Edge of Dark Water by Joe R. Lansdale Page B

Damned old cracker. I don’t want to never be called nigger no more by nobody. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of it. I can’t stand this goddamn place. I can’t stand no goddamn place.”
    “Jinx,” I said. “Now quit it. You ain’t gonna hit him anymore.”
    “What if he wakes up?”
    “You can hit him then,” I said.
    “All right then, let me go.”
    I let her go, and she jumped right up and ran over there to whack him again with the stick. Terry caught her arm, said, “That’s enough, Jinx. He’s nothing more than an old fool.”
    “That’s as much our money as it is his,” Jinx said, trying to jerk her hand free of Terry. “It don’t matter who stole it first. Besides, he didn’t even know where it was. We was the ones figured it out and dug it up.”
    Finally, I came up behind her and helped him hold her, and after a while, Jinx got herself together, and started breathing shallow again. Terry let her go, but not before he took the stick from her.
    “Let’s gather up the money before he wakes up and Jinx becomes a murderer,” Terry said.
    We got the money stuffed back in the bag, and right before we left out, Jinx kicked Cletus in the head as hard as she could. We had to pull her off of him and drag her along the riverbank, her cussing a blue streak, flailing her arms and legs like a centipede on a hot rock.

10
     
    T he Sabine River is long, but it ain’t that wide in the places I know. It’s not like I hear the Mississippi is, which can be more than a mile or so across. The Sabine is a brown run of water that twists its way along dirty banks, underneath lean-over trees and all their shadows. It’s deep in spots, not real deep in most, but there’s a right smart amount of water to carry boats and to sink them. There’s plenty of water to drown in. It’s a dark old river and it’s the Kingdom of the Snake; home to the water moccasin in particular, a thick, nub-tailed serpent with a bad attitude. I thought about that as we came ashore on the other side and dragged the leaky boat out of the water and under a weeping willow.
    Our plans had changed. There wouldn’t be a lot of time to do much more than take off. I wasn’t firm on what had become of the idea to burn up May Lynn’s body, but I was sure Terry had that still tucked away in the back of his mind. We had all cared about May Lynn, but Terry, who had always seemed less close to her than me, had really taken all this to heart; he seemed the most bothered by her death, the unfairness of it all. It wasn’t that I had moved on, but I couldn’t figure how there was any way to rectify what happened. Wasn’t any way for me to know who done it or how to get them nabbed if I did. Jinx, she had cared for May Lynn, too, but she was someone who looked at things pretty straight on, or so it seemed to me. I figured her view was, dead is dead, and that’s sad, and she felt bad about it, but she wasn’t going to worry about if May Lynn got burned up and hauled anywhere if she could avoid it. That business was Terry’s plan.
    We decided to let Terry hang on to the bag full of loot, go home and put together a few possibles, meet back quick at this spot, and head out. As I watched my friends go their own ways in the dark, I was having second thoughts, some of them due to thinking about days and nights on the river. Bad as my life was, it was the life I knew. And though Mama had lied to me and disappointed me all my life, and my daddy wasn’t my daddy at all, I still thought maybe I ought to reconsider. Maybe we could give Cletus the money and let bygones be bygones. Going off to Gladewater to find my real daddy, then out to Hollywood, was a good thing to think about, but I wasn’t so sure it was a good thing to do, even if there was stolen money in the deal—though secretly I was thinking I might get a share of it for a nice dress and shoes and my hair done up like I’d never had it, and maybe I’d buy one of those hats women wore that looked