.

As we got out of the boat, pulled it on shore, and pushed it under some trees, Jinx said, “One thing we gonna have to say for sure. This boat ain’t no damn good. We go downriver, we’ll have to take the barge, otherwise we’ll be tuckered out in a couple hours. The boat will fill up and sink to the bottom of the river. Catfish will be living in our skulls before a week passes.”

This statement went uncontested. Everything we talked about seemed like so much wind now. Talk is cheap and exciting, but when you get right down to doing something, money is usually needed. Planning is often better than going through with the actual plan. Expectations, I once heard an old man say, were a little like fat birds: you might as well kill them before they fly away.

We split up and headed our own ways. As I walked, the shadows stretched. I realized it would be dead dark long before I got home. Even though I had grown up in the bottoms, there was lots of tales about things down in them that gave me a case of the nerves. Mostly they was stories about things that came out at night and was angry and hungry and carried you off and sucked the centers out of your bones. Ever hoot of an owl or crack of a limb or the scratching of brush moved by the wind made me jump a little. To top things off nicely, it began to lightning in the east, stitching up the pit-black sky like a drunk seamstress with bright yellow thread. The wind rose and made the trees sigh and whip even more, and before long, drops of rain were falling on me. By the time I got near enough to our house to see a light in the window, the rain was coming down hard as tossed gravel, and the wind was whipping the willows along the riverbank like a teacher smacking a rowdy student’s butt with a switch.

In the yard, I was startled by one of the free-ranging hogs that came around the side of the house and grunted at me, perhaps hoping I had an apple or something. It was the big black-and-white one. I started to reach out and pet it, but since it was gonna be eaten in the fall, I hesitated. It never set well with me to get friendly with something I planned to have on a plate with a side of new potatoes and collard greens. I felt it was proper to have a solid understanding between person and hog that no friendship was involved, though if the hog had known the true nature of its arrangement, I’m sure it would have found reason to depart for parts unknown, maybe taking the other hog and chickens with him. Besides, petting a wet hog, be it friend or supper, is stinky business.