Joe Lansdale - Edge of Dark Water

I grinned in spite of myself.

“Killing that mule tuckered me out such, I ain’t never come back to myself. That’s why I was glad to see ya’ll.”

“We could have cleaned the place for a meal,” I said. “You didn’t need to threaten us with a pistol.”

“The gun was empty.”

“We didn’t know that.”

“I wanted to keep you around. I guess at the bottom of it, I knew it wouldn’t work out. But it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

In that moment, I surprised myself by feeling sorry for her.

“What are all of you afraid of?” she said. “What are you running from?”

“Who says we’re running or afraid?” Mama said.

“Your eyes,” said the old woman. “Way you look around. Check the door and the windows.”

“Why would it matter to you?” I said.

“It don’t, except if they come for you, they might come for me,” the old woman said. “I figure I got a right to know on account of that.”

“You lost your rights to much of anything when you held us prisoner,” I said.

“Maybe she ought to know,” Mama said. “Maybe she’s earned that by saving Terry.”

“She just wanted to see she could still cut someone’s arm off,” I said.

“Me and your mama together did a good job, didn’t we?” the old woman said. “Me and her saved that boy.”

“I still hate you,” Jinx called from the other room.

“All right, here’s the short version,” I said. “We made some people mad. We’re on our way to California, and they got a man named Skunk on our tail. That’s as much as you need to know.”

“Skunk?” the old woman said, and I swear, even there in the near dark, the room lit only by the fire in the fireplace, I was sure I could see her turn pale.

“You know of him?” I asked.

She nodded. “If that hellhound is on your trail, then you’re already dead and just walking around.”

“I don’t plan to just roll over and let him have me,” I said.

“It don’t matter,” said the old woman.

“It matters to me,” I said.

“What you need to do is go in the bedroom there, look in the chifforobe and get the pistol shells, and load up that pistol. Then you ought to get the shotgun out of the closet. It’s loaded and there’s a box of shells in there for it. I was going to try and get to it later and blow your head off, but I don’t think I can get out of this chair again, and I doubt you’ll help me over there so I can take hold of it.”

“You got that right,” Jinx called out.

I went and got the shells for the pistol, pulled the shotgun and shells for it from the closet. I gave the pistol to Jinx and she loaded it while I went back in the main room with the shotgun. It was a double-barrel. A twelve-gauge. I had the box of shells for it with me, and I sat down on the floor and laid the shotgun across my legs and set the box of shells nearby.

“Surely,” Mama said, “he’s given up by now.”

“He don’t give up,” the old woman said. “He might take a break, get bored, or decide to go off and look at something he ain’t seen for a day or two, but he’ll come back.”

“You’re just going on old stories,” I said.

She shook her head. She licked her lips, said, “I heard tell my mama and daddy knew Skunk’s mama. That after the slaves was freed, she used to work for our family, doing laundry and stuff, cooking. She lived in a shack on the back end of her former master’s property, Eval Turpin. The master was long dead, but his grandson, Justin, lived there without no living kin. But them that had been slaves he let live on the farm, let their children and their children’s children live there, too. He didn’t hire them or pay them nothing, cause he didn’t have nothing himself. Like my family, when cotton wasn’t king no more, his family went broke, and stayed that way.

“One of the women living there was named Mary, and she got with baby by a half-Comanche nigger, and had a child. She called him Absalom. He wasn’t never right, would stir the ground with a stick, killing ants, just grinning. That’s what Daddy said. Said he talked all the time, but a lot of it was nonsense. He was even suspected of killing one of Daddy’s prize coonhounds by feeding it meat with broken glass in it. Daddy said he never knew for sure, but suspected it. Said that old dog was just as good a dog as there was, and followed Absalom around like he was the boy’s pet, and then the boy did that to him. Probably just to see him suffer.

“When Absalom was little, his daddy, the half-breed, got tired of hearing his babble, and held him down and pulled out his tongue with a pair of pliers, and run off, and wasn’t never seen again. Wasn’t but a few years later, when the boy was ten or so, his mama got scared of him. Said she’d wake up at night and he’d be standing over her, just looking down at her the way he looked at those ants. One morning she gathered him up and took him out in a boat. It was the boy’s birthday, and she later said she thought that was about the right time to do it. She told him they was going fishing, but what she did was she shoved him out of the boat, and pushed him in the water, leaned out of the boat and held him under.

“My daddy said she done it and didn’t feel bad about it, because she thought there was something in that child that was wrong, and that she was doing what she ought to do. What God would have wanted her to do. She said she could see that boy’s eyes looking up at her from beneath the water, looking up through the cracks of her fingers as she held him down. She said his eyes was cold as marbles. He didn’t drown, though. She took a boat paddle to him and hit him some licks with it, and he floated off. She thought he was dead. But he ended up on shore, and he lived. Stayed out in the woods like a wild animal. He lived in such a wild way he got a stink about him, and that’s how he come to be called Skunk.”

“I done told them this story,” Jinx said.

“Well, then,” the old woman said, “if you told it like I told it, then you told it true.”

“The pliers part was new,” Jinx said.

“That’s the little detail that matters,” said the old woman.

“You didn’t mention about how he lives in places where he hangs up bones and such, and they rattle in the wind.”

“I ain’t never heard that part,” said the old woman.

“You didn’t tell nothing but a story most everyone tells,” Jinx said. “I don’t believe your daddy knew Skunk or his mama. I think you’re just yarning.”

“I’m telling it like it was told to me,” she said. “From white men, reliable and truthful.”

“Ha,” Jinx said.

“Now, here’s some more details,” said the old woman. “After Skunk was grown, after everyone thought he was dead and rotted away in the woods, he come back. He was a young man by then, and somehow he had survived. Daddy said one morning Justin Turpin went down to Mary’s shack cause he was starting to take up with her in secret, but when he got there she was skinned and nailed to the side of the shack like a deer hide. She was just a head and a skin, and he had put a boat paddle between her teeth. He hadn’t never forgot, and that’s how everyone knew who it was. What had been inside her was outside of her, piled up on a chopping block in the yard, and it was still warm. Turpin had missed Skunk by just a few minutes. Her hands was gone. Chopped off. They say he does that now all the time, when he kills someone, on account of his mama’s hands holding him under that water, and him trying to come up, and those hands holding him down. I can’t vouch that’s the reason, but that’s how folks guess at it. He don’t like the thought of hands because a pair almost drowned him.