we got so tired that when we came to a run of shady cottonwoods, we stopped under them without even discussing it. We tossed our bags aside and sat down and leaned against the trunk of one of the trees and closed our eyes to rest. And though they say there’s no rest for the wicked and the good don’t need any, exhaustion caught up with us like a train and run us over.
I dreamed of Hollywood again, and it was the same dream as before, with us on the raft with May Lynn’s ashes, but this time, as we sailed, no one waved as we went past. All the pretty people looked fine, but they stunk bad enough to gag a maggot. It was a stink that brought me awake.
When I opened my eyes, it was almost dark. I thought I had been asleep only a few minutes, but we had slept most of the day away. I sniffed the stinking air and glanced at Terry beside me. He was awake. I started to say something, but he reached out and touched me gently, said, “Shh.” He pointed. I looked.
Way down in the direction of the river, running through the dying light, was a man shape. The shape was dark and wore a derby hat; something bright was pinned to it. The shape’s hair was long and kinky and it stuck out from under the hat on the sides and rolled down the man’s neck like a large wad of copper wire. Something flopped along the side of his head as he ran. His face in the twilight looked like polished mahogany washed in blood. He had a walking stick with him, and as his feet lifted I saw they was way long and wide. I thought for a moment that whoever this was wasn’t human. Course, the smell told me who it was. It was Skunk. But maybe Skunk wasn’t human.
We watched until Skunk was way beyond us and was swallowed up by where the ground sloped toward the Sabine. After a while, I said, “Some master tracker. Here we was, and he didn’t see us asleep under a tree.”
“We were in a fortunate spot,” Terry said. “We were hard to see here in the shadows. I speculate that after he abandoned the car, he found someplace to sleep more comfortably out here in the open. It’s more his natural way of doing things. Had we not taken to the higher ground, birds would be pecking our remains right now. What I presume he’s doing is following what Constable Sy told him when he was tortured. That we had taken to the river. He isn’t actually following a sign because he believes we’re downriver on the raft, so he doesn’t need to look for any indication we’re on land.”
“But isn’t there a place where he’ll cross our sign from this morning?” I said.
“If he does, he’ll know where we came from and where the raft is, or he’ll turn and come back for us. Or he’ll do one first and then the other.”
“Then we need to get to the raft first,” I said.
“So we’re going to fly over his head?”
“No,” I said. “We’re going to sail under his feet.”
“You mean the river?”
“Of course I mean the river,” I said.
“And how are we going to do that? Swim for miles? Ride a fish?”
“One thing for sure is we need to get down to the water, and we need to get there fast, and we need to do it well behind Skunk’s trail…Good grief, did you see his feet?”
“I did, and it couldn’t have been feet.”
“Oversized shoes?” I said.
“Like snowshoes. You know what those are?”
I shook my head.
“They’re made long and wide to walk on snow. Those shoes he had on were made to walk on the marsh and move quickly and not bog down. He would know that from being on wet ground so much.”
“Come on. I got an idea, but we have to hurry.”
We jumped up and grabbed our bags and started toward the river, crossing Skunk’s trail as we went. The riverbank was full of trees, and there was underbrush and blackberry vines to contend with, too. Close to the river the bank was falling off from being washed by rain. Roots from trees stuck out all over. Below them was a thin line of damp sand and gravel. We swung off some of the roots and dropped onto the wet sand, went along close to the river for a good long ways. I looked around and around, but didn’t see what I needed. Terry and me kept going, and finally, I saw a dead tree above us, sticking out of the bank. It was short-ten feet long-and thick. The limbs had mostly dropped off of it from rot. The top of it had long ago come loose and fallen away and been washed downriver. Its weight was causing the rest of it to lean out toward the water and its roots was springing out of the ground.
I laid aside my bag, scuttled up to the high ground, and crawled out onto the tree. “Come on,” I said. “Help me.”
Terry was looking at me as if I had suddenly lost my senses. But he put his bag down and climbed up and behind me on the dead tree.
“Bounce,” I said, and began bumping my butt up and down.
Terry followed the plan, and we bounced for quite some time before I heard the roots slipping completely loose of the bank. The dead tree fell.
It struck the ground below, throwing us off it. When we looked up, we saw that it had broken nearly in half. We had to stand on it and bounce with our feet until the pieces were free of one another.
I opened my bag, looked inside, grabbed a ball of twine, and slung the bag over my shoulder. I used twine to tie the bag to my overalls strap, and then I wrapped a couple runs of twine around it and my waist, so that it fastened to my back. I cut the twine loose with my pocketknife, cut another run of it, tied a loop of it to the handle of Constable Sy’s pistol, then made a loose necklace of it; the gun hung around my neck and down on my chest. After that, I helped Terry tie up his bag in a similar fashion, though he didn’t have an overalls strap to help him out like I did.
I put the knife away, said, “Come on. Push.”
We shoved the log out into the water, and I practically leaped at it like a lizard. Terry followed suit, and away we went, down the river. The log tried to turn loose of us at first, but we found places on either side where we could hang, and that balanced it out.
By this time twilight was gone and night had dropped down on us like a croaker sack. But the black was lit now and then by lightning. It was sizzling across the sky in bright runs, and thunder was banging out like someone striking a number ten washtub with an ax handle.
The water was cool and it was hard to hang on to the log, especially now that we was in a wider and swifter part of the river. It started raining hard enough it was like bullets slamming onto our heads; it made the river run even faster. To make matters worse, the old tree was loosing bark, and it was chock-full of ants that bit me and made my skin feel like hot tacks were being knocked into it.
The log kept dipping, though, and pretty soon there were no more ants. There was just us and that log, the rainstorm, and the dark water. The lightning flashed and lit up the sky in such a way that the riverbank was clear and bright for a moment-and I saw Skunk squatting on the side of the bank between two trees. He was sitting there like a statue, watching us rush by.
I could see he had the mud shoes strapped on his back, because they was poking up over his derby. The water ran along the rim of his hat and leaped off at the front. The badge he had taken from Constable Sy was pinned to his derby. What I had seen flopping along the side of his face was a dead bird, dangling head-down on a cord fastened up in his copper hair. Jinx had said it was a seasoned bluebird, but it didn’t look all that seasoned to me, and I couldn’t have told you in that glimpse if it was blue or black or plaid, but it was a bird. I spied a hatchet hanging off his belt, and a big cane knife in a sheath, near big as a sword. He clutched his gnarly walking stick in the middle. I could see his face in the flash. It was reddish, like an old penny, and squashed into shape, like a gourd that had grown funny. He seemed about as interested in us as a fly was in arithmetic.
Then we sailed on, and the long run of lightning was gone. I had to yell over the roar of the river, “Did you see that?”
“See what?”
“It was Skunk. He must have crossed our trail below, cut back, and made for the river, found our new trail.”
“That’s not good news,” Terry said.
There was another flash of lightning. I glanced toward the bank, and there was Skunk, running along, dodging through low-?hanging limbs and jumping over bushes like a rabbit.
“Worse news,” I said.
