Joe Lansdale - Edge of Dark Water

“She certainly loved them,” Terry said.

“I figured she’d go off someday and become a movie star,” I said. “I figured anyone could do it, it was her.”

Terry sat down in the chair at the end of the bed and picked up one of her pillows. He said, “It smells like her. That drugstore perfume she wore.” He put the pillow down and looked at us. “You know, May Lynn really ought to go to Hollywood.”

“She’s a whole lot dead,” Jinx said, sitting down on the mattress.

“She should still make the journey,” Terry said, and crossed his legs. “It’s all she ever wanted, and now she’s ended up buried in a hole like a dead pet. I don’t think that’s how it ought to end for her.”

“And I don’t think I ought to stink when I’m straining in the outhouse,” Jinx said, “but so far it don’t work no other way.”

“We could take her to Hollywood,” Terry said.

“Say what?” I said.

“We could take her.”

“You mean dig her up?” Jinx said.

“Yes,” Terry said. “She won’t dig herself up.”

“That’s certainly true,” I said.

“I mean it,” Terry said.

Me and Jinx looked at one another.

Jinx said, “So we dig her up and carry her and the coffin all the way to Hollywood on our backs, and when we get there, we go over to see the movie people and tell them we got their next star, a dead body that don’t look nothing like May Lynn used to look and has a smell about her that could knock a bird out of a tree and kill it stone dead?”

“Of course not,” Terry said. “I’m merely stating the obvious fact that we haven’t got so many friends that we should not care about a dead one. I think we have to dig her up, give her a funeral like they used to give heroes in ancient Greece. You know, burn her on a funeral pyre and gather up her ashes; the ashes can go to Hollywood.”

“She ain’t a Greek,” Jinx said.

“But she was a kind of goddess, don’t you think?” Terry said.

“What she was was a river-bottoms kid that was very pretty that came up dead with a sewing machine tied to her feet,” I said. “You’re crazy, Terry. We can’t dig her up and set her on fire, take her ashes to Hollywood.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” Terry said.

“How’s that?” Jinx said.

“It won’t mean anything to her, you’re right,” Terry said. “Being dead takes the fun out of things. I know. I once had a dog that died and I prayed that he’d come back to life, but he didn’t. And I finally decided God had brought him back, but hadn’t let him out of the hole. I went out and dug him up to help him out, only he was still dead and not looking very good.”

“I could have told you how that was going to turn out,” Jinx said.

“It isn’t like any of us want to remain here,” Terry said.

“That’s true,” Jinx said. “I do, I’m gonna end up wiping white baby asses and doing laundry and cooking meals for peckerwoods the rest of my life. And if that’s what I got coming, I might do like Mrs. Baxter and wrap a shirt around my head and go in the river.”

“Don’t even say that,” I said.

“I just did.”

“Well, don’t say it again.”

“There isn’t anything for us here,” Terry said. “You can’t really grow here. Not the way we should. We stay here, there will always be some kind of weight on our heads, holding us down. I like the idea of taking May Lynn’s ashes to Hollywood and sprinkling them around where she’ll always be a part of it. May Lynn had an adventurous spirit about her, and I think she was no more than a few months shy of departing from this place.”

“She should have hurried up,” Jinx said.

“We have a chance to leave,” Terry said. “All we have to do is reach out and embrace it. Together we can make it work. We can help each other achieve that goal.”

“What you need is a good meal and some sleep,” I said, looking at Terry.

Terry shook his head. “No. What I need is a shovel and some friends to help me dig her up. Then we burn her and the magazines together. It’s symbolic that way.”

“Symbolic?” Jinx said.

“Then we put the combined ashes in a jar-”

“A jar?” Jinx said.

“Or some kind of container,” Terry said. “Then we float down the river to a good-sized town, catch a bus, and head for Hollywood.”

“A bus?” Jinx said.

“Stop being a mockingbird,” Terry said, frowning at Jinx.

“That sounds crazy,” I said.

“I like crazy better than I like being around here,” Terry said.

“That’s two of us,” Jinx said.

They both stared at me, waiting for agreement, I suppose.

“Let me think about it,” I said.

“I know you,” Terry said. “You aren’t really going to consider it. You’re just saying that so I’ll shut up.”

“While you think about it,” Jinx said, “me and Terry are gonna be setting May Lynn on fire with them magazines, and by the time you’ve decided one way or the other, we’ll be in a boat, maybe one without a hole in the bottom, on our way to Hollywood with that gal in a jar.”

“I know this much,” I said. “The Sabine River don’t go to Hollywood.”

“Yeah, but we’ll arrive there somehow,” Terry said.

I could almost see the wheels in his head turning.

He lifted his head and his lips curled at the edges. “There’s the barge. We could take the barge. It’s big enough to live on.”

“It’s too big for some of the narrow spots,” Jinx said. “We might go better by patching up the boat, or getting some other one.”

“I bet we can get it through those spots if we put our backs into it,” Terry said.

“The barge, as you call it, ain’t nothing more than a raft,” I said.

“You could actually dock it against the bank at night and sleep on it,” Terry said.

“I want to think about it,” I said, feeling the pressure, hoping the whole thing would go out of his and Jinx’s head by the time we got back across the river.

“What’s to think on?” Jinx said. “You told us you can’t even sleep good for watching for your daddy coming into your room.”

I nodded, thinking about how I usually slept with a piece of stove wood in the bed next to me, my door locked, one eye open and an ear cocked. “That’s true.”

“Well, then,” Terry said.

“I got some things to do at home first,” I said, still thinking it was all going to be forgotten in a short time, but actually beginning to warm to the idea.

“All right, then,” Terry said. “We can all go home and prepare, and if either of you have any money, now would be a good time to bring it.”

“I have a quarter,” I said. “That’s it.”

“I got the teeth in my head,” Jinx said.

“I have a few dollars,” Terry said. “But what we really need is a plan.”

We gathered up the magazines, and decided it was okay because May Lynn told us her daddy always thought her wanting to be in the movies was silly, told her wanting to be on a screen dressed up like a hussy in tight clothes and wearing makeup like war paint wasn’t any plan for a grown woman. That meant those magazines would soon be burned up for fire starter or tossed out to rot when he came back and found out she was dead. I figured that portion of the house would become his, too, littered with cigarette papers and tobacco crumbs.

Anyway, we took them, and as we was stuffing them into a couple of pillowcases, a writing tablet with a red cardboard cover fell out and hit the floor. Jinx picked it up and said, “Look here.”

Scrawled on the front of it in May Lynn’s handwriting was the word DIARY. The writing was in pencil, and it was so rubbed over, and the cover so dark to begin with, you could hardly see the word.