The Thicket (22 page)

But I’m starting to sound like some kind of lovesick coyote, which I was, so I’ll move on. We slept, and it was a good, deep sleep. The best I had had since we left the farm to go to Kansas and it hadn’t worked out.

It was night when I woke up. Everyone else was asleep but Shorty. The shed door was open, and he was sitting on an overturned bucket in the moonlight smoking a cigar. He had the Twain book in his lap. I could smell the tobacco burning, and he turned to look at me. He always seemed to know if you or anything else was stirring. I didn’t say anything or make a gesture. I just rolled up tight with Jimmie Sue again and went back to sleep.

The heat woke me up. I guess that was why me and Jimmie Sue had come apart in the night. She was lying on her back with her eyes closed and her mouth open and I could hear her breathing. Everyone else had started to stir. I didn’t see Spot. Shorty was still at the doorway, though he had changed positions on the bucket.

I sat up, and since me and Jimmie Sue were at the back of the shed, I pushed my spine up against the wall. Without my asking, Winton, who was pulling on his boots, said, “Spot’s done gone over to get us some grub from the café. I still got some biscuits in my saddlebags, but I tried to bite into one this morning and couldn’t do it. They’ve grown solid. I was gonna soak it in some water, but then I figured I had enough money to go us all breakfast, though after this I think we’ll have to eat grass. I ain’t got but a dime left now, and I’m saving that for some kind of emergency.”

Eustace was also pulling on his boots. He said, “If you ain’t come to an emergency yet, I ain’t sure you’re gonna recognize one when you do.”

Winton grinned at him.

Spot come back later carrying two metal buckets. They had their tops covered over with thin white towels. Inside the shed he took the towels off, and in one of the buckets was a stack of sweet-smelling biscuits, fluffy as clouds, flaky as dandruff. Underneath them was another towel, and underneath that we found a pile of sausages. The smell that came from them was so strong and good it darn near floated me up to the ceiling of that little shed, though I might add that wouldn’t have been to any great height. It was tight in there.

Hog ended up eating some of the old cornmeal I had left over. I put it out for him before we ate. I figured a biscuit might have been all right for him, but we were too greedy to share them with a porker, and I thought giving him a sausage was just somehow wrong. He ate quickly, before we had our meal even sorted out.

The other bucket had a pot of coffee in it and some thick, hard cups. We ate our breakfast and drank our coffee with the enthusiasm of a hog in a corn patch. When we finished our meal and the coffee was down to the last drop, Winton went to see about the horses.

When he came back all he had was a horse apiece. He had sold them spares from the trading post to pay for our stay and filled his pockets with the leftover money.

Checking our supplies, we found we had plenty of ammunition for our weapons, and Shorty made sure we were all strapped up with knives, some of which we already had and some of which we were able to buy at the general store, though Winton gave up the money with the same reluctance a banker gives up a dollar he knows isn’t actually his.

Next thing we done was wait outside in the street while Winton and Shorty went into the saloon for a while. It turned out our wait was to be a long while, and we ended up tying the horses outside to a hitching post that stuck up in front of the saloon and had big metal rings fastened to it. We sat on the sidewalk boards and waited. Jimmie Sue sat by me and looped her arm through mine and rested her head on my shoulder and slept some more. One thing I was to learn about that girl was she liked her sleep and went at it with the dedication one might have to a job.

While she was sleeping I watched some horses with riders come along the street, and I seen a bunch of motorcars as well. There was some kind of altercation when a motorcar made a horse jump and threw the rider off. The man in the machine stopped and got out. He and the rider got in each other’s faces and gave me a full education in foul language. As a Christian, I hate to admit it, but I tucked away a few of those words for later use, and there was one so foul I made a pact with myself to only use it inside my head.

Hog, during all this, lay at our feet snoring, or, rather, snorting. He was a big one, I’ll tell you that. Folks kept coming by to take a look, and one man offered to buy him from us and pay us to help scald-pot him and butcher him out, but we turned him down. Hog never stirred. Like Jimmie Sue, he enjoyed his sleep, and we could have cut his throat and sold him and he’d have never known it. I said as much to Eustace.

“He wouldn’t sleep like that he didn’t trust us,” he said. “He’s more on the scout usually. I think he really likes you and Jimmie Sue.”

After what seemed like an hour or so, Winton and Shorty come out of the saloon. Winton was weaving like a sailor riding the deck in a storm, and he nearly fell off the boardwalk—and would have if little Shorty hadn’t grabbed him and shown himself to be far stronger than would be expected.

“I thought y’all done moved in,” Eustace said.

“We were at the task of acquiring information,” Shorty said. “And during the process, Winton thought it was polite to buy drinks and drink some himself.”

“Some?” Spot said. “It’s like he’s a fish and done tried to drink the ocean.”

“Yes,” said Shorty. “But this ocean was at least a hundred proof.”

Winton, still sitting on the boardwalk, leaned over and threw up in the street.

“There goes that fine breakfast,” Shorty said. I was near Shorty, and though he was not drunk, I could smell that he had taken in a bit of the ocean as well. “What we learned is that this band of men we are looking for could be near the Indian reservation. On out a little farther, but near. They have their own camp there, in the deep woods, and it is likely that there will be more than just Cut Throat and Nigger Pete, just as we expected. But it seems possible that there is quite a large number. Fact is, what we know is not a whole lot more than what we already knew.”

“What do we do, then?” I asked.

“First thing we do is see how many of us here are sticking. I know Eustace and Winton and I are in, and I can assume you will be, Jack, as you are the initiator of all this. Jimmie Sue has indicated that she plans to stay with us, so I suppose that only leaves Spot. Now you have to decide how close to us you want to be, Spot, and how much that five dollars is actually worth.”

“Could I get shot up?” Spot asked. He had been sitting on the boardwalk whittling on a stick that he had been carrying with him for just such an occasion. He had the new knife from the general store to try out, and that’s what he was doing. He didn’t look up when he asked his question.

“It could turn sour,” Shorty said.

“Meaning I could get myself shot,” Spot said.

“Correct,” Shorty said.

“I don’t want to get shot none, but I don’t want to go back to swamping out rooms and tossing out chamber pots. I’m thinking I’d just like to take my money for giving the information I gave, then I can go on to whatever. I don’t see no reason to get killed. I’ve already been in more tight situations than I would prefer.”

“You ain’t getting shit,” Winton said. He had recovered considerably after throwing up his breakfast, and was holding his head.

“You said you would pay me,” Spot said.

“I didn’t mean it,” Winton said.

“He will pay you,” Shorty said. “But the truth is, we need all the money we have until we are through with our mission. We may need more food and ammunition. You can wait here until we get back and see if we collect some bounty. It could take some time, but the sheriff here will pay out. Papers are on them all over East Texas.”

Spot studied on that suggestion. “I think I better go with you. I wait, you might get killed, and I wouldn’t know for sure you was dead, and here I’d be looking for another chamber pot to empty. I could starve.”

“If we do not get killed,” Shorty said, “you will get your five dollars.”

“I bet you could pay me now,” Spot said.

“We could,” said Shorty. “But we will not. As I said, we may need that money.”

“All right, then,” Spot said. “I’ll come, but I’m staying out of the thick of it if I can. I might wait up in the trees somewhere.”

“That is agreeable,” Shorty said.

“We met a gimpy fella in there says he knows a little about where they might be,” Winton said, “and he’ll come by later to talk to us at the stable. He didn’t want to be seen talking much in the saloon, not knowing who might see him. He feared word might get back to Cut Throat. He seemed awful scared of him. Oh, damn. I feel just godawful.”

“You’re still drunk,” Eustace said. “I wish I was.”

“The hell you do,” Shorty said.

Later turned out to be late afternoon. The fella that come by was a little man, though not as short as Shorty, of course. He had a face that was like a sack full of burdens. He came to meet us in our shed. He limped hard when he walked, and he had a woman with him. She had a good build and wore black and had a veil pulled down from a dress hat she wore, and it covered her face. It wasn’t a regular kind of veil, more of a cloth, really. There was a slit cut in it for her eyes.

The man came in and sat down on the floor. Shorty got a bucket and brought it over for the woman to sit on. The rest of us sat around near her, Jimmie Sue the closest. Eustace sweet-talked Hog into staying over in the corner. A hog likes a corner. They’ll usually just do their business there, like it’s their own outhouse, and keep the rest of the pen clean as possible. Hog didn’t have no pen, but he had crapped in the corner of the hay and I had only just cleaned it out and put fresh down when the little man and the woman showed up.

The man said, “I figured I ought to tell you what you’re up against, least you think what you’re dealing with is a garden party.”

“We do not think that,” Shorty said.

“All right,” said the little man.

“I do not remember your name,” Shorty said.

“I didn’t give it none, but it’s Efrem.”

“All right, Efrem,” Shorty said. “I understand you want us to know what a bad gentleman Cut Throat is, but what we want to know is where he is hiding.”

Winton, who was still getting over his drunk, said, “And I want to know what she’s doing here and how come she’s wearing that mask.”

Efrem nodded. “Let me tell you this before you get into it. I can’t pinpoint where he is, I can only point you in the general direction.”

“We have that much information,” I said.

“Less general than what you’ve got,” Efrem said. “Or at least I think so. But I couldn’t point you in any direction without telling you about Cut Throat Bill. We got a farm about two miles out, and one day about two years back, we looked up and seen these men coming along. There was three of them. They rode up to the farm and asked if they could water their horses and get a drink for themselves out of the well. Now, we wasn’t against that, and they watered the horses and drank, and my sister here, Ella, offered to cook them up some food. I think she was kind of sweet on one of them who was young and a good-enough-looking fella. Would you agree with that, Ella?”

Ella nodded.

“So they stayed for supper and got fed, and then they wanted some liquor, and we didn’t have any. They said they figured we did, for medicinal purposes. But we didn’t. We ain’t drinkers. Well, one of them, the fat one, the one they called Fatty, he got up and went outside and he come back with a little bottle. They had some with them, but they had hoped to drink our whiskey. But there wasn’t none. They had been polite about it all, but the way it was going I was getting nervous. The more they drank, louder they got and the rowdier they got, and then the young one, he said he had some cards he’d like to show. He pulled them out of his shirt pocket. They was all cards with pictures of naked women on them. When I seen what they was, I said, ‘Why don’t you put them up? My sister is here.’ Well, now, that just made the young one laugh, and by then, Ella, she wasn’t so fond of him. He said something about how she might like to look at the cards, and I said I wouldn’t want her to do that. Suddenly he stood up and grabbed an ax by the fireplace I kept there for kindling and chopped down on my foot. That’s why I limp. He cut off my toes, plumb off. I fell over, and I won’t lie to you, I passed out. When I come to they had Ella’s clothes pulled off of her…It’s okay, Ella.”

Ella had turned her head to the side so as not to look at us.

“We got to tell these folks so they know what they’re getting into. They had her clothes off…and they had their way with her, and the young one, he kept saying while the others was at it that he ought to have gone first and been the one to…well, to open her up.”

“We get the idea,” Eustace said.

“I don’t like talking about any of this, and in front of a colored fella it’s even harder,” said Efrem.

“I can go outside,” Eustace said.

“No,” Shorty said. “He cannot. What white ears can hear, so can black ears. The color does not change the listening.”

Efrem nodded. “I suppose that’s true. Well, I tried to get a rifle I had hung over the mantel, but I couldn’t move good because of my foot, and they caught me, and Cut Throat, who had already had his turn with Ella, come over and dragged my foot into the fireplace. We had fired it up to cook the beans, and he put my foot in it and damn near burnt it off, and that fat man sat on my head while he did it. I didn’t pass out that time, but I wished I had. Thing was, I was a pure coward for a while after that. I couldn’t do nothing and wouldn’t. The young one complained so much about not being first, Cut Throat told him he couldn’t put the cherry back in her so he ought to do what he could with the box it come in. I’m sorry, Ella. But that’s what he said.”

“You can quit,” Shorty said.

“I can, and I will,” Efrem said, “but Ella wanted me to tell you. I think she wants to get it off her chest.”

“Go on, then,” I said.

Jimmie Sue moved over by Ella and sat her butt on the hay by the bucket and quietly took Ella’s hand. Ella let her have it.