The Thicket (18 page)

“We wouldn’t want none of that complacent shit,” Jimmie Sue said.

We got off and joined Spot on the ground and let the horses blow. It wasn’t more than twenty minutes later that Eustace come out of the woods. His dark face looked ashen as he come up on us.

“There’s a woman down there,” he said. “An old woman and an old man and what I figure must have been their grandchild, a boy. They’re all dead, and the woman has had her dress hiked up and her undergarments pulled off.”

“Ah, shit,” Winton said.

“He must have hijacked them this morning, was hiding out there in the woods waiting for someone to come along the road so he could get a horse he could use. But way it looks, what he came across was that man and woman and child in one of those motorcars. That’s what the tracks show. No horse, but tires. He probably came out of the woods acting like he needed help, killed the man and boy, dragged them off in the woods, and it looks like the woman helped him. Had to, I figure. Now, that would be a thing, wouldn’t it? And then he raped her and shot her in the head and took the motorcar and the old man’s pants and boots.”

“That means he has covered quite a patch of ground, then,” Shorty said. “We have to conclude, however, that if he is in a motorcar, he will continue the straight path, the machine not otherwise being able to travel the same route as a horse or a man on foot. And he is wounded. We have that on our side. Though if he was able to kill and rape, maybe he is not as bad off as we first assumed.”

“Or he is one bear for recovery,” Jimmie Sue said. “Oh, that poor family. A thing like that.”

“We aren’t going anywhere this time,” I said. “Not without us burying those poor people first. For all I know that boy we left had had his bones scattered from East Texas to Nebraska. We will bury these three, and make note of where so their kinfolks can come pluck them out and bury them where they please.”

“You are not one for practicality,” Shorty said. “Even when it is your sister we are trying to rescue.”

“I’ve noted we pause when you like,” I said. “I love Lula, and I want her back, but I have gone far from my Christian training as it is. I won’t go farther.”

“You think burying those unfortunate people is going to make up for killing a murderer?” Shorty said. “Could that be your thinking?”

“It might be,” I said.

“The problem, kid,” Shorty said, “is there is no one on either side of the fence keeping measurements about what you do. God is an idea, and the devil is us.”

“Leave him be, Shorty,” Winton said. “We’ll bury them. We got a fold-out shovel in our goods, and I’ll do the digging. I have to. Like the boy, I’m not for leaving those poor people lying out there in the woods, that woman with her drawers pulled off and her womanhood exposed. The man in his drawers. I won’t do it.”

“You are quite the goddamn gentleman, are you not?” Shorty said to Winton.

“We can take turns with that shovel,” Spot said, and went to pull it out of the packing on one of the horses.

That was the end of Shorty making protests. We went and found them. It was a brutal sight. Yet somehow it soothed me some to think we were about burying these poor innocents, giving them proper respect, and that the ones we had killed were not innocent at all, even if they weren’t the ones who had directly taken Lula. They had no love for womanhood, those men, protecting Fatty and the location of his comrades the way they had. And I had no love for them.

Jimmie Sue collected the woman’s underthings and pulled them back on her, and when the grave was deep—and it took work, there being so many roots up there in the woods—I took hold of the woman’s feet and Spot took her head. I saw then that she was old and worn and had gray hair. She had lived life this long without dying, and her husband had somehow come by the money to buy a motorcar, and it, and their hospitality for a traveler in need, had gotten them killed, nothing more. We put her in the hole and went after the other two. The boy, about nine, I reckoned, had a hole in his forehead from where he was shot, and his eyes and mouth were held in a manner that made me think he had died during a moment of amusement. The old man had taken one in the heart. I never noted the old woman’s wound, and didn’t care to check it out. We lowered them all into that cold, common grave as gently as we could manage.

After that we mounted up and started out, our string of horses tagging along behind us.

H
orses can gallop. Motorcars roll along at a steady rate. The thing is, though, motorcars don’t have to eat and drink and rest, long as there’s gasoline. So the car already had a lead, though even I could see from the tire marks in the road that Fatty was driving all over the place. He had nearly run off the road and into the trees a half dozen times. I was hopeful that would be how it turned out, and we’d find Fatty wrecked beside the road with some of that car stuck in his chest.

I was riding along between Jimmie Sue and Winton. Winton said, “You look pretty sad, kid.”

“I think you’re aware they have my sister,” I said. “I got a right to be sad.”

“So you do, but it seems to me a kind of mood has settled down on you, and I was hoping to cheer you up a little.”

“I don’t understand you people,” I said. “We killed men back there, and you’re riding along like it’s something just comes every morning with breakfast.”

“They pulled on us,” Winton said.

“Yep, they did,” I said. “I’m not denying that. But killing a man ought to mean something, even if you have to do it.”

“It means we didn’t get killed,” Winton said. “And after that, I quit measuring it.”

“Still,” I said.

“They were protecting Fatty, were they not?” Winton said.

“But they were still men, and we killed them. I never shot anyone before.”

“First time or two I did it, I felt a might weak-kneed, too,” Winton said. “But that was on account as to both times I thought it might have been me got shot. It does get a lot easier to do, though, after a time or two. But I tell you, boy, they were bad men. Why, I reckon they weren’t so blowed up from Eustace’s four-gauge I might even have found out there were arrest papers on them somewhere. Even if that isn’t the case, you can bet they are just the type would have stolen your sister theirselves. And let me tell you something. Those men at that trading post, that’s a place for criminal activity. It didn’t cater to good folks.”

“Are we good folks?” I asked.

“Well, now,” Winton said. “If you could lay out who we are on a board side by side with them that was killed, and we took a measurement of the good and the bad in each, and long was bad and short was good, our size might be longer than we’d like but a lot shorter than theirs. Life isn’t just black or white, here or there; it’s got some mud in it, and we’re some of the mud.”

“That doesn’t really cheer me up,” I said.

“Not everything is cheery,” Winton said.

“You said you were trying to cheer me up,” I said.

“All right, I did,” he said. “But you want to do this, and you say it matters to you to get your sister back, you got to be willing to accept what it takes. So maybe I’m not so goddamn cheery after all. I’m missing an ear and I look like I been rolling around in a campfire, and that kind of takes some of my cheer, even when I say it don’t.”

“I just don’t know it takes murder.”

“Self-defense. The three of you tried to walk out after the initial dustup, but they came out on the porch after you, didn’t they?”

“They did,” I said. “But we initiated it.”

“And you knew Fatty was in the back room, didn’t you?”

“I did,” I said.

“Then you did what you had to do, and they’d have done to you what you done to them had they had the chance. To me it’s clear. End of story. I’ll leave you to recollect on events,” Winton said, and rode on ahead of me and Jimmie Sue to join the others.

“He’s right, you know,” Jimmie Sue said. “Just a year ago I kept thinking this ain’t fair, the way things have turned out for me. Then it come to me clean as spring rain. Life is just what it is, and it ain’t fair at all.”

“Can’t we make it fair?”

“You can try, but all that other unfairness keeps seeping in.”

It was near the last of the day when we come upon the motorcar. It was in the yard of a farmhouse. The farmhouse was small but neat, and there were flowers in a bed around the front of the house, and out back was a little red barn, and the door was wide open on it. It was a nice house to be out here in the wilds, and it made me sick before I knew what was what, just knowing someone had worked their way into the Thicket to build and live and make a life of it, clearing trees and planting flowers. But that stolen motorcar parked in the yard didn’t bode well.

We rode up and dismounted, left the horses with Spot, spread out, except Winton. He went up to the door. The door was open. He knocked and called out, but didn’t anyone come to answer.

He pushed the door open with his foot and pulled his revolver and went inside. Shorty and Eustace rushed on up there, and I took the back. After a moment I heard Winton call out. “Come on in. Jimmie Sue, you might want to stay out.”

Jimmie Sue didn’t stay out. We all ended up going inside. There was an old man dead by the fireplace. He had been dead a while, because his blood was hard-dried on his head and the floor. There was a table with food on it and a big pan in the center of the table with cornbread crumbs. I could tell from how light-colored it looked it hadn’t been good cornbread.

“I reckon Fatty run out of petrol,” Winton said. “So he come here and took whatever he wanted, maybe even had a dinner with the old man, then killed him. That’s how it looks. Fella was hospitable, and then Fatty thanked him with a bullet. I figure one of the other things he wanted besides food was a horse. I bet that’s why the barn door’s open.”

Sure enough, the barn was empty, but Eustace found tracks. There was some blood on the ground, too.

“His wound is still open,” Eustace said. “Or he’s broke it open again. One or the other. But there wasn’t any horse in here.”

“Now that he is bleeding,” Shorty said, “perhaps you will be able to pursue him without losing him.”

“Shorty,” Eustace said, “you are close to the end of all that. Quit on it now.”

Shorty must have heard something in Eustace’s voice that told him enough was enough, because it went against his nature to quit on something once he got started. But he gave up on that trail of talk and went silent, though I figured it pained him about as bad as a knife in the ribs.

Back at the house we had to pull the old man off the floor. It sounded like someone ripping a newspaper when we pulled him up. That blood was so hard it had glued him there. We toted him into the room with the bed and put him on it and pulled a blanket over him. Winton wrote out a note telling who he was and what he had found, and who we was on the trail of, and that he was an officer of the law. He stuck that on the outside of the front door with a pocketknife. When we were all outside, I went over and looked in the car. There was a picnic basket in there, and it was empty. I figured that’s where the man and woman and child had been going when Fatty waylaid them—on a picnic. Or maybe they had finished. Whichever, either them or Fatty had eaten what was in the basket, and all that was left was a crumb-covered cloth napkin and some broken dishes.

We left out of there and headed on down the road where Fatty had gone. After a while Eustace determined Fatty had wandered off the main road and taken to the woods. That’s the way we went, and it was a hard go. We come across a piece of Fatty’s long-john shirt that had been caught up on a thorn, and it was bloody. I couldn’t see how a man that big and beat up with a pistol—and shot up, too—could kill all them others and keep going and not fall over dead, or at least not be so weak he couldn’t move. But he was moving on at a steady clip and making us move on after him. I didn’t know about the others in our party, but I knew I was tired, and I could tell from looking at Jimmie Sue she was feeling weary.

It finally came down to stopping because Winton and Eustace thought the horses were failing. I was about to the point where I couldn’t go on, and I was glad those horses were tuckered out. I had told myself from the first that no matter what, I would push on night and day, tirelessly, but what I didn’t reckon on was getting tired. I had the idea, too, that Eustace was tracked out, and that he could only go so far on the trail in the dark. If Shorty thought the same, and I’m sure he did, he didn’t mention it.

There was a clear patch in the woods, and there looked to have been a lightning strike there, and a plot of land had burnt out. The trees were skinny and dead, but the fire had been some time ago. Most of the char had given way to a field of grass between fire-stripped trees. We stopped and took care of the horses, stretched a rope between two scraggly persimmon trees that were somehow alive after the fire, if not real healthy, and tied the horses to the rope. It was as if we were down in a hole with all these big trees on the edge of our patch, and in the night, with the shadows and all, they were like a wall that went all around us.

We built a small fire for cooking, because we didn’t need it for any other purpose. It was a bright night and warm. We cooked and ate and laid out our bedrolls with a plan to leave at first light. Hog wandered off in the woods and found a place to lie down on the pine needles, which I was glad for, since I didn’t want to share my bed with him.

Jimmie Sue had made her bed below what was left of the fire, and some of my religious zeal, which had once held me strong, was starting to rust around the edges. On that night it pretty much could be said it completely collapsed. When I thought everyone was asleep, I got up and crept over to where she was and lifted up the blankets and got under there with her. I nuzzled her ear with my lips, and she come to slowly, said, “Ain’t Jesus going to be mad?”

“Don’t say that,” I said. “It puts me off a mite.”

“I reckon Jesus can forgive if he wants to,” she said. “And if he don’t, then he ain’t near the forgiver he’s made out to be.”

“Now you got to bring up Jesus?” I said.

“You bring him up when he suits you,” she said.

“So he suits you now?”

“I’m just saying I can’t imagine a man, even Jesus, not liking to take his pleasure from time to time. I also like to have my faith when I want it. That way it works. If I think about it too hard I know it’s a lie, but if I just squint at it I’m okay.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Oh, shut up and kiss me,” she said. “And may Jesus give you strength.”

She rolled over then, and we kissed. Her breath was a little stale, and I figured mine was, too. But after we got to smacking I didn’t notice anymore. Pretty soon we were shedding our clothes under her blankets. We went at it until the moon had gone down and it was near morning. I had just thought I was tired, but had certainly found some energy for that, though I was reluctant to give credit to Jesus. Jimmie Sue went straight to sleep, but I was all heated up still, and ended up pushing back the covers enough to let the air cool my naked chest. In that moment, no matter that we were on the trail in search of my sister, I felt as good as I had felt in memory. The Sabine River was never really blue, always a muddy brown, but in my mind it was blue then, and the grass was always green, even in winter, and the wind was cool, the earth was rich and firm, and all the world was full of light. It was a wonderful feeling. I lay there and enjoyed it, even as it was eased away from me and memory of why I was on the trail flooded back over me and wilted my mind’s grass and hardened the ground and turned my light to shadow.

When that happened, and I came back to myself, I saw that Shorty was on the other side of the fire, not thirty feet from us, sitting on his bedroll. He had moved it there without us hearing or noticing. He had a book in his hand, was wearing his glasses, and was leaning toward the fire for light.

I pulled on my shirt and put my pants on under the blankets, got up, and went around in my bare feet to squat next to him. “You could have cleared your throat,” I said.

“I could have banged a pan and sang a couple of songs, but I did not want to distract you from your business.”

“You didn’t have to watch,” I said.

“There was nothing to see but covers going up and down. I sat here to read my book.”

“You read a book while that was going on?” I said.

“Well, I will admit that now and then I took a glance in case the covers had fallen, but my greatest fear was seeing your naked ass instead of hers.”

“I guess I wasn’t near as sneaky as I thought,” I said.

“You two sounded like two pigs going at corn in a trough. Do not tell Hog I said that, as I believe he views himself as fastidious.”

I looked down the hill where the others slept. They seemed to be tucked in tight and unaware of what was going on. I could even see Hog’s pale shape out there in the pines. He looked snug.

“I feel guilty now that I done it.”

“Did you feel guilty when you were doing it?”

“Not in the least, but I was caught up in doing it.”

“There are many things you can get caught up in doing that you should not do and should be ashamed of, but believe me, a woman is something to enjoy completely, so there is no need to feel guilt. She is no one’s wife, and she is willing, and it does not say in the Bible that Thou Shalt Have No Pussy. Not that I care what it says.”

I let all that settle on me and then changed the subject. “What’re you reading that can hold your attention that well?”

“Twain’s book on travel again. It makes me want to follow the equator. It makes me want to do anything but what I do. The drawback is money. I had money I could travel and I could buy women and I could have fine food and all the things that would be to my enjoyment. I am not saying I deserve it more than others, but I am saying I probably would like it more than others.”

I laughed a little. “Someday you may go.”

Shorty shook his head. “I do not think so. You know what I was thinking? I was thinking someday soon I will die on a trail like this one, or I will die at home, or on that hill where I place my telescope, and though none is any worse than any other place, if I had my pick, I would die on a great ship somewhere at sea, on the way to some foreign port, and if not that, then by the telescope, and maybe, when I think about it, that would actually be the best. I have picked my own star. It is mine. Others may have picked it, but I have claimed it for myself and will allow no others to have it. When it is visible I find it in the sky at night, and it is like a shiny eye looking directly at me. It is not God. It is not a star. It is my own self looking back at me.”