Joe Lansdale - Edge of Dark Water

Down a ways was a hand. The hand still had some flesh on it, and there were worms digging into it.

“Them worms would have done chewed up anyone buried long ago,” Jinx said. “This fella may not be fresh as this morning’s milk, but he’s fairly new to the ground.”

“She’s right,” Terry said. He stood up, got the shovel, and started gently digging around the body. It took a long while, but in time it was uncovered. It was a man in a brown-and-white pin-stripe suit, lying slightly on his side with his knees pushed up toward his middle. The teeth we had seen was in a skull. A lot of him was missing, but he didn’t need any of it back.

The white stripes on his suit had turned the color of the red clay, and there wasn’t any shoes on the feet, just brown silk socks with blue clocks on them. There were still strips of flesh where the face had been, and on the skull was a brown narrow-brimmed hat. It was crushed up, but it was easy to see that, like the suit, it had been something that cost money and most likely went with a new cigar and gold watch chain.

Terry got down on his hands and knees and looked the body over. He said, “It still has an odor about it. You’re right, Jinx. He hasn’t been in the ground all that long.”

Terry opened the man’s clay-caked coat. When he did, way it stuck to the rotting body, it made a sound like something ripping. He reached inside the man’s coat pockets, but there wasn’t anything in them. He fumbled through the outside pockets and found some threads and a button. He pulled off the hat, and when he did the man’s skull crumbled somewhat. You could see that the back of his head had been crushed. Terry took the hat, which was dark in the back, and shook it into some kind of shape. He looked inside of it and let out his breath.

“It has his name stenciled on the inside band,” he said. “Warren Cain.”

He showed it to us. I let out my breath.

“Wasn’t that name in May Lynn’s book?” I said.

“That was the man her brother was running with,” Terry said. “The one who helped him rob the bank. Now we know what happened to their partnership.”

“And if that ain’t enough, they took his dadburn shoes,” Jinx said.

“Jake would be my guess,” Terry said. “It would make sense they came here to bury the money, and an argument ensued-”

“Ensued?” Jinx said.

“Started,” Terry said. “And when it did, it turned ugly, and Jake killed him, buried him, and put the money on top of him. My assumption is they had already dug the hole for the money, and Jake didn’t want to dig another. Probably caught him from behind with the shovel.”

“Maybe there wasn’t an argument, and he planned to kill him all along,” I said.

“Either way makes sense,” Terry said. “He killed him, hid the money on top of him, and took his shoes because he liked them. He’d have probably taken the hat and the suit, too, if he hadn’t covered them in blood by hitting Warren with that shovel.”

“That’s all tough on the dead man and all,” Jinx said, “but maybe we ought to count the money. Ain’t like he’s gonna get any deader.”

We counted it twice. There was close to a thousand dollars. When we put the money back in the bag, it was on the edge of night.

“It’s like we done dug up a pirate’s chest,” Jinx said.

“It is at that,” I said.

Jinx cleared her throat, said, “You know, that’s a lot of money even if we don’t burn May Lynn up.”

“We have to stick to the plan,” Terry said.

“Do we?” I said.

“We do,” Terry said. “She’s why we found the money.”

“We sure gonna use a lot of it going out to that California,” Jinx said. “We could use a lot of it someplace closer.”

“That sounds greedy,” Terry said. “If not for her we wouldn’t have known about the money, and when it comes right down to it, it’s not our money.”

“When it comes right down to it,” Jinx said, “it’s not her money, neither. Nor her brother’s. It come from a bank.”

“Do you think her daddy knows where it’s buried?” I asked.

Terry shook his head. “He did, he would have already dug it up and drank it up. He’s not exactly a salt-away-for-a-rainy-day sort of individual. Jake told May Lynn where it was when he was sick because he didn’t want anyone else to know. She obviously didn’t have time to dig it up and leave before things went wrong.”

“Think she knew about the murdered man?” I said, nodding at the hole.

“I don’t know,” Terry said. “I think when Jake realized he was dying he had her draw up the map and didn’t tell her his bank-robbing buddy was here under it. Listen, we want to get out of here, don’t we?”

Me and Jinx nodded.

“Here’s our chance,” Terry said. “And we ought to take May Lynn with us.”

“She’s pretty snug in the graveyard,” Jinx said.

Terry gave Jinx a hard look. “She’s our friend.”

“Was,” Jinx said.

“Should we forget her because she’s dead?” he said.

“I ain’t forgetting her,” Jinx said. “I remember her real good. But what I’m saying is she’s dead and there’s a lot of money in that bag and I don’t think she had plans to share it with us.”

“Does that matter?” Terry said.

“You got the bus tickets to get, the food for going out there, someplace to stay, and so on,” Jinx said. “It can run into some expense, and I’m not sure that’s how we want to spend the dough.”

“May Lynn didn’t want to end up buried in some hot plot of dirt in the pauper’s section of the local graveyard,” Terry said, “and I don’t think we should let her.”

I have to admit, thinking about digging her up and setting her on fire and going all the way out to Hollywood to dump her ashes seemed less appealing now that we had a huge bag of money. I was a little ashamed of myself for thinking that way, but there you have it.

“Well?” Terry said. “That’s not what we want. Is it?”

“No, I reckon not.”

Jinx’s face twisted up, then slowly straightened out. “Okay,” she said, and the word struggled out of her mouth like a rat out of a tight hole. “Sure. Let’s burn her up and haul her out.”

“Good,” Terry said. “It’s decided.”

We started back with Terry carrying the bag full of money from the crockery pot. When we got to the cane field we stopped and I cut us another snack. I figured since we had gone over deep into theft, we might as well go whole hog and hit the cane again.

The night was growing thick, and we left the cane field and went through a run of trees and out into a meadow of wild grass. It was a slightly different path than we had gone before, and the moonlight made the grass look like shiny water; the wind rustled it like someone shaking hard candy in a paper bag.

By going that way, we came down right behind where May Lynn lived. As we neared her place, you could hear the river run, and you could see the house near it creaking in the wind. Cletus was home, because we could see his old truck parked in the trail that ended up against the house. Course, if the truck wasn’t there, it didn’t mean he wasn’t home. Sometimes he lost his truck when he got drunk and got brought back by someone and dropped off, least that’s what May Lynn had said, and I didn’t have any reason to doubt her. It’s why I had been careful to want to call out to the house earlier, to make sure he knew we was there if he was home. He struck me as a man might shoot first and ask questions later.

Jinx spied the outhouse not far from us.

“I’m gonna have to stop and use the toilet,” she said.

“Can’t you wait?” Terry said.

“I can wait, but you won’t like it about the time we get to the boat.”