The Best of Joe R. Lansdale (13 page)

“It ain’t a story, Mama,” I said.

I told her about it, making it brief.

When I finished, she was quiet for a long moment. “Where’s your daddy?”

“He took Toby out to the barn. Toby’s back is broken.”

“I heard. I’m real sorry.”

I listened for the blast of the shotgun, but after fifteen minutes it still hadn’t come. Then I heard Daddy coming down from the barn, and pretty soon he stepped out of the shadows and into the lantern light, carrying the shotgun.

“I don’t reckon he needs killin’,” Daddy said. I felt my heart lighten, and I looked at Tom, who was peeking under Mama’s arm as Mama scrubbed her head with lye soap. “He could move his back legs a little, lift his tail. You might be right, Harry. He might be better. Besides, I wasn’t any better doin’ what ought to be done than you, son. He takes a turn for the worse, stays the same, well… In the meantime, he’s yours and Tom’s responsibility. Feed and water him, and you’ll need to manage him to do his business somehow.”

“Yes sir,” I said. “Thanks, Daddy.”

Daddy sat down on the porch with the shotgun cradled in his lap. “You say the woman was colored?”

“Yes sir.”

Daddy sighed. “That’s gonna make it some difficult,” he said.

Next morning I led Daddy out there by means of the road and the trail up to the swinging bridge. I didn’t want to cross the bridge again. I pointed out from the bank the spot across and down the river where the body could be found.

“All right,” Daddy said. “I’ll manage from here. You go home. Better yet, get into town and open up the barbershop. Cecil will be wondering where I am.”

I went home, out to the barn to check on Toby. He was crawling around on his belly, wiggling his back legs some. I left Tom with the duty to look after Toby being fed and all, then I got the barbershop key, saddled up Sally Redback, rode her the five miles into town.

Marvel Creek wasn’t much of a town really, not that it’s anything now, but back then it was pretty much two streets. Main and West. West had a row of houses, Main had the General Store, a courthouse, post office, the doctor’s office, the barbershop my daddy owned, a couple other businesses, and sometimes a band of roving hogs that belonged to Old Man Crittendon.

The barbershop was a little, one-room white building built under a couple of oaks. It was big enough for one real barber chair and a regular chair with a cushion on the seat and a cushion fastened to the back. Daddy cut hair out of the barber chair, and Cecil used the other.

During the summer the door was open, and there was just a screen door between you and the flies. The flies liked to gather on the screen and cluster like grapes. The wind was often hot.

Cecil was sitting on the steps reading the Tyler newspaper when I arrived. I tied Sally to one of the oaks, went over to unlock the door, and as I did, I gave Cecil a bit of a rundown, letting him know what Daddy was doing.

Cecil listened, shook his head, made a clucking noise with his tongue, then we were inside.

I loved the aroma of the shop. It smelled of alcohol, disinfectants, and hair oils. The bottles were in a row on a shelf behind the barber chair, and the liquid in them was in different colors, red and yellow and a blue liquid that smelled faintly of coconut.

There was a long bench along the wall near the door and a table with a stack of magazines with bright covers. Most of the magazines were detective stories. I read them whenever I got a chance, and sometimes Daddy brought the worn ones home.

When there weren’t any customers, Cecil read them too, sitting on the bench with a hand-rolled cigarette in his mouth, looking like one of the characters out of the magazines. Hard-boiled, carefree, efficient.

Cecil was a big man, and from what I heard around town and indirectly from Daddy, ladies found him good-looking. He had a well-tended shock of reddish hair, bright eyes, and a nice face with slightly hooded eyes. He had come to Marvel Creek about two months back, a barber looking for work. Daddy, realizing he might have competition, put him in the extra chair and gave him a percentage.

Daddy had since halfway regretted it. It wasn’t that Cecil wasn’t a good worker, nor was it Daddy didn’t like him. It was the fact Cecil was too good. He could really cut hair, and pretty soon, more and more of Daddy’s customers were waiting for Cecil to take their turn. More mothers came with their sons and waited while Cecil cut their boys’ hair and chatted with them while he pinched their kids’ cheeks and made them laugh. Cecil was like that. He could chum up to anyone in a big-city minute.

Though Daddy never admitted it, I could see it got his goat, made him a little jealous. There was also the fact that when Mama came down to the shop she always wilted under Cecil’s gaze, turned red. She laughed when he said things that weren’t that funny.

Cecil had cut my hair a few times, when Daddy was busy, and the truth was, it was an experience. Cecil loved to talk, and he told great stories about places he’d been. All over the United States, all over the world. He had fought in World War I, seen some of the dirtiest fighting. Beyond admitting that, he didn’t say much about it. It seemed to pain him. He did once show me a French coin he wore around his neck on a little chain. It had been struck by a bullet and dented. The coin had been in his shirt pocket, and he credited it with saving his life.

But if he was fairly quiet on the war, on everything else he’d done he was a regular blabbermouth. He kidded me some about girls, and sometimes the kidding was a little too far to one side for Daddy, and he’d flash a look at Cecil, and I could see them in the mirror behind the bench, the one designed for the customer to look in while the barber snipped away. Cecil would take the look, wink at Daddy and change the subject. But Cecil always seemed to come back around to it, taking a real interest in any girlfriend I might have, even if I didn’t really have any. Doing that, he made me feel as if I were growing up, taking part in the rituals and thoughts of men.

Tom liked him too, and sometimes she came down to the barbershop just to hang around him and hear him flatter and kid her. He loved to have her sit on his knee and tell her stories about all manner of things, and if Tom was interested in the stories I can’t say, but she was certainly interested in Cecil, who was like a wild uncle to both her and me.

But what was most amazing about Cecil was the way he could cut hair. His scissors were like an extension of himself. They flashed and turned and snipped with little more than a flex of his wrist. When I was in his chair pruned hair haloed around me in the sunlight and my head became a piece of sculpture, transformed from a mass of unruly hair to a work of art. Cecil never missed a beat, never poked you with the scissor tips — which Daddy couldn’t say — and when he was finished, when he had rubbed spiced oil into your scalp and parted and combed your hair, when he spun you around to look in the closer mirror behind the chairs, you weren’t the same guy anymore. I felt I looked older, more manly, when he was finished. Maybe a little like those guys on the magazine covers myself.

When Daddy did the job, parted my hair, put on the oil, and let me out of the chair (he never spun me for a look like he did his adult customers), I was still just a kid. With a haircut.

Since on this day I’m talking about, Daddy was out, and haircuts for me were free, I asked Cecil if he would cut my hair, and he did, finishing with hand-whipped shaving cream and a razor around my ears to get those bits of hair too contrary for scissors. Cecil used his hands to work oil into my scalp, and he massaged the back of my neck with his thumb and fingers. It felt warm and tingly in the heat and made me sleepy.

No sooner had I climbed down from the chair than Old Man Nation drove up in his mule-drawn wagon and he and his two boys came in. Mr. Ethan Nation was a big man in overalls with tufts of hair in his ears and crawling out of his nose. His boys were big, redheaded, jug-eared versions of him. They all chewed tobacco, had brown teeth, and spat when they spoke. Most of their conversation was tied to or worked around cuss words not often spoken in that day and time. They never came in to get a haircut. They cut their own hair with a bowl and scissors. They liked to sit in the chairs and read what words they could out of the magazines and talk about how bad things were.

Cecil, though no friend of theirs, always managed to be polite, and, as Daddy often said, he was a man liked to talk, even if he was talking to the Devil.

No sooner had Old Man Nation taken a seat than Cecil said, “Harry says there’s been a murder.” It was like it was a fact he was proud to spread around, but since I’d been quick to tell him and was about to burst with the news myself, I couldn’t blame him none.

Once the word was out, there was nothing for me to do but tell it all. Well, almost all. For some reason I left the Goat Man out of it. I don’t know exactly why, but I did.

When I was finished, Mr. Nation said, “Well, one less nigger wench ain’t gonna hurt the world none. I was down in the bottoms, came across one of them burr-head women, I don’t know, I might be inclined to do her in myself. They’re the ones make the little ones. Drop babies like the rest of us drop turds. I might want her to help me out some first, though, you know what I mean. I mean, hell, they’re niggers, but for about five minutes the important thing is they’re all pink on the inside.”

His boys smirked. Cecil said, “Watch your language,” and moved his head in my direction.

“Sorry, son,” Mr. Nation said. “Your pa’s looking in on this, huh?”

“Yes sir,” I said.

“Well, he’s probably upset about it. He was always one to worry about the niggers. It’s just another shine killin’, boy, and he ought to leave it alone, let them niggers keep on killin’ each other, then the rest of us won’t have to worry with it.”

At that moment, something changed for me. I had never really thought about my father’s personal beliefs, but suddenly it occurred to me his were opposite those of Mr. Nation, and that Mr. Nation, though he liked our barbershop for wasting time, spouting his ideas and reading our magazines, didn’t really like my daddy. The fact that he didn’t, that Daddy had an opposite point of view to this man, made me proud.

In time, Mr. Johnson, a preacher, came in, and Mr. Nation, feeling the pressure, packed him and his two boys in their wagon and went on down the road to annoy someone else. Late in the day, Daddy came in, and when Cecil asked him about the murder, Daddy looked at me, and I knew then I should have kept my mouth shut.

Daddy told Cecil what I had told him, and little else, other than he thought the woman hadn’t gotten caught up there by high water but had been bound there with those briars, like she was being showcased. Daddy figured the murderer had done it.

That night, back at the house, lying in bed, my ear against the wall, Tom asleep across the way, I listened. The walls were thin, and when it was good and quiet, and Mama and Daddy were talking, I could hear them.

“Doctor in town wouldn’t even look at her,” Daddy said.

“Because she was colored?”

“Yeah. I had to drive her over to Mission Creek’s colored section to see a doctor there.”

“She was in our car?”

“It didn’t hurt anything. After Harry showed me where she was, I came back, drove over to Billy Gold’s house. He and his brother went down there with me, helped me wrap her in a tarp, carry her out and put her in the car.”

“What did the doctor say?”

“He reckoned she’d been raped. Her breasts had been split from top to bottom.”

“Oh, my goodness.”

“Yeah. And worse things were done. Doctor didn’t know for sure, but when he got through looking her over, cutting on her, looking at her lungs, he thought maybe she’d been dumped in the river still alive, had drowned, been washed up and maybe a day or so later, someone, most likely the killer, had gone down there and found her, maybe by accident, maybe by design, and had bound her against that tree with the briars.”

“Who would do such a thing?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t even an idea.”

“Did the doctor know her?”

“No, but he brought in the colored preacher over there, Mr. Bail. He knew her. Name was Jelda May Sykes. He said she was a local prostitute. Now and then she came to the church to talk to him about getting out of the trade. He said she got salvation about once a month and lost it the rest of the time. She worked some of the black juke joints along the river. Picked up a little white trade now and then.”

“So no one has any ideas who could have done it?”

“Nobody over there gives a damn, Marilyn. No one. The coloreds don’t have any high feelings for her, and the white law enforcement let me know real quick I was out of my jurisdiction. Or as they put it, ‘We take care of our own niggers.’ Which, of course, means they don’t take care of them at all.”

“If it’s out of your jurisdiction, you’ll have to leave it alone.”

“Taking her to Mission Creek was out of my jurisdiction, but where she was found isn’t out of my jurisdiction. Law over there figures some hobo ridin’ the rails got off over there, had his fun with her, dumped her in a river and caught the next train out. They’re probably right. But if that’s so, who bound her to the tree?”

“It could have been someone else, couldn’t it?”

“I suppose, but it worries me mightily to think that there’s that much cruelty out there in the world. And besides, I don’t buy it. I think the same man killed her and displayed her. I did a little snoopin’ while I was over in Mission Creek. I know a newspaperman over there, Cal Fields.”

“He the older man with the younger wife? The hot patootie?”

“Yeah. He’s a good guy. The wife ran off with a drummer, by the way. That doesn’t bother Cal any. He’s got a new girlfriend. But what he was tellin’ me was interestin’. He said this is the third murder in the area in eighteen months. He didn’t write about any of ‘em in the paper, primarily because they’re messy, but also because they’ve all been colored killings, and his audience don’t care about colored killings. All the murders have been of prostitutes. One happened there in Mission Creek. Her body was found stuffed in a big, ole drainpipe down near the river. Her legs had been broken and pulled up and tied to her head.”