“Didn’t Zendo say turn left?” Sunset said.
“Way I remember it,” Hillbilly said.
“Yeah,” Clyde said. “That’s how you go. It’s coming back to me.”
They walked along for a distance, and soon there was a large clearing that looked to have been worked with machetes, and just beyond that was a place of erected stones. There were oak trees in the cemetery with moss and vines growing up the sides, dripping off their limbs. There was one dogwood in the cemetery and some honeysuckle, and the aroma of the honeysuckle was strong and bees were buzzing the flowers on the tree.
Some of the graves ran right up to the trees, and you could see where roots had lifted the stones and made them sag. But it was a well-cared-for place and there were fresh flowers on many of the graves and voodoo beads and pieces of bright-colored glass on some of the others. There were even a few fruit jars with liquid in them.
“What’s in them fruit jars?” Hillbilly asked.
“Home liquor sometimes,” Clyde said. “They bring it out for the dead.”
“That’s silly,” Hillbilly said, “and a waste of liquor.”
Karen laughed at that.
Hillbilly grinned at Karen. “Me and Karen could drink that instead of it going to waste, couldn’t we, kid?”
Karen laughed again.
Sunset said, “Karen don’t drink.”
“Course not,” Hillbilly said. “Just making a joke.”
Finally Sunset found a grave with a wooden cross over it. The cross was made of cheap lumber and two nails. Next to it were fragments of busted pottery.Written on the cross was: BABY.
“Pete did this,” Sunset said. “I recognize the way he carved the B’s into that cross. It’s like his writing, way he makes his B’s. He must have busted up the pot to get the baby out, or maybe it got busted later on by someone else.”
“Daddy wasn’t so bad,” Karen said. “See how he done with the baby and all.”
Hillbilly swatted a mosquito. “Long walk down here for nothing, you ask me.”
“We could give the baby a name,” Clyde said. “We could write it on the cross. We could call it something like Snooks.”
“No, we couldn’t,” Sunset said. “And besides. We don’t know if it was male or female.”
“I still like Snooks,” Clyde said. “It works either way. Girl or boy. You like Snooks, Hillbilly?”
“No,” Hillbilly said.
“Hell, you got a name like Hillbilly,” Clyde said. “What’s wrong with Snooks?”
“Hillbilly’s a nickname. And don’t ask my real one, cause I don’t tell it. What did we learn here, Sunset? What was this trip all about?”
“Don’t rightly know,” Sunset said. “Let’s go back.”
10
That night, before Sunset and Karen went to bed, it came a rain not too unlike the one that pissed on Noah’s ark, but it didn’t last long. Just wetted up the place, churned the creeks, made them rise, then moved on. The tent had been set up on top of the flooring of the old house, so they didn’t get wet, but they could feel it against the floorboards, begging to come in.
The rain cooled off things, and when she and Karen lay down that night to sleep, it was comfortable and there were no mosquitoes.
Sunset lay in bed listening to the rain move south with a vengeance, thinking about the baby in the jar coated in oil, about how Pete had gone to the trouble to bury it and carve the word BABY on the cross.
It was a kind gesture.
And not like him at all. Especially if he thought the baby might be colored.
It was a side of Pete she hadn’t known existed, and it was a side of him she wished she had known. It was also a side of him that confused her and of which she was suspicious.
Later on she heard the tent flap being thrown back. She sat up in bed and saw a man’s shape standing there. He pushed the flap back farther and moonlight spilled in over him. It was Pete. Grave dirt was dropping off of his body and he looked mad enough to pee vinegar.
He pointed his finger at Sunset and opened his mouth to speak. Dirt fell out. Then he screamed.
Sunset sat up in bed.
She looked at the tent flap.
It was closed and tied. Outside she could hear crickets and frogs. The rain had passed. She had fallen asleep thinking she was awake.
Suddenly, once again, there was a scream.
It wasn’t Pete. It was a panther, roaming the bottomland. They could scream like a woman. The sound of the panther had awakened her, not a dead Pete.
She looked over at Karen.
Still asleep. She gently pulled the covers up to Karen’s neck.
“I love you,” she said softly.
Lying down, she dozed uneasily, dreamed again. But she knew it was a dream this time, and it wasn’t so bad. It was a dream about her putting the pistol to Pete’s head, pulling the trigger, and in her dream the sound of the gun was sharp and sweet and it cut through her thoughts like a bright light and the light opened a gap somewhere down deep in the dark insides of her, and out of that gap came all the answers to questions long asked, and in that moment, that fine and wonderful moment, she knew things.
She came awake.
“Damn,” she said. Thought: Almost had the answers. They were about to be revealed, all the goddamn perplexities of the universe, and I had to wake up.
The tent flap moved.
She reached over and pulled the gun from the holster where it lay on the floor and pointed it.
It was the black-and-white dog. It had stuck its head under the tent flap. It was soaking wet.
“Easy, boy,” she said, but the dog bolted at the sound of her voice.
She put the gun away, lay there waiting to see if the dog would return, but it didn’t.
Next morning, before daybreak, to the sound of birds singing loud in the trees and somewhere an agitated squirrel fussing, Karen got up along with Sunset. Karen started a fire in the woodstove and cooked a breakfast of eggs and toasted some bread on top of the burner for the both of them.
Sunset eyed all this suspiciously. It was the first time in days Karen had shown interest in doing anything.
Karen walked buckets of water from the water pump and heated them in a larger bucket on the stove and poured the hot water into a number ten washtub. By the time she had enough buckets to fill the tub, much of the water had cooled, but it was still warm enough for a bath with minted lye soap and special attention to her hair.
When Karen finished, Sunset went through the same ritual, washing her hair and combing it out. As Sunset dressed in her skirt and shirt, she saw that Karen was already dressed and had put her hair up in a kind of bun. She had on one of the few good dresses she owned, one her grandmother gave her before they had moved into the tent, and she had on her only good pair of shoes.