Joe Lansdale - A Fine Dark Line

“You did?”

“Uh huh. May see them as your letters, but really they belonged to her daughter, so I thought the mother should have them. Some of them anyway. I wanted to keep a few around for the flavor, case we needed to look back over them and make sure of somethin’. Just picked out ones didn’t matter much, repeated what had already been said.

“Told her I found them workin’ out back the drive-in fence, buried in a jar. I don’t know why I said a jar, but I did.”

“What did she say?”

“Let me set this up. Went out there late last night. Her husband—he’s common-law, which means they just live together—he invited me in, gave me a cup of coffee, ’cause she was busy, if you know what I mean, in the back room.”

“Her husband knows?”

“He’s her pimp, Stan.”

“Pimp?”

He explained what a pimp was, added: “He gets a big share of the money. Likes money so much, I had to pay him some to sit and talk for a half hour. He didn’t care I had letters from Winnie’s daughter, felt I was burnin’ work time. So, I had to pay. Expensive coffee that way.”

“He isn’t Margret’s father, right?”

“I told you. Some Puerto Rican, or Mexican. Winnie is mixed herself. This here was a colored gent.”

“What did Miss . . . Miss Winnie think?”

“Hate to report, but she feel same as her husband. Least, she had to act like she did around her old man, ’cause he’ll beat her she don’t do right the way he sees right. I didn’t see him whup her, but I know how it works with pimps and whores, even if they live together as husband and wife.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Well, Stan, they ain’t the PTA. Know what I’m sayin’? She looked the letters over a little, gave ’em back to me. Said toss ’em, whatever.”

“She didn’t cry?”

“She didn’t even tear up. She said, ‘You got money on the clock, boy, why don’t you use it for somethin’ matters.’

“Now, I was tempted. She don’t look too bad, and I did put down ten dollars . . . I told her, sure, and we went in the back room, and when she closed the door, she said, ‘You’re gonna have to be kinda quiet so we can talk.’ We sat on the bed and she took the letters again and looked them over. This time she cried a little.”

“So she was sad?”

“In her own way. You see . . . Well, let me go through it. I showed her the letters again, and she said, Margret always treated her good, but she didn’t believe the girl got pregnant.”

“But Margret says she is in the letters.”

“No. No she doesn’t, Stan. What I noticed right off was she talked about pregnancy, didn’t say she was with baby. There’s never one line in them letters says she’s pregnant. Says she and J can deal with pregnancy, but she ain’t talkin’ about herself.”

“Who could she have been talking about? James can’t get pregnant.”

“No,” Buster said. “No, he can’t. But I’ll come back to that. Asked Margret’s mama about James Stilwind, and she said she didn’t know him, but that Margret was friends with the little Stilwind girl.”

“Jewel Ellen.”

“That’s right. Said they together all the time. That she knew the Stilwinds didn’t approve. Margret couldn’t go over to her place, for instance. She said the Stilwinds didn’t approve of her profession, and they didn’t approve that she had turned Margret out.”

“Turned her out?”

“Made a whore of her.”

“Her own daughter? She did that?”

“Winnie thought she was passin’ on the family trade, Stan.”

“Margret was just a girl!”

“Lot of men like that. Little girls, I mean. They sick sons-abitches in the world, Stan. Margret was a real moneymaker, her mother said. But she didn’t like the life and wanted to do more with herself. Thought she could run off to Hollywood and be an actress, ’cause she was so pretty. Winnie said she tried to tell Margret she wasn’t good for nothin’ else but what she was doin’.”

“That’s horrible.”

“It is. But she’s tellin’ all this to me with tears in her eyes. She loved her daughter in her fashion, but she just doesn’t have any bottom to her, Stan. She couldn’t see her daughter doin’ any better than her, makin’ anything of herself. Said how irritated she’d been that the girl wanted to go to school, and she didn’t want her to. This what a person does when they really love themselves better than they own child. Don’t want them to improve.

“Finally Margret did quit, started picking up jobs here and there. Savin’ for goin’ to Hollywood. Mother called it pissant labor and sneered, like what she was doin’ herself was some kind of scientist work.”

“This is hard to understand,” I said.

“Come from a family like yours, it is. But Winnie was worried Margret wouldn’t take to whorin’. Then she found out Margret was different. Said at first it made her mad, then she thought it might be a way to make some unexpected money. But then Margret got killed.”

“What does she mean different, Buster?”

“When Winnie said that, things in the letters clicked. J ain’t James. It’s Jewel.”

“But she’s a girl.”

“Uh huh. Sometimes it goes that way.”

“You mean . . .”

“Yep. That’s different.”

“A girl can make a girl pregnant?”

“No, son. That requires a man. Or a boy. Like I said, don’t think it was Margret that was pregnant. Mother might not know for sure, of course, but from them letters, and what I learned, I think Jewel Ellen was pregnant, and Margret was talkin’ about the two of them raisin’ the child after it was born.”

Buster looked at me, saw I was bewildered.

“Growin’ up, just full of confusion, ain’t it, Stan?”

“I’ll say.”

“Question is this: Who is the father of Jewel Ellen’s baby? We start from that idea, even if it’s just an idea, and we see where that leads us. Thing I’m thinkin’ is this: If Jewel was funny for Margret, then maybe she’s not wantin’ a man. Or maybe she wants both. It happens. That ain’t it, it means some man could have raped her? If that’s the case, who done it? So, that’s where we are.”

“Wow.”

“One thing I didn’t mention, Stan, was I did end up buyin’ me a little bootleg liquor from Jukes before I went out there. Took it with me, and in the bedroom, me and Winnie shared it. So she talked a lot. About all manner of things. But wasn’t all that much of it about her daughter. She gave me the letters back a second time, said for me to do what I wanted with them.

“She was gettin’ a little tipsy, so I said, ‘You sure you don’t know this James Stilwind?’ She said she’d never met him, but her old man—meanin’ her husband, pimp—had taken some money from James’s daddy. I asked her why, and she said, ’cause he wanted them to be quiet.”

“About what?”

“About her daughter knowin’ Jewel. Said it was a lot of money Old Man Stilwind gave ’em and she hadn’t said a word about it until now, because she didn’t think it mattered. She figured they didn’t want Jewel Ellen’s memory sullied by her sayin’ she was queer. Bottom line is, Winnie misses her daughter in her own way, but she was willin’ to take money, be quiet, not talk to the police, even if it meant not solvin’ her daughter’s death. Money was more important to her.”

Buster settled back and sipped the last of the pop he was drinking.

“That’s all?” I said.

“I had ten minutes left on my ten dollars, and I used them.”

“Oh.”

“One thing I’ve learned over the years. Don’t waste your money.”

———

BUSTER SAID he was going home to sleep for a while. I decided to actually buy comic books. I walked along as if in a dream. The world was certainly turning out to be a peculiar place, and I was becoming one perplexed little boy.