certain than a ride, and we don’t have to wonder who it is we’re riding with. Catching a ride might be why May Lynn’s dead. She may have caught it with the wrong kind of person. I say we take the money and steal her body and burn it up, and jar it up, and then float down near Gladewater, walk in and buy tickets at the bus station, and proceed to Hollywood.”
“There’s some sense in that,” Jinx said. “And when we get to Gladewater and take the bus, we can use some of the money to buy lunches to tote with us. I’ve always wanted to buy a lunch. Though you’ll have to buy it for me. There’s that whole colored thing about going into cafes and such.”
“Don’t worry,” Terry said. “It’ll be taken care of.” He looked at me. “You aren’t saying much.”
“I’m sitting here considering on my life of crime and how it could help me buy a lunch for a bus trip.”
“It’s money that has already been stolen,” Terry said. “It’s not like you stole it.”
“If I take it, it would be like stealing, because that’s exactly what I’d be doing. Stealing from a thief wouldn’t make me any less a thief.”
“The thief is dead, and so are his heirs,” Terry said.
“There’s the father,” I said.
“He doesn’t count,” Terry said.
“Why’s that?” I said.
“Because I don’t like him, and if you get right down to it, you can’t be an heir to stolen money. Not legally, anyway.”
“I’m glad that puts us on such solid legal ground,” I said.
5
We pushed our boat off the barge-or what I call a raft-back into the river, and paddled it to land. After we got on ground, we pulled the boat up under a tree and found some dried brush to lean on it. It wasn’t much of a hideaway, but it’s what we had.
Before we left out of there, we sat down under a tree and got out the map and turned it ever which way trying to figure out what it meant. It might as well have been written in Greek. We could make out what must have been May Lynn’s house and the river drawn on it in a squiggly line, and above it a rise in the land that was familiar. Finally there was a couple of thick lines with little lines drawn between them. We figured that had to be railroad tracks. Beyond the tracks, there were some humps, and there was a line written out that said MALCOLM CUZINS. Neither the humps or the name meant anything to us.
We walked away from the river and the bottomland, made our way back to where May Lynn’s house stood. We went wide of it toward the woods.
The woods were thick and it took us a while to thread through them and climb up a big hill. We finally got on the trail that went out of the bottoms, ending us up on a field where cane grew. It was highland cane and it wasn’t as good as bottom cane, but it was still good enough. It was a big patch that covered a lot of acres, and the stalks were thick and tall. The cane had turned slightly purple, and I knew once it was stripped the sugar inside of it would be sweet.
I had a pocketknife, and I cut down a stalk next to where the field started, then cut it into three pieces. It took some work, but we all got our pieces frayed and that gave us the pulp to chew on. It was sugary, and it was something to keep us happy and busy while we walked. I figure when you got right down to it, we weren’t fresh thieves after all, but had had plenty of practice in the cane fields and watermelon patches. Heck, I had started my life of crime sometime back, but had just then realized it. The natural move forward would be to take stolen bank money and spend it on a trip to Hollywood with a dead girl burnt up in a jar.
We followed the map and came to a low cut of pines, and on the other side of the pines was the train tracks. On the far side of the tracks was more trees. Most of them was pecan and hickory nut and might have once been part of an orchard, but were now wild and unpruned. There was a nice breeze blowing, and we could smell the scent of the trees on the wind, and there were birds in the trees, mostly red-winged blackbirds; they were as thick there as leaves.
There was a rumble and the train rails began to vibrate. We stepped back in the pines, in the shadow, and waited. A train came chugging by, screeching on top of the rails. I thought maybe that ought to be the way we should get out of there, by hopping a train. But it was traveling fast as it went by, and none of the boxcar doors was open; it was an idea that passed from my mind quickly. I figured if I grabbed at the train my arms would get jerked off.
Still, it was mighty pleasant watching the train go by, all those boxcars clacking along, and while it rolled I thought of May Lynn. I guess it was the train moving away from us, heading anywhere but where we was, that made me think of her. That and our plans, of course.
I remember once sitting in her house on her mattress on the floor, and she had been talking about the movies and her plans to star in them, and then she said something to me that dove out of the air like a rock and felt like it hit me in the back of the head.
“Sue Ellen,” she said, “what is it you want to do with your life?”
Until she asked that, I didn’t even know I had the chance to think about anything different than what I was doing at the moment, but with her telling me all her plans, and then asking me that question, certain feelings I had started rising up to the surface like a dead carp. I knew then I wanted out of what I was in, and I wanted something else other than what I had, but the miserable thing was, I didn’t know where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do.
We laughed and talked about this and that, about some boys we knew, none of them particularly interesting, and May Lynn said she sure thought Terry was cute, but there was that whole sissy problem. We combed each other’s hair, and her mama, a few months short of her dip in the river and moving like she was some kind of animal dying slowly, cooked us some grits, and we had them with no butter and no milk. I remember thinking then that May Lynn was the most wonderful person in the world, and certainly the most beautiful. But what made me feel really good while eating grits with no butter and no milk was that she had spoken to me like I could have plans and ought to have plans, and that my life could be better. Right then and there I believed it myself a little. Not so much you could write a song about it, but some. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew it would be something. I can’t say that stealing money and going by raft down the dirty Sabine with May Lynn’s ashes in a jar had been any part of those plans, but I knew then that I wasn’t going to be settled with life as I knew it; wasn’t going to end up like Mama, drinking cure-all and taking a whacking from her husband and thinking it was as natural as the course of the river.
I looked up from thinking about all this, and saw the train moving on down the line and out of sight. We stood there looking where it had gone, and then we looked at the map again and determined that we at least knew where the tracks were. Beyond that it was all mighty confusing. The little humps-and there was bunches of them in several rows on the paper-and the name Malcolm Cuzins didn’t make no sense whatsoever.
As we crossed the tracks and went under the trees, the red-winged blackbirds took flight. They looked bloodied as they rose in a whoosh, and they filled the sky like a cloud, then they was gone.
“Well,” Terry said, looking at the map. “I fail to make sense of it. I can’t determine what these humps mean. And the name written on the map is a mystery to me.”
Jinx and I were equally baffled, and we kept looking at the map like it would all come to us eventually, but it didn’t. Fact was, I was getting a bit of a headache.
“There’s nothing out here but a few trees,” I said. “I think there’s an old graveyard over there, and beyond that there’s a road.”
“I remember that ole graveyard,” Jinx said. She nodded at me. “We was up here once, when we was little kids. We seen some of them graves then.”
“I barely remember,” I said.
“I told you there was haints there and that they’d grab you up and pull you down in the ground,” Jinx said. “I thought you was gonna pee your pants.”
“That wasn’t very nice,” I said.
“That’s what made it funny,” she said.
