then we got Helen, too. It could be real good for us before it turns real bad for them. And we got the sissy, too. A sissy can be all right if you know how to use him.”
“For God’s sake, Sue Ellen’s your niece,” Mama said.
“Not by blood,” Gene said. “And if she was, I don’t know how much that would bother me. You might say since that money got stolen and you left, circumstances has changed in a big way.”
“We lost the money,” Terry said.
Constable Sy snapped his head toward Terry. “You’re a liar. You’re a damn liar, and that’s the worst lie I’ve heard. You think we looked hard and long as we have to take a lie as the truth? You better have that money.”
“The raft turned over and we lost it,” Terry said.
Gene glanced at Constable Sy. “It could have happened,” he said.
“If it did,” Constable Sy said to Gene, “that’s a real sad thing for everybody. But especially for them.” Sy turned his attention back to us. “What we want to know, and all we want to know, is where the money is. You tell us that, we can all go our own way, without the messy part.”
Gene reached in his pocket and took out a folding knife, flicked his wrist, and popped it open with a loud snap.
“You seen me gut fish and skin squirrels,” Gene said, looking at me. “You know how I can work. You don’t want me to start skinning, do you?”
“Leave her alone,” Mama said.
“I would start at the toes and skin upward to the top of your head,” he said. “I’d take your hide and hair right off. It wouldn’t be any fun for anyone but me.”
“We didn’t take that money from you,” Jinx said. “Wasn’t your money.”
“Damn, gal,” Gene said. “I forgot your black ass was even here.”
“You didn’t take it from us,” Constable Sy said. “But we’re going to take it from you.”
“What you going to tell Cletus?” I said.
“Thought we’d tell him you died,” Gene said. “That we didn’t find no money. And he wasted his fee on Skunk.”
“There ain’t no Skunk,” Constable Sy said. “Cletus ought to know better. He might as well stick a dollar in his ass and wait for the leprechauns to leave him a note.”
“All right, then,” Gene said. “I’ve decided first thing I’m going to do is skin that little uppity darky.”
Jinx was on her feet with her fists up. “You better brought you a bucket full of dinner, cause this fight here going to take all night.”
Gene grinned at her and stood up. “That’s all right,” he said, waving the knife around. “I think I’m up to it.”
A shadow fell across the open doorway. Reverend Joy came through it clutching a two-by-four. Gene and Constable Sy didn’t see him, least not in time.
The board whistled and caught Gene upside the skull so hard it knocked his head around and made him look over his shoulder in a way a man can’t do when his neck is on right. Before he hit the floor, Constable Sy, who was still sitting at the table, stood up as he grabbed his gun, but the board was there first. It caught him across the nose and knocked him back on the floor. He tried to sit up and Reverend Joy hit him again, right between the eyes. Constable Sy lay there not moving, but he was breathing loud, like a horse snorting water out of his nose.
“Come on,” Reverend Joy said, tossing the board aside, picking up Constable Sy’s pistol. “Come on.”
The constable was almost to his feet when we ran outside. We ran past Constable Sy’s truck in the yard, and started downhill toward the river. We was just following the Reverend Joy, like he knew something we didn’t, but we all knew in the back of our minds where we was going. The raft. When we got to it, we loosened the rope, and pushed off with our poles. The water wasn’t running fast, and we couldn’t see good, but there was enough current to get us moving.
We hadn’t gone far when something hit the raft. It hit and bounced off into the water. Looking back at the bank and up the hill, I saw Sy’s big shape on the rise. He was bending down and coming up fast with small rocks, throwing them at us. One hit my foot hard enough it made me hop.
“You don’t do this to me,” he yelled. “You just don’t do it. I’ll catch you all. Every damn one of you.”
“You couldn’t catch a cold,” I yelled back at him.
The rocks kept coming, and Constable Sy had a good arm. We was way out and still they was coming. Mama crawled into the hut Reverend Joy had built and hid out there, rocks clattering on top of it like hailstones.
Eventually the water was faster and we moved beyond his arm, sailing out of the little horseshoe spot where we had been and onto the main river. By that time, we couldn’t see him anymore, though we could hear him running through the brush and trees and cussing his head off, trying to catch up.
Soon we couldn’t hear him, either. We had a straight shot on the river now, and it was just a dark, wide line of water. There could have been sandbars or rocks or logs in our path and we wouldn’t have seen them until we was right up on them. But we didn’t have a choice. We used the poles to stay as straight as we could and let the water run us, Jinx doing her best with the rudder at the back.
Mama crawled out of the little hut and sat down in front of it. Reverend Joy, who had been standing on the raft like he was a rock target but hadn’t so much as been grazed, looked at Mama and said, “I think I killed a man.”
I was thinking: that makes two. But I didn’t say anything. Jinx did, however.
“Hell, yeah, you killed him,” she said. “You knocked his head all the way around on his neck. You hit him any harder, his brother, Don, would have died, too, and maybe them hogs they got in the yard would have keeled over. I ain’t never seen nobody take a piece of wood like that.”
“I didn’t mean to hit him that hard,” Reverend Joy said, and he sat down on the raft as if his legs had just melted. He still had the pistol in his hand, and the way he held it, loose and unconcerned, made me nervous. Mama scooted over beside him and put her arm around his shoulders.
“I don’t know you didn’t mean to,” Jinx said. “I ain’t never seen nobody get hit that hard that wasn’t on purpose. I think you meant it.”
“Jinx, hush,” Terry said.
“I ain’t got nothing for that Gene,” Jinx said. “I hope he is dead.”
“I think I heard something snap,” Reverend Joy said.
“That was his neck,” Jinx said.
“You did what you had to do,” Mama said.
“Here’s something I hate to bring up,” Terry said. “The money is back at the cabin. And so are May Lynn’s ashes.”
“What money?” Reverend Joy said. “Whose ashes?”
These were the parts of the story Mama had left out when she told him why we was on the river. Now, as we floated on, she filled the Reverend Joy in on it. After she was done, he sat there taken aback, looking up at us with his mouth open. He had in one night lost his church, murdered a man, and discovered he had run off downriver with a bunch of thieves and grave robbers. It was a lot to take in. Right then his mind went somewhere we couldn’t go, and it didn’t try to come back, least not right away. He just turned around and, still clutching the pistol, crawled inside the hut, sticking his head in there and letting his feet hang out on the raft.
“Guess he didn’t take none of that too well,” Jinx said. “I was just trying to give him a compliment on his board slinging. It wasn’t meant in a bad way.” She studied his feet hanging out of the hut. “Even so, looks like he’d just go on and crawl the rest of the way in.”
“I believe he has gone as far as his will allows,” Terry said.
16
We drifted for a long time, me and Terry using the poles to keep the raft in the middle of the river. Jinx was still at the rudder, and she was beginning to get the hang of it. The reverend had done a fine job building the rudder, and it heaved easy and gave the raft better direction and kept us from swirling.
Reverend Joy hadn’t moved from where he lay. Fact was, I thought he might have died, but Mama checked
