The Thicket

  I said to Jimmie Sue, “Why don’t you and me go outside careful-like, away from this?”

  “I don’t mind hearing it,” she said. “It don’t bother me.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said, “it bothers me.”

  I looked out the door and saw the whorehouse door was still open, but it wasn’t open so wide I felt I could be easily seen. I went on out, started around the side of the old house.

  Jimmie Sue caught up with me.

  “I’ll come with you anyway,” she said.

  Behind the house I could still hear the pistol hitting Fatty, and I could hear him grunt, trying to keep the pain inside, trying not to yell.

  “You’re kind of softhearted, ain’t you, Jack?” Jimmie Sue said.

  “Reckon so,” I said.

  “For me, I guess it depends,” Jimmie Sue said. “My father was a preacher, which is why I sort of took to your old grandpa.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” I said.

  “Ah, it ain’t nothing,” she said.

  “It’s something to me.”

  We sat on a big stump near where the woods were broke up from tree chopping and burning. I thought about how large that tree had been and how little it had been to the men who cut it down and took its years and sawed them up and put them on a fire. Not for warmth or lumber in this case, just for space. We seemed to always be needing space. Lumbermen wanted certain trees and they didn’t care about the others, and those just went to hell in sawdust and smoke.

  I knew right then, if it wasn’t for my sister being out there with those men, I’d have just gone and walked on out of there and been done with the whole lot of them, including Jimmie Sue. But those men did have her. And they had done things to her. The thought made me sick, small like she was, and afraid, and with no one there to help her. I couldn’t hardly stand the thought. But I had to.

  “Hear that?” Jimmie Sue said. “They’re really beating the hell out of him.”

  “I hear it,” I said.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just I’m thinking about your sister and it brings to mind what was done to me, and how I come to be sitting right here with you, having met you in a whorehouse. You think I grew up thinking I’d like to be a whore? That fat bastard groaning and such is music to my ears. I remember the first time I had men on me. It wasn’t by choice, and they worked me over good. Steve told me after he picked me up at the depot how special I was, and then I ended up here. He had a bunch of men take me and have their way. He said they was ‘breaking me in.’”

  “Horrible,” was all I could say.

  “Yeah. It wasn’t something I’d wish on anyone. And now that I know some of the same kind of men have had their way with your sister, I don’t feel the least bit bad for that porky son of a bitch. They find out where she is, then it was all worth it.”

  “I suppose,” I said. “I guess I have to think that way.”

  “Ain’t no other way to think, Jack. You either want her back or you don’t.”

  “I want her back,” I said.

  “She ain’t gonna be just like she was. You know that.”

  “I reckon she can get over it. If you did, I reckon she can.”

  Jimmie Sue lifted her head and looked at me. Her eyes narrowed, and she looked much older all of a sudden. “Who said I got over it?”

  7

  Even out there we could hear what was going on inside the shack, and I was thinking it could be heard across the street, but this was probably just because the whole thing was something I had my mind directed to.

  After a while things went silent, and Eustace come from alongside the shack to where we were. He squatted down on his haunches, took out some makings, and rolled a cigarette. It was the first I had seen him do that. He spilled tobacco ever which way, and Jimmie Sue got up, said, “Give me that.”

  She took the makings from him and rolled a quick cigarette, poked it at his mouth. He bit down on it. She said, “Now there.”

  Eustace found a match in his shirt pocket, struck it along the side of his pants, and lit his cigarette, the light of the match wavering a little as he did. The wind shifted and picked up, and I could smell the ash from the chopped and burnt-down woods behind me.

  “He tell you anything?” I said.

  “He said plenty,” Eustace said. “He wasn’t gonna talk at first, but he come around. There was a nail in there, sticking out of an old board, and Shorty laid that on his goober and drove it through it with the butt of his pistol. I thought before that Fatty wasn’t gonna talk, but when that happened the fat bastard sang like a goddamn songbird so as to get that nail pulled out.”

  “It wouldn’t have taken me that long,” I said. “I’d seen Shorty pick up that board with a nail in it, I’d have started talking. It wouldn’t have taken any time at all for me.”

  “Me, neither,” Eustace said. “I figure if you’re gonna take one for not talking, and it’s gonna stop when you talk, talk right up front and avoid as much pain as possible, because truth is you’re gonna talk, even if you tell a lie. It was hard for him to get that nail out, by the way. He caught up the head of it on his pistol, the trigger guard, and got it hooked enough to pull out. The pulling seemed to me worse than the going in, but I reckon you can’t go around the rest of your life with a chair nailed to your pecker.”

  “You would always have a place to sit,” Jimmie Sue said.

  “That’s right,” Eustace said, grinning around his cigarette. “You would.”

  “You said he talked,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Eustace said. “Sang like a goddamn bird.”

  “How do you know he ain’t lying?” Jimmie Sue said.

  “Don’t,” Eustace said. “From my experience a fella will lie when you torture him if he thinks it’ll get him out of it, and he’ll tell the truth, too. I think he told the truth. We got some directions. Fatty said the rest of them, with your sister, are heading over into the main of the Big Thicket, as he put it. Over there beyond Livingston, down in the brambles and the high-ass pines. It’s a badlands there, down in them deep, dark woods. There’s lots of colored who have run off there to trap and live, and there’s lots of outlaws, too. I knew some colored that left here to go there, and I ain’t never seen them since. Law don’t like to go in there, cause lot of time they do, they don’t come back. That’s where we got to go if you want your sister back, and there ain’t nothing else for it. You sure it’s worth it to you?”

  “It is,” I said. “You sound like it’s not to you.”

  “Not my sister,” Eustace said.

  “What about the deed I got for you?”

  “I think about that, and it holds me up some, but that’s some bad place down in the Thicket, so I got to linger on the idea a little,” Eustace said.

  I was surprised. I thought I could see him wavering, and I figured the best thing to keep him at it was not only to remind him of the deed but to step on his pride a little.

  “You scared?” I said.

  “Ain’t you?” he said. “Being scared, even if you go ahead and do a thing, is what keeps you alive. You ain’t scared, it’s because you’re too stupid to know what’s down in them woods. I know. There’s folks was raised there that ain’t never been out. I heard all about them. How they can live off the land, climb a tree, and pull a bear out of it. How they’re all fucking one another down there—family members, men and women, dogs and squirrels, and for all I know fish and birds. So, yeah, I’m scared enough cause I got sense enough to be. Only time I ain’t scared of nothing is when I’m drunk. Then you got to be scared of me. Sober I know which end of my ass to wipe and which end to feed. And I know when to be scared.”

  “Sounds like wild fairy tales to me,” I said. “Like them kind Shorty was talking about.”

  “Well, it ain’t,” Eustace said. “Most of it, anyway.”

  “He’s right, you know,” Jimmie Sue said.

  “How would you know?” I said.

  “Cause now and
again there is some that leave them woods, and I suppose you might call them the sophisticated ones. They come into town here, trade skins and such for dollars, get drunk as skunks, then they like to come to the pleasure house across the street. I know what they are and what they’re like from my own experience. They’re the ones want you to strip down naked but wear your shoes, bend over the dresser, and yodel while they do it. They bring their own axle grease to loosen up your asshole. They like me to call them daddy or brother while they do it, or they like to howl and bark like dogs when they’re at it. They always end up blacking your eye or busting your lip, and when they leave, the room stinks like something dead, cause that’s how they smell. From the way I look at things, that’s how they act—like they’re something dead that just won’t lay down. They ain’t just mean, Jack; they’re something wrong in the world.”

  I wasn’t much for Grandpa’s sayings right then, but I thought of one and said it: “There’s a new world coming, and those that live the lives of men won’t live in the world of God.”

  “Yeah,” Jimmie Sue said. “I always hear about that new world coming—from your grandpa, for one. But when he got through riding me and I looked out the window, the new world hadn’t come. It looked just like the old one to me.”

  “Well, now,” Eustace said. “I got to go back to it, like it or not. I might need to pick up the shotgun again.”

  He dropped the cigarette, stood up, put his heel to it, and started back around the side of the house.

  When he was gone, I said to Jimmie Sue, “What you said about those folks from the Big Thicket—you were exaggerating some, weren’t you?”

  “I was pulling back on the reins, you want to know the truth,” she said. “I didn’t want to scare you any more than you already are.”

  “I didn’t say I was scared.”

  “You don’t have to say it.”

  “I’ll do all right,” I said. “But you, you don’t have to go. There isn’t any real reason for you to be in this.”

  “Not like I got anywhere else to go but with you,” she said. “I like you, part of the reason. I won’t tell you I won’t run off at some point, but I got to at least start off in that direction. I know I promised you some ass and such, and I’m not saying you can’t have it, but I’m saying you may not have it for long. I may decide to become an independent contractor in my profession. Who knows? Closer we get to those backwoods, the more I might want to set sail, so to speak.”

  I nodded. “All right, then.”

  There was nothing more I could say. But the idea of Jimmie Sue with other men in the future—it was bad enough in the past—made me hurt all over and in places that seemed outside of me.

  “I better go inside there and make sure they don’t kill him,” I said.

  “It won’t be a big loss if they do,” she said.

  “It will be to me if I just let them do it.”

  I went back inside the shack, leaving Jimmie Sue sitting there on that old stump at the edge of what had been a forest.

  8

  When I came inside the shack the door to the back room was open, and I could see Fatty in there. He was still tied to the chair and asleep. Which is a nice way of saying he was unconscious. He was bloody, too. The place stank of sweat and piss and shit. Shorty wasn’t kidding about what would happen when he gave someone a pistol-whipping.

  The whole thing made me ill and caused me to feel sick to my stomach. Not only that it had happened, but that I had let it. Shorty was sitting on the couch taking a rest, rubbing his shoulder with one small hand. Eustace was in a chair, and his face was bathed in sweat.

  Shorty said, “My arm is tired. I should have traded hands more.”

  Eustace grunted.

  Hog had returned and was lying on the floor. He grunted, too.

  “We have been discussing the possibility of going over to the sheriff’s office so that he might take Fatty here, and perhaps receive a reward,” Shorty said. “We can do that or we can shoot him in the head first, then take him over. Either way, we get the reward.”

  “We’ve talked about this,” I said.

  “Killing him has its merits,” Shorty said. “First off, I do not like him much, a feeling I assure you from his end is mutual. And while we are talking, Jack, I admit to you that Eustace and I did not leave a note for the sheriff about the boy’s body.”

  “We up and lied about that,” Eustace said.

  “Why?” I said.

  “Sometimes it’s just our way,” Eustace said.

  “Well, your way isn’t so good, as I see it.”

  “As he sees it,” Shorty said, glancing at Eustace.

  “Look here,” I said. “You do within reason what you got to do so I can get Lula back, but you don’t need to kill him. It’s not that far a hike to the sheriff’s office. What I don’t understand is why you lied to me about the note.”

  “We didn’t think we ought to get the sheriff mixed up in this just yet,” Eustace said. “It didn’t seem—what was that big-ass word you had, Shorty?”

  “Prudent,” Shorty said.

  “Yeah, Prudence,” Eustace said.

  “No,” Shorty said. “Prudent…oh, hell. Never mind. It was not a good idea.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “We didn’t want to take the chance the sheriff would see us,” Eustace said. “He knows us some.”

  “And to know us is to love us,” Shorty said.

  “You mean he hates you,” I said.

  “Naw,” Eustace said. “We’re friends. He used to bounty-hunt some. Then he got married and got respectable and needed a job. He ended up sheriff. Fortunately for him his wife ran off. So he’s got it pretty good. But thing is, being a bounty hunter and taking bounty money dies hard. He knows Shorty’s handwriting, and if he knows we’re on the hunt he might just stick his nose into our business.”

  “My handwriting is fine and distinct,” Shorty said. “I am proud of it and cannot bring myself to purposely print or write cursive poorly. I learned my penmanship from my friend Walter the Midget, who had a very fine education. But how he became educated is of no interest to you, I presume.”

  I felt he was laying that out there as a trap, so that I might feign interest and he could tell me the complete story about how he had acquired good handwriting. So I took a dodge. “Look,” I said. “We got to take him to the sheriff. That’s all there is to it. We’re going to do some of this my way or not at all.”

  “And if we were to choose to abandon you?” Shorty said.

  “Then you can go back to your little telescope, and you, Eustace, can go back to digging graves or digging burnt folks up and putting them on doorsteps,” I said. “We’ll do this my way or no way at all.”

  Shorty looked at Eustace. Eustace smiled. “Well, now,” he said. “I like to see a little rooster grow up some.”

  “Very well, then,” Shorty said. “I suggest we find something to wipe Fatty down and haul him over to see the sheriff.”

  I went over to the livery and borrowed a bucket of water and some rags and told the liveryman I wanted to have a washdown. He said the bucket was old and so were the rags and I could keep them. I hauled it all over to the shack, doing it in as sneaky a way as I could manage.

  I brought the stuff inside the shack, where I found Jimmie Sue had joined Shorty and Eustace. I set the bucket down, and they asked if, as the woman of the bunch, Jimmie Sue would do the honors of cleaning Fatty up. She told them they could go do something to themselves that I had never heard of before, and then Shorty turned to Eustace for the job, and Eustace didn’t want it, either. That left me or Shorty.

  It turned out to be me.

  I went in there with my water and rags and set the bucket beside Fatty’s chair. I stood for a moment looking at him, holding the rags. I took a deep breath and put the rags on the floor. Fatty was unconscious, and my first thought was I wanted to take a gun and shoot him, and my second thought was that was too easy. I wanted to make hi
m suffer. I wanted to shoot him in the feet and then the knees and then the elbows and then the groin and then the neck. I wanted him to die slowly. I wanted to shoot him and take my time between shots. I thought first I would wake him, and then I would start shooting, and with each shot I would say my sister’s name. I could imagine him and her and what he might have done to her, and what the others might have done, and I felt a rising in my stomach. I didn’t want those thoughts in my head, but they had already roosted there.

  Dampening a rag, I touched it to Fatty’s face, over his eye, where he had taken a good blow. It was a deep cut and bloody. I touched it, and he groaned. I was reminded of a dog I had found all cut up once. I don’t know how he got that way, but it looked as if someone had been at work on him with a knife. I had picked the dog up and taken it home and put it in the shed out back. I got water and rags just like this, and I had gone out there and cleaned him up. The dog was so hurt it didn’t move. Fatty was the same. So hurt he didn’t move. I liked the dog better than Fatty, so Fatty became the dog in my mind. I touched the wet rag to all the spots on his face and the sides of his head where it was bleeding through his hair. I cleaned him in places I didn’t want to clean him. It took a lot of time because there was a lot of blood, but just like the dog, he was a healer. He didn’t keep leaking. He had already started to dry up.

  After I had wiped Fatty down he came awake. I expected a stream of bad language and such, but he didn’t say a word. I think he had been trained by Shorty that the pistol might come out at any moment, and for the least little reason, so it was best to watch in silence, yet the glare in his eyes was sharp as a knife. There was no gratitude for cleaning him up. I remembered then that after I had cleaned the dog and treated its wounds with medicine, I fed it, holding its head so it could eat. The dog finished eating, gained its strength, and bit me on the hand. When I pulled back from the bite, the dog that had been near death just a short time before jumped up and darted out through the open door of the shed. Still, I had felt good about myself then. I was my mother’s good boy, the one who had cleaned up and fed the wounded dog and endured its bite with understanding, but considering I was the reason Fatty was where he was and in the condition he was in, it wasn’t a feeling I could cling to now with as much enthusiasm.