Joe Lansdale - Edge of Dark Water

If the money really is there, I’m going to try and find it and go off to Hollywood to get my start. I think God must want me to have this money, or he would not have let my brother rob banks and bury it and then die. I thank God left this money for me.

When Terry quit reading, he said, “That is an interesting conclusion.”

“Sounds to me like stealing,” I said. “And if God left her the money, then he’s a thief, too.”

“It sounds to me like a way to get out of this hellhole,” Jinx said. “And though I ain’t no thief under normal situations, I knew where that money was, I’d be on it like stink on a dead possum.”

“We can follow the map,” Terry said.

“What if it’s just one of her tales?” I said. “The diary is full of them. And it’s even missing pages, for some reason.”

“I presume that was her way of editing it,” Terry said. “Writing things about yourself and putting them in a diary can even be difficult. There’s always some part of you, I suppose, that fears someone will see it.”

“Like three friends who stole it from her house,” Jinx said.

“Like that,” Terry said. “I think a lot of this is more like a novel, or a long short story. Maybe she started out to write a diary and there just wasn’t enough to talk about that was interesting.”

It certainly had in it all manner of nonsense about how she had been writing big movie stars and they had been writing her back, and how she had sent a picture of herself in and a producer liked the way she looked and wanted her to come on out. All of that was just foolishness, and nothing else, but some of it I knew to be true. Some of it was about things I knew had happened.

“Well, now,” Terry said, “we know Jake was a robber, isn’t that correct? And she has written down a detailed map that she said she got from her brother on his deathbed, so-”

“All we got to do,” said Jinx, “is take that map and follow it, see if it leads somewhere, and then split up the money and run like bastards.”

“Not exactly what I had in mind,” Terry said. “But it has occurred to me that with Sue Ellen’s quarter, and your ‘nothing but teeth,’ Jinx, and me having a few dollars, we might not get far, or however far we manage to go there might be very little comfort to it. But once we get downriver, to a town, money can make things a lot better. So we go and see if the stolen money is there, and if it is, we take it. Then we do what I said about the body. Burn it up and carry her ashes out to Hollywood. It’s what she wanted.”

“It’s stolen money,” I said.

“We don’t even know what bank it came from if we wanted to give it back,” Terry said.

“See there?” Jinx said, nodding quickly several times. “We ain’t really got no other choice.”

“We could give it to the authorities,” I said.

“Constable Sy?” Terry asked.

“There’s bound to be someone else,” I said.

“There might be,” Jinx said, “but I don’t want to find them suckers. Constable Sy would just take it for his own self. I want to do what Terry wants to do, and I say we do it on the cheap, and if there’s money left over we split it. And if you’re all that bothered about it, Sue Ellen, I’ll take your cut.”

“Say there was bank money,” I said. “Why didn’t May Lynn take it and go off on her own?”

“Maybe she wasn’t ready,” Jinx said. “Maybe she couldn’t figure out the map. That don’t mean the money ain’t there and that she didn’t plan to take it. Now that I think on it, we ought to take a bus. I don’t like water all that much. I can swim, but not so good, and there’s snakes and such. On a bus, I have to ride in the back in the colored part, like dirty laundry, but at least I’m a whole lot less likely to drowned or get snakebit.”

“And where do we catch that bus?” Terry said.

“Gladewater,” Jinx said. “That’s how Daddy goes. He walks across the Sabine River bridge, catches a ride to Gladewater, then gets the bus there, takes it up north to Yankee land. We’d take our bus out west.”

“Your daddy has a car,” I said.

“Now he does,” Jinx said. “But that’s how he went the first time. By bus.”

“Best way for us to arrive in Gladewater is to take the river,” Terry said. “It’s quicker than walking, and more certain than a ride, and we don’t have to wonder who it is we’re riding with. Catching a ride might be why May Lynn’s dead. She may have caught it with the wrong kind of person. I say we take the money and steal her body and burn it up, and jar it up, and then float down near Gladewater, walk in and buy tickets at the bus station, and proceed to Hollywood.”

“There’s some sense in that,” Jinx said. “And when we get to Gladewater and take the bus, we can use some of the money to buy lunches to tote with us. I’ve always wanted to buy a lunch. Though you’ll have to buy it for me. There’s that whole colored thing about going into cafes and such.”

“Don’t worry,” Terry said. “It’ll be taken care of.” He looked at me. “You aren’t saying much.”

“I’m sitting here considering on my life of crime and how it could help me buy a lunch for a bus trip.”

“It’s money that has already been stolen,” Terry said. “It’s not like you stole it.”

“If I take it, it would be like stealing, because that’s exactly what I’d be doing. Stealing from a thief wouldn’t make me any less a thief.”

“The thief is dead, and so are his heirs,” Terry said.

“There’s the father,” I said.

“He doesn’t count,” Terry said.

“Why’s that?” I said.

“Because I don’t like him, and if you get right down to it, you can’t be an heir to stolen money. Not legally, anyway.”

“I’m glad that puts us on such solid legal ground,” I said.

We pushed our boat off the barge-or what I call a raft-back into the river, and paddled it to land. After we got on ground, we pulled the boat up under a tree and found some dried brush to lean on it. It wasn’t much of a hideaway, but it’s what we had.

Before we left out of there, we sat down under a tree and got out the map and turned it ever which way trying to figure out what it meant. It might as well have been written in Greek. We could make out what must have been May Lynn’s house and the river drawn on it in a squiggly line, and above it a rise in the land that was familiar. Finally there was a couple of thick lines with little lines drawn between them. We figured that had to be railroad tracks. Beyond the tracks, there were some humps, and there was a line written out that said MALCOLM CUZINS. Neither the humps or the name meant anything to us.

We walked away from the river and the bottomland, made our way back to where May Lynn’s house stood. We went wide of it toward the woods.

The woods were thick and it took us a while to thread through them and climb up a big hill. We finally got on the trail that went out of the bottoms, ending us up on a field where cane grew. It was highland cane and it wasn’t as good as bottom cane, but it was still good enough. It was a big patch that covered a lot of acres, and the stalks were thick and tall. The cane had turned slightly purple, and I knew once it was stripped the sugar inside of it would be sweet.

I had a pocketknife, and I cut down a stalk next to where the field started, then cut it into three pieces. It took some work, but we all got our pieces frayed and that gave us the pulp to chew on. It was sugary, and it was something to keep us happy and busy while we walked. I figure when you got right down to it, we weren’t fresh thieves after all, but had had plenty of practice in the cane fields and watermelon patches. Heck, I had started my life of crime sometime back, but had just then realized it. The natural move forward would be to take stolen bank money and spend it on a trip to Hollywood with a dead girl burnt up in a jar.