The Thicket (9 page)

“He means he cannot track over flat rock very well,” Shorty said.

“Then what use are you?” I said. I think if I had a gun right then I would have used it on one or the other of them. Certainly I would have shot Eustace, and might have at least managed to wing the dwarf.

“Thing is,” said Eustace, “we know one of them is going down the wagon road, and we can follow that. We find him, we got a good chance of knowing where the others went.”

“Why would he go off like that?” I said. “Is he setting a trap?”

“I doubt that is his reasoning,” Shorty said. “We have come too late for them to be on to us, to know we are following. He has broken off just in case someone is in pursuit, but he certainly would have no idea that we are. If I have read between the lines of the newspaper accounts of Cut Throat’s robberies, there is seldom anyone brave enough to follow them for long. If the rabbit is running, the hound pursues, but if the rabbit pauses, and in fact turns out to be a wolf instead of a rabbit, then the pursuers lose interest. Or, to be more precise, townsfolk are brave in a cluster and in their own surroundings, but ultimately they do not want to be led out into deep water, so to speak, and drowned for some bank money, even if part of it is theirs.”

“While we’re chasing this clown…” and then I paused, remembering Shorty’s previous profession, and looked at him. “No disrespect, but the ones that have Lula are heading into the woods, and will soon have her carried away, and maybe never to be found. So why would we follow this other fellow? It doesn’t make sense.”

“We would be wise to find the person who would most likely know where they are going,” Shorty said. “And that would be the man who has ridden away on his lonesome. One is easier to handle than several. It would not surprise me to discover that he has gone to No Enterprise for supplies. Sending one man would be smarter than all of them going. But his intent for riding into No Enterprise is not a matter of concern; catching up with him is.”

“And what if he isn’t going into No Enterprise?” I said.

“Then that will be a new concern,” Shorty said.

“Horse he’s riding, one they took off that kid?” Eustace said. “It’s got a nick in its shoe. I can follow the track clear, and when we catch up with him we can talk to him, see what he knows.”

“You can’t figure out how to track the others?” I said.

“I might could glance about and poke around till some sign showed up,” Eustace said. “That could come quick or not at all. And if it rains, or there’s lots of horses and wagons come this way, the tracks we got and know belong to one of them fellas could get lost. We could end up with nothing in our sack. A bird in hand is better than two in the bush.”

I sat on the horse, bewildered.

Shorty said, “This is not like a Nick Carter story, son. We do not always find a red feather in a cow plop that shows us the way. Mostly we stumble along until we find them. And if we only get one of them, which we have an opportunity to do, we pistol-whip the shit out of him until he reveals to us what we want to know. Which in this case would be where they have taken your sister.”

I nodded, feeling numb all over. I had been raised to live and let live, to forgive and forget, but I couldn’t forget. There was a burning part of me that wanted a gun in my hand. Not just for protection, but to kill. That scared me. It made me feel as if I was no different than one of Cut Throat’s gang—a package of sweaty flesh full of bile for blood, dynamite for bones, and horse manure for brains. I thought about how my father would only give me four shells for squirrel hunting so I wouldn’t chase the urge to shoot at will. “A gun is a tool,” he used to say. “And you don’t need to get so you don’t want to stop pulling the trigger.”

The situation left to us was to follow the boy’s horse—the one that had been stolen—and even as we discussed it we were riding in that direction, our minds actually made up. Eustace, watching the trail, rode ahead of me and Shorty. As he went, Hog came out of the woods and ran alongside Eustace’s horse as if he had been there all along and didn’t want Eustace to know he had been wandering. I speculated on the possibility that he had in fact eaten that poor boy, or at least part of him. It was a horrible thing to think about, that boy’s flesh bouncing around inside Hog’s belly.

“My guess is our bad man is surely going into No Enterprise and will not veer,” Shorty said. “He has some bank money, and most likely will want to spend some of it on drink and a woman and whatever is provided in the way of entertainment. I have been to No Enterprise on many occasions myself, and know that for such a small place it is quite lively and deadly, which is another reason he chose it. It does not cater to the less-than-bold, and it is not a town full of idle talkers, even if they suspect you have killed a pack of women and diddled a sheep on the steps of the Baptist church. They pretty much keep it to themselves and consider it your business, as long as the women are not theirs. Or the sheep.”

“What if the bandits have all the supplies they need?” I said. “Why would he leave the others? Maybe he’s split with them over something, and doesn’t know where they’re going.”

“Perhaps that is the case, but perhaps he is the one who was shot—Cut Throat Bill—and he needs medical attention. I doubt it, however, because Cut Throat has survived this long by not being overly foolish, and in spite of what I said there might be a limitation to what one could expect in the way of protection in No Enterprise if there is money involved. As you said, there is a price on his head, and of course, there is the bank money itself. You do not know how much was actually taken, do you?”

“No,” I said. “I haven’t got any idea at all.”

“I have made very little of it, but Cut Throat Bill is known to me by newspaper accounts, and I confess to having read a couple of dime novels about his exploits—not that I believe any of them. It is said that he likes to cut throats, though, and time has proven him clever, or he would have been dead or captured long ago.”

A new thought struck me about the money as Shorty talked. What if it was the bank money itself Shorty and Eustace were after? That would make me and Lula both expendable. But if that were the case, they wouldn’t need me at all. They could have killed me early on. Or ignored, or lost me, and gone after the loot for themselves. They hadn’t. When I came to that somewhat satisfying conclusion, it was a comfort, at least for a few moments.

“Cut Throat Bill is pretty smart for one of his profession,” Shorty said. “Most of them are not. Jesse James was, at least until Northfield. The Daltons were a mixed batch, and mostly lucky. Cut Throat Bill sees the angles. I read in the papers of one shootout in Missouri where he shot several children in the legs so that the town’s attention would be drawn there while he and his gang made their escape. I think had he killed those children, folks would have gone after him outright, but he made it so they had to save them, get them to a doctor. It worked. There was considerable anger over the episode, but by the time they were ready to give chase, he was long gone. And he knows how to lose trackers, especially one like Eustace.”

“Keep it up,” Eustace called back to us.

“I think what we have here is one of the solos going his own way. Cut Throat Bill is unlikely to be anything more than a general leader with a team that does what they please when the job is done. Besides, this will give us a chance not only to catch up to one of them, but we can sell the borrowed horse to get a solid grubstake.”

By this time I had been beset with fresh misery. My butt ached, and my thighs were raw from riding. Eventually the trail widened and emptied out of the woods. On either side of the road, trees had been sawed and chopped and made a mess of. Stumps had been blown out of the ground with dynamite, or dug out, piled up, and burnt. The recent rain had washed through it all and carried off the good topsoil, put a lot of it in a ditch beside the road and the rest of it in the road itself.

“Dumb sons a bitches,” said Eustace, who had slowed down so that we were all riding together now, Hog having fallen behind a ways. “They’ve wrecked good farmland and a woodlot. They’ve cut the trees clear instead of cutting it in such a way that it could be plowed and they’d have a back line of trees to hold the dirt. Without the trees there’s just runoff and the soil that went with it.”

“I was just thinking that,” I said, feeling this might be a good time to bring back up the reward they were working for. “Pa’s farm, the one you’ll get when this job is done, has soil as fine as what washed away here. Better, actually—darker and deeper, fattened and richened with wood ash and chicken manure. It has terraces to hold the water in, to keep it from washing all the topsoil off. You get the job done, you’ll have it, or you can sell it for a better price than any farm in the county, the whole of Texas.”

“So you have been everywhere,” Shorty said, “and know the quality of the soil here and abroad?”

“Leave him alone, Shorty,” Eustace said. “He’s speaking big. I know what he means. If the dirt’s half that good, I can raise my elephant-eye corn.”

“I bet I am the only one among us who has actually seen an elephant,” Shorty said. “And certainly the only one to ride one.”

“They’re tall, though, aren’t they?” Eustace said.

“They are,” Shorty said.

“Then it don’t matter if I’ve seen one or not, does it?”

“You have a legitimate point,” Shorty said.

The slaughtered woods and butchered soil went on for some space, and as we got close to town there were shacks thrown up alongside the road, made more by hope and lean than nail and level. In the distance, far out to the right, I could see a wooden tower. It was wide at the bottom and thin at the top and made up of what appeared to be broad slats of wood. It was like a dead tree without leaves.

“What in Sam Hill is that?” I said.

“You are country, are you not?” Shorty said. “That, Jack, is an oil well tower. I think it is dead, or drilled a dry hole. But all the same, oil is the future, not farmland. Mark my words.”

“Yeah,” Eustace said. “I’ll make that note. That stuff is just messing up the land, oozing out all over. That damn tower will end up forgotten, if it ain’t already. Wait and see. In fact, here’s one of the reasons you can count on it being forgotten.”

Eustace pointed.

Bouncing down the road toward us was a horseless machine. I had seen a few, but they never ceased to amaze me. It hummed and banged along on its little tires, causing the horses to startle. As the machine drew close, we split and let it pass between us. A man was driving and had a woman sitting beside him. They were dressed up, him with a derby, her with a sunbonnet. There was a picnic basket between them. The man tipped his derby as they rattled past. The couple looked well fed and remarkably content.

“That is the future,” said Shorty, watching it cough along. “It runs on oil products, and soon those devices will be the way people get about. Not as a lark. Not as a short-lived inclination but as the future.”

“I hate them things,” Eustace said. “I thought about shooting it. Those damn things will never catch on, and there will go your so-called oil products beyond lighting a lamp.“

Shorty laughed. “You, Eustace, are wrong. We use oil for all manner of things. There will come a time when men no longer travel by horse but by those oil-fueled carriages. Mark my words.”

“I’ll do that,” Eustace said. “I’ll make me a note of it.”

We continued past more shacks, another gap of mauled countryside, a couple more of those oil towers, a large acreage of cotton, and then the first of the town’s buildings, which was as big as a barn and painted the color of spring grass.

“That there is the opry house,” Eustace said. “They had some blind colored singers there once, five of them, every one of them dead in the eyes but with voices like goddamn angels. I heard about it, come over to see them, thinking it was for colored, but it wasn’t. It was for white folks to listen to. They wouldn’t let colored in, and they had colored singing. Later that night, them five did a show in the niggertown section, too. I got to see that. They were damn good. Like doves and canaries, they were. Except they were as black as wet crows, blacker than me.”

“Angels or birds?” Shorty said. “Which was it?”

“Both,” Eustace said.

“I saw a singing group called the Marx Brothers in that place once,” Shorty said. “On the upper floor, a year or so back, and they were not good. I would much rather have heard the colored boys singing in niggertown, or perhaps a dog howling with a chicken bone in its throat. Listening to them caused me considerable pain, though they told a few jokes and I thought those were quite entertaining.”

More buildings followed on each side of the street. They didn’t look nearly as sophisticated as those in Sylvester, but they were larger than those in Hinge Gate and brighter in color than anywhere else I had been. The town, however, looked to have been laid out by one of those blind singers. It was as if everyone got together and decided on a different color for the buildings just so nothing would be anything alike. Actually, I have exaggerated the variety of color. There was green and blue and red, and everything else was some darker or lighter shade of those, except for one building that was two-story, blue at the bottom, red at the top, buttercup yellow on the windowsills and the gallery railing. A door on the upper floor was also buttercup yellow, and the knob had been painted bright blue, like a giant robin’s egg.

As we passed that building, Shorty said, “That is one of the biggest and best whorehouses in East Texas. They call it a club for cattlemen. But you do not have to know one end of a cow from the other to enter, though you should know which end is up on a woman. I have been known to be accepted into the arms of ecstasy there, my money being larger than my size. Though after both myself and my money are spent, suddenly I grow smaller and considerably less attractive.”

“Hog,” Eustace said, “you best run off now. Hunt some acorns or such.”

Hog grunted as if in reply and drifted off into the woods.

I said, “Does he really understand you?”