Joe Lansdale - Edge of Dark Water

Along the street, on either side, all the people-knowing who May Lynn was and what she might have been, knowing all the movies she didn’t make, the life she didn’t live-stopped waving and started to cry. We sailed quietly down the street, out of their sight, into shadows black as crows.

Next morning I awoke to the sound of a mockingbird outside my window, perched on a cottonwood limb. It was imitating a songbird, and it sounded as happy as if the song belonged to it; the mockingbird is a kind of thief, same as I planned to be. The big difference was he seemed happy about it and I didn’t, and I hadn’t stolen anything yet, outside of cane and watermelons.

I lay there for a while and listened to it sing, then got up and dressed, unlocked my door, and went out carrying my stove wood. I wanted to see Mama, but I feared Daddy might still be there. I went downstairs and looked out the window and saw his truck was gone. I rummaged around in the warmer over the stove and found a biscuit hard as a banker’s heart, and ate that, careful not to break any teeth.

Back upstairs, I knocked on Mama’s door and she called to me to come in. It was dark in the room-since last night someone had pulled the curtain-and I went to the window and pushed it open slightly. Sunlight draped across the bed, and I could see Mama with the covers pulled to her chin, her head propped up on the pillows. Her blond hair was undone and flowed out from her like spilled honey. Her face was white as milk and her bones poked against her skin more than usual, but even so, she was quite beautiful. She looked like a doll made of china.

Dust was spinning in the sunlight, and the bottom of the comforter was fuzzed with it. Cobwebs lay in the corners of the room, thick as ready-to-pick cotton. A bit of the outside breeze came in through the cracks in the wall and moved the floating dust around. It wasn’t anything some elbow grease and about twenty-five pounds’ worth of lumber and a hammer couldn’t fix, but none of us were having at it. We lived there like rats hanging on to a ship we knew was going down.

Mama smiled at me as I sat down in a stuffed chair by the bed. The chair smelled damp and old, like a wet grandma.

“I’d like to get up and fix you something to eat, baby,” she said, “but I don’t feel up to it.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I had what I think was a biscuit.”

“It’s the medicine,” she said. “It makes me woozy. I just don’t feel up to anything, with it or without it.”

“I know.”

She looked at me for the longest time, as if she was trying to see something beneath my skin, and then she came out with a confession. “Your daddy was in here last night.”

I wasn’t sure why she told me, but I said, “Oh,” like I didn’t know what she was talking about. It was knowledge I would have preferred to have tucked away someplace where I couldn’t touch it, like down at the bottom of an alligator pit.

“I’m so ashamed,” she said, and turned her head away from me. “I shouldn’t even be telling you, you’re just a young girl.”

“I know some things you might not think I know.”

Actually, I had an idea she had seen me, or Daddy had told her, and she felt obliged to explain herself.

Slowly she shifted her head on the pillow and looked back at me. “I don’t really remember all that well, but this morning I knew. He had been here. In the night.”

“That’s all right, Mama.”

“No,” she said. “No, it isn’t. He isn’t any good.”

We sat that way for a while, her looking at me and me looking at the floor.

After a time, I said, “What if I wanted to go away?”

“Why wouldn’t you want to go away?” she said. “There isn’t anything for you here.”

This wasn’t exactly what I expected, and I had to let that roll around in my head for a moment before I was certain I had heard what I thought I had.

“No, ma’am, there ain’t nothing here for me.”

“Isn’t,” she said. “Don’t use ‘ain’t.’”

“Sorry,” I said. “I forget.”

“Actually, you haven’t had enough schooling to know better, and I haven’t exactly furthered your education by lying in bed, but I’m not up to much, you know. There was a time when I thought I might be a teacher, or a nurse.”

“Really?”

“Sure,” she said.

“Mama, if you had a friend got drowned, and you found her body, and she always wanted to go to Hollywood to be a movie star, would it be wrong to dig her up after she was buried, burn her to ashes, take them downriver to Gladewater in a jar, catch a bus, and take her out to Hollywood?”

“What?”

I repeated myself.

“What are you talking about? Who is this girl you would dig up?”

“May Lynn.”

“The beautiful May Lynn?” she asked, like there were dozens of them.

“That’s the one.”

“My God, is she dead?”

“Daddy didn’t tell you?”

She shook her head.

“You been kind of out of touch,” I said. “She was found with a sewing machine tied to her feet yesterday and was buried today. I would have told you last night, but you was out of it.”

“Don knew about this?”

“Yes, ma’am. He and Uncle Gene and me and Terry found her in the river.”

“Oh my God,” Mama said. “She was so young. And it hasn’t been that long ago she lost her brother, and before that her mother.”

“She was my age,” I said. “She never did go nowhere. She wanted to, but she never did.”

“Your daddy was there when she was found?” Mama asked, as if I hadn’t already explained it.

“He was.”

“He never said anything to me.”

“No surprise. He wanted to push her and the Singer back in the water.”

“He doesn’t like problems,” she said, as if that explained all his actions.

“I guess not,” I said.

“And now you want to go away?”

“I don’t know what I want. Me and Terry and Jinx-”

“You still seeing that colored girl?”

“I am.”

“Oh, it’s all right,” Mama said. “I’m not speaking against her. I’m just surprised you aren’t like everyone else.”

“Everyone else?”

“Way it usually goes is children, colored and white, play together until they get grown, and then they don’t associate. It’s how it is.”

“Thanks for thinking highly of me,” I said.

“I didn’t mean it that way, Sue Ellen. I just meant it’s not the standard way things work out in these parts, or most parts, for that matter, and there’s the whole problem of how she’s affecting your speech. You talk like a field hand.”

She paused, seeming suddenly to have taken hold of what I had said about May Lynn.

“You said you want to dig up your friend and burn her up and take her ashes to Hollywood?”

“I said that, yeah, but am I going to do it? I don’t know.”

“That’s pretty crazy,” she said.

“You should know,” I said, and hated it as soon as I said it.

Mama turned her face away from me.

“I didn’t mean nothing by it,” I said. “I’m sorry, Mama.”

Slowly she looked back in my direction. “No. It’s all right. I wasn’t very thoughtful before I spoke. And I suppose I’m not one to judge anyone in any manner, am I?”

“You’re all right.”

“No. No, I’m not. Listen. I don’t know that you should dig up and burn anybody. I’m pretty sure that’s a crime. I think there’s a list of weird crimes and that’s on the list, along with eating out of the toilet and the like. It’s just not done. So forget that. But I think it would be good for you to leave. I haven’t got the gumption for much of anything anymore, not even being a mother, but you ought not to stay here. Something happens to me, there’s just you and your daddy…and you wouldn’t want that.”