The Thicket by Joe R. Lansdale

Author:Joe R. Lansdale [Lansdale, Joe R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316248754
Publisher: Hachette Book Group USA
Published: 2013-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

After the papers were filled out, coffee was made, but no matter how hard I tried to get them into a mode of haste, nothing came of it. I said, “We should move on. Time is wasting and my sister is with them, and maybe not doing well.”

“If they’ve already gotten the cherry from the box,” said the sheriff, “then she is as well off as she is going to be.”

“What the heck does that mean?” I said.

“If they’ve been at her,” the sheriff said, “then they’ve had their fun, and if they don’t want her anymore she’ll be found dead as that boy back there you said Hog was nosing at. But if they liked her well enough and she didn’t scratch out no one’s eye, then they probably kept her. Which means she’s alive and with them.”

“They could change their minds,” I said. “They could decide to kill her now or tomorrow, so we ought to get.”

“Since you got information where they’re going, we got just as much of a chance of finding her tomorrow as today.”

“She’s gonna do laundry,” Fatty said.

He was standing up now, looking through the bars.

“Laundry?” I said.

“We first had an old woman done it,” he said. “Someone’s mother that we passed around between washings, but one night she run off, so we got this part-Indian gal, but she tried to stick Cut Throat with a butcher knife, and he stove her head in with a stick of firewood. That caused the laundry to pile up. He don’t like doing laundry, likes to have a woman do it. You better hope, son, your sister knows how to do laundry, cause if she don’t, once they get her to the Thicket, she ain’t gonna last any longer than it takes for a tear to dry.”

“Don’t pay him no mind,” Eustace said. “He was so smart and knew everything, he wouldn’t be in that goddamn jail having been pistol-whipped by a midget. Now, you think on that.”

The sheriff made plans with Harlis to see someone was sent for the boy’s body, then he said he was going to throw some things together and off we could go. A short while later Eustace took the dead chickens out of his saddlebag and fed them to Hog, who gobbled them up as easily as a toothless man might eat a wet biscuit.

“I didn’t want them to waste, and I figured he’s hungry as us,” Eustace said. “I was going to fry them up for us tonight, but I reckon in all this heat they might be on the spoiled side. I had an uncle ate a chicken that had gone a little ripe, and he said he had a fever and felt like he was trying to shit an anvil for a week. A hog, though, if there’s enough gravy on it, can eat an anvil. Chickens don’t need no gravy.”

We watched Hog eat and cough feathers while Shorty and the others finished getting their stuff together—all but Jimmie Sue, who stood with us and watched the eating of the chickens.

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