It was solid light when a five-foot-long rat snake wriggled through the grass in front of us. We stopped and watched it slither by, then started again. Big white birds flew up from the river, and one flew high over our heads with a fish in its mouth. Terry said, “Maybe that’s some kind of good omen.”
“Unless you’re considering from the fish’s point of view,” I said.
By the time the sun was high and hot, we still hadn’t recognized anything. It was hard to tell just how far we had come, not knowing what time it was when we started out, but we guessed something like four hours, maybe five. Had we been on flat, dry land, we’d have already covered the necessary distance, but the muck slowed us and wore us out, so it was pleasing to reach a stretch of pines and get out of that mess.
The pines was a thin stand. Looking through them, on the far side, I spotted the church where the reverend had been minister. We had come out on higher ground than I expected. It had gone up so gradual, I hadn’t realized we was climbing. We was well above the reverend’s house.
We went to the church. The front door was thrown open; inside, some of the Christians had written on the walls. ADULTEROR was painted in big black letters in two places, and in another spot was a longer sentence that declared something Reverend Joy did with donkeys, which I knew was a lie. We hadn’t seen a donkey once since we’d been there.
“They ain’t much on spelling, are they?” Terry said.
We came out of the church and halted just below it and looked down the trail at the cabin. The front door was still thrown open and there was lantern light inside. Constable Sy’s truck hadn’t moved.
“You think he’s waiting inside?” Terry asked.
“Don’t know. Seems funny he’d stay there. Maybe he’s looking for the money.”
“He won’t find it,” Terry said.
“If it’s still in your sack on the floor, it won’t take a prize bloodhound to sniff it out,” I said.
“I moved it.”
“Out of the house?”
“It’s in the toolshed.”
“Reverend keeps that locked,” I said.
“I know where he hides the key. That’s how I got it moved in there in the first place.”
“And pray tell, where does he hide the key?”
“That’s the drawback,” Terry said. “The money and May Lynn are no longer in the house, but the key is still there, shoved into a crack in the front-door frame, along the side. I saw him stick it there once. When he was gone, I borrowed it and used it to take a peek in the shed. I wanted to see what was in there. Way he locked it up, I thought he might have something in there we needed to know about. What he had was lumber and some nice tools and finally, for me, a good hiding place for the money and the ashes.”
“So we still have to go down there in broad daylight. We might as well strip off and paint ourselves barn-red and run down yelling at the top of our lungs.”
“It does present a challenge,” Terry said. “Where can we find the paint?”
“Ha.”
We went wide and came down near the side of the house, and hid up in the tree line. We stood in the trees and looked around. It was as quiet as a deaf-mute taking a nap down there. The morning light was spreading.
“What’s that on the porch?” Terry said.
I looked at what he was talking about for a long time. I said, “It looks like spilled black paint.”
“Why would there be black paint on the front porch?” he said.
“Someone had black paint up at the church,” I said. “Maybe they brought it down here to write on things.”
“I doubt that,” Terry said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.”
I don’t know how long we stood there, listening and watching, but after a while curiosity got the best of us. I pulled the pistol from my overalls and we sneaked down there and slipped up on the porch. About where the doorway started there was the black mess, and now that we was close, I could see it wasn’t paint-it was blood that had dried dark. There was lots of it.
I cocked the revolver, and we eased along to the window and looked in. I could see Uncle Gene lying on the floor on his stomach. His head was still turned around on his shoulder and his face was looking right at me, his eyes as dull as if they had been worked over with sandpaper. Jinx was right. That had been some lick Reverend Joy had given him.
On the table, on his back, stretched out and tied down with rope, was Constable Sy. Blood had dripped off the table, and the floor must have sloped slightly because the blood had ran toward the wall and out the door. I had no idea there was that much blood in a person, even a big man like Constable Sy.
“What in hell happened here?” Terry said.
I suppose the thing for us to have done was to have lit out for the raft, but we didn’t. What we had seen through the window yanked us forward as surely as if we was on a rope.
Over by the door we was careful to try and not step in the blood, but it wasn’t any use. We couldn’t help it. It was everywhere. As we went inside, our shoes, already mud-coated and sticky, stuck to the floor like flies to molasses. The inside smelled bad, really bad, and not just because of the blood. The air was rank, like body odor on top of dead things on top of old river mud on top of what was left in the outhouse.
I stood at Uncle Gene. His death didn’t heat up much sympathy. What occurred to me was that he wouldn’t leap up suddenly and hit his wife anymore. When she found out he was dead, I wondered if she would feel like a bird that had just figured out the cage door had been left open. I hoped so. I liked to imagine her burning his clothes and dancing around the fire and taking a piss on the whole mess after it had gone black and cold.
But that broken neck wasn’t all that was horrible about his body. There was something else. His hands was cut off at the wrist from jagged strikes. It was the same for Constable Sy, who had been bound to the table with wraps of rope. The lantern had been placed by his head so whoever had done him in would have a close light to work by. The jar with the buttermilk was empty, and the jar itself had bloody fingerprints on it. Whoever had done this had paused in his work to refresh himself.
The picture of an animal of some kind had been carved into Constable Sy’s forehead; a duck with a ruler and a pocketknife could have made pretty much the same mark.
If Constable Sy had lived, he’d have needed two patches, cause his other eye had been scooped out, and flies was crawling around inside his head. There was a spoon lying on the table, and it was bloody, and I had a pretty good idea how the eye had been taken out.
Constable Sy had been cut and stabbed in a lot of places. You could see where his wrists had been placed on the table and struck. There was deep chop marks in the wood. His head was thrown back and his mouth was open and his tongue was torn out. His shoes was off and his toes had been whittled down to nubs so there was only the bones left, poking out like little wet sticks. The badge he always wore on his shirt pocket was missing.
I felt sick. I carefully set the hammer on the pistol down and put the gun back in my overalls pocket.
“What sort of design is that etched into his head?” Terry asked, leaning over Constable Sy. “Is that representative of some breed of cat?”
I looked at Terry, sniffed the foul air loudly so as to add to what I was about to say. “I wouldn’t hold it up as an example of much, but it looks like a skunk to me.”
“Oh,” he said.
It was spine-chilling to think we might have just missed Skunk catching up to us, or that he was out there now looking for us. I guess he saw Uncle Gene and Constable Sy as standing in the way of his progress, trying to do what he had been hired to do, so he had taken them out. Or maybe he thought they had the money, or knew where it was. Whatever the reason, if we had been here when he came, we’d have been tortured, and no doubt we’d have given up the goods, as well as our lives. Course, if he hadn’t come, and the reverend hadn’t showed up with that board, the same thing could have come about with Constable Sy and Gene before he got there. I wondered by how many minutes we had missed Skunk showing up.