Joe Lansdale - A Fine Dark Line

Buster took hold of Bubba Joe, dragged him off. In the distance I heard a splash. Buster came back.

“Water will carry him along, I reckon,” Buster said. “It’s runnin’ good and hard . . . You can’t say nothin’. Nothin’ at all. Maybe I’m wrong and someone will miss him. You understand me? Don’t say nothin’.”

“No, sir. I won’t.”

Buster bent over and threw up. He did this for several minutes. I was glad for the pounding rain, or the smell would have been overwhelming.

“You sick?” I asked.

“Drunk,” he said. “Come on. Let’s get back to the house and get you dry. And make me some coffee. Damn, boy. I didn’t mean to send you out in the rain.”

“Yes you did.”

“It’s the moods. You understand, don’t you? I knew what I had done and shouldn’t have done right after I done it. You’d already gone out then. Can’t blame you. Decided to come get you . . . See the way that dog lit into him? Some dog you got there, boy. You know about moods, don’t you? Understand, don’t you?”

My sister certainly had them, and so did my father, but nothing like this. Looking back now, I know that Buster’s mood swings were probably due to some chemical deficiency mixed with the alcohol, but as of that moment in time, I could only think what so many Southerners thought back then about an odd friend or relative: “It was just his way.”

When we got back to Buster’s, he let Nub inside with us, had me strip off my clothes. He wrapped a blanket around me and I sat in a chair while he stoked up that old stove of his with chunks of wood and scraps of paper. When the fire was burning hot enough to melt silver, he had me sit by the open door of the stove, next to my clothes, which he shook out and racked on the back of a chair. I thought about what had almost happened to me, and had happened to Bubba Joe. I shook not only with cold, but with fear. I felt vulnerable and embarrassed sitting there in wet underwear.

“You sure he’s dead?” I said.

“Oh, yeah, Stan, he’s dead. I know dead when I see it. I’ve seen it a few times.”

“Shouldn’t we tell the law? It’s self-defense.”

“No tellin’ how them law will act when it’s a colored done the killin’. Even if it’s colored killing colored. No tellin’, so we ain’t gonna tell. Are we?”

“No, sir. You saved my life, Buster.”

“Wouldn’t have needed to had I not acted like a jackass.”

“He must have been following me from home. He’s been watching our house, ’cause of Rosy Mae. I saw him the other night. Me and my sister and a friend sneaked out of the house to go down and look for Margret’s ghost, and we saw it, a kind of light, and then we saw Bubba Joe. He chased us. But we lost him by running in front of a train, leaving him on the other side.”

“You knew he was out there?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But you came here to tell me about my job?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You little fool.”

I hung my head. A few moments went by, then Buster, almost bright, said: “The railway light. I’ve seen that. That ain’t no ghost, boy.”

“What is it then?”

“I don’t know. I seen similar lights out at Marfa, Texas, once. But whatever it is, it ain’t no ghost. It’s some kind of gas or somethin’. Hell, I don’t know. But it ain’t no ghost.”

“You killed him, Buster. He’s dead.”

“Yep. He’s dead all right. In time he’d have got Rosy or one of you, ’cept maybe your daddy. That’s a hell of a man, your daddy.”

“I’ve never heard you say anything good about him before.”

“You haven’t really heard me say anything bad about him.”

“No.”

“Listen. I recognize him for what he is. A good father. I wasn’t never that. He cares for you. He’s tough, and everyone in town knows it. White town, and here on the colored side. Your daddy is known, boy.”

“How?”

“Men know. I can’t tell you how. Way he carries himself. ’Course, I don’t think he likes colored all that much.”

“I don’t know. He helped Rosy Mae. He’s still helpin’ her. He says some things that sound bad, but he does pretty good.”

“I suppose you’re right. You didn’t get cut nowhere, did you?”

“No. It was like he was studying on me. Like he was looking to make it last.”

“That would have been his way. He got in a knife fight up the old sawmill once, took his time on that nigger. Cut him maybe fifty times, near killed him, got cut a lot himself, but he didn’t mind it. Figured he could finish a knife fight at any time.”

“He didn’t finish you.”

“I took him by surprise, and I had a couple of Jap tricks up my sleeve. I learned them from folks picked it up in the army. And I wasn’t gonna give him a chance. I threw him, pinned him, finished him. He’d have killed me otherwise. I had to do what I did. You understand that, boy?”

“Yes, sir.”

Buster looked down at his shirt. It was covered in blood and the rain had washed it down and into his trousers.

“You’re hurt,” I said.

“His blood. It sprayed. I’ll change shirts.”

He took off the bloody shirt and put it in the stove. It burst into flames. His skinny body was covered with scars. Across his back there were welts that made it look as if barbed wire were under his skin.

He got a folded shirt from a box under his bed, slipped it on.

“Someone will find him, won’t they?” I said.

“Starts to smell . . . Yeah, they’ll find him. And you and me, we ain’t gonna say a word. Are we?”

“No, sir.”

“I don’t mean that as a threat, boy. I’m askin’ as a friend.”

“You did save my life.”

“Suppose I did. Your dog took a little cut.”

“What?”

“It ain’t nothin’. I’m gonna pour some stuff on it. He’ll be good as new. Hell, tough dog like this, he don’t even know he’s been cut.”

Nub may not have minded the cut, but he sure minded that alcohol. He bit Buster.

———

WHILE MY CLOTHES finished drying, we moved to the table, me with a blanket draped over me, Buster drinking coffee, trying to get “the mood out of him,” he said.

He got a record player and put a record on it and let it play. “Need to get my mind off this,” he said. “Got to not think on it too hard.”

The record was of a kind I had never heard before. It wasn’t rock and roll, but it reminded me of it.

“That’s the blues,” Buster said. “Big Joe Turner.”

We listened. While we did, I looked at his notes. I said: “What does this mean, Buster?”

It was what I had seen earlier: “Girl’s mother.”

“That means we got maybe a wedge into this. A way of pushing open the case and seein’ what’s inside. You find the roots of somethin’, then you can better understand the flower of the thing. The flower bein’ the murders and the murderers.”

“So what do you know?”

“Well, what I know is the mother of that little white girl killed down by the tracks is still alive and maybe she knows something. You remember, I told you how I knew her.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I talked to some folks I know would know if she’s still alive, and she is. She ain’t that old actually. She’s still in the same house.”

“I know,” I said. “Down by the tracks near the swamp, not far from the trestle bridge. That’s where we went to see the ghost. It’s near where Margret was killed.”

“You gettin’ to be a first-class snoop, Stan. The momma, Winnie, she might know somethin’. I think we can talk to her. Normally I wouldn’t bother to talk to no white woman ’cause it could get me lynched. But I know who Winnie is, and she lives with a black man down there by the slough. He’s an ornery sort named Chance. Besides, she’s not all white. She’s dark-skinned ’cause she’s got that Mexican, or Puerto Rican, or whatever in her. But I told you that.”