together. Human bones. That’s that sound you hear, them bones.”
“There isn’t any Skunk,” Terry said. “That’s an old wives’ tale. Like the goat man that’s supposed to live in the woods. It’s just a tale to scare children.”
Jinx shook her head. “Skunk is real. He’s a big old colored man that’s more red than black, with twisty red hair; he wears it wild, like it’s a bush. They say he keeps a dried-up bluebird hanging in it. He’s got dark eyes as dead and flat as coat buttons. They say he can walk softer than a breeze and can go for days without sleeping. That he can live for weeks sipping water from mud holes and eating roots and such, and that since the only baths he ever had was when he fell in the river, or when he got caught out in the rain, he stinks like a skunk and you can smell him coming a long ways off.”
Terry let out a laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“He’s part Indian-Seminole or Cherokee or something-and that’s why he’s red-touched. He’s a tracker used to live in the Everglades over in Florida. He’s a stone killer. Ain’t nobody bothers Skunk unless they want someone caught, or dead is more likely. He chops off hands and takes them back to prove he’s done the business he was hired to do.”
“Even if there is a fella with a bird in his hair, and his name is Skunk,” I said, “I don’t think that’s bones from his place rattling. Terry’s right; that’s treetops knocking together. I’ve heard that sound before, and not just in this place.”
“Well,” Jinx said, “he moves his place around. And if that is trees, not bones, it don’t mean Skunk ain’t out there. I know people that have seen him. I know one man told me he hired Skunk because his wife run off and he wanted Skunk to find her. He said Skunk must have misunderstood or didn’t care. All he brought back was her hands, chopped off right at the wrist with a hatchet. Old man told me the story said he didn’t ask where the rest of her was, and he paid up, too. What Skunk wanted from him wasn’t money. He wanted all the man’s blankets and the food he canned for the winter, and his biggest, fattest hunting dog. Old man gave it to him, too. Skunk carried that stuff off in a wheelbarrow, the dog tied to a rope, walking alongside him. Old man said Skunk didn’t use no hunting dogs because he was better than any of them. He figured the dog was for dinner.”
“And he’s got a big blue ox named Babe,” Terry said. “And he can rope a tornado and ride it like a horse.”
Jinx was so mad she almost stood up in the boat.
“He ain’t like no Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill,” she said. “You’re making me mad. He ain’t no story. He’s real. And you better watch out for him.”
“It wasn’t my intention to make you angry, Jinx,” Terry said.
“Well, you done made me angry,” Jinx said. “Big angry.”
“Sorry,” Terry said.
“Go on, Jinx,” I said, soothing her ruffled feathers. “Finish telling about him.”
“He don’t talk much, unless it’s to who he’s gonna kill. They say then he can’t talk, just makes funny sounds. I know cause Daddy told me he knew a fella had got away from Skunk, just by accident. That Skunk had been hired to get him, found him, tied him to a tree, and was gonna cut his throat and chop off his hands. The tree this fella was tied to was up against the bank next to the river. It was an old tree, and though this fella wasn’t thinking about it on purpose, he was pushing with his feet to get away from Skunk. The tree was more rotten than it looked, because there was ants at the base, and they had gnawed it up. This fella told Daddy he could feel them ants on him, biting, but he didn’t hate them none, because they had made that old tree rotten, and with him pushing with his feet, pressing his back into the trunk, it broke off. He went backward into the water. When he hit, the log floated, spinning him around and around, him snapping breaths every time he was on top of the river. Finally the log come apart altogether, and that loosened the ropes and he swam out to a sandbar and rested, and then he swam across to the other side. Course, none of it done him any good. Daddy said that later, after he told him about it, he wasn’t seen no more. Daddy said it was because he didn’t have sense enough to go up north or out west, but had stuck around. He figured Skunk finally got him. Skunk ain’t no quitter, though he can wander off from a trail for a while if he gets bored. He gets interested again, he comes back. He always comes back, and there ain’t no end to it until he’s got whoever he’s after.”
“Why was Skunk supposed to be after this man?” Terry asked.
“I don’t know,” Jinx said. “Someone hired Skunk to get him, and Skunk got him. Reckon he chopped off his hands and gave them to whoever hired him, or maybe he kept them himself. I don’t know. As for what was left of the fella, I bet he rotted away in the woods somewhere, never to be seen again.”
The boat was drifting lazily toward the bank. We started paddling again.
“He’s in them woods,” Jinx said, not through with her Skunk business. “In the dark shadows. He don’t do nothing but wait till someone wants to hire him. He’s out there somewhere, in his tent made of skins, all them bones hanging around it, rattling in the breeze. He wraps all those bones in that tent and straps it to his back and moves about, sets up camp again. He’s waiting till someone wants him. They got to talk to one of his cousins to go up in there and find him, because he won’t let no one else come close, and they say even his cousins are afraid of him.”
“How did he get the way he is?” I asked her.
“They say his mama couldn’t stand him no more cause he was crazy, and so when he was ten, for his birthday, she took him out in the river and threw him out of the boat and hit him in the head with a paddle. He didn’t die. He just got knocked out good and floated up on shore. He took to living ’long the riverbank, and in the woods. Later, his mama was found with her hands chopped off and her head had been stove in with a boat paddle.”
“How perfect,” Terry said, and he laughed.
“You laugh, you want,” Jinx said. “But you better believe it. Skunk’s out there. And you run up on him, it’s the last running you gonna do.”
3
Finally we come up on the spot by the river where May Lynn had lived, paddled the boat up there, and leaped out on the bank. Terry had hold of the rope that was tied to the front of the boat, and he looped it around a stump by the water. Then for insurance we all dragged the front end of the boat out of the water so the hole in the bottom was on dirt.
Just before we started up to the house, Jinx looked out over the river and pointed. Jinx was a big pointer. She was always pointing out this and pointing out that. Every time we were there Jinx would point out that spot. It’s where May Lynn’s mother went into the river with a shirt wrapped around her head.
“It was right there,” she said, as if we didn’t know.
We walked up a hill, which was slick with pine needles. The house was on top of the hill and it was raised on a bunch of leaning creosote posts; it was up high like that so that when the river rose it wouldn’t float away. With the way it leaned, I reckoned it wouldn’t be long before the whole shebang was shoved off and went tumbling downhill and into the river, about where May Lynn’s mama had gone down.
When we got to the top of the hill, just so we wouldn’t surprise May Lynn’s daddy and get our teeth filled with shotgun pellets, I called out, “Hallo the house.”
No one answered, but we waited a minute anyhow. Just in case he might be napping off a drunk. There was an outhouse farther up the hill, and there was a ditch that ran off from it out into the water, which was the plumbing. What went in the hole in the outhouse went down the hill through that open ditch, and into the water. Terry studied the toilet for a while, then said, “That isn’t very sanitary. You should keep your body leavings away from water. It’s standard knowledge. You dig a pit, not a runoff. That’s lazy.”
“Her old man is lazy,” I said. “What else can you say?”
We had been standing below and near the house, waiting to see if anyone came out. When they didn’t, we called out again, all three of us calling at the same time. Still no one answered.
There were some steps going up the ten-foot rise to the weathered, sagging porch, and we walked up them. They shook as we climbed. The sides of the steps were fixed onto the platform by wooden rails, and where there should have been a step at the top there wasn’t one. You had to stretch your leg out and climb carefully onto the
