The Thicket (13 page)

“They’re cousins,” Jimmie Sue said.

“Me and Jack are cousins,” Eustace said. “We don’t kiss.”

“Are you cousins?” Jimmie Sue said. “Really?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“He don’t kiss me and I don’t kiss him,” Eustace said. Then: “But I want to.”

We all looked at Eustace, and he laughed.

“Not so loud, you clutch of morons,” Shorty said.

We had all moved to the doorway to see Fatty walking down the street. He had left his kissing cousin, Katy, on the porch. She went inside and closed the door.

Shorty said, “We need to follow him before he gets too public.”

It didn’t happen quick, and it didn’t go down easy.

Fatty got ahead of us and went into the saloon. I couldn’t go in because he knew me, and Eustace couldn’t because colored weren’t allowed. Shorty would draw too much attention, and Jimmie Sue didn’t care to have it announced she was out running around on her own, lest it bring Steve into play. Hog was neutral and of no help.

“We could talk to the sheriff,” I said.

“We could,” Eustace said, “but we won’t. To get money, we have to bring him in ourselves. We point him out, that ain’t the same. The sheriff keeps the money, or at least half of it. I think that’s how it works.”

“I believe you are correct,” said Shorty. “My suggestion is we cross into that bit of woods there and keep our eyes on the saloon, wait for Fatty to leave.”

“He could be in there all day,” Jimmie Sue said.

“It has to close sometime,” I said.

“It don’t,” she said. “It’s open round the clock.”

“And I can’t just sit around,” I said. “Lula is out there with those men, and no telling what all has been done to her. I’ll go in and get him if I have to. I don’t give a bird crap if he recognizes me or not.”

“He might make short work of you,” Shorty said. “Or you might accidentally kill him, though that is less likely. What is more likely is that you will be found somewhere out back of one of these establishments with a knife in your ass. If you die and you still have the land papers on you and I can learn to forge your name, things might work out. I do not wish to take that chance, however. So do not damage our plans.”

“You call what we’ve been doing planned?” I said.

“I admit our tactics have been flexible,” Shorty said. “But there is indeed a plan buried in our actions somewhere.”

“Well, then,” Eustace said. “That narrows it down. We got to go in the saloon and get him. We got to go in and be out before they can figure I’m black and you’re short and so on.”

“An unlikely variation on our highly variable plan,” Shorty said.

Right then I looked down the alley between the livery and the saloon and saw Fatty out back, practically waddling off toward an outdoor convenience, tugging his hat down tight over his head as he went.

“There he is,” I said.

“Betrayed by his natural need to piss or shit,” Shorty said.

Fatty went inside the outhouse and closed the door.

“Ain’t no need in all of us going,” Eustace said. “Y’all go on back to the shack, and I’ll fetch him.”

Before anyone could respond yes or no, Eustace was crossing the street, carrying his four-gauge, Hog following.

“I would not want to be that fat man,” said Shorty.

“Aren’t we supposed to go to the shack?” I said.

“We are,” said Shorty. “But frankly, I like to watch Eustace work.”

Eustace walked briskly through the alley and came to the outhouse. Hog sat down, waiting, as if this was something he had gone through before.

Eustace swung the shotgun, used the butt of it to hit that door as hard as a buffalo stampede. The door flew back off its hinges, and there was Fatty, squatting on the drop hole. Eustace grabbed him by the front of his shirt and jerked him out of the toilet, Fatty’s bare ass flashing in the last of the day’s sunlight. Fatty’s shirt ripped partly away in Eustace’s hands. Fatty yelled out, “Get away from me, you crazy nigger,” and then the stock of that shotgun caught Fatty upside the head and he was out.

Eustace picked up Fatty and slung him over his shoulder like he was a bit of wet wash, and came carrying him across the street, Fatty’s bare ass shining to the world. Let me tell you, Fatty was a big one, and for anyone to do what Eustace done, it was a feat not too unlike that of Hercules.

Hog ran out in front of them, ran ahead of them like an escort.

O
ddly enough, no one seemed to notice a big black man carrying a fat white man with his ass hanging out and a large wild hog in tow.

Eustace crossed the road, toted Fatty to the shack across from the whorehouse, hauled him into the back room, and dumped him on the floor. He pulled one of the chairs from the front room in there and boosted Fatty into it. Shorty tied Fatty to it with four bandannas that Eustace pulled out of his pocket. Hog sat and watched Shorty tie Fatty down. He was well focused on what we were doing, as if he were learning to tie knots.

Shorty pulled out a handkerchief, which he let us know contained a goodly portion of his snot, and stuck it in Fatty’s mouth. Fatty still had his pants partway down, and he didn’t have any shorts on underneath, so it wasn’t a pretty sight. And though I knew Jimmie Sue had seen such things on a regular basis, I asked if she’d leave the room, and she did.

Shorty slapped Fatty a little, trying to bring him around, but he didn’t snap to. Shorty said, “You hit him hard, Eustace.”

“I thought it a damn good idea at the time.”

“Well, you may have moved his brain around to the point that he thinks he ought to be walking ass-backwards everywhere he goes.”

“It was a solid lick,” Eustace said. “Now, wait a minute, look there. He’s coming around.”

“Watch that he don’t kick at you,” I said. “He has blades in the toes of his boots.”

“He can’t kick shit with his feet tied,” Eustace said.

“I just wanted you to know those blades are there,” I said.

Fatty moaned, tried to spit out the handkerchief, but Shorty poked it in deeper. He said, “Listen here, fat ass. I am going to remove the handkerchief, but if you call out, I will have Eustace here hit you again with the butt of his shotgun.”

Eustace grinned and held up the shotgun to show how possible that threat was.

“Now, if you believe in your little black heart that you can stay quiet, I will yank out the handkerchief. Just nod if you agree. You can shake your head no as well, but when you do you will get the shotgun stock between the eyes.”

Fatty nodded, and Shorty removed the handkerchief. Fatty focused on me for the first time. He was still ugly, his mouth sucked in due to lack of teeth. He spoke in a way that sounded as if he were trying to eat his words. “You, Red. What you doing here?”

“What do you think?” I said. “I’m looking for my sister.”

“Well, she’s done been spoiled, you know,” he said.

“She’s not an apple,” I said. “She is not spoiled.”

“Call it how you like,” Fatty said. “She’s been plowed pretty good.”

That went all over me, but I gathered myself. “I still want her back.”

“One thing for her,” said Fatty. “She’s good and broke in by now.”

“Eustace,” said Shorty.

Eustace stepped forward, popped Fatty between the eyes with the shotgun butt. “What the hell?” Fatty said. “That hurt.”

“No shit,” Eustace said.

“That was a well-contained strike,” Shorty said. “Am I right, Eustace?”

“If you mean I held back a good bit, I reckon so,” Eustace said.

“That is precisely what I meant.”

“All right, then,” Eustace said. “That’s right.”

Fatty lifted his head, said to me, “Where’d you get this sawed-off piece of shit and the nigger?”

“We came by mail,” Shorty said. “From the Sears and Roebuck. We have our photos in the back. You can order us. I come mad, and so does Eustace. The whore may or may not be listed.”

“I know her,” Fatty said. “She thinks she’s too good to fuck me.”

“Actually, I can see how that might be a common conclusion among women, and that somehow explains why it is necessary for a cousin to take mercy on you,” Shorty said. “Here is the situation. I am going to ask you a series of simple questions, and in between questions, I am going to pistol-whip you. My thought is that when I finish it will be difficult for your hat to fit. Even if you answer the questions I am going to pistol-whip you. The reason for this is simple. It is to help you understand that I intend to pistol-whip you even more severely if I do not get answers. I may ask Eustace here to see if he can make your brains leak out your nose if you should in any way hesitate to lay out what we need to know.”

“I get a beating I talk and one if I don’t,” Fatty said. “That don’t make no sense.”

“You will receive a beating, as you call it, that is true,” Shorty said. “But that is merely to show you we mean business.”

“What if I just take it on faith that you mean business?” Fatty said.

“I am not much on faith, to tell it true,” Shorty said. “But I think if you take a beating and know it will be worse and more constant if you hesitate to lay out the facts we want to know, you might be more inclined to give us what would like revealed more quickly. When you answer directly, and if I believe you—this will, of course, be my judgment call—I stop hitting you with my pistol. Do you have any teeth left in your mouth?”

“What?” Fatty said.

Shorty said, “I believe you heard me.” Shorty took off his coat and pulled out his pistol and held it down by the side of his leg. “I will not repeat the question.”

“A few,” said Fatty, and from the look on his face it was obvious he was confused as to Shorty’s line of questioning. So was I.

“Which side are they on?” Shorty asked.

“Both sides,” Fatty said.

“Exactly where?”

I could see Fatty was growing even more nervous.

“Why do you want to know?” said Fatty.

That’s when Shorty’s pistol fanned alongside Fatty’s head with a smacking sound.

“Goddamn,” Fatty said, jerking his head aside.

“Do you really need to do that?” I said.

“Listen to that boy,” Fatty said. “He’s got some of God’s mercy in him.”

“True, he does,” Shorty said. “I do not.”

Shorty slammed the barrel of the gun down on Fatty’s parts, which were laid out on the chair like a stumpy sausage and two potatoes. Fatty screamed, his head nodded forward, and a bit of whatever he had been drinking in the saloon came out and splashed on the floor.

Hog, finding this all too much, got up and left the room and, for that matter, left the shack.

“Even a hog won’t taste your leavings,” said Eustace. “And I’ve seen him eat shit.”

“Shorty,” I said. “For the love of God.”

Shorty turned to me. “Jack. You be about your business, and I will be about mine.”

“I don’t have any business,” I said, though I won’t go on and lie. I liked that Shorty had given me a chance to leave the room. It was all I could do not to tremble. I hadn’t considered the possibility of anything like this. I had seen myself at the head of a noble rescue, assisted by a capable tracker and a bounty hunter. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to me the meanness it all might sprout. I wasn’t at the head of anything, and the tracker was someone who lost the trail, and the bounty hunter was an angry midget with a revolver. I didn’t like it, and I wanted to stop it, but I determined myself to remain steadfast for Lula’s sake.

“Find some business,” Shorty said, “and close the door on your way out. Fatty, try not to yell real loud. Louder you yell, the worse it will go for you.”

“You little bastard,” Fatty said, but there wasn’t any real enthusiasm in it, and he was already bringing his voice down a few notches.

I went out and closed the door, my hand trembling on the knob. I glanced at Jimmie Sue. She was sitting on the couch looking at me like a wild animal with her foot in a trap.

“What are they doing in there?”

“Remember when I said they meant to interrogate him and that meant they were going to pistol-whip the shit out of him?”

She nodded.

“That’s the sum of it,” I said. “And I believe Fatty is about to lose some teeth.”

“He has some?” she said, and at that very moment we heard Fatty let out with a scream.

“I think that was one or two of the ones left,” I said.

“Take it and like it and be quiet about it,” I heard Shorty say on the other side of the door. “You talk when I ask a question. Not any other time.”

Then came Fatty’s voice, his lips sucking into what I was sure was now a bloody mouth. “Then ask a goddamn question.”

I said to Jimmie Sue, “Why don’t you and me go outside careful-like, away from this?”

“I don’t mind hearing it,” she said. “It don’t bother me.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, “it bothers me.”

I looked out the door and saw the whorehouse door was still open, but it wasn’t open so wide I felt I could be easily seen. I went on out, started around the side of the old house.

Jimmie Sue caught up with me.

“I’ll come with you anyway,” she said.

Behind the house I could still hear the pistol hitting Fatty, and I could hear him grunt, trying to keep the pain inside, trying not to yell.

“You’re kind of softhearted, ain’t you, Jack?” Jimmie Sue said.

“Reckon so,” I said.

“For me, I guess it depends,” Jimmie Sue said. “My father was a preacher, which is why I sort of took to your old grandpa.”

“I don’t want to hear about it,” I said.

“Ah, it ain’t nothing,” she said.

“It’s something to me.”

We sat on a big stump near where the woods were broke up from tree chopping and burning. I thought about how large that tree had been and how little it had been to the men who cut it down and took its years and sawed them up and put them on a fire. Not for warmth or lumber in this case, just for space. We seemed to always be needing space. Lumbermen wanted certain trees and they didn’t care about the others, and those just went to hell in sawdust and smoke.

I knew right then, if it wasn’t for my sister being out there with those men, I’d have just gone and walked on out of there and been done with the whole lot of them, including Jimmie Sue. But those men did have her. And they had done things to her. The thought made me sick, small like she was, and afraid, and with no one there to help her. I couldn’t hardly stand the thought. But I had to.

“Hear that?” Jimmie Sue said. “They’re really beating the hell out of him.”

“I hear it,” I said.

“Sorry,” she said. “It’s just I’m thinking about your sister and it brings to mind what was done to me, and how I come to be sitting right here with you, having met you in a whorehouse. You think I grew up thinking I’d like to be a whore? That fat bastard groaning and such is music to my ears. I remember the first time I had men on me. It wasn’t by choice, and they worked me over good. Steve told me after he picked me up at the depot how special I was, and then I ended up here. He had a bunch of men take me and have their way. He said they was ‘breaking me in.’”

“Horrible,” was all I could say.

“Yeah. It wasn’t something I’d wish on anyone. And now that I know some of the same kind of men have had their way with your sister, I don’t feel the least bit bad for that porky son of a bitch. They find out where she is, then it was all worth it.”

“I suppose,” I said. “I guess I have to think that way.”

“Ain’t no other way to think, Jack. You either want her back or you don’t.”

“I want her back,” I said.

“She ain’t gonna be just like she was. You know that.”

“I reckon she can get over it. If you did, I reckon she can.”

Jimmie Sue lifted her head and looked at me. Her eyes narrowed, and she looked much older all of a sudden. “Who said I got over it?”