Edge of Dark Water (16 page)

W
e sailed around the tip of that sandbar even as Skunk was running down it trying to reach us. Terry was taking on something terrible, yelling out loud, and in another flash of lightning I saw why that was. That hatchet Skunk had been carrying was now sticking in our log, right near his hand. It was just a glimpse in that brief light, but I saw right away that the tip of Terry’s finger on the hand clutching the log was chopped off clean and spurting blood. That damn Skunk had thrown the hatchet at him.

There wasn’t no time to worry about such things, though, and we kept kicking and waving in the water with our free arms. When I glanced back, I saw Skunk going into the water. His head bobbed like a big fishing cork. That derby hat seemed stuck to his head; a birthmark couldn’t have been on him any tighter.

Water got deeper and wider and swifter, and pretty soon we were really moving along—so fast I thought I was going to lose my grip. Finally I had to use both hands to clutch the log, and so did Terry. We were still kicking at the water, but mostly now the river and rain was hauling us along lickety-split.

I peeked back, expecting to see Skunk right behind me, but I couldn’t see him anymore. I didn’t know if the water had taken him under or if he had given up and swam for shore. Maybe he was out there and I just couldn’t see him, because there was not only the dark but there was all manner of limbs and logs and such blasting along on the river’s swift current.

I kept hoping the rain would quit, but it didn’t. It wasn’t a running rain by any measure; it was what Mama always called a deluge and what Jinx described as being like a cow pissing on a flat rock.

The lightning kept on sizzling across the sky, and there was a time when it shot a bolt out of the blackness and hit a tree by the riverbank, blazed it up like a torch. The light from it threw itself across the water and made the current look like a river of blood. I could feel the heat from the fire all the way out to where we was. I could also see something else. A hump in the water near the shore, and then the hump come up, and went back down, diving and fighting the current, and then I saw that hump reach the bank and glide up it, and flow into the woods like a shadow. I couldn’t make it out good, but I figured it was Skunk. How he had swum in that swirling mess and been able to make it to shore was beyond me. I thought maybe my eyes was playing tricks on me and what I had seen was a beaver, made to look larger by the licking flames of the lightning-lit tree.

The river carried us on. The bag strapped on my back was heavy with water. If I could have taken the time to let loose of the log with my other hand, I might well have got my pocketknife from my overalls and cut myself free of it. That wet bag was like someone was riding on my back, tugging me down.

Finally the storm slowed enough and cleared enough that there was a little heavenly light, and I recognized that we had been in that place before, and that the raft should be parked up on a sandbar not too far away.

Sure enough, we hadn’t gone along much further when I saw it. It wasn’t in the same place exactly, as the water had gotten high enough to have pressed it off the bar and against the bank. In fact, the sandbar wasn’t there no more. It was either washed away or underwater, or a little of both.

Terry and me quit drifting with the flow of the river, and started kicking and flailing our free arms. It was a hell of a battle, and we couldn’t make our log do what we wanted. We sailed right on by the raft. There wasn’t anyone standing or sitting on it, and I hoped they was inside the hut, which was a reasonable thought. But it also occurred to me they could have been washed off and drowned. Then I told myself if that was true, how come the raft was tied to a big tree root at the bank? Someone had to do that, and that meant someone had to be alive when the raft was banged up to shore. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t have been carried off later by a rush of water. All these thoughts was pounding around in my head like they was wearing army boots. I was trying to sort them out when we finally got the log veered and was close enough to shore to let loose of it and swim for it. The last I seen of our log and the hatchet stuck up in it, it was sailing away, blending with the rest of the branches and twigs that had come loose and were floating in the water.

The bag had been heavy before, but now, without the log for support, it almost dragged me under. Once again, I wanted to be shed of it, but swimming for my life didn’t allow it.

Eventually we got to a spot on the bank where it wasn’t high, and we got hold of some roots sticking out, and just clung there for a time trying to get our breath and strength back. Right then I felt like a horse that had been rode hard and put up wet without its oats.

After a time, I crawled up on the bank, the wet bag damn near pulling me back in the water. When I got up there, I stuck out a hand and helped Terry up. The hand he gave me was the cut one, and I could feel his warm blood on my flesh as I yanked him onto shore. We both lay there on our backs with the rain coming down on us, not moving, not able to think for a long while. Eventually, we got up and I found my pocketknife and cut the bags off of us. We paused to get the flashlight out of Terry’s bag. It was wet, but by unscrewing it and taking out the batteries and shaking out the water, putting it together again, we was able to make it work. We used it to check the contents of our haul. Everything in the way of food I had in the bag, except the canned goods, was ruined. The lard bucket looked to be sealed as tight as before. I took it out and used my knife to pry off the lid. It was dry inside, and the jar was still intact, wrapped as it was in an old hand towel. I got it out and held it up and looked at it. It was May Lynn’s ashes, and I felt then that the weight that had been on my back might well have been her ghost, if a ghost could be heavy as a crate of bricks.

Terry checked his can, and the money was safe inside the jar. We put the jars back in the cans and sealed them. I had a sudden thought, and checked for the pistol around my neck, but it was gone. It had come loose and was now at the bottom of the river.

We shouldn’t have done it, but I guess we was worn out from lugging those wet sacks, so we carried our cans by their handles and went back along the bank to find the raft, and find it we did. The bank was a little higher up than where we had come ashore, but it wasn’t so high we couldn’t drop down on the raft from above.

When we did, Jinx come out of the hut on all fours with a boat paddle in her hands. She started yelling about how she was going to come upside our head with that thing. Then she saw it was us.

“Dang it,” she said. “You dropping down on the raft like that, I thought you was Constable Sy. I damn near browned my pants.”

“He ain’t going to be coming,” I said.

“Dead,” Terry said, with his wounded hand clutched up against his chest.

“How’d he get dead?” Jinx said.

Before we could answer, I saw Mama poke her head out of the hut.

“I been worried sick,” she said.

“We’re all right,” I said.

“Did you say Constable Sy was dead?” Mama asked, keeping herself mostly inside the hut, away from the rain.

“He is,” I said. “But we didn’t do it. And we got to heave off and go, cause someone’s coming after us that might be worse than Constable Sy.”

“Who’s coming?” Jinx said.

“Skunk,” Terry said. “You were correct in your assumptions about him being real. He’s not only real, we’ve seen him and he’s seen us, and—”

Terry held out his hand.

“What in the world?” Mama said from the confines of the hut.

“He chopped off my finger with a throw of a hatchet,” Terry said. “Had I not chosen in that moment to turn my head and adjust my body slightly, I would have taken that hatchet to the skull.”

Then Terry went to his knees, settled there for a moment, carefully placing his lard can full of money beside him, and then he fell flat on his face.

“Well,” Jinx said, looking down at Terry. “I had this whole brave story I was going to tell. About how the rain come and washed away the boat paddle that was stuck up in the sandbar, then washed away the bar. How we nearly got swamped, and fought the rain to get tied off. But with there being a Skunk, as I said there was, and you two done seen him, and Terry coming in here with part of his finger chopped off, falling out like that, it sort of takes away from it. I’ll just say we had a hard time of it.”

Mama had come out of the hut now, and she and me rolled Terry over and looked at his finger. It was just the tip of it cut off, but he had lost some blood, and that combined with the savage nature of our adventure had worn him out.

I didn’t feel so spry myself. I put my can down, and Mama and Jinx and me got Terry pulled inside the hut. It was tight in there, and we didn’t go in with him, just sort of pushed him inside, next to the reverend, who I could see was stretched out on his back, not moving.

I said, “Is he dead?”

“No,” Mama said. “He’s where the dead go before they let go of their body.”

Mama crawled inside the hut and got some rags out of one of the bags that was up in there, and went to tying off Terry’s finger. Terry was awake now, but he wasn’t frisky.

I got the cans and took those and put them inside the hut, back behind the reverend. Mama was still tying up Terry’s hand. She looked at the cans, said, “I suppose that’s May Lynn and the money.”

“Yep,” I said. “And so far we’ve made sure not to mix them.”

I crawled out then, and me and Jinx got the raft untied from the bank. Jinx had been smart enough to tie the rafting poles down with twine on the side of the raft, and now we cut them loose and took them and pushed off into the river.

The rain was still coming, but it was coming less and less now. The river was not near as brisk as it was before. When we got pushed off good, Jinx took to the rudder and I walked from side to side on the raft, poling it as much as I could until the pole didn’t touch bottom. It was hard to see what was coming, but we went along well until light came. I first saw it through the trees, a sweet pink glow, and then a bright-red warm apple swelling up to fill the sky.

It was a good thing to see, that light, cause things look and seem better in the light, even if that ain’t always the truth. But, like Jinx once said to me, “At least when it ain’t dark you got a better chance of seeing what’s sneaking up on you.”

The sky may have been lighter, but the river was near dark as sin and stuffed with limbs and leaves. I saw a dead possum float by, and a snake that had somehow died in the storm. The air smelled full of the earth. Eventually the sun was up high enough that the water seemed less coffeelike and more like milk with chocolate in it. Birds started chirping and flying between trees. The day warmed and mostly dried my damp clothes.

I took my turn at the rudder, and Jinx came to sit up front, waiting for when she might need to use the pole or the paddle to guide the raft. Mama came out of the hut with her bag and pulled it open and took out some dried meat I hadn’t known was in there. She gave us some of it. The meat was damp where the sack had got wet and the moisture had bled through; it was pretty swell nonetheless. We didn’t have any fresh water, though, and right then I would have kicked a bear in the teeth for some.

Terry finally crawled out of the hut and came over and had some of the dried meat.

“You all right?” I said.

“I am tolerable,” he said, holding up his bandaged hand.

“The reverend moving in there?” I asked.

“He farted once,” Terry said, “but except for that physical exclamation, he’s as quiet as the grave.”

“I fear he won’t live,” Mama said.

“He ain’t had it no worse than the rest of us,” Jinx said.

I, of course, knew what had happened to the reverend, and knew all that had happened since then had happened on top of how he felt about himself. It was too much for him. It was like one too many bricks had been piled on him and that last one had broken him down. I didn’t mention this, because nobody knew I had overheard his business, and I didn’t think it was time to bring it up.

The river was still flowing well, and the sun was drying my clothes. I was beginning to feel right positive. I had begun to think things were going to shake out all right, and that we were away from Skunk and would soon be someplace where he couldn’t follow.

I was starting to think about the money again, and what I could do with it. I thought about May Lynn’s ashes as well, though there was a part of me that was still mad because I felt those damn ashes in that can had tried to drown me, and I think I was jealous of her, even in death.

Now the river tapered, and I began to hear this rumbling noise. It was so loud I thought maybe it was thunder again, and that we were in for another rain. But when I looked at the sky it was bright and blue as could be, and the only clouds up there were fluffy white, without so much as a shadow of rain.

“What’s that?” I asked Terry, who was standing next to me.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“It’s the river,” Jinx called from her place at the rudder.