The Thicket (17 page)

“Now,” said Shorty. “Here is what I am thinking. I am thinking that a big fat man who has been severely pistol-whipped by a midget—that would be me—and a whore who is his cousin but has no considerations about the men she diddles, are back there behind the curtain, listening, and armed with a stolen rifle from the sheriff we have with us outside. And I am also reasonably certain that you are lying to me, and to my good friends here, and this is about to go very bad.”

“For you,” said the bartender. He put one hand behind his back.

“If your hand comes back into view, and it is holding anything other than what you might have dug from your butt crack, I will shoot a hole in you.”

“I don’t believe you got no sheriff outside,” said another of the men at the card table. He was the man who had held charcoal mustache back. He was bony and looked as if his face had once been filled with thorns. He had on a greasy hat, and he pushed it back with one hand so as to see us all better.

“Your belief is in error,” said Shorty.

“We ain’t even got a sheriff around these parts,” another man at the table said. He leaned forward, and I could see his face now. It was just a face under a hat, nothing memorable.

“He is not from here,” said Shorty. “He is from No Enterprise.”

“He’s out of his place, then,” said the man. “He ain’t got no call to do nothing here.”

Shorty nodded. “He does not indeed, if he were worried about legalities and had not turned bounty hunter. And I should also mention that me and the colored gentleman here are also bounty hunters. The kid is looking for his sister, Lula. And if you have seen a young woman who seems to be moving about against her will with any of the aforementioned folks, or with anyone who might be associated with them, you could create considerable goodwill by revealing that information.”

“You talk like you’re one of them cranked-up phonographs,” said the man to my right. “You just go on and on.” He, too, had leaned forward now, and his fingers had wrapped around his pistol handle. There was little light over there, but I could sure see his hand and that pistol, as he was sitting slightly to the side of his table. He was a little guy with an old face.

“So can I assume that no assistance will be forthcoming from any of you in this room?” Shorty said.

No one answered. Shortly let the silence rest. He drank his drink. He said, “Any of you who would like to be left in one piece, you might want to skedaddle, and not out the back door, as the sheriff has my Sharps fifty and he will blow a hole in you if you go that way.”

“There ain’t no sheriff,” said the man who had barked a laugh. “And if you are bounty hunters, ain’t none of you but the nigger look worth his salt, and he ain’t but one man.”

“You are all of one mind and in agreement, then?” said Shorty. “You plan to protect the hardened criminal in the back room at the cost of your lives?”

“I ain’t got nothing for him,” said one of them at the card table, the one who had said nothing up until that point. He got up and left through the front door.

“That explains a lot,” said Shorty. “And now our situation is properly laid out.”

No sooner had those words come out of Shorty’s mouth than the bartender pulled a pistol out from behind him, out of his belt, and Shorty pulled that big Colt fast and swung it around with one hand and shot. I kind of saw the bartender’s head jerk and his brains splatter, but mostly I had my eye on the man to my right, who stood up and fired. A bullet went by me close enough it sounded like a freight train passing. I tugged my pistol, but it hung up in my belt. The man fired another shot, and I got my pistol out, barely remembered to cock it, and fired. I missed. The man fired again and missed. I couldn’t see how he could, close as we were to one another, but he had missed three times and I had missed once. Hog got him. He went under the table, knocking it over, biting a chunk out of the man’s leg, then another, and this time he hung on. The man went back against the wall and started hitting Hog with the pistol. If it bothered Hog I couldn’t note it. I cocked and fired again, and this time I hit him, and he went back against the wall and dropped his pistol and said, “Shit,” and then Hog went to work on him. The man screamed a lot, and Hog grunted a lot and squealed a few times, but not in pain. Hog was feeling pleasurable.

I turned and looked at the three men at the table. They hadn’t moved. It’s like they had been flies stuck in molasses.

“Now, keep it like that,” said Eustace, speaking to them.

The curtain at the back parted. A rifle barrel poked through. Shorty fired at it. The shot sent the rifle winding, and we heard running in the room and a back door being thrown open, and then there was a scuttling sound and the roar of that big Sharps .50, and then it was followed by a couple of snaps from a pistol.

A woman’s voice, Katy, I’m sure, yelled out, “Shit on a goose,” and then went silent.

Shorty leaped down off the plank and strode over to the man I had shot. Hog had him by the ankle now and was jerking his head from side to side, causing the man to knock over chairs and the table, and he was banging the man’s head against the wall when he slung him back. Shorty said, “Hog, that will be enough.”

Hog let him go, reluctantly. It was easy to see the man was bad off. He had gotten hold of his gun again, but he didn’t look strong enough to lift it, bleeding from hog bites and a pistol shot as he was. I could see now that Hog had got him in the face, too, and had chewed off an ear and part of his nose. The only career he had left was working in the circus.

He looked up at Shorty, wheezing as he did. He acted as if he would like to lift the pistol, but it was just too much for him. He quit trying. He kept wheezing and looking at Shorty. Shorty shot him between the eyes. It was quick and it was cold-blooded. I felt light-headed.

Eustace had darted through the curtains and into the back room while I held my pistol on the men at the table, the hammer cocked and ready. Shorty joined me with his gun pointed at them.

“Nice night, is it not?” Shorty said.

Eustace came back carrying the rifle Shorty had shot out of the hands of someone back there; I had a pretty good idea who. “Back door is open, but I ain’t going out of it. I figure Winton has reloaded the Sharps by now and I wouldn’t want him or Jimmie Sue to mistake me for someone I ain’t.”

“Absolutely,” Shorty said.

We all started moving toward the front door. Eustace said, “If any of you men are wanted, we don’t know of it, and the sheriff doesn’t have papers on you. But you want to talk about where you think the men we’re looking for have gone, though we have a pretty good idea from Fatty himself, we are all ears. Or you can just sit there with your thumbs up your asses and stay out of the way.”

“I ain’t never even liked the idea of no midget,” said charcoal mustache. “Let alone having one in my sight.”

“Now is your time to eliminate one of my ilk,” Shorty said. “If you think you are tall enough.”

The man didn’t move. He seemed to have quickly decided midgets were just fine with him. We went out the front door. My ears were ringing.

“You didn’t need to kill the man I shot,” I said.

“I thought I did,” Shorty said.

“You didn’t need to,” I said.

“Need and want sometimes do not mix well,” said Shorty. “He was bit up good, and your bullet had caught him in the lungs. He was not going to make it. I did him a favor.”

We were talking softly as we backed off the porch and out into what would pass for the yard. There were a number of large stumps out there, and we just stood between them for a while, waiting to see if the sheriff or Jimmie Sue would come around.

I
t was one of them things that looked like it was over, but it wasn’t. There’s a thing about men that is both special and foolish, and that’s pride; I reckon those men at the card table had been overwhelmed with it. They come out then, and I even seen the man who had decided he didn’t want any part of it coming out of the dark, off to the left of the trading post, coming back to set right what I guess he considered cowardice on his part and what I considered common sense.

The men on the porch lined up straight across with their handguns drawn. The other man come up on the porch, stood just to the side of the swing, opposite them other three.

“You do not need to do this,” Shorty said. He sounded calm, like he was just reminding someone to button up their fly.

“I reckon we do,” said the man with the charcoal mustache. “I reckon we can’t have a midget and a nigger and a pissant kid come into a place where we play cards and kill our bartender and whoever that was at the other table. He throwed down with us, so we got to see him as one of us.”

“I saw him that way,” said Shorty.

“It’s just something we can’t let lay,” said the man with the thorn-poked face.

“I understand your position,” said Shorty.

Shorty was still holding his pistol, but he put it in its holster. What the hell was he doing?

Then a man on the porch moved. I don’t even remember which one, and it may have been more than one. When it happened, Eustace swung that shotgun up and let fire with one of the barrels. The men on the porch went away, as if yanked by an invisible hand. The door behind them blew apart in a shatter of splinters and sawdust. The shotgun rode up so high it appeared Eustace had to snatch it down after it was fired. The man at the swing fired his pistol, and Eustace’s hat went sailing. Eustace swung the gun around. The man had already been hit by the wide spread of the shotgun, but when that barrel turned directly on him, even with nothing more than moonlight to see by, I saw his eyes go wide and his mouth fall open. He fired a shot. He didn’t hit anyone. I don’t think he came close.

Eustace cut down with the other barrel and the man came apart and the swing swung up high and slammed against the wall. One of the chains came off one end of it and it dropped down on the porch with a thud.

We stood there a moment, our heads ringing. The sheriff came around on the right of the trading post then. He said, “Don’t nobody shoot me.”

When he got around where we could see him good, he said, “That fat bastard pulled the whore in front of him, and I got her, not him. He run to his horse and rode off.”

“That is unfortunate,” said Shorty.

“How is Katy?” I said.

“Well, she’s alive, but I knocked a hell of a hole in her. Shot went through her, and Fatty took a piece of it, but not so much he couldn’t spring like a frog onto that pinto Katy had been riding. He rode out of here wearing nothing but long johns.”

Shorty walked up on the porch, and I followed him. He lit a match and held it up. There were some pieces of clothes and dripping meat splattered against the wall. It looked like someone had given the side of the trading post a thin coat of barn red then thrown some guts against it. Shorty’s match went dead. He stepped over to where the other man had stood. He lit another match by striking it on the trading-post wall. He held the match and took a look. I gagged a little.

Shorty moved the match along what looked to be a ragged pair of pants that had most of a leg in them. He come to the broken-down swing with the match and stopped.

“Here is one of his balls,” Shorty said. “His hat is here. And something nasty in it. I think it is part of his head, but it could be most anything.”

I stumbled off the porch and over to one of the stumps, sat on it, bent over, and threw up.

“That’s all right, kid,” said Eustace. “Killing folks is messy.”

Out back, Jimmie Sue was on the ground and she had lifted up Katy’s head and had it draped over her knee. When we come up Katy was gasping for air the way a fish out of water will. I noticed she had around her neck the chain with the star on it that belonged to Lula. I knew where she had got that, and though it could have meant Lula was dead as last spring, somehow it made me think of her and feel confident she was alive. There was no reasoning behind that kind of thinking, of course, but the thought run over me and made me warm inside like hot cider.

“She have anything to say?” the sheriff said, looking down at Katy.

“She called Fatty a bastard and a lousy fuck,” Jimmie Sue said.

“I will take her word on both,” said the sheriff.

I went over and bent down and took Katy’s hand. I said, “You have any family you want notified?”

Katy slowly and painfully turned her head and looked at me and smiled, then coughed blood that sprayed all over the front of my shirt; and that was all for her.

Sheriff Winton lit a match and leaned over and held it close to Katy. The match was a flat light in her dead eyes. He said, “I got her right there under the heart. I’m surprised she lasted that long. She had a pistol drawn, so I guess she had it coming, but it was Fatty I was aiming for, and he pulled her in front of him. That’s only the third woman I ever shot in the line of duty, or nearabouts.”

“That necklace,” I said. “That belongs to my sister, Lula. I reckon Fatty gave it to her.”

“That would be like him,” Jimmie Sue said. “He wouldn’t buy nothing he could steal.” Jimmie Sue stood up. The moonlight lit up the wet blood on the knee of her pants, made it look like a greasy spot. “I didn’t like her, but I hate to see her go like that. As for Fatty, I think I shot him once, maybe twice while he was running.”

“He’s got a piece of that Sharps and Jimmie Sue’s shots in him, then,” said the sheriff. “I know that fifty went right through her and into him. It had to have.”

“It would be wise, then, to pursue,” said Shorty. “Even in the dark. Since with those wounds he may be slowed down. Which way did he make his exit?”

Jimmie Sue turned and pointed.

A
s the necklace belonged to Lula, I didn’t hesitate to take it off Katy and put it in my pocket. My plan was to return it to her when we found her, and with a bit of fanfare and a smile. I imagined our reunion in all manner of ways, but it was always a happy one, with us back together and her glad to be home. I hoped I wasn’t fooling myself. I had thought she was pretty silly about a lot of things, but right then I hoped she was still a girl that could look up at the sky and name a star for herself.

It was decided me and Jimmie Sue and Spot would stay at the trading post and bury Katy and the others while Shorty, Eustace, and Sheriff Winton went in pursuit of Fatty. I was not fond of the plan, never liking any idea that might separate me from Shorty and Eustace and give them the chance to strike on out on their own. My little bit of land in my pocket, so to speak, might have been less of an inducement than it once was because they had outlaws they could claim bounty on, and they might prefer that than having to deal with me. I had yet to completely accept them in my camp, and I felt it was the same for them.

Before they left, the sheriff looked around at what was left of the dead, thinking maybe he might recognize somebody, but unless he had a poster with a drawn picture or a photograph of a man’s left nut and some guts, there wasn’t much there to recognize them by.

Inside the trading post he determined that the bartender was someone he had seen and that the man had done some time, but he didn’t know of anything new on him that might claim a reward. The man I had shot and Hog had chewed on wasn’t much to look at, neither. Hog had snuck on in there while we were dealing with Katy out back and had gone to work on the face, getting at the softer parts. Winton talked firm to Hog about getting off the man, but Hog didn’t pay him no mind. Jimmie Sue come in and petted Hog a little behind the ears, got him distracted, and then me and Winton grabbed the fellow by the boots and pulled him to the middle of the floor and got one of the lamps and set it down by him.

“This fella could be my son and I wouldn’t know him, not the way he’s chewed up,” Winton said.

After we had our look, the ones leaving after Fatty took some fresh horses from the remuda out back, left the mule and pack horse, and rode on into the night. As I said, I didn’t like the idea, but I’ll tell you truer than the rising of the sun, I was tuckered out and felt strange and was glad to stay there. My ears still rang, and those dead men were still moving about in my head. I kept thinking about how I had shot that man and he had gone down and Hog had got him. I thought of those men on the porch, how when that four-gauge went off it had knocked them right out of their clothes and into blood-sodden pieces.

We went back inside the trading post and set about relighting some of the lanterns. When the door got knocked off the hinges by the shotgun blast, I swear to you it caused a wind that had blown a couple of the lanterns out, so we needed more light. We went about cleaning the place up so as to give what was left of those men and Katy a Christian burial. There were shovels in the ragtag storage room, along with all manner of goods, and after we had Katy down, I said some words over her I had heard Grandpa say at Mama and Papa’s funeral. We buried the bartender and the partly hog-eaten body of the man I had shot side by side. The rest of those boys were kind of guesswork. Scraping a little here, a little there, trying to decide what was part of a man and what might have been part of one of them animal hides that had been on the wall.

We finally just scraped up what we could and put it in a barrel and buried the barrel. I will admit I didn’t have a lot to say over the grave, but I did say something. I figured even the worst among us deserved a few good words. I said a thing or two about how they must have loved their mamas or a dog and maybe even believed in Jesus. I finished with, “Dust to dust and such,” and we went on about our business, me feeling that in spite of my insincere best wishes, the bunch of them had done gathered up in a wad and gone straight to hell.

When that was all finished, we went back to the storage room and found some food back there—jerked salt pork, beans and flour, and some lard and a few eggs in a box. There was a stove back there and wood for it, and I lit a fire, and before long we had some lard melting in a frying pan. Though I could smell the lard was on the edge of rancid, it wasn’t close enough to scare me. I asked Jimmie Sue if she would cook, and she said she might be a woman but she wasn’t a cook, and she had done told me that. I managed to warm up the salt pork and beans and made some pan-fried cornbread in another pan. It’s an easy thing to make if you know what you’re doing, but if you don’t you just get these hot, fried pieces of corn that taste a little like what I imagine cat mess to taste like if it’s dried up good and salted. I got a bowl and cracked some eggs in it, and none of them was rotten. I put in some cornmeal, and since I didn’t have any milk, which would have been preferred, I used some water I heated on the stove. You heat it, and it mixes in with the cornmeal better. I spooned a bit of lard into the bowl, the hot water helping it break down. There was plenty of cornmeal in sacks, and I used several cups of it and mixed it real smoothe while the water was still hot and spread it out thick on a long pan that I put in the oven when it was good and heated. When the cornbread started to get firm from the heat, I slid that tray out by using a rag, then I slicked the top with more of the lard. When that was done, and the salt pork and beans were simmering, I added some salt and pepper to that, seasoned it all up.

It wasn’t bad. It would have been better with some dandelion greens, but I didn’t want them so much I was willing to go out in the dark and look for them.

We ate till we were full as ticks, then we found some cured bear and deer skins and made ourselves pallets. It occurred to me before we lay down that we had to close and bolt the back door, and since there wasn’t any front door, and one of the two windows that was on the front porch was blown out, it also occurred to me we ought to post a guard at the curtain in case someone came into the place looking for supplies, or someone who was friends with what was left of those men in the holes out back come sniffing around.

But it didn’t work out that way. We got to preparing pallets and talked about posting a guard, but none of us hopped to it. I found a shirt in the trading-post goods that allowed me to get rid of the one with bloodstains, and the next thing I knew we were all asleep. I didn’t know another thing until morning and there was another toe of a boot in my ribs.

It was Shorty. I sat up quick, said, “Did you get him?”

“We did not,” Shorty said. He had found some of my leftover cornbread in the warmer, as had the others. They’d poured up some molasses in a bowl, made a fire in the stove, sat the bowl next to it so the molasses would loosen up. They had a coffeepot on the burner hole. They poured coffee in cups and dipped the cornbread in it and sometimes the molasses while standing there looking at us. They had to have been there a while already, but we were so tired we hadn’t noticed.

“Fatty gave our Natty Bumppo here the slip,” Shorty said.

Eustace listened to all this while he poured from the coffeepot into the bowl of molasses. I knew lots of people liked a bit of coffee in syrup to warm it and make it run so they could sop with cornbread, but I have never cared for it myself. Molasses is too sweet and makes my head hurt when I eat it, and mixing coffee with it didn’t ever appeal to me.

“What?” Jimmie Sue said, having come awake. It was like she had joined a house party about the time everyone would have been putting up the fiddle and looking for their hats.

“He means Eustace didn’t track him,” I said.

“Oh, he tracked him for a while,” Shorty said, turning to look at Eustace.

“Don’t start in on me, you little turd,” Eustace said.

“He was bleeding all over the countryside,” Shorty said. “He was dripping out his life force. He was leaving us a path to follow, and at some point he took to the woods and Eustace lost him. We were still looking when the day broke, but nope, there were no more blood spots, so Eustace’s ability to pursue had gone the way of last year’s south-flying ducks.”

“I know them sons a bitches go south,” Eustace said.

“Yes,” said Shorty. “You are correct. You are acquainted with the set and absolute pattern of ducks, but when it comes to tracking, unless the juice of your prey is lying on the ground he can give you the slip.”

“In all fairness,” said Winton, “it was a good track. When we got down in the creek bed, well, any blood there had gone in the water and had washed along pretty quick. He might be dead a few miles up from where we quit.”

“Why did you quit?” I said.

“Because we thought we should come back for you,” Shorty said.

“That ain’t entirely the truth,” Winton said. “Fatty seemed to be heading off a way we didn’t want to go, a way that wasn’t toward the Big Thicket. He might have been purposely leading us astray, though I think he was unlikely in the frame of mind to do much of anything but get away from us, in any direction he could go. I still think Shorty’s information about them others being down there around Livingston, in the Thicket, is good. We needed to come back here for the other horses, and it occurred to us dead men don’t need theirs, and we might can sell or trade their rigs and mounts for something on down the road.”

“Shorty don’t know shit from wild honey,” Eustace said, the words coming out of him like vomit. “He’s the sort wouldn’t know the difference between the two even if he was a bee.”

Spot had awakened now. He sat up on his bearskin, said, “Is that coffee I smell?”

This distracted the argument, and we ate breakfast, drank our coffee, and gradually the mood shifted. With our bellies full, and with the failed pursuers full of hot coffee, things mellowed considerably.

We packed supplies we figured we needed, got all the horses and made a line of them to follow the ones we were riding, and started out. We had also collected all the guns the men had used and stuffed saddlebags with them. A tow sack had a bunch more guns we had found in the back room—a twelve-gauge pump shotgun, an old Winchester, and a bunch of single-shot squirrel rifles, .22 in caliber. The idea was to sell some of them, keep the rest. I was beginning to get used to breaking the law. Besides, I had a sheriff with me and he was doing it, so I will admit to you, sadly, that I was comforted in my criminal activity.

Riding along, Hog kept running off in the brush and startling birds. I thought of when I was younger and Papa would take me out to shoot quail and doves and the like.

What I remembered wasn’t the pleasantness of those days, me with Papa, but of a time I shot a bird with a single-shot shotgun and how when it fell it had a wing broke off and its beak was open and it was trying to suck in air. I thought it was a good shot, but when I got up closer, the way that bird looked, the pain and confusion in its eyes, and that beak open like that, well, I felt sick, plumb sick to the bone. I stood over that bird looking down, and when Papa came up, I said, “You think we could repair its wing and nurse it back to health?”

He picked up the bird and twisted its neck so that it popped and the bird went still. “Nope,” he said. “He ain’t going to get his wing fixed and he ain’t going to have his health improved.”

This was true. We ate him that night along with several others we had killed. I know those men weren’t nothing like that bird. We darn sure didn’t plan to eat them. So it wasn’t like we were out hunting food. I told myself we did what we had to do, them having guns and an attitude to kill us. But the feeling I had about it was like with that bird, only deeper and sadder and more troubling. I kept seeing Katy, the way her mouth was open, and how that blood came out of it, and her eyes, all pained and confused the way that bird’s had been. I didn’t feel too good about anything right then, even if she had been protecting one of the men who stole my sister from me. I knew that I had in that moment, back at the trading post, crossed some kind of dark divide. No matter what my intent in doing so was, it had done something to me that hurt worse than a beating. I felt farther from Jesus and closer to Satan than I had ever felt before. It was a feeling that made my old fears about jacking off in the outhouse less important. My thinking God was watching me work my weenie over a woman in drawers in the Sears and Roebuck didn’t hold a candle to helping kill a man and watching his life being sucked out, and then having a hog eat chunks out of him.

It must have been around three in the afternoon, way the sun was riding, when we come across that pinto Fatty had escaped on. It was wandering out in the road, and it was limping. Spot got down off his mule and took a look. He said, “The sweat on it is well dried. It’s got a broke foot. Reckon it stepped off in a rabbit hole. It ain’t gonna fix.”

He took one of the rifles we had borrowed from the trading post, loaded it up, walked the horse off in the woods a piece, and after a while we heard a shot. Spot come back.

“That was one fine hoss,” Spot said. “I hated doing that.”

“This means Fatty is around here somewhere, don’t it?” I said.

“It means that or it means he ain’t nowhere around here, and the horse stumbled and throwed him and he ain’t got up, or he did get up and has wandered off somewhere,” Eustace said. “And with the sweat dried on the horse, it means he’s had time to move on a bit. I’m going to take a look around, see if I can pick up some sign.”

Eustace dismounted and tied his horse to a scrub tree.

“Good luck with that looking around,” Shorty said.

“Go fuck yourself,” Eustace said, and went into the woods.

“He is looking for a note in a bottle from Fatty,” Shorty said. “Something along the lines of I am about two miles from here, on the left of a big oak tree, leaning against a dirt mound, and I am dead.”

“Cut him some slack,” Winton said. “He’s doing all right. He followed Fatty in the night better than any of us could.”

“Yes,” said Shorty, “but none of us are supposed to be a tracker. Besides, if I do not ride him, he will become complacent.”