“He don’t talk much, unless it’s to who he’s gonna kill. They say then he can’t talk, just makes funny sounds. I know cause Daddy told me he knew a fella had got away from Skunk, just by accident. That Skunk had been hired to get him, found him, tied him to a tree, and was gonna cut his throat and chop off his hands. The tree this fella was tied to was up against the bank next to the river. It was an old tree, and though this fella wasn’t thinking about it on purpose, he was pushing with his feet to get away from Skunk. The tree was more rotten than it looked, because there was ants at the base, and they had gnawed it up. This fella told Daddy he could feel them ants on him, biting, but he didn’t hate them none, because they had made that old tree rotten, and with him pushing with his feet, pressing his back into the trunk, it broke off. He went backward into the water. When he hit, the log floated, spinning him around and around, him snapping breaths every time he was on top of the river. Finally the log come apart altogether, and that loosened the ropes and he swam out to a sandbar and rested, and then he swam across to the other side. Course, none of it done him any good. Daddy said that later, after he told him about it, he wasn’t seen no more. Daddy said it was because he didn’t have sense enough to go up north or out west, but had stuck around. He figured Skunk finally got him. Skunk ain’t no quitter, though he can wander off from a trail for a while if he gets bored. He gets interested again, he comes back. He always comes back, and there ain’t no end to it until he’s got whoever he’s after.”
“Why was Skunk supposed to be after this man?” Terry asked.
“I don’t know,” Jinx said. “Someone hired Skunk to get him, and Skunk got him. Reckon he chopped off his hands and gave them to whoever hired him, or maybe he kept them himself. I don’t know. As for what was left of the fella, I bet he rotted away in the woods somewhere, never to be seen again.”
The boat was drifting lazily toward the bank. We started paddling again.
“He’s in them woods,” Jinx said, not through with her Skunk business. “In the dark shadows. He don’t do nothing but wait till someone wants to hire him. He’s out there somewhere, in his tent made of skins, all them bones hanging around it, rattling in the breeze. He wraps all those bones in that tent and straps it to his back and moves about, sets up camp again. He’s waiting till someone wants him. They got to talk to one of his cousins to go up in there and find him, because he won’t let no one else come close, and they say even his cousins are afraid of him.”
“How did he get the way he is?” I asked her.
“They say his mama couldn’t stand him no more cause he was crazy, and so when he was ten, for his birthday, she took him out in the river and threw him out of the boat and hit him in the head with a paddle. He didn’t die. He just got knocked out good and floated up on shore. He took to living ’long the riverbank, and in the woods. Later, his mama was found with her hands chopped off and her head had been stove in with a boat paddle.”
“How perfect,” Terry said, and he laughed.
“You laugh, you want,” Jinx said. “But you better believe it. Skunk’s out there. And you run up on him, it’s the last running you gonna do.”
3
Finally we come up on the spot by the river where May Lynn had lived, paddled the boat up there, and leaped out on the bank. Terry had hold of the rope that was tied to the front of the boat, and he looped it around a stump by the water. Then for insurance we all dragged the front end of the boat out of the water so the hole in the bottom was on dirt.
Just before we started up to the house, Jinx looked out over the river and pointed. Jinx was a big pointer. She was always pointing out this and pointing out that. Every time we were there Jinx would point out that spot. It’s where May Lynn’s mother went into the river with a shirt wrapped around her head.
“It was right there,” she said, as if we didn’t know.
We walked up a hill, which was slick with pine needles. The house was on top of the hill and it was raised on a bunch of leaning creosote posts; it was up high like that so that when the river rose it wouldn’t float away. With the way it leaned, I reckoned it wouldn’t be long before the whole shebang was shoved off and went tumbling downhill and into the river, about where May Lynn’s mama had gone down.
When we got to the top of the hill, just so we wouldn’t surprise May Lynn’s daddy and get our teeth filled with shotgun pellets, I called out, “Hallo the house.”
No one answered, but we waited a minute anyhow. Just in case he might be napping off a drunk. There was an outhouse farther up the hill, and there was a ditch that ran off from it out into the water, which was the plumbing. What went in the hole in the outhouse went down the hill through that open ditch, and into the water. Terry studied the toilet for a while, then said, “That isn’t very sanitary. You should keep your body leavings away from water. It’s standard knowledge. You dig a pit, not a runoff. That’s lazy.”
“Her old man is lazy,” I said. “What else can you say?”
We had been standing below and near the house, waiting to see if anyone came out. When they didn’t, we called out again, all three of us calling at the same time. Still no one answered.
There were some steps going up the ten-foot rise to the weathered, sagging porch, and we walked up them. They shook as we climbed. The sides of the steps were fixed onto the platform by wooden rails, and where there should have been a step at the top there wasn’t one. You had to stretch your leg out and climb carefully onto the landing, which wobbled when we climbed up on it.
We called out one more time, but still no one answered. Except for Cletus Baxter, there wasn’t anyone left to answer. There had been May Lynn’s brother, Jake, but he came to an end about a year back. Word was he robbed banks, but according to most he knocked off filling stations. He hid out down in the Sabine bottoms between station jobs and nobody would tell the cops on him. It wasn’t that he was all that well liked, but he was one of the river people, and he had a gun and bad temper and at any moment either one of them could go off.
Course, Constable Sy Higgins knew he was there, but he didn’t care because Jake kept him paid up. Constable Sy, according to folks I heard talk, was always glad to hear Jake was about a new job of stealing, cause it meant the constable was going to have a fresh supply of whiskey, or a new eye patch.
As for Jake, before the real law could close in on him, if they were ever going to, he come down with a cold and got pneumonia and died right in the house.
When no one came to our knock at the door, Terry said, “What in the world are we doing here? May Lynn is back at the graveyard.”
I was the only one that had ever actually met Cletus Baxter. All of us had been in the house a few times to see May Lynn, but when Terry and Jinx were with me, Cletus was never there. When I had seen him, he hadn’t so much as acknowledged me with a fart or a nod. Her mama we had all known; a quiet, thin woman with hair the color of damp wheat, a face like all the sadness in the world.
Even Jake we had all seen, a dark-eyed man with a handsome face marred by a scar across his right cheek where an old shotgun had blown apart on him when he was about our age. He was friendly enough, but always eyed us like we might be young feds out to gun him down for stealing twenty-five bucks from a filling station.
“It is funny,” I said. “Here we are, and I don’t know what for.”
“We is just plain nosey, that’s what for,” Jinx said.
I knocked on the door again, and this time it moved. We all stood there looking at the crack that was made when it did, then I reached out and pushed at it, and went inside just like I had been invited.
Terry and Jinx followed.
“This isn’t right,” Terry said.
“It sure ain’t,” Jinx said.
Neither of them turned around, though. They kept coming after me.
The house was just one big slanting room that was sectioned off by blankets hung up on ropes so the blankets could slide back and forth. The biggest section was
for May Lynn’s daddy, and there were several blankets stretched across the house for his part. One of his blankets was pulled back and I could see a cot in there and a little table with a Bible on it that was stuffed full of papers. When I looked more closely, I saw they were cigarette papers for rolling. There was a tin of Prince Albert on the stand, too, and all over the place—the table, the bed, the floor, and even on the one wooden chair—there was specks of tobacco, like dirty dandruff flakes. I remembered I had watched him roll a cigarette once, and his hands shook so bad from being on the end of a weeklong drunk, he scattered tobacco everywhere.
Part of the room had been divided for a cooking place, which was a woodstove with a pipe that ran out a hole cut into the wall by a window. Over the window was curtains made of the same blue flowers that had been on May Lynn’s dress.
May Lynn’s part was sectioned off by blankets, and it wasn’t much. If Jake had ever had a section, it had been taken over by his old man. It was hard to believe four people had ever lived there.
We moved May Lynn’s blankets aside and took a peek. She had a little feather mattress on the floor, and it was stained by water and sweat. There were two near-flat pillows on the mattress. One of them had a pillowcase made of the same material as her dress and the kitchen curtains. The other didn’t have a case. There was a dresser with a cracked mirror up against the wall. It had belonged to May Lynn’s mother, and it was the only piece of real furniture in the house.
On top of the dresser was a huge stack of movie magazines. There was a chair by the dresser and one at the end of the bed. May Lynn used to sit in one chair and I would sit in the other, and she would show me the magazines and the people in them. They seemed like people from a dream, like angels descended from heaven. They didn’t look like anyone I knew except May Lynn, even if she didn’t have the clothes for it.
Jinx touched the magazines, lifted them, said, “These here all put together is heavy enough to sink a boat.”
“She certainly loved them,” Terry said.
“I figured she’d go off someday and become a movie star,” I said. “I figured anyone could do it, it was her.”
Terry sat down in the chair at the end of the bed and picked up one of her pillows. He said, “It smells like her. That drugstore perfume she wore.” He put the pillow down and looked at us. “You know, May Lynn really ought to go to Hollywood.”
“She’s a whole lot dead,” Jinx said, sitting down on the mattress.
“She should still make the journey,” Terry said, and crossed his legs. “It’s all she ever wanted, and now she’s ended up buried in a hole like a dead pet. I don’t think that’s how it ought to end for her.”
“And I don’t think I ought to stink when I’m straining in the outhouse,” Jinx said, “but so far it don’t work no other way.”
“We could take her to Hollywood,” Terry said.
“Say what?” I said.
“We could take her.”
“You mean dig her up?” Jinx said.
“Yes,” Terry said. “She won’t dig herself up.”
“That’s certainly true,” I said.
“I mean it,” Terry said.
Me and Jinx looked at one another.
Jinx said, “So we dig her up and carry her and the coffin all the way to Hollywood on our backs, and when we get there, we go over to see the movie people and tell them we got their next star, a dead body that don’t look nothing like May Lynn used to look and has a smell about her that could knock a bird out of a tree and kill it stone dead?”
“Of course not,” Terry said. “I’m merely stating the obvious fact that we haven’t got so many friends that we should not care about a dead one. I think we have to dig her up, give her a funeral like they used to give heroes in ancient Greece. You know, burn her on a funeral pyre and gather up her ashes; the ashes can go to Hollywood.”
“She ain’t a Greek,” Jinx said.
“But she was a kind of goddess, don’t you think?” Terry said.
“What she was was a river-bottoms kid that was very pretty that came up dead with a sewing machine tied to her feet,” I said. “You’re crazy, Terry. We can’t dig her up and set her on fire, take her ashes to Hollywood.”
“It’s the principle of the thing,” Terry said.
“How’s that?” Jinx said.
“It won’t mean anything to her, you’re right,” Terry said. “Being dead takes the fun out of things. I know. I once had a dog that died and I prayed that he’d come back to life, but he didn’t. And I finally decided God had brought him back, but hadn’t let him out of the hole. I went out and dug him up to help him out, only he was still dead and not looking very good.”
“I could have told you how that was going to turn out,” Jinx said.
“It isn’t like any of us want to remain here,” Terry said.
“That’s true,” Jinx said. “I do, I’m gonna end up wiping white baby asses and doing laundry and cooking meals for peckerwoods the rest of my life. And if that’s what I got coming, I might do like Mrs. Baxter and wrap a shirt around my head and go in the river.”
“Don’t even say that,” I said.
“I just did.”
“Well, don’t say it again.”
“There isn’t anything for us here,” Terry said. “You can’t really grow here. Not the way we should. We stay here, there will always be some kind of weight on our heads, holding us down. I like the idea of taking May Lynn’s ashes to Hollywood and sprinkling them around where she’ll always be a part of it. May Lynn had an adventurous spirit about her, and I think she was no more than a few months shy of departing from this place.”
“She should have hurried up,” Jinx said.
“We have a chance to leave,” Terry said. “All we have to do is reach out and embrace it. Together we can make it work. We can help each other achieve that goal.”
“What you need is a good meal and some sleep,” I said, looking at Terry.
Terry shook his head. “No. What I need is a shovel and some friends to help me dig her up. Then we burn her and the magazines together. It’s symbolic that way.”
“Symbolic?” Jinx said.
“Then we put the combined ashes in a jar—”
“A jar?” Jinx said.
“Or some kind of container,” Terry said. “Then we float down the river to a good-sized town, catch a bus, and head for Hollywood.”
“A bus?” Jinx said.
“Stop being a mockingbird,” Terry said, frowning at Jinx.
“That sounds crazy,” I said.
“I like crazy better than I like being around here,” Terry said.
“That’s two of us,” Jinx said.
They both stared at me, waiting for agreement, I suppose.
“Let me think about it,” I said.
“I know you,” Terry said. “You aren’t really going to consider it. You’re just saying that so I’ll shut up.”
“While you think about it,” Jinx said, “me and Terry are gonna be setting May Lynn on fire with them magazines, and by the time you’ve decided one way or the other, we’ll be in a boat, maybe one without a hole in the bottom, on our way to Hollywood with that gal in a jar.”
“I know this much,” I said. “The Sabine River don’t go to Hollywood.”
“Yeah, but we’ll arrive there somehow,” Terry said.
I could almost see the wheels in his head turning.
He lifted his head and his lips curled at the edges. “There’s the barge. We could take the barge. It’s big enough to live on.”
“It’s too big for some of the narrow spots,” Jinx said. “We might go better by patching up the boat, or getting some other one.”
“I bet we can get it through those spots if we put our backs into it,” Terry said.
“The barge, as you call it, ain’t nothing more than a raft,” I said.
“You could actually dock it against the bank at night and sleep on it,” Terry said.
??
?I want to think about it,” I said, feeling the pressure, hoping the whole thing would go out of his and Jinx’s head by the time we got back across the river.
“What’s to think on?” Jinx said. “You told us you can’t even sleep good for watching for your daddy coming into your room.”
I nodded, thinking about how I usually slept with a piece of stove wood in the bed next to me, my door locked, one eye open and an ear cocked. “That’s true.”
“Well, then,” Terry said.
“I got some things to do at home first,” I said, still thinking it was all going to be forgotten in a short time, but actually beginning to warm to the idea.
“All right, then,” Terry said. “We can all go home and prepare, and if either of you have any money, now would be a good time to bring it.”
“I have a quarter,” I said. “That’s it.”
“I got the teeth in my head,” Jinx said.
“I have a few dollars,” Terry said. “But what we really need is a plan.”
4
We gathered up the magazines, and decided it was okay because May Lynn told us her daddy always thought her wanting to be in the movies was silly, told her wanting to be on a screen dressed up like a hussy in tight clothes and wearing makeup like war paint wasn’t any plan for a grown woman. That meant those magazines would soon be burned up for fire starter or tossed out to rot when he came back and found out she was dead. I figured that portion of the house would become his, too, littered with cigarette papers and tobacco crumbs.
Anyway, we took them, and as we was stuffing them into a couple of pillowcases, a writing tablet with a red cardboard cover fell out and hit the floor. Jinx picked it up and said, “Look here.”
Scrawled on the front of it in May Lynn’s handwriting was the word DIARY. The writing was in pencil, and it was so rubbed over, and the cover so dark to begin with, you could hardly see the word.
“You think we should peek inside?” Jinx said.
“We shouldn’t,” I said, “but I know we will.”
“If we’re going to steal her body and set her on fire and take her ashes to Hollywood,” Jinx said, “I think we must go in for the whole hog, including the squeal.”