The Bottoms Read Online Free Page A

Moonlight didn’t change anything. I looked over my shoulder, into the darkness we had just left, and in the middle of the trail, covered in shadow, I could see it.
    Standing there.
    Watching.
    I didn’t say anything to Tom about it. Instead I said, “You take the shotgun now, and I’ll take Toby. Then I want you to run with everything you got to where the road is.”
    Tom, not being any dummy, and my eyes probably giving me away, turned and looked back in the shadows. She saw it too. It crossed into the woods. She turned, gave me Toby, took the shotgun, and took off like a scalded-ass ape.
    I ran after her, bouncing poor Toby, the stringed squirrels slapping against my legs. Toby whined and whimpered andyelped. The trail widened, the moonlight grew brighter. The red-clay road came up. We leaped onto it, looked back.
    Shadows and moonlight. Trees and the trail.
    Nothing was after us. We didn’t hear anything moving in the woods.
    “It okay now?” Tom asked.
    “Guess so. They say he can’t come as far as the road.”
    “What if he can?”
    “Well, he can’t … I don’t think.”
    “You think he killed that woman?”
    “Figure he did.”
    “How’d she get to lookin’ like that.”
    “Somethin’ dead swells up like that. You know that.”
    “How’d she get all cut? On his horns?”
    “I don’t know, Tom.”
    We went on down the road, and in time, after a number of rest stops, after helping Toby go to the bathroom by holding up his tail and legs, in the deepest part of the night, we reached home.

3

    I t wasn’t an altogether happy homecoming. The sky had grown cloudy and the moon was no longer bright. You could hear the cicadas chirping and frogs bleating off somewhere in the bottoms. When we entered into the yard carrying Toby, Daddy spoke from the shadows, and an owl, startled, flew up and was temporarily outlined against the faintly brighter sky.
    “I ought to whup y’all’s butts,” Daddy said.
    “Yes sir,” I said.
    Daddy was sitting in a chair under an oak in the yard. It was sort of our gathering tree, where we sat and talked and shelled peas in the summer. He was smoking a pipe, a habit that would kill him later in life. I could see its glow as he puffed flames from a match into the tobacco. The smell from the pipe was woody and sour to me.
    We went over and stood beneath the oak, near his chair.
    “Your mother’s been worried sick,” he said. “Harry, you know better than to stay out like that, and with your sister. You’re supposed to take care of her.”
    “Yes sir.”
    “I see you still have Toby.”
    “Yes sir. I think he’s doing better.”
    “You don’t do better with a broken back.”
    “He treed six squirrels,” I said. I took my pocketknife out and cut the string around my waist and presented him with the squirrels. He looked at them in the darkness, laid them beside his chair.
    “You have an excuse,” he said.
    “Yes sir,” I said.
    “All right, then,” he said. “Tom, you go up to the house, get the tub and start filling it with water. It’s warm enough you won’t need to heat it. Not tonight. You get after them bugs with the kerosene and such, then bathe and hit the bed.”
    “Yes sir,” she said. “But Daddy …”
    “Go to the house, Tom,” Daddy said.
    Tom looked at me, laid the shotgun on the ground, and went on toward the house.
    Daddy puffed his pipe. “You said you had an excuse.”
    “Yes sir. I got to runnin’ squirrels, but there’s something else. There’s a body down by the river.”
    He leaned forward in his chair. “What?”
    I told him everything that had happened. About being followed, the brambles, the body, the Goat Man. When I was finished, he sat silent for a time, then said, “There isn’t any Goat Man, Harry. But the person you saw, it’s possible he was the killer. You being out like that, it could have been you or Tom that he got.”
    “Yes sir.”
    “Suppose I’ll have to take a look early morning. You think