The Thicket (23 page)

“The young one pulled Ella in the back room, and the others sat in there with me by the fireplace and drank out of that bottle. Cut Throat Bill, who when we first met that day just called himself Bill, said when he was young his mother had told him she didn’t want him in the first place and had decided to get rid of him. The other one, the fat one, said, ‘I thought it was your father.’ Cut Throat said, ‘Depends on which day I’m telling it.’ My guess was it was something he was telling that was mostly true, and as he started talking, I knew then who he was. He had a reputation, and I hadn’t really thought too much about that scar around his neck, thought maybe it was an accident. Didn’t want to think it was anything else. I heard it was a robber done it to him when he was a boy. I read about him in the dime novels, and I think that’s where I got that. But he said he got his throat cut slow and they all thought he was going to die, but he didn’t. He said it was powerful painful. At that time, way my foot hurt, the way I lay there not able to move or speak, I had some idea what he meant. He said, ‘You know, it was a strange thing, cause it didn’t hurt at first at all.’ Said it stung a little after the fact, and then he got weak cause he was losing blood, but he survived it cause he got the wound bound and his mother hadn’t cut deep enough with the straight razor. Then he said, ‘You know, it wasn’t my mother. It was a demon done it. A demon that wanted my soul. And you know what? He got it.’

“That’s when he just quit talking, reached in his pocket, and got out a razor and come over quick and grabbed my burnt and chopped foot and just started sawing pieces of meat off of it. I was so weak, and it happened so fast, I couldn’t do nothing about it. It was over before I knew it happened, but I tell you, a moment later I was damn sure it had happened, because the pain on that foot was something fierce. I passed out again. I don’t know why he didn’t kill me, but right in the middle of it, right before I passed out, he got up and went in the bedroom. I didn’t know nothing after that, but when I come to they was gone. The front door was open, and the place had been thrown about. My rifle was gone, and so were some odds and ends, and later I found out that the money we had saved in a milk jar under the bed had been taken as well as some we had hid up in a rafter. I woke up and I couldn’t walk. I crawled to where Cut Throat Bill had thrown the hatchet in the floor, and I got that and made my way crawling to the back room. Now, I don’t know what had happened or why. But the young man was there, and he was on the bed, facedown, but his face was turned sideways toward me and his eyes were open and his blood was soaked into the bedclothes. He had his pants pulled down to his ankles. I didn’t see Ella. I was still on the floor, and I reached up and dragged him off the bed, and he fell on his back and I seen then his throat was cut; fact was, his head was darn near cut off. Bill had got mad at him for whatever reason and had come up on him and cut his throat. While I was there looking at him, I heard something, and looked under the bed…there was Ella. She opened her mouth, and I seen right off that her tongue had been cut out.”

“Jesus,” Winton said.

“Ella?” Efrem said.

Ella took hold of the bottom of her mask and lifted it. I could tell she had been a real looker in the past, but now her mouth had been cut on both sides so that there was a thick scar that ran up from the corners of it to under each ear. She opened her mouth, and there remained just a bit of her tongue; it wiggled like a little fish tail. I thought then about what Shorty had said about humans being pretty much the same—Indians, whites, what have you. I didn’t mean to, but I looked at Winton and what had been done to him, and then back at her. I wished then that I wasn’t a man at all but a hawk, something with some kind of integrity about what it killed, that did it for food or survival, not for sport or revenge or to satisfy something rotten inside.

Ella closed her mouth and quickly pulled down the mask. I was glad she did.

“He ain’t just a bad man with a gun and a razor,” Efrem said. “He’s something wicked. I don’t know which story is true about how his throat got cut, and he may not even know, but I tell you this: he’s a thing you don’t want to mess with. You want to leave that be. I tell you this hoping you won’t. I’m hoping you’ll go after him and do him in, make him pay for whatever you want him to pay for, cause that will be for us, too. But I couldn’t just send you and not let you know how he is and how it could turn out, and not in your favor.”

“With that understood,” Shorty said, “we are set on a true course to find him, no matter what.”

“Where is he?” Eustace said.

“What I can tell you is he’s southwest and in the Thicket,” Efrem said. “He’s got a place not many miles from a sawmill. You go down the main road out, and you come to that sawmill, and you aren’t far. More than that I can’t tell you. I only know that through hearsay.”

“Then you don’t really know much at all,” Winton said. “I think you always wanted us to go after him. You wanted to fire us up with that story. You haven’t given us any kind of directions that help a bit. You ain’t told us a damn thing we didn’t already know.”

“All right,” Efrem said. “I suppose that is true. They ruined our lives. I can’t hardly even work. I got to grow a small patch of vegetables and raise a few chickens. Ella here, she ain’t never gonna marry. There ain’t a thing for her and me but just living till we die. Yeah, we want you to get him.”

“You didn’t need to convince me,” I said. “He has my sister.”

“Oh, my goodness,” said Efrem.

“No need to say it,” I said. “I got to believe she’s all right.”

“I suppose it’s possible,” Efrem said. “Cut Throat ain’t got no balance. I don’t think he knows what he plans to do from moment to moment. Man’s law don’t mean nothing to him, and he’s got no fear of it.”

“I got to trust in God and believe she’s all right,” I said.

“Don’t you think I prayed that night when Cut Throat come in our house? Don’t you think I prayed after he chopped on my foot and put it in the fire, sliced meat off of it like it was a roast? Don’t you think I did that? Don’t you think I did when Ella was in that room with them? Don’t you think that?”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“Ain’t no suppose to it,” Efrem said. “I did. And I guess I could say thank God for sparing Ella. But then I got to wonder what he had against us in the first place. We was raised up good, and every time the church door opened, we was there. But I’ll tell you, boy. I ain’t been back since, neither of us, and I don’t never plan to go again.”

I didn’t have anything to say in return.

“I hope your sister is fine,” Efrem said. “I do. She could be. Like I said, Cut Throat, he hasn’t got any balance about him. You never know what he’s gonna do. That young fella got crossways with him, and I think he thought on that and decided to take care of him. And then he did what he did to Ella. Why that, I don’t know. Why anything he does, I don’t know.”

We all sat around silent for a while after that.

When the silence got too heavy, Efrem stood, said, “I guess I did get you folks to listen to me dishonestly. Don’t know how to tell you where they are. Just wanted you to know what happened to us. You want to find him, and I want you to. I can’t do nothing about it myself, and if I could, I don’t know I would. They scared me so bad I’m fearful if a bird’s shadow falls over me.”

“It ain’t nothing to be ashamed of,” Winton said. “I get some fear myself from time to time when the night comes. And I got some problems with the mirror, in more ways than one.”

Efrem held out his hand to help his sister off the bucket, but Jimmie Sue was already up and helping her. She hung on to Ella’s arm until they were outside the shed, and she walked with her on out into the street.

As we watched Efrem and Ella go, saw Jimmie Sue coming back toward us, Winton said, “I want that Cut Throat son of a bitch bad. Real bad.”

Eustace’s voice was deep, like he was bringing it from a well in a bucket. He said, “Me, too.”

Shorty stood short and silent, the last part being unlike him.

We rode outside of town and stopped near a clearing. Shorty had us dismount, then laid us out some guns on a horse blanket. We already had weapons, but he collected them, and then placed them and the ammunition out with the others so we could see what was what. The only thing that didn’t get collected and redistributed was Eustace’s shotgun. Wasn’t anyone else could shoot it comfortably without having the stock take out a tooth. I wasn’t sure why he was doing this, but I didn’t squawk. I was long past trying to figure out Shorty’s mind.

Shorty got back his Sharps and a big Colt pistol and a small pistol, which he stuck in his boot. Eustace was given a little revolver to go with his cannon. Winton had an automatic we had taken from the trading post.

I was given an old navy .36 with shells, all of which had been taken from the trading post. Jimmie Sue was handed a Winchester. They gave Spot a just-in-case gun, an iffy-looking pistol that broke open in the middle. It fired five shots, if I remember correctly. I have never cared much for guns, and don’t take to them like some folks do, and don’t always remember their details. A gun is a tool, but I never learned to love one as much as a rake or a hoe.

After we got to riding along, I expressed just that opinion to Shorty, who, along with Spot, was riding closest to me right then. I told him I was glad to have a gun like a comfort pillow, but I didn’t know if I was good enough with it to be put in the forefront.

“I’m willing to stand there,” I said. “Just saying I don’t know how much good I’ll be when it comes to the nut-cutting.”

“Might I remind you that you have already used a gun and did quite well?”

“That was mostly an accident. I missed until I didn’t.”

“Then you better work close. Listen here. You have proved brave as any man I have been with in a tight spot. You did what you had to do and did not make like a rabbit.”

“I don’t like guns, and I don’t like killing,” I said.

“A gun makes me feel taller. As a man ages a gun’s machinery becomes more important than the machinery of the flesh. You can fix or replace an old gun, but an old man cannot be fixed. That said, it is best not to learn to love guns, because they damn sure do not love you back.”

“I shot a crow once was pecking on a shack I was in,” Spot said. “It woke me up, and I was mad at it.”

I was kind of startled when he spoke up. I had forgotten about Spot riding close to us. I turned in the saddle, said, “What?”

“I shot that sucker,” Spot said. “And then I seen there was another crow nearby. I was gonna shoot it, too, but saw how it was fluttering from limb to limb, all upset, and once it dived down near that dead crow for a look, then up. Figured it was the mate to the one I killed. I thought about it some, then went on and shot the other on account I didn’t want it to be alone.”

I
haven’t done much of a job explaining how we thought we could be on Fatty’s trail. Even the peculiarities of the wagon wheel were now lost in the traffic marks on the road. Efrem had pretty much given us hoot-and-holler directions, some guesses, and a might-be. All he had told us that was solid was that some said they stayed beyond a sawmill back in the woods. But the Big Thicket is a lot of woods. And for that matter, there are a lot of sawmills gnawing through the country like rats through cotton.

Pretty soon we come upon one of those sawmills, and, stopping near it, we watched the colored workers hack small limbs off logs with axes and take the big limbs off with a gasoline-driven saw that whined like a cooped-up child.

The man running the sawmill was a little white fellow. He was standing out front of a little shack built by the road. Even from a distance we saw what you would expect of an old sawmill man. He was missing some fingers. Two on his left hand, and on his right his forefinger and little finger were nubbed and yellowed at the tips. He seemed nervous, like he was expecting important news from far away.

Me and Shorty went over to see him, leaving our people on the other side of the road. When we got up to where he was, standing by the shack, watching some colored men haul lumber into the sawmill camp, he turned and looked at us.

He let out a laugh, looked at Shorty, said, “I thought my eyes was fooling me on account of I had me a little nip about an hour ago. I was thinking you was an ugly child, and this boy here was your father, but I can see now he’s too young for that and you’re too old to be any child.”

“Very observant,” said Shorty.

“One minute,” said the man. He ducked into the shed and came out with a bottle of whiskey. He opened and swigged it and recapped it and slipped it in his back pocket. This might be part of an explanation as to why he was missing fingers.

I told the man about the wagon and Fatty, but without details as to why we were looking for him. I said we’d heard there might be a camp of some fellas living off in the woods near a sawmill, and Fatty might be with them.

The man scratched his head, said, “I don’t know about no camp, but I seen your man, I’m pretty damn sure.” He looked at Shorty and grinned. “You do any flips?”

“I beg your pardon?” said Shorty.

“You know, somersaults.”

“Why in hell would I do flips?”

“I thought midgets did flips and stuff like that. I seen one in a circus once that rode a dog.”

Shorty was turning red in the face. I said, “He doesn’t do flips. But this fat man you seen in a wagon. He’s someone we’re trying to catch up with.”

“Why would that be?” said the man. “You ain’t said yet. I’m going to be giving out words on him, I’m thinking that’s something I ought to know.” He turned his head to the side a little, as if he suspected an untruth he might have to dodge, but it turned out he was the sort of person that knew how to embrace a lie with enthusiasm—and the bigger the lie, the more he wanted to hold it close to him.

I found this out when I said, “That fat fellow is this midget’s manager, and he run off with money he owes him that Shorty was collecting for his midget wife to have her foot fixed.”

“Her foot?” said the man. “What’s wrong with it?”

“They aren’t sure,” I said. “But she’s got to have it broke and set for a while, but even then she’ll still have to wear some kind of special shoe so she can walk.”

The man looked down at Shorty. “He stole your little-shoe money?”

Shorty nodded. “Yes, sir. He did. All of it.”

“He took some of Shorty’s clothes, too,” I said. “I think he’s planning on letting his monkey wear them.”

“He has a monkey?” said the man.

“Two,” I said.

“Aren’t they pretty small?”

“My clothes?” said Shorty. “Or the monkeys?”

“The monkeys,” said the man.

“Why, yes, they commonly are,” said Shorty, getting into the spirit. “But these are some big monkeys, out of the jungles of Brazil. They are nearly my size and are known to be carnivorous.”

“What?” said the man.

“They eat meat,” said Shorty. “They could easily wear my pants and shirts, and perhaps even my little boots, and eat you, too.”

“That’s a terrible thing for him to have done, taking your duds like that,” said the man. “And planning on giving them to man-eating monkeys.”

“My sentiments exactly,” Shorty said. He dropped his eyes and let his lips droop and tremble a bit, like no sadder short man existed on earth.

“Well, he come through here. I was right here when he passed. If’n it’s the man you’re talking about. But I didn’t see no monkeys.”

“They wouldn’t be with him,” I said.

“No, sir,” said Shorty. “They have been packed away somewhere and he is bringing the clothes to them. Once he has them suited up again, I think he is going to take them on the road. They have a little act, see. I was once part of that act, but we had a falling-out over my little wife, bless her heart. One of the monkeys bit her left pinkie finger off.”

The man held up his left hand, then his right. “Least it was just one. Where is your wife?” He started looking around, as if we might present her to him.

“Back at the circus,” Shorty said. “She does not travel well. Her little foot and all. My wife and I had been saving up for some time to have that foot fixed and booted out. But now we are without funds for either the surgical repair or the footwear.”

The sawmill man nodded, took a swig of his whiskey. I thought I saw his eyes glisten for a moment. “Well, this fella was fat, all right, and he looked the worse for wear. White-faced and leaning forward a bit, like he had a bellyache.”

“That sounds like him,” I said.

“He come through going pretty fast, and working them old mules that was pulling the wagons harder than I think you ought to work mule or nigger. I don’t work my niggers too hard. I try and keep them and the mules on the same level of work, you see. Steady but not abusive.”

“That is mighty white of you,” said Shorty.

“I see there’s a nigger with you,” said the man. “I got an opening he wants a job. It pays about half what a white man gets, and I’m the only one around here pays his niggers that good.”

“No, actually,” Shorty said. “He works for us. He is from the circus.”

“He’s too big to do flips, ain’t he?” said the man.

“Yes,” Shorty said. “Yes, he is. He cleans up and serves part of the time as a lion tamer.”

“I guess a fella that would know a lion would be a nigger. And if they get eaten there’s always another one out there that will need the work.”

“They are very easy to replace,” Shorty said.

“That big hog part of the circus, too?”

“He walks the high wire,” Shorty said.

“That hog?”

“He is quite agile,” Shorty said.

“If I was to string up a rope between some trees, could he walk it?”

“No,” Shorty said. “He has to have a very taut wire, and he does not work without a net.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because he does not want to fall and strike the ground.”

“Oh, yeah. I can see that. I know I’d want a net. Course, you ain’t getting me up any higher than a footstool.”

“About this fat thief,” I said. “We would love to get that money back and buy that shoe.”

“The monkeys can keep the clothes,” Shorty said.

Turned out that fellow knew what everyone else knew. That there was a gang of ruffians down in the woods somewhere, and that a fellow named Cut Throat might be among them. We were of course playing it that Fatty was taking our money and joining in with them, and that they all planned to go into the circus business together financed by the money for Shorty’s wife’s little shoe.

“I tell you this,” said the man. “I’ve heard about Cut Throat. I think I may have seen him come by, though I ain’t sure it was. One of the niggers said it was. This fella, whoever he was, always had a mess of men with him, ten or twelve. And if he’s down there and half of what I’ve heard about him is true, you might want to tell that midget woman she’s just gonna be a cripple and that’s all there is to it. Or you got to start back saving up your money again to buy that shoe.”

“We’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

The exact place they were staying he didn’t know, but he knew it was off to the southwest. He was about as helpful as spinning a bottle in the dirt and following where the mouth of it pointed. But at least he had seen our man Fatty.

As we turned and made our way back to our group, the sawmill man called out, “Hope that midget gal’s foot gets fixed and you can afford the shoe, little fella. I’d give you something toward it, but I got to pay the niggers.”

We accounted how this was understandable and wandered back to our posse.

Eustace, who had been eyeing us from a distance, said, “How’d it go? What was that about a shoe?”

“We told him you were a lion tamer,” Shorty said.

“What?” Eustace said.

“You heard me,” Shorty said. “And there was much to-do about man-eating monkeys and a shoe for a crippled midget woman.”

“What the hell?” Jimmie Sue said.

“Your young man started it,” Shorty said to Jimmie Sue. “And to tell you the truth, he was pretty magnificent. Course, it helped the man was half drunk and nearly all stupid. That said, we know only that Fatty came by and was seen. That wraps up our information.”

Spot, I noticed, had suddenly turned toward inner thoughts. After a moment, he said, “Are there man-eating monkeys?”

“Of course,” Shorty said.

We were well down the road by the time the heat of the day had burnt out and a bit of cool darkness had slipped in and the road and trees seemed to become as one with the shadows and the birds quit singing and began to coo in the darkness.