The Thicket

by Joe R. Lansdale

  I shook my head. “I’m going in. Lula might be in there, and I’d like to try and make sure no one shoots her, including us.”

  “All right, then,” Eustace said. “That long end is what you point at them.”

  “I am past humor,” I said.

  “Everything is humorous,” said Shorty, “except your own death. But other people will laugh.”

  Now, I will not lie to you. I was hoping with all my heart that Lula was in there and safe. I was so scared I could feel my feet wiggling in my boots like a snake trying to crawl out of a slick-sided hole. I didn’t know what to expect, and I believe I had thought this would be more simple than it was turning out to be. I had figured we’d surprise them and say, “Throw up your hands, you’re all under arrest,” and we’d tie them up and lead them back to town. I was having my doubts now, and sick to my stomach to think I might actually have to draw a bead on someone and shoot him. Or end up shot up myself, thrown in a ditch out back of the place for the ants to eat.

  The sheriff got the Sharps, and Jimmie Sue wheedled him out of his pistol, and they started out back. Spot said he had to pee, then he disappeared into the bushes with his mule. The three of us, and Hog, started down toward the trading post.

  When we pulled on the leather sling and the door swung back, a stink come with it full of bean farts and sweat and something sweet as honey, and that honey smell just made it all the worse. There were three or four lanterns lit up, and they gave about as much light as the damned get in the grave. As we come in, I saw to the left there were four people at a little table playing cards, sitting on stools of different heights. There was a plate of cornbread between them and a bottle of syrup. I could see that good because they had a lantern sitting right next to the plate. I searched their faces, but none of them were Nigger Pete or Cut Throat. They were all white men, but none looked familiar. They all looked as if they had been rode hard and put up wet. They were all staring at Eustace and Hog, as if they were one of a kind.

  Back of the counter was a man who appeared out of place, due to being clean and having his hair cut close and his face shaved to a nice pink lantern-lit glow. There was a lantern on either end of the bar he was behind, and the bar was a warped plank over some old barrels. Behind him, on the wall, were three shelves with assorted items on them, mostly bottled goods that I took to be whiskey or beers, a couple of Dr Peppers and Coca-Colas, and a few bottles with colored liquid in them that could have been hair tonic or sarsaparilla. There was another table to our right, but there wasn’t but one man sitting at it, and he was back in the shadows and I couldn’t make out his face, but one thing was sure, wasn’t no one in there Fatty, the whore Katy, Cut Throat, or Nigger Pete.

  I stayed on the right side, near the single man at the table. Shorty was in the middle, and Eustace was on the left. Eustace had that shotgun cradled in his arms like a baby. The man behind the counter said, “We don’t serve colored, and you can’t bring that hog in here.”

  “That a fact,” Eustace said, and walked up to the plank, his head turned more toward the men at the table, who had now given up their cards to stare at us. “Give me a bottle of whiskey.”

  “I said—” the bartender said, but Eustace cut him off.

  “I know what you said,” Eustace said. “But trying to avoid a bit of unpleasantness, as my short friend here would call it, I say give me a bottle and I’ll pay for it, and nothing angry will happen. As for the hog, I didn’t bring him. He come on his own. But he don’t want nothing. Let me be sure. You want anything, Hog?”

  Hog looked up at Eustace, but I don’t think it’ll be any big revelation to say Hog didn’t ask for anything.

  “Nah, like I thought,” Eustace said. “He don’t want nothing. He’s done ate and don’t drink after four. It’s his digestion.”

  The bartender studied Eustace, then leaned over the plank and looked down at Shorty. “What the hell’s that?”

  “That,” said Eustace, “is what we call a midget. That is a short man with a big pistol.”

  “And a big dick,” said Shorty.

  “That’s something I don’t care to figure on,” Eustace said. “But I want to point out to you, Mr. Bartender, that pistol he’s got is easy for him to level under the plank there so that he can lay down a shot on your balls.”

  “It’s in the holster,” said the bartender.

  “It can come out,” said Eustace.

  The bartender looked at me. “What’s he for?”

  “To hold the midget up if I get tired.”

  “Why you got a midget with you?” asked the bartender. I heard Shorty sigh.

  “Why, that’s my son,” said Eustace. “I noticed he come out white, which means my wife is going to have some explaining. And you know what I think, Mr. Bartender Man?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I think if I was a fella called Nigger Pete, you’d let him have a drink.”

  “I don’t know no Nigger Pete.”

  “Then you may be better off than you think. Now put that whiskey on the plank before I go back there and get it.”

  “Niggers and pigs both have a smell about them,” said one of the men at the table. He was a squatty fella with a beak of a nose and a mustache that looked like someone had painted it there with charcoal.

  “Now, that ain’t mine or Hog’s stink,” Eustace said. “What you’re smelling there is a thick wipe of shit just under your nose.”

  The man at the table stirred, but a touch from the fella next to him stayed him on his stool.

  Eustace smiled at him, then looked away.

  The bartender glanced to both sides of the room, perhaps for help, but no one was moving. I glanced at the back of the place, to the left of the plank, and there was curtain over a doorway. I thought I heard someone move back there. I laid my hand on the pistol I had stuck in my belt.

  Seeing there was no assistance forthcoming, the bartender put the bottle on the plank and said, “Just this once.”

  “Unless I come back,” said Eustace. “Then it’ll be twice.”

  The bartender said, “Give me six bits.”

  “Six bits?” Eustace said. “This better be the stuff the angels drink. Get me two glasses. Make that three. Give the kid a Dr Pepper.”

  Eustace hoisted Shorty up so he could sit on the plank. Shorty took six bits from out of his clothes and dropped it on the plank. The bartender opened the Dr Pepper and a bottle of whiskey and put them on the plank. He set down two glasses. One for Shorty, one for Eustace. Eustace slid the glass to Shorty, said, “Pass it on.”

  I remembered then that Eustace avoided drink. I didn’t pour any of the Dr Pepper, and when the bartender put the whiskey bottle in front of Shorty, Shorty just looked at it.

  I turned to look at the man at the table. He was watching me like a chicken watches a bread crumb. Hog was watching him like he was an acorn.

  Shorty poured himself a drink. I didn’t move.

  “Just sip it to be polite,” Shorty said.

  I didn’t pour any. I just picked up the bottle and took a swig. I don’t remember tasting it.

  “Here is our situation,” said Shorty. “We are looking for some people. We are looking for a man called Cut Throat, and one called Fatty, and a man called Nigger Pete. Do you know them?”

  “I heard tell of them,” said the bartender.

  “Okay,” said Shorty. “So we are that far along in our investigation. Let us be more direct and more precise. Have you seen them as of late?”

  “I can’t say I have,” said the bartender.

  “Here is a thing that should be explained before we continue our conversation. If you say you have not seen them, and we should deduce that you have, well, there could be considerable unpleasantness. Do you understand?”

  “See?” said Eustace. “I told you he’d call it unpleasantness.”

  “You think that concerns me?” said the bartender.

  “It should,” said Shorty.

  “Why,
I shit turds bigger than you,” the bartender said, and one of the men at the card table let out with a single loud laugh. It was the one with the mustache like a charcoal stain. He seemed to be the bravest one there.

  Shorty looked toward the table. “You might best have a chicken bone hung in your throat I hear that again.”

  The man moved slightly, turning himself on his stool so that he was facing us. I glanced at the single man at the table on my right. His hand was resting on his pistol. A single drop of sweat went into my right eye, and I wiped it away quickly with my sleeve.

  “Now,” said Shorty. “Here is what I am thinking. I am thinking that a big fat man who has been severely pistol-whipped by a midget—that would be me—and a whore who is his cousin but has no considerations about the men she diddles, are back there behind the curtain, listening, and armed with a stolen rifle from the sheriff we have with us outside. And I am also reasonably certain that you are lying to me, and to my good friends here, and this is about to go very bad.”

  “For you,” said the bartender. He put one hand behind his back.

  “If your hand comes back into view, and it is holding anything other than what you might have dug from your butt crack, I will shoot a hole in you.”

  “I don’t believe you got no sheriff outside,” said another of the men at the card table. He was the man who had held charcoal mustache back. He was bony and looked as if his face had once been filled with thorns. He had on a greasy hat, and he pushed it back with one hand so as to see us all better.

  “Your belief is in error,” said Shorty.

  “We ain’t even got a sheriff around these parts,” another man at the table said. He leaned forward, and I could see his face now. It was just a face under a hat, nothing memorable.

  “He is not from here,” said Shorty. “He is from No Enterprise.”

  “He’s out of his place, then,” said the man. “He ain’t got no call to do nothing here.”

  Shorty nodded. “He does not indeed, if he were worried about legalities and had not turned bounty hunter. And I should also mention that me and the colored gentleman here are also bounty hunters. The kid is looking for his sister, Lula. And if you have seen a young woman who seems to be moving about against her will with any of the aforementioned folks, or with anyone who might be associated with them, you could create considerable goodwill by revealing that information.”

  “You talk like you’re one of them cranked-up phonographs,” said the man to my right. “You just go on and on.” He, too, had leaned forward now, and his fingers had wrapped around his pistol handle. There was little light over there, but I could sure see his hand and that pistol, as he was sitting slightly to the side of his table. He was a little guy with an old face.

  “So can I assume that no assistance will be forthcoming from any of you in this room?” Shorty said.

  No one answered. Shortly let the silence rest. He drank his drink. He said, “Any of you who would like to be left in one piece, you might want to skedaddle, and not out the back door, as the sheriff has my Sharps fifty and he will blow a hole in you if you go that way.”

  “There ain’t no sheriff,” said the man who had barked a laugh. “And if you are bounty hunters, ain’t none of you but the nigger look worth his salt, and he ain’t but one man.”

  “You are all of one mind and in agreement, then?” said Shorty. “You plan to protect the hardened criminal in the back room at the cost of your lives?”

  “I ain’t got nothing for him,” said one of them at the card table, the one who had said nothing up until that point. He got up and left through the front door.

  “That explains a lot,” said Shorty. “And now our situation is properly laid out.”

  No sooner had those words come out of Shorty’s mouth than the bartender pulled a pistol out from behind him, out of his belt, and Shorty pulled that big Colt fast and swung it around with one hand and shot. I kind of saw the bartender’s head jerk and his brains splatter, but mostly I had my eye on the man to my right, who stood up and fired. A bullet went by me close enough it sounded like a freight train passing. I tugged my pistol, but it hung up in my belt. The man fired another shot, and I got my pistol out, barely remembered to cock it, and fired. I missed. The man fired again and missed. I couldn’t see how he could, close as we were to one another, but he had missed three times and I had missed once. Hog got him. He went under the table, knocking it over, biting a chunk out of the man’s leg, then another, and this time he hung on. The man went back against the wall and started hitting Hog with the pistol. If it bothered Hog I couldn’t note it. I cocked and fired again, and this time I hit him, and he went back against the wall and dropped his pistol and said, “Shit,” and then Hog went to work on him. The man screamed a lot, and Hog grunted a lot and squealed a few times, but not in pain. Hog was feeling pleasurable.

  I turned and looked at the three men at the table. They hadn’t moved. It’s like they had been flies stuck in molasses.

  “Now, keep it like that,” said Eustace, speaking to them.

  The curtain at the back parted. A rifle barrel poked through. Shorty fired at it. The shot sent the rifle winding, and we heard running in the room and a back door being thrown open, and then there was a scuttling sound and the roar of that big Sharps .50, and then it was followed by a couple of snaps from a pistol.

  A woman’s voice, Katy, I’m sure, yelled out, “Shit on a goose,” and then went silent.

  Shorty leaped down off the plank and strode over to the man I had shot. Hog had him by the ankle now and was jerking his head from side to side, causing the man to knock over chairs and the table, and he was banging the man’s head against the wall when he slung him back. Shorty said, “Hog, that will be enough.”

  Hog let him go, reluctantly. It was easy to see the man was bad off. He had gotten hold of his gun again, but he didn’t look strong enough to lift it, bleeding from hog bites and a pistol shot as he was. I could see now that Hog had got him in the face, too, and had chewed off an ear and part of his nose. The only career he had left was working in the circus.

  He looked up at Shorty, wheezing as he did. He acted as if he would like to lift the pistol, but it was just too much for him. He quit trying. He kept wheezing and looking at Shorty. Shorty shot him between the eyes. It was quick and it was cold-blooded. I felt light-headed.

  Eustace had darted through the curtains and into the back room while I held my pistol on the men at the table, the hammer cocked and ready. Shorty joined me with his gun pointed at them.

  “Nice night, is it not?” Shorty said.

  Eustace came back carrying the rifle Shorty had shot out of the hands of someone back there; I had a pretty good idea who. “Back door is open, but I ain’t going out of it. I figure Winton has reloaded the Sharps by now and I wouldn’t want him or Jimmie Sue to mistake me for someone I ain’t.”

  “Absolutely,” Shorty said.

  We all started moving toward the front door. Eustace said, “If any of you men are wanted, we don’t know of it, and the sheriff doesn’t have papers on you. But you want to talk about where you think the men we’re looking for have gone, though we have a pretty good idea from Fatty himself, we are all ears. Or you can just sit there with your thumbs up your asses and stay out of the way.”

  “I ain’t never even liked the idea of no midget,” said charcoal mustache. “Let alone having one in my sight.”

  “Now is your time to eliminate one of my ilk,” Shorty said. “If you think you are tall enough.”

  The man didn’t move. He seemed to have quickly decided midgets were just fine with him. We went out the front door. My ears were ringing.

  “You didn’t need to kill the man I shot,” I said.

  “I thought I did,” Shorty said.

  “You didn’t need to,” I said.

  “Need and want sometimes do not mix well,” said Shorty. “He was bit up good, and your bullet had caught him in the lungs. He was not going to make it. I di
d him a favor.”

  We were talking softly as we backed off the porch and out into what would pass for the yard. There were a number of large stumps out there, and we just stood between them for a while, waiting to see if the sheriff or Jimmie Sue would come around.

  13

  It was one of them things that looked like it was over, but it wasn’t. There’s a thing about men that is both special and foolish, and that’s pride; I reckon those men at the card table had been overwhelmed with it. They come out then, and I even seen the man who had decided he didn’t want any part of it coming out of the dark, off to the left of the trading post, coming back to set right what I guess he considered cowardice on his part and what I considered common sense.

  The men on the porch lined up straight across with their handguns drawn. The other man come up on the porch, stood just to the side of the swing, opposite them other three.

  “You do not need to do this,” Shorty said. He sounded calm, like he was just reminding someone to button up their fly.

  “I reckon we do,” said the man with the charcoal mustache. “I reckon we can’t have a midget and a nigger and a pissant kid come into a place where we play cards and kill our bartender and whoever that was at the other table. He throwed down with us, so we got to see him as one of us.”

  “I saw him that way,” said Shorty.

  “It’s just something we can’t let lay,” said the man with the thorn-poked face.

  “I understand your position,” said Shorty.

  Shorty was still holding his pistol, but he put it in its holster. What the hell was he doing?

  Then a man on the porch moved. I don’t even remember which one, and it may have been more than one. When it happened, Eustace swung that shotgun up and let fire with one of the barrels. The men on the porch went away, as if yanked by an invisible hand. The door behind them blew apart in a shatter of splinters and sawdust. The shotgun rode up so high it appeared Eustace had to snatch it down after it was fired. The man at the swing fired his pistol, and Eustace’s hat went sailing. Eustace swung the gun around. The man had already been hit by the wide spread of the shotgun, but when that barrel turned directly on him, even with nothing more than moonlight to see by, I saw his eyes go wide and his mouth fall open. He fired a shot. He didn’t hit anyone. I don’t think he came close.