The Thicket by Joe R. Lansdale

swatting at a bug. I was beginning to fear the men I had fallen in with. It was as if I had gone to visit Lot in Sodom and Gomorrah and had encountered the men who wanted to bugger the angels. I wanted to be holy, but there didn’t seem a way I could show it. Unlike in the sermons I’d heard, where the righteous fellow laid out his views on matters and the unwashed suddenly came clean, cleanliness of that sort was not in the making.
    I decided I had no choice but to go on with things, but I will tell you quite sincerely that my guts ached and I felt as if Jesus had laid a disapproving hand on my shoulder. In fact, its warm presence was with me for a while, until later in the day I discovered I had been messed on by a bird.
    The trail went along easy for some time, then, with me still brooding on matters, we came to where it forked. Eustace said, “Y’all wait here.”
    He rode off and we waited. Shorty’s face was scrunched up, his lips pursed, his eyes narrowed.
    “What’s wrong?” I said.
    “I think he lost the trail a ways back,” Shorty said, pausing to relight his cigar. “I could tell the way he hesitated, and began searching around. It was easy to see he was hoping spoor of some manner would present itself. I think it did not. I believe the bleeder has stopped bleeding and is less easy to follow. You, too, would notice these things if you paid less attention to what is said and more attention to what is in fact true instead of what you prefer to be true. Suppose you are in a tough situation, and a man is smiling at you, and he is telling you something you want to hear, but his hand is reaching inside his coat, or behind something, or is resting on anything that might be used as a weapon. Well, watch his true action, not his false mannerisms. One can be faked, the other cannot.”
    “Isn’t a mannerism and an action the same?” I said.
    Shorty snorted as if he were trying to blow out a cantankerous booger. “Hardly. A mannerism is how you work your mouth and eyes, the way you try to sound when you talk. You saw something in my face then that concerned you, but you had to ask me what it was I was thinking. An action is what you actually do. It is not what you say, it is what you do. That is true in all matters of importance. You have to be cautious when you are in this line of work. It helps as well if you are good at it. Eustace, when it comes to tracking, is very much hit or miss. Currently, I believe he is in the miss position.”
    “That can’t be good,” I said.
    “Of course not,” Shorty said. “I told you he is not the master trailsman he pretends to be. His mother and her people were so good he cannot quite accept it. He seems to think it should be an innate quality, not one that is obtained through teachings from skilled trackers as well as from one’s personal observations.”
    “He said he was taught.”
    “Yes, but he thinks you are born with certain attributes, like tracking and cooking skills. He claims both and has neither in abundance, though he can follow a trail sometimes and well enough, if it has not rained or the trail is not too cold. I should also add that Eustace is dogged in his own sometimes distracted way, and will eventually return to the snoop and manage to sniff something out, even if it is only squirrel shit in the pines or an old man riding a donkey instead of a deadly outlaw on a horse.”
    None of this sounded particularly encouraging.
    “His cooking,” Shorty said, “is fair to middling. He can heat beans, which is no great feat. However, he can fry you up some nasty pork with a gravy straight from the ass of the devil.”
    We sat there on our horses for what seemed a long time, and then I realized we were missing one of our companions. I said to Shorty, “Where’s Hog?”
    “He will find us,” Shorty said, puffing his cigar. “You want the truth, I believe he has gone back to examine that boy’s body.”
    “You mean eat it?” I said.
    “That could be