Joe Lansdale - The Bottoms

Woodrow turned red and put his hat on.

“It wasn’t no threat. But you just keep in mind what I’ve said.”

“Whatever it is you said, you keep in mind what I just said. Take it to heart, Woodrow. I’m goin’ home now.”

“I ain’t finished, Jacob.”

“Yeah you are,” Daddy said.

As Daddy walked away, Woodrow said, “You tell May Lynn I said howdy.”

Daddy paused momentarily. I saw the arteries stand out in his neck, and for a moment I thought he might turn around, but he didn’t. He kept coming.

I slid away from the driver’s side and waited for Daddy to get in. When he was behind the wheel, I said, “Everything all right, Daddy?”

“Everything’s fine, son. Fine.”

I looked back and saw the banged-up black car was turned around and heading in the other direction, the man called Woodrow had his sleeve-covered arm hanging from the window.

When we got home, Daddy let me out, turned the Ford around, and headed off. He didn’t say where he was going. Just told me to tell Mother not to worry.

He didn’t come back until nightfall, and he was quiet all night. After supper, he and Mama sat and read awhile, her from the Bible and him from a seed catalogue and then the Farmer’s Almanac. But he seemed to be just going through the motions. I noticed that he had been on the same page for a long time. Once he looked over at Mother, sighed, then went back to glaring at the page, as if he wished to be absorbed by it, like a stain.

Me and Tom played checkers, and Tom, after me beating her four times in a row, got mad, turned over the checker board, and went out on the sleeping porch. There were a couple of cots out there, and when it was real hot, sometimes that’s where me and Tom slept.

Normally, I wasn’t of a mind to care a lot about how she felt, but maybe seeing that body had softened me. I went out on the porch. Tom was on one of the cots, her hands behind her head, looking up at the ceiling.

“It’s just an ole game,” I said, realizing I probably should have let her win one.

“That’s all right,” she said.

I sat on the other cot. We sat there in silence, listening to the crickets, some bugs banging up against the screen.

“That woman we found,” Tom asked, “you think the Goat Man did that to her?”

“Doc Stephenson said he thought some kind of animal did it. Doc Tinn said he thought a man did it. Constable over there thought it was a hobo.”

“How you know all that?” she said.

“I heard ’em talkin’.”

“Is a hobo a monster?”

“It’s a fella rides the trains by sneaking on.”

“Well, that’s a man, ain’t it? You said an animal, a man, or a hobo.”

“I suppose.”

“But could it have been the Goat Man?”

“Daddy says it ain’t. But if you put together what everyone says, it adds up to the Goat Man. Miss Maggie thinks it was the Goat Man.”

Tom considered on that for a while, said, “Miss Maggie knows all kinds of things. Makes sense to me it was the Goat Man. We seen it, didn’t we?”

“We did.”

“I didn’t see it real good. It was too dark. It looked pretty horrible though, didn’t it?”

I agreed it did.

“I think about it sometimes,” Tom said.

“I know.” I thought about Daddy telling me I didn’t need to talk about the body, but then again, hadn’t Tom already seen it?

Heck, I was turning out to be a real blabbermouth.

I told Tom what I had done, about climbing on the icehouse and looking through the hole. I told her what was said, and I embellished it a little, making myself the leader of the boys that climbed the chinaberry.

I also left out the part about being caught in the act of spying. That seemed to me to take the edge off the story and made me seem less clever than I wanted to be.

I also added, “Don’t say nothin’ about what I told you, or I’ll be in a heap of trouble.”

Me and Tom talked awhile, speculating on the Goat Man, and pretty soon we were starting to hear him creeping around at the back of the house, and maybe even calling to us in a kind of soft voice that mocked the wind. I got up and locked the screen door, but that didn’t keep us from being scared. Pretty soon every time a bug smacked up against the screen, I was sure it was the Goat Man scratching to get in.

Having scared ourselves to death, we gladly went inside to bed.

That night, as I lay in bed, Jelda May Sykes came to me, all cut up. Not just the way I found her, but the way Doc Tinn had cut her, from breastbone to private parts. There was a big empty gap in her stomach except for one long intestine Doc Tinn hadn’t pulled out. It hung out of the rip in her belly and dragged across the floor. She moved slowly, and finally stood by my bed, looking down at me. Her pubic hair and her cut-up womanhood was near my head. I had my eyes open and I could see her, but I couldn’t move. Very carefully, very slowly, she laid her hand on my forehead, as if checking for fever.

I woke up in a sweat, and lay panting. I looked to see if I had awakened Tom, but she was still sleeping sound by the window that connected to the sleeping porch. She might have been frightened when she went to bed, but she sure seemed content enough now. She had even opened the window, which was a good thing, hot as it was.

The wind was soft and gentle, moving the curtains. It licked at Tom’s dark hair and waved it about. I was certain I could smell death and river water in the room. I checked about, to see if Jelda May had moved into the shadows, waiting for me to get comfortable again, but there was nothing there but the shapes of familiar things.

I folded my pillow and stuffed it under my head and took deep breaths, tried not to think about Jelda May Sykes. While I was doing that, I heard Mom and Dad talking behind the wall, just a buzz of words.

I slid over and put my ear against the wall and tried to pick up what they were saying. They were speaking soft, and for a moment I couldn’t make anything out, but pretty soon I adjusted, shut out the sound of the wind coming through the window by putting a hand over my ear and pressing my other one tight against the wall.

“… you got to consider that except for stories I haven’t never heard of a panther killing anybody,” I heard Daddy say. “My belief is they probably have. Some say they don’t do that, but I think any kind of critter can do that under the right circumstances. Even a family dog. But Doc Stephenson didn’t have no reason to suspect that. He just wanted it to be that way.”

“Why?” Mama asked.

“He didn’t want no colored doctor making any kind of examination and maybe knowing something he didn’t know. Everyone that’s got the mind to admit it, knows Doc Tinn is a good doctor. Better’n most, white or black. That’s all I can figure. And Stephenson was drunk, so I don’t think that helped his judgment none. He may have been showin’ out for that intern, Taylor. Though I don’t think Taylor was much impressed.”

“What did Doc Tinn say?”

“He said she’d been raped and cut up. The cut-up part was obvious. He figured someone had come back after she was dead, probably the killer, and kind of played with the body.”

“You don’t mean it?”

“Uh huh.”

“Who would do such a thing?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t even an idea.”

“Did the doctor know her?”

“No, but the colored preacher over there, Reverend Bail, he knew her. Name was Jelda May Sykes. He said she was a local prostitute and a… he called her a juju woman.”

“A what?”

“Some kind of witchcraft they believe in. She sold charms and such. She worked in the juke joints along the river. Picked up a little white trade now and then.”