Edge of Dark Water

by Lansdale, Joe R.

  “All I know is it’s a good thing to know he’s not my kin, and Mama says my real daddy is a good man.”

  Jinx nodded, picked up the empty wash basket, started back toward the house with me following. “You ought to keep in mind you ain’t never seen your real daddy, and your mama ain’t seen him in sixteen years. He might be same as Don. Might be worse. Might even be dead.”

  “Don’t say that,” I said.

  “I’m not trying to mess up where your heart is right now, but as your friend, I’m just giving you a warning. Sometimes when things are bad, they don’t get better. They get worse, and when you think they can’t get no worse, they do.”

  “That’s not a very forward way of looking at things,” I said.

  “No. But it’s a way that often comes to pass.”

  “I hope that isn’t true.”

  “By the way,” Jinx said, grinning at me, “you giving them back?”

  “What?”

  “The legs your mama borrowed.”

  Terry lived in town, which wasn’t much more than a handful of buildings that looked to have been stolen away by a tornado and set down on a crooked street so that they didn’t line up good. His house was off the main street and down a blacktop road. It was a pretty nice house, good as Jinx’s, and larger. There was a house on either side of it, and unlike the downtown, they were lined up even and similar in the way they looked. All the houses along there had a little front yard and a backyard and some flowers out front, and on this day, in Terry’s front yard, there was a kid. He was a short, fat kid with carrot-colored hair and green snot on his face that had dried in a long trail that reached to the corner of his mouth, like the runoff from an outhouse.

  There was a white fence around the yard and a swinging gate. I pushed through the gate and waved at the kid. It was one of Terry’s stepbrothers. Terry hated all his step-kin. I think what he mostly hated was that he was no longer the center of attention since his mama got remarried. After that, he always had a feeling of being left out in the rain without a hat. I didn’t think he had it so bad myself, but I guess it’s what you compare it to.

  The kid in the yard was called Booger by Terry and most everyone else, including his daddy and his stepmother. I figure it was a thing that would follow him even when he was grown up, like a cousin of mine who was called Poot. I suppose it beat being called Turd, especially if the tag had some kind of truthful connection.

  “Is Terry here?” I asked Booger.

  Booger eyed me as if he was sizing me up for a meal. “He’s out back with a nigger.”

  The apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Terry said his new daddy was the sort of man that was still upset he had to pay colored people a nickel for a couple hours’ work and thought he should be able to find them for jobs at the same place he bought mules.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Did you know boys and girls got different thangs?” the boy said.

  “Yep,” I said.

  I went out back. There was a big pile of wood near the fence, and next to the wood was Terry. Closer to it yet, with ax in hand, was a big colored man. He was splitting a piece of stove wood in half over a log, and he was doing it with the ease of a fish swimming in water. I stood and watched while he did it, it was such good work. He had his shirt off and he was well muscled, and his skin was the color of sweaty licorice. I had been noticing a lot of things about men lately, white and colored, and some of what I noticed made me nervous and anxious.

  Terry wasn’t wearing a shirt, either, and I noticed that right off as well. He wasn’t as muscled as the colored man, but he looked pretty good, and I remember thinking in that moment that it wasn’t such a good thing he was a sissy.

  Terry was grabbing the pieces as they were halved and piling them on a wheelbarrow. He was doing this quickly and with great skill to avoid the rising and swinging of the ax. He looked around and saw me and nodded. I knew he had chores to finish, so I went and sat on the back porch. I heard the door open behind me, and Terry’s mama came out. She was a fine-looking person with dark, short hair that had a perm in it. She sat down on the steps beside me, said, “Sue Ellen, how are you?”

  “I’m fine, ma’am.”

  I didn’t look at her direct, as I figured if I did I would look guilty, considering the plans I had might include her son.

  “It’s been so long since I’ve seen you,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I had to look at her now. It was manners. I put on my best lying face and turned it to her. When I did I saw she looked a little less full of juice than when I had seen her last; still pretty, but something she needed had been sucked out of her, and I had the impression that if I touched her hard she might fall apart, like a vase that had been badly glued back together. Still, compared to my mama, she was as solid as a mountain.

  According to Terry, what was sucking out the juice was his stepdaddy, who he said was well-heeled but had all the personality of a nasty dishrag. He told me once, “Stepdad didn’t become rich by charm. He became rich by discovering oil on some land he bought and by building a brick-firing company that hires most of the people in town that are being hired. After that, he didn’t need to be charming. He just had to have his wallet with him.”

  “How do you think Terry is?” she asked me.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Do you think he’s okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I guess so.”

  “I think the new arrangements bother him.”

  That was like saying I think the selling of one of our children to buy a pig might have been a bad idea. But since I was thinking about even newer arrangements for him, I didn’t know what to reply, other than, “I suppose that’s so.”

  After a bit, the colored man stopped chopping and picked his shirt off the woodpile and wiped his face and chest with it and then put it on. Terry pushed the wheelbarrow over to the porch and started unloading it, piling wood under the porch’s overhang.

  The colored man came over, smiling and shuffling. Jinx said that was how colored did if they didn’t want to have a visit from the Ku Klux Klan. She said you never knew when it would be decided you were being uppity in the presence of a white, and being uppity could cause you to come to grief. To add to that, it was probably pretty well known that Terry’s stepdad had a white robe and hood hanging in his closet.

  The colored man didn’t say anything, just stood there smiling, like a jackass waiting for a carrot. It made me feel funny, seeing a grown man act like that.

  Terry’s mama stood up and smiled and handed him something she had in her hand. He took it without looking to see what it was, and went away. When he was gone, she looked down at me and said, “I think that was worth more than a nickel, don’t you? He chopped a lot of wood and it’s hot.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “I gave him a quarter.”

  “Well worth it,” I said.

  Terry finished up with the wood and came over and sat by me on the porch steps. I could feel the heat off his body and I could smell his sweat.

  “Well,” his mama said, still standing on the steps. “I’ll leave you two to visit. But don’t forget your other chores, Terry. You know how your daddy gets when they’re not done.”

  “He’s not my real father,” Terry said.

  “You don’t mean that,” she said.

  “I do mean it.”

  “Well, it’ll take a little time to adjust.”

  “By the time I adjust, the world will be made anew,” Terry said.

  “We won’t discuss it right now…Sue Ellen, it’s good to see you.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  She went in the house.

  I said, “You hurt her feelings.”

  “I know,” he said. “I didn’t mean to. It’s not her I don’t like. It’s that man she married and all his kids. The smartest one of them barely knows to get in out of the rain, and only does so with considerable encouragement.”

 
“I’m wanting to look at that map again,” I said. “I’m wanting to find that money.”

  “You sure?”

  “I am. Jinx might come, and she might not. But I want to go.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight.”

  “I think I got in too big a hurry the other day,” Terry said.

  “You don’t want to go now?”

  “No. I want to go. But I think we should find the money, and then we have to dig up May Lynn and burn her, and I need to do some work on that barge so it can run cleaner down the river.”

  “You know how to do that?”

  “I know how to do a lot of things. My real daddy taught me things, and he taught me how to teach myself about things I don’t know. He taught me how to study, and my mama taught me the same.”

  “How much studying you need?”

  “For what we have in mind, little to none. But I need time. Burning a body takes more time and work than you might think. You need a real serious fire, and we have to have it someplace where we won’t be seen. I have an idea for that, but I’d rather not discuss it until I’ve had time to consider on it awhile. Thing we should do first is determine if the map is real, and if it is, we have to find out if there’s any money buried out there.”

  “Then we steal it.”

  “You’re reconciled with that idea now?” he said.

  “If ‘reconciled’ means I’m fine with that idea, I am.”

  “That’s about the size of it,” Terry said.

  8

  Terry got the map from a hiding place in the house, put on a shirt, and then we took a walk down the street. There was a graveyard nearby, and we went there. It was a private place to talk. We sat where we often sat, on a metal bench under a spreading oak tree in view of the Confederate dead; rows and rows of sun-shiny stones that held down old rebels who had been shot or died later of wounds, or old age, or disappointment.

  We unfolded the map and stretched it out between us and looked it over.

  “What I can’t figure,” Terry said, “is what these humps are. Everything else on the map seems accurate, but I can’t make them out, and then there’s the name written here, Malcolm Cuzins.”

  I nodded, said, “I figure we can go back there and look things over more carefully and see what we can come up with. Maybe if we look again, something will jump out that fits this. I thought it might mean hills, but after we got to where we was going, there wasn’t any hills. There’s nothing out there but a few trees and—”

  And then it hit me.

  I looked at Terry. “We are the dumbest people that ever walked on a spinning earth.”

  “How do you mean?” he said.

  “Look out there,” I said, waving my hand toward the graves.

  He looked.

  “Okay. A bunch of dead people with rocks on their heads.”

  “That’s it, the stones,” I said. “We been overthinking things.”

  “You mean that old graveyard up in the pines?”

  “Well, I don’t mean this one. Sure. Those humps on the map could be gravestones.”

  “But the tombstones there have mostly been removed by vandals,” he said. “Or broken up.”

  “Yeah, but that don’t mean these humps don’t mean a graveyard. That would be a way the map drawer could remember things. A graveyard is supposed to have gravestones, even if it don’t. There might even be a stone or two left up there we ain’t seen, and one of them might have the name Malcolm written on it. The money might be there.”

  “You know, Sue Ellen, you may be correct. We should check it out. We might get lucky.”

  “I figure luck is either a plan or an accident,” I said. “What we have is a plan.”

  We went over to see Jinx and helped her finish up her chores. She got us some boiled eggs and wrapped them in a black-and-white checkered cloth and put them in a syrup bucket. We borrowed one of her daddy’s shovels and she told her mama we was going digging for fishing worms, and the three of us lit out. We used the leaky boat again and paddled across the river, not too far down from May Lynn’s house.

  Following the map the way we had gone before, we got to where the graveyard was, stopped, and took a breather. Underneath the trees there were shadows, and the shadows lay where the graveyard was said to be. It was supposed to be haunted by the ghosts of those buried there. Some said it was a graveyard full of slaves, others said it was the graveyard of a family long forgotten. Some claimed Christian Cherokees had been buried there.

  It was cooler in the shadows and the trees dripping cool water from the rain of last night made it even cooler. There were no gravestones visible, but there were slumps in the ground where aged graves might have been. There were no fresh diggings, however, and after poking around with the shovel, we finally wore out looking, stopped, and sat down on the ground under the pines. Jinx pulled the eggs in the cloth from the bucket, and we took one apiece and started peeling. We ate and thought and listened to birds.

  The boiled egg was good but dry, and I was wishing for some water, when Terry said, “Look here.”

  He pushed the rest of the egg into his mouth and stood up, talking around his chewing. “I’m sitting on an old gravestone.”

  Me and Jinx got up and took a look. It was a rock that had a name carved on it, and some dates. It had fallen over, or maybe had been placed flat to begin with. The name on it wasn’t Malcolm Cuzins, but still, my heart beat faster.

  We went back to looking around with a new fire in our bellies, and before long, Jinx said, “You gonna like this.”

  Me and Terry went for a look-see, followed Jinx’s pointing finger. Near a crop of poison ivy there was a slight slope, and through a split in the pines above there was so much sunshine coming in it looked as if it was being poured from a bucket. What it was pouring on was a stone. It had fallen over but was supported by a mound of dirt. It was easy to miss and had near-blended into the pine needles on the forest bed. There was a name on the stone, and the sunlight made the name stand out.

  It read: MALCOLM CUZINS.

  “Ain’t that something?” Jinx said. “Here we was just looking and looking, and we sat down to have a boiled egg and we found it.”

  “It’s God’s will,” Terry said.

  “Or we found it because we had a map and was looking around,” Jinx said.

  I grabbed up the shovel, knocked the poison ivy back, and started digging. I could tell pretty quick that the dirt had been moved and not too long ago. My first thought was May Lynn might have got to the money already, but then the shovel clicked on something; I dropped it, got down on my hands and knees. So did Jinx and Terry. We all started scraping the dirt back with our hands.

  As we dug, the day slipped away, and I heard a whip-poor-will call from somewhere over the hill. We kept digging.

  My fingers wrapped around something solid, and I called out. Terry and Jinx started helping me dig there, and in no time at all we came upon a large piece of crockery. It had a tight cover on it, and when we felt around the lid, we realized it had been sealed with wax.

  We dug more, knocked away the dirt around it, and lifted it out. It was a small crockery pot, but heavy enough. Terry pulled out his pocketknife and trimmed around the waxed-on lid until the wax was loose enough we could get the lid off. There was a bag inside with a blue-and-white flower pattern on it. I pulled it out. I recognized it as a match to the pillowcases and curtains and May Lynn’s dress. It was pretty heavy. It was tied shut with a string. Before I could loose the string, Terry went at it with his pocketknife. We opened the bag and looked inside.

  It was full of greenbacks, and even a bit of change. There was a daddy longlegs in there, too. He was dead and dried up, like a salesman’s heart.

  “Oh, hellfires,” Jinx said.

  “That’s a lot of money,” I said.

  “I don’t mean that,” Jinx said. “Looky there.”

  She was pointing at something in the grave. It was right under where the crockery h
ad been. We had been so excited we hadn’t noticed. It was a row of teeth, and they was partly coated in clay.

  “Well,” Terry said. “It is a graveyard. You are going to find bones.”

  “Yeah, but look there,” Jinx said, and pointed again.

  Down a ways was a hand. The hand still had some flesh on it, and there were worms digging into it.

  “Them worms would have done chewed up anyone buried long ago,” Jinx said. “This fella may not be fresh as this morning’s milk, but he’s fairly new to the ground.”

  “She’s right,” Terry said. He stood up, got the shovel, and started gently digging around the body. It took a long while, but in time it was uncovered. It was a man in a brown-and-white pin-stripe suit, lying slightly on his side with his knees pushed up toward his middle. The teeth we had seen was in a skull. A lot of him was missing, but he didn’t need any of it back.

  The white stripes on his suit had turned the color of the red clay, and there wasn’t any shoes on the feet, just brown silk socks with blue clocks on them. There were still strips of flesh where the face had been, and on the skull was a brown narrow-brimmed hat. It was crushed up, but it was easy to see that, like the suit, it had been something that cost money and most likely went with a new cigar and gold watch chain.

  Terry got down on his hands and knees and looked the body over. He said, “It still has an odor about it. You’re right, Jinx. He hasn’t been in the ground all that long.”

  Terry opened the man’s clay-caked coat. When he did, way it stuck to the rotting body, it made a sound like something ripping. He reached inside the man’s coat pockets, but there wasn’t anything in them. He fumbled through the outside pockets and found some threads and a button. He pulled off the hat, and when he did the man’s skull crumbled somewhat. You could see that the back of his head had been crushed. Terry took the hat, which was dark in the back, and shook it into some kind of shape. He looked inside of it and let out his breath.

  “It has his name stenciled on the inside band,” he said. “Warren Cain.”