Free The Bottoms by Joe R. Lansdale

hung in the sky next to a dark cloud.
    The house looked a lot nicer than our place. I guessed doctoring, even for a colored doctor, wasn’t such a bad way to make a living.
    “Jes ’scuse me for a moment so I can see I can find him,” the lady said, and went away.
    Daddy was looking the place over too, and I saw something move in his throat, a sadness cross over his face, then the lady came back and said: “Doctor Tinn’s out back. He’s waitin’ on you, Constable. This yo boy?”
    Daddy said I was.
    “Ain’t he just the best-lookin’ little snapper. How’re you, Little Man?”
    That was the same thing Miss Maggie called me, Little Man. “Fine, ma’am.”
    “Oh, and he’s got such good manners. Come on back, will y’all?”
    She led us through the back door and down some steps. There was a clean white building out back of the house, and we went inside. We stood in a stark white room with a large desk and smelled some kind of pine oil disinfectant. There was a maple wood chair behind it with a suit coat draped over it. There were some wooden file cabinets, another shelf of books, this one half the size of the one in the house, and a row ofsturdy chairs. There was a painting similar to the one in the house on the wall. It was of a riverbank, rich with dark soil and shadowed by trees, and between the trees a long thin shadow over the river.
    The lady called out, “Doctor Tinn.”
    A door opened and out came a large colored man, older than Daddy, wiping his hands on a towel. He wore black suit pants, a white shirt, and a black tie. “Mister Constable,” he said. But he didn’t offer to shake hands. You didn’t see that much, a colored man and a white man shaking hands.
    Daddy stuck out his hand, and Dr. Tinn, surprised, slung the towel over his shoulder, and they shook.
    “I suppose you know why I’m here?” Daddy said.
    “I do,” Dr. Tinn said.
    Standing next to him, I realized just how large Dr. Tinn was. He must have been six four, and very wide-shouldered. He had his hair cut short and had a mustache faint as the edge of a straight razor. You had to really pay attention to see he had it.
    “I see y’all met my wife,” Dr. Tinn said.
    “Well, not formally,” Daddy said.
    “This here’s Mrs. Tinn,” Dr. Tinn said.
    Mrs. Tinn smiled and went away.
    Daddy and Mama called each other by their first names, but it wasn’t unusual then for husband and wife to use formal address to one another, at least in front of folks. Still, since it wasn’t something I was accustomed to, it seemed odd to me.
    “Have you looked at the body?” Daddy asked.
    “No. I was waitin’ on you. I thought instead of totin’ her, we’d go on over to the icehouse for a look. Do what we gonna do there. I got some things I need, then we’ll go. And I’ll need you to tell me where the body was found. Give me some of the background.”
    “All right,” Daddy said.
    Dr. Tinn paused. “What about the boy?”
    “He’s gonna be on his own for a while,” Daddy said.
    My heart sunk.
    “Well then,” Doc Tinn said, taking his dark suit coat off the back of the chair. “Let’s go.”

6

    T he icehouse was a big worn-out-looking barn of a place with peeling paint that had once been white but was now gray. It had a narrow front porch of new lumber, the only new lumber on the building.
    I knew that inside the icehouse would be lined with sawdust. Big blocks of ice would be stacked about. There would be a table for cutting up slabs of ice with a saw, and a scale to weigh it, and a chute to send it down into wagon or truck beds. The ice would be so cold if you put your hand on it, it would burn you, and cause the flesh to stick.
    And there was the body. The body I’d found.
    As we came to the icehouse, Daddy said, “I’ll be damned.”
    Sitting on the porch, dressed in a dusty white suit with mud splashed on his shoes and pants legs, fanning himself with his straw hat, was Doc Stephenson.
    There was a flat bottle of dark