Smonk or Widow Town Part 2

She's a man! We caught her. Him. In, er, congress. With another gentleman. The other gentleman swore it was a woman with whom he was in congress with, but I and my subordinates have good reason to believe that he is prevaricating.

The Lord's Name in vain! she hissed. How ye know?

Walton tapped his goggle lense. From witness of these very eyes. He was-forgive me!-committing a perversion in the method of species caninus with the other gentleman we caught. Sodomy, good woman, sodomy! UnG.o.dly, it was. The depth of wickedness. Fornicating like heinous canines. And before we could apprehend him, off she flew like a demon out the window. We provided the sinner we did catch with a good thras.h.i.+ng, but that other "ornery" s...o...b..-sorry old boy-has thus far escaped his come-uppance.

Wait. You followed him all the way from Louisiana? Jest to give him a whooping?

Walton paused. We did. We Christian Deputies are very committed to our quest. The fact of the tavern owner's murder and mutilation is just good fortune. Our instincts feel, shall we say, vindicated. Also, we believe she "mugged" a man outside the tavern as well.

So you seen this Evavangeline's...? The boardinghouse woman did the Indian finger-sign for "white man's p.e.c.k.e.r" (a hand at the crotch with the pinky hanging down).

Oh, we "seen" it all right.

And now you fixing to track him?

To the end. I swear it. He tapped one of his extra pockets. On this Bible printed in Miniature.

Say, now. She seemed distracted by his garb. Them's nice pants.

If you covet these "britches," all you need do is tell me and I'll give them to you.

How come?

It's in my Christian Deputy Code. I despise things of the flesh. Objects, I mean. I'm eager to divest myself of worldly belongings. The Good Book teaches, "Fling aside such accouterment like dust in the wind." I'm paraphrasing.

The boardinghouse woman pointed out the parlor window. Would ye be willing to divest ye self of that horsey and saddle rig yonder? You do that you can keep them pants. And that queer tie around ye neck too.

It's an ascot, Walton said, gazing out to where his tall white stallion stood. Ron. The very definition of "steed." Straight-legged, straight-backed, straight-tempered. Gun-broken. Tireless in a hunt. Eyes like amber. Terrified of chickens, but since few fowl intervened in their peripatetic lives, this was manageable. The Christian Deputy leader's hazel eyes misted at the gorgeous gray-tipped mane he had a deputy trim and comb each morning for an hour. And the rig! Across Ron's rippling spine sat the stock saddle that had cost his mother fifty dollars at Sears, Roebuck & Co. The finest genuine oiled California skirting leather. Sixteen inch tree. Steel fork. Beaded roll cantle.

Yet when Walton departed the boardinghouse he did so on barefoot, having retained only his uniform and goggles, which she didn't ask for. Perhaps she thought them his actual eyes; good country people had before. Meanwhile, the pockets in his pants hung like an octogenarian's dugs.

The boardinghouse woman sat on her famous porch wearing her new Creedmoor boots propped on the rail, spitting snuff juice and rolling a cigarette. She struck a match and lit the smoke and gestured to Walton's departing back. Sign of a polecat. A dandy boy. A large a.n.u.s. The word--, for which English has no synonym.

Upriver, dawn's dry herald brought to the hungover steams.h.i.+p crew news of the pervert Evavangeline had gutted the midnight before. It went bunk to bunk in whispers and giggles. Instead of falling into the water like decent folk, the pervert had gotten tangled in a fishnet hung along the s.h.i.+p's port side. Throughout the night a pulsing contingent of catfish, carp, grinnel, gar, sucker, alligators and even a few river-lost sand sharks disoriented by fresh water had followed the boat, swirling in the ooze. In the morning light, enormous orange crawfish with their pinchers clicking rode the body, one arm of which trailing in the water was festooned with moccasins attached at the fang. When one became too blooded it fell loose and sank in the clouds in the sky in the river.

On board the steamboat came the further news of the doctor's head shot half off in his bed, his jimmied-out molar. Bad luck for Evavangeline in that he had been not only the s.h.i.+p's physician but the captain's younger brother. More bad luck yet in that the pervert she'd knifed behind the barrels had been the s.h.i.+p's cook as well as the captain's older brother.

She ought never drink tequila.

The captain went about howling and throwing things from the s.h.i.+p. He rent his clothing and pulled clumps from his beard and rammed his head into the galley wall.

Hungover, Evavangeline watched from beneath a tarp. When she yawned the dried blood on her chin cracked. She swiped it with the back of her hand. On the open deck somebody was telling the captain that his brother the cook had last been seen with a fellow who matched a certain description. Somebody else said that same character had been seen going below with the doc. Evavangeline, meanwhile, tiptoed to the edge of the boat and slunk over the rail like a vapor and slid down a rope. Behind the barrels, the captain's pet spider monkey found the growth of mole from the famously hot-headed dead dive-owner and raced across the deck and leapt to the captain's shoulder and began to earnestly screw the mole into his ear.

He grabbed the monkey and flung it overboard. He picked up the growth of mole from the deck and glared at it. Its hairs had grown longer since last it was seen.

It's a shriveled banana, the first mate said, salivating.

Naw, it's a pickled n.i.g.g.e.r thumb, said the second mate, also salivating.

The captain threw them both overboard.

From the river the two thras.h.i.+ng officers saw Evavangeline dog-paddling toward land and tried to point her out, but the crew at the boat's high rail was giving them the finger and mooning them and p.i.s.sing on them and shooting at them. Somebody threw a pig.

Then one of the men was s.n.a.t.c.hed underwater. He came up, flung back and fore spewing bile, bit in half by the largest alligator in Alabama. The crowd went Ahhhhhh. The officer bobbed for a moment, looking very surprised. He began to point at objects and call them Robert: a cypress knee, a beaver's mound, a dragonfly rising from the water. Then he went down again. The other officer was screaming as things began to tear at him and he went under as well and nothing remained save his woolen skull cap, tossed in waves the color of blood.

In the meantime, Evavangeline kicked quietly toward sh.o.r.e, circ.u.mventing the feeding frenzy which had the men along the boat rail cheering and trying to throw one another in.

Lord G.o.d! bellowed the captain to the sky. He began to punch himself in the face. The sailors noticed and elbowed each other. He fell to his knees. He thrust the mole heavenward and squeezed it so hard it squirted from his grip and went skittering over the deck.

It's a p.e.c.k.e.r! he yelled. What manner of man-eater, O Lord, have I brought upriver?

3.

THE BALLOON.

MEANWHILE, IN OLD TEXAS, IT SEEMED THE BAILIFF'S BOY WITH THE balloon had vamoosed with the mule, and for a moment, a revolver in his left hand and sword in his right, E. O. Smonk had given the line of horses s.h.i.+rking at the rail his savage consideration. But he detested the preening highnesses and now could be found hobbling east along a row of storefronts, ducking bullets and favoring his gouty foot and using his sword as a cane and firing the revolver over his shoulder. Thinking Next time jest take a f.u.c.king horse.

Across the street, the mercenaries covered Smonk's escape from their wagon, one firing the machine gun while the other readied a second lock and added water for coolant. The man at the trigger was screaming as he obliterated the hotel, shutters snapped off their hinges and posts sawed to dust and windows dissolving to silver mists and s.h.i.+ngles flapping off and one short board twirling in the alley like a child.

The panicked horses kicked and rolled, a roan's head gone, a rumpshot bay burying its hind hooves in a sorrel's stomach, nails shrieking and wood splintering as the horses drew the rails away like a curtain, buckling the upstairs deck, the back of the building suddenly ablaze with fire, men spilling onto the porch dancing as if on stage, in their dying poses flinging out their arms or backflipping with their boots left upright on the floor. They cursed and cried to Jesus. They fingered their holes to dam the blood. They tried to remember how their legs worked. What their names were. They raised their palms but the bullets were true to the faces behind, a cheek gone, a lower jaw, grin of false teeth clacking to the floorboards and one shot-off finger pointing through the air still bearing its wedding band.

Fire leapfrogged over the floors, peeling up doorjambs and across the ceiling and walling the air with smoke. When the man at the trigger paused to let the other change locks, the citizens in the hotel began to clamber away from the fire by jumping through windows. They lurched from the ruined porch, some with their hats and coattails on fire, but froze when they saw a third man striding toward them in the smoke, stepping over bodies in the dirt, a German automatic rifle in one hand and a stick of dynamite fizzing in the other.

At the bottom of the hill, lumbering along panting for air, Smonk felt the concussion of the explosion before he heard it. Windows shook and shook the widows' faces behind, faces already flinted into the masks they'd wear to the grave. Then he heard the Maxim resume its work. He tipped an imaginary hat to a widow on her steps trying to c.o.c.k a rifle with both thumbs with a result of shooting herself in the foot. He was still chuckling when the undertaker's widow appeared from a doorway holding a revolver in both hands and shot him broad in the chest. His gourd exploded but otherwise unharmed he grabbed her with his sword hand and danced her around and pulled her face to his and kissed her flush on the mouth and when he let go he'd taken her pistol and she bore his blood on her lips like paint, her back braced against the wall behind her.

He popped off the gun's four rounds in three seconds and tossed it away and turned a second corner into an alley and shrugged out of his coat and left it crumpled in the dirt, his shoulders jerked by a fit of coughing and sneezes that mapped the oak trunk before him bright red.

He was edging down the alley when gla.s.s shattered by his head and a rifle barrel nosed out. Still coughing, he grabbed it from the widow's fingers and looked it up and down with his good eye. Marlin repeater, full magazine judging the weight. He caught the hand swiping from the window and crushed its fingers like a sack of twigs and began to limp, again firing over his shoulder, levering with a flick of his wrist, ducking as a shot apothecary's sign swung from its chain like a pendulum. A nail sparked by his foot and a post splintered by his cheek, but that was the closest they came to killing him as Smonk broke the empty rifle over his knee and burst into the livery barn. He saw no mule, donkey or pony and had little choice but the tall gray mare in the first stall, the only animal saddled and bridled. The livery attendant's widow charged screeching from the dark holding a pitchfork woven with hay but he parried it with his sword and knocked her aside. He'd wiggled his good foot into the stirrup when she attacked again with a snub-nosed pistol. He s.n.a.t.c.hed it away and smashed the gun into her cheek and flung himself onto the horse and told it Git.

The gray kicked boards loose in the wall behind and swung its head and tried to bite him but he punched its muzzle away and evened the reins. The woman grabbed his saddle strap as Smonk dug his heels in the horse's flanks and they trundled her through the dust in the bay door and left her balled on the ground. A wave of cinders blistered past: Adios, Tate Hotel. Smonk fired the snub into the sky to get the horse's attention and soon had her majesty goaded to an awkward lope. He looped the reins around his fingers and whacked her rump with his sword until the ground drummed beneath them and they hurtled across the railroad tracks and east, clinking bottles on the bottle tree, gunfire fading behind like a celebration of fireworks.

When it was safe he blew a mouthful of frothy blood and aimed the pistol and centered the last bullet through the gray's left ear. The horse leapt a crossfence and whinnied and twisted in the air in some fit of pain or ecstasy and landed with the squat rider bouncing and low, the pair blurring, elongating, barely a hoof to earth, inspired by G.o.d or bespooked by the devil who could tell.

Meanwhile Will McKissick, the bailiff, coughed himself awake. Pus.h.i.+ng a body off his own, he sat up plastered in gore. I'm in h.e.l.l, he thought. Things around him were moving and hot. Vaguely he heard gunshots. Screams. He fought to his knees, half aware of the dead and dying on the floor. Place shot to pieces. Air boiling. Splinters of gla.s.s stuck in the walls.

He fanned his face. Remembered being eight years old, the first time he'd used a slingshot and pebble to pick a hummingbird out of the air. Under a mimosa tree not long before his daddy got shot. He remembered knowing from that moment onward that he was a bad boy who would grow into a bad man. Then he'd pegged another hummingbird, a hatchling just out of the nest, no larger than a b.u.mblebee.

He steadied himself against the wall and coughed and pounded his chest. But those birds were in the past now. Them and everything else. Lately, despite the long, varied and original chart of sins awaiting him in the devil's ledger, he'd been fighting his evil inclinations and had broken his a.s.sociations with the outlaw element and even settled down. An honest bailiff job. Several choices to marry. Redemption his target, no matter how long the shot. There was something round and blue in his brain. He could almost imagine it, but- Smonk!

McKissick looked around. He wasn't in h.e.l.l. This was only its anteroom, Old Texas Alabama, where moments ago E. O. Smonk had grinned blood and drawn a sword from the air and conjured a pistol by brazen will and squirted out his eye.

McKissick opened his fingers. There it was. His breath whistled out. White gla.s.s marble with a few nicks. Blue dot in the middle. Warm. He smelled it. He rolled it in his palm and pecked it with his thumbnail. It seemed to be looking at him. He popped it in his mouth where it clicked against his teeth.

His head snapped. Gunshots! He skipped through the dead to the window and double-took when he saw two men in a wagon reloading-was it?-a got-dern Gatling gun, the design of which he'd never seen, a steam cloud hovering around them like a halo. Water-cooled. Fancy.

Expensive.

They ain't after no picture-graphs, he said to himself. Dern, I ought to knew it. Ye done got soft, Will, thoughts of revenge plus all these women at ye.

For he himself in his official capacity had questioned the strangers at their wagon before the trial. He himself the town bailiff had been convinced of their sincerity when they demonstrated the use of their camera, having him pose with his hair flattened by oil and a grimace on his face while they huddled together at the device under a blanket. Their intention was common practice, McKissick knew, to make a picture of a dead body, which would of been Smonk if things had gone according to plan. (Often the New York Times would pay a dollar for a picture of lynched n.i.g.g.e.rs or shot-up outlaws. Those wily photographers would change the body-shave the fellow, say, or add an eyepatch-and send it back for another dollar.) As McKissick had stood getting his picture made, not one hour before, a number of the ladies had gathered to watch and he'd been buffaloed, proud to be the subject of artists.

Now something moved in the street. Justice of the Peace Tate, easily recognizable by his pompadour, was crawling through the dirt away from the murderers, blood strung from his chin.

McKissick saw a third killer by the hotel, a rifleman-probably the one who'd set the building afire-waving his arms so the men in the wagon wouldn't shoot him. He hurried through the street, sticks of dynamite in his back pockets. When he reached the justice, he shouldered his rifle and drew and pointed a revolver at the back of the man's head and fired. Dust puffed by his foot as a bullet missed him and the gunner turned the Maxim on its swivels and laid a hail of bullets across the windowfront of the apothecary's. Meanwhile, Mister Tate's hair had fallen but he kept crawling. The gunman shot once more then knelt and turned the man over and began going through his s.h.i.+rt.

There were more pockets of return fire now and the gunner swiveled the Maxim and dragged its anchor of bullets across the storefronts and ladies dove out of sight.

The rifleman in the street grabbed his chest and McKissick looked to the large house, second floor window, where Mrs. Tate, the justice's wife-widow-was levering her rifle to shoot again. The man she'd killed crumpled and lay on his side. The gunner tried to turn toward her house, catty-corner the hotel, but b.u.mped the shoulder of the man filling the coolant.

McKissick was high-stepping through the logjam of arms and legs, dodging a fiery falling roof timber and grabbing Smonk's over & under which he'd squirreled away beneath the sideboard-he'd always admired the stout Winchester and knew it would be perfectly sighted. He hopped across the undertaker and clicked the rifle's safety with his thumb and knelt at the window and sighted the gunner no more than a second before he shot him in the temple and then shot the other man before the first landed.

McKissick stared down at the rifle, heavy in his hands, the line of upswept gray smoke from its barrels a shade lighter than the smoke in the air. You done good, he told the over & under.

Since coming to, he'd been conscious of an ache in his left side, and now that he had a quiet moment he reached inside his s.h.i.+rt. When he drew out his fingers b.l.o.o.d.y pellets of the rice he'd eaten for dinner were stuck there. Smonk's got-dern sword must of run right through him. He steadied himself against the pinewood wainscotting. Gritted his teeth.

Surrender? someone called.

Across the room through coils of smoke a revolver b.u.t.t flagged with a white handkerchief raised itself above an overturned table. The judge's eyebrows inched up and then his face. He waved.

You that G.o.dd.a.m.n bailiff, he called. Ain't ye? I forget ye name. Mic-something.

How come ye ain't dead? McKissick asked.

How come you ain't?

I jest about am. Case ye ain't noticed.

G.o.d d.a.m.n, said the judge, fanning at smoke. Might we finish this discussion elsewhere?

A woman screamed from outside. McKissick ducked through the window and stood blinking on the splintered porch. The wind changed the smoke's course and the street appeared before him. He lowered the rifle.

The dead were strewn and splashed along the porch, halves and quarters of horses and men splattered in puddles of tar in the street. A crater smoking where it looked like a bomb had gone off and arms and half-legs and other fragments here and there. The world seemed too bright. McKissick felt like somebody had boxed his ears. Women followed their own screams outside and whisking their skirts over the dirt sprang corpse to corpse calling out the names of the dead. At the corner of what used to be the hotel a woman held a severed hand by its pinky and screamed, Oliver! Over in the alley by the store McKissick saw the abandoned gun, still steaming, pointed at him. He tongued Smonk's eye around the horseshoe of his jaw.

Inside the hotel, the judge crashed over the table and fell off his dais. G.o.d d.a.m.n, he cried. My arm's on fire!

The bailiff ignored him. He looked up the street and down. His memory was coming back. The mule...

The balloon!

Where's my boy? he yelled, so hard his wound farted. He unstuck his hand from his side and raised it to the sky, rice on his fingers. Willie! he yelled.

Still making their noise, the widows in silhouette looked up from the murdered while behind them the hotel roof collapsed, fire and smoke bursting out the top windows and a moment later those on the ground floor, the air fogged with smoke and the yowls so baleful and plaintive it seemed h.e.l.l had breeched its levee and poured forth its river of dead.

Eugene Oregon Smonk, McKissick yelled, is done stold my got-dern boy!

Ike was waiting for Smonk at the three-way crossing, smoking his cob pipe and fanning his face with his hat. He'd shaved clean but for a bristly goatee, and under thick eyebrows white as a cottonmouth's yawn his pupil bores were pinheads, watching. Old as he was and weary, he leaned against the railing of his farm wagon holding the mule thief's hand high behind his head as the boy squirmed, kicked, spat and cursed. The mule was biting up sheaves of gra.s.s, the balloon still floating above. The mare s.h.i.+vered under Smonk so he dismounted and slapped her hard on the rump. Farewell yer highness, he said and watched her gone in a rattle of dust and gra.s.shoppers.

Ike tossed him a jug which he caught onehanded. He thumbed off its thong and drank a long time with little care for what spilled into his whiskers.

The boy groaned.

Smonk gazed down. Almighty d.a.m.n, he said and took another swig. Go on turn him loose, I.

Ike released the hand and the boy fell to the ground.

You run, Smonk said, I'll shoot ye in the a.s.s.

Dad gum that hurt. From beside the wagon wheel, the boy glared up at Ike.

What would ye name be? Smonk asked.

I ain't got to tell you, the boy said. William R. McKissick Junior.

Well, Junior. I seen ye before. Ain't I? I mean before I told ye to watch my mule which you will not be paid for, case ye was wondering.

Yessir. Our mule. You seen me fore that.

I thought I recognized ye daddy. A f.u.c.king bailiff, no less. Smonk's knees clicked as he squatted then sat against the wheel spokes to catch his breath. He had both hips eaten up with the rheumatism, and every time he got down like this it felt like he might never rise.

Reckon ye old man's bit by the respectable bug agin, he said. Well, I wish him luck but don't allow none 'll smile down on him, life he's led.

The boy's eyes egged when he saw Smonk's speckled plank of a face up close, his b.l.o.o.d.y teeth and lips, the bright red string dripping into his beard, the hole an eyeball once held.

The boy pointed. Something got ye eye.

Smonk touched the hole. This? He put his fingertip in it.

The boy leaned in for a closer look. How deep can it go?

Smonk made a noise in his chest like rocks grumbling and spat under the wagon. Hear that, I? How deep do it go?

He did a trick where he pretended to put his whole trigger finger in but in truth he was just bending it back.

The boy laughed and clapped his hands.

Smonk lit a cigar. You ever seen a picture of a pirate?

Naw sir, what's that?

A robber that uses a s.h.i.+p and robs other s.h.i.+ps. Out in the high seas. They carry curved swords called cutla.s.ses and kill whales for fun and fly a G.o.dd.a.m.n skull for a flag. Wear eyepatches too and about half the time they got these birds riding on they shoulder. I never did put the two together till it was too late. See, I'd always wanted to be a pirate, way back a hundred years ago when I was a youngun like you, reading dime novels, and in them days I reckon it might of been possible. But then I growed up as ye will if somebody don't murder ye first and anyway one month of June not too long back I spent playing blackjack in a gutted-out church in Biloxi Mississippi. Remember, Ike? This c.o.o.n-a.s.s dealer used to wear him one of them pirate birds on his shoulder and I got to coveting that G.o.dd.a.m.n bird. It would say ante and bust, and it was the funniest thing. It never got old. Not one time. Ante. Bust! The wh.o.r.es loved it. If a man had owned that bird the wh.o.r.es would of f.u.c.ked him for free.