Edge of Dark Water

11

Now, there’s no use going into all of it, but what I will say is it’s a wonder we didn’t end up being caught. I guess we didn’t because it was late and we didn’t see anybody but a couple of dogs. They came out to smell the dead meat and Jinx threw rocks at them and ran them off.

We took turns pushing the wheelbarrow, and it wasn’t no real chore, because what was left of May Lynn seemed as light as a new loaf of bread, without the freshness. The night was clear and the wheelbarrow squeaked a little. Her stench made us push the barrow along quite smartly.

Terry guided us to the back of his stepdad’s brick company. We stopped under a window, and me and Jinx made a cradle with our hands, and Terry stepped up on it and pushed at the window till it come up. He wriggled inside, and in a moment the back door opened to let us in. I pushed the wheelbarrow through the door.

I guided the barrow between rows of stacked bricks, and finally we came to a spot along the wall with a dozen brick beehive kilns. They all had metal doors on them, and there were some handles on the doors-wooden ones in metal slots-and on the wall between each door was a dial.

Terry fumbled a match out of his pocket and lit it to a twist of paper that had been lying on the floor. He turned one of the dials, opened a metal door. There was a hiss like a surprised possum. It was gas shooting up from a grate on the bottom of the kiln. Terry stuck the flaming paper through the grate, touched a spot inside, and the hissing turned to a whoosh; the heat from it nearly singed my eyebrows. The fire rose up and licked out with blue and yellow tongues, and in an instant, I was sweating.

“We got to wait a little bit,” Terry said, and closed the door.

There were some stacks of bricks, and we used them to sit on.

“It’ll have to heat to a very high temperature,” Terry said. “When it does, she’ll burn hot and rapidly. Her body will turn to ash, bones and all.”

I don’t know how long we waited there, but I know I was nervous the whole time. I kept expecting the constable and those mean old former kin of mine to burst in on us, but they didn’t.

Finally, Terry stood up and pulled on his gloves, which he had stuck in his belt, and opened the door; the flame inside was twisting and rolling. Using gloves and the shovels, we lifted the tarp with May Lynn’s body folded inside it, along with the broken-off arm and the dark part we didn’t know, out of the wheelbarrow. Together we carried the tarp to the open beehive, stuck the corpse in at the feet, and shoved. The flames went to work immediately. They licked at the tarp like they was hungry. Terry slammed the door. He looked at us. His face was popped up with sweat balls from the fire, and he looked like he was barely there with us.

“Someone ought to say something,” he said.

“I’m sorry it’s so hot in there,” Jinx said.

“Something else.”

“Goodbye, May Lynn,” I said. “You’ve been a good friend up until we didn’t see you much anymore, and maybe you had your reasons for that. And we thank you for the map and the stolen money, which has shown us a way to go. I hope you wasn’t hurt too long before you died. I hope it was quick.”

“I hope so, too,” Terry said, and made a choking sound. “You’re going to Hollywood, May Lynn.”

We pushed the wheelbarrow back to the graveyard and covered up May Lynn’s grave with the shovels. We loaded our supplies on the wheelbarrow, along with the shovels, and left. The graveyard was on the way to the river bottoms, so it had been best to leave the stuff there, and Terry, on one of his early trips, had put the bag of money in a lard bucket and buried it near May Lynn’s grave. He dug it up and we loaded it and the rest of the stuff on the wheelbarrow, right next to a small sealed cardboard box we had taken from the brick company and put May Lynn’s ashes in.

We headed out, and when we got into the woods, close to where our boat was, which was also close to where Mama was, I laid it on them.

“Mama not only told me about Cletus coming to the house, she’s going with us.”

“Say what?” Jinx said.

By that time, we were coming down a little rise, and they could see Mama sitting there in the moonlight on the log. She turned and looked at us and our squeaking wheelbarrow.

“Wasn’t you the one talking about a yellow dog and a goat?” Jinx said.

“She ain’t neither,” I said.

“No,” she said. “But there sure is a right smart lot of us now.”

After we loaded the boat and pushed the wheelbarrow off into the Sabine, Terry cut three long poles with a hatchet he had in his bag. We stretched the poles across the boat so that they stuck out long on either end, then we got in and Jinx held them in place while me and Terry paddled downriver to the raft. Mama used the can to bail out water.

“It took you a while,” she said. “I thought you had gone on without me.”

“We had to burn May Lynn up,” I said.

“You actually did that?” she said.

“In a brick dryer,” Terry said.

“Yeah,” Jinx said. “We got her somewhere in a box.”

“Oh my,” Mama said.

When we come to the raft, or barge, if you prefer, we loaded onto it. It was a good thing, too, cause we had been tight in the boat, and the water was coming through the bottom worse than ever, even with Mama bailing fast as a spinning windmill in a high wind. We took the paddles and pushed the boat away from the raft; it was already taking on heavy water by the time it drifted away from us.

After we was good and fixed, Terry got his hatchet and went to cutting the rope that held our ride to the tree. When it come loose, the raft turned sideways a little, then straightened itself and started to move forward in the slow but steady current of the river.

I looked back at the boat we had left behind us. It was tilting up slightly at one end, but mostly it was just low in the water. It got lower as I watched, and I’m sure within a few moments I would have seen it go down. But I never got the chance. The raft shifted a little as the river bent around a sandbar, and we had to go to work with our poles to guide it through the shallows. Then the river carried us beyond the bar and around a bend, and out of sight of the sinking boat.