by Bobby Byrd
Had Charlene? Could Charlene?
I have a hunger, she’d said. Sometimes it’s all I can do not to give in to it.
And do you? Give in to it? Neely’d asked.
One time, she’d said. But only once.
“Charlene is a good woman,” I insisted. “A faithful woman, 100 percent. It’s not even possible, what you’re saying, that she would’ve—” I choked on the words.
And then I grew spitfire angry.
“All right,” I snapped. “Fine. It happens all the time. Maybe he’s my son, maybe he isn’t.” My face was growing red. “But even if he isn’t my son, adultery is a matter for the church, not the police. Sin is the Lord’s work.” It would have been a comfort to stand behind a pulpit and shout down the voices that whispered evil all around me. But here I was, weak and vulnerable in the face of something I didn’t expect. “I don’t see how this is any of your business,” I said.
I glared at the two silent men standing in front of me.
And suddenly, they both looked uncomfortable.
Neely cleared his throat.
“We don’t think he’s Charlene’s son, either,” Chief said.
It felt like a hammer to the spine, to the throat, to the chest, everywhere, my whole body beaten. “What?” And my voice didn’t sound like my own, it sounded like an old man’s.
Neely slapped a newspaper story down on the table in front of me. It was the Amarillo Globe-News, dated seventeen years back, July, the week or so after we’d left there to move here.
I scanned it, heart beating beating beating.
DEAD BABY SWAPPED
Parents in a Panic to Find their Missing Newborn AMARILLO, TX—Police are investigating a possible kidnapping at Amarillo General Hospital. On June 13, Rachel Smith, 26, gave birth to a healthy baby boy that appeared to have died during the night. In the course of a routine autopsy, hospital officials discovered that the dead baby was not related to Smith. Police are currently searching for both the Smith baby and for the parents of the dead baby.
I looked at the two men who stood before me. “What are you saying?”
“You know what we’re saying,” Neely replied.
“Sammy is my son,” I whispered.
“Correction: Sammy is Rachel Smith’s son.” Chief smirked. “Your son was buried by the city of Amarillo.”
My knees buckled and I had to sit.
“You gonna make it?” Neely asked.
“I don’t know how to make any sense of this,” I said.
“You really didn’t know?” he asked.
“Know what?”
“Your wife was alone when she went into labor,” Neely said, “and the baby was born dead. She went to the hospital where she worked and switched the dead baby with the Smith baby.”
There was a picture in my head, a picture of Charlene, alone, holding the dead body of our son close to her chest, weeping and cursing God for taking her miracle away.
“Charlene told you this?” I asked. “She’s talking about it?”
“Oh, she’s talking,” Chief said. He shook his head. “She won’t shut up. It seems she started feeling guilty about what she’d done after all these years. Apparently, a few months ago she told your son—excuse me, Rachel Smith’s son—the truth.”
A bitter laugh escaped my lips. “‘What is truth?’” I quoted Pontius Pilate, unsure who I expected to answer that question, the fallen men standing before me or the God I’ve served all my life. It felt like I’d been robbed of my very life. Something evil had slept right next to me for years, and I’d never known how close it was to me, how I’d loved it, how I’d nurtured it, how I’d been blind to it.
“When we found Sammy, he was in Amarillo looking for his real parents,” Neely said.
“We’ve contacted Amarillo police,” said Chief. “They’re trying to locate the Smith family. Once they have all the samples, it’s just a matter of waiting for the DNA results to confirm what we already suspect.”
“How long will that take?” I asked, throat dry.
“It depends on how long the forensics lab is backed up,” Chief said. “A few weeks. Possibly a month.”
I swallowed. Then I swallowed again. It could take a month to find out if my boy was really my boy? Because suddenly, that was all that mattered to me. Although deep down, I already knew. Maybe I always had.
“Can I bring you some water?” Neely asked.
“Sure.” I was parched, thirstier than I’d been all my life. If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink.
Chief opened the door to let Neely through. I looked out at the busy police department. It wasn’t a big place, so I could see everything there was to see. Sammy was just outside, leaning his head against the wall, eyes closed, like he was tired beyond belief, a tired that went beyond the body, a tired that bit its sharp teeth into a soul and wouldn’t let go. And I wanted so badly to say to him, Come. Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.
But I knew I wouldn’t be allowed to speak to him, not yet, maybe not for a long time, maybe not ever. Perhaps he would never want to talk to me, and with a clarity that comes with revelation, I realized I had no right to ask him to.
I had lost my boy.
The door to the interrogation room opened and for just a few seconds, I could see Charlene inside, talking to somebody, a police officer. She was talking to him the way one might talk to a pastor, I saw. She was saying everything, leaving nothing aside, confessing her sin, hoping for forgiveness, for salvation.
But police are not in the salvation business. That would be me, picking up the pieces after the trial. I didn’t want to lose her too.
Like Sammy, I closed my eyes and leaned my head back until it touched the wall. Images of the boy and the wife flooded the black space between my eyes and my eyelids. There was Sammy, just a boy, hefty and athletic, running down the sidewalk in front of our home after a football. There was Charlene, standing at the door, calling after him not to go too far, calling after him to come home. There they were, sitting in a church pew while I preached a sermon, Sammy fiddling until Charlene handed him a piece of paper and a crayon, her expression serene as she turned her face back toward mine. I saw her in her nurse’s uniform, kissing Sammy goodbye at the door as she headed out to work the night shift at the hospital, headed out to heal the bodies of sick babies and their mothers.
And I could not—I could not—believe he was somebody else’s boy.
I turned my thoughts toward the flatland surrounding the small town of Andrews, where I’d been a preacher of the Word for the past seventeen years.
I’d always said that land was like God, endless and encompassing everything.
I thought about how a man could just walk out into that land and keep going for miles.
I thought about how a man might never come to the end of it.
SIX-FINGER JACK
BY JOE R. LANSDALE
Gladewater
Jack had six fingers. That’s how Big O, the big, fat, white, straw-hatted son of a bitch, was supposed to know he was dead. Maybe by some real weird luck a guy could kill some other black man with six fingers, cut off his hand, and bring it in and claim it belonged to Jack, but not likely. So he put the word out that whoever killed Jack and cut off his paw and brought it back was gonna get $100,000 and a lot of goodwill.
I went out there after Jack just like a lot of other fellas, plus one woman I knew of, Lean Mama Tootin’, who was known for shotgun shootin’ and ice-pick work.
But the thing I had on them was I was screwing Jack’s old lady. Jack didn’t know it, of course. Jack was a bad dude, and it wouldn’t have been smart to let him know my bucket was in his well. Nope. Wouldn’t have been smart for me, or for Jack’s old lady. If he’d known that before he had to make a run for it, might have been good to not sleep, ’cause he might show up and be most unpleasant. I can be unpleasant too, but I prefer when I’m on the stalk, not when I’m being stalked. It sets
the dynamics all different.
You see, I’m a philosophical kind of guy.
Thing was, though, I’d been laying the pipeline to his lady for about six weeks, because Jack had been on the run ever since he’d tried to muscle in on Big O’s whores and take over that business, found out he couldn’t. That wasn’t enough, he took up with Big O’s old lady like it didn’t matter none, but it did. Rumor was Big O put the old lady under about three feet of concrete out by his lake-boat stalls, buried her in the hole while she was alive, hands tied behind her back, staring up at that concrete mixer truck dripping out the goo, right on top of her naked self.
Jack hears this little tidbit of information, he quit fooling around and made with the jackrabbit, took off lickety-split, so fast he almost left a vapor trail. It’s one thing to fight one man, or two, but to fight a whole organization, not so easy. Especially if that organization belongs to Big O.
Loodie, Jack’s personal woman, was a hot flash number who liked to have her ashes hauled, and me, I’m a tall, lean fellow with a good smile and a willing attitude. Loodie was ready to lose Jack because he had a bad temper and a bit of a smell. He was short on baths and long on cologne. Smellgood juice on top of his stinky smell, she said, created a kind of funk that would make a skunk roll over dead and cause a wild hyena to leave the body where it lay.
She, on the other hand, was like sweet, wet sin dipped in coffee and sugar with a dash of cinnamon; God’s own mistress with a surly attitude, which goes to show even He likes a little bit of the devil now and then.
She’d been asked about Jack by them who wanted to know. Bad folks with guns, and a need for dough. But she lied, said she didn’t know where he was. Everyone believed her because she talked so bad about Jack. Said stuff about his habits, about how he beat her, how bad he was in bed, and how he stunk. It was convincing stuff to everyone.
But me.
I knew that woman was a liar, because I knew her whole family, and they was the sort, like my daddy used to say, would rather climb a tree and lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth and be given free flowers. Lies flowed through their veins as surely as blood.
She told me about Jack one night while we were in bed, right after we had toted the water to the mountain. We’re laying there looking at the ceiling, like there’s gonna be manna from heaven, watching the defective light from the church across the way flash in and out and bounce along the wall, and she says in that burnt-toast voice of hers, “You split that money, I’ll tell you where he is.”
“You wanna split it?”
“Naw, I’m thinkin’ maybe you could keep half and I could give the other half to the cat.”
“You don’t got a cat.”
“Well, I got another kind of cat, and that cat is one you like to pet.”
“You’re right there,” I said. “Tellin’ me where he is, that’s okay, but I still got to do the groundwork. Hasslin’ with that dude ain’t no easy matter, that’s what I’m tryin’ to tell you. So, me doin’ what I’m gonna have to do, that’s gonna be dangerous as trying to play with a daddy lion’s balls. So, that makes me worth more than half, and you less than half.”
“You’re gonna shoot him when he ain’t lookin’, and you know it.”
“I still got to take the chance.”
She reached over to the nightstand, nabbed up a pack, shook out a cigarette, lit it with a cheap lighter, took a deep drag, coughed out a puff, said, “Split, or nothin’.”
“Hell, honey, you know I’m funnin’,” I said. “I’ll split it right in half with you.”
I was lying through my teeth. She may have figured such, but she figured with me she at least had a possibility, even if it was as thin as the edge of playing card.
She said, “He’s done gone deep into East Texas. He’s over in Gladewater. Drove there in his big black Cadillac that he had a chop shop turn blue.”
“So he drove over in a blue Caddy, not a black one,” I said. “I mean, if it was black, and he had it painted blue, it ain’t black no more. It’s blue.”
“Aren’t you one for the details, and at a time like this,” she said, and rubbed my leg with her foot. “But technically, baby, you are so correct.”
That night Loodie laid me out a map written in pencil on a brown paper sack, made me swear I was gonna split the money with her again. I told her what she wanted to hear. Next morning, I started over to Gladewater.
Jack was actually in a place outside of the town, along the Sabine River, back in the bottom land where the woods was still thick, down a little trail that wound around and around, to a cabin Loodie said was about the size of a postage stamp, provided the stamp had been scissor-trimmed.
I oiled my automatic, put on gloves, went to the store and bought a hatchet, cruised out early, made Gladewater in about an hour and fifteen, glided over the Sabine River bridge. I took a gander at the water, which was dirty brown and up high on account of rain. I had grown up along that river, over near a place called Big Sandy. It was a place of hot sand and tall pines and no opportunity.
It wasn’t a world I missed none.
I stopped at a little diner in Gladewater and had me a hamburger. There was a little white girl behind the counter with hair blond as sunlight, and we made some goo-goo eyes at one another. Had I not been on a mission, I might have found out when she got off work, seen if me and her could get a drink and find a motel and try and make the beast with two backs.
Instead, I finished up, got me a tall Styrofoam cup of coffee to go. I drove over to a food store and went in and bought a jar of pickles, a bag of cookies, and a bottle of water. I put the pickles on the floorboard between the backseat and the front; it was a huge jar and it fit snugly. I laid the bag with the cookies and the water on the backseat.
The bottoms weren’t far, about twenty minutes, but the roads were kind of tricky, some of them were little more than mud and a suggestion. Others were slick and shiny like snot on a water glass.
I drove carefully and sucked on my coffee. I went down a wide road that became narrow, then took another that wound off into the deeper woods. Drove until I found what I thought was the side road that led to the cabin. It was really a glorified path. Sun-hardened, not very wide, bordered on one side by trees and on the other by marshy land that would suck the shoes off your feet, or bog up a car tire until you had to pull a gun and shoot the engine like a dying horse.
I stopped in the road and held Loodie’s hand-drawn map, checked it, looked up. There was a curve went around and between the trees and the marsh. There were tire tracks in it. Pretty fresh. At the bend in the curve was a little wooden bridge with no railings.
So far Loodie’s map was on the money.
I finished off my coffee, got out and took a pee behind the car, and watched some big white waterbirds flying over. When I was growing up over in Big Sandy I used to see that kind of thing often, not to mention all manner of wildlife, and for a moment I felt nostalgic. That lasted about as long as it took me to stick my dick back in my pants and zipper up.
I took my hatchet out of the trunk and rested it on the front passenger seat as I got back in the car. I pulled out my automatic and checked it over, popped out the clip and slid it back in. I always liked the sound it made when it snapped into place. I looked at myself in the mirror, like maybe I was going on a date. Thought maybe if things fucked up, it might be the last time I got a good look at myself. I put the car in gear, wheeled around the curve and over the bridge, going at a slow pace, the map on the seat beside me, held in place by the hatchet.
I came to a wide patch, like on the map, and pulled off the road. Someone had dumped their garbage where the spot ended close to the trees. There were broken-up plastic bags spilling cans and paper, and there was an old bald tire leaning against a tree, as if taking a break before rolling on its way.
I got out and walked around the bend, looked down the road. There was a broad pond of water to the left, leaked there by the dirty Sabine. On the right, n
ext to the woods, was a log cabin. Small, but well made and kind of cool looking. Loodie said it was on property Jack’s parents had owned. Twenty acres or so. Cabin had a chimney chugging smoke. Out front was a big blue Cadillac Eldorado, the tires and sides splashed with mud. It was parked close to the cabin. I could see through the Cadillac’s windows, and they lined up with a window in the cabin. I moved to the side of the road, stepped in behind some trees, and studied the place carefully.
There weren’t any wires running to the cabin. There was a kind of lean-to shed off the back. Loodie told me that was where Jack kept the generator that gave the joint electricity. Mostly the cabin was heated by the firewood piled against the shed, and lots of blankets come late at night. Had a gas stove with a nice-sized tank. I could just imagine Jack in there with Loodie, his six fingers on her sweet chocolate skin. It made me want to kill him all the more, even though I knew Loodie was the kind of girl made a minx look virginal. You gave your heart to that woman, she’d eat it.
I went back to the car and got my gun-cleaning goods out of the glove box, took out the clip, and cleaned my pistol and reloaded it. It was unnecessary, because the gun was clean as a model’s ass, but I like to be sure.
I patted the hatchet on the seat like it was a dog.
I sat there and waited, thought about what I was gonna do with $100,000. You planned to kill someone and cut off their hand, you had to think about stuff like that, and a lot.
Considering on it, I decided I wasn’t gonna get foolish and buy a car. One I had got me around and it looked all right enough. I wasn’t gonna spend it on Loodie or some other split tail in a big-time way. I was gonna use it carefully. I might get some new clothes and put some money down on a place instead of renting. Fact was, I might move to Houston.
If I lived close to the bone and picked up the odd bounty job now and again, just stuff I wanted to do, like bits that didn’t involve me having to deal with some goon big enough to pull off one of my legs and beat me with it, I could live safer, and better. Could have some stretches where I didn’t have to do a damn thing but take it easy, all on account of that $100,000 nest egg.