Edge of Dark Water

by Joe R. Lansdale

  He showed it to us. I let out my breath.

  “Wasn’t that name in May Lynn’s book?” I said.

  “That was the man her brother was running with,” Terry said. “The one who helped him rob the bank. Now we know what happened to their partnership.”

  “And if that ain’t enough, they took his dadburn shoes,” Jinx said.

  “Jake would be my guess,” Terry said. “It would make sense they came here to bury the money, and an argument ensued—”

  “Ensued?” Jinx said.

  “Started,” Terry said. “And when it did, it turned ugly, and Jake killed him, buried him, and put the money on top of him. My assumption is they had already dug the hole for the money, and Jake didn’t want to dig another. Probably caught him from behind with the shovel.”

  “Maybe there wasn’t an argument, and he planned to kill him all along,” I said.

  “Either way makes sense,” Terry said. “He killed him, hid the money on top of him, and took his shoes because he liked them. He’d have probably taken the hat and the suit, too, if he hadn’t covered them in blood by hitting Warren with that shovel.”

  “That’s all tough on the dead man and all,” Jinx said, “but maybe we ought to count the money. Ain’t like he’s gonna get any deader.”

  We counted it twice. There was close to a thousand dollars. When we put the money back in the bag, it was on the edge of night.

  “It’s like we done dug up a pirate’s chest,” Jinx said.

  “It is at that,” I said.

  Jinx cleared her throat, said, “You know, that’s a lot of money even if we don’t burn May Lynn up.”

  “We have to stick to the plan,” Terry said.

  “Do we?” I said.

  “We do,” Terry said. “She’s why we found the money.”

  “We sure gonna use a lot of it going out to that California,” Jinx said. “We could use a lot of it someplace closer.”

  “That sounds greedy,” Terry said. “If not for her we wouldn’t have known about the money, and when it comes right down to it, it’s not our money.”

  “When it comes right down to it,” Jinx said, “it’s not her money, neither. Nor her brother’s. It come from a bank.”

  “Do you think her daddy knows where it’s buried?” I asked.

  Terry shook his head. “He did, he would have already dug it up and drank it up. He’s not exactly a salt-away-for-a-rainy-day sort of individual. Jake told May Lynn where it was when he was sick because he didn’t want anyone else to know. She obviously didn’t have time to dig it up and leave before things went wrong.”

  “Think she knew about the murdered man?” I said, nodding at the hole.

  “I don’t know,” Terry said. “I think when Jake realized he was dying he had her draw up the map and didn’t tell her his bank-robbing buddy was here under it. Listen, we want to get out of here, don’t we?”

  Me and Jinx nodded.

  “Here’s our chance,” Terry said. “And we ought to take May Lynn with us.”

  “She’s pretty snug in the graveyard,” Jinx said.

  Terry gave Jinx a hard look. “She’s our friend.”

  “Was,” Jinx said.

  “Should we forget her because she’s dead?” he said.

  “I ain’t forgetting her,” Jinx said. “I remember her real good. But what I’m saying is she’s dead and there’s a lot of money in that bag and I don’t think she had plans to share it with us.”

  “Does that matter?” Terry said.

  “You got the bus tickets to get, the food for going out there, someplace to stay, and so on,” Jinx said. “It can run into some expense, and I’m not sure that’s how we want to spend the dough.”

  “May Lynn didn’t want to end up buried in some hot plot of dirt in the pauper’s section of the local graveyard,” Terry said, “and I don’t think we should let her.”

  I have to admit, thinking about digging her up and setting her on fire and going all the way out to Hollywood to dump her ashes seemed less appealing now that we had a huge bag of money. I was a little ashamed of myself for thinking that way, but there you have it.

  “Well?” Terry said. “That’s not what we want. Is it?”

  “No, I reckon not.”

  Jinx’s face twisted up, then slowly straightened out. “Okay,” she said, and the word struggled out of her mouth like a rat out of a tight hole. “Sure. Let’s burn her up and haul her out.”

  “Good,” Terry said. “It’s decided.”

  9

  We started back with Terry carrying the bag full of money from the crockery pot. When we got to the cane field we stopped and I cut us another snack. I figured since we had gone over deep into theft, we might as well go whole hog and hit the cane again.

  The night was growing thick, and we left the cane field and went through a run of trees and out into a meadow of wild grass. It was a slightly different path than we had gone before, and the moonlight made the grass look like shiny water; the wind rustled it like someone shaking hard candy in a paper bag.

  By going that way, we came down right behind where May Lynn lived. As we neared her place, you could hear the river run, and you could see the house near it creaking in the wind. Cletus was home, because we could see his old truck parked in the trail that ended up against the house. Course, if the truck wasn’t there, it didn’t mean he wasn’t home. Sometimes he lost his truck when he got drunk and got brought back by someone and dropped off, least that’s what May Lynn had said, and I didn’t have any reason to doubt her. It’s why I had been careful to want to call out to the house earlier, to make sure he knew we was there if he was home. He struck me as a man might shoot first and ask questions later.

  Jinx spied the outhouse not far from us.

  “I’m gonna have to stop and use the toilet,” she said.

  “Can’t you wait?” Terry said.

  “I can wait, but you won’t like it about the time we get to the boat.”

  “Well, hurry up,” Terry said. “We’ll wait over by that tree.” He pointed at a big elm on the hill above the river.

  Jinx darted across the way and inside the outhouse and closed the door.

  Terry and I walked over to the elm, sat down under it, side by side, our backs against the trunk. Terry put the bag of money between his legs and looked off toward May Lynn’s house and the truck parked by it. He said, “Think he knows about May Lynn by now?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m not in the mood to tell him anymore. Especially since we dug up the money his son stole and we’re thinking about digging his daughter up. I don’t know I could look him in the eye.”

  “I don’t care,” Terry said. “With that money, we can get out of here.”

  “Split three ways it won’t last long,” I said. “It’s a good start, but that’s all it is.”

  “That’s all I want,” Terry said. “A good start. I’m like a bird with someone’s foot on its tail. I can’t fly. Stepdaddy has heard rumors about me, about me and a boy who came to visit before he married my mom. Those rumors are not true. But because he thinks it, he treats me bad and talks to me bad, and he hurts my mother’s feelings. He’s sucking the spirit out of her, like she’s nothing more than a sugar tit. And how come he’s made up his mind about me? How come so many people have? Do I seem like a sissy to you?”

  I mulled that over.

  “I do!” he said. “I can tell the way you’re thinking it over.”

  “Well, you are very good-looking and you have good manners. I don’t see you with a lot of girls.”

  “You’re a girl,” he said.

  “But we’re friends,” I said.

  Terry shook his head. “Looks are not my choice, and there are lots of people with good manners.”

  “Not crossing my path,” I said.

  “That’s the only reason you think I’m a sissy?”

  I shook my head. “No. May Lynn. You didn’t look at her the way other men did. You didn’t even
take notice when we went skinny-dipping; you hardly even looked.”

  “You noticed her, or you wouldn’t be asking me why I didn’t notice her,” Terry said. “So do you like girls?”

  “Sometimes, between me and you, I think I could have liked her. She looked like some kind of ice cream dessert. But no, I’m kidding. I reckon I’m inclined to men and a life of misery.”

  “Not all men are miserable,” Terry said. “A man and a woman can be friends and be married.”

  “Mama and Don aren’t friends,” I said.

  “Yeah, and that’s precisely the reason they don’t get along,” Terry said.

  “You got me there,” I said.

  “That time we went skinny-dipping, when May Lynn was naked as a nymph, I noticed. I noticed plenty. I was on the sly about it, but I noticed. Thing is, May Lynn liked to use that body of hers for power, and I didn’t want to give it to her. I didn’t want her to know I liked what I saw. I don’t want anyone having power over me. Anyone. In any kind of way.”

  Before I could fully get in line with this new information, I saw a man coming up from May Lynn’s house, trudging in the moonlight. He was heading for the outhouse. He had on a ragged hat and overalls and clodhopper boots with the laces untied. He had about him the look of a scarecrow that had climbed down from its pole.

  “It’s Cletus,” I said, knowing it was the first time Terry had actually ever seen him.

  We stood up but stayed in the shadows under the tree. Still, bright as the night was, he would have seen us easy had he looked that way, but he had his head down and was walking fast. He was a man on a mission.

  He came to the outhouse, tugged on the door, and it didn’t open. Jinx had thrown the swivel lock inside. It wasn’t the sort of lock that would hold if someone was serious against it; it was more of a friendly reminder that someone was inside.

  May Lynn’s old man stepped back and looked at the outhouse like it was strange to him. He said, “Who’s in there?”

  “Just passing by,” Jinx said. “I’ll be out right soon.”

  “Is that a nigger in there?” he said. “You sound like a nigger.”

  “No,” Jinx said. “I’m white.”

  “Better not be no black ass on my outhouse hole,” he said.

  There was a long pause, and then the side of the outhouse bumped, and bumped again. A board came loose with a screech and popped out. Then another. Jinx shot out of there like a cannonball, causing the boards to fly completely off. She came charging toward the tree where we stood, pulling an overall strap over her shoulder as she ran.

  Behind her came Cletus, running at a good pace, his loose bootlaces flapping.

  I suppose the polite thing to do would have been to wait on Jinx, but we didn’t. Terry grabbed the bag, and we broke and ran like a couple of rabbits, leaving her to catch up. When I looked back over my shoulder, she was almost up with us, but Cletus was closing in fast.

  “Hey, hey,” Cletus yelled. “That there is my bag.”

  He had recognized it even in the dark.

  We ran over the ridge and down to the river, and then we ran along its edge. When I looked back again, Cletus wasn’t slowing, and he had picked up a big stick. About that time, Jinx tripped and fell against the riverbank.

  “I got you now,” Cletus yelled, and in fact he did.

  I stopped and turned, saw him bring the stick down on the back of Jinx’s head as she tried to get up. It was a good solid blow, and it wasn’t meant to aggravate or wound. It was meant to kill. Jinx went down with her nose in the dirt, her heels flipping up like two startled birds.

  Cletus dropped his club and grabbed her up and pulled her to the edge of the water and stuck her head under. Jinx started flailing her arms and legs and sputtering.

  Cletus looked at us. “You two better come back, or I’m gonna drown this little nigger. If she’s anything to you, you better come back.”

  I found a rock by the river, about the size of half a cantaloupe, dug it free with my fingers, hefted it in my hand, and started running at him. I seen then that Terry was running up alongside me, and he had the bag of money in one hand and a short, stubby stick in the other.

  Cletus was pushing Jinx’s head under the water again as we came running up. He was yelling at Jinx, even though she didn’t have the pillowcase. “Why you got my pillowcase? You better tell me. Better give it back.”

  I came up on him and brought the rock down with both hands. I hit him on the forehead with it, just as he turned to look at me. It knocked him onto his side and his hat come off. It wasn’t an entirely successful attack. The rock slipped out of my hands and fell down and hit Jinx in the small of the back. Cletus tried to get up, one hand holding his bloody head.

  Then Terry was on Cletus with the stick, swinging it like a madman. Cletus grabbed Terry around the waist, driving him over Jinx, who still lay on the ground, trying to get her hands underneath her. So far, she had only managed to get her face out of the water.

  When Terry was knocked back, the bag came out of his hand and came open and a bunch of that money puffed out of it like goose feathers from an old mattress.

  Cletus came down on top of Terry with his fist raised, and then he saw the money scattered about, said, “That’s my money.”

  Jinx, who had found her feet and her energy, got hold of Terry’s dropped stick and swung it. It was one heck of a swing. I could hear the wind coming off of it; it made a sound like an owl swooping down on a mouse. The blow caught Cletus in the back of the head. His noggin jumped up like it might come off his neck, and then he bent his head forward, shook once, and down came that stick again. Man, that was some hit. You could probably have heard it all the way to Gladewater. It caused Cletus to let out with a kind of bark like a startled dog, and then he fell off Terry.

  Jinx jumped on Cletus again, and was hitting his knocked-out self every which way with that stick, hitting him faster than a woodpecker can peck. I ran over and grabbed her and hugged her and the stick to me. She started sputtering and struggling like a greased pig.

  “You’ll kill him,” I said.

  “That’s what I’m trying to do,” she said.

  I jerked her back and fell on the ground. She struggled on top of me.

  Terry went over and looked at Cletus.

  “He’s good and out,” he said.

  “I hope he’s dead,” Jinx said, still struggling. “Called me nigger, and messed up my toilet, and hit me in the head, and stuck my face in the water. Damned old cracker. I don’t want to never be called nigger no more by nobody. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of it. I can’t stand this goddamn place. I can’t stand no goddamn place.”

  “Jinx,” I said. “Now quit it. You ain’t gonna hit him anymore.”

  “What if he wakes up?”

  “You can hit him then,” I said.

  “All right then, let me go.”

  I let her go, and she jumped right up and ran over there to whack him again with the stick. Terry caught her arm, said, “That’s enough, Jinx. He’s nothing more than an old fool.”

  “That’s as much our money as it is his,” Jinx said, trying to jerk her hand free of Terry. “It don’t matter who stole it first. Besides, he didn’t even know where it was. We was the ones figured it out and dug it up.”

  Finally, I came up behind her and helped him hold her, and after a while, Jinx got herself together, and started breathing shallow again. Terry let her go, but not before he took the stick from her.

  “Let’s gather up the money before he wakes up and Jinx becomes a murderer,” Terry said.

  We got the money stuffed back in the bag, and right before we left out, Jinx kicked Cletus in the head as hard as she could. We had to pull her off of him and drag her along the riverbank, her cussing a blue streak, flailing her arms and legs like a centipede on a hot rock.

  10

  The Sabine River is long, but it ain’t that wide in the places I know. It’s not like I hear the Mississippi is, which can be
more than a mile or so across. The Sabine is a brown run of water that twists its way along dirty banks, underneath lean-over trees and all their shadows. It’s deep in spots, not real deep in most, but there’s a right smart amount of water to carry boats and to sink them. There’s plenty of water to drown in. It’s a dark old river and it’s the Kingdom of the Snake; home to the water moccasin in particular, a thick, nub-tailed serpent with a bad attitude. I thought about that as we came ashore on the other side and dragged the leaky boat out of the water and under a weeping willow.

  Our plans had changed. There wouldn’t be a lot of time to do much more than take off. I wasn’t firm on what had become of the idea to burn up May Lynn’s body, but I was sure Terry had that still tucked away in the back of his mind. We had all cared about May Lynn, but Terry, who had always seemed less close to her than me, had really taken all this to heart; he seemed the most bothered by her death, the unfairness of it all. It wasn’t that I had moved on, but I couldn’t figure how there was any way to rectify what happened. Wasn’t any way for me to know who done it or how to get them nabbed if I did. Jinx, she had cared for May Lynn, too, but she was someone who looked at things pretty straight on, or so it seemed to me. I figured her view was, dead is dead, and that’s sad, and she felt bad about it, but she wasn’t going to worry about if May Lynn got burned up and hauled anywhere if she could avoid it. That business was Terry’s plan.

  We decided to let Terry hang on to the bag full of loot, go home and put together a few possibles, meet back quick at this spot, and head out. As I watched my friends go their own ways in the dark, I was having second thoughts, some of them due to thinking about days and nights on the river. Bad as my life was, it was the life I knew. And though Mama had lied to me and disappointed me all my life, and my daddy wasn’t my daddy at all, I still thought maybe I ought to reconsider. Maybe we could give Cletus the money and let bygones be bygones. Going off to Gladewater to find my real daddy, then out to Hollywood, was a good thing to think about, but I wasn’t so sure it was a good thing to do, even if there was stolen money in the deal—though secretly I was thinking I might get a share of it for a nice dress and shoes and my hair done up like I’d never had it, and maybe I’d buy one of those hats women wore that looked like it ought to have come with a quiver of arrows and a couple of Robin Hood’s Merry Men.