The Thicket

by Joe R. Lansdale

  “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.”

  “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.”