“Not here, though,” I said, switching my viewpoint instantly. “We can go somewhere, sit, and read it. I don’t want her daddy showing up, and us having been housebreakers and thieves right out here in the open. Criminals, I think, should act in privacy or the dark.”
“Perhaps we ought to burn it with the magazines,” Terry said, taking the diary from Jinx’s hands so deftly I figured it was a full minute before she realized she wasn’t holding it no more. “She isn’t here to say we can look at it.”
“That’s the proper thing to do,” I said. “Burn it. But is that what we’re gonna do?”
Jinx said, “We all know we’re gonna look at it, so we should get on with it.”
“I thought it might be good manners to at least act like we wasn’t,” I said.
Going home right then went out of my mind like a bird that had been let loose from a cage. We decided to go someplace private and read the diary. But when we went out of the house, Terry, still clutching the diary, left me holding the pillowcase full of magazines and went to the outhouse.
“Don’t you read none of it in there,” Jinx said.
“I won’t,” Terry said.
“Leave it,” I said.
“Nope, cause I trust me not to read it,” he said. “But you two, I don’t.”
“That wasn’t very nice,” Jinx said, as Terry went into the outhouse and closed the door.
* * *
Not too far downriver there’s the barge, the one Terry said we ought to steal. It’s staked out like a Judas goat to an old cypress stump in the middle of the water. It’s really just a big raft, but everyone calls it a barge. There’s a tree branch that has sprouted off the stump and it grows tall and green and puts out shade at one end of the barge. Midday and dead summer, the shade looks green because of the way the sun shines through the leaves and lays on the rough planks nailed over the logs. The barge is tied to the stump with thick twists of weathered rope, replaced from time to time by someone with fresh rope and the desire to do it. Where the barge sits, the water is wide. The barge can hold a fair number of people on it, and it was put there by someone long ago that’s been forgotten. Whoever built it made it solid, and the wood has held and hasn’t rotted. The bottoms of the logs and boards used to make it are coated in creosote. Everyone uses it, and no one has moved it for at least ten years. Storms and high water have been unable to tear it up, even if on occasion the water has risen higher than the rope that binds it. Sometimes when the water is way up, the roped end of the barge stays down, and the loose end floats to the top and you can see that end sticking out of the water. When the water settles, it’s like nothing ever happened. Sometimes when I walk along the river and look out at it, I can see frogs on it, or long yellow-bellied water snakes and sometimes water moccasins, looking thick and stumpy and evil and ready to bite.
Whoever gets there first uses it as a place to picnic, fish, and swim. At night, kids skip the shorts and skinny-dip there. It’s said there’s been a few babies made there on blankets when the night is deep and the water is smooth and the moon is shining a silvery love light. And I don’t doubt it.
There have been a lot of drownings around the barge, and there’s been talk about setting fire to it so folks won’t go out on it. But the thing is, people will always go in the water, and they’ll always drown, and they don’t need a barge to do it. Some even do it on purpose, something May Lynn’s mother proved without a barge. As for wearing a shirt over your head, you can do it or not—it’s not expected.
We paddled and bailed our boat on down the river until we came to the barge. There was no one there, only the shade.
We climbed out of the boat onto the barge and pulled the boat up behind us. It was tough work, but we did it. Under the shade of the leafy limb we sat down, and Terry opened the diary. There were a number of pages torn out of it, and doodles in the margins. Terry started reading it aloud. It wasn’t written the way she talked, but instead she had tried to make it proper. It made me sad. It had some truth to it, but it also had a lot of things that might not have happened—things that May Lynn felt certain would occur someday. Like going to Hollywood and being discovered in some soda shop or such, and then becoming a big star. She told how this had happened, when I knew it hadn’t. She hadn’t never got out of East Texas, let alone to Hollywood.
She talked about us in passing, like you might point out you seen a redbird the other day. I won’t kid you, that bothered me a little. I figured we was worth more than a spotty mention. Here we was going to her funeral and planning on burning her up and taking her out to Hollywood, and we didn’t get no more consideration than that. I felt the story of her life, even with lies, might have given us a bigger role.
The shadow was spreading wider by the time Terry came to the part in the diary that made our plans, everything we had talked about, real. It was a part that caused me to cry inside and made me scared a little, though I can’t tell you exactly why. It was the part that sealed the deal about us going to Hollywood. It was the part that would change our lives and make it so nothing would ever be the same again.
It was a page or two about her brother, and there was a photograph of her stuffed inside the diary. It was a good one, but she had ways about her a photograph couldn’t hold; even in that old faded flower dress she looked like a million bucks. And there was another thing inside of the diary, a little map put down on thin paper. This map, along with things we read in the diary, let us know that her brother, who we knew to be a thief, was a bigger thief than we thought; though I guess she could have made the whole thing up, like some of the other stuff she had written down.
May Lynn wrote about her brother: “This isn’t something I should put down, because it is a scandal to the family.” But she was doing it anyway, because it was her diary, she said, and she could write what she wanted. There was no one to see it but her and the lamplight.
Her take on Jake’s theft wasn’t what I expected. She said Jake gave her some of the money he stole. Her daddy got some of it, too, and that she was always glad to see Jake coming, not only because she loved her brother, but she liked that he had money. She thought soon he’d give her more than just enough for perfume and a picture show; maybe enough for some new clothes and a bus ticket to Hollywood.
The diary said Jake had mostly centered his attentions on service stations and little stores until he took in a partner named Warren Cain, and because of that he got his courage up. They came to a little town that had a bank, and he and Cain went in there and robbed it at pistol point, jumped in the car and drove off, and came here to the river bottoms to hide away. There wasn’t any more mention of Warren Cain, but a few pages later, May Lynn wrote how before Jake got the chest sickness and died, he buried all the money he stole cause her daddy kept sniffing around, trying to lay his hands on it, and Jake knew he’d drink it up, quicker than a cat can jump.
“Jake gave me a map,” she wrote,
so I could find the money. He may just be out of his head and none of what he says is true, and the money may be all gone. And what he says about how I need to be careful may not be anything to worry about. I asked what it was I should be careful of, and he said getting killed. When I asked by what, or who, he began to roll his eyes up in his head, as if something might be standing on the ceiling. I guess it was. I guess it was the Angel of Death that he saw, because it wasn’t more than a minute after he done that, that his eyes glazed over and I realized he had quit breathing and was gone on.
If the money really is there, I’m going to try and find it and go off to Hollywood to get my start. I think God must want me to have this money, or he would not have let my brother rob banks and bury it and then die. I thank God left this money for me.
When Terry quit reading, he said, “That is an interesting conclusion.”
“Sounds to me like stealing,” I said. “And if God left her the money, then he’s a thief, too.”
“It sounds to me like a way to get out of this hellhol
e,” Jinx said. “And though I ain’t no thief under normal situations, I knew where that money was, I’d be on it like stink on a dead possum.”
“We can follow the map,” Terry said.
“What if it’s just one of her tales?” I said. “The diary is full of them. And it’s even missing pages, for some reason.”
“I presume that was her way of editing it,” Terry said. “Writing things about yourself and putting them in a diary can even be difficult. There’s always some part of you, I suppose, that fears someone will see it.”
“Like three friends who stole it from her house,” Jinx said.
“Like that,” Terry said. “I think a lot of this is more like a novel, or a long short story. Maybe she started out to write a diary and there just wasn’t enough to talk about that was interesting.”
It certainly had in it all manner of nonsense about how she had been writing big movie stars and they had been writing her back, and how she had sent a picture of herself in and a producer liked the way she looked and wanted her to come on out. All of that was just foolishness, and nothing else, but some of it I knew to be true. Some of it was about things I knew had happened.
“Well, now,” Terry said, “we know Jake was a robber, isn’t that correct? And she has written down a detailed map that she said she got from her brother on his deathbed, so—”
“All we got to do,” said Jinx, “is take that map and follow it, see if it leads somewhere, and then split up the money and run like bastards.”
“Not exactly what I had in mind,” Terry said. “But it has occurred to me that with Sue Ellen’s quarter, and your ‘nothing but teeth,’ Jinx, and me having a few dollars, we might not get far, or however far we manage to go there might be very little comfort to it. But once we get downriver, to a town, money can make things a lot better. So we go and see if the stolen money is there, and if it is, we take it. Then we do what I said about the body. Burn it up and carry her ashes out to Hollywood. It’s what she wanted.”
“It’s stolen money,” I said.
“We don’t even know what bank it came from if we wanted to give it back,” Terry said.
“See there?” Jinx said, nodding quickly several times. “We ain’t really got no other choice.”
“We could give it to the authorities,” I said.
“Constable Sy?” Terry asked.
“There’s bound to be someone else,” I said.
“There might be,” Jinx said, “but I don’t want to find them suckers. Constable Sy would just take it for his own self. I want to do what Terry wants to do, and I say we do it on the cheap, and if there’s money left over we split it. And if you’re all that bothered about it, Sue Ellen, I’ll take your cut.”
“Say there was bank money,” I said. “Why didn’t May Lynn take it and go off on her own?”
“Maybe she wasn’t ready,” Jinx said. “Maybe she couldn’t figure out the map. That don’t mean the money ain’t there and that she didn’t plan to take it. Now that I think on it, we ought to take a bus. I don’t like water all that much. I can swim, but not so good, and there’s snakes and such. On a bus, I have to ride in the back in the colored part, like dirty laundry, but at least I’m a whole lot less likely to drowned or get snakebit.”
“And where do we catch that bus?” Terry said.
“Gladewater,” Jinx said. “That’s how Daddy goes. He walks across the Sabine River bridge, catches a ride to Gladewater, then gets the bus there, takes it up north to Yankee land. We’d take our bus out west.”
“Your daddy has a car,” I said.
“Now he does,” Jinx said. “But that’s how he went the first time. By bus.”
“Best way for us to arrive in Gladewater is to take the river,” Terry said. “It’s quicker than walking, and more certain than a ride, and we don’t have to wonder who it is we’re riding with. Catching a ride might be why May Lynn’s dead. She may have caught it with the wrong kind of person. I say we take the money and steal her body and burn it up, and jar it up, and then float down near Gladewater, walk in and buy tickets at the bus station, and proceed to Hollywood.”
“There’s some sense in that,” Jinx said. “And when we get to Gladewater and take the bus, we can use some of the money to buy lunches to tote with us. I’ve always wanted to buy a lunch. Though you’ll have to buy it for me. There’s that whole colored thing about going into cafés and such.”
“Don’t worry,” Terry said. “It’ll be taken care of.” He looked at me. “You aren’t saying much.”
“I’m sitting here considering on my life of crime and how it could help me buy a lunch for a bus trip.”
“It’s money that has already been stolen,” Terry said. “It’s not like you stole it.”
“If I take it, it would be like stealing, because that’s exactly what I’d be doing. Stealing from a thief wouldn’t make me any less a thief.”
“The thief is dead, and so are his heirs,” Terry said.
“There’s the father,” I said.
“He doesn’t count,” Terry said.
“Why’s that?” I said.
“Because I don’t like him, and if you get right down to it, you can’t be an heir to stolen money. Not legally, anyway.”
“I’m glad that puts us on such solid legal ground,” I said.
5
We pushed our boat off the barge—or what I call a raft—back into the river, and paddled it to land. After we got on ground, we pulled the boat up under a tree and found some dried brush to lean on it. It wasn’t much of a hideaway, but it’s what we had.
Before we left out of there, we sat down under a tree and got out the map and turned it ever which way trying to figure out what it meant. It might as well have been written in Greek. We could make out what must have been May Lynn’s house and the river drawn on it in a squiggly line, and above it a rise in the land that was familiar. Finally there was a couple of thick lines with little lines drawn between them. We figured that had to be railroad tracks. Beyond the tracks, there were some humps, and there was a line written out that said MALCOLM CUZINS. Neither the humps or the name meant anything to us.
We walked away from the river and the bottomland, made our way back to where May Lynn’s house stood. We went wide of it toward the woods.
The woods were thick and it took us a while to thread through them and climb up a big hill. We finally got on the trail that went out of the bottoms, ending us up on a field where cane grew. It was highland cane and it wasn’t as good as bottom cane, but it was still good enough. It was a big patch that covered a lot of acres, and the stalks were thick and tall. The cane had turned slightly purple, and I knew once it was stripped the sugar inside of it would be sweet.
I had a pocketknife, and I cut down a stalk next to where the field started, then cut it into three pieces. It took some work, but we all got our pieces frayed and that gave us the pulp to chew on. It was sugary, and it was something to keep us happy and busy while we walked. I figure when you got right down to it, we weren’t fresh thieves after all, but had had plenty of practice in the cane fields and watermelon patches. Heck, I had started my life of crime sometime back, but had just then realized it. The natural move forward would be to take stolen bank money and spend it on a trip to Hollywood with a dead girl burnt up in a jar.
We followed the map and came to a low cut of pines, and on the other side of the pines was the train tracks. On the far side of the tracks was more trees. Most of them was pecan and hickory nut and might have once been part of an orchard, but were now wild and unpruned. There was a nice breeze blowing, and we could smell the scent of the trees on the wind, and there were birds in the trees, mostly red-winged blackbirds; they were as thick there as leaves.
There was a rumble and the train rails began to vibrate. We stepped back in the pines, in the shadow, and waited. A train came chugging by, screeching on top of the rails. I thought maybe that ought to be the way we should get out of there, by hopping a train. Bu
t it was traveling fast as it went by, and none of the boxcar doors was open; it was an idea that passed from my mind quickly. I figured if I grabbed at the train my arms would get jerked off.
Still, it was mighty pleasant watching the train go by, all those boxcars clacking along, and while it rolled I thought of May Lynn. I guess it was the train moving away from us, heading anywhere but where we was, that made me think of her. That and our plans, of course.
I remember once sitting in her house on her mattress on the floor, and she had been talking about the movies and her plans to star in them, and then she said something to me that dove out of the air like a rock and felt like it hit me in the back of the head.
“Sue Ellen,” she said, “what is it you want to do with your life?”
Until she asked that, I didn’t even know I had the chance to think about anything different than what I was doing at the moment, but with her telling me all her plans, and then asking me that question, certain feelings I had started rising up to the surface like a dead carp. I knew then I wanted out of what I was in, and I wanted something else other than what I had, but the miserable thing was, I didn’t know where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do.
We laughed and talked about this and that, about some boys we knew, none of them particularly interesting, and May Lynn said she sure thought Terry was cute, but there was that whole sissy problem. We combed each other’s hair, and her mama, a few months short of her dip in the river and moving like she was some kind of animal dying slowly, cooked us some grits, and we had them with no butter and no milk. I remember thinking then that May Lynn was the most wonderful person in the world, and certainly the most beautiful. But what made me feel really good while eating grits with no butter and no milk was that she had spoken to me like I could have plans and ought to have plans, and that my life could be better. Right then and there I believed it myself a little. Not so much you could write a song about it, but some. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew it would be something. I can’t say that stealing money and going by raft down the dirty Sabine with May Lynn’s ashes in a jar had been any part of those plans, but I knew then that I wasn’t going to be settled with life as I knew it; wasn’t going to end up like Mama, drinking cure-all and taking a whacking from her husband and thinking it was as natural as the course of the river.