The Best of Joe R. Lansdale (18 page)

I paddled quickly through them, spreading the school, and one did indeed try to climb up the side, but I brought the boat paddle down on him hard and he went back in the water, alive or dead I couldn’t say.

As I paddled around a bend in the river, I saw where the wild briars grew, and in that moment I had a strange sinking feeling. Not only for fear of what I might find in the briar tunnels, but fear I might find nothing at all. Fear I was all wrong. Or that the Goat Man did indeed have Tom. Perhaps in Mose’s cabin, and had been keeping her there, waiting until I was out of sight. But if that was true, why had he given my gun back? Then again, he wasn’t bright.

He was a creature of the woods, same as a coon or a possum. He didn’t think like regular folks.

All of this went through my head and swirled around and confused itself with my own fears and the thought of actually cutting down on a man with a shotgun. I felt like I was in a dream, like the kind I’d had when I’d had the flu the year before and everything had swirled and Mama and Daddy’s voices had seemed to echo and there were shadows all around me, trying to grab at me and pull me away into who knows where.

I paddled up to the bank and got out and pulled the boat up on shore best I could. I couldn’t quite get it out of the water since I was so tuckered out from paddling. I just hoped it would hang there and hold.

I got the shotgun out and went up the hill quietly and found the mouth of the tunnel just beyond the tree, where me and Tom and Toby had come out that night.

It was dark inside the briars, and the moon had gone away behind a cloud and the wind rattled the briars and clicked them together and bits of rain sliced through the briars and mixed with the sweat in my hair, ran down my face and made me shiver. July the Fourth, and I was cold.

As I sneaked down the tunnel, an orange glow leaped and danced and I could hear a crackling sound. I trembled and eased forward and came to the end of the tunnel, and froze. I couldn’t make myself turn into the other tunnel. It was as if my feet were nailed the ground.

I pulled back the hammer on the shotgun, slipped my face around the edge of the briars, and looked.

There was a fire going in the center of the tunnel, in the spot where Tom and I had seen the burn marks that day, and I could see Tom lying on the ground, her clothes off and strewn about, and a man was leaning over her, running his hands over her back and forth, making a sound like an animal eating after a long time without food. His hands flowed over her as if he was playing a piano. A huge machete was stuck up in the dirt near Tom’s head, and Tom’s face was turned toward me. Her eyes were wide and full of tears, and tied around her mouth was a thick bandanna, and her hands and feet were bound with rope, and as I looked the man rose and I saw that his pants were undone and he had hold of himself, and he was walking back and forth behind the fire, looking down at Tom, yelling, “I don’t want to do this. You make me do this. It’s your fault, you know? You’re getting just right. Just right.”

The voice was loud, but not like any voice I’d ever heard. There was all the darkness and wetness of the bottom of the river in that voice, as well as the mud down there, and anything that might collect in it.

I hadn’t been able to get a good look at his face, but I could tell from the way he was built, the way the fire caught his hair, it was Mr. Nation’s son, Uriah.

Then he turned slightly, and it wasn’t Uriah at all. I had merely thought it was Uriah because he was built like Uriah, but it wasn’t.

I stepped fully into the tunnel and said, “Cecil?”

The word just came out of my mouth, without me really planning to say it. Cecil turned now, and when he saw me his face was like it had been earlier, when Tom was being bounced on his knee and the fireworks had exploded behind him. He had the same slack-jawed look, his face was beaded in sweat.

He let go of his privates and just let them hang out for me to see, as if he were proud of them and that I should be too.

“Oh, boy,” he said, his voice still husky and animal-like. “It’s just gone all wrong. I didn’t want to have to have Tom. I didn’t. But she’s been ripenin’, boy, right in front of my eyes. Every time I saw her, I said, no, you don’t shit where you eat, but she’s ripenin’, boy, and I thought I’d go to your place, peek in on her if I could, and then I seen her there, easy to take, and I knew tonight I had to have her. There wasn’t nothing else for it.”

“Why?”

“Oh, son. There is no why. I just have to. I have to do them all. I tell myself I won’t, but I do. I do.”

He eased toward me.

I lifted the shotgun.

“Now, boy,” he said. “You don’t want to shoot me.”

“Yes, sir. I do.”

“It ain’t something I can help. Listen here. I’ll let her go, and we’ll just forget about this business. Time you get home, I’ll be out of here. I got a little boat hid out, and I can take it downriver to where I can catch a train. I’m good at that. I can be gone before you know it.”

“You’re wiltin’,” I said.

His pee-dink had gone limp.

Cecil looked down. “So I am.”

He pushed himself inside his pants and buttoned up as he talked. “Look here. I wasn’t gonna hurt her. Just feel her some. I was just gonna get my finger wet. I’ll go on, and everything will be all right.”

“You’ll just go down the river and do it again,” I said. “Way you come down the river to us and did it here. You ain’t gonna stop, are you?”

“There’s nothing to say about it, Harry. It just gets out of hand sometime.”

“Where’s your chain and coin, Cecil?”

He touched his throat. “It got lost.”

“That woman got her hand chopped off, she grabbed it, didn’t she?”

“I reckon she did.”

“Move to the left there, Cecil.”

He moved to the left, pointed at the machete. “She grabbed me, I chopped her with that, and her hand came off. Damndest thing. I got her down here and she got away from me and I chased her. And she grabbed me, fought back. I chopped her hand off and it went in the river. Can you imagine that… How did you know?”

“The Goat Man finds things in the river. He hangs them on Mose’s shack.”

“Goat Man?”

“You’re the real Goat Man.”

“You’re not making any sense, boy.”

“Move on around to the side there.”

I wanted him away from the exit on that other side, the one me and Tom had stumbled into that night we found the body.

Cecil slipped to my left, and I went to the right. We were kind of circling each other. I got over close to Tom and I squatted down by her, still pointing the shotgun at Cecil.

“I could be gone for good,” Cecil said. “All you got to do is let me go.”

I reached out with one hand and got hold of the knot on the bandanna and pulled it loose. Tom said, “Shoot him! Shoot him! He stuck his fingers in me. Shoot him! He took me out of the window and stuck his fingers in me.”

“Hush, Tom,” I said. “Take it easy.”

“Cut me loose. Give me the gun and I’ll shoot him.”

“All the time you were bringin’ those women here to kill, weren’t you?” I said.

“It’s a perfect place. Already made by hobos. Once I decided on a woman, well, I can easily handle a woman. I always had my boat ready, and you can get almost anywhere you need to go by river. The tracks aren’t far from here. Plenty of trains run. It’s easy to get around. Now and then I borrowed a car. You know whose? Mrs. Canerton. One night she loaned it to me, and well, I asked her if she wanted to go for a drive with me while I ran an errand. And she liked me, boy, and I just couldn’t contain myself. All I had to do was bring them here, and when I finished, I tossed out the trash.”

“Daddy trusted you. You told where Mose was. You told Mr. Nation.”

“It was just a nigger, boy. I had to try and hide my trail. You understand. It wasn’t like the world lost an upstanding citizen.”

“We thought you were our friend,” I said.

“I am. I am. Sometimes friends make you mad, though, don’t they? They do wrong things. But I don’t mean to.”

“We ain’t talkin’ about stealin’ a piece of peppermint, here. You’re worse than the critters out there with hydrophobia, ‘cause you ain’t as good as them. They can’t help themselves.”

“Neither can I.”

The fire crackled, bled red colors across his face. Some of the rain leaked in through the thick wad of briars and vines and limbs overhead, hit the fire and it hissed. “You’re like your daddy, ain’t you? Self-righteous.”

“Reckon so.”

I had one hand holding the shotgun, resting it against me as I squatted down and worked the knots free on Tom’s hands. I wasn’t having any luck with that, so I got my pocketknife out of my pants and cut her hands loose, then her feet.

I stood up, raised the gun, and he flinched some, but I couldn’t cut down on him. It just wasn’t in me, not unless he tried to lay hands on us.

I didn’t know what to do with him. I decided I had no choice but to let him go, tell Daddy and have them try and hunt him down.

Tom was pulling on her clothes when I said, “You’ll get yours eventually.”

“Now you’re talkin’, boy.”

“You stay over yonder, we’re goin’ out.”

He held up his hands. “Now you’re using some sense.”

Tom said, “You can’t shoot him, I can.”

“Go on, Tom.”

She didn’t like it, but she turned down the tunnel and headed out. Cecil said, “Remember, boy. We had some good times.”

“We ain’t got nothin’. You ain’t never done nothing with me but cut my hair, and you didn’t know how to cut a boy’s hair anyway.” I turned and went out by the tunnel. “And I ought to blow one of your legs off for what you done to Toby.”

We didn’t use the opening in the tunnel that led to the woods because I wanted to go out the way I’d come and get back to the boat. We got on the river it would be hard for him to track us, if that was his notion.

When we got down to the river, the boat, which I hadn’t pulled up good on the shore, had washed out in the river, and I could see it floating away with the current.

“Damn,” I said.

“Was that Mose’s boat?” Tom asked.

“We got to go by the bank, to the swinging bridge.”

“It’s a long ways,” I heard Cecil say.

I spun around, and there he was up on the higher bank next to the tree where me and Tom had found the body. He was just a big shadow next to the tree, and I thought of the Devil come up from the ground, all dark and evil and full of bluff. “You got a long ways to go, children. A long ways.”

I pointed the shotgun at him and he slipped behind the tree out of sight, said, “A long ways.”

I knew then I should have killed him. Without the boat, he could follow alongside us easy, back up in the woods there, and we couldn’t even see him.

Me and Tom started moving brisk like along the bank, and we could hear Cecil moving through the woods on the bank above us, and finally we didn’t hear him anymore. It was the same as that night when we heard the sounds near and in the tunnel. I figured it had been him, maybe come down to see his handiwork at the tree there, liking it perhaps, wanting it to be seen by someone. Maybe we had come down right after he finished doing it. He had been stalking us, or Tom, maybe. He had wanted Tom all along.

We walked fast and Tom was cussing most of it, talking about what Cecil had done with his fingers, and the whole thing was making me sick.

“Just shut up, Tom. Shut up.”

She started crying. I stopped and got down on one knee, let the shotgun lay against me as I reached out with both hands and took hold of her shoulders.

“I’m sorry, Tom, really. I’m scared too. We got to keep ourselves together, you hear me?”

“I hear you,” she said.

“We got to stay the course here. I got a gun. He don’t. He may have already given up.”

“He ain’t give up, and you know it.”

“We got to keep moving.”

Tom nodded, and we started out again, and pretty soon the long, dark shadow of the swinging bridge was visible across the river, and the wind was high, and the bridge thrashed back and forth and creaked and groaned like hinges on rusty doors.

“We could go on down a ways, Tom, I think we got to cross by the bridge here. It’s quicker, and we can be home sooner.”

“I’m scared, Harry.”

“So am I.”

“Can you do it?”

Tom sucked in her top lip and nodded. “I can.”

We climbed up the bank where the bridge began and looked down on it. It swung back and forth. I looked down at the river. White foam rose with the dark water and it rolled away and crashed over the little falls into the broader, deeper, slower part of the river. The rain came down on us and the wind was chilly, and all around the woods seemed quiet, yet full of something I couldn’t put a name to. Now and again, in spite of the rain, the clouds would split and the moon would shine down on us, looking as if it were something greasy.

I decided to cross first, so if a board gave out Tom would know. When I stepped on the bridge, the wind the way it was, and now my weight, made it swing way up and I darn near tipped into the water. When I reached out to grab the cables, I let go of the shotgun. It went into the water without any sound I could hear and was instantly gone.

“You lost it, Harry,” Tom yelled from the bank.

“Come on, just hang to the cables.”

Tom stepped onto the bridge, and it swung hard and nearly tipped again.

“We got to walk light,” I said, “and kind of together. Where I take a step, you take one, but if a board goes, or I go, you’ll see in time.”

“If you fall, what do I do?”

“You got to go on across, Tom.”

We started on across, and we seemed to have gotten the movement right, because we weren’t tipping quite so bad, and pretty soon we were halfway done.

I turned and looked down the length of the bridge, past Tom. I didn’t see anyone tryin’ to follow.

It was slow going, but it wasn’t long before we were six feet from the other side. I began to breathe a sigh of relief. Then I realized I still had a ways to go yet till we got to the wide trail, then the road, and now I knew there wasn’t any road would stop Cecil or anyone else. It was just a road. If we got that far, we still had some distance yet, and Cecil would know where we were going, and Mama and Daddy might not even be home yet.