The Thicket Read online

  “Fuck your old mother,” said the man who had commented previously on the short time Bobby O’Dell would have to wear his bonds.

  “Now, you didn’t have to say that,” said Bobby. “That wasn’t necessary.”

  “Hell it wasn’t,” said the man in the crowd.

  About that time another man lurched out of the mob and hit the condemned man a good one on the side of the head with his fist. The blow knocked Bobby to the ground. He was quickly pulled up and held upright by so many men he seemed to float to a standing position.

  A big man took hold of the end of the rope that was draped over the metal peg and pulled on it. This tightened the rope on Bobby’s neck and lifted him to his tiptoes.

  “This isn’t how it’s done,” said Bobby, bleeding from under the rag around his head. “You don’t hang a man proper this way. Where’s my trial?”

  “This is it,” said the big man holding the rope.

  “You ain’t hanging me. You’re gonna strangle me.”

  “Now you got it,” said the big man, and then several men took hold of part of the rope, and they began to pull, backing up as they did. Up went Bobby O’Dell.

  He wasn’t pulled more than about a foot off the ground before the men wrapped their end of the rope around the pole and tied it off. When they did, the rope slipped a little and the man was lowered until his toes nearly touched the ground. He kicked furiously, trying to stretch his feet far enough to take hold, but that wasn’t happening. He kicked so hard one of his boots came off and flew into the crowd and hit a young boy in the chest.

  The boy ran forward, said, “You seen that? He kicked at me.”

  He ran over and hit Bobby then, a weak blow that caught the strangling man in the chest. Next moment, the boy scampered off, because Bobby really did try and kick him this time, and for a man hanging by a rope and being strangled slowly, it was a ferocious kick, and a part of me sort of wished he’d connected.

  As Bobby spun around and around like a piñata, men came forward, almost in turn, and hit him. Some were throwing dirt clods out of the street, and harsh language was applied in near-ceaseless intervals. The hanging man’s tongue was sticking so far out of his mouth he could almost lick himself under his chin. After a moment, he did a kind of shimmy, like a snake wiggling through a tight space, and went still. They kept hitting him.

  “Ain’t hanging him enough?” I yelled out.

  “It wasn’t your money, I figure,” said the church-suit man, then someone clipped me one in the back of the head. Next thing I remember I was tasting dirt and trying to see, but all I saw were some boots coming my way, then I didn’t see nothing for a while except memories of Grandpa being shot and that damn storm.

  When I woke up it was near dark, and I was still lying in the street. There was something wet poking at me, and when I was able to get my thoughts and sight together, I seen it was a big black boar hog with stains of white fur at his belly. I shot up to a sitting position, and the hog edged closer. It was a big hog, had to have topped out around six hundred pounds, and with tusks as long and sturdy as the business end of a pickax. One eye appeared to hang lower than the other, as if it might be thinking of going someplace without the rest of the hog. The critter’s breath was a mixture of corn and cow shit, which is what was on its snout, and now on my face.

  “Don’t move fast again,” said a voice. “He don’t much like surprises. He might decide to eat your face off.”

  I turned my head slowly and saw a colored man standing behind me with a corncob pipe in his mouth. He was lighting it up by striking a lucifer on his greasy pants. He had the handle of a shovel poked under his armpit, and the shovel itself was touching the street, and he was leaning on it. He was bigger than Cut Throat had been—solid and thick, with legs and arms like tree trunks. The flame of the match looked like a firefly cupped in his black palm. He had a lot of nice teeth, and he used them to clench his pipe tight when he lit it. His face looked smooth as silk and dark as long-boiled coffee.

  “You know this hog?” I said, inching back from it.

  “Quite well,” he said, shaking out the match. “Me and him had been until lately sharing a small stretch of living quarters out the back of Rutledge’s farm. I worked there, and he followed me around. I found him when he was a wild piglet. Bunch of dogs was trying to tear him apart. He was trying to fight them, and him about the size of a rat stuffed with cabbage. I ran them dogs off, took him home with me, and was going to raise him up and eat him. But me and him mostly got along, so I let him stay around. Now and again we have a row, but on the whole we do all right together. He’s smarter than any dog.”

  “I’m glad you and him are happy,” I said. “Can you get your hog to stand back a bit?”

  “He ain’t mine,” said the colored man. “I said he stays with me. Now and again I get the feeling he knows I considered eating him once, knows if things turned one way or the other I might yet. I think he feels pretty much the same about me.”

  Now that I was up I realized I was hearing a thudding sound. I looked toward where that sound was coming from, and there was that boy the dead man tried to kick. He had a stick and was hitting the hanging man with it. He wasn’t in any hurry about it. He took his time cocking the stick and swinging it, but he was hitting solid, and it sounded loud and made me hurt a little. Bobby O’Dell was good and dead, of course, and was plastered with dirt from clods that had been thrown, and his face had dark marks all over it, like he’d been lying facedown on a flapjack griddle.

  “You stop that,” I said to the boy. “He’s already dead.”

  “Then he won’t mind much,” said the colored man.

  “It ain’t right,” I said.

  “Lot of things ain’t right,” said the colored man. He smoked his pipe and watched the boy work with his stick. He said to him: “All right, now, that’s enough, I reckon.”

  The boy didn’t stop.

  The colored man picked up a pretty nice-sized rock from the road and slung it whistling through the air. It caught the kid just above the ear and knocked him down, causing him to fling his stick away. The colored man went back to smoking his pipe. The boy got up slowly with his hands under him, then pushed up on his knees and shook his head.

  The colored man picked up another rock. The boy turned and looked at him.

  “You didn’t have no cause for that,” said the boy.

  “You about to get another one, you don’t get on up and out of here,” said the colored man. “I’ll sic that hog on you.”

  The kid got to his feet quickly and ran off, but he ran with a slight lean toward the side where the rock hit him. The hog ran after him a piece, then came snorting back our way as if he were laughing.

  “That was a pretty good lick you put on that kid,” I said.

  “Which is it, then?” said the colored man, dropping the rock. “You worried about the dead or the living?”

  “I’m worried about my sister,” I said. “She’s been kidnapped, and my grandpa has been murdered.”

  “Say they have?” said the colored man. “Well, I guess you tried the law yonder?”

  “Deputy has quit, and the sheriff’s dead.”

  I looked down the street, saw the wagon with the sheriff’s body in it was gone, and so was the man on the board, along with the dead horse.

  “Sheriff was brave,” said the colored man. “I seen it all from the corner of the General Store there. I was coming up the alley from behind it when it all come down like a hailstorm. I think them robbers thought they had it made easy. They didn’t. There was lots of shooting. But the ones got away took the money with them. They split up there at the end of the street, to meet up somewhere else, I figure.”

  “The river and the ferry,” I said.

  “Oh, you mean that rig that pulls across the Sabine. That son of a bitch owns it burnt the bridge to have that ferry.”

  “It didn’t do him any good,” I said. “The ferry got hit by a water twister right after Gra
ndpa got shot. I was near drowned, and them others were the ones got away with robbing the bank. They took my sister with them.”

  “That ain’t good for her,” said the colored man. “Not with one of them being Cut Throat Bill. And I think there was Nigger Pete with them. They been in the papers, mostly robbing banks up north. They got prices on their heads, considerable ones. Papers say Bill rode with Frank and Jesse James when he was just a kid. He liked the work and has been out doing it for near thirty years or so, off and on, between that and other mischief. I don’t know nothing about the fat one. There was some dime novels about Cut Throat Bill, though they made him out a hero and such. There ain’t no heroes.”

  “Fatty is all the name I know,” I said. “That’s what they called him. Deputy, or former deputy, seemed to know who he was. Not that it mattered. He’s quit and gone on to hunt out another career, possibly barbering.”

  “Well, that barbering is a pretty steady job, cause there’s plenty like a neat haircut and a shave they don’t have to do themselves,” said the colored man.

  I tried to get up, but my legs weren’t ready, and I had to sit back down. It was then that a bunch of dirt fell off me and I knew I had been hit with a mess of dirt clods while I was out, not to mention that I ached all over from having been kicked and whopped on. I figured that kid had been at me with that stick a little.

  “Only good thing come of this is that ferry is gone,” said the colored man. “I don’t like to pay for crossing a river when there was a perfectly good bridge there. Though you got to give him credit for coming up with that ferry idea. I might have done it had I thought of it.”

  “I got to go find my sister,” I said. “I got to get some law some kind of way.”

  “Good luck to you, kid,” said the colored man. “Ain’t no law wants any part of that bunch. Not after what happened here. Sheriff was brave, and what it got him was a final ride in the back of a wagon with a tarp slung over him. The deputy, soon as the shooting started and a bullet whizzed in his direction, he run off like a rabbit. If he’d have run any faster, he’d have run out of his clothes.”

  “He was telling me he had a kind of revelation that the law wasn’t his kind of work,” I said.

  “I bet he did tell you that,” said the colored man.

  I tried to get up again, and this time the colored man grabbed me under the arm and helped me to my feet.

  “You might get a Texas Ranger involved,” he said. “They are some bad men. But by the time you find one of them, your sister could be on the dark side of things, and there ain’t no certainty about them Rangers.”

  “What else is there?”

  “You could hire a bounty hunter or a tracker.”

  “Do you know one?”

  “Well, I’ve done the work. I’m part white, part nigger, and part Comanche injun, and I’m the part of that last part that knows how to track. I was taught by my mother and some of her people. They could find a fart under a stone at the bottom of a lake. I’m not that good, actually, but I’ll do. I mean, I’m pretty damn good. So I could find him, but I wouldn’t do it without Shorty going with me, and I don’t know he would. Neither of us would go without being paid. And we can take the hog, too. He helps track. Well, not really, but I’m used to his company. But I got to have enough to make it worth my salt and bacon. I’m going to chance ending up like the sheriff, I got to get paid for my work, and more than he did.”

  “Therein is the grit in the lard,” I said. “I haven’t got any serious money.”

  “How much you have that ain’t serious?” he said.

  And then an idea hit me. I dug in my overalls for those papers Grandpa had given me. They were still wet while the rest of me was dry, so I was careful pulling them out. They had been folded, and were on good solid paper, and had survived the damp well. I said, “When these dry, they are papers that say I own land. And if you and this Shorty fellow will help me find my sister and get her back, and avenge the death of my grandpa by bringing those men in that are responsible, I will sign them over to you. You can sell them or do as you like after that.”

  “That’s owner kind of land?”

  “I own it, I sign it over to you and Shorty, you’ll own it. And the man that’s got the right to do that is right here in town. But there ain’t no need for me to sign anything unless I get my sister back. You do that, then these papers and the land is yours to do as you would.”

  “How much land?”

  “It’s two places,” I said. “One is a hundred acres, my grandpa’s old place, and one is twenty-five, my folks’ place, but it’s on good farmland. Grandpa’s isn’t as good.”

  “Farmland is what you make of it,” said the colored man. “You got to know the right way to break down animal manure, and I do. I had some land of my own I could grow corn so high you’d have to be a bird to see over it. I was doing that for Old Man Rutledge, but he died and his wife didn’t like me. Her family, the Cox family, used to own my people, and when the change come the old man could stand it, but she couldn’t. She didn’t like having to pay me in crop and some wages for what they used to get for free from my folks. I was looking for some new work when I come into town and these fellows and his friends robbed the bank. I thought I could get a job burying them. I’ve done that off and on for years, since I wasn’t making all that much on the farm. Oh, I left now and then to track and do sundry work, like digging graves. Usually pays a quarter apiece for burying; least it does for me. I’ve done it quite a few times. White man digs a grave, it’s fifty cents a corpse. Like the way he digs it is different and better than the one I dig for a quarter.”

  I decided not to mention that my parents had died of the pox and that they were buried in coffins full of lime, as I figured that might possibly bring down the property value. I said, “Then you’ll do it?”

  “That depends on if we can get Shorty to sign up. He’ll do it, I’ll do it. But I got to have someone like him at my back. And my guess is all those men, especially Cut Throat Bill, have prices on their heads. Me and Shorty could make quite a collection if this comes out right. If it don’t, well, we could get ourselves killed, and you, too. And you look green enough they might even kill you twice.”

  “You get my sister back and help me catch those men that killed Grandpa, see they get justice, I’ll sign both properties over to you. Then, like you said, there’s the possibility of rewards for those skunks.”

  He rubbed his chin. “We’ll need some supplies, but I reckon to have any we’ll have to steal it.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “I don’t want to get in the wrong life myself, end up hanging beside Bobby there. I won’t steal. That’s not how us Parkers do things.”

  “So far the way you Parkers do things is you get yourself killed and kidnapped and knocked out in the street. You are not off to a good beginning, young man.”

  “I won’t steal,” I said. “I can’t. My grandpa was a preacher, and he would roll over in his grave if he had one. Only he’s somewhere in the Sabine River or washed up along its banks. I get sick thinking he’s stuck to some root down under and catfish are at him.”

  “Tell you what,” said the colored man. “Let’s go see Shorty, see what he thinks, and we can see about supplies from there. He might not go. We’ll see him first. You say your name is Parker?”

  “Jack Parker.”

  “Mine’s Eustace Cox, and I think we might be cousins of a sorts.”

  “How’s that?” I said.

  “You sound a little offended that you might be part darky. Well, rest assured, white boy, it’s me that’s part of you. Cox family married in the Parker family, and one of them Cox boys, some forty-five years back, made me with my mother—against her will, I might add—and she was colored and Comanche, and so here I am. So we could be relatives.”

  “I don’t care one way or the other,” I said. “I just want to rescue my sister, and time’s wasting.”

  “Not me been lying out here in the dirt, cuz
,” he said. “But it’s near night now, so ain’t much you can do. We can get over to see Shorty maybe, talk to him. I’ll have an answer for you then. If we can’t help you, then you’re on your own, cause I got no other suggestions. Like I said, I got to have the right man riding with me, and no offense, you’re just barely grown.”

  “Nineteen,” I said.

  “You’re lying,” he said.

  “Well, I might be closer to seventeen,” I said, still stretching the blanket.

  “In my day that was grown and then some, but not now,” he said. “You are green behind the ears, and pretty much green all over. Actually, you’re more pink in spots. You got the sunburn on the back of your neck from lying out here in the street. That’s gonna smart some come morning, if not sooner. Let’s go see if we can find Shorty. But first, I got to bury this one. I already tucked the other one away at the cemetery.”

  “The one on the board?”

  “That would be him. Now I got to get this one. I’m going to have to cut him down and drag him, because I don’t have a horse.”

  I won’t lie to you. I was horrified at the thought, and even more horrified when he gave me the shovel to hold, put his pipe away, pulled out a big knife, and reached up on his tiptoes to cut the rope high. When he did, he let the man fall, got hold of the nub of rope, and started dragging him down the street with that big old hog trotting after him. After a moment he and the hog paused, and both looked back at me. Eustace said, “You coming?”

  Carrying the shovel, I went after them.

  Eustace dragged the body through an alley and out back of the town buildings, over some rough ground toward a line of trees that was on a hill above Sylvester. This was quite a trip we took, and the body of Bobby O’Dell kept turning over and over, and by the time we got to the trees, what was left of his face didn’t look so good. I won’t talk about what happened to his eyes during this event.