Coco Butternut

by Joe R. Lansdale

  I swung the crowbar, hit the back glass and the crowbar bounced back and nearly came out of my hands. I swung it again, and saw Jackie turning her face toward me. A warrior’s face. She gunned the dozer backwards and I nearly lost my footing, but I bent low and held on. The dozer’s movement paused, I came up and swung the bar again. The glass fell like chunks of shiny ice. I went through the hole to get at Jackie, ripping my shirt and cutting my arms a little on the broken glass. Jackie was up and out of her seat now, and she was like a wildcat. She grabbed me by the throat and rammed me backwards.

  We went through the gap in the glass and I felt my arm being ripped by the glass, and then we were tumbling over the back of the dozer and falling to the street.

  Jackie jumped astride me and started swing her fists, knocking my head from side to side like a piñata. I had lost the crowbar during all that, but Jackie found it. She stopped hitting me long enough to reach over and grab it and then she lifted it above her head with both hands and was going to drive the sharp end into me. I drew both legs back quickly and put my heels inside her thighs, close to her waist, and kicked with all my might. She went back and the crowbar came down and hit me without design. It hurt, but not as bad as it would have. I grabbed the bar, and then me and her were on our feet. She was a strong woman and I was an injured weak man. We both had hold of the bar now, and I was trying to wrest it from her, or at least keep her from whacking me with it, when a fist flashed out and hit Jackie in the side of the head, hurtling her head over heels without the crowbar. I was left holding it.

  Brett was there. Her face was scratched and she was bleeding from the mouth and nose.

  “Fuck with my man, and you’ll have the undertaker wiping your ass,” she said, and kind of collapsed against me. I held her. She was breathing heavily, but she seemed all right.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “Of course it is,” Brett said.

  I looked at Jackie. She was out cold.

  Leonard limped over with Chance.

  “That was some punch,” Chance said. She was all out of breath and hopped up on adrenaline. She was vibrating.

  “I brought that with me from hell,” Brett said, righting herself.

  “Scanner?” I said.

  “Good thing they own a cemetery,” Leonard said. “It’s going to make his burial cheaper.”

  “How did you know we needed you?” Brett said.

  “Didn’t,” Leonard said. “We saw Scanner drive by and we started following him and he made us and started driving fast, and we thought, well, shit, he knows we’re here, so Chance drove faster. Scanner lost control of his car and put it between two trees. I don’t know how he did it, but he spun out and flew off the edge of the bar ditch and landed ass backwards in it, his car about three feet off the ground. It was like a goddamn circus trick.”

  “It was kind of funny,” Chance said. “Well, I hate he got killed later, I think. But it was kind of funny right then, that car in a tree.”

  “You been hanging around Leonard too long,” I said.

  “I pulled him out of the car and asked him a few questions that he didn’t want to answer,” Leonard said, “then I interrogated him with my knuckles and he started to talk. His mother had come the back way, she always went that way, he said. A road we didn’t even know about. Jackie was going to do what we thought, brother. Dig up the body. She thought she lost a necklace in the coffin. Hadn’t thought about it in years, just knew it came up missing, and then when Marvin wanted to dig up the coffin, she got to thinking she had been wearing it the night she saw Farmer bury the coffins. She went out there and dug them up to see what was in them, saw the bodies, realized it was good for her, them being dead, and later she had Farmer’s crime in her back pocket. And then she thought maybe that’s where her necklace had gone. Had come off in one of the coffins when she was prying the lids open to look inside. Thought it had come loose of her neck and fell in one of them. It didn’t turn up in the wife’s coffin, so she figured it had to be the boyfriend’s.”

  “It’s like I thought,” Chance said. “Well, mostly.”

  “Yep,” I said. “Thing is, I looked in that coffin pretty good. I didn’t see a necklace.”

  “It’s probably under a couch somewhere,” Brett said, “and she should not have bothered. She was golden and didn’t know it.”

  I looked at Jackie sprawled on the road like a collapsed puppet. She hadn’t so much as twitched a muscle.

  “That was one hard lick,” I said.

  “She wakes up, I’ll give her a fresh one,” Brett said.

  Marvin came over later that night after we had all been arrested, and then released, except for Jackie. I don’t know there was enough evidence to nail her even then, but with the death of Scanner—he ended up with Leonard’s truck radio pushed into his chest when the truck flipped—Jackie had had enough. She wanted to come clean. She told Marvin everything, filled in the gaps. Marvin told us we were going to have to pay a fine for digging up the cemetery, commandeering a backhoe that didn’t belong to us, and breaking into a closed cemetery, but considering Jackie’s confession, he figured we’d come out all right. We might have to pick up trash along the highway for a few days in orange jumpsuits and pay a fine, but that was the worst of it.

  “I’d get to wear a jumpsuit?” Chance said.

  “Darling,” Brett said. “Don’t be too proud.”

  Here’s some of the stuff Marvin told us. It isn’t all that new, some was obvious, some we guessed, but he had the facts from Jackie now.

  Farmer buried his wife and her lover after killing them. Jackie was working late one night at the mortuary, looked outside and saw Farmer using the backhoe, digging up graves. She started to go out and ask him what was up, but hesitated. She watched from behind a shrub on the back walkway out of the mortuary, and watched him dig the holes, climb off the backhoe and pull the coffins out of the holes. They were cheap coffins, too big for dogs, really, but they were bought in mass and were cheap. They were light metal. She watched Farmer pry them open, take out the mummified dogs.

  She watched him pull some bags out of the back of the truck, let them smack on the ground. He pushed them into the coffins and fitted in the false bottoms he had prepared, put the dogs on top of those, closed the lids, and pushed the coffins back in the holes, covered them up with the backhoe. Tomorrow he could claim he was doing a bit of cleaning work around the graves, and that’s why they looked freshly dug.

  A few days later when Jackie knew Farmer was out of town, one night actually, she dug up the graves and found what was in them. She covered them back up. It was to her advantage to have the wife dead, and now she had a secret that Farmer was unaware of. She literally knew where the bodies were buried, and as we also suspected, she waited until the time was ripe to play that card.

  It hadn’t quite worked out the way she thought.

  Jackie also admitted she killed Farmer. Still had a key to the house from when they were married. He never changed the locks. She waited on him in a closet with a baseball bat, and surprised him. It took her one lick to knock him down, and then she finished him with more than was necessary. There was a lot of rage in that lady.

  Scanner had been in on it, of course, but Jackie claimed he didn’t know she was going to whack Farmer, only knew about the money part of it.

  It didn’t really matter. Scanner, innocent of murder or not, was as dead as those who were under those dogs.

  Some time has passed. The cemetery is closed down now. No new customers will grace its grounds, human or otherwise. I drove by there the other day for no reason at all other than I wanted to.

  I parked at the front of the cemetery and walked through the gate, which was still open and wrecked from us ramming through it. I walked over to Coco Butternut’s grave. The dog had been reburied there by the county. Farmer’s wife and the wife’s boyfriend had been hauled away by relatives who finally knew where their kin ended up.

  I looked down at Coco
Butternut’s grave. Thanks to that mutt we had caught a killer.

  “Good dog,” I said and went back to the car and drove away.