The Thicket (8 page)

Shorty used the ladder to help him climb on the horse, then pulled the ladder up and put the last loop of it over his saddle horn. He tongue-clicked to his horse. We started out with it still night, us riding and Hog trotting along like he was out to see the scenery and maybe write some kind of travelogue on it; he kept turning his head and looking up, as if he were amazed at the lightening of the sky. We hadn’t gone hardly any distance at all when the moon began to look like a pat of butter melting in an iron skillet, and the stars got hard to see. Then there was pink light crawling through the dark, and a blue sky crept in. By the time we got down to the river, being on the side where Cut Throat and his gang would have made their escape, the sun was up, and the river smelled of fish and rot. In the morning light the land and trees and the surface of the river were the color of fresh blood.

W
e rode alongside the river until we came to where the ferry would have docked had it made it across. Eustace got down off his horse, started looking about for sign, Hog looking with him.

I said to Eustace, “Can Hog follow sign?“

“He ain’t a hound dog,” Eustace said. “He probably could, but if he did, he wouldn’t tell us about it. I think he just likes to look busy so we’ll maybe think he’s in the know.”

While Eustace looked about, Shorty pulled a cigar from inside his coat pocket and put it in his mouth. He produced a match and lit it, licked his left thumb and forefinger, pinched the match head dead with his wet fingers, and tossed it onto the riverbank. He puffed a bit, looked at me, said, “Did you hear a wolf howling and caterwauling down by the spring last night?”

I knew he had heard me after all, so I didn’t answer him. Eustace said, “I did. I thought it sounded more like someone crying. Maybe a girl, or a little child that wanted some titty milk.”

He and Shorty looked at one another and snickered.

“That’s very nice of you two,” I said. “I was worried about my sister.”

“Worrying will not find her,” Shorty said.

“I got something here,” Eustace said, breaking the direction of our conversation, and I was glad for it. “Two horses carrying two riders. They went off that way. One of them is bleeding.”

“Maybe they went that way, and maybe they did not,” said Shorty. “I remember the time we tracked an old man on a donkey.”

“They did go this way, smart-ass,” Eustace said. “I can follow this sign as it stands, plain and simple.”

“Maybe you can, and maybe you cannot,” Shorty said. “Or maybe you can until whoever is bleeding runs out of blood, my sweet Gretel.”

“What?” Eustace said.

“It is a fairy tale,” Shorty said. “And I have made you a character in it.”

“You can go fuck your little short self with your little short dick in your fairy tail,” Eustace said, then got on his horse. “This way.”

Shorty looked at me with a grin, said, “I may be short, but the appendage to which he refers is not. Sometimes in the night, I mistake it for a full-grown water moccasin and try to choke it to death.”

“That is no concern of mine,” I said.

“Eustace there thinks when I say ‘tale,’ I am saying ‘tail,’ as in a tail you wag, and that I am referring somehow to a fairy, one of those little winged creatures, so he thinks I have made him a character inside a fairy’s tail. How would anyone ever arrive at such a notion?”

“I have no idea, and I don’t care,” I said.

“It is because he does not know fairy tales,” said Shorty.

“I said I didn’t care.”

“I do, for after all, I am a dwarf, and they seem to appear frequently in those stories. And speaking of that, I always thought if I were a dwarf in the story about Snow White, I would have worked seriously on dipping my wick in that bitch.”

I rode on ahead of him, not only because I was finding him somewhat offensive but also because, like Eustace, I wasn’t entirely sure what he was talking about. When I got up beside Eustace, he said, “Howdy, cousin.”

“He’s crazy,” I said.

“Don’t I know it?” Eustace said. “But there ain’t no man, taller or bigger, I’d rather have at my back.”

We traveled along a trail bathed in birdsong, mosquitoes, and blood drops, riding into the thick woods for a long distance. Eustace, now in the fore, was leaning out from his horse, studying the ground. Shorty came along behind us, leading the borrowed horse, as they called it. Hog trotted with us, occasionally disappearing into the woods, only to burst out of it at unexpected moments like a cannon shot.

Eventually, Eustace reined up and we all came to a halt. Eustace hopped off his horse, stood holding the reins and looking about.

“There was some kind of dustup here,” he said, pushing his hat back on his head.

“A falling-out among thieves, perhaps?” Shorty said.

“I don’t think so,” Eustace said, wrapping the reins of his horse around a bush, then walking off into where the growth was thickest.

“You found something?” I asked.

“Got to shit,” he said from within the brush.

He was gone for a while, and when he came out, Shorty said, “You did not wipe your ass on poison ivy like you did that time in Arkansas, did you?”

“Nope,” Eustace said. “But I found something in there that tells me they have another horse.”

“It is probably a note containing that information,” Shorty said, looking at me, chomping on his cigar. “As that would be Eustace’s best way of finding anything of complex origins.”

Eustace grunted, went back into the brush.

We got off our horses, Shorty using his rope ladder, and tagged after Eustace. Hog, who had been wandering ahead of us by some distance, returned and trailed us into the undergrowth.

“You don’t want to step over there,” Eustace said when we were in the thicket. “That’s where I left a little something. But if you look in that ditch next to where that honeysuckle is growing, you’ll find what I’m talking about.”

We looked, noticing pretty quick as we went that what we were smelling wasn’t honeysuckle. There was a boy lying down in the ditch. He was about twelve, I figured, and he wasn’t taking a nap. His throat was cut so wide and long it looked as if he had a second mouth. There were ants on him. His eyes were wide open—or what was left of them was, as the ants, and probably birds, had been at him for a time. He didn’t have a shirt on, or shoes. Hog got down in the ditch, bit at the kid’s hair, tearing it loose.

“Get away from there,” I said.

Hog ignored me. I started to kick at him, but Eustace said, “I wouldn’t do that you want to keep that leg.”

I didn’t.

“Hog,” Eustace said. “Get out.”

Hog got out, went crunching and smashing through the brush, as if throwing a tantrum.

Eustace said, “I could see out there on the trail that they came by another horse, and when I come in here to drop my apples, I found him. They robbed him of his ride, killed him, and left him. They probably took the shirt to bind those wounds you said your grandpa gave Cut Throat with his derringer. The shoes may have been for one of them lost theirs in the river. Maybe they just wanted an extra pair of shoes. No telling.”

“All right,” Shorty said. “That means they have found another horse to aid them in their escape, which means that, not having to ride double, they can continue wherever they are going more swiftly. And I would say that Cut Throat Bill himself has been at work. Word is, due to his having had his throat slit once, it is his favorite method of operation when it comes to dispatching someone.”

Eustace and Shorty started walking out of the brush toward the trail. I said, “We can’t just leave him here.”

“I do not want to,” Shorty said, “but we are losing time. Your sister is in need of rescue now. We do not need distractions.”

Shorty could see I was having a hard time accepting this. He said, “Here, now, this is what we will do.” He pulled a big knife from under his coat, slashed a hickory by the trail several times with it, and put it back. “We will have to let him remain in the ditch, but when we finish with our duty, we can let someone know he is here, and they can reunite his bones with his family.”

“Which is what I figure will be left,” Eustace said.

“That’s unchristian,” I said.

“You know where I stand on those matters,” Shorty said.

“I am mostly Christian,” Eustace said, “but I think it would be more Christian to help your sister out. That boy ain’t going to need no helping. And we ain’t got no shovel, and he ain’t paying us anything, either.”

I remembered then that burying was in fact part of Eustace’s profession, and he had been known to dig up the dead when not paid properly, so appealing to his Christian learning wasn’t going to have much impact. I looked at Shorty. Nope. Nothing there. He was smoking his cigar and swatting at a bug. I was beginning to fear the men I had fallen in with. It was as if I had gone to visit Lot in Sodom and Gomorrah and had encountered the men who wanted to bugger the angels. I wanted to be holy, but there didn’t seem a way I could show it. Unlike in the sermons I’d heard, where the righteous fellow laid out his views on matters and the unwashed suddenly came clean, cleanliness of that sort was not in the making.

I decided I had no choice but to go on with things, but I will tell you quite sincerely that my guts ached and I felt as if Jesus had laid a disapproving hand on my shoulder. In fact, its warm presence was with me for a while, until later in the day I discovered I had been messed on by a bird.

The trail went along easy for some time, then, with me still brooding on matters, we came to where it forked. Eustace said, “Y’all wait here.”

He rode off and we waited. Shorty’s face was scrunched up, his lips pursed, his eyes narrowed.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“I think he lost the trail a ways back,” Shorty said, pausing to relight his cigar. “I could tell the way he hesitated, and began searching around. It was easy to see he was hoping spoor of some manner would present itself. I think it did not. I believe the bleeder has stopped bleeding and is less easy to follow. You, too, would notice these things if you paid less attention to what is said and more attention to what is in fact true instead of what you prefer to be true. Suppose you are in a tough situation, and a man is smiling at you, and he is telling you something you want to hear, but his hand is reaching inside his coat, or behind something, or is resting on anything that might be used as a weapon. Well, watch his true action, not his false mannerisms. One can be faked, the other cannot.”

“Isn’t a mannerism and an action the same?” I said.

Shorty snorted as if he were trying to blow out a cantankerous booger. “Hardly. A mannerism is how you work your mouth and eyes, the way you try to sound when you talk. You saw something in my face then that concerned you, but you had to ask me what it was I was thinking. An action is what you actually do. It is not what you say, it is what you do. That is true in all matters of importance. You have to be cautious when you are in this line of work. It helps as well if you are good at it. Eustace, when it comes to tracking, is very much hit or miss. Currently, I believe he is in the miss position.”

“That can’t be good,” I said.

“Of course not,” Shorty said. “I told you he is not the master trailsman he pretends to be. His mother and her people were so good he cannot quite accept it. He seems to think it should be an innate quality, not one that is obtained through teachings from skilled trackers as well as from one’s personal observations.”

“He said he was taught.”

“Yes, but he thinks you are born with certain attributes, like tracking and cooking skills. He claims both and has neither in abundance, though he can follow a trail sometimes and well enough, if it has not rained or the trail is not too cold. I should also add that Eustace is dogged in his own sometimes distracted way, and will eventually return to the snoop and manage to sniff something out, even if it is only squirrel shit in the pines or an old man riding a donkey instead of a deadly outlaw on a horse.”

None of this sounded particularly encouraging.

“His cooking,” Shorty said, “is fair to middling. He can heat beans, which is no great feat. However, he can fry you up some nasty pork with a gravy straight from the ass of the devil.”

We sat there on our horses for what seemed a long time, and then I realized we were missing one of our companions. I said to Shorty, “Where’s Hog?”

“He will find us,” Shorty said, puffing his cigar. “You want the truth, I believe he has gone back to examine that boy’s body.”

“You mean eat it?” I said.

“That could be the case,” he said. “We can hope he does not scatter the bones too far, so that those markings I made will still be of use to the family.”

He sounded about as sincere as a lawyer whose client was holding a smoking gun.

By this point I felt as if I had fallen off the face of the earth and right down into hell, where I’d been led by these fellows with their stories—all this shiny business about what they could do and so on. Grandpa once told me that man lusted after silliness, women, shiny things like silver and gold, and all manner of big, bright lies. He warned me that you have to be careful of such things, because a sparkle isn’t always a traveling light or a reward. It can be misleading. He said everything sparkles in hell.

About that time, Eustace came riding back, his head held down a little more than usual. When he got up to us, he reined in, dismounted, and said, “Here’s what we got. Where the trail splits, well, I think some of them went off in the woods there, maybe cause they thought it was about time to throw anyone might be following off their scent, and one man went down this other trail for his own reasons.”

“Toward No Enterprise?” Shorty said.

“That’s the look of it,” Eustace said.

“Does the man that went toward town have my sister?” I asked.

“No,” Eustace said. “That man is riding single. She would still be riding double with one of them. They wouldn’t have given her the spare horse. You said the men were also riding double, so it stands to reason one of them would end up with the horse. Which means she’s with them that made their own trail through the woods.”

“Then that’s the way we should go,” I said.

Eustace didn’t say anything, but he had a look on his face like a blind man wishing he could see.

“Ah,” Shorty said, leaning back in his saddle. “I can tell you right now we have a problem.”

“Here he goes,” Eustace said, kicking the dirt.

“Eustace has lost their trail in the trees, and the only trail he has is the one that goes right down the center of that little wagon road toward No Enterprise. Am I correct in this assumption, Eustace?”

“I guess you have assumpted right,” Eustace said.

“Can’t you find the sign to go after the others?”

“Maybe,” Eustace said. “The woods break up in there a piece, and there’s flat rock for a long ways, and a few straggling trees. It’s not normal for around here. I’m not used to it.”