The Thicket

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Cut Throat stood, and Nigger Pete lifted Spot up so that his feet didn’t touch the ground. Spot tilted his head to one side and closed his eyes and let his arms hang loose at his sides. Nigger Pete lifted him even higher and moved him toward the bear. The bear didn’t seem interested. The man with the clods was still there, and now he knew how it was, and that caused him to giggle and get busy with leaning over and grabbing dirt, making and throwing clods at the bear that was now riled and had taken to standing on its hind legs. Cut Throat came in front of Spot, and the razor moved again, and then Cut Throat stepped aside. This time the cut struck Spot’s throat, and there was the same queer delay, the red line, and then a spray of blood that went wide and far and splattered on the bear’s face and beaded in its fur, the sun making the beads look like wet rubies.

  The bear seemed reluctant at first, but the blood was hot and the bear was hungry. The bear came forward, and Pete pushed Spot toward it, causing him to fall face-first in front of the bear. I like to think Spot was already dead when the bear went at him. Except for being grabbed by the back of the head by the bear and shook like a rag and flung aside, there was never another move out of Spot that made me think he suffered.

  A couple of men that had been wandering around in the yard, peeing and just strolling about, came over to watch the bear work. One of them nudged Spot with his foot, spoke up. “Now there’s a little nigger done gone to heaven.”

  I felt in that moment as if I had come unstuck from life and that I was somewhere outside the real world, in some insane place where common decency and the laws of men were just silly things, like lace pants on a donkey. My eyes turned wet. My bowels went loose. I didn’t know if I should move or stay still, and was uncertain I could do either. Then a hand came down on my shoulder.

  “Stay quiet,” said Shorty’s voice.

  I turned, saw Shorty behind me on his knees with his Sharps, starting to move backwards. I eased back with him until we were maybe twenty feet from where we had been, hunkered down under a wide elm. When we spoke our faces were as close as lovers and our voices were as light as the beating of a gnat’s wings.

  “Cut Throat,” I said. “He…”

  “I saw.”

  “I didn’t do a thing.”

  “There was not nothing you could do. Nothing I could do. Spot saw us both, Jack. I was looking just over your shoulder.”

  “I didn’t know you were there,” I said. “I didn’t do a thing.”

  “Was not anything you could do. Spot said not a word. He died game.”

  “I haven’t any consolation in that,” I said.

  “I think he did.”

  Shorty got me by the sleeve and pulled me away, deeper down the trail and out of sight of the cabin. My legs wouldn’t hold me after that, and I just sat down in the middle of the trail. The world was blurry.

  Shorty hunkered down by me.

  “He might have give us up,” I said, “and we just don’t know it yet. You don’t know he didn’t.” I said that because I wanted him to have given us up. I wanted not to think he just looked at me and I looked back and didn’t say a word and he stood brave and I sat coward.

  “I believe not. They do not act like men that are worried or even mildly concerned about anyone else being about. I think he gave them a lie about himself and they took it.”

  “He just wandered off to shit, went too far, and they got him and hurt him and fed him to a bear,” I said. “One moment he’s cooking beans to eat, the next thing is he’s being eaten.”

  “That is about the size of it,” Shorty said.

  I felt boneless, as if I might come apart and trickle away into a hole in the ground.

  “What do we do?” I said.

  “Gather our posse and surprise them. To be more precise, we shoot the hell out of them before they know we are coming. Eustace, however, may be a problem. I went looking for him and did not find him, and that is the way he gets when he drinks. He wanders and hides until it takes him over. When it does he is a wild animal. We should sober him up. We need his shotgun. How many did you make out down there?”

  “Six wandering about, counting Cut Throat and Pete, but the horses and the smoke coming up from the cabin make me think there are more inside.”

  “Did you see your sister?”

  I shook my head.

  “She may be inside the cabin,” Shorty said.

  I nodded. “I can’t believe what they done to Spot.”

  “Believe it, son. Come on, let us find the others.”

  We had gone back but a short piece down the path when we come across Eustace, drunk as a beaver at the bottom of a whiskey barrel and making enough tromping noise to arouse Cut Throat’s men. He had the shotgun in one hand and the liquor bottle in the other.

  “Hey,” Eustace said when he saw us. “I been drinking.”

  “I can see that,” Shorty said. “Eustace, I am going to need you to get quieter and become sober quickly, because we have come upon them.”

  “Who?”

  “The killers and kidnappers,” Shorty said.

  “Oh, oh yeah, those fellas,” Eustace said. He burped, lifted the bottle, which was a big one, and took a chug from it. It was nearly empty. When he lowered it, he looked around, said, “Have you noticed how many pine cones there are? I saw some under an oak tree. Why is that?”

  “They roll with the wind,” Shorty said. “It is a simple mystery. Now, listen to me, Eustace. Please. We will need to prepare a strategy.”

  “A what?”

  “Prepare a plan to take care of the kidnappers.”

  “Hell, I got a goddamn plan,” Eustace said. “Go down there and shoot their dicks off. Which way are they?”

  “They have killed Spot,” Shorty said.

  “Spot?”

  “He came out here to do what nature demands, must have heard them, or one of them walked up on him. Whatever, they got him and they killed him in a bad way.”

  Eustace looked at me as if this needed to be agreed on. I nodded.

  “Little Spot? That can’t be. He wasn’t doing nothing to nobody. He wasn’t bigger than a bump on a log. He was just riding with us. He ain’t in on this.”

  “Nonetheless,” Shorty said. “He is dead by their hands.”

  Eustace started to cry. Shorty grabbed him by the hand with the bottle in it.

  “Come on, Eustace. We need to go back to our camp and get Winton.”

  Eustace ignored him, started walking in the direction of Cut Throat’s camp.

  “Dog fuckers,” Eustace said.

  “No,” Shorty said, taking a firm grip on Eustace’s arm. “No.”

  Eustace started trying to sling his arm free, but Shorty clung to it.

  “What are you?” Eustace said. “A tick?”

  “We need Winton and Hog, maybe Jimmie Sue,” Shorty said. “We need all our guns.”

  Eustace was starting to get loud, and though we were some space from Cut Throat and his men, it wasn’t so much it didn’t worry me.

  Eustace started swinging his arm, and Shorty swung with it, like he was tied to it. Then Eustace snapped his arm a little, and Shorty came free of it and rolled up under a pine tree, losing his hat and his rifle.

  I ran and grabbed Eustace’s legs and tried to take him down, but he wasn’t going anywhere. Shorty was up now. He ran behind him, jumped up, and grabbed the back of Eustace’s shirt and pulled him backwards. Between the two of us we took him down on his back. He dropped the shotgun but clung tight to the bottle of whiskey.

  It was a short-lived victory. Eustace took a deep breath, sat up, and flung us both away from him, knocking me down the trail a ways, sending Shorty to roll back under that same pine tree.

  “Damn it,” said Shorty, picking up his hat and sticking it on his head again.

  Shorty grabbed up a large stick, ran up behind Eustace while he was trying to stand, and hit him in the back of the head as hard as he could. Eustace was on one knee when he took the hit. He didn’t bu
dge, just turned and looked at Shorty.

  “Shit,” Shorty said.

  Eustace rose up and loomed over Shorty like a mountain. The look on his face made me think he was about to take hold of Shorty and mash him like an accordion. Then, without the least bit of warning, Eustace toppled over on his back, somehow managing to keep that whiskey bottle in his fist. He lay there and didn’t move.

  Me and Shorty eased over to him. Eustace had both eyes closed. He opened them suddenly, making me jump. He said, “They got Spot?”

  “Yes,” Shorty said. “They finished him off.”

  Eustace sat up. He lifted the bottle to his lips and started swigging what little was left. A moment later he tossed the empty bottle aside and got up. He went over and picked up his shotgun, though it took him a couple of tries.

  “You have to take it easy,” Shorty said. “You are drunk as a skunk.”

  Eustace said, “I’m going to kill someone. I got lots of shells in my pocket. Some of them I’m going to kill twice.”

  I started to say something. Shorty said, “It is no use. He has got some of his sense about him, but not much of it is common sense. You go on back and get Winton and Jimmie Sue. Me and him will go down there and see what we can roust.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m going with you.”

  “I am past arguing,” Shorty said. “I cannot leave him, and we need the others.”

  It was decided for us. Eustace was already staggering down the trail toward the cabin. Shorty grabbed his Sharps and went after him, and I went after the both of them. There was part of me that figured I was walking right into the mouth of death, but I remembered those men back at the trading post, especially the one that had walked off and then come back and joined the others. They were trying to fix something about themselves, too. It didn’t turn out too well for them, but now I understood.

  There was a bit of good fortune, though. Eustace didn’t sober up, but I think Shorty telling him Spot was dead brought him around a little, curbed his drunkenness. He stopped his shambling and started walking quietly and carefully, and before we got near the place overlooking the cabin, we all took to whispering.

  Eustace ducked down with me and Shorty, and we worked ourselves up behind the brush on the hill and looked down on things. The light had gotten brighter. The same men were there to be seen, and another I hadn’t seen before, a stubby guy with a raw patch on his forehead that looked as if someone had tried to scalp him but had been unable to finish the job, came out of the cabin and stretched and spat on the ground and looked at the sky to figure the nature of the day. He walked over and looked at the bear gnawing on what was left of Spot’s body. He said something to the big-nose guy, who had returned to tease the bear. The bear wasn’t paying any attention. It was chewing on Spot. The stubby man eased forward, got hold of Spot’s foot when the bear wasn’t looking, and yanked the corpse back and out of the bear’s reach. The bear came at him, but the rope held it and caused it to fall. Stubby laughed. It was the kind of laugh a mean child might make seeing a friend trip and fall. The bear was pawing out at the body, but it couldn’t reach it and instead scratched at the dirt.

  I turned my head away and looked at Eustace.

  “Poor little guy,” Eustace said. He was careful to keep his voice down, but squatted there on his heels behind the brush he looked as if he might topple over any moment. There were tears in his eyes.

  It grew more lively down below, so I turned back to look. That man with the big nose, who had been throwing clods at the bear, got him a long stick out of the fire and came over with it. The man who had pulled Spot away from the bear went over and leaned on a sapling to watch. Suddenly he seemed tired and looked to be getting over a drunk. He said, “Go on and stick him, Skinny.”

  The stick Skinny had was red on the end with heat. He started poking at the bear with it. The angered bear rushed to the end of its rope, trying to claw Skinny, but the little man, fast as a rat, would dart back out of the way, laughing, pulling the stick back with him. Now and again he glanced around at his comrades to make sure they were watching him, and then he would go at the bear again, poking him with that hot stick. I could smell the bear’s fur being scorched from up there on the hill. The poor old bear looked tired and ready to fall over. It was thin and weak, pieces of Spot probably the only thing it had eaten in a while.

  The man with the stick said, “You ain’t so bad, now, are you, you dumb bear?”

  Right then Fatty came out of the cabin. I couldn’t believe it. He was still standing. He had on a blood-spotted white union shirt, too-small black pants that were unfastened at the waist and held up by a belt. He wasn’t wearing shoes. He had on a gun belt and holster with a revolver in it, and a smaller gun was poked into the pants belt against his belly. He looked somewhat feeble, but considering all he had gone through he was surprisingly of sound nature.

  After a time, another man came out; that cabin must have been stuffed tight as a full-grown hog in a tow sack. This man I hadn’t seen before. He was tall and dark-skinned and had black hair that was going thin at the crown. He was wearing red long johns and an ugly face. He had on a gun belt with a pistol in it. It looked kind of funny, him in his drawers wearing that gun.

  Eustace, all of a sudden, quit squatting and just sat down, kind of loud, but with that man down there yelling at the bear and the men starting to talk among themselves, he wasn’t heard. Eustace sat there with his eyes closed, breathing evenly.

  Shorty came close to my ear, said, “I will cause a disturbance, and I expect you to take advantage of it. Do not do a thing until I give you that disturbance.”

  “What about Eustace?”

  “When I give you the signal, you poke Eustace, gently, and watch your head, because he might take it off with a fist. Poke him and say, ‘Go down and get them.’”

  “Will that work?”

  “I do not know, but that is what I would try.”

  I didn’t find this idea all that stimulating, but I didn’t argue about it. All I could think about was what they had done to Spot and wonder if Lula was in the cabin. I said, “When you start this disturbance, and I tell Eustace to go down and get them, what am I to do?”

  “Do you still want to take them prisoner?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then we are going to kill every last one of them,” Shorty said. “If Eustace does wake up and goes down with you, I advise you stay out of the path of that shotgun. The blast from it does not sort friend from foe.”

  “You got to watch for Lula,” I said.

  “I know that. We need to kill everyone outside the cabin before they can get inside and hole up. And at the same time we have to keep in mind that there may be others inside with guns.”

  Shorty glanced down at the man tormenting the bear. “I cannot abide an animal abuser,” he said. “Nor do I like the idea of our dead comrade lying down there without his pants and his head chewed on. It is time.”

  Shorty crept off then, crawling on his belly, dragging the Sharps along. He went low and quietly down the side of the hill on the left side, toward the big oak that the bear was tied to. The man with the stick was still poking at the unfortunate bear, cackling and giggling as if there couldn’t be anything funnier.

  “How you like that, you hairy old fart?” Skinny said, and turned and wiggled his ass at the bear. “You sure would like some of my ass, wouldn’t you? What you get for killing my hunting dogs, you nasty piece of shit.”

  Eustace opened his eyes a little, his mouth, too, and then he closed them. I thought: Perfect. He will be as useless as tits on a boar hog.

  Although I had a good view of Shorty as he crawled, he was at an angle and behind enough brush those down below couldn’t see him. He inched down the side of the hill and shimmied up even with the tree. He stood up behind it, leaned the Sharps against its trunk, pulled out his knife, and cut the rope where it was tied. The bear didn’t know it was free right away, but Skinny had gotten bolder and was running
at the bear, stopping just short of where the rope would reach, poking at it with the stick, which by now had lost its heat, and this time the bear was able to swat it out of his hand. That didn’t discourage Skinny. He began to prance at the bear, then prance back, teasing him, tucking his hands up under his pits and flapping his elbows like chicken wings. It was clear to see he thought he was entertaining, and was getting laughs from the others, who had now turned their attention on him.

  He danced in another time, and the bear lunged forward, and then, as the man danced out, doing the chicken wings with his arms again, he came to the knowledge that the bear was still coming and the rope wasn’t holding him back anymore and that an angry black bear can move fast on all fours.

  When he realized it, he said, “Shit,” and that was the last thing he said, cause that bear did three things at once. It came up on its hind legs, growled loud, and struck out with its paw. It caught Skinny upside the head and sent him reeling like an acrobat. He tumbled along the ground for a goodly distance and then flopped limply into the fire. His hair caught ablaze and his head did, too.

  Cut Throat, who was near the front door, leaning against the cabin wall, hooted out loud. Nigger Pete, who was nearby, started laughing himself, along with the others, including Fatty, who had to hold his wounded stomach when he did. Their dead pal’s demise was funnier than a puppet show until the bear came running toward them, dragging that rope. Their guns came out and they started firing, but if they hit that bear once I couldn’t tell it. That bear was the distraction Shorty had given us. I reached out and grabbed Eustace’s knee, said, “Go on down the hill shooting.”

  Eustace opened his bloodshot eyes and looked at me, and I tell you, I saw something in those eyes I’ve never seen before or since, and I’m comfortable with that. I pointed down where all the laughing was going on.

  Eustace, without one ounce of sneak about him, rose up, plowed through the brush, and started downhill, toting that four-gauge like it was Excalibur.