Joe Lansdale - Edge of Dark Water

“Have you spoken with him?” I said.

“No,” she said. “He’s not quite the Adonis I remember.”

“It’s still him, though,” I said.

“Yes. Watch.”

After a moment a nice-looking woman who was a little thick in the waist came down the walk with two girls trailing her. I figure they were a year apart, nine and ten was my guess, but I’m no good at guessing ages.

The woman smiled and my real daddy smiled. The woman touched his arm, and he let her slip it into the crook of his as he moved away from the wall. The little girls jumped up at him, so as to look him in the face, and I could hear him laugh even from where we sat. It was a happy laugh. The laugh of a man whose life had gone right and was good.

“He’s going to the cafe with them,” Mama said. “He was in there the first time I had lunch with Captain Burke. I didn’t know it was him, but I remember looking at him and thinking he looked familiar, and the next time I was in there with Captain Burke, Brian came over and spoke to him, and Captain Burke introduced me as Helen Wilson. Then he introduced me to Brian. Course, I knew who he was by then, but he never figured out who I was. He didn’t recognize me at all. I haven’t aged that much, have I?”

“No, Mama,” I said. “You look fine.”

“I thought so…well, I think I look pretty good.”

“You look real good,” Jinx said. Terry nudged her with his shoulder, letting her know to butt out; this was just me and Mama talking.

“He didn’t know me from nothing. I found out where he had his law office, in the courthouse there, and I knew he came to the cafe for lunch, so I came here to watch for him. And the first time I did his wife and daughters met him, right there. They hadn’t gone to the cafe with him those other times, for whatever reason, but there they were, and that’s where they went two days in a row.”

“How do you know?” I said.

“I followed them. And when I did, it came to me that his life is made. It’s all wrapped up neat in a bow, and I ought to leave it that way. I let him go back then, when I had a chance to keep him, and I have to let him go now, even if he would want something to do with me-and I doubt he would. Frankly, I wouldn’t want him to. We’re different now, and he’s happy, and I’m going to leave him that way. But because I have to let him go, it doesn’t mean you have to, Sue Ellen. He is your father.”

I looked at Brian and his family walking toward the cafe.

I said, “Funny thing is, I don’t feel nothing. Not a thing.”

“I’m sort of disappointed,” Mama said. “But I don’t feel anything, either.”

“Does this mean we’re going to get the money and bus tickets and go away?” Jinx said.

Mama smiled at Jinx. “It does. And Sue Ellen, wherever we go, it might be nice if we got you some education.”

We didn’t actually leave right away. Me and Jinx walked out of town the next day, back down the road, and made our path across the stretch that led to the old woman’s house. We knew our way now and made very quick time and didn’t have to spend the night in the woods. We had some bread and cheese to eat, and a little water in a jar.

When we got to the old woman’s house, it was mostly burned down. We walked around it and looked to see if there was anything to see, but there was just charred wood and the chimney standing up. There wasn’t any way we could figure what happened for sure, but our guess was folks traveling down the river had used it to hole up in at night, and someone had been careless with the fireplace. If that was the case, they looked to have escaped. Wasn’t any bodies in the burned wreck that we could see.

The shovel was still there where it had been under the house, though now the house had fell down on it and burned the handle off. We took the blade out of the ashes and went to where we had buried the cans and dug them up. They looked fine.

Walking down to the river, we carried the cans and eased along to where Skunk had been buried. We didn’t discuss it, we just done it like it was in our heads all along, and it might well have been.

The side of the bank where Skunk had been buried was busted open, and there wasn’t any sign of his body.

“Shit,” Jinx said.

“I think he just got washed away,” I said.

“Ain’t been no serious rains since we left here,” she said.

“That don’t mean the body might not have fallen out, and there could have been enough water to carry it off.”

“Can’t be sure,” she said. “And I don’t see how there’d be any more water than there is now without there being any more rain.”

“You’re the one that don’t believe in miracles,” I said. “He didn’t walk away. His head was torn off.”

“I don’t believe in miracles,” she said, “but that damn Skunk might change my mind.”

I supposed the body could actually have been dug out by someone who was curious, saw part of it poking out, though I couldn’t figure the reason anyone would want him. Maybe wild animals dragged him off, or an alligator. That made some sense. But to tell you true, I don’t know what really happened and never did figure it.

Bottom line to all this is, we walked out with the money and May Lynn, and back to Gladewater. We got there early night, and later that night in the boardinghouse, we counted out the money. There wasn’t no way to divide it up right, cause there were a number of large bills. Mama wasn’t in on the divide, but I promised her half of my third. Next day we took some of the money and bought bus tickets to ride out the next morning to California, with what Mama called some scenic stops along the way.

We talked about how we would take May Lynn’s ashes and toss them at some famous Hollywood spot. We had talked about it many times, but for the first time, at least as far as I was concerned, it finally seemed real. While we talked, I peeked at Terry. He had tears in his eyes. I think maybe he had decided he wasn’t a murderer, but that hadn’t changed his feelings of responsibility. I decided then and there that I forgave him, and that he was going to punish himself plenty enough. I was also mad at May Lynn, even if she was dead; she shouldn’t have treated him that way. But I forgave her, same as Terry.

Terry didn’t tell Mama what he had done, and me and Jinx didn’t want him to. We figured that at this point it was just best to let that dog lie.

Before bed that night, me and Mama had a private moment out on the porch of the boardinghouse. We was sitting in rocking chairs, taking in the breeze. After a while, I said, “Mama, you still dream about that black horse?”

“You know, after you killed Skunk, that dream mostly stopped, just now and again I’d have it. But when I told Don good-bye, next night I dreamed I caught that white winged horse and it took me away. What was odd, Sue Ellen, was that I was naked as the day I was born, riding on that horse up into a night sky, riding right up at the moon. I looked down, and behind me that black horse was coming, flying without wings, and then it come undone, like it was made of dry shadows, and those shadows were swallowed up by the night and were gone. Me and that white horse, we just kept on flying, flying fast to the moon. Next night, I didn’t dream anything about it at all.”

“I guess that’s good,” I said.

“Yes,” Mama said. “It certainly is.”

We slept with our tickets on an end table, the lard can with May Lynn’s ashes holding them down, the bucket of money nearby.

During the night I woke up in my little bed thinking I was on the raft again, and that I was floating downriver. I looked around the room; it took me some time to realize that not only was I not on the raft, but that Skunk was no longer after us; wasn’t nobody after us anymore. I got out of my bed and got dressed in my shirt, overalls, and shoes, and slipped outside.