Joe Lansdale - Edge of Dark Water

“It took you a while,” she said. “I thought you had gone on without me.”

“We had to burn May Lynn up,” I said.

“You actually did that?” she said.

“In a brick dryer,” Terry said.

“Yeah,” Jinx said. “We got her somewhere in a box.”

“Oh my,” Mama said.

When we come to the raft, or barge, if you prefer, we loaded onto it. It was a good thing, too, cause we had been tight in the boat, and the water was coming through the bottom worse than ever, even with Mama bailing fast as a spinning windmill in a high wind. We took the paddles and pushed the boat away from the raft; it was already taking on heavy water by the time it drifted away from us.

After we was good and fixed, Terry got his hatchet and went to cutting the rope that held our ride to the tree. When it come loose, the raft turned sideways a little, then straightened itself and started to move forward in the slow but steady current of the river.

I looked back at the boat we had left behind us. It was tilting up slightly at one end, but mostly it was just low in the water. It got lower as I watched, and I’m sure within a few moments I would have seen it go down. But I never got the chance. The raft shifted a little as the river bent around a sandbar, and we had to go to work with our poles to guide it through the shallows. Then the river carried us beyond the bar and around a bend, and out of sight of the sinking boat.

It was such a bright night we could see the river good as day. We could make out sandbars and easily pole around them. We could see the spaces between trees clearly, and the moonlight lay on the tops of them like some kind of fuzzy halo. Slats of soft shadow fell over the water as if they was window blinds. Even the sticklike heads of turtles poking out of the water was easy to see.

After we had gone a ways, the river became straight and wide, and we saw a deer swimming across it wearing a rack of antlers on its head big enough to hang a rich man’s winter coats and a couple of hats.

Mama sat in the middle of the raft with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them while the rest of us poled. The box holding May Lynn was near her, and she had her head turned, looking at it, knowing what it was, I guess, though we hadn’t actually pointed it out as May Lynn’s resting place.

She wasn’t doing nothing to help, and we didn’t expect her to. Hell, we hadn’t planned on her going, so it was hard to have expectations. And what we all knew from just looking at her was she was weak and sick and could have been wrestled to the ground by a playful kitten. I was even afraid harsh language might knock her out.

I don’t know exactly how long we poled along like that, but we seemed to be making good time, and Terry said he figured we was five to seven days away from Gladewater, depending on circumstances and how hard we worked at it.

After a long while I began to feel hungry and in need of sleep because it had been one busy day, but I didn’t want to be the first to call out, and didn’t have to. We come to a place where the river went pretty thin, and Terry said, “Look over there.”

What there was to see was a little pool off the straight of the river. You had to be in just the right spot to see it. Too soon and all you saw was a big overhanging cypress and some droopy willows, and if you looked too late, you was past it. It was a shiny pool and didn’t look stagnant or mossy. It was a pretty good size, about twice the size of the raft. The water flowed into that place, turned around, and flowed out, keeping the spot clean and fresh, and from the dark of the water I figured it was deep, too.

“Go there,” Terry said.

Me and Jinx poled in that direction. It was a hard turn in that fast water, but we poled hard enough we got some speed up, and the raft glided into that little pool and bumped up against the shore.

I held my pole to the bank to keep us from floating back, and Terry took a hammer and nails from his bag. He drove a couple of long nails, darn near spikes, into the front of the raft, then got a rope out of the bag, uncoiled it, wrapped it around the nails, and bent them over a bit of the rope with the hammer. He tied off the rope to the roots of the cypress-those roots being considerable and sticking out from the bank for some ten feet, coiling down and around like fat snakes twisting into the water.

“We didn’t go too far before we holed up,” I said.

“I believe we have a good start,” Terry said. “And they don’t know how we’re making our run for it. Except maybe they’ll think by boat, since we stole your daddy’s. It’s missing, they might figure we’re going that way, but my first guess is they’re going to think the bus, and they’ll go to the bus station in Gladewater. That we caught a ride with someone. But we won’t be there, and they won’t know when to expect us.”

“He ain’t my daddy,” I said.

“What?” Terry said.

“Ain’t my daddy’s boat, cause he ain’t my daddy,” I said.

“No,” Mama said. “No, he isn’t. And Don, he’s pretty much a quitter. Something doesn’t work out immediately for him, he’ll leave out. That’s been my experience in more ways than one.”

I tried not to mentally count the ways, but I said, “Why he fishes with poison, ’lectricity, and dynamite is because it takes the waiting and trouble out of things.”

“It doesn’t matter, we have to rest, and it’s better that we don’t wear ourselves thin right at first,” Terry said. “We’re most likely better off traveling by day than night, even if we can be seen. The moon will be less bright tomorrow night, and even less so as we go. We’re more probable to end up getting wedged up on something or turning the whole thing over when we can’t see. During the day, we can journey more rapidly, even if we can be observed more easily.”

None of us argued. We were tuckered out.

Terry had stuffed a couple of blankets in his bag, and Mama had thought to do the same, and so had Jinx. They were all thin blankets, but there wasn’t much need for them on a nice night like it was. The boards that had been nailed over the logs were nice and smooth from years of people walking on them, so it was easy to stretch out and cover ourselves and get comfortable. Mama chose the middle of the raft, and I ended up close to her. She was warm, and she put her arm around me. The crickets sawed and the frogs bleated and the wind blew and the mosquitoes took a night off; the water beneath the raft rocked lightly.

“He didn’t want to be the kind of man he is,” Mama said in my ear.

“What?”

She was talking soft, and though Jinx and Terry might could have heard her, I’m sure they couldn’t have understood her.

“Don. I think he got broken early on, like me, only he was broken more. He came from a family that inherited much and his father turned it into less. The beatings he got took a toll, and, like me, he never thought he was worth anything. My family sure didn’t know what to do with me. It wasn’t that we didn’t get along, it’s that they seemed to be somewhere else even when I was there. I never told you much about them, my mother and father.”

“You said they died of smallpox,” I said.

“Yes. They did. But before they died, they might as well have been dead. Me and Don was the same to you. We didn’t do you any good, that’s for sure, but you haven’t become like us, and I’m not sure why.”

“I reckon you did your best,” I said. “But you still get to choose how you want to act and go, don’t you?”

“You do. But not everyone chooses well.”

“That’s on them,” I said.