Joe Lansdale - Edge of Dark Water

Jinx jumped on Cletus again, and was hitting his knocked-out self every which way with that stick, hitting him faster than a woodpecker can peck. I ran over and grabbed her and hugged her and the stick to me. She started sputtering and struggling like a greased pig.

“You’ll kill him,” I said.

“That’s what I’m trying to do,” she said.

I jerked her back and fell on the ground. She struggled on top of me.

Terry went over and looked at Cletus.

“He’s good and out,” he said.

“I hope he’s dead,” Jinx said, still struggling. “Called me nigger, and messed up my toilet, and hit me in the head, and stuck my face in the water. Damned old cracker. I don’t want to never be called nigger no more by nobody. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of it. I can’t stand this goddamn place. I can’t stand no goddamn place.”

“Jinx,” I said. “Now quit it. You ain’t gonna hit him anymore.”

“What if he wakes up?”

“You can hit him then,” I said.

“All right then, let me go.”

I let her go, and she jumped right up and ran over there to whack him again with the stick. Terry caught her arm, said, “That’s enough, Jinx. He’s nothing more than an old fool.”

“That’s as much our money as it is his,” Jinx said, trying to jerk her hand free of Terry. “It don’t matter who stole it first. Besides, he didn’t even know where it was. We was the ones figured it out and dug it up.”

Finally, I came up behind her and helped him hold her, and after a while, Jinx got herself together, and started breathing shallow again. Terry let her go, but not before he took the stick from her.

“Let’s gather up the money before he wakes up and Jinx becomes a murderer,” Terry said.

We got the money stuffed back in the bag, and right before we left out, Jinx kicked Cletus in the head as hard as she could. We had to pull her off of him and drag her along the riverbank, her cussing a blue streak, flailing her arms and legs like a centipede on a hot rock.

The Sabine River is long, but it ain’t that wide in the places I know. It’s not like I hear the Mississippi is, which can be more than a mile or so across. The Sabine is a brown run of water that twists its way along dirty banks, underneath lean-over trees and all their shadows. It’s deep in spots, not real deep in most, but there’s a right smart amount of water to carry boats and to sink them. There’s plenty of water to drown in. It’s a dark old river and it’s the Kingdom of the Snake; home to the water moccasin in particular, a thick, nub-tailed serpent with a bad attitude. I thought about that as we came ashore on the other side and dragged the leaky boat out of the water and under a weeping willow.

Our plans had changed. There wouldn’t be a lot of time to do much more than take off. I wasn’t firm on what had become of the idea to burn up May Lynn’s body, but I was sure Terry had that still tucked away in the back of his mind. We had all cared about May Lynn, but Terry, who had always seemed less close to her than me, had really taken all this to heart; he seemed the most bothered by her death, the unfairness of it all. It wasn’t that I had moved on, but I couldn’t figure how there was any way to rectify what happened. Wasn’t any way for me to know who done it or how to get them nabbed if I did. Jinx, she had cared for May Lynn, too, but she was someone who looked at things pretty straight on, or so it seemed to me. I figured her view was, dead is dead, and that’s sad, and she felt bad about it, but she wasn’t going to worry about if May Lynn got burned up and hauled anywhere if she could avoid it. That business was Terry’s plan.

We decided to let Terry hang on to the bag full of loot, go home and put together a few possibles, meet back quick at this spot, and head out. As I watched my friends go their own ways in the dark, I was having second thoughts, some of them due to thinking about days and nights on the river. Bad as my life was, it was the life I knew. And though Mama had lied to me and disappointed me all my life, and my daddy wasn’t my daddy at all, I still thought maybe I ought to reconsider. Maybe we could give Cletus the money and let bygones be bygones. Going off to Gladewater to find my real daddy, then out to Hollywood, was a good thing to think about, but I wasn’t so sure it was a good thing to do, even if there was stolen money in the deal-though secretly I was thinking I might get a share of it for a nice dress and shoes and my hair done up like I’d never had it, and maybe I’d buy one of those hats women wore that looked like it ought to have come with a quiver of arrows and a couple of Robin Hood’s Merry Men.

Anyway, there I stood on the riverbank, thinking these thoughts, considering what Terry had told me about himself not being a sissy, feeling confused. Just about everything I thought I knew about my world had changed. And then it hit me. All of a sudden I couldn’t walk or stand no more. I started to cry.

There was a log nearby, and I went over and sat on it and kept crying. It wasn’t a long cry, but it was a good one. Pretty soon I was cried out, and not exactly sure what it was I was crying about. I sniffed like a little kid, sat there till I was sure I was done with it, got up, and started walking quickly toward home, feeling stupid for wasting valuable time sitting on a log.

As I neared our house, I saw there wasn’t no lights on, but out by the side of the house was three pickups. Don’s truck, Uncle Gene’s, and, damn it, Cletus’s. I was considering my next move when someone stepped out of the dark between the trees and touched my shoulder and stuck a hand over my mouth.

“It’s me, Sue Ellen,” a voice said, and of course, I recognized right off it was Mama. “Be quiet now.”

She took her hand from over my mouth and grabbed my shoulders.

“What are you doing out here?” I said.

“I knew this was your way to come, so I waited on you.”

“But why?”

“Cletus has come for you, and Constable Sy is coming, too. I heard Cletus telling Don and Gene about how you stole some money. That isn’t true, is it?”

“There’s more story to it than that,” I said. I thought, So much for Don’s “sight.” He got all his information secondhand.

“Come on,” Mama said. “Let’s walk back a ways and find a place to talk.”

Fact that my mama was out of the house was amazing enough, but before we walked off to that place to talk, she stepped back in the shadows and picked up a tow sack and half-dragged it after her. I took it away from her and carried it myself, cause she was as weak as a newborn pup and it was a heavy sack. Surprised as I was, I didn’t ask her about why she had it or what was in it.

We walked back to the log I had sat down on to cry. When we got there, Mama was so tuckered out and breathing so hard that I felt bad for her, but it seemed like a good idea to put some space between us and the house. When we were sitting on the log, I put the tow sack between my legs, said, “What are they saying about me?”

“I heard Gene drive up. I looked out the window. Then I saw Cletus follow up in his truck. Cletus must have gone to Gene first, cause they are closer friends, and then they came to the house. Since the window was open, I could hear them talking. Cletus said you and a boy and a colored girl stole some money from him. He said the colored girl hit him in the head to get it. That would be Jinx, I suppose. The boy would be Terry.”

“He doesn’t know them,” I said. “They were never at May Lynn’s when Cletus was.”

“Yes, but that won’t be hard for them to figure out. Don knows who you run with, and he hates Terry.”

“True enough,” I said. “But that’s not entirely right about what happened.”