ashes to Hollywood and sprinkling them around where she’ll always be a part of it. May Lynn had an adventurous spirit about her, and I think she was no more than a few months shy of departing from this place.”
“She should have hurried up,” Jinx said.
“We have a chance to leave,” Terry said. “All we have to do is reach out and embrace it. Together we can make it work. We can help each other achieve that goal.”
“What you need is a good meal and some sleep,” I said, looking at Terry.
Terry shook his head. “No. What I need is a shovel and some friends to help me dig her up. Then we burn her and the magazines together. It’s symbolic that way.”
“Symbolic?” Jinx said.
“Then we put the combined ashes in a jar-”
“A jar?” Jinx said.
“Or some kind of container,” Terry said. “Then we float down the river to a good-sized town, catch a bus, and head for Hollywood.”
“A bus?” Jinx said.
“Stop being a mockingbird,” Terry said, frowning at Jinx.
“That sounds crazy,” I said.
“I like crazy better than I like being around here,” Terry said.
“That’s two of us,” Jinx said.
They both stared at me, waiting for agreement, I suppose.
“Let me think about it,” I said.
“I know you,” Terry said. “You aren’t really going to consider it. You’re just saying that so I’ll shut up.”
“While you think about it,” Jinx said, “me and Terry are gonna be setting May Lynn on fire with them magazines, and by the time you’ve decided one way or the other, we’ll be in a boat, maybe one without a hole in the bottom, on our way to Hollywood with that gal in a jar.”
“I know this much,” I said. “The Sabine River don’t go to Hollywood.”
“Yeah, but we’ll arrive there somehow,” Terry said.
I could almost see the wheels in his head turning.
He lifted his head and his lips curled at the edges. “There’s the barge. We could take the barge. It’s big enough to live on.”
“It’s too big for some of the narrow spots,” Jinx said. “We might go better by patching up the boat, or getting some other one.”
“I bet we can get it through those spots if we put our backs into it,” Terry said.
“The barge, as you call it, ain’t nothing more than a raft,” I said.
“You could actually dock it against the bank at night and sleep on it,” Terry said.
“I want to think about it,” I said, feeling the pressure, hoping the whole thing would go out of his and Jinx’s head by the time we got back across the river.
“What’s to think on?” Jinx said. “You told us you can’t even sleep good for watching for your daddy coming into your room.”
I nodded, thinking about how I usually slept with a piece of stove wood in the bed next to me, my door locked, one eye open and an ear cocked. “That’s true.”
“Well, then,” Terry said.
“I got some things to do at home first,” I said, still thinking it was all going to be forgotten in a short time, but actually beginning to warm to the idea.
“All right, then,” Terry said. “We can all go home and prepare, and if either of you have any money, now would be a good time to bring it.”
“I have a quarter,” I said. “That’s it.”
“I got the teeth in my head,” Jinx said.
“I have a few dollars,” Terry said. “But what we really need is a plan.”
4
We gathered up the magazines, and decided it was okay because May Lynn told us her daddy always thought her wanting to be in the movies was silly, told her wanting to be on a screen dressed up like a hussy in tight clothes and wearing makeup like war paint wasn’t any plan for a grown woman. That meant those magazines would soon be burned up for fire starter or tossed out to rot when he came back and found out she was dead. I figured that portion of the house would become his, too, littered with cigarette papers and tobacco crumbs.
Anyway, we took them, and as we was stuffing them into a couple of pillowcases, a writing tablet with a red cardboard cover fell out and hit the floor. Jinx picked it up and said, “Look here.”
Scrawled on the front of it in May Lynn’s handwriting was the word DIARY. The writing was in pencil, and it was so rubbed over, and the cover so dark to begin with, you could hardly see the word.
“You think we should peek inside?” Jinx said.
“We shouldn’t,” I said, “but I know we will.”
“If we’re going to steal her body and set her on fire and take her ashes to Hollywood,” Jinx said, “I think we must go in for the whole hog, including the squeal.”
“Not here, though,” I said, switching my viewpoint instantly. “We can go somewhere, sit, and read it. I don’t want her daddy showing up, and us having been housebreakers and thieves right out here in the open. Criminals, I think, should act in privacy or the dark.”
“Perhaps we ought to burn it with the magazines,” Terry said, taking the diary from Jinx’s hands so deftly I figured it was a full minute before she realized she wasn’t holding it no more. “She isn’t here to say we can look at it.”
“That’s the proper thing to do,” I said. “Burn it. But is that what we’re gonna do?”
Jinx said, “We all know we’re gonna look at it, so we should get on with it.”
“I thought it might be good manners to at least act like we wasn’t,” I said.
Going home right then went out of my mind like a bird that had been let loose from a cage. We decided to go someplace private and read the diary. But when we went out of the house, Terry, still clutching the diary, left me holding the pillowcase full of magazines and went to the outhouse.
“Don’t you read none of it in there,” Jinx said.
“I won’t,” Terry said.
“Leave it,” I said.
“Nope, cause I trust me not to read it,” he said. “But you two, I don’t.”
“That wasn’t very nice,” Jinx said, as Terry went into the outhouse and closed the door.
* * *
Not too far downriver there’s the barge, the one Terry said we ought to steal. It’s staked out like a Judas goat to an old cypress stump in the middle of the water. It’s really just a big raft, but everyone calls it a barge. There’s a tree branch that has sprouted off the stump and it grows tall and green and puts out shade at one end of the barge. Midday and dead summer, the shade looks green because of the way the sun shines through the leaves and lays on the rough planks nailed over the logs. The barge is tied to the stump with thick twists of weathered rope, replaced from time to time by someone with fresh rope and the desire to do it. Where the barge sits, the water is wide. The barge can hold a fair number of people on it, and it was put there by someone long ago that’s been forgotten. Whoever built it made it solid, and the wood has held and hasn’t rotted. The bottoms of the logs and boards used to make it are coated in creosote. Everyone uses it, and no one has moved it for at least ten years. Storms and high water have been unable to tear it up, even if on occasion the water has risen higher than the rope that binds it. Sometimes when the water is way up, the roped end of the barge stays down, and the loose end floats to the top and you can see that end sticking out of the water. When the water settles, it’s like nothing ever happened. Sometimes when I walk along the river and look out at it, I can see frogs on it, or long yellow-bellied water snakes and sometimes water moccasins, looking thick and stumpy and evil and ready to bite.
Whoever gets there first uses it as a place to picnic, fish, and swim. At night, kids skip the shorts and
