The Thicket

by Joe R. Lansdale

  To kill our two hours and allow Eustace and Winton to make their way quietly ahead, we stopped and made a fire and cooked some white beans and salt pork in a little pot. I made up some simple makings with cornmeal and water and stuck it all together with a bit of the lard. It wasn’t a real good way to make cornbread—even fried bread—as an egg mixed into the batter would have been better. While it was cooking, Hog showed up and watched me doing the frying. I got some cornmeal and tore up a paper sack we had, put it on the ground, and poured him some of the cornmeal on it. He ate the cornmeal, and he ate the brown paper sack, too. I might as well have just poured it in the dirt.

  After we finished eating, we heated up some coffee, drank that, then put the fire out. Shorty took out his pocket watch and looked at it.

  While he did, Spot said, “I ain’t heard no shooting.”

  “Nor have I,” said Shorty. “But it is unlikely they have had time to catch up with him, and it is also possible that he has given them the slip. It occurs to me that if he has, he may be circling back on us.”

  That had not occurred to me, but now I took notice of my surroundings and laid my hand on the pistol I had in my belt. I thought that if I had to pull it again, I would be sure the sight didn’t snag.

  “You think he even knows where we are?” Jimmie Sue said.

  “Unlikely,” Shorty said. “I think his nose is forward and his ears are laid back, and he is trying to find some sort of sanctuary. If his wound is bad enough, that may be his only thought. It may be that his planned sanctuary is not where we intend to go, but he is still our best bet. If that fails, then we know where the Big Thicket is at its fullest, and we will go there and nose about. There is always a way. That said, I suggest we not become too casual and depend too much on Eustace’s tracking skills.”

  “You don’t never cut that man no slack on that, do you?” Spot said.

  “You have not been lost with him as many times as I have,” Shorty said.

  It might seem strange to you that just after me telling you how alert I was for Fatty, I grew tired again and sat down with my back against a tree, but that’s how it was. One minute I was full of piss and vinegar, and the next I was as empty as a drunk’s glass.

  I had my hat pulled down over my eyes, was drifting in and out, when I thought I heard two sharp snaps, followed by a third, like someone stepping on a twig—one, two . . . and three. But it didn’t seem close. It was a sound in the distance. I lifted my head and pushed back my hat to see if anyone else had noticed, but everyone seemed to be relaxed and unaware of any sounds. I considered on it awhile, decided I had day-dozed and dreamed it. Hog had come over to sleep by me, and as I lay back against the tree, he lifted his head and rested it across my knee. I put my hand on top of his hard noggin, closed my eyes, drifted out again.

  When Shorty felt we had waited long enough, he roused us, and we started leading the horses in the direction Eustace and Winton had gone. They had made a trail so obvious even I could follow it. We traveled through the trees for a while, then come to a logging road that had been hacked through the middle of the forest. There were stumps of trees everywhere, but there was a wide patch of road cut through it with the stumps dynamited out. Any resemblance to the natural greenery of what had been there before was purely accidental. There were hardwood trees piled up and burning, and all the pines had been toted off to make lumber. Even the birds didn’t sing.

  Along the wide-cut road we went, and finally we came upon a pile of metal milk cans and some bushel baskets of overturned sweet potatoes and a dead dog. It was a medium-sized black dog, and it lay among the sweet potatoes and the milk cans, some of which had the lids knocked off of them, milk spilling out in such a way to mix with the blood of the dog—for it appeared to have been shot—and a pile of dried-out sweet potatoes.

  By this time we were riding our horses, leading the others, but for this bit of business we got down to look. Spot pointed at the road, said, “I ain’t no Daniel Boone, but them there are fairly fresh wagon tracks.”

  Now, I couldn’t much tell fresh tracks from those made last week, but Spot seemed sure, so I decided to believe him. So did Shorty. He got off his horse and bent down in the road and looked and stood up and glanced around and nodded.

  We got down off our horses then, looked around for anything that might explain the situation.

  Shorty pointed at the ground, said, “The wagon came through here not long ago, and here you can see tracks of men walking. There are more tracks, coming later, because they are even fresher. One of those tracks is Eustace’s, which makes the other Winton’s. I know Eustace’s tracks by the turn of his boot heels, which are worn on both sides. Eustace tends to distribute his weight to the sides of his feet, and one heel is always slightly more worn than the other.”

  “I thought you weren’t a tracker,” I said.

  “I am not,” Shorty said. “But that much I learned from Eustace. That much he knows.”

  “He’s right,” said Spot. “Them tracks there come up later. I ain’t no real tracker, either, but I can follow a deer some, and I can make out this.”

  Jimmie Sue said, “You know, that milk might not be spoiled, and I’m hankering for some. Shall I open a can?”

  We agreed she should, as there were still a few with the lids tight on them. I helped set up one, and she unscrewed with Spot’s help. The milk smelled like it was still good, but it had grown warm. We got our cups out of our bags and went to dipping milk. I reckon I had three cups before Shorty said we should all stop, as milk didn’t mix well with the stomach in hot weather, especially riding a horse.

  Jimmie Sue had paused to pick a few of the better sweet potatoes up and shove those in her saddlebags. About then, Spot, a cup of milk almost to his lips, said, “Oh, hell. Looky there, will you?”

  He lowered the cup and pointed.

  We looked, saw there was a leg and a bare foot sticking out over a log. Going over there to see, we found fastened to that leg a whole man. He was a white fella, about forty, I reckoned, and his hat had twisted so that his face was down in it and the hat was pressed to the ground. He was as dead as the dog. Hog had been off in the woods a spell, but now he came out and came over for a look. Shorty said, “No, Hog. Leave him be. Go eat the dog.”

  Hog left the man alone, and he didn’t bother the dog, either. I figure he had been scrounging for acorns and roots and was full as a tick.

  “He has been shot in the head,” Shorty said. “Now I see what has happened. Fatty came down this way without a horse, and, as providence would have it, along came a man and a dog in a wagon hauling milk and potatoes to market. Fatty ambushed the man and the dog, probably because the dog tried to bite him or barked at him, or he saw him as a threat. Then he tossed all their goods out the back of the wagon so that it might roll faster. When that was done, he took off down the road. Along came Winton and our own tracking legend, Eustace, and now he and Winton are on foot and in hot pursuit of a wagon drawn briskly by horses.”

  It was then that it came clear to me that those three snaps I had heard had been three shots, and they had been those meant for this man and his dog, and a third that was probably a miss.

  We mounted up, followed their tracks, and I didn’t mention burying anybody. What I wanted was to catch up with the murdering bastard. I had never known anyone like that, who would kill for any reason whatsoever and who was as hard on livestock and dogs as he was on people, not to mention how rough he was on cans of milk and bushels of sweet potatoes.

  17

  We rode along at a brisk trot, but not a run. Shorty was certain that we would soon come upon Eustace and Winton following the trail Fatty had left.

  Jimmie Sue and Spot had fallen behind a bit, riding beside one another, and for some odd reason the sweet potatoes had led to an argument between them on how to prepare them best for a meal. Jimmie Sue held out on butter and sugar placed in a split tater and baked, while Spot was certain it was best to place few fork holes in a ta
ter, let it cook, split it when done, then add the sugar and butter. There was also an argument on frying sweet potatoes that had something to do with floating them a bit in milk first, but it was a conversation, though as important to them as interpreting scripture, I not only couldn’t follow, but wasn’t interested in. This is why I ended up beside Shorty.

  In a brief time we ceased to trot the horses and let them walk so as not to wear them down too soon in the day, as it was already growing warm and would soon be sticky as molasses in an armpit.

  I said, “I don’t know about women. I don’t know about Jimmie Sue.”

  “You mention this in a quest for advice?” Shorty said.

  “I suppose.”

  “You know I am not one to be large on love, or any component of it, though I admit I am not entirely immune.”

  “So you’ve been in love?”

  “In lust,” he said. “As a younger man I had a hard time separating the two, love and lust, as both involved fucking. There is supposed to be a difference, however, and I suppose I was in what I thought was love then. Now I know the need for someone is usually some weakness of self.”

  “You can’t believe that,” I said.

  “I can, Jack, and I do. But there was Cherry Wilson. She was a whore, like Jimmie Sue, and like her, she was comely. I think she had considerable feelings for me as well. The problem was the public. The idea of walking the street with a man who when you held his hand gave the appearance of a mother and small child was too much for her. Once, when we had sex from the rear, I had to stand on a footstool to get my position. It made me feel foolish and made her feel even more so. It was a doomed relationship from the start. She would have loved to stay with me, I think. On a personal level, in the darkness of a room, my size was not a consideration, but there was no street time for our romance; there were just too many people to see us. I think she would have rather been seen with a known murderer with one eye and a limp than with a midget.

  “We parted from one another, and I was a mess for some time after that. Went on a drunk and bought whores. I am ashamed to say I was mean to them. I took up a job, like a normal person. I became a shopkeeper in central Texas. An ugly place, I assure you. It is the very bunghole of Texas. My store was built along a road that I was sure would supply much traffic. It did not. The traffic had chosen to use a different road that wound past a rail station. I could not give away a keg of flour if I had it tied on the back of a free donkey. It was like my store sold cow turds. Not enough people dropped in to make business matter, though I did have a number of nonbuyers who liked to come by and sit on the porch and talk politics, as if any of them had ever voted or even knew how. They liked to argue religion as well, which usually boiled down to controversy over being baptized by submersion or sprinkling, a distinction that seemed to be without matter or purpose to me. There were plenty who came to see me as well, though they were not eager to buy anything. It was as if I were still in the circus.

  “I reached my fill of being an object of display, and on a dark Wednesday I made this point clear to a man who insisted that he was going to pull my clothes off and make me wear a dress and dance. He had brought the dress with him. It was a nice dress, bright red, but not to my liking. Had it been fine and come with a free pair of shoes, I can tell you emphatically I was neither prepared to have my pants pulled off nor wear a dress. He mistook my size for easy submission, and I shot him in the balls and he died.

  “The law was inclined to believe it had been something of an overreaction, and that it would have been much simpler had I let him pull my pants off and put me in a dress. I continued to maintain my disagreement with this. I ended up with a drunken lawyer that was being paid by the court and did not give a hoot if I was hanged, castrated, or given a tea party while wearing that dress and those shoes. He once joked to me that it sounded funny and he would have liked to see it. Underestimation of my abilities led me to leap high and swing a hard right. That played a significant part in my escape, for that is what I did, and for years I thought I might be caught up with. Later, I learned the courthouse had burned and so had records of my arrest. The trading post had been taken over by the relatives of the man who wanted me to wear a dress, and it seemed they felt that was adequate compensation, as he was not that popular, even among his kin. Many of them, it turned out, had been forced to wear dresses, and it was known among the community, if not to me, that the man whose balls I deflated had liked to dress up himself, and that he had a particular penchant for women’s underthings, especially girdles. Even if my records had not burned, it seemed clear that by this time they were ready to let me slide rather than fall down on the side of a swinging dick in a red gingham whore dress. So here I am today. Without true love or a trading post, but not wearing a dress and little shoes, either.”

  I was digesting all this when up ahead we saw Eustace and Winton sitting by the side of the road with a young colored boy. He looked to be about thirteen or fourteen, but when we come riding up on him I saw he was a little older, but still a boy, small of height and thin. He held a hand to his head, and his mouth hung open, showing his teeth.

  Eustace looked up as we were coming, lifted a hand. When were alongside them we got down off our horses, except for Jimmie Sue, and walked over for a look. Hog went over, too, and at first the boy was frightened by him, but Eustace calmed him down. After a moment the boy was petting Hog.

  “Fatty done it,” Eustace said. “We come down out of the woods, found a dead man and dog, some overturned milk. There were wagon tracks, so it was easy to figure what happened. Fatty. We took on after him. But with all the stuff dumped off the wagon, he was traveling light and making good time.”

  “We seen all that,” I said.

  “We come on down the road and found this boy sitting here, holding his head,” Winton said.

  “He was hired to load the milk and potatoes and was on his way to market in Livingston,” Eustace said.

  “Let him tell it,” Shorty said.

  “I done told it,” the colored boy said. “I was riding in the back of the wagon with the goods. Mr. Druskin and his dog, Butch, was in the buck seat driving the mules. I mean Mr. Druskin. The dog didn’t know how.”

  “That’s disappointing,” Jimmie Sue said.

  “Yeah,” Spot said. “I would have liked that. A dog driving a wagon.”

  “Would you two shut up?” Shorty said.

  The boy took up his story again. “This fat white guy come out of the woods on us. He was carrying a rifle and he looked rough and red-faced, like he had been boiled and was ready to be buttered. He opened up right away. He shot the dog first, then Mr. Druskin. I jumped off that wagon, took to running like a rabbit. He shot at me and cut a bullet alongside my head, right here.”

  He took his bloody hand down. There was a light groove over his ear and along the back of his head where it had plowed through his woolly hair like a middle buster through burnt grass.

  “I went in the woods and hid out. I must have stayed there an hour or so, then snuck back and seen Mr. Druskin and his dog dead, like I figured. All that milk and taters was tossed off, and the wagon was gone. I don’t see how that man could have gone on, way he looked. It was easy to tell at just a glance he was hurting bad. But he took the wagon and drove the horses on. I followed—not so I could catch up with him but because I figured he wouldn’t be coming back my way, and if he did, I’d catch sight on him and could run like a rabbit again. Then I got dizzy and realized I’d been creased. I sat down beside the road, and these two fellas come up. I done told them what I told you. This hog ain’t gonna bite me, is he?”

  “Just don’t move sudden,” Eustace said.

  “We got an extra horse, you want it,” Winton said.

  “I could sure appreciate a ride,” the colored boy said.

  “It’s a horse ain’t no one gonna need anymore,” Winton said. “So you take it and ride it. It ain’t got a bridle or saddle, but I reckon you can make a bridle and some re
ins with a bit of rope. I think we got some rope.”

  “I’d appreciate that considerably,” the colored boy said.

  “How far is Livingston?” Shorty asked.

  “It ain’t that much on down the road,” the colored boy said.

  “All right, then,” said Eustace. “I guess that’s the direction we got to go, and it might not be good to be in too big a hurry. Maybe it’s best we catch Fatty where he’s holed up with the rest. That way we’ll have all the snakes in one pile.”

  “Yeah,” Winton said. “But one snake is easy enough to kill with a hoe, but a bunch of them at one time might prove harder to reckon with.”

  “When we get to Livingston,” Shorty said, “Jimmie Sue might want to find a place to stay until we are through, or they are through with us.”

  “I think not,” she said. She had never gotten off her horse and was still sitting up there looking down on us. “I’ve come this damn far, I don’t intend to quit coming.”

  “It’s not your fight,” I said.

  “You and me are together, ain’t we?” she said.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “Well, now, you need to quit guessing and go to knowing.”

  Right then every doubt I had ever had grew wings and flapped out of my head and out of sight into the sky of my thoughts. It felt good to say, “We are.”

  “Then that there settles it,” Jimmie Sue said. “We’ll all go down to see them rascals together. I kind of like the idea of seeing those men shot up. I wouldn’t mind doing some of the shooting.”

  A couple of those doubtful birds that had flown away flew back out of that sky and back into my head, and I thought perhaps I could hear a few wings of the others beating my way.

  “You and me are friends, ain’t we?” Winton said to Jimmie Sue. I figured him having had experience with her, he wanted to see which side of the chart he was marked on.