The Bottoms by Joe R. Lansdale Read Free Book Online Page B

a little somethin’ to eat and such, and people hear about this fella travelin’ around with a fiddle, playin’ a tune or two for his dinner, but he ain’t no good on the fiddle. No good at all. So folks that hear this, they don’t figure on it being Dandy, ’cause Dandy, he can play good as a pig can eat. But it’s Dandy.”
    “How come he can’t play?”
    “Comin’ to that. You jumpin’ ahead.”
    “Sorry, Miss Maggie.”
    “Where this Travelin’ Man and his fiddle go, they’s womens start turnin’ up dead. You see, he got a bitter thing in him now. He always did want the womens to like him, but now heain’t got that goin’ for him ’cause he ain’t got no fiddlin’ to draw them in, and it’s boilin’ him inside. Or, that’s how I figure on it. Ain’t no one really knows. But this is certain, for three years he wandered all over East Texas killin’ colored womens and girls, and to the white law it don’t mean a thing.
    “But he finally gets him a little white girl, mistreats and kills her. Kluxers get on his tail, ’cause it ain’t just about niggers killin’ niggers anymore, you see. And he gettin’ bolder and bolder, and he kills a white woman over near them honky-tonks in Gladewater, and the Klan run him down and cut him where a man don’t want to be cut, tar and feather him, hang ’im and light him on fire. And that’s the end of Dandy on this here earth, and it one of the few times the Klan do us all a favor.”
    I thought about that for a while. I said, “But why couldn’t he play the fiddle no more? If the devil gave him the power, wouldn’t he be able to play?”
    “I done some thinkin’ on that. What I figure is that ole pumpkin head give him that fiddle and say you can play good on this here fiddle, that’s exactly what he meant. That fiddle. When he smashed it up, and took a dead man’s fiddle, a man learned to play it by hard work and not no pee in a bottle and a trip to the crossroads, he couldn’t play no mo’. You see?”
    I did. But I still had questions. “If you didn’t see the devil, or the devil’s man, how do you know he had a pumpkin head?”
    “I knowed how he looked ’cause there’s folks I know, includin’ cousins, seen the debil and know what he and all his men look like. They can look different ways too. Might not have a head like a pumpkin all the time. Might have horns. Might look like a banker or one of them polatickans, but I’m just figure’n on how he might have looked that night. I’m colorin’ the story some, but that don’t mean it ain’t true.”
    “And this woman me and Tom found, you think it’s someone sold his soul to the devil done that to her? A Travelin’ Man?”
    “If’n you ain’t sold your soul to the debil you wouldn’t do such a thing, Little Man. It could be the debil himself. Sometime he like to do his own work.”
    “What about the Goat Man?”
    “Little Man, I think the Goat Man might be the debil. I said he can look anyway he wants, and ain’t them goat horns and hoofs jes like the debil? If’n I was the debil, them bottoms is where I’d be a runnin’ ’cause they dark and wet and got all manner of thing in ’em. Let me gives you a word of smarts. You stay away from anything to do with what the debil likes, ’cause you get in with him he’ll trick on you. You hear?”
    “Yes ma’am.”
    “Now you need to run on. I got me some washboard’n to do.”
    “Yes ma’am. Thanks for the food.”
    “You welcome. Now you draw some water out of the well and water that ole hog of mine. And you come back and see me.”
    I went out, letting the screen door loose, not so that it would slam, but enough it would jar the flies that were on it.
    I went out to the well, dropped the bucket and cranked it up, poured from it into the totin’ bucket. I made several trips with the bucket to fill the hog’s tub with water.
    As I went away I remembered another time Miss Maggie told me about how flies are the