The Thicket (10 page)

“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 oozing 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.

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.

I left out and looked in the other two saloons, but still didn’t see anyone I recognized. I saw a fistfight in an alley between two big men, and one man finally knocked the other one down and was kicking him when I went on by. I came to where the bright buildings ended and saw above them on the hill a different batch that were whitewashed and simple-built. There was beyond that a few houses with white fences around them, flowers in the yard, struggling against the heat, as by this time of day it had warmed up considerable. I also saw in the distance a cotton gin and wagons of cotton being brought to it. The air was starting to fill with the lint of cotton from the gin, and in the sunlight the lint was yellow, not white, and I could smell it being ginned.

Further up the street, I saw the sheriff’s office. It was located between the brightly colored buildings and the whitewashed ones. Up the hill, in the less brightly painted part of town, was where the more orderly citizens lived, perhaps with families and jobs. I thought then of going to see the sheriff, but hesitated. If I let him know the bank robber was in town, he might think I had come to kill him and would want to pull me off the search. I figured it might be best if I found the man first and then told the sheriff. I stood there looking at the sheriff’s office for a long time, thinking not only about that but also about the boy in the ditch. At some point, I had to let the sheriff know about the kid with the cut throat and give some idea as to the body’s location. Maybe the boy’s family could be found. But not right then.

I turned around and started walking back into the brightly painted section of town. When I got to the whorehouse there wasn’t a lot of activity, but the main door was open, and there was a closed screen door behind it. I looked through the screen. There was a man sitting in a chair in the hallway facing the door, and he had an old .410 lever-action shotgun across his knees. I had only seen a gun like that once. Pa had one when I was younger, and he had swapped it for something with the same peddler who had most likely carried the pox to him.

I took off my hat and went in, the screen squeaking like a nervous bird. It was exactly the kind of place Grandpa would have hated. The man with the shotgun looked at me, said, “They’re mostly sleeping, except for Jimmie Sue.”

My plan had been to come in and look about, hope to spot someone from the ferry, but now that I was inside I realized just how stupid that idea was. If the man were here he would probably have taken a room with one of the whores. I considered coming back at night, when there might be more activity, but I feared I could miss my man, as he could move on. I decided to think on it.

I said, “You know what? I’m going to think about it and come back later. I’m not sure I have enough money.”

The man with the shotgun eyed me like I was the pox myself. “Think about it?” he said. “You either want pussy or you don’t.”

“A man can change his mind,” I said.

“I wouldn’t change my mind,” he said.

“I guess that’s where me and you differ,” I said. Then I heard the stairs creak and saw a woman in her bloomers coming down the stairs. The only time I’d ever seen such a thing before was in the Sears, Roebuck catalog, which I would look through before tearing a page loose to use to wipe in the outhouse, and though I had thought some of those women looked pretty good in that catalog, this was an altogether different thing, and better.