The Thicket

by Joe R. Lansdale

  “Keep it up,” Eustace called back to us.

  “I think what we have here is one of the solos going his own way. Cut Throat Bill is unlikely to be anything more than a general leader with a team that does what they please when the job is done. Besides, this will give us a chance not only to catch up to one of them, but we can sell the borrowed horse to get a solid grubstake.”

  By this time I had been beset with fresh misery. My butt ached, and my thighs were raw from riding. Eventually the trail widened and emptied out of the woods. On either side of the road, trees had been sawed and chopped and made a mess of. Stumps had been blown out of the ground with dynamite, or dug out, piled up, and burnt. The recent rain had washed through it all and carried off the good topsoil, put a lot of it in a ditch beside the road and the rest of it in the road itself.

  “Dumb sons a bitches,” said Eustace, who had slowed down so that we were all riding together now, Hog having fallen behind a ways. “They’ve wrecked good farmland and a woodlot. They’ve cut the trees clear instead of cutting it in such a way that it could be plowed and they’d have a back line of trees to hold the dirt. Without the trees there’s just runoff and the soil that went with it.”

  “I was just thinking that,” I said, feeling this might be a good time to bring back up the reward they were working for. “Pa’s farm, the one you’ll get when this job is done, has soil as fine as what washed away here. Better, actually—darker and deeper, fattened and richened with wood ash and chicken manure. It has terraces to hold the water in, to keep it from washing all the topsoil off. You get the job done, you’ll have it, or you can sell it for a better price than any farm in the county, the whole of Texas.”

  “So you have been everywhere,” Shorty said, “and know the quality of the soil here and abroad?”

  “Leave him alone, Shorty,” Eustace said. “He’s speaking big. I know what he means. If the dirt’s half that good, I can raise my elephant-eye corn.”

  “I bet I am the only one among us who has actually seen an elephant,” Shorty said. “And certainly the only one to ride one.”

  “They’re tall, though, aren’t they?” Eustace said.

  “They are,” Shorty said.

  “Then it don’t matter if I’ve seen one or not, does it?”

  “You have a legitimate point,” Shorty said.

  The slaughtered woods and butchered soil went on for some space, and as we got close to town there were shacks thrown up alongside the road, made more by hope and lean than nail and level. In the distance, far out to the right, I could see a wooden tower. It was wide at the bottom and thin at the top and made up of what appeared to be broad slats of wood. It was like a dead tree without leaves.

  “What in Sam Hill is that?” I said.

  “You are country, are you not?” Shorty said. “That, Jack, is an oil well tower. I think it is dead, or drilled a dry hole. But all the same, oil is the future, not farmland. Mark my words.”

  “Yeah,” Eustace said. “I’ll make that note. That stuff is just messing up the land, oozing out all over. That damn tower will end up forgotten, if it ain’t already. Wait and see. In fact, here’s one of the reasons you can count on it being forgotten.”

  Eustace pointed.

  Bouncing down the road toward us was a horseless machine. I had seen a few, but they never ceased to amaze me. It hummed and banged along on its little tires, causing the horses to startle. As the machine drew close, we split and let it pass between us. A man was driving and had a woman sitting beside him. They were dressed up, him with a derby, her with a sunbonnet. There was a picnic basket between them. The man tipped his derby as they rattled past. The couple looked well fed and remarkably content.

  “That is the future,” said Shorty, watching it cough along. “It runs on oil products, and soon those devices will be the way people get about. Not as a lark. Not as a short-lived inclination but as the future.”

  “I hate them things,” Eustace said. “I thought about shooting it. Those damn things will never catch on, and there will go your so-called oil products beyond lighting a lamp.“

  Shorty laughed. “You, Eustace, are wrong. We use oil for all manner of things. There will come a time when men no longer travel by horse but by those oil-fueled carriages. Mark my words.”

  “I’ll do that,” Eustace said. “I’ll make me a note of it.”

  We continued past more shacks, another gap of mauled countryside, a couple more of those oil towers, a large acreage of cotton, and then the first of the town’s buildings, which was as big as a barn and painted the color of spring grass.

  “That there is the opry house,” Eustace said. “They had some blind colored singers there once, five of them, every one of them dead in the eyes but with voices like goddamn angels. I heard about it, come over to see them, thinking it was for colored, but it wasn’t. It was for white folks to listen to. They wouldn’t let colored in, and they had colored singing. Later that night, them five did a show in the niggertown section, too. I got to see that. They were damn good. Like doves and canaries, they were. Except they were as black as wet crows, blacker than me.”

  “Angels or birds?” Shorty said. “Which was it?”

  “Both,” Eustace said.

  “I saw a singing group called the Marx Brothers in that place once,” Shorty said. “On the upper floor, a year or so back, and they were not good. I would much rather have heard the colored boys singing in niggertown, or perhaps a dog howling with a chicken bone in its throat. Listening to them caused me considerable pain, though they told a few jokes and I thought those were quite entertaining.”

  More buildings followed on each side of the street. They didn’t look nearly as sophisticated as those in Sylvester, but they were larger than those in Hinge Gate and brighter in color than anywhere else I had been. The town, however, looked to have been laid out by one of those blind singers. It was as if everyone got together and decided on a different color for the buildings just so nothing would be anything alike. Actually, I have exaggerated the variety of color. There was green and blue and red, and everything else was some darker or lighter shade of those, except for one building that was two-story, blue at the bottom, red at the top, buttercup yellow on the windowsills and the gallery railing. A door on the upper floor was also buttercup yellow, and the knob had been painted bright blue, like a giant robin’s egg.

  As we passed that building, Shorty said, “That is one of the biggest and best whorehouses in East Texas. They call it a club for cattlemen. But you do not have to know one end of a cow from the other to enter, though you should know which end is up on a woman. I have been known to be accepted into the arms of ecstasy there, my money being larger than my size. Though after both myself and my money are spent, suddenly I grow smaller and considerably less attractive.”

  “Hog,” Eustace said, “you best run off now. Hunt some acorns or such.”

  Hog grunted as if in reply and drifted off into the woods.

  I said, “Does he really understand you?”

  “I don’t know,” Eustace said. “For all I know he’s messing with me. Maybe he ain’t hunting acorns at all. Maybe he’s hunting for a girl pig or making plans for your grandpa’s land. He might not want to farm with me at all. He might want to throw in with Shorty and buy an oil well.”

  “Hog is a lot like his daddy,” Shorty said, nodding at Eustace. “Unpredictable. Yet I would welcome him into the oil business with me in a heartbeat. I have seen how fast and deep he can dig with that snout. I think he might find oil sooner than a rig and drill.”

  The town had a smell about it. Not like Sylvester or Hinge Gate, but a floating stink of raw sewage and horse manure, of which there was plenty of both in the streets, running in rivulets, stacked in piles. In Hinge Gate and Sylvester there were people whose job it was to shovel it up, and there were honey wagons to take out the human sewage. Here, there were outhouses back of places, but the drops were not too deep and you could see streams of offal oozi
ng out from beneath them toward the street with nothing but a now-and-then board crossing over the rot. We rode along next to one of those ditches, and in one I saw a bird of some sort drowned there. He looked tarred and, of course, feathered.

  The streets themselves were wet and rough. They had all manner of pocks and holes in them, and there were ragged boards stretched over the street in places to make a path from one boardwalk to the next. On the right, we passed a gap in some buildings, and there were a bunch of men and young boys, a few girls, gathered in a circle. We could hear a terrible squawking that was almost as loud as the men cheering and yelling.

  Shorty took off in that direction right away. I rode after him with Eustace. Eustace said, “Now, this ain’t in our plan, but I can guarantee we’re about to take detour from it.”

  I wasn’t sure what that meant, but by this time I had dismounted with Eustace and Shorty and realized what was going on. A chicken fight. Men had made a circle around two red roosters and were betting on the winner. A chicken fight is nasty business, and I hadn’t never seen but the natural ones, where roosters will take to one another on the yard. This is why some folks will say they’re not doing anything they wouldn’t do naturally, but if they’re not forced, and they have the opportunity, one of them will usually break and things will be all right. And it is a fight of their choosing, not that of some man with a dollar to bet.

  This way—when they were fought for money—one of the roosters, maybe both, were not going to be all right, because little metal claws had been made for their feet and fastened there. When they jumped and swiped at each other, it was like a razor fight between men. The ground where the roosters fought had been made dry with sand and raked over, but now it was wet with hot rooster blood, and the smell of it gave me a taste in my mouth like biting into copper.

  Shorty pushed through the circle and yelled, “Better make clear, or you will catch a bullet.”

  One man on the far side said, “What’s that midget saying?”

  By that time, “that midget” had drawn a little .38 belly gun out from under that coat he had on, which I guess explained why he wore it even though the weather wasn’t suitable. He pointed it at the man who had spoken with a sure hand. The man made a run for it. That side of the circle broke as well, making a wave to the left and right, creating a gap like the parting of the Red Sea.

  One of the roosters was breathing heavy, and its head was hanging with exhaustion. The other one was moving in for the kill. Shorty said, “Kill them and eat them or leave them alone,” and he fired, two quick snaps, taking those roosters’ heads off cleaner than you could have done with a hatchet and them with their necks stretched out on a chopping block. One of the headless roosters fell over and kicked, the other started running around in circles, flapping its wings, as if it might find its head, put it on, and take off to parts unknown. It did that for what seemed a long time before falling over, shaking once, and finishing out its string with a last long squirt of blood from its neck.

  “You bunch of goddamn cowards,” Shorty said.

  The crowd had mostly gone away, but there were still some that remained. One of them, a large man, said, “That big one was my rooster. You owe me for him, you little sawed-off piece of shit.”

  Shorty didn’t look up. He put the pistol under his coat, picked up the man’s rooster, pulled out his big knife, and cut off one of its feet. When he did, that metal spur sparkled in the sunlight. He turned toward the man, said, “I advise you to be careful what manner of speech you direct to me.”

  “Where did you learn to talk?” said the man. “In some foreign country? Talk American, for God’s sake. We had a bet going, and my rooster was winning. You haven’t got any right to wreck our fun and cost me money.”

  “Call that fun?” Shorty said.

  “I do,” said the man, and no sooner were the words out of his mouth than Shorty leaped, put his foot on the man’s knee, grabbed his shirt with one hand, and, holding the rooster spur in the other, brought the metal blade across the man’s cheek, cutting a red river in his skin.

  “Hell,” the man said, trying to push Shorty off. “Hell, now.” But it was like trying to pull a raccoon out of a tree by the tail. It wasn’t happening. Shorty was all over that big man, up one side and down the other, slashing with that razor-tipped chicken foot.

  The man started yelling for us to get our midget off of him. Eustace handed me the reins of the horses and the rope to the borrowed horse, ran over, and clutched Shorty around the waist. He yanked him back from the man, set him down on the ground, and placed his hand on top of his head to weight him down. Shorty tried to get up and plow ahead, but Eustace’s hand covered the entire top of his noggin, crushing Shorty’s hat. Shorty twisted beneath Eustace’s hand, cussing and waving the rooster foot at the big man like it was some kind of witch’s charm.

  By this time the man Shorty had been working over with the rooster foot had fallen on his knees and was bleeding quite smart, as he was cut from head to belly button, his clothes hanging in rags where the blade on the rooster’s foot had done its work.

  “There is some fun for you,” Shorty said as Eustace pulled him back by the collar.

  “You better keep that little crazy bastard off of me,” said the man, “or I’ll—”

  “You’ll do what?” Eustace said. “You get on up and out of here or I’ll let him go.”

  The man got on up and out of there as suggested and ran away fast. It was then that I noticed everyone that had been left in that circle had disappeared like the morning dew. All that was left was us and those two dead roosters.

  “That is no way to treat a bird,” Shorty said, and his little shoulders sagged.

  Eustace was soothing him with a repetition of “Now, now, now, Shorty. It’s all done up now. I tell you what I’m going to do, I’m going to let you go, and you don’t have no cause to do nothing else now. Everybody’s done run off.”

  “Do not treat me like a child, Eustace,” Shorty said.

  “Course not, Shorty. I wouldn’t do that.”

  Eustace let go of Shorty’s collar. Shorty shook a little, as if trying to settle back properly inside his coat.

  “I’m going to stuff these here chickens in my saddlebag,” Eustace said, “and fix them up for our dinner in a bit. Ain’t no use for them to go to waste, being as how they’re dead.”

  “Damn them and their so-called sport,” Shorty said.

  Shorty marched over to where I was holding the horses, grabbed the reins to his, started leading it back into the street. Eustace came over, shaking the blood out of the chickens as best he could, then put them inside one of his saddlebags.

  “That ain’t even him mad,” Eustace said. “He’s just irritated. It’s real irritated, but it ain’t mad yet.”

  I wasn’t exactly sure what to make of what had just happened. A man who would leave a boy dead in a ditch but fight a man twice his size with a bladed rooster foot for mistreating a rooster wasn’t a man I could wrap my feelings around, not even a little bit.

  It was decided that since I was the only one who had seen the men on the ferry, and that only Cut Throat Bill had a mark they could identify, it would be best if I wandered about to see if I could locate the lowlife who had taken the dead kid’s horse. I was to take note of him, come and find Shorty or Eustace so that they could take care of the problem. I was told that under no circumstances was I to try and take on the man myself, and that what we needed from him was information as to the whereabouts of the others, not a killing; least not right up front. That was all right with me. Bad as I wanted to avenge my sister, I wanted more to find her, and frankly had no desire to kill a man, only to have him captured and jailed. They were speaking a language I wanted to hear.

  While I looked around, it was their plan to go to the livery, sell the borrowed horse, and buy us a grubstake. It was also their plan to grain and water and rest the horses, and maybe ask if a man had come in on a horse with a bad shoe.

&n
bsp; It wasn’t a plan up there with Napoleon’s, but it’s what we had. Before I left out, Eustace came and stood by me as Shorty moved toward the livery with the horses.

  “Here’s that money I got for digging those graves, cousin,” he said. “I want you to hold it for me so I don’t get the need to spend it on liquor. I spend it on a piece of ass back there in niggertown, that’s all right, but I’m afraid one might lead to the other, and I don’t want to get myself going in the wrong direction, considering what we got ahead of us.”

  “Just don’t drink,” I said.

  “I don’t have money, I won’t,” he said, and he closed my fingers around his four bits. “You want to buy some ass, they got it cheap over at the whorehouse there, and you might find your man inside, too.”

  “I don’t think I want to do that,” I said. “I mean, I want to find the man, but I’m not interested in the other.”

  “You do what you want, but you either spend it or hang onto it. I get in a town like this, start looking around, next thing I know I got me a jar of lightning and I’m putting it in my belly. But it don’t stay there. It goes straight to my head, sparking and hissing and making me wild.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll take the money.”

  Eustace nodded, followed Shorty to the livery.

  I poked the four bits in my overall pocket, went wandering about. I first went to one of the three saloons, but didn’t see anyone there I recognized from the ferry. One thing Shorty and Eustace hadn’t mentioned was that since I knew the robber, he would know me. Maybe with my hat on, my red hair would be mostly covered, though it still leaked over my ears and hung down the back of my collar. If he spotted me right off, he might take flight, or might decide to kill me. With this in mind, nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, I went about the saloon but didn’t find my man. I felt strange being there, as I had never been inside a saloon before. I had the feeling everyone knew it and was watching me, which, of course, was unlikely.