The Bottoms Read online

  “I don’t think so. He’d be at the mercy anything came along. Darn chiggers and ticks would eat him alive.” I’d thought of that because I could feel bites all over me and knew tonight I’d be spending some time with a lamp and tweezers, getting them off all kinds of places, bathing myself in kerosene, then rinsing. During the summer me and Tom ended up doing that near every evening. In fact, ticks were so thick they gathered on weed tops awaiting prey in such piles they bent the weed stalks over. Biting blackflies were thick in the woods, especially as you neared the river, and the chiggers were plentiful and hungry. Sometimes, late in the afternoon, the mosquitoes rose up in such a gathering they looked like a black cloud growing up from the bottoms.

  To ward off the ticks and chiggers we tied kerosene-soaked rags around our ankles, but I can’t say it worked much, other than keeping the bugs off the rags themselves. The ticks and chiggers found their way onto your clothing and body, and by nightfall they had nested snugly into some of the more personal areas of your person, sucking blood, raising up red welts.

  “It’s gettin’ dark,” Tom said.

  “I know.”

  I looked at Toby. There was mostly just a lump to see, lying there in the wheelbarrow covered by the dark. While I was looking he raised his head and his tail beat on the wooden bottom of the wheelbarrow a couple of times.

  “Don’t think I can do it,” I said. “I think we ought to take him back to Daddy, show how he’s improved. He may have a broke back, but he can move his head and even his tail now, so his whole body ain’t dead. He don’t need killin’.”

  “Daddy may not see it that way, though.”

  “Reckon not, but I can’t just shoot him without trying to give him a chance. Heck, he treed six squirrels. Mama’ll be glad to see them squirrels. We’ll just take him back.”

  We got up to go. It was then that it settled on us. We were lost. We had been so busy chasing those squirrels, following Toby’s lead, we had gotten down deep in the woods and we didn’t recognize anything. We weren’t scared, of course, least not right away. We roamed these woods all the time, but it had grown dark, and this immediate place wasn’t familiar.

  The moon was up some more, and I used that for my bearings. “We need to go that way,” I said. “Eventually that’ll lead back to the house, or the road.”

  We set out, pushing the wheelbarrow, stumbling over roots and ruts and fallen limbs, banging up against trees with the wheelbarrow and ourselves. Near us we could hear wildlife moving around, and I thought about what Cecil had said about panthers, and I thought about wild hogs and wondered if we might come up on one rootin’ for acorns, and I remembered that Cecil had also said this was a bad year for the hydrophobia, and lots of animals were coming down with it, and the thought of all that made me nervous enough to feel around in my pocket for shotgun shells. I had three left.

  As we went along, there was more movement in the thicket next to us, and after a while I realized whatever it was it was keeping stride with us. When we slowed, it slowed. We sped up, it sped up. And not the way an animal will do, or even the way a coach whip snake will sometimes follow and run you. This was something bigger than a snake. It was stalking us, like a panther. Or a man.

  Toby was growling as we went along, his head lifted, the hair on the back of his neck raised.

  I looked over at Tom, and the moon was just able to split through the trees and show me her face and how scared she was.

  I wanted to say something, shout out at whatever it was in the bushes, but I was afraid that might be like some kind of bugle call that set it off, causing it to come down on us.

  I had broken open the shotgun earlier for safety sake, laid it in the wheelbarrow and was pushing it, Toby, the shovel, and the squirrels along. Now I stopped, got the shotgun out, made sure a shell was in it, snapped it shut and put my thumb on the hammer.

  Toby had really started to make noise, had gone from growling to barking.

  I looked at Tom, and she took hold of the wheelbarrow and started pushing. I could tell she was having trouble with it, working it over the soft ground, but I didn’t have any choice but to hold on to the gun, and we couldn’t leave Toby behind, not after what he’d been through.

  Whatever was in those bushes paced us for a while, barely cracked the leaves it stepped on, then went silent. We picked up speed, and didn’t hear it anymore. And we didn’t feel its presence either.

  I finally got brave enough to break open the shotgun and lay it in the wheelbarrow and take over the pushing again.

  “What was that?” Tom asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “It sounded big.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The Goat Man?”

  “Daddy says there ain’t any Goat Man.”

  “Yeah, but he’s sometimes wrong, ain’t he?”

  “Hardly ever,” I said.

  We went along some more, found a narrow place in the river, crossed, struggling with the wheelbarrow. We shouldn’t have crossed, but here was a good spot to do it, and I was spooked and wanted to put some space between us and it.

  We walked along a good distance, and eventually came up against a wad of brambles that twisted in amongst the trees and scrubs and vines and made a wall of thorns. It was a wall of wild rosebushes. Some of the vines on them were thick as well ropes, the thorns like nails, and the flowers smelled strong and sweet in the night wind, almost sweet as sorghum syrup cooking.

  The bramble patch ran some distance in either direction, and encased us on all sides. We had wandered into a maze of thorns too wide and thick to go around, too high and sharp to climb over; they had wound together with low-hanging limbs, making a thorny ceiling above.

  I thought of Brer Rabbit and the briar patch, but unlike Brer Rabbit, I had not been born and raised in a briar patch and it wasn’t what I wanted.

  I dug in my pocket, got a match I had left over from when me and Tom tried to smoke some corn silk cigarettes and grape vines, struck the match with my thumb and waved it around, saw a wide path had been cut into the brambles.

  I bent down, poked the match forward. I could see the brambles were a kind of tunnel, about six feet high and six feet wide. I couldn’t tell how far it went, but it was a good distance.

  I shook the match out before it burned my hand, said to Tom, “We can go back, or we can take this tunnel.”

  Tom studied the brambles. “I don’t want to go back because of that thing. And I don’t want to go down that tunnel neither. We’d be like rats in a pipe. Maybe whatever it is knew it’d get us boxed in like this, and it’s just waitin’ at the other end, like that thing Daddy read to us about. The thing that was part man, part cow.”

  “Part bull, part man,” I said. “The Minotaur.”

  “Yeah. It could be waitin’ on us, Harry.”

  I had, of course, thought about that. “I think we ought to take the tunnel. It can’t come from any side on us that way. It has to come from front or rear.”

  “Can’t there be other tunnels in there?”

  That I hadn’t considered. There could be openings cut anywhere. And if it grew tight in there, all a person, animal, Minotaur had to do, was reach out and grab me or Tom.

  “I got the gun,” I said. “If you can push the wheelbarrow, Toby can sort of watch for us, let us know something’s coming. Anything jumps out at us, I’ll cut it in two.”

  I picked up the gun and made it ready. Tom took hold of the wheelbarrow handles, wiggled it through the split in the briars, and me and her went on in.

  2

  The smell of roses was thick and overwhelming. It made me sick. The thorns sometimes stuck out on vines you couldn’t see in the dark. They snagged my old shirt and cut my arms and face. I could hear Tom back there behind me, cussing softly under her breath as she got scratched.

  The bramble tunnel went on for a good ways, then I heard a rushing sound, and the tunnel widened and we came out on the bank of the roaring Sabine River. There were s
plits in the trees above and the moonlight came through strong and fell over everything like milk that had thickened, yellowed, and turned sour.

  Whatever had been pacing us seemed to be good and gone.

  I studied the moon, thought about the river. I said, “We’ve gone some out of the way. But I can see how we ought to go. We can follow the river a bit, which ain’t the right direction, but I think it’s not far from here to the Swinging Bridge. We cross that, we can hit the main road, walk to the house.”

  “The Swinging Bridge?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Think Mama and Daddy are worried?” Tom asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Bet they are. I hope they’ll be as glad to see these squirrels as I think they’ll be.”

  “What about Toby?”

  “We just got to wait and see.”

  The bank sloped, and there was a little trail ran along the edge of the river.

  “Figure we got to carry Toby, then bring the wheelbarrow. You can push it forward, and I’ll get in front and boost it down.”

  I carefully picked up Toby, who whimpered softly, and Tom, getting ahead of herself, pushed the wheelbarrow. It, the squirrels, shotgun, and shovel went over the edge, tipped over near the creek.

  “Damnit, Tom,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It got away from me. I’m gonna tell Mama you cussed.”

  “You do, and I’ll whup the tar out of you. ’Sides, I heard you cussin’ plenty.”

  I gave Toby to Tom till I could get a footing and have him passed to me.

  I slid down the bank, came up against a huge oak growing near the water. The brambles had grown down the bank and were wrapped around the tree. I put my hand against it to steady myself, jerked back quick. What I had touched hadn’t been a tree trunk, or even a thorn. It was something soft.

  When I looked I saw a gray mess hung up in brambles. The moonlight was shining across the water and falling on a face, or what had been a face, but was more like a jack-o’-lantern now, swollen and round with dark sockets for eyes. There was a wad of hair on its head, like a chunk of dark lamb’s wool, and the body was swollen and twisted and without clothes. A woman.

  I had seen a couple of cards with naked women on them that George Sterning had shown me. He was always coming up with stuff like that ’cause his Daddy was a traveling salesman and sold not only Garrett snuff, but what was called novelties on the side.

  But this wasn’t like that. Those pictures had stirred me in a way I didn’t understand but found somehow sweet and satisfying. This was stirring me in a way I understood immediately.

  Her breasts were split like rotten melons cracked in the sun. On closer examination I realized the brambles weren’t brambles at all, but strands of barbed wire tightly wrapped around her swollen gray flesh.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “You’re cussin’ again,” Tom said.

  I climbed up the bank a bit, took Toby from Tom, laid him on the soft ground by the riverbank, stared some more at the body. Tom slid down, saw what I saw.

  “Is it the Goat Man?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “It’s a dead woman.”

  “She ain’t got no clothes on.”

  “No, she ain’t. Don’t look at her, Tom.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “We got to get home and tell Daddy.”

  “Light a match, Harry. Let’s get a good look.”

  I considered on that, finally dug in my pocket. “I just got one left.”

  “Use it.”

  I struck the match with my thumb and held it out. The match wavered as my hand shook. I got up as close as I could stand to get, due to the smell.

  It was even more horrible by matchlight.

  “I think it’s a colored woman,” I said.

  The match went out. I righted the wheelbarrow, shook mud out of the end of the shotgun, put it, the squirrels, and Toby back in the wheelbarrow. I couldn’t find the shovel, figured it had slid on down into the river and was gone. That was going to cost me.

  “We got to get on,” I said.

  Tom was standing on the bank, staring at the body. She couldn’t take her eyes off of it.

  “Come on!”

  I pulled her away. We went along the bank, me pushing the wheelbarrow for all I was worth, it bogging in the soft dirt until I couldn’t push it anymore. I bound the squirrels’ legs together with some string Tom had, and tied them around my waist.

  “You carry the shotgun, Tom, and I’ll carry Toby.”

  Tom took the gun. I picked Toby up. We started toward the Swinging Bridge, which was where the Goat Man was supposed to live.

  Me and my friends normally stayed away from the Swinging Bridge, all except George. George wasn’t scared of anything. Then again, George wasn’t smart enough to be scared of much.

  The bridge was some cables strung across the Sabine from high spots on the banks. Some long board slats were fastened to the cables by rusty metal clamps and rotting ropes. I didn’t know who built it or how old it was. Maybe it had been a pretty good bridge once. Now a lot of slats were missing and others were rotten and cracked and the cables were fastened to the high banks on either side by rusty metal bars buried deep in the ground. In places, where the water had washed the bank, you could see part of the bars showing through the dirt. Enough time and water, the whole bridge would fall into the river.

  When the wind blew, the bridge swung. In a high wind it was something. I had crossed it only once before, during the day, the wind dead calm, and that had been scary enough. Every time you stepped, it moved, threatened to dump you. The boards creaked and ached as if in pain. Little bits of rotten wood came loose and fell into the river below. Down there was a deep spot and the water ran fast, crashed up against some rocks, fell over a little falls, and into wide, deep, churning water.

  Now, here we were at night, looking down the length of the bridge, thinking about the Goat Man, the body we’d found, Toby, it being late, and our parents worried.

  “We gotta cross, Harry?” Tom asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m gonna lead, and you watch where I step. The boards hold me, they’re liable to hold you.”

  The bridge creaked above the roar of the river, swaying ever so slightly on its cables, like a snake sliding through tall grass.

  It had been bad enough trying to cross when I could put both hands on the cables, but carrying Toby, and it being night, and Tom with me, and her trying to carry the shotgun … Well, it didn’t look promising.

  The other choice was to go back the way we had come. Or try another path down where the river went shallow, cross over there, walk back to the road and our house. But the river didn’t shallow until a good distance away, and the woods were rough, and it was dark, and Toby was heavy, and there was something out there that had been tracking us. I didn’t see any other way but the bridge.

  I took a deep breath, got a good hold on Toby, stepped out on the first slat.

  When I did, the bridge swung hard to the left, then back even more violently. I had Toby in my arms, so the only thing I could do was bend my legs and try to ride the swing. It took a long time for the bridge to quit swinging. I took the next step even more gingerly. It didn’t swing as much this time. I had gotten a kind of rhythm to my stepping.

  I called back to Tom. “You got to step in the middle of them slats. That way it don’t swing so much.”

  “I’m scared, Harry.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “We’ll do fine.”

  I stepped on a slat, and it cracked and I pulled my foot back. Part of the board had broken loose and was falling into the river below. It hit with a splash, flickered in the moonlight, whirled in the brown water, went over the little falls, and was gone.

  I stood there feeling as if the bottom of my belly had fallen out. I hugged Toby tight, took a wide step over the missing slat toward the next one. I made it, but the bridge shook and I heard Tom scream.

  I glan
ced over my shoulder as she dropped the shotgun and grabbed at the cable. The shotgun fell a long ways and hung between the two lower cables. The bridge swung violently, threw me against one of the cables, then to the other side. I thought I was a goner for sure.

  When the bridge slowed, I lowered to one knee on the slat, pivoted, and looked at Tom. “Easy,” I said.

  “I’m too scared to let go,” Tom said.

  “You got to, and you got to get the gun.”

  It was a long time before Tom finally bent over and picked up the gun. After a bit of heavy breathing, we started on again. That was when we heard the noise down below and saw the thing.

  It was moving along the bank on the opposite side, down near the water, under the bridge. You couldn’t see it good, because it was outside of the moonlight, in the shadows. Its head was huge and there was something like horns on it and the rest of it was dark as a coal bin. It leaned a little forward, as if trying to get a good look at us, and I could see the whites of its eyes and chalky teeth shining in the moonlight. It made a high keening noise, like a huge wood rat being slowly crushed to death. It made the noise twice and went silent.

  “Jesus, Harry,” Tom said. “It’s the Goat Man. What do we do?”

  I thought about going back. That way we’d be across the river from it, but then again, we’d have all that woods to travel through, and for miles. And if it crossed over somewhere, we’d have it tracking us again, because I felt certain that’s what had been following us in the brambles.

  If we went on across, we’d be above it, on the higher bank, and it wouldn’t be that far to the Preacher’s Road. The Goat Man didn’t go as far as the road. That was his quitting place. He was trapped here in the woods and along the banks of the Sabine.

  “We got to go on,” I said. I took one more look at those white eyes and teeth, and started pushing on across. The bridge swung, but I had more motivation now. I was moving pretty good, and so was Tom.

  When we were near to the other side, I looked down, but I couldn’t see the Goat Man anymore. I didn’t know if it was the angle or if it had gone on. I kept thinking when I got to the other side he would be there, waiting.