He hit her in the head with his rifle-stock and the woods exploded white before they faded to nothing.
Walton would have run all the way to the scene of violence had not Donny trotted up behind him and pushed his nose in the ticklish spot between the northerner"s shoulders. Thus aback his steed, the head deputy closed the distance quickly and came upon Deputy Ambrose where he was kneeling at the corpses relieving them of their possessions.
What, yelled Walton, in the name of G.o.d are you doing?
The Negro paused in rolling one of the dead men"s socks down over his calves and regarded Walton. This my stuff now, he said. I killed these ones and now I get they stuff.
Walton folded his arms to hide his trembling hands. Hardly, he said. Do you know what a "rig" like this costs, Deputy Ambrose? Do you know who pays that cost?
Ye momma.
Well. Yes, technically. But as her agent, I claim all these men"s effects for the Christian Deputies, myself commander. Into the company store, so to speak.
Don"t be so-to-speaking to me.
Poor grammar fails to augment your arguments, Walton said. Now, continue to gather the equipment and we"ll inventory it later, what do you say? I was thinking of giving you a commendation for your stealth.
You, Ambrose said, are the biggest fool I ever seen.
Pardon?
I said "fool." F-U-L. Big one. Big fool. He stretched out his arms, a sock in each hand.
Why, that"s insubordination. Walton stabbed his pockets for a pencil, his cheeks stinging and his lungs light. I could have your badge!
My f.u.c.king badge? The Negro s.n.a.t.c.hed it from his crimson shirt and threw it in the dust and stamped on it. f.u.c.k my f.u.c.king badge, he said. He stamped it again. You know what I"m gone do? I"m gone teach a lesson now. He mimicked Walton in a prissy fashion, writing at his chalkboard. I call it "How to Rob Two Dead Deserting f.u.c.kers of All They f.u.c.king Possessions and Then Cut Off They Tallywhackers and Stick Um in They Mouth Cause That How the Indians Do It So If Anybody Come Along They Gone Think It Was the Savages Done It."
I see, Walton said.
He watched Ambrose pull one man"s pants down over his hips and, a precise motion of his beltknife, slice off his member and place it without ceremony in its owner"s mouth. He did the same to the second dead deputy. Then Walton watched the Negro not speak respectful words over the bodies and, arms full of "booty," languidly pursue his horse across the field and charm it calm and gather its reins.
Frozen at the site, Walton clutched his hat and quoted a few apt verses of Scripture to usher the dead men wherever their journey next took them. The leader then prodded Donny with gentle heels and followed his distant second-in-command whose silhouette now rode back toward the last two deputies, Loon and Onan, and soon the four of them rode together at a fair clip without speaking a word. Deputy Ambrose whistling and practicing with his sword, lopping off the tops of small trees.
The man had walloped the wh.o.r.e-lady in the back of her head, William R. McKissick Junior witnessed it from the bushes. He watched the walloper squat with his rifle and regard her a while, the whole time that dang dog trying to eat the door off. The man rose and William R. McKissick Junior saw that he was tall and wore overalls tucked into his boots and had no shirt on underneath the straps. There was a red kerchief around his neck and every patch of his skin the boy could see was covered with freckles. He"d never seen such a speckled man before, but this one was going through Evavangeline"s pockets and touching her in all the secret places that William R. McKissick Junior wished he were touching. He"d best kill that man. He held the Mississippi Gambler by its blade tip and closed his eye and judged the distance and flung the knife.
It flew behind the man as he stepped over the p.r.o.ne girl and slashed into the brush. The freckled man, busy with his prisoner, set his rifle against the shed and took a forked stick and went to the door where the dog was still making its racket.
Shet up! he bellowed. Ye got-d.a.m.n cannon mouth cannon mouth cannon mouth. He kicked the door which quieted the dog.
Then it was back, more savage still.
Creeping through the foliage, William R. McKissick Junior saw the man use the stick to unlatch a small trapdoor in the center of the larger door. He saw him throw down his stick and fling sweat from his fingers. When he lifted the girl her eyes were fluttering. The man tussled Evavangeline forward in his arms as if they were dancing, her feet off the ground, intending to job her arm in where the mad-dog was. Without a thought he was running from behind the shed out into the dappled light, falling on his hands once and getting back up. The speckled man had stuck Evavangeline"s forearm in the hole but when he saw William R. McKissick Junior he dropped her and scrambled for the rifle and she fell, withdrawing her arm. William R. McKissick Junior grabbed the rifle but couldn"t make it shoot before the man was on him. The man raised him up in the air by his collar and looked him in the face a moment then underhanded him into the shed wall where the boy slid to the ground and moved his elbow a second before the mad-dog"s snout left frothy drool peeling down the wood. He c.o.c.ked the rifle and aimed down the barrel where the boy lay scowling.
Then an idea seemed to dawn upon the man"s long face. He resembled a horse, his lips bore a perpetual pucker of protruding yellow teeth which made him seem to be smiling. Scabs of beard dotted here and there among the freckles. He came forward leering behind the gun and grabbed the boy"s foot.
I"m gone sell ye, ain"t I, he said. Get a get a get a get a real good price.
He backed toward the wh.o.r.e dragging the boy and didn"t see that she"d opened her eyes. The forked stick was within her grasp and her fingers closed around it. The speckled man was bent over, looping a rope over that boy from the orphanage. Her sodden brain couldn"t call up his name but she pushed off the ground and held the stick in both hands and swung hard and whacked him a good one across the base of his skull and using the momentum of her first swing swung again as he turned to face her and this time she hit him hard across his mouth and burst his lips and nose. Then fell herself.
The boy helped her to her feet, staring at her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, their nipples targets in her thin sweaty shirt.
Thank ye, she said, holding her head in her hands.
He pulled the b.l.o.o.d.y hairs off the stick and offered it to her for a crutch.
Thank ye. He conked me a good one.
The boy kicked dirt on the downed man. I"d call ye even now.
Is he dead?
As if in answer, the speckled man stirred. The two youngsters looked at him and then at each other and then at the shed door which had never ceased its rattle. It took them both to drag him to the door and push him up against its side and prop him there as he muttered and jerked and tried to wake up. They pushed his arm in the hole and fled as he hung, hooked by his own armpit, and the dog had its way. From the safety of the woods Evavangeline and the boy watched him come to his senses. He s.n.a.t.c.hed out his arm which had been gnawed to a b.l.o.o.d.y stob. He glared at the woods, seeking them, then tore his handkerchief off his neck and did a rough onehanded job of bandaging his elbow.
Evavangeline knelt and squinted so she could see in the boy"s blue eyes. Her vision was blurry, there seemed to be two of him. She blinked and tried to focus. What did ye say yer name is agin?
William R. McKissick Junior.
Well, Junior. Where"s them younguns you promised to look after?
He pointed behind her.
There they were, three boys and the same number of girls. They were filthy and gaunt and hollow-eyed and holding hands. She might of gotten angry except it was then she noticed the dog-bite on her elbow.
9.
THE EYE.
MEANWHILE, MCKISSICK THE BAILIFF AND GATES THE BLACKSMITH had spent a few hours sleeping on the hard earth, the latter tossing and afraid, and after a morning of hard riding, he squirmed atop the pack mule, waiting for McKissick to return from moving his bowels. He could hardly keep from humming, close as he was to getting the eye.
It ought to of happened first thing today, according to what the bailiff had said was his gut"s regular schedule.
Ever morning, he"d said.
You lucky, Gates thought. I done a bucketful earlier and I could fill up another one right now.
Perhaps the wound had irregulated his system, as McKissick claimed, which now worried Gates that Smonk"s eyeball might of already popped out of the injury unbeknownst to them. s.h.i.t. Such a nag would eat at him like possums on a dead cow till he saw the eye. Until he knew it was safe, until he could roll it in his fingers and smell its smell. Insisting on privacy, McKissick had ridden his horse into a stand of mimosa trees a dern half-hour ago. Dang. Gates craned his neck. For all the blacksmith knew, his partner had shat the eye and played with it a spell and gone off to kill Smonk alone. Gates breeched his rifle. Still empty. He unc.o.c.ked it and sighed. Everything was against him.
Meanwhile, naked as an Indian but for his borrowed shoes, McKissick plucked Smonk"s eye from the rope of coal-black s.h.i.t he"d deposited across a rotten log. He wiped the ball clean on his shoe-toe and admired it from several angles. How the light hit it. He had no intention of giving it back. He meant to keep it. Smonk had bullied his way into McKissick"s life which had become the kind of situation where once E.O. was there he would never leave until somebody killed him.
He"d met Smonk several years before, when E.O. still had two eyes, one green, one blue, in the lost train of days when Smonk looked like a d.a.m.n savage, red hair streaming down his back, those arms that were like battering rams and hairy as a bear"s. He could crush a brick in his hand, which frequently won him drinks in saloons. His other bet was that he had a c.o.c.k that hung below his knee. There were always takers against this boast, and Smonk would pull down his britches and show them the rooster on a noose tattooed on his shin. Laughter would be general, and the nature usually good, but on a couple of occasions McKissick had seen men get testy and challenge Smonk. Some fellows took his short, squat stature as weakness. Like one time this lanky dentist-said he bare-knuckled his way through dental school-outright refused to pay. He was drunk on Smonk"s shine. Threw a jarful in Smonk"s face and said the real c.o.c.k in the room was Smonk his self. Smonk grabbed the dentist"s head in one hand and popped it like a coconut. Then E.O. called for the man"s brother who shuffled forward out of the crowd. You gone pay me? Smonk asked. I am, said he. McKissick had covered Smonk in that altercation, and had the brother said anything other than, "It"s okay, Mister Smonk, he always was a cheap skate," McKissick would of shot him in his knee. Or higher up, depending on how much whiskey he"d had.
McKissick and Smonk had met in Utah in the sheep town of Hornwall Bend, where Smonk was hiding out and McKissick was in jail waiting to hang. While E.O. had been laying with some man"s wife, her husband and his friends had arrived home unexpectedly. Ike, the n.i.g.g.e.r Smonk traveled with, crowned the husband with a shotgun but another fellow got the drop on Ike and they arrested him and p.r.o.nounced him guilty without a trial and had him scheduled to hang in the near future. Smonk got away Scot free and mounted sugar bags on a horse he"d stolen from a town fifty miles away. He fired a pistol and scared the horse off, it running in the direction home, the weight bouncing on its back exactly Smonk"s. From beneath the wh.o.r.ehouse, he watched most of the town"s men ride off in a posse, leaving an inexperienced deputy to guard the prisoners.
Thus McKissick, jailed for murder (banker, strangled), sat in the cell beside Ike and yelled it wasn"t fair for a white man to be caged up with a c.o.o.n. Get this watermelon out of here. Ike never said anything. Just sat with his arms folded and eyes closed.
Hey, McKissick called.
At midnight there came a scuffle from the front office where the deputy was sleeping. Ike sat up from his bunk and began lacing his shoes.
What the h.e.l.l, McKissick wanted to know.
Then, lit by the lantern he held, in walked the strangest fellow you"d ever see. He looked like an orangutan McKissick had seen at a zoo once. Smonk told Ike there were no keys to be had, the sheriff had taken them. Under his arm he had a big shield of iron that he handed through the bars to Ike. Ike propped the plate up against his bunk and got behind it. Smonk-he hadn"t acknowledged the other prisoner-was lighting a stick of dynamite.
Panic flickered over McKissick"s face as Smonk stood the stick against the east wall and walked out of the room.
Ike said, Come on.
McKissick dove behind the iron shield as the TNT exploded and when he looked out the town newly revealed gleamed with rain.
To follow were years of robberies, blackmail schemes, McKissick and Smonk meeting in a city and making their money and fading in different directions and communicating via secret code in newspaper advertis.e.m.e.nts. (McKissick never again saw Ike during their transactions. For all he knew, in those years and in these, the n.i.g.g.e.r was gone.) Their partnership would dissolve every year or two because McKissick was the guilty sort, and each time an innocent was murdered in crossfire or blown to bits in the wrong place at the wrong time, he would give up his guns and go straight. He"d disappear.
Smonk always found him.
One time he found him and McKissick had got married. Lived in a brick house in Carter Wyoming, happy the first time in his life. She was a reformed wh.o.r.e who would still use her wh.o.r.e tricks on him and did each night...until the dawn McKissick walked out naked on his porch to p.i.s.s and saw Smonk sleeping there, a bottle for a pillow. Soon as his wife saw Smonk it started. It always did. Smonk got all the girls, they couldn"t resist him. It was something of the animal about him, was McKissick"s notion, a wild element men had left behind with the advent of such peacekeeping creations as the six-shooter or Gatling gun.
McKissick helped Smonk extort several thousand dollars from a mayor who was a secret octoroon in a nearby town. Later, after he caught Smonk in his, McKissick"s, bedroom, with his, McKissick"s, wife, McKissick took the girl and fled. They both pretended the baby was McKissick"s, and h.e.l.l, maybe he was. They lived in Oklahoma in poverty and the boy grew up skinny and by the time Smonk found them again McKissick was lean himself, short of fuse, unable to find work, happy to extort or threaten or burn or kill.
It"s a tobaccy farmer, Smonk had said, pushing gold coins across the table, the boy hiding beneath. E.O. had lost his eye by now, lost his looks. He"d gotten fatter. Hairier. Brown spots on his skin. Chancre sores. But he was short none of the appeal he had for women. In these lean years McKissick"s wife had stopped performing her wifely duties with McKissick, but here she was flirting with Smonk, and here was Smonk paying gold coin after gold coin to McKissick so he"d go outside and tend the one-eye"s horse while he visited with the woman. McKissick kicked the dog across the yard on his way to the barn.
McKissick murdered the tobacco farmer and when he came back his wife was gone, took off after Smonk. So with the boy in tow McKissick had chased them. He found his wife in a town in east Texas, whoring, but she refused to take him back and he shot her dead and with the boy behind him on his horse he rode off after Smonk. They"d chased E.O. all over the world it felt like, for years, winding up at last in the wilderness between the rivers. He"d installed himself as bailiff in the nearest town (Old Texas) and clipped his chin whiskers and cut his hair. He"d donned the overalls and bicycle cap of a town b.u.mpkin and waited in disguise.
Now, naked, he thumped the eye in the air and caught it and popped it in his mouth. Its taste growing on him.
He turned to go and there stood E.O. Leaning against a tree. He had his cane in one hand and a pistol in the other. Somehow he looked even worse than he had the day before, coughing, dragging one leg as he came forward, blood oozing into his beard. McKissick stepped back, closing his hands. For the first time since he"d known the one-eye, Smonk looked killable. Like murdering him would do him a favor. McKissick was backing up, aware he was naked, his loin cloth draped over a branch near where he"d defecated.
That"s yer stob? Smonk pointed his cane. No wonder that wh.o.r.e of yern used to fret so on mine.
McKissick"s rifle lay across the log.
Smonk stepped closer. He wore an eyepatch but had it flipped up so you could see in the hole. The bailiff remembered Smonk telling the story of how, after he lost the eye, its attachments had rotted in his head and for dern near a year he"d had to stuff garlic in the hole to make it bearable and keep the gnats and flies away.
I recollect ye now, fellow, Smonk said. Here we are ain"t we. A reunion in the woods.
McKissick kept backing up and Smonk paced him step for step. He was like a grizzly about to stand.
I want my rifle yonder, Smonk repeated. And I want my f.u.c.king eye.
McKissick edged to his right, toward Smonk"s blind side, but the one-eye angled his head and wagged his finger at such a squarehead move.
McKissick, Smonk said, ye got nerve, boy. I"ll give ye that. To come after me when you know what I"ll do to ye.
It was cause of my boy.
Ye boy.
William Junior. Willie. He was at the trial when ye butchered the town. When I come to he was gone and I knew you must of took him.
Smonk"s good eye narrowed. I remember that little sneak, he said. Ike caught him, all right. Done stole my mule. Knucklehead"s got sand.
Where is he?
h.e.l.l if I know.
McKissick had been backing toward the log and when he was close enough he dove over it and, airborne, kicked the stock so the over & under flipped and he landed on his back behind the log and caught the gun. He"d swallowed the eye again, this time on purpose. He raised up to fire but Smonk was gone, except for his voice, which boomed in the high treetops and dropped acorns and seemed to shake the sand.
GIVE ME BACK MY f.u.c.kING EYE!.
"Give me back my f.u.c.king eye"? the blacksmith repeated down to his mule. He gazed into the dark trees. Did you hear that?
The animal didn"t answer.
The woods were soundless and still, a picture of woods with him sitting in the middle of it.
Well, s.h.i.t my britches, he said, looking upward where dapples of blue highlit the leaves. He was poking the mule"s ribs with his heels. Why don"t we get the h.e.l.l out of here.
He goaded the mule to a run in the direction of the tenant farm. If devilry were going on, if Smonk was out in the woods killing McKissick and saying such a string of words a Christian ought never hear, Gates could sneak back and see the wh.o.r.e for a quick suck and a spot of licker to sustain him on the long ride to come. He could charge it to the judge.
Yah! he said, kicking the mule harder.
McKissick peered over the log.
He"s done for, the bailiff thought. Or I"d be dead already.
He stood up. He scanned the s.p.a.ces between the trees. He saw a sparrow. He saw a chipmunk. A b.u.t.terfly blinking past.
The sniper"s shot he half-expected never came.
So Smonk was gone. His eye, however, was working its way down the bailiff"s gullet.
He strapped his loin cloth on and cinched its knot. If E.O. had indeed retreated, it showed weakness. Here was their chance. McKissick turned, he was running toward his horse. He"d circle back, get Gates, and the two of them would track Smonk and kill him once and for all.
Gates rolled off the mule at the farmhouse and reined it to the rail. He mounted the stairs, brandishing the empty Winchester like Daddy used to, when he hit Momma. He looked around, then knocked on the wall with the rifle-stock. He knocked again, then again, and finally creaked open the door. A slab of light fell into the room and the dark corners tensed. He stepped in from the sun and waited.
The mule brayed behind him.
Dry up, said the blacksmith. He lit a lamp and found a jar of yellow liquid on a shelf and sipped it but spat it back out. p.i.s.s, he said. I drunk p.i.s.s! In a rage, he overturned chairs and kicked up the rug and stomped through floorboards and tore apart the stove. Not even a shot"s worth. That lying tenant farmer. h.e.l.l. By now Gates was so ready for a taste he"d of swallowed the jar of p.i.s.s if it had been a drunk had p.i.s.sed it. He walked onto the porch and glared down the hillside, nothing except more woods and sugarcane. Mule "d got loose. Out in the field pulling up gra.s.s. s.h.i.t.
At the insistence of his bowels, he left the porch and picked his way through the weeds alongside the cabin. He saw the tenant farmer spread out on the ground, his throat cut. His face covered with ants. Serves ye right, Gates said, stepping over the body. He searched the man"s pockets and reclaimed the nail he"d given him earlier but found nothing else. Dusting ants from his hands, he walked a few yards farther, into a stand of oaks.
The wh.o.r.e stood up from a crouch and grinned. She was unhooking her slip from one shoulder and then the other. It fell from the skeleton and skin she was and she glowed white in a burst of sunlight where the forest roof hadn"t yet st.i.tched out the sky. His bowels forgotten, Gates rushed toward her fumbling with his britches and she met him with her teeth bared and they fell coupling. She was a zestful lover who growled and scratched and bit, just the way he liked, and when he flipped her to her stomach and held her arms behind her back she groaned and took his wad which was all he wanted from any lady, wh.o.r.e or otherwise.