Joe Lansdale - The Bottoms

Many didn’t even think Red killed Miss Maggie.

’Course, that left a series of questions. Why was Red’s car at Miss Maggie’s? Why had he disappeared? Why was his car found in the bottoms, run off in the woods like that?

There were answers given for all of these. Like he found the money and run off somewhere to spend it. Hadn’t folks heard him say he wanted to go abroad someday?

Bottom line was, no real conclusions were come to, and finally it became an “unknowable nigger murder.” Wasn’t anyone besides Daddy concerned about it. More people were concerned about Red.

Had he actually been abducted by the Bottoms Killer? Maybe he had found some clues to the killer’s identity, and the killer had gotten rid of him.

No matter Red hadn’t been concerned about the killer before, this became a popular theory, right up there with him having found the hidden money and gone off to Paris or some such.

There was even a rumor that one of his friends got regular postcards from him under a disguised name and that the cards came from exotic places all over the world. It was also said some of the cards had lipstick stains on them, kisses he had asked his girlfriends in all those countries to stick to the cards with their soft red lips.

’Course, since these cards were supposedly coming in over a short time from all over the world, this wasn’t an entirely convincing story.

I think the fact that Daddy didn’t come up with any answers just made things worse than before. For a few days there he had been his old self, but his investigation had stalled at Red’s car being discovered and then nothing else.

The whole thing settled down on him heavy as a boulder, and he fell back to the dark place where he had been lying for so many months, and unlike before, he didn’t even bother to dodge us when he was on a drunk, and pretty soon the whiskey bottles showed up at the house in plain sight.

Grandma took the hard line with him, calling him this and that, but it didn’t budge him.

Finally, he moved out to the barn with his bottles and it was as if he didn’t exist anymore. Oh, he got some money from the barbershop, though now Cecil was getting the bulk of it, and he did a little work around the place, but the plowing was left to me and I wasn’t real good at it.

We were scratching for a living like never before.

If things weren’t difficult enough on the farming scene, it started in raining real hard, beating on the ground worse than that day Grandma and I had been trapped in Mose’s shack.

With it pouring like that, there wasn’t any real plow work to be done. The rain went on for days, gushed through our fields, washed away our topsoil, carried plants with it, or beat them down in place.

Grandma said it was the darnedest thing yet. She’d already been through everything drying up and blowing away, now she was having to go through everything turning wet and washing away.

The rain turned to flooding and the Sabine flowed high and wide and fast, swirling mad water in brown foamy heaps. The river even changed its course by churning away weak standing banks and uprooting and toting off trees, some of them large enough to have built the front end of Noah’s Ark.

But eventually it passed. The rain quit, the black sky cracked open, showed blue behind it, as well as the sun in all its hot golden glory. In fact, it turned hot as hell and dry as Arab sand; mud heaped up in hard crust, like scabs healing all over the earth.

At night the dark sack that held the skies was burst open and the stars fled from it and glowed like frightened animal eyes all across the black velvet heavens.

The river ceased to roar, murmured instead, like a man sleeping contentedly, his belly full of cornbread and beans. Earth stopped dropping off the banks, the ground turned solid again, and the river flowed comfortably within its new boundaries, happy as if the skies had never mistreated it.

Clem Sumption lived some ten miles from us, right where a little road forked off what served as a main highway then. You wouldn’t think of it as a highway now, but it was the main road, and if you turned off of it, trying to cross through our neck of the woods on your way to Tyler, you had to pass Mr. Sumption’s house, which was situated alongside the Sabine River.

Clem’s outhouse was on the bank of the Sabine, and it was fixed up so what went out of him and his family went into the river. Lot of folks did that, though some like my Daddy were appalled at the idea. It was that place and time’s idea of plumbing. Daddy thought it was not only nasty, but lazy. To have a proper outhouse you had to have the fortitude to dig a proper hole. A very deep hole. When the hole was packed, you dug a new hole, moved the outhouse, filled the old hole, and started about packing the other.

The lazy way, you backed an outhouse up to the river’s edge so your waste dropped down a slant and onto the bank. When the water rose, the waste was carried away. When it didn’t, you did your best to stay downwind. Big blue-green bottle flies collected on the dark mess like jewels shining in rancid chocolate. In the dry season if a sudden wind picked up, the stink could bowl you over.

During the flood, Mr. Sumption and his boys used pieces of lumber that fit into grooves on the side of the outhouse so it could be lifted and placed in an area safe from the rising waters.

What they did to relieve themselves during this time I’m uncertain, but when the flooding passed, they moved the outhouse to a location near its original spot.

As the river lowered, it was discovered that the mess from the outhouse had not completely washed away, but was now parked in a big dark hill under the outdoor convenience’s new slip-and-slide position.

But before I continue with events, it’s necessary to point out Mr. Sumption ran a little roadside stand where he sold vegetables now and then, and on this hot day I’m talking about, he suddenly had the urge to take care of a mild stomach disorder, and left his son, Wilson, in charge of the stand.

After doing his business, Mr. Sumption said he rolled a cigarette and went out beside the outhouse to look down on the fly-infested pile, maybe hoping the river had carried some of it away. But dry as it was, the pile was bigger and the water was lower, and something unusual lay in it.

Mr. Sumption, first spying it, thought it was a huge, bloated, belly-up catfish. One of those enormous bottom-crawler types that were reputed by some to be able to swallow small dogs and babies.

But a catfish doesn’t have legs.

Mr. Sumption said even when he saw the legs it didn’t register with him that it was a human being. It looked too swollen, too strange to be a person. But it was, and it was a woman. Her legs were crossed and tied at the ankles. One of her arms was pulled behind the back, stretched out and tied so tight to her feet it had caused the back to bow slightly. The other arm was tied in such a manner it looked as if she were reaching over the shoulder to scratch the small of the back, but the hand, from the wrist on, was gone. The cord was bound around the forearm, and was tied off to the other arm.

Mr. Sumption eased carefully down the side of the hill, mindful not to step in what his family had been dropping along the bank all summer. He saw the woman’s bloated body lying face down in the moist blackness, and the flies were as delighted with the corpse as they were with the waste.

Mr. Sumption saddled up a horse and arrived in our yard a short time after that. I was out trying to knock some splashed mud off of some tomato plants so they might stand up and not rot, when he showed up.

Mr. Sumption rode right up to the edge of the field, jumped off his horse, and started calling to me. Toby barked at him a few times, but it was a friendly bark. He knew Mr. Sumption.