Whoever gets there first uses it as a place to picnic, fish, and swim. At night, kids skip the shorts and skinny-dip there. It’s said there’s been a few babies made there on blankets when the night is deep and the water is smooth and the moon is shining a silvery love light. And I don’t doubt it.
There have been a lot of drownings around the barge, and there’s been talk about setting fire to it so folks won’t go out on it. But the thing is, people will always go in the water, and they’ll always drown, and they don’t need a barge to do it. Some even do it on purpose, something May Lynn’s mother proved without a barge. As for wearing a shirt over your head, you can do it or not-it’s not expected.
We paddled and bailed our boat on down the river until we came to the barge. There was no one there, only the shade.
We climbed out of the boat onto the barge and pulled the boat up behind us. It was tough work, but we did it. Under the shade of the leafy limb we sat down, and Terry opened the diary. There were a number of pages torn out of it, and doodles in the margins. Terry started reading it aloud. It wasn’t written the way she talked, but instead she had tried to make it proper. It made me sad. It had some truth to it, but it also had a lot of things that might not have happened-things that May Lynn felt certain would occur someday. Like going to Hollywood and being discovered in some soda shop or such, and then becoming a big star. She told how this had happened, when I knew it hadn’t. She hadn’t never got out of East Texas, let alone to Hollywood.
She talked about us in passing, like you might point out you seen a redbird the other day. I won’t kid you, that bothered me a little. I figured we was worth more than a spotty mention. Here we was going to her funeral and planning on burning her up and taking her out to Hollywood, and we didn’t get no more consideration than that. I felt the story of her life, even with lies, might have given us a bigger role.
The shadow was spreading wider by the time Terry came to the part in the diary that made our plans, everything we had talked about, real. It was a part that caused me to cry inside and made me scared a little, though I can’t tell you exactly why. It was the part that sealed the deal about us going to Hollywood. It was the part that would change our lives and make it so nothing would ever be the same again.
It was a page or two about her brother, and there was a photograph of her stuffed inside the diary. It was a good one, but she had ways about her a photograph couldn’t hold; even in that old faded flower dress she looked like a million bucks. And there was another thing inside of the diary, a little map put down on thin paper. This map, along with things we read in the diary, let us know that her brother, who we knew to be a thief, was a bigger thief than we thought; though I guess she could have made the whole thing up, like some of the other stuff she had written down.
May Lynn wrote about her brother: “This isn’t something I should put down, because it is a scandal to the family.” But she was doing it anyway, because it was her diary, she said, and she could write what she wanted. There was no one to see it but her and the lamplight.
Her take on Jake’s theft wasn’t what I expected. She said Jake gave her some of the money he stole. Her daddy got some of it, too, and that she was always glad to see Jake coming, not only because she loved her brother, but she liked that he had money. She thought soon he’d give her more than just enough for perfume and a picture show; maybe enough for some new clothes and a bus ticket to Hollywood.
The diary said Jake had mostly centered his attentions on service stations and little stores until he took in a partner named Warren Cain, and because of that he got his courage up. They came to a little town that had a bank, and he and Cain went in there and robbed it at pistol point, jumped in the car and drove off, and came here to the river bottoms to hide away. There wasn’t any more mention of Warren Cain, but a few pages later, May Lynn wrote how before Jake got the chest sickness and died, he buried all the money he stole cause her daddy kept sniffing around, trying to lay his hands on it, and Jake knew he’d drink it up, quicker than a cat can jump.
“Jake gave me a map,” she wrote,
so I could find the money. He may just be out of his head and none of what he says is true, and the money may be all gone. And what he says about how I need to be careful may not be anything to worry about. I asked what it was I should be careful of, and he said getting killed. When I asked by what, or who, he began to roll his eyes up in his head, as if something might be standing on the ceiling. I guess it was. I guess it was the Angel of Death that he saw, because it wasn’t more than a minute after he done that, that his eyes glazed over and I realized he had quit breathing and was gone on.
If the money really is there, I’m going to try and find it and go off to Hollywood to get my start. I think God must want me to have this money, or he would not have let my brother rob banks and bury it and then die. I thank God left this money for me.
When Terry quit reading, he said, “That is an interesting conclusion.”
“Sounds to me like stealing,” I said. “And if God left her the money, then he’s a thief, too.”
“It sounds to me like a way to get out of this hellhole,” Jinx said. “And though I ain’t no thief under normal situations, I knew where that money was, I’d be on it like stink on a dead possum.”
“We can follow the map,” Terry said.
“What if it’s just one of her tales?” I said. “The diary is full of them. And it’s even missing pages, for some reason.”
“I presume that was her way of editing it,” Terry said. “Writing things about yourself and putting them in a diary can even be difficult. There’s always some part of you, I suppose, that fears someone will see it.”
“Like three friends who stole it from her house,” Jinx said.
“Like that,” Terry said. “I think a lot of this is more like a novel, or a long short story. Maybe she started out to write a diary and there just wasn’t enough to talk about that was interesting.”
It certainly had in it all manner of nonsense about how she had been writing big movie stars and they had been writing her back, and how she had sent a picture of herself in and a producer liked the way she looked and wanted her to come on out. All of that was just foolishness, and nothing else, but some of it I knew to be true. Some of it was about things I knew had happened.
“Well, now,” Terry said, “we know Jake was a robber, isn’t that correct? And she has written down a detailed map that she said she got from her brother on his deathbed, so-”