Free The Bottoms by Joe R. Lansdale Page A

liquid on the porch beside him, and when he saw Daddy he took a swig of it and put it down. Doc Stephenson had a mouth that looked as if it did not want to open wide, lest tacks and nails fall out. His eyes madeyou uncomfortable, like they were looking for a place to stick a knife.
    “What’s he doin’ here?” Daddy asked Dr. Tinn.
    “Can’t say as I know, suh,” Dr. Tinn said.
    “You don’t need to sir me,” Daddy said. “I won’t sir you, you don’t sir me.”
    “Yes suh … Very well, Constable.”
    At that moment, Doc Taylor came walking toward the icehouse. He was carrying a Dr Pepper and some sort of candy from Pappy’s place. He looked sharp in his clothes, which were a little more special than we were used to seeing. Very-well-made slacks, the cuffs of which he had somehow managed to keep clear of mud, though with the shoes he had not succeeded. He wore a clean white shirt that was so soft-looking it seemed to be made of angel wings. He had on a thin black tie that glistened like the wet back of a water snake, and his soft black felt hat was cocked at a jaunty angle that made him look more like he was going to a dance than to examine a mutilated body. I wondered if he had on his chain with the dented coin attached.
    “That there’s Doc Taylor,” Daddy said to Doc Tinn. “He’s what I think they call an intern. He’s with Stephenson ’cause he’s thinkin’ about retirin’, and he thought he’d get to know folks so he could take his place. He’s a little dandy, but he seems all right to me.”
    “I doubt he wants to know us folks,” Doc Tinn said.
    “I suppose you’re right,” Daddy said. “Let’s get this over with, then.”
    Daddy turned to me, gave me a pat on the head, said, “See you later, Harry.”
    Dejected, I wandered up the street a ways, turned, looked back at the icehouse, watched Daddy and Doc Tinn go inside with Doc Stephenson.
    It was confusing to me. I had heard Daddy say the doctordidn’t want anything to do with the body because it was colored, but here he was, away from his office, down in colored town for a looksee. And he had Doc Taylor with him.
    I was thinking on all this when I heard a squeaking behind me, turned to see an ancient, legless, colored man in a cart covered by a willow stick and tarp roof, drawn by a big glossy white hog fastened up in a leather harness. The old man was bald and his scalp was wrinkled like a leather bag that had been wadded up and smoothed out by hand. He could have hidden a pencil in the wrinkles on his face. There wasn’t a tooth in his head. He looked much older than Miss Maggie. In fact, she was a girl compared to him.
    He carried a thin green willow stick he was using to tap the hog on the hind quarters. The hog was grunting, trundling along at a pretty good gate. Walking beside the old man and his cart were two boys about my age, one colored, one white. Their clothes were even more worn-looking than mine. The colored boy’s pants were gone at the knee and there wasn’t any attempt there to hold patches. The white kid’s pants were gone at one knee, and there was a cotton sack patch there that had been multidyed by life, most likely the dye consisting of grass stains, clay roads, dirty riverbanks, and berry stains.
    I noticed folks that had been standing around were edging toward the icehouse, congregating outside of it like a bunch of blackbirds on a limb. I realized then the body in the icehouse wasn’t much of a secret.
    The old man in the hog-drawn cart pulled up beside me. He looked at me with his rheumy eyes and opened his toothless mouth to say: “How’re you, little white boy?”
    “I’m fine, sir.”
    The truth of the matter was he scared me. I had never seen anyone that looked that old, and certainly no one in that circumstance, minus legs and drawn about in a cart by a hog.
    The white boy who had been walking along with him said, “I’m Richard Dale. I live on down the bottoms.”
    Richard Dale was a