Edge of Dark Water

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Anyway, there I stood on the riverbank, thinking these thoughts, considering what Terry had told me about himself not being a sissy, feeling confused. Just about everything I thought I knew about my world had changed. And then it hit me. All of a sudden I couldn’t walk or stand no more. I started to cry.

  There was a log nearby, and I went over and sat on it and kept crying. It wasn’t a long cry, but it was a good one. Pretty soon I was cried out, and not exactly sure what it was I was crying about. I sniffed like a little kid, sat there till I was sure I was done with it, got up, and started walking quickly toward home, feeling stupid for wasting valuable time sitting on a log.

  As I neared our house, I saw there wasn’t no lights on, but out by the side of the house was three pickups. Don’s truck, Uncle Gene’s, and, damn it, Cletus’s. I was considering my next move when someone stepped out of the dark between the trees and touched my shoulder and stuck a hand over my mouth.

  “It’s me, Sue Ellen,” a voice said, and of course, I recognized right off it was Mama. “Be quiet now.”

  She took her hand from over my mouth and grabbed my shoulders.

  “What are you doing out here?” I said.

  “I knew this was your way to come, so I waited on you.”

  “But why?”

  “Cletus has come for you, and Constable Sy is coming, too. I heard Cletus telling Don and Gene about how you stole some money. That isn’t true, is it?”

  “There’s more story to it than that,” I said. I thought, So much for Don’s “sight.” He got all his information secondhand.

  “Come on,” Mama said. “Let’s walk back a ways and find a place to talk.”

  Fact that my mama was out of the house was amazing enough, but before we walked off to that place to talk, she stepped back in the shadows and picked up a tow sack and half-dragged it after her. I took it away from her and carried it myself, cause she was as weak as a newborn pup and it was a heavy sack. Surprised as I was, I didn’t ask her about why she had it or what was in it.

  We walked back to the log I had sat down on to cry. When we got there, Mama was so tuckered out and breathing so hard that I felt bad for her, but it seemed like a good idea to put some space between us and the house. When we were sitting on the log, I put the tow sack between my legs, said, “What are they saying about me?”

  “I heard Gene drive up. I looked out the window. Then I saw Cletus follow up in his truck. Cletus must have gone to Gene first, cause they are closer friends, and then they came to the house. Since the window was open, I could hear them talking. Cletus said you and a boy and a colored girl stole some money from him. He said the colored girl hit him in the head to get it. That would be Jinx, I suppose. The boy would be Terry.”

  “He doesn’t know them,” I said. “They were never at May Lynn’s when Cletus was.”

  “Yes, but that won’t be hard for them to figure out. Don knows who you run with, and he hates Terry.”

  “True enough,” I said. “But that’s not entirely right about what happened.”

  “Did you steal money?”

  “We stole stolen money.”

  “Stealing is stealing,” Mama said.

  “I know that, and to tell you the truth, I can live with it.”

  She didn’t argue with me. She sat there waiting for me to say more, so I told her all about it, including how there was a body under the money, and who it was. I told her how Jinx had been chased and hit, and how she fought back, and how we helped her. I told her we planned to dig May Lynn up, unless something changed in the next few hours.

  Mama sat silent for a long time after I finished telling my story. “A body?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’m so weak,” she said, and for a moment I thought she was going to slide off the log.

  “I’m sorry, Mama,” I said. “I said some things to you I shouldn’t have, and now I’m a thief and pretty soon a grave robber.”

  She shook her head. “No, I’m not weak from what you’ve done. I’m weak from living the way I have. Lying in bed so much hasn’t done me any good, either. I should never have left Brian, and I should never have settled.”

  “You were protecting him,” I said.

  She shook her head again. “I didn’t think I was good enough for him. I wasn’t never good for anything, to hear my mama tell it, and when I met Brian, for a moment I thought I might be worth something. Then when I got pregnant, I felt bad, and dirty. I didn’t want to make Brian dirty. But mostly I believed I got pregnant because the Lord was telling me who I was, and that I was being punished, and that my lot in life was always to be an unhappy one.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Not how I meant it, dear. I come to the conclusion just this morning that if he’s a loving God, he wouldn’t do that kind of thing, and he isn’t punishing me at all. I’m punishing myself. I listened to those men talking, and I heard Don say he didn’t care what happened to you. He said that after Cletus said if they got the money back, he’d give Don and Gene some of it. Offered them fifty dollars apiece, but Don argued him up to seventy-five apiece. He said they couldn’t help him find you, he’d hire that colored man that lives in the woods.”

  “Skunk?”

  “Yeah. Skunk.”

  “There ain’t no Skunk.”

  “I have heard different,” Mama said.

  Mama also believed in signs and angels and ghosts, so I didn’t take her thoughts on Skunk seriously.

  “Seventy-five apiece, huh?” I said.

  “That’s what Cletus finally offered,” she said.

  “Considering it’s a thousand dollars missing, that’s not that good a deal,” I said. “But at least I know how much I’m worth, along with Jinx and Terry. Did Cletus mention it was stolen and there was a dead body under it in a once-nice suit?”

  “He didn’t.”

  “Well, I guess selling me out for a hundred and fifty dollars between the two of them is better than Don and Gene doing it for nothing,” I said. “That’s the stepdaughter rates, I figure. I wonder what they’ll trade their own kin out for.”

  “That’s a lot of money in these times,” she said.

  I stared at her.

  “I didn’t mean he should do it. Just saying.”

  “You ought to get back before they miss you,” I said. “I got to warn Terry and Jinx.”

  “I’m not going back. I’m going with you,” Mama said.

  “You are?”

  “Why I brought the bag,” she said. “It’s got some things for both of us in it. I even put your good dress and shoes in there.”

  “Thank goodness for that,” I said. “I hope you brought the dresser from my room. The one with the mirror.”

  “You might need that dress along the way,” she said. “You never know who you might meet.”

  “Traveling with us, that makes you a thief, too.”

  “Then we will all be thieves together,” she said. “You see, Sue Ellen, today, as the cure-all wore off, I had a dream of a big black horse, and it was following me along this riverbank. It was a big horse, and just kept getting closer. And then I saw this white horse up ahead, in the brush, and somehow I knew if I could get to that white horse, and swing on its back, that it would ride me away from the black one.”

  “Maybe it’s a nice black horse,” I said.

  “I don’t think so, hon. I don’t think so.”

  “Did you get to it?”

  “I woke up. So no. What now?”

  * * *

  It sounds pretty bad, but I left Mama sitting on that log and went to warn Terry first cause he was the closest. Mama just didn’t have the strength for a lot of scouting around. I left her there thinking about horses.

  It took me a while to get out of the river bottoms and into the crooked-built town. I went along, watching carefully, and as I was walking to Terry’s place, trying to figure how I could get to him without being discovered by his stepfamily or his mama, down the road he come
, walking in the moonlight, moving in such a way it looked as if he had one foot in a ditch and the other on something slick. He had two shovels slung over his shoulder. He saw me and raised his hand.

  When we met up, I spilled out all that Mama had told me. I didn’t mention she planned to go with us. I thought I’d save that tidbit.

  “Damn,” Terry said. “I assumed I’d already have May Lynn dug up by the time you and Jinx showed. I knew pretty soon Cletus would put two and two together as far as Jinx and myself went, so I started making trips. That’s how I hurt my ankle. Stepped in a hole.”

  We started walking together in the direction of the graveyard where May Lynn was buried.

  “Trips?” I said.

  “I’ve already been to the graveyard, and I carried a tarp out there to put the body on. I’ve made three trips, taking supplies we’ll need. I have a wheelbarrow there as well. I’ve been busy. But I haven’t dug up the body yet. Why I brought the shovels.”

  “Jinx is probably there by now,” I said.

  “Works out right,” Terry said. “By the time they come to tell my mama and the stepdummies what’s what, we’ll have May Lynn dug up, and they’ll have no idea where we are. I got a surprise in store, too.”

  It took us about a half hour to get to the place where May Lynn was buried. When we got there, Jinx was sitting on the ground by the grave with her little bag of goods. When she saw us coming she sprang to her feet.

  “It done took you long enough,” she said.

  “I was here before you,” Terry said.

  “I figured that, all this stuff being here,” Jinx said. “But still, I been waiting and thinking Cletus would be after me like a pig on a mushroom since he knows Sue Ellen and she knows us.”

  “Good figuring,” I said. “That is, in fact, in motion.”

  I filled Jinx in quick-like. She said, “Mama, she knows I’m going. I couldn’t just leave her. I told her.”

  “How’d she take it?” I asked.

  “She took it good,” Jinx said. “She took it so good I almost stayed. She told me I might ought to go even if I hadn’t stole nothing; that there’s not a thing here for me, and that maybe there’s something out there. She said a colored girl might have a chance out in California or up north, but here there wasn’t nothing but raw fingers and tired bones. I’ll write her when everything blows over—Daddy, too, where he’s working up north. I almost figure I’m doing it for them, giving myself a chance. Besides, me having hit that white man with a stick upside the head isn’t going to set well around here.”

  “I reckon that’s right,” I said.

  “Take a shovel,” Terry said, handing me one of them.

  I took it, and me and Terry started digging.

  After a while I traded out the shovel with Jinx, and as I was sitting on the ground beside the grave, it really hit me. We was digging up May Lynn’s dead body.

  I was startled out of my thoughts when Jinx’s shovel hit the lid of the coffin. Jinx and Terry stopped for a moment. Jinx said, “We’re standing right on top of her.”

  “We have to rake the dirt clear, prize up the lid, and take her out,” Terry said. “I brought gloves for it. They’re in the wheelbarrow.”

  I got the gloves, and by the time I done that and looked in the hole, the wooden coffin lid was visible. Terry was pushing the last of the dirt off it with his hands. The coffin was made of wood so cheap it looked as if you could spit through it.

  Jinx climbed out of the hole. Terry took the tip of the shovel and pushed it under the edge of the box, and started prying it up. It didn’t resist much. The nails squeaked like a rat, the lid lifted and cracked in the middle, and a stink came out from under it big enough and strong enough to deserve some kind of government promotion.

  I turned and threw up. When I looked back in the grave, I could see the lid was off and I could see the body in the box. They had tossed her in on her side. She was thinner now and darker, and she still had on that old dress, which had sort of melted into her. She wasn’t blowed up no more. She had popped and gone flat against the bone. You could see where water had leaked in from below, making the bottom of that coffin come apart in places. If the wood had been a penny cheaper, she’d have fallen through the underside of it before she was in the ground.

  “Those sons a bitches,” Terry said. “This thing wasn’t good for a day in damp ground.”

  He reached in his back pocket and took out a handkerchief and tied it over his nose. Me and Jinx didn’t have a handkerchief, so we had to depend on scrunching up our faces and trying to think about something else. But me and her got down in the hole and yanked May Lynn out. When we did one of her arms come off, and I had to climb out and throw up again. By the time I got back down there, Jinx was throwing up in the grave.

  Terry didn’t so much as cough, but when we finally got her out of the hole, he wandered off a ways and puked. I glanced at May Lynn, and her face was dark as old pine sap. There were no eyes cause bugs and worms and groundwater had done been at them, and she had been full of river when we pulled her out, so she looked way worse than that dead man under the money bag; and she hadn’t been near as long gone as he had. It didn’t seem right.

  After a bit, Terry come back and helped us load the body into the wheelbarrow. We put the tarp down first and put her on top of it. We had to bend her some to make her fit, and she came apart a little more, and something fell out of her that I couldn’t recognize. Terry used the shovel to put it in the wheelbarrow. Jinx brought over her arm and laid it on top of the body. Terry folded the tarp over her on both sides and at the ends.

  “Now what?” I said.

  “The brick kiln,” he said.

  11

  Now, there’s no use going into all of it, but what I will say is it’s a wonder we didn’t end up being caught. I guess we didn’t because it was late and we didn’t see anybody but a couple of dogs. They came out to smell the dead meat and Jinx threw rocks at them and ran them off.

  We took turns pushing the wheelbarrow, and it wasn’t no real chore, because what was left of May Lynn seemed as light as a new loaf of bread, without the freshness. The night was clear and the wheelbarrow squeaked a little. Her stench made us push the barrow along quite smartly.

  Terry guided us to the back of his stepdad’s brick company. We stopped under a window, and me and Jinx made a cradle with our hands, and Terry stepped up on it and pushed at the window till it come up. He wriggled inside, and in a moment the back door opened to let us in. I pushed the wheelbarrow through the door.

  I guided the barrow between rows of stacked bricks, and finally we came to a spot along the wall with a dozen brick beehive kilns. They all had metal doors on them, and there were some handles on the doors—wooden ones in metal slots—and on the wall between each door was a dial.

  Terry fumbled a match out of his pocket and lit it to a twist of paper that had been lying on the floor. He turned one of the dials, opened a metal door. There was a hiss like a surprised possum. It was gas shooting up from a grate on the bottom of the kiln. Terry stuck the flaming paper through the grate, touched a spot inside, and the hissing turned to a whoosh; the heat from it nearly singed my eyebrows. The fire rose up and licked out with blue and yellow tongues, and in an instant, I was sweating.

  “We got to wait a little bit,” Terry said, and closed the door.

  There were some stacks of bricks, and we used them to sit on.

  “It’ll have to heat to a very high temperature,” Terry said. “When it does, she’ll burn hot and rapidly. Her body will turn to ash, bones and all.”

  I don’t know how long we waited there, but I know I was nervous the whole time. I kept expecting the constable and those mean old former kin of mine to burst in on us, but they didn’t.

  Finally, Terry stood up and pulled on his gloves, which he had stuck in his belt, and opened the door; the flame inside was twisting and rolling. Using gloves and the shovels, we lifted the tarp with May Lynn’s body folded
inside it, along with the broken-off arm and the dark part we didn’t know, out of the wheelbarrow. Together we carried the tarp to the open beehive, stuck the corpse in at the feet, and shoved. The flames went to work immediately. They licked at the tarp like they was hungry. Terry slammed the door. He looked at us. His face was popped up with sweat balls from the fire, and he looked like he was barely there with us.

  “Someone ought to say something,” he said.

  “I’m sorry it’s so hot in there,” Jinx said.

  “Something else.”

  “Goodbye, May Lynn,” I said. “You’ve been a good friend up until we didn’t see you much anymore, and maybe you had your reasons for that. And we thank you for the map and the stolen money, which has shown us a way to go. I hope you wasn’t hurt too long before you died. I hope it was quick.”

  “I hope so, too,” Terry said, and made a choking sound. “You’re going to Hollywood, May Lynn.”

  We pushed the wheelbarrow back to the graveyard and covered up May Lynn’s grave with the shovels. We loaded our supplies on the wheelbarrow, along with the shovels, and left. The graveyard was on the way to the river bottoms, so it had been best to leave the stuff there, and Terry, on one of his early trips, had put the bag of money in a lard bucket and buried it near May Lynn’s grave. He dug it up and we loaded it and the rest of the stuff on the wheelbarrow, right next to a small sealed cardboard box we had taken from the brick company and put May Lynn’s ashes in.

  We headed out, and when we got into the woods, close to where our boat was, which was also close to where Mama was, I laid it on them.

  “Mama not only told me about Cletus coming to the house, she’s going with us.”

  “Say what?” Jinx said.

  By that time, we were coming down a little rise, and they could see Mama sitting there in the moonlight on the log. She turned and looked at us and our squeaking wheelbarrow.