We watched until Skunk was way beyond us and was swallowed up by where the ground sloped toward the Sabine. After a while, I said, “Some master tracker. Here we was, and he didn’t see us asleep under a tree.”
“We were in a fortunate spot,” Terry said. “We were hard to see here in the shadows. I speculate that after he abandoned the car, he found someplace to sleep more comfortably out here in the open. It’s more his natural way of doing things. Had we not taken to the higher ground, birds would be pecking our remains right now. What I presume he’s doing is following what Constable Sy told him when he was tortured. That we had taken to the river. He isn’t actually following a sign because he believes we’re downriver on the raft, so he doesn’t need to look for any indication we’re on land.”
“But isn’t there a place where he’ll cross our sign from this morning?” I said.
“If he does, he’ll know where we came from and where the raft is, or he’ll turn and come back for us. Or he’ll do one first and then the other.”
“Then we need to get to the raft first,” I said.
“So we’re going to fly over his head?”
“No,” I said. “We’re going to sail under his feet.”
“You mean the river?”
“Of course I mean the river,” I said.
“And how are we going to do that? Swim for miles? Ride a fish?”
“One thing for sure is we need to get down to the water, and we need to get there fast, and we need to do it well behind Skunk’s trail…Good grief, did you see his feet?”
“I did, and it couldn’t have been feet.”
“Oversized shoes?” I said.
“Like snowshoes. You know what those are?”
I shook my head.
“They’re made long and wide to walk on snow. Those shoes he had on were made to walk on the marsh and move quickly and not bog down. He would know that from being on wet ground so much.”
“Come on. I got an idea, but we have to hurry.”
We jumped up and grabbed our bags and started toward the river, crossing Skunk’s trail as we went. The riverbank was full of trees, and there was underbrush and blackberry vines to contend with, too. Close to the river the bank was falling off from being washed by rain. Roots from trees stuck out all over. Below them was a thin line of damp sand and gravel. We swung off some of the roots and dropped onto the wet sand, went along close to the river for a good long ways. I looked around and around, but didn’t see what I needed. Terry and me kept going, and finally, I saw a dead tree above us, sticking out of the bank. It was short—ten feet long—and thick. The limbs had mostly dropped off of it from rot. The top of it had long ago come loose and fallen away and been washed downriver. Its weight was causing the rest of it to lean out toward the water and its roots was springing out of the ground.
I laid aside my bag, scuttled up to the high ground, and crawled out onto the tree. “Come on,” I said. “Help me.”
Terry was looking at me as if I had suddenly lost my senses. But he put his bag down and climbed up and behind me on the dead tree.
“Bounce,” I said, and began bumping my butt up and down.
Terry followed the plan, and we bounced for quite some time before I heard the roots slipping completely loose of the bank. The dead tree fell.
It struck the ground below, throwing us off it. When we looked up, we saw that it had broken nearly in half. We had to stand on it and bounce with our feet until the pieces were free of one another.
I opened my bag, looked inside, grabbed a ball of twine, and slung the bag over my shoulder. I used twine to tie the bag to my overalls strap, and then I wrapped a couple runs of twine around it and my waist, so that it fastened to my back. I cut the twine loose with my pocketknife, cut another run of it, tied a loop of it to the handle of Constable Sy’s pistol, then made a loose necklace of it; the gun hung around my neck and down on my chest. After that, I helped Terry tie up his bag in a similar fashion, though he didn’t have an overalls strap to help him out like I did.
I put the knife away, said, “Come on. Push.”
We shoved the log out into the water, and I practically leaped at it like a lizard. Terry followed suit, and away we went, down the river. The log tried to turn loose of us at first, but we found places on either side where we could hang, and that balanced it out.
By this time twilight was gone and night had dropped down on us like a croaker sack. But the black was lit now and then by lightning. It was sizzling across the sky in bright runs, and thunder was banging out like someone striking a number ten washtub with an ax handle.
The water was cool and it was hard to hang on to the log, especially now that we was in a wider and swifter part of the river. It started raining hard enough it was like bullets slamming onto our heads; it made the river run even faster. To make matters worse, the old tree was loosing bark, and it was chock-full of ants that bit me and made my skin feel like hot tacks were being knocked into it.
The log kept dipping, though, and pretty soon there were no more ants. There was just us and that log, the rainstorm, and the dark water. The lightning flashed and lit up the sky in such a way that the riverbank was clear and bright for a moment—and I saw Skunk squatting on the side of the bank between two trees. He was sitting there like a statue, watching us rush by.
I could see he had the mud shoes strapped on his back, because they was poking up over his derby. The water ran along the rim of his hat and leaped off at the front. The badge he had taken from Constable Sy was pinned to his derby. What I had seen flopping along the side of his face was a dead bird, dangling head-down on a cord fastened up in his copper hair. Jinx had said it was a seasoned bluebird, but it didn’t look all that seasoned to me, and I couldn’t have told you in that glimpse if it was blue or black or plaid, but it was a bird. I spied a hatchet hanging off his belt, and a big cane knife in a sheath, near big as a sword. He clutched his gnarly walking stick in the middle. I could see his face in the flash. It was reddish, like an old penny, and squashed into shape, like a gourd that had grown funny. He seemed about as interested in us as a fly was in arithmetic.
Then we sailed on, and the long run of lightning was gone. I had to yell over the roar of the river, “Did you see that?”
“See what?”
“It was Skunk. He must have crossed our trail below, cut back, and made for the river, found our new trail.”
“That’s not good news,” Terry said.
There was another flash of lightning. I glanced toward the bank, and there was Skunk, running along, dodging through low-hanging limbs and jumping over bushes like a rabbit.
“Worse news,” I said.
“I see him,” Terry said.
And then we didn’t see him. The flash was gone and the thunder boomed and the river churned on.
The water carried us along and the rain picked up and the lightning kept flashing, more often now, and the thunder came up behind it quick-like; it was so loud it made the water in the river shake, and it made me shake, too.
I don’t know how long we sped on like that, but in time the river began to narrow again, which is the way the Sabine does, and we was coming to a place where we could see a sandbar poking out into the water from the shore. I immediately thought that would be Skunk’s moment to reach us.
Way the lightning was coming now, our wet path was lit up every few seconds. I used the flashes to look toward the bank, then toward the sandbar, but I didn’t see Skunk. Maybe the rapid river had carried us so far beyond he couldn’t catch up.
It was so damn miserable being out there in the water on that fraying log, I was thinking maybe we could get off of it at the sandbar, go through the woods the rest of the way. If we were ahead of Skunk, maybe we could stay ahead.
Whatever the good or the bad of that plan, the idea got dropped, cause there was a long lightning flash, and I saw Skunk running above on the bank. He would be coming up on the sandbar about the same time as we was, though it
lay below where he was on the bank by a good twenty feet.
“Paddle wide,” I said.
We each had just one arm to spare on either side of the log, and our legs to kick with, but we went at it, thrashing around like a monstrous catfish. The log veered, but Skunk jumped. I saw him do it in one long flash of the lightning. He looked for a moment like he was pinned in midair. The tree limbs in the background looked like bony fingers clutching at him. Then he came unstuck and landed on the sandbar as gentle as a cat. The lightning went away, and it was so dark you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.
“Kick,” I screamed above the growl of the river. And kick we did, thrashing our legs in the water and pulling with our free arms.
When the lightning flashed again, there was Skunk, running out to the tip of the sandbar just as we were about to sail around it. He wasn’t no more than ten feet away when I grabbed that pistol on the cord around my neck, swiveled it toward Skunk, and told Terry, “Duck.”
Terry bobbed his head down and I fired. I didn’t even know if that pistol would work, cause it had gotten some water, that’s for sure, but the shells was tight, and it fired. There was a brief, bright blast, and I saw the bird under his hat cut loose and fly away. Skunk startled and stopped, and then there wasn’t any light, though I could tell even in the dark that Skunk had moved his arm real quick, and then I heard Terry scream.
PART THREE
SKUNK
18
We sailed around the tip of that sandbar even as Skunk was running down it trying to reach us. Terry was taking on something terrible, yelling out loud, and in another flash of lightning I saw why that was. That hatchet Skunk had been carrying was now sticking in our log, right near his hand. It was just a glimpse in that brief light, but I saw right away that the tip of Terry’s finger on the hand clutching the log was chopped off clean and spurting blood. That damn Skunk had thrown the hatchet at him.
There wasn’t no time to worry about such things, though, and we kept kicking and waving in the water with our free arms. When I glanced back, I saw Skunk going into the water. His head bobbed like a big fishing cork. That derby hat seemed stuck to his head; a birthmark couldn’t have been on him any tighter.
Water got deeper and wider and swifter, and pretty soon we were really moving along—so fast I thought I was going to lose my grip. Finally I had to use both hands to clutch the log, and so did Terry. We were still kicking at the water, but mostly now the river and rain was hauling us along lickety-split.
I peeked back, expecting to see Skunk right behind me, but I couldn’t see him anymore. I didn’t know if the water had taken him under or if he had given up and swam for shore. Maybe he was out there and I just couldn’t see him, because there was not only the dark but there was all manner of limbs and logs and such blasting along on the river’s swift current.
I kept hoping the rain would quit, but it didn’t. It wasn’t a running rain by any measure; it was what Mama always called a deluge and what Jinx described as being like a cow pissing on a flat rock.
The lightning kept on sizzling across the sky, and there was a time when it shot a bolt out of the blackness and hit a tree by the riverbank, blazed it up like a torch. The light from it threw itself across the water and made the current look like a river of blood. I could feel the heat from the fire all the way out to where we was. I could also see something else. A hump in the water near the shore, and then the hump come up, and went back down, diving and fighting the current, and then I saw that hump reach the bank and glide up it, and flow into the woods like a shadow. I couldn’t make it out good, but I figured it was Skunk. How he had swum in that swirling mess and been able to make it to shore was beyond me. I thought maybe my eyes was playing tricks on me and what I had seen was a beaver, made to look larger by the licking flames of the lightning-lit tree.
The river carried us on. The bag strapped on my back was heavy with water. If I could have taken the time to let loose of the log with my other hand, I might well have got my pocketknife from my overalls and cut myself free of it. That wet bag was like someone was riding on my back, tugging me down.
Finally the storm slowed enough and cleared enough that there was a little heavenly light, and I recognized that we had been in that place before, and that the raft should be parked up on a sandbar not too far away.
Sure enough, we hadn’t gone along much further when I saw it. It wasn’t in the same place exactly, as the water had gotten high enough to have pressed it off the bar and against the bank. In fact, the sandbar wasn’t there no more. It was either washed away or underwater, or a little of both.
Terry and me quit drifting with the flow of the river, and started kicking and flailing our free arms. It was a hell of a battle, and we couldn’t make our log do what we wanted. We sailed right on by the raft. There wasn’t anyone standing or sitting on it, and I hoped they was inside the hut, which was a reasonable thought. But it also occurred to me they could have been washed off and drowned. Then I told myself if that was true, how come the raft was tied to a big tree root at the bank? Someone had to do that, and that meant someone had to be alive when the raft was banged up to shore. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t have been carried off later by a rush of water. All these thoughts was pounding around in my head like they was wearing army boots. I was trying to sort them out when we finally got the log veered and was close enough to shore to let loose of it and swim for it. The last I seen of our log and the hatchet stuck up in it, it was sailing away, blending with the rest of the branches and twigs that had come loose and were floating in the water.
The bag had been heavy before, but now, without the log for support, it almost dragged me under. Once again, I wanted to be shed of it, but swimming for my life didn’t allow it.
Eventually we got to a spot on the bank where it wasn’t high, and we got hold of some roots sticking out, and just clung there for a time trying to get our breath and strength back. Right then I felt like a horse that had been rode hard and put up wet without its oats.
After a time, I crawled up on the bank, the wet bag damn near pulling me back in the water. When I got up there, I stuck out a hand and helped Terry up. The hand he gave me was the cut one, and I could feel his warm blood on my flesh as I yanked him onto shore. We both lay there on our backs with the rain coming down on us, not moving, not able to think for a long while. Eventually, we got up and I found my pocketknife and cut the bags off of us. We paused to get the flashlight out of Terry’s bag. It was wet, but by unscrewing it and taking out the batteries and shaking out the water, putting it together again, we was able to make it work. We used it to check the contents of our haul. Everything in the way of food I had in the bag, except the canned goods, was ruined. The lard bucket looked to be sealed as tight as before. I took it out and used my knife to pry off the lid. It was dry inside, and the jar was still intact, wrapped as it was in an old hand towel. I got it out and held it up and looked at it. It was May Lynn’s ashes, and I felt then that the weight that had been on my back might well have been her ghost, if a ghost could be heavy as a crate of bricks.
Terry checked his can, and the money was safe inside the jar. We put the jars back in the cans and sealed them. I had a sudden thought, and checked for the pistol around my neck, but it was gone. It had come loose and was now at the bottom of the river.
We shouldn’t have done it, but I guess we was worn out from lugging those wet sacks, so we carried our cans by their handles and went back along the bank to find the raft, and find it we did. The bank was a little higher up than where we had come ashore, but it wasn’t so high we couldn’t drop down on the raft from above.
When we did, Jinx come out of the hut on all fours with a boat paddle in her hands. She started yelling about how she was going to come upside our head with that thing. Then she saw it was us.
“Dang it,” she said. “You dropping down on the raft like that, I thought you was Constable Sy. I damn near browned my pants.”
> “He ain’t going to be coming,” I said.
“Dead,” Terry said, with his wounded hand clutched up against his chest.
“How’d he get dead?” Jinx said.
Before we could answer, I saw Mama poke her head out of the hut.
“I been worried sick,” she said.
“We’re all right,” I said.
“Did you say Constable Sy was dead?” Mama asked, keeping herself mostly inside the hut, away from the rain.
“He is,” I said. “But we didn’t do it. And we got to heave off and go, cause someone’s coming after us that might be worse than Constable Sy.”
“Who’s coming?” Jinx said.
“Skunk,” Terry said. “You were correct in your assumptions about him being real. He’s not only real, we’ve seen him and he’s seen us, and—”
Terry held out his hand.
“What in the world?” Mama said from the confines of the hut.
“He chopped off my finger with a throw of a hatchet,” Terry said. “Had I not chosen in that moment to turn my head and adjust my body slightly, I would have taken that hatchet to the skull.”
Then Terry went to his knees, settled there for a moment, carefully placing his lard can full of money beside him, and then he fell flat on his face.
“Well,” Jinx said, looking down at Terry. “I had this whole brave story I was going to tell. About how the rain come and washed away the boat paddle that was stuck up in the sandbar, then washed away the bar. How we nearly got swamped, and fought the rain to get tied off. But with there being a Skunk, as I said there was, and you two done seen him, and Terry coming in here with part of his finger chopped off, falling out like that, it sort of takes away from it. I’ll just say we had a hard time of it.”