The Thicket

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Way down the road there were two dark dots that looked like crickets, and the sun rose over them and threw their shadows long behind them. Because of the sun I had to squint, and when I did it seemed as if the crickets jumped, and when I opened them wide again I realized I was seeing Cut Throat and Lula on horses, and I got the impression, if not the true sight of it, that Cut Throat was slightly ahead and was leading Lula’s horse. They weren’t running full out, but they were moving briskly, and so were we. My guess is they were near a mile ahead of us and better mounted. Cut Throat had obviously taken the best horses.

  I yelled out at Shorty, “Shorty, you got to take the shot.”

  He glanced at me, and I couldn’t tell if he heard me or not, but I knew one thing for sure: we weren’t going to catch up to them. Not on this day, not with our mounts.

  I reined my horse to a stop and swung off its back. Shorty wheeled and rode back to me. He leaned forward on his horse and looked at me. “What in hell?”

  “You have to take the shot,” I said.

  “What shot?”

  “You know what shot I mean,” I said. “It’s clear enough here.”

  “They are a mile or more away.”

  Then what he had said came to him. He swung off the horse with the rifle, tumbling as he hit the ground. His horse bolted a little, but was too tired to run off. It just strayed off the road and started looking for grass among the stumps.

  Shorty picked up the Sharps, which he had dropped, and ran forward until he came to a stump. He put one foot on the stump and looked at the riders.

  He said, “It is much too far a shot, and the sun is in my face.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “Billy Dixon made that shot.”

  “So they say,” Shorty said. “He did not have the sun in his eyes, though.”

  “You can make that shot.”

  “I am not positive Billy Dixon made that shot.”

  While he was talking he stretched out on the ground on his belly and laid the Sharps across the stump.

  He sighted down it, said, “I think they have gone over a mile.”

  Sure enough, there wasn’t much to see of them now; two specks like dust dots in the distance, and beyond them a line of green. If they got to the woods they would have plenty of places to hide, and there wouldn’t even be a chance of a shot.

  Shorty stuck his finger in his mouth then held it up, testing the wind. He said, “Do not say a word.”

  He stuck the Sharps stock tight against his shoulder and let out his breath, took in another one slowly, and kept sighting. He did this for what seemed a long time. Then he cocked back the hammer and cleared his throat. He readjusted himself and lifted the rifle higher. It was more like he was shooting at the sky than at them. I saw his body rise with a breath, and then the breath eased out, and when it did the shot came so quick as to make me jump. It seemed like a long time between the firing and the homing in of the metal pigeon, for it most certainly found its nest. It looked to me even from that distance that Cut Throat threw up his hands as if to praise Jesus, and at the same time the horse’s feet collapsed under it. The horse went down, and Cut Throat rolled off of it and didn’t move. The horse didn’t move. Lula, having been freed of Cut Throat’s grip on her horse’s reins, rode on without stopping.

  “The hell with Billy Dixon,” I said.

  Lula had ridden on without waiting and was out of sight altogether. We rode up on Cut Throat and his horse, cautiously, in case he was playing possum and it was the horse that had taken the shot.

  I dropped off my horse and helped Shorty down, something I could see he resented. Examining Cut Throat, we saw that the shot had gone through his back, cutting him through the spine, about six inches above the ass. The shot had gone on forward and struck the horse in the back of its neck and traveled into the base of its brain, killing it as well as Cut Throat.

  “I hate it for the horse,” Shorty said. He looked at me, said, “I should also admit I was aiming for Cut Throat’s head. The load had a lot more drop in it than I anticipated. Had he been another six to eight feet ahead of where my bullet found him, I would have missed.”

  “But you didn’t,” I said.

  “Well, now,” Shorty said, sitting down on a nearby stump, clinging to his horse’s reins. “I am going to rest here while you find your sister. I think my horse is more blown out than yours.”

  I rode off then, looking for her. I rode for some distance, and after a time came upon her horse. It was sitting with its legs under it, its mouth open, bellowing air. It had worn out, crouched down, and quit. Lula was nowhere in sight.

  I carried on, and finally I saw Lula walking up ahead. She was walking fast. I started calling to her, but either she didn’t hear me or didn’t care. She walked faster and faster, and finally she started running all out. She got tripped up as she went and fell down on her hands and knees.

  Jumping off my horse, I yelled out, “Lula, are you all right? Stop. It’s me.”

  I ran over to her. She turned and had a derringer in her hand. I guess she had picked it up and hid it in her clothes during the shootout. She shot me with it.

  23

  Damn it, Lula,” I said. “You’ve shot your own brother.” It was a solid shot to my knee, and it took the support out from under me. I dropped back and fell on my butt and cocked my knee up and cradled it with my hands.

  She came over then, poked the derringer, which was a two-shooter, straight into my face. Her eyes looked like they were on fire. She cocked back the second hammer.

  “I’m your brother, Lula. Jack.”

  Lula kept glaring down at me, the way a brat might before stepping on a bug. Then her face softened, seemed to slide around on the bone. She narrowed her eyes and licked her lips and her expression finally settled in one place. I guess my swollen eye and banged-up face and all the dirt I had acquired had changed my looks some. She tossed the derringer and dropped down and grabbed me and lifted my face and planted kisses on my forehead. I hugged her and kissed her tear-stained face, and then I, too, was crying. We cried like that for some time. Cried so much I forgot how bad my knee hurt. Remember what I told you about us Parkers? Once we let it out, we really let it out. So we opened the gates, crying and moaning and kissing each other on the head and cheeks, and just pretty much falling all apart.

  Lula started saying, “Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack,” over and over, as if she had just remembered my name.

  It was a pretty long moment in time before I got up, and Lula had to help me. My knee hurt something awful. I looked up and saw Shorty was riding slowly toward us. He was leading Lula’s horse, which had gotten some of its wind back.

  Lula said, “A child on horseback?”

  “A midget,” I said. “But don’t ask him to do circus tricks.”

  As we watched him ride closer, Lula, without looking at me, said, “I ain’t as pure as I once was, Jack.”

  “Who is?” I said.

  “All those men,” she said. “They—”

  “I have something for you.”

  I dug the necklace from my pocket and held it up for her to take. She looked at it, almost reached for it, said, “I can’t, Jack. You got to keep it for now. I can’t take it. A different girl wore that.”

  “You’re just the same to me,” I said, and slipped it over her head. Her expression changed slightly, but I couldn’t quite figure it.

  Shorty rode up and dropped off the horse.

  “How’d you get up there without your rope ladder or a boost?” I said.

  “With the assistance of a tall stump and considerable determination. So this is Lula.”

  “Shorty is the one that took the shot that put Cut Throat down,” I said.

  “And, unfortunately, his horse,” Shorty said. Then to her: “You are a lovely sight, Miss Lula.”

  Lula had a weak smile for him. “I look much better cleaned up,” she said.

  “You look fine to me,” Shorty said. “And just for the record, cleaned up I
look pretty much the same.”

  Lula actually smiled. It seemed to be a smile borrowed from someone else; it didn’t quite fit her face. But it was a smile. It melted like frost on a warm windowpane.

  “I seem to have shot my own brother,” she said.

  When Jimmie Sue saw us, she ran out to meet me. Hog came loping out as well. I dropped off the horse, forgetting my wound to the knee, and collapsed. The knee was swollen up like a sausage stuffed too tight in a skin.

  Hog got there first, nuzzled me like a dog. Jimmie Sue helped me to my feet. I took her in my arms and we kissed. Jimmie Sue had tears on her cheeks.

  “I figured you had gone under,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  Lula swung off her horse, came around, and looked at Jimmie Sue.

  “This here,” I said to Lula, “is my fiancée, Jimmie Sue…what was the last name?”

  “Forget it,” Jimmie Sue said. “It’s going to be the same as yours.”

  “That ugly beast right there,” I said, “is Hog.”

  Jimmie Sue smiled at Lula. She said, “Come here, sister.”

  Lula did so, walking like she had two wooden legs. Jimmie Sue took hold of her and held her. Lula broke out crying again and damned if Jimmie Sue didn’t cry with her. Pretty soon I was sniffling and had to walk off and leave them together so that I didn’t turn into a blubbering fool again.

  There isn’t much left to say. Eustace wasn’t dead, but he was shot up some. It had about as much effect on him as bug bites. When he was sober, he and Shorty loaded up bodies in the wagon, except for the burnt-up bear tormentor. Eustace got a bucket out of the cabin and made some scoops in the dirt with it and threw the dirt over the fire and the bear tormentor. It wasn’t a very good job. Skinny’s arm and hand were still sticking out, and one of his burnt-up feet. When Eustace finished his chore, his wounds began to bleed. One bullet had gone all the way through and hadn’t hit anything vital, and the other didn’t bury deep enough in him to cause any real harm. He was able to squeeze out the lead with nothing more than pressure from his thumb and forefinger.

  Spot and Winton were put in the wagon, too, at the back of it, away from the riffraff. Shorty found blankets in the cabin and covered them, but not before Eustace found a pair of pants to pull on what was left of Spot. Nigger Pete wasn’t where Shorty had left him. He hadn’t been dead after all, and had crawled off in the woods a ways and died there. As his body was loaded in the wagon, Shorty called him a regular Rasputin, whatever that is.

  I was sitting on a stump while the loading was going on. I could hardly walk. Lula cut my pants open to the knee to examine where she shot me. The derringer hadn’t been much of a gun, fortunately for me, and Lula was able to heat up a knife and dig out the bullet. I near fainted a couple of times, but once it was out I felt considerably better and the swelling started going down right away.

  It was late afternoon by the time Jimmie Sue came back from our old camp with the horses and supplies we had left. The horses we chose to hook to the wagon belonged to Cut Throat and his gang and were obviously experienced with that sort of thing, and they pulled it well enough. I rode on the wagon seat with Jimmie Sue, and she drove the team. The others came along with the horses. Hog, of course, just trotted nearby as he always did, disappearing from time to time to do whatever it was he liked to do.

  We picked up Cut Throat’s body on the way out.

  When it was all said and done and days had passed, there was some reward money out of Livingston and some out of No Enterprise—even some out of Hinge Gate, though there wasn’t any kind of overlap. The government didn’t play that way, and though those towns promised us payment, there was none forthcoming immediately. We ended up having to travel over to Tyler, which was the county seat, to get things straightened out on full payment. While we were there we saw lots and lots of motorcars, as if they had bred overnight like fly larvae and grown up to honk horns and run on gas; the world seemed to have changed in the short time we had been manhunting and chasing the bounty.

  We did eventually get paid, and me, Shorty, Eustace, and Jimmie Sue shared the reward money. I signed over the land to Eustace and Shorty, like I promised, but that event went a direction I didn’t expect.

  Before I explain that, though, I will say we ended up putting Winton in a cemetery in No Enterprise. We paid for the burying, as none of the townspeople wanted to chip in. Spot was buried on Grandpa’s old property, out under a nice spreading oak. We got both Winton and Spot a stone for their sites with their names on them, though we never did learn Spot’s last name, because I wasn’t sure if the Grandpa Weeden he mentioned was his mother’s father or his father’s father. I just had to have SPOT carved on the stone. We didn’t even know when he was born; we only had a blank there and the date he was killed.

  As for Grandpa, his body was never found, but we put him a stone next to Ma’s and Pa’s graves on my property and let that stand in his place, though I often dreamed of him down there at the bottom of the Sabine River, caught up in weeds and being nibbled on by catfish. Sad as I felt about that, I never did forget he had been one of Jimmie Sue’s clients, and that he had spent a lifetime telling me how righteous he was. I didn’t never put flowers on his grave, but Lula did. Then again, neither me nor Jimmie Sue ever told anyone our information about his whorehouse activities, and this is the first time I’ve mentioned it openly. I’m either tired of holding that secret or I just don’t care anymore. Truth be told, I’m not sure which it is.

  I was saying how I signed my property over to Eustace and Shorty, but I should add they wouldn’t accept all of it, us all having grown tight together there at the end, having sealed a friendship on the day of the shootout with blood and gunpowder. They made it so I got a deed to Ma and Pa’s old place, and they split Grandpa’s between them, finding different ends of the property to build homes, which in time they did. Nice enough places, I might add, though Eustace’s house smelled funny on account of Hog was always laying up in it. Shorty sold off his previous bit of land and house to a fellow from Oklahoma.

  When I rebuilt on Ma and Pa’s land, it wasn’t where the old house had been but in a place far from there. I always associated smallpox with where my folks were buried, and I didn’t want anything to get planted there lest that old disease might come up from the ground to find me and finish off what it missed out on. We let that spot become a family cemetery, though at that point in time the only other ones we expected to be buried there were me and my sister and the woman who became my wife, Jimmie Sue.

  It wasn’t any time at all until oil was discovered on that land Eustace and Shorty had split up. Oil was found right on the line of their properties, and it led to some good humor among the two, and considering on how much money was brought in by that well I can see why they were amused. There was some chance there was more oil there, but that’s the only well they let be drilled, because the both of them decided they’d rather keep the property rich in trees and farmland. Lot of folks found this odd.

  Before the oil was discovered, another peculiar thing happened. Shorty took to visiting Lula at our new house, and in a few years they went into Hinge Gate, which of course by this time was well past any kind of smallpox, and got married by a judge at the courthouse. Shorty told me he married her not only because she was lovely and appealing and they got along and liked to talk about stars and dewdrops and such but also because she was more than willing to hold his hand no matter where they went. He was certainly a might older than her, but by this time she was full into her adulthood and had a mind of her own. I liked the way they looked at one another.

  Eustace didn’t marry; said he couldn’t get along with anybody that had to stay with him all the time. That didn’t keep him from coming to see us right regular, and we had a number of fine holidays with him and Shorty and Lula.

  Hog aged out and died. Eustace himself died after falling off a wagon and having it roll back over him, breaking his neck. Some said he
was drunk, but I don’t believe it. I think he told it true when he said he would never take another drop. He was the richest colored man in our county. He left what he owned to Jimmie Sue and me, and that included his land and house, half of the oil well, and that old four-gauge and a fistful of loads. That made us rich as Midas overnight and gave us a formidable weapon, though after my experience with the four-gauge I never wanted to fire it again, and to date I haven’t.

  Shorty and Lula had a child named James, and he grew up to be normal height but looked just like his daddy. A handsome fellow, a fine nephew, I must say. I expect he’ll grow up and be something special someday. As for all that travel Shorty talked about, except for a trip to a world’s fair up north in a brand-new motorcar with Lula and his son, Shorty never went anywhere outside of East Texas again. He didn’t seem to mind at all. The travel books got put away, and I never saw him reading them again. He built a tower on the highest part of his land, and at the top of that tower he put a telescope. Not the old one but a new one, a more powerful one. In bad weather he covered it with an oilcloth.

  It was there some ten years later that Lula found him. His heart gave out; he died too young, though he wasn’t any spring chicken. He was sitting in a tall chair, the telescope in front of him. He had been looking at the stars. I hope his eye had been on the lens when he passed on, and that his last sight was of Mars.

  There’s more to tell about Lula and her son, and how me and Jimmie Sue had children, a son named Lucas and a daughter named Lula, after my sister. But it doesn’t fit here. I also want to say that all I’ve told you might not be the perfect truth, but it is the truth as I remember it. As Jimmie Sue says, you don’t always remember it so much the way it was as how you thought it was.