He got a folded shirt from a box under his bed, slipped it on.
“Someone will find him, won’t they?” I said.
“Starts to smell . . . Yeah, they’ll find him. And you and me, we ain’t gonna say a word. Are we?”
“No, sir.”
“I don’t mean that as a threat, boy. I’m askin’ as a friend.”
“You did save my life.”
“Suppose I did. Your dog took a little cut.”
“What?”
“It ain’t nothin’. I’m gonna pour some stuff on it. He’ll be good as new. Hell, tough dog like this, he don’t even know he’s been cut.”
Nub may not have minded the cut, but he sure minded that alcohol. He bit Buster.
———
WHILE MY CLOTHES finished drying, we moved to the table, me with a blanket draped over me, Buster drinking coffee, trying to get “the mood out of him,” he said.
He got a record player and put a record on it and let it play. “Need to get my mind off this,” he said. “Got to not think on it too hard.”
The record was of a kind I had never heard before. It wasn’t rock and roll, but it reminded me of it.
“That’s the blues,” Buster said. “Big Joe Turner.”
We listened. While we did, I looked at his notes. I said: “What does this mean, Buster?”
It was what I had seen earlier: “Girl’s mother.”
“That means we got maybe a wedge into this. A way of pushing open the case and seein’ what’s inside. You find the roots of somethin’, then you can better understand the flower of the thing. The flower bein’ the murders and the murderers.”
“So what do you know?”
“Well, what I know is the mother of that little white girl killed down by the tracks is still alive and maybe she knows something. You remember, I told you how I knew her.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I talked to some folks I know would know if she’s still alive, and she is. She ain’t that old actually. She’s still in the same house.”
“I know,” I said. “Down by the tracks near the swamp, not far from the trestle bridge. That’s where we went to see the ghost. It’s near where Margret was killed.”
“You gettin’ to be a first-class snoop, Stan. The momma, Winnie, she might know somethin’. I think we can talk to her. Normally I wouldn’t bother to talk to no white woman ’cause it could get me lynched. But I know who Winnie is, and she lives with a black man down there by the slough. He’s an ornery sort named Chance. Besides, she’s not all white. She’s dark-skinned ’cause she’s got that Mexican, or Puerto Rican, or whatever in her. But I told you that.”
“We’re going to see her now?”
“Of course not. Not in this weather. And though she’s used to seein’ men with little or no clothes on, I don’t think you’d be all that anxious to go over there in your drawers. Now am I right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What we need to do now is get you dressed and home.”
“You’ll be at work tonight?”
“If I can stay away from the liquor.”
“Daddy told me you don’t come to work . . . he’s gonna make me the projectionist. I don’t want that.”
“I know you don’t. You’re a true friend. And I ain’t much of one.”
“It doesn’t get any truer than what you did for me.”
“You go on home and don’t think about this no more. You ain’t at fault no kind of way. And Bubba Joe, he’s about as important to the world as a flea. Another thing. I don’t do what I’m supposed to do, you ain’t doin’ me no shame takin’ my job. A man’s responsible for what he does or doesn’t do. Hear what I’m sayin’?”
“Yes, sir . . . But, Buster . . . Please be there.”
“I will. I really do try to keep my word, but that old alcohol gets on me sometimes. You ever been coon huntin’, boy?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, you get dogs runnin’ a coon, and you get down in the bottoms, and that ole coon, when he’s bein’ chased, he’ll lead those dogs out into the wetlands, deep water if he can, then he’ll jump on a dog’s head and try and drown him. I ain’t a lyin’. That’s what he’ll do. And that dog, he’s done committed himself to that deep water, and he’s got this coon on him with teeth and claws, and a coon’s strong for its size, and it’s pushin’ down on him, and it’s all that dog can do to swim and fight and keep his head above water. Sometimes he does. Sometimes he don’t. Alcohol is like that. It’s like I’m out in deep water, and that stuff is jumpin’ on my head, tryin’ to hold me under. I keep fightin’. One day, I don’t shake it, that ole coon is gonna win. Gonna push me under for good . . . Good thing, though, is, I’m out of whiskey and ain’t got money for more.”
———
THE RAIN HAD DIED, but it was still misty. I decided I had to go home anyway. I got dressed. My clothes felt strange, toasty in spots, damp in others.
“You get home. You pet that dog good, you hear?”
“I will,” I said.
As I tentatively stepped off the steps, started away, Buster, who had followed me as far as the porch, said, “You ain’t got no worry about him anymore. Trust me on that. But that storm ain’t through yet. You just got a lull. You get on. Hear?”
I nodded at him, and kept walking.
With the wind gone and the sky less black, it was no longer cold and the summer heat began to make things steam and soon I was sweating like a staked goat at a Fourth of July picnic.
I walked by where Bubba Joe had bought the farm. I saw his knife lying there. Buster had forgotten to pick it up.
I looked around. No one was in sight. I went over and kicked the knife against a tree, used the toe of my shoe to knock dirt over it.
As I did this, a tremble went through me. I thought of Bubba Joe chasing us the other night, earlier today when he had his hand twisted in my shirt, his breath beating me with tobacco and liquor. I thought about the way Buster had drawn his own knife across Bubba Joe’s throat, quick and simple like a teacher drawing a chalk line. I thought too of the creek where Buster had tossed Bubba Joe like so much rotten wood.
I could hear the creek water rushing, full of the power of the rain. I thought of Bubba Joe lying down there, the crawdads working at him like they work at bacon on a string. I had the urge to go over for a look. But didn’t.
15
I ARRIVED HOME in the late afternoon. When I stepped inside the house, I tried my best to act as if nothing had happened. At first, somehow, I thought my family knew. They were as excited to see me as Lazarus’s family was to see him step from the tomb.
Rosy Mae started in with, “We been worried ’bout you, Mr. Stanley. We thought you’d have enough sense to come home right away, way that storm was goin’.”
Callie laughed. “But you didn’t.”
“I got stranded in town,” I said. “I sat it out in the drugstore.”
I felt sick to my stomach lying like that, but didn’t know what else to do. Telling them I had gone to Buster’s and that Buster was stone drunk, and Bubba Joe had tried to kill me, and Buster had cut his throat, just didn’t seem like the kind of information they needed to hear right then. In fact, it was information I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. Ever.
“We should never have let you go out with that storm brewing,” Mom said. “I get so mad at myself when I allow my common sense to be overridden by my desire to make you happy.”
