fancy kerosene lamp with a big brass shield for throwing light. There were shelves with dishes on them and a half-full bottle of hooch.
Clyde found some matches on the table next to the lamp, and lit it. The room filled with light. There wasn’t really anything special to see. He opened the cedar chest. It was full of women’s clothes, some of them a little on the garish side. He recognized one of the dresses. He’d seen Jimmie Jo wear it.
Clyde closed the chest, put out the lamp, and started back to Zendo’s property. When he got there, Zendo offered him water from a wooden barrel. Clyde took the dipper and drank. He didn’t say anything to Zendo about what he had found. He wasn’t sure what to make of it, and he thought he ought to discuss it with Sunset before anyone else.
He drove into Camp Rapture, went by the general store and bought a soft drink. Driving out, he saw a funeral going on up on the hill. A massive tool crate was being lowered by mules, rope, pulley and tripod, into a hole big enough to bury a baby hippo. He recognized Henry up there, next to the hole, along with Willie Fixx, the preacher. There was a colored man working the mules and two other coloreds standing on either side of the hole, managing the lowering of the box.
Clyde recognized the colored man in control of the mules as Zack Washington. He didn’t know the other two. No one else was there. He wouldn’t have known it was a funeral if it hadn’t been for Fixx’s pickup with the black cloth over the side boards.
He wasn’t sure whose funeral it was, but he figured it was someone had to do with Henry. Considering it was a crate and not a coffin going down, he made the jump to Henry’s wife. It was rumored she’d gotten strange and fat, scary and pickled, and now Clyde figured she had gotten dead.
Goose was sitting in a rocking chair on the shack’s weathered porch. He had a plate of fried chicken balanced on his lap. He was eating a piece of it greedily and greasily. A yellow cat was sitting on the ground near the porch watching Goose eat and the cat had a look that made you think seeing Goose eat that chicken was tearing its heart out.
Lee was in the yard with Uncle Riley, placing sawed logs on a chopping block for Uncle Riley to split with an axe. Uncle Riley was in his undershirt and it was covered in dark bursts of sweat. When he swung the axe it came down hard and he gave out a grunt and the wood went in half and grasshoppers jumped. The yard seemed full of them.
“I ain’t never seen so many grasshoppers around,” Uncle Riley said.
“I have,” Lee said, “but it was more than this, thousand times more. They come out of the sky like a buzzing cloud and ate every damn green thing there was, including shirts.”
“For real?”
“If it was green, they went at it. It was the dust bowl, and them bugs was starving like everyone else.”
“Now that’s a story.”
“It’s true.”
“I wouldn’t think a bug knew one color from another.”
“I’m just telling what I seen.”
After a few more pieces were chopped, Uncle Riley said, “That’s enough. We got stove wood for supper, breakfast and tomorrow noon, and besides, my back hurts.”
“I can chop some,” Lee said.
“Naw. That’ll hold us.”
Uncle Riley slammed the axe into the chopping block, took a bandanna out of his back pocket, used it to wipe sweat from his face and the back of his neck. He looked where Goose was eating.
“Boy’s healing up good.”
“Yes, he is. Thanks to you and Aunt Cary.”
“She knows her business.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it. Tell you another thing, way he’s been fed here, I think it’s the most food he’s had in a week. I appreciate it.”
“He is a scrawny thing. You his daddy?”
Lee shook his head. “He told me a story about his family and him going off on his own so things would be easier at home, but I think they abandoned him somewhere. I don’t think he could go home if he wanted to. Me and him, we worked together at a farm, got cheated out of our money, and we were on the road together, then he got snakebit and Marilyn came along. We ended up here. Thank goodness.”
“You better leave him here another day or two.”
“I like the idea of him staying, because he needs to. Me, I don’t want to impose on you.”
“You ain’t imposing. You the first man I’ve had to play checkers with in a long time.”
“You just like me because you beat me every game.”
“That helps.”
“Naw. I reckon I gotta move on. I have someone to see, some things to fix, much as they’re fixable. I ain’t going real far, though, and I’ll be back. In the meantime, you should move Goose out of your bed and put him on a pallet. Giving up your bed to him like that was real Christian of you.”
“When he heals up, what about him?” Uncle Riley said.
Lee looked at Goose. He was ravenously finishing off his last piece of chicken.
“I don’t know,” Lee said. He was thinking he’d told the boy he wasn’t going to go off, and now he was planning to do just that. He always meant to stay, but he always ran. Maybe where he went the boy had to come too. Maybe that was the way to be from now on. Not leaving people you cared about.
As they were talking, Marilyn’s truck, still rattling the junk in the bed, pulled up. When she got out, Lee took note that she looked very nice and fresh and was wearing a bright green dress with white trim.
Uncle Riley and Lee greeted her.
“I come by to see how Goose is doing,” she said, “but I see he’s doing pretty good.”
From the porch, Goose raised a hand in greeting.
“That’s real nice of you, Marilyn,” Lee said.
“I had another reason. I was going to give you a ride. You said you were going to see Sunset.”
“Well, that’s good of you. I’d like that. But truth to tell, I thought I’d leave out tomorrow. I feel like I ought to spend another day here with Goose, and besides, I got to beat Riley in some more checkers.”
“He ain’t won a game yet,” Uncle Riley said. “But you could join us for dinner, Goose ain’t ate all the fried chicken yet.”
Marilyn smiled. “I think I will.”
24
Sunset and Hillbilly put the box with the maps in the trunk of the car along with Sunset’s gun and holster, and when they came out from behind it, they noted more colored men and one colored woman had been added to the trotline around the oak. Plug was outside now, under the tree, and he was giving the prisoners drinks of water from a wooden pail with a long metal dipper. The new deputy that had been there before was still there, cradling the shotgun in his arms, looking out at the street, watching women pass.
She and Hillbilly went about town, bumping into people, finally making it to the bank to cash the checks Marilyn had given them.
They went to the cafe and ate steaks and drank coffee and walked back and behind the courthouse where there was a fair going on and the street was closed off with blue and yellow sawhorses. There was a band playing, strong on fiddle and banjo and female voices. Hillbilly talked them into letting him sing, borrowed a guitar that lay idle against a chair, and went at it.
And Sunset couldn’t believe it, because he was just as good as he thought he was, his voice sometimes deep as the bottom of an old Dutch oven, sometimes sharp as the prick of a pin, blending well with the sweet voices of the women. He sang about love and he sang about loss and he sang about sundown and the rise
