Other Worlds, Better Lives, A Howard Waldrop Reader Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003

by Howard Waldrop

  “I’m supposed to meet a man here coming to work for Boss Eustis.”

  The deputy laughed. “I see a pattern developing here. Ain’t but one reason a man coming to work for Boss Eustis would have to be met at the sheriffs’ office. I think that there’s your man. Come on along.”

  This is the kind of stuff Boss Eustis gets me into. What now? We went out the steps and around to the marshal’s office in the basement. Marshall took off his hat. “Where’s them damn forms?” he said, searching through his desk. “Here they are. Lemme see your papers.”

  He looked at the yellow form. “This here’s Boss Eustis’s charge alright,” he said to me. “Things has come to a might lax pass when The Boss sends a little nigger boy down here for a man what did five years hard time.”

  “I didn’t know anything about it, Mr. Marshall. I thought it was just somebody coming here to work for Mr. Eustis.”

  “I guarantee he’ll work, all right. Let’s get this stuff down here on the paper. Name?”

  “1213—” the man started, then said, “Lee, comma Houlka, no middle name.”

  “Age?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  “And you’re a Caucasian male by the looks of that there beard. Which prison?”

  “Parchman Farm.”

  Marshall whistled. “That’s where them muscles come from. I think there’s only been one white man come from Parchman in the last ten years. Occupation?”

  “Convict.”

  “Before then, dammit.”

  “You might say I was a wildlife management specialist.”

  “Home?”

  “Route 1, Box 2, Mt. Oatie, Mississippi.”

  “Next of kin?” Then Marshall looked at the yellow form. “Well, you pretty much took care of that, didn’t you? Next next of kin?”

  “Al Lee, Route 1, Box 4, Mt. Oatie.”

  “Relationship?”

  “Twin brother.”

  “Read and write?”

  “Some.”

  “Alright. I’m gonna read this to you then. You gotta tell me you understand, cause you mess up, or don’t please the Boss, we get your ass back to Parchman P.D.Q.”

  He pulled out the county form.

  “You are hereby remanded to the custody of the below-named person to work for him for the rest of your term, being a period of,” he looked down on the other form, “—one year from today’s date.

  “The following terms apply:

  “You will work for two dollars a month and keep. This rate is set by the state. You cannot work for any other wages, tips or salary, and you cannot be lent out for money hire by your employer. Employer is to provide one hot meal a day and two others. Employer is to provide one change of clothes and shoes or boots and one extra shirt, pair of socks and a light jacket during each year or portion of a year.

  “You are not to associate with known criminals, parolees or persons of low morals. You are not to have in your possession firearms, concealed weapons, or knives with blades longer than three inches. You are not to have in your possession proscribed articles, drugs, or alcohol. Prohibition is the law of these United States, the State of Mississippi and every county therein. You are not to leave the county under any circumstances unless your employer requires it and gives three days advance notice in writing to the county sheriffs. You are not to use profanity or blasphemy. You are to perform your work in a courteous and expedient manner. Your work-release depends on the good will of your employer and you can be remanded to custody for transportation back to the prison you came from at any time during the period, with no option for further buying-out of your time. Escape or attempts to escape will result in the return to prison with an additional two years added to your original sentence. Do you understand all this?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Sign here.”

  Mr. Houlka Lee picked up the fountain pen and carefully and slowly wrote out his name.

  “I’m gonna let you take this man out to the Boss’s place, but you tell Mr. Eustis next time send a man in to do this job. And he runs away before you get him home, I’m gonna put your ass in Parchman.”

  “Yessir.”

  Marshall wrote out “for Eldridge Eustis, employer” on the bottom of the form and pushed it over to me. “Make your mark, then tell me your name,” he said.

  I took up the fountain pen and signed “Invictus Ovidius Lace.”

  Marshall looked up at me. “I’ll remember that next time, Invictus.”

  “They call me I.O., Mr. Marshall.”

  “I’ll put these under the sheriffs’ door,” he said. “Git.”

  * * *

  I took Mr. Lee out to the Boss’s place. Things was in an uproar there—some circuit court judge had died four counties away, and you’d think the Moon had fallen into the Pacific Ocean the way people was yelling on phones and roaring up and jumping in and out of cars, and with Boss Eustis still over in Anatolia County.

  I found JimBob, the Boss’s overseer. “Take him out to Roskus’s old shack, the one next to yours. Clean it up and scrub it down. He’ll eat with the second shift of white folks in the kitchen. The Boss’ll see him tomorrow.”

  He turned to Mr. Lee. “We gonna have any trouble with you?”

  “Not that you can tell.”

  “If we are, tell me now; we’ll get you back up to Parchman tonight. Mr. Eustis is doing this as a favor to some friends up in Corinth, same’s they do for him. We’d as soon have one person as another.”

  Houlka didn’t say anything, and we went out and made a start cleaning up the shack.

  III

  Boss Eustis sat back in his big half-barrel chair on the front porch.

  “Well, hee-heee-hee!” he said. He was a dried-up prune of a little man, looked about four hundred years old, although I looked in the Big Bible once, on the family tree pages, and he wasn’t even born when the War for Southern Independence ended, though he looked like he’d been around when George Washington was a surveyor.

  He hasn’t changed a speck since I saw him the first time leaning over the old dresser drawer they said they used for my crib. That was the first bad scare I ever had in my life.

  I was scared pissless of him till I was around ten years old. Usually white folks when they get old they fall apart all at once—one week they’re middle-aged, the next they’re toothless old noddies being pushed around by their grandkids in a wheelbarrow. Black folks just get older and a little grayer and a little shorter and then they die.

  The Boss was the only white person who got old that way.

  “I done brought you out of Parchman on the advice of my cronies. You understand the terms of your employment?”

  “Yes.”

  Boss Eustis was a little taken aback. He waggled his finger in his ear like he was clearing it out. “What wuz zat?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Houlka Lee.

  “That’s better. Well. You gonna get to start early. I’m sorta responsible for everything in this county that don’t come under the heading of the judge’s or the sheriffs’ business. We got us a re-port this morning that they’s a cougar tearing up hell in the northeast section just above the Lake. Your job’s gonna be to get rid of it. Run it out of the county, trap it, I don’t care, just so long’s I don’t have to hear people squawk about it. Take that pissant there with you,” he said, pointing at me. “Can’t let you have a gun, of course, but you’ll have to figure something out.”

  “Yessir.”

  “JimBob,” said the Boss, “get someone to drive ’em out to Skeeno’s place. Make sure this man gets whatever he needs, short of firepower.”

  “Sure thing, Boss.”

  Houlka and me went out back. He looked around. “Get me the sharp-est axe on the place,” he said. I went ou
t to the tool shed and came back with the Michigan double-bit. Houlka took it and walked out to the woods over the back fence

  “What’s this?”

  “That? Oh, that’s one of them damn olive trees the Frenchman who owned the place before the Boss’s folks bought it tried to plant. He had some notion Mississippi would become the olive-oil capital of the world. Only two or three of them lived.”

  Houlka put his foot on it and started chopping. The trunk was nine inches in diameter and about eight feet up to the first branches. He chopped it down, started working it on one end with the edge of the blade held close to his hand. Then he whacked it off about four feet up and smoothed that end.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  We went back out front where the truck was waiting. Some of the men on the porch started sputtering and laughing.

  Then I saw something I hadn’t seen in three years. Boss Eustis stood up.

  “You mean you’re going after a mountain lion with a stick? You ain’t taking any traps or nets or stuff to make a deadfall? No dogs?”

  He even walked to the edge of the porch. “You go on. You just go on. I find out you’re just out there settin’ somewhere, I’ll send you back to the farm.”

  We got in the truck and they drove us out to above Lake Yuksino.

  * * *

  “I think you should cut up from the stomach and around the ribcage,” I said.

  “There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” Houlka said. He cut a little nick in the heel of one of the cougar’s legs he’d nailed to the fence rail. He grabbed with both hands and started pulling and walking.

  The skin started turning inside out, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t pull off, over the butt, around the other leg, off the chest, up the neck and down the chin. When he finished, there was nothing but the white carcass and the whole skin joined by two little-bitty pieces to the lips and one leg. He came back and made three quick cuts with his Ka-Bar knife.

  “Know anybody who needs two hundred pounds of meat?”

  “I can’t believe Mr. Eustis didn’t want the skin,” I said.

  “I told him I needed a new coat this winter. He saw it as a way not to have to spend any money.” He took off his yellow and black Lion Feed cap and held it up next to the cougar’s head skin. “Should just fit,” he said. We carried the carcass to the butcher’s, who ran it through a bone saw four or five times, then on to the orphan asylum.

  “Venison,” he said to the lady in the orphanage kitchen.

  “It ain’t deer season yet.”

  “It had an accident,” said Houlka.

  * * *

  I was in my shack when JimBob knocked on the door. “Get ya butt out to the porch. Him too,” he said, nodding toward Houlka’s cabin.

  Houlka and I went out front where Boss Eustis and the others were holding forth. It was the first time Mr. Eustis had seen Houlka’s outfit—the leather coveralls he always wore, the boots, and now the coat made out of the cougar hide with the head still attached that he wore pulled back like a cowl on his neck. He was carrying his big club.

  “Halloween ain’t for two more weeks yet. Damn if you ain’t dressed to win every contest in this town,” said the Boss. “Then again, I ain’t ever paid a man for the way he looks, either. Never let that be said, or Goober over there would be broke all the time.” They all laughed.

  “You did so well with that panther you’re wearin’ that we done thought of another call along the same lines. We want you and the boy there to go over and clean up all the snakes from Mr. Hyder’s pools.”

  “Ooh, they’s moccasins in there eight feet long, I hear,” said Goober.

  “That set right with you?”

  “Fine,” said Houlka. “I been killing snakes since I was a baby.”

  “Dr. Sclape’s been warned to look out, you might be being brought in to his clinic,” said JimBob.

  “Well, if they’s bit, they sure as hell ain’t gonna make it back to town, JimBob,” said Boss Eustis. “Who you better call’s the undertaker.”

  I was shaking in my shoes.

  “You got a frog-gig for the boy?” asked Houlka.

  “Fix ’em up, JimBob.”

  * * *

  We was in the thick of it, down in the muddy bottomland, and there was already a snake every twenty feet just gettin’ to the ponds. I saw one on the path and raised up the gig to get it.

  “That’s a rat snake,” said Houlka.

  “A snake’s a snake!” I said.

  “You want rats eating the butts off every baby in Spunt County, go ahead.”

  I let it slide away.

  “I hope your eyes is quick and good,” I said. “Can’t nobody fish here anymore it’s so full of snakes. Used to be the best fishing in the county.”

  The ponds covered five acres or so in all. As we came over a little rise I saw a bass that must have weighed five pounds come out after a snake doctor. You could almost see the bottom of the pond it knocked so much water up when it arced.

  “We need to make some torches,” said Houlka. “Use it when they strike, hit back when they recoil. You’ll get the rhythm soon enough.”

  * * *

  Snakes flew around like they had wings. Loops flopped around on the ground. You could smell their flesh burning. I was scared and the air was full of their venom smell. One struck at me, I lowered the torch. Its fangs knocked sparks off. As it pulled back, I stuck it with the gig, twisted to break its back, and shook it off the tines.

  Houlka used the torch and club. He flipped the bashed snakes behind him. There were two in front of him, seven, eight feet long. I tried to watch, then another one came at me. I missed with the gig and it started winding around the haft up toward my hand. I caught its head between the torch and the handle. Its flopping and coiling twisted the gig from my hands.

  I heard Houlka yell and thought sure one of the snakes had got in.

  I looked over. Both snakes were mashed in three or four places. Houlka jumped around. I’ll be damned if there wasn’t a crawdad pinching his leg with both claws. It must have been flipped up in the melee and landed on his coveralls.

  Houlka pulled it off and laughed.

  * * *

  We got our breath back finally. We’d piled the snakes up on the sides of three of the ponds. It looked like stacks of tires at a service station. One of the Hyder family came over the rise, stopped stock still.

  We walked up to him.

  “That’s all the mocassins and copperheads, except the little ones that swam out to the middles of the ponds. Weren’t any rattlers. If somebody comes back tomorrow with a .22 they can take care of all the little ones. Anything big that’s left is just a mud snake,” said Houlka.

  The man’s jaw hung open.

  “You satisfied?” asked Houlka.

  The man nodded his head, still staring at the nearest pile of bloody snakes.

  “Then if you could tell Boss Eustis our work’s done when he calls, we’ll be on our way.”

  The man looked at the other two piles.

  “I’ll be godddamned,” he said.

  IV

  People had come to give Houlka a wide berth whenever he had to go into town. Deputy Marshal Marshall had been talking, as had the Hyders and Skeenos, and all the cream of Spunt County who spent all their time on the Boss’s front porch. Wearing those coveralls and the lionskin didn’t help much, but it did let them see him coming a long way off.

  Miz Eustis had him doing odd jobs around the place. The big house had never looked better—she had us planting and cleaning and painting. Houlka just did his work and didn’t say much of anything till he was through. I don’t think Miz Eustis gave him much thought at all except just as another handyman around the place.

  Bo
ss Eustis though—he fumed and he pondered on what to do, and him and his buddies was always thinking of ways to humiliate Houlka with menial stuff. Me, I came in for my share of it, but after awhile they tired of that stuff, like it wasn’t fun any more to make us wash their cars, like it was them being belittled, not us.

  After the cougar and the pond cleaning, and having to go run down that old razorback that had come all the way over from Arkansas just before Thanksgiving—we had hog along with turkey and put up two hundred pounds of pork besides—there wasn’t as much hoorawing on the front porch as there once had been.

  It was on a cool day, December 1st, and we was all lined up because it was payday on the place. If you didn’t go see Boss Eustis sittin’ in his cut-down half-barrel chair, you didn’t get paid. Some of the farmers who were on pay-and-cost instead of shares had to come seven or eight miles, but by eight in the morning there was ten or twelve wagons and a couple of trucks parked outside on the road. They were full of kids and wives and there were always dogfights.

  “Well, Elmer,” said Boss Eustis to the farmer who stood in front of him, “I done heard you been drinkin’ again. That right?”

  “Boss,” said Elmer, “I don’t rightly see how a man with eight kids, a wife, a mother, four mules, two horses and twelve dogs to keep up would have the time or money to drink, do you?

  “Besides,” he added, “I been spending all my time finding a covey of quail for you. I know just where they keep in the south field.”

  “Hee-hee-hee,” said the Boss. “Give him his pay, JimBob.”

  “Sure thing, Boss.” Mr. Eustis always paid in solid dollars and change.