Joe Lansdale - Edge of Dark Water

I was startled out of my thoughts when Jinx’s shovel hit the lid of the coffin. Jinx and Terry stopped for a moment. Jinx said, “We’re standing right on top of her.”

“We have to rake the dirt clear, prize up the lid, and take her out,” Terry said. “I brought gloves for it. They’re in the wheelbarrow.”

I got the gloves, and by the time I done that and looked in the hole, the wooden coffin lid was visible. Terry was pushing the last of the dirt off it with his hands. The coffin was made of wood so cheap it looked as if you could spit through it.

Jinx climbed out of the hole. Terry took the tip of the shovel and pushed it under the edge of the box, and started prying it up. It didn’t resist much. The nails squeaked like a rat, the lid lifted and cracked in the middle, and a stink came out from under it big enough and strong enough to deserve some kind of government promotion.

I turned and threw up. When I looked back in the grave, I could see the lid was off and I could see the body in the box. They had tossed her in on her side. She was thinner now and darker, and she still had on that old dress, which had sort of melted into her. She wasn’t blowed up no more. She had popped and gone flat against the bone. You could see where water had leaked in from below, making the bottom of that coffin come apart in places. If the wood had been a penny cheaper, she’d have fallen through the underside of it before she was in the ground.

“Those sons a bitches,” Terry said. “This thing wasn’t good for a day in damp ground.”

He reached in his back pocket and took out a handkerchief and tied it over his nose. Me and Jinx didn’t have a handkerchief, so we had to depend on scrunching up our faces and trying to think about something else. But me and her got down in the hole and yanked May Lynn out. When we did one of her arms come off, and I had to climb out and throw up again. By the time I got back down there, Jinx was throwing up in the grave.

Terry didn’t so much as cough, but when we finally got her out of the hole, he wandered off a ways and puked. I glanced at May Lynn, and her face was dark as old pine sap. There were no eyes cause bugs and worms and groundwater had done been at them, and she had been full of river when we pulled her out, so she looked way worse than that dead man under the money bag; and she hadn’t been near as long gone as he had. It didn’t seem right.

After a bit, Terry come back and helped us load the body into the wheelbarrow. We put the tarp down first and put her on top of it. We had to bend her some to make her fit, and she came apart a little more, and something fell out of her that I couldn’t recognize. Terry used the shovel to put it in the wheelbarrow. Jinx brought over her arm and laid it on top of the body. Terry folded the tarp over her on both sides and at the ends.

“Now what?” I said.

“The brick kiln,” he said.

Now, there’s no use going into all of it, but what I will say is it’s a wonder we didn’t end up being caught. I guess we didn’t because it was late and we didn’t see anybody but a couple of dogs. They came out to smell the dead meat and Jinx threw rocks at them and ran them off.

We took turns pushing the wheelbarrow, and it wasn’t no real chore, because what was left of May Lynn seemed as light as a new loaf of bread, without the freshness. The night was clear and the wheelbarrow squeaked a little. Her stench made us push the barrow along quite smartly.

Terry guided us to the back of his stepdad’s brick company. We stopped under a window, and me and Jinx made a cradle with our hands, and Terry stepped up on it and pushed at the window till it come up. He wriggled inside, and in a moment the back door opened to let us in. I pushed the wheelbarrow through the door.

I guided the barrow between rows of stacked bricks, and finally we came to a spot along the wall with a dozen brick beehive kilns. They all had metal doors on them, and there were some handles on the doors-wooden ones in metal slots-and on the wall between each door was a dial.

Terry fumbled a match out of his pocket and lit it to a twist of paper that had been lying on the floor. He turned one of the dials, opened a metal door. There was a hiss like a surprised possum. It was gas shooting up from a grate on the bottom of the kiln. Terry stuck the flaming paper through the grate, touched a spot inside, and the hissing turned to a whoosh; the heat from it nearly singed my eyebrows. The fire rose up and licked out with blue and yellow tongues, and in an instant, I was sweating.

“We got to wait a little bit,” Terry said, and closed the door.

There were some stacks of bricks, and we used them to sit on.

“It’ll have to heat to a very high temperature,” Terry said. “When it does, she’ll burn hot and rapidly. Her body will turn to ash, bones and all.”

I don’t know how long we waited there, but I know I was nervous the whole time. I kept expecting the constable and those mean old former kin of mine to burst in on us, but they didn’t.

Finally, Terry stood up and pulled on his gloves, which he had stuck in his belt, and opened the door; the flame inside was twisting and rolling. Using gloves and the shovels, we lifted the tarp with May Lynn’s body folded inside it, along with the broken-off arm and the dark part we didn’t know, out of the wheelbarrow. Together we carried the tarp to the open beehive, stuck the corpse in at the feet, and shoved. The flames went to work immediately. They licked at the tarp like they was hungry. Terry slammed the door. He looked at us. His face was popped up with sweat balls from the fire, and he looked like he was barely there with us.

“Someone ought to say something,” he said.

“I’m sorry it’s so hot in there,” Jinx said.

“Something else.”

“Goodbye, May Lynn,” I said. “You’ve been a good friend up until we didn’t see you much anymore, and maybe you had your reasons for that. And we thank you for the map and the stolen money, which has shown us a way to go. I hope you wasn’t hurt too long before you died. I hope it was quick.”

“I hope so, too,” Terry said, and made a choking sound. “You’re going to Hollywood, May Lynn.”

We pushed the wheelbarrow back to the graveyard and covered up May Lynn’s grave with the shovels. We loaded our supplies on the wheelbarrow, along with the shovels, and left. The graveyard was on the way to the river bottoms, so it had been best to leave the stuff there, and Terry, on one of his early trips, had put the bag of money in a lard bucket and buried it near May Lynn’s grave. He dug it up and we loaded it and the rest of the stuff on the wheelbarrow, right next to a small sealed cardboard box we had taken from the brick company and put May Lynn’s ashes in.

We headed out, and when we got into the woods, close to where our boat was, which was also close to where Mama was, I laid it on them.

“Mama not only told me about Cletus coming to the house, she’s going with us.”

“Say what?” Jinx said.

By that time, we were coming down a little rise, and they could see Mama sitting there in the moonlight on the log. She turned and looked at us and our squeaking wheelbarrow.

“Wasn’t you the one talking about a yellow dog and a goat?” Jinx said.

“She ain’t neither,” I said.

“No,” she said. “But there sure is a right smart lot of us now.”

After we loaded the boat and pushed the wheelbarrow off into the Sabine, Terry cut three long poles with a hatchet he had in his bag. We stretched the poles across the boat so that they stuck out long on either end, then we got in and Jinx held them in place while me and Terry paddled downriver to the raft. Mama used the can to bail out water.