The Thicket (15 page)

“He thinks he owns this goddamn place,” the sheriff said.

“You want your trash carried out this week, and that chamber pot full of what I figure is your shit,” said a voice from behind the door, “you better treat me a little more special.”

“Goddamn nigger has ears like a coyote,” the sheriff said.

“You can be sure of that,” came Spot’s voice again. The sheriff sat silent, and after a while he got up and went to the back door and peeked out. “He’s gone,” he said. He looked at Eustace. “I didn’t mean nothing by that nigger remark.”

“Hell, I know that,” Eustace said. “We been in enough tight spots together for me to know that. You don’t got to explain yourself. What you got to do is give us our reward money.”

The sheriff turned crafty. You could see that craftiness light on him like a bird. His mouth twisted, and he showed his teeth, and even with his face like it was that smile lit him up and gave him a friendly look. The kind of friendly that makes you put a hand on your wallet.

“You know we got to fill out papers, send them in, and wait,” the sheriff said.

“Sooner they are filled out,” Shorty said, “the sooner the proper items will be in the mail and we can await reasonable return. Though we will have to leave for a while and come back through for it.”

The sheriff nodded at Fatty in the cell. “How’d he manage to get all marked up like that?”

“He resisted while we had him tied securely to a chair and beat him with a pistol,” Shorty said.

“And a shotgun stock,” Eustace said.

That made the sheriff laugh.

“We told him to stay put,” said Eustace, “but he kept falling out of the chair. And he was tied to it.”

“Uh-huh,” said the sheriff. “I seen him around before, but I ain’t got no paper on him.”

“He robbed the bank just the other day,” Eustace said. “It’s gonna take a while for the bulletin to show up. Wouldn’t surprise me none, though, to find out there’s already some kind of paper on him. What we’d like to do is get those reward papers filled out, then we can be on our merry way. When we come back you might have some merry money waiting for us.”

“You’re going after them others Red told me about?” the sheriff said.

“My name is Jack,” I said.

“What I said. Red.”

I gave up after that.

“That is our plan,” Shorty said. “Track them down, bring them back. One way or the other. File claims on them, receive the reward money. Simple, really.”

“Y’all get killed, don’t come back,” said the sheriff. “I got them papers sent in, then who is that money going to? Maybe I should wait till you come back with the others before we mark up the forms.”

“We will come back,” Shorty said. “And if we do not, we can make someone out as the beneficiary.”

“Would he be someone we know?” the sheriff said.

“It could very well be someone in this room,” Shorty said.

The sheriff considered on this for a moment by leaning back in his chair and looking at a large, dark water spot on the ceiling. The ceiling sagged there, and pretty soon a good rain was going to break it through. It was right over his desk. It was like that sword of Damocles you hear about, and one day it was going to fall. Well, the sheriff sat there for some time looking at that water spot, and pretty soon all of us, except Hog, who had drifted off to sleep, were looking at that spot as if waiting for it to take on the shape of Jesus.

Finally the sheriff got up, went to the telephone. He took a little cone off of a hook, took hold of a crank jutting out of it, and went to work squirreling it around. He’d come up on the toes of his boots each time he took the crank high, and then settle on his heels as the crank come down. Finally he quit cranking and started yelling at somebody in the phone as if they were standing across the street and he was in his doorway.

After a moment he listened, and then said, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. No goddamn shit. We’ll, I’ll be set on fire, and in fact I have been before.” He laughed at his own joke, said a few more uh-huhs, and hung up. He went back to his desk. “I called the doctor’s office over in Hinge Gate. Only one I know there has a phone. He said the bank was robbed.”

“Now, ain’t that a surprise?” Eustace said. “We done told you that.”

“I got some descriptions of the robbers, and that there fella does seem to fit the description of one of them, except they didn’t mention all them bruises and red marks.”

The sheriff grinned when he said that.

“So are we going to receive the financial reward or not?” Shorty said.

The sheriff dug around in his desk drawer and came up with some papers. Shorty dropped out of his chair, waddled over to the desk, and began filling them out with a feather pen that he dipped into a little bottle of ink that the sheriff had taken out of a drawer and placed on his desk.

“They have a thing now called a fountain pen,” Shorty said. “You should get you one.”

“Naw,” the sheriff said. “I’m all right. I don’t like change. That phone and the two or three places it connects around here are too much. Besides, I was thinking you fellas, and the young lady with the cat in the tree, are heading out after them others pretty quick, and since I’m thinking about going with you, I don’t need to fill out the papers.”

Shorty stopped writing while the sheriff’s words sank in. “Wait a moment. You are not a bounty hunter anymore, Winton. Why would you be going?”

“I’m a goddamn sheriff,” he said. “You might need someone along like me.”

“If you were to go with us,” Shorty said, “might your prisoner in there starve to death?”

“Ha,” the sheriff said. “I got me a deputy. He’s out getting me and him lunch right now. There won’t be enough to share, by the way. We just got enough for ourselves.”

“Ain’t nobody asking for none,” Eustace said.

“Problem solved,” the sheriff said.

“Look here, Winton,” Shorty said. “You do not have jurisdiction where we are going.”

“Oh, I don’t think it really matters, do you?” the sheriff said.

“I believe that is how the law works,” Shorty said. “You might want to read it sometime, as it is the sound basis for your job.”

“It gets in the way of my arrests,” the sheriff said. “I like to think for myself, not let the law get all mixed up in it.”

“That is our liberty, not yours,” Shorty said. “You have an obligation to the law. We do not.”

“I think I can take that liberty, I want to,” said the sheriff. “I was thinking I could ride along, and we could split the money five ways. I say five because I assume Hog is not receiving a share. Four is already a good bite into it, so how would one more hurt? That way no one makes much, but we all make something.”

“The girl is not receiving one red penny,” Shorty said. “She is merely along for decoration, and as a sometime saddle mount for the kid.”

“Hey,” said Jimmie Sue.

“You don’t have no call to talk to her like that,” I said.

“Perhaps not,” said Shorty. “But that is exactly how I am talking, is it not?”

Feeling Jimmie Sue had been insulted, I stood up. Jimmie Sue nabbed my pants leg with her thumb and forefinger and tugged. I paid it no mind. I said, “I’ve had just about enough of you, sir. First you have been rude to me and insulted my religion, and now you have insulted Jimmie Sue, who has been most kind to me.”

“For four bits,” Shorty said.

“That’s enough of that,” I said.

“To get it straight,” Eustace said, “that was my four bits.”

“Listen here, kid,” Shorty said. “If you think it has come time for you to kick the midget around the room, I assure you I will climb you like a chipmuk, land on your head like a ton of fat bricks, and drop you all the way to the bottom of hell. But if you feel the bear is in you, come ahead.”

I clenched and unclenched my fists.

Jimmie Sue, as if he had insulted someone other than her, and then me for taking up for her, said, “What’s a chipmunk?”

Eustace said to me, “I think we should stay on friendly terms, cousin, and the best way for that to happen is for you to sit your ass down before Shorty tunnels up your butt and comes out your ear.”

I didn’t like it, but the truth was, they were all I had. Besides, looking at Shorty, I saw that he was indeed ready to climb me. I had seen him about that business earlier with the chicken fighter and wanted no part of it. Still, I felt that to sit down and say nothing in front of Jimmie Sue might scar me in her eyes. I was about to say something smart when Jimmie Sue tugged at my pants again, said, “You want to find your sister, don’t you?”

I looked at her, nodded, and sat down.

She whispered in my ear. “What’s a chipmunk?”

“Kind of like a squirrel, I think. They got them out west, I figure. It really matters to you?”

“I like to be up on things,” she said.

“Well, then,” the sheriff said. “Now that it’s been determined that the girl don’t get a bite out of things and the boy has sat down, you can count me in, can’t you?”

“I hate all you sons a bitches,” came Fatty’s voice.

We looked over at him. He had gotten up and was sitting on the cot.

“You shut up in there,” the sheriff said. “Or I’ll wash your mouth out with soap.”

“I heard what you said about someone robbing a bank,” Fatty said. “But it wasn’t me.”

“Oh, yeah, it was,” Eustace said.

Fatty didn’t argue. He just sat on the cot with his head hung.

About that time the front door opened and a man with a clean white hat sitting high on his head came in. He was wearing a gun slung low on his hip and tied down with cord against his leg. The holster tipped forward a little, and the butt of the gun was oversized for good gripping. The man himself had a fresh-scrubbed, pink face marked with shaving nicks. He had stuck bits of brown paper to them to soak up the blood. He was wide-eyed and had plenty of straw-blond hair poking out from under his hat. He was a little chubby, and his feet seemed small in his boots. They kind of sloshed when he walked.

He saw Fatty behind the cage, sitting on the cot. He closed the door and went over there. “Why, look at him,” he said. “He looks like he’s been dragged through a patch of prickly pears.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Fatty said.

“Who is that in there?” said the young man.

“That there is a bank robber, a kidnapper, and probably a rapist,” said the sheriff. Then to us, he said, “This here, gentlemen, is my deputy, Harlis.”

Harlis turned around and looked at us, said, “You got a big hog lying on the floor there.”

“You noticed that, did you?” said the sheriff. “Stay away from him. Don’t let his snoozing mislead you. He’ll take right away to your nut sack.”

“I wasn’t gonna pet him,” Harlis said.

“You do, you might just draw back a nub,” Eustace said.

Deputy Harlis had already turned his attention back to Fatty. “You’re behind bars, ain’t you?”

“This is one smart fella, now, ain’t he?” Fatty said.

“Nothing gets by him,” the sheriff said. “There ain’t a fly he don’t notice.”

“You’re a fat one, ain’t you?” said Deputy Harlis.

“Like you’re some kind of stretched-out rag,” Fatty said.

“I’m big-boned,” Deputy Harlis said. “All my family are big-boned.”

“I think what it is,” Fatty says, “is you and your whole damn family, right down to your hound-dog-fucking grandma, are fat like me.”

“Give me them keys,” Deputy Harlis said. “I’m gonna whop him some.”

“Forget it,” the sheriff said.

“You ever watch your old hound dog mount your grandma?” Fatty said. “You ever do that?”

“I’m gonna find something and hit you with it,” Deputy Harlis said. He drew his pistol quick-like. But not as quick as the sheriff picked the biscuit from his plate and threw it, hitting Deputy Harlis on his right cheek.

When that biscuit struck, it sounded like when Papa used to take a hammer to a cow’s skull at slaughter time. Deputy Harlis stumbled, looked at the sheriff. “Damn, Winton. That hurt. You could have broke something.”

“With a goddamn biscuit?” the sheriff said.

“Café cooks them up hard from the start,” Deputy Harlis said, holstering his gun. “They sit awhile they might as well be a rock.”

“You’ll live,” said the sheriff. “You’re gonna be in charge here for a spell, as I’m gonna be leaving, and you will not pistol-whip or hurt the prisoner unless I say so. He’s already had a good thrashing as it is.”

“Oh, hell,” Shorty said. “There it is. Winton is definitely going with us.”

“That’s right,” the sheriff said. “Just to see things are done right.”

“Oh,” said Shorty. “That is a relief.”

Deputy Harlis had finally fixed his eyeballs on Shorty, and as he looked at him, his mouth slowly came open. “I thought you was some kid sitting there.”

“That there,” the sheriff said, “is what you call a bona fide goddamn midget, Harlis, you fucking ignoramus. Why the hell would I have a kid sitting in a chair there? This ain’t no barber shop. Damn, boy. I think Fatty might be right about that hound dog, only it wasn’t your grandma, it was your mama, and you are the result.”

Eustace said, “Tell you what, Winton. Just so we know, why don’t you toss a stick and see if he fetches?”

N
ow, Shorty didn’t agree to let Sheriff Winton go right away, no matter if Winton said he was, but I was beginning to see the handwriting on the wall. Shorty was wearing down. I think it was because the sheriff was suggesting the papers for our reward might get misplaced, or someone else might get the credit for bringing Fatty in. Someone like the sheriff, which I figured would take some hard believing on the part of anyone who knew him, as I had him figured for quite the layabout.

I am going to add right here that I would be well proved wrong on this, but right then there wasn’t much to see in him other than the fact he looked like he’d been through a fire and someone tried to put it out with a dull hatchet.

Finally Shorty gave in. As I said, I think it had to do with him thinking he might not get anything without the sheriff’s proper help, but also I could tell they were actually right smart friends and trusted one another, at least as far as they could throw each other. I figured the sheriff might be able to throw Shorty pretty far, by the way. And there was Eustace, who wouldn’t easily be thrown if he cooperated and there was plenty of assistance. He was friends with that old burnt-up sheriff, too.

Pretty soon they were discussing how many there were that we were after, and then Sheriff Winton afforded there were probably a damn sight more of them that needed arresting for bounty than we were looking for. He said the whole woods was full of them, thick as seed ticks, and they had done all manner of crimes, and if we just shot them as we come to them, we could have a regular nest of dead folks that would generate a passel of dollars. He thought we might need a couple to three pack horses to tote them out.

I said, “Sheriff, there’s a dead boy in a ditch that’s maybe part eaten by Hog, and he needs a proper burial.”

“Oh, yeah,” Shorty said. “The young one here has been agitated to a remarkable degree ever since we found the dead boy, and he cannot quite get into his head that the boy will get no deader.”

The part about the dead boy had been left out of my story previously, but now Shorty explained it. When he was finished, the sheriff said, “Now, that does present a problem, but I figure I can get someone to go out there and see if they can find him and box him up and bury him with the understanding he might have to be dug up and buried again, once it’s figured who he belongs to.”

“He needs digging up,” Eustace said, “I can do that for a fee. I ain’t got time to go get him and put him down, though.”

“We’ll find someone,” the sheriff said.

“Does that please you?” Shorty asked me.

“Once I know for a fact it’ll be done,” I said, “I’ll be covered with contentment.”

After the papers were filled out, coffee was made, but no matter how hard I tried to get them into a mode of haste, nothing came of it. I said, “We should move on. Time is wasting and my sister is with them, and maybe not doing well.”

“If they’ve already gotten the cherry from the box,” said the sheriff, “then she is as well off as she is going to be.”

“What the heck does that mean?” I said.

“If they’ve been at her,” the sheriff said, “then they’ve had their fun, and if they don’t want her anymore she’ll be found dead as that boy back there you said Hog was nosing at. But if they liked her well enough and she didn’t scratch out no one’s eye, then they probably kept her. Which means she’s alive and with them.”

“They could change their minds,” I said. “They could decide to kill her now or tomorrow, so we ought to get.”

“Since you got information where they’re going, we got just as much of a chance of finding her tomorrow as today.”

“She’s gonna do laundry,” Fatty said.

He was standing up now, looking through the bars.

“Laundry?” I said.

“We first had an old woman done it,” he said. “Someone’s mother that we passed around between washings, but one night she run off, so we got this part-Indian gal, but she tried to stick Cut Throat with a butcher knife, and he stove her head in with a stick of firewood. That caused the laundry to pile up. He don’t like doing laundry, likes to have a woman do it. You better hope, son, your sister knows how to do laundry, cause if she don’t, once they get her to the Thicket, she ain’t gonna last any longer than it takes for a tear to dry.”

“Don’t pay him no mind,” Eustace said. “He was so smart and knew everything, he wouldn’t be in that goddamn jail having been pistol-whipped by a midget. Now, you think on that.”

The sheriff made plans with Harlis to see someone was sent for the boy’s body, then he said he was going to throw some things together and off we could go. A short while later Eustace took the dead chickens out of his saddlebag and fed them to Hog, who gobbled them up as easily as a toothless man might eat a wet biscuit.

“I didn’t want them to waste, and I figured he’s hungry as us,” Eustace said. “I was going to fry them up for us tonight, but I reckon in all this heat they might be on the spoiled side. I had an uncle ate a chicken that had gone a little ripe, and he said he had a fever and felt like he was trying to shit an anvil for a week. A hog, though, if there’s enough gravy on it, can eat an anvil. Chickens don’t need no gravy.”

We watched Hog eat and cough feathers while Shorty and the others finished getting their stuff together—all but Jimmie Sue, who stood with us and watched the eating of the chickens.

“He likes them with the feathers on?” she asked.

“He likes them in tar with a stick up their butt,” Eustace said. “He don’t have a picky bone in his body about food, though he doesn’t much care for the smell of fresh-cut hay, which I can’t ponder a reason to. It causes him to move on. I think it makes his nose stuffy.”

When Hog finished, he made a coughing noise, then spat up some chicken bones and feathers and something that didn’t look like anything we had seen him eat. That coughing up of his meal seemed to be our signal, and we mounted up and set out. The deputy had said he would like to go, too, but Shorty threatened to kill him, and Harlis appeared to believe him. I know I did.

What we were trying to do was cut a trail that would get us where Fatty said his comrades were, and I kept wondering if he was telling it true or if we were on a wild goose chase. Shorty felt certain he and his pistol and the butt of Eustace’s shotgun had helped Fatty be accurate in his directions, but I was still unconvinced.

We went along until night came, and by then we were deep down the trail that led through the woods and was supposed to be a shortcut. I was heartened a bit when Sheriff Winton said he knew the path and claimed he had a pretty good idea where Fatty was talking about. He said it was a place where a lot of the bad and the unwashed gathered, as if the sheriff himself were any example of fine grooming. I made sure I didn’t ride behind him, because when I did, and there was a wind blowing back at me, I got about what I figured to be a few months’ body stink, some rancid hair oil, and some onion-stink breath, not to mention the pack horse he was tagging behind him was about the foulest-stinking creature I have ever encountered, way it cut wind and dropped turds. Compared to them, Hog’s stench was even refreshing.

I looked over at Jimmie Sue, and she was fanning herself. I couldn’t help but wonder how she had dealt with him as a customer. Later I would ask when we took a stop for the horses to blow, and she’d say she put a lot of smell-pretty on him, which I reckon was some kind of perfume.

But at this time we rode up past him, found position near Eustace and Shorty, placing us upwind of the stink. Still, it didn’t improve my spirits all that much. By the time night come falling in through the timber I was about as low as I had been since Lula was stolen away and Grandpa was killed. Fact was, I felt so low I could have crawled under a peanut hull and called it home.

We stopped now and then to make water in the bushes—or, as I said earlier, to let the horses blow, but mostly we rode on. We went along a little ways even after night, cause the trail was clear and there was some moonlight and the stars were as bright as candles. But finally we stopped and put together a rough camp. It was hot weather, even at night, but we made a rope line for the horses, built a fire and heated up some beans with weevils in it, and, disgusting as it was, for a few moments with hot food in my belly, I felt better about things. We sat around the fire and I amused myself by pushing a small log I had chopped up for firewood into the flames. When I did this the fire would crackle and there would be a few sparks, but nothing serious enough to catch the woods on fire. There were lots of fireflies out, and they glowed their tails all around us. Once I looked over at Shorty, and he had a halo of the things around his hat. The minute I looked and saw them, it was like they were embarrassed about it and flew off.

While we sat the weather cooled a might, and a wind kicked up. It had a smell about it that was mixed with water and pine needles and forest dirt. It wasn’t a bad smell. It made me think of when me and Lula was kids and we’d dig in the dirt together looking for fishing worms. I could close my eyes and picture us out back of the house near the woods, digging with a shovel or a garden trowel. She would have loved being here in front of the fire, thinking her strange thoughts about the woods and what was in it. Everything to her was a mystery.

I took off my boots and laid out my blanket and crawled under another and let my head rest on my saddle. Jimmie Sue pulled her dress over her head right in front of everyone, kicked off her shoes, and got under the blanket with me. The men didn’t hesitate to turn their heads and look, and I could even hear them breathing heavy. Jimmie Sue wanted to snuggle up, but I wouldn’t have it, not with them others watching. Finally she said, “Suit your ownself,” and turned her butt into me and went to sleep. After about five minutes, Hog come along and nestled on the other side of me, squeezing me up like a sandwich.

Eustace said, “Me and Hog used to be right smart buddies till you came along.”

“That so,” I said.

“That’s so, but you know,” Eustace said and laughed, “I don’t miss his smelly self none.”

“Hog does stink,” Jimmie Sue said, then went silent. After a short spell I could hear her breathing evenly in sleep. Eustace took first watch with his four-gauge, up on a rise between some trees overlooking the trail we had come down, near the tied-out horses.

I eventually drifted off and dreamed. It was one of those dreams that seems to make a lot of sense when you’re having it, but talking about it now, it seems pretty silly and not worth mentioning. When I come out of it, it was still night, and I rolled over and glanced out and seen that Shorty was awake and sitting by the fire, leaning toward it, reading a book. The way the fire popped and waved, it made Shorty’s shadow throw up against the trees, and it was much larger than Shorty.

I watched for a little while, and then weariness took me over and when I awoke it was to Jimmie Sue’s shoe in my ribs.

“They done gone on ahead,” she said.

“What?” I said, sitting up. Jimmie Sue was dressed, wearing some loose pants and a man’s old blue shirt. She had her regular shoes on.

“Where’d you get those clothes?”

“Winton gave them to me. He brought them along in his saddlebag for me. Thought I’d be more comfortable. I am. He said they belonged to some fella got shot and got buried, but not in these pants. They don’t smell the way Winton does. They’re pretty clean.”

“That stands to reason,” I said.

“That they don’t smell?”

“No—that whoever owned those pants didn’t get buried in them. You’re wearing them.”

“Yeah. Winton said that dead fella, his parents put a nice new suit on him that was bought with two pair of pants, and these was left over. Somehow Winton ended up with them after the funeral. And though all that is just as interesting as it can be, Jack, I thought you might be more interested in knowing everyone, including Hog, has gone on without us.”

“Damn them,” I said.

“They ain’t left us for good,” Jimmie Sue said, “just gone on ahead. I know how they’re going. Eustace said he figured you needed a sound rest, since you hadn’t really had a good one in the last day or so.”

“He did, did he?”

“You saying you wasn’t tired?”

“I’m feeling all right,” I said.

“That why didn’t you want to ride me last night?”

“No spurs.”

“That’s funny, Jack. Right firmly hilarious. All them men done seen what I got, or someone who’s got something similar. It wouldn’t have been no big surprise to them.”

“Yeah, but I’m not all that anxious for them to see what I got.”

“I thought we was gonna have fun,” she said.

“This isn’t a holiday,” I said.

“We got to go somewhere and it takes a while, we might as well make the best of it. I mean, I could try and tell funny stories, but as you’ve seen I ain’t as funny as I thought. But I know I’m good at the other, so that seems the right choice, don’t you think?”

While she was talking, I had shook out my boots in case a scorpion had crawled up in them. I put them on, rolled up my bedroll, and went to saddling my horse. Jimmie Sue had hers saddled. She said, “Don’t expect no breakfast in bed or me in your bed if you ain’t willing to do your manly duties.”

“I have duties now?”

“Ain’t we kind of together?”

“Kind of. Yeah.”

“Then you act like it.”

There was really nothing to say. It was like she was a bottle of something with fizz that had been shook up and uncorked, and she wasn’t going to stop talking until her bottle run out.

We got on horseback and Jimmie Sue reached in her saddlebags and pulled out a couple of biscuits. She gave me one. She said, “You ought to kind of suck around it before you bite, cause you might lose some teeth. Woman at the café makes them.”

“One of the biscuits that the sheriff hit Harlis with?”

“Yep,” she said. “And maybe the same batch. Winton gave me some this morning.”

We started out then, sucking on our biscuits, following the trail, going the way Jimmie Sue said to go. I never could do more than get my biscuit to flake a little, and the flake lay in my mouth for a long time like a metal shaving before it was gooey enough to be swallowed.