Ghost Town

An eye-patched mestizo with long black greasy hair puts his one ear to the rail that he’s been squatting on. Nope. Nuthin.

Mebbe these aint the right ones, says a bandy-legged old gray-beard in a red undershirt and black derby. Mebbe these’re jest more false tracks thet goldang train has laid down t’throw us offn its trail.

The black mare behind him lifts her head and shakes it with a dissentious snort. Them’s the tracks, ole man, he says quietly, patting the mare’s shoulder. Dont git antsy. It’ll be here soon enuf.

To bide the waiting time and calm this restless bunch of high-tempered roadriders, Belle sings old campmeeting favorites about destiny and fast guns, potency and freedom (Sumthin howlin sumthin prowlin black’n hairy on the prairie, she warbles into the dark windy night, the ruby in her cheek so lit up from the campfire it seems more like a window to a furnace in her mouth), and at the end (Space without end! Aymen! Aymen!) he and the men all join in by throwing their heads back and emitting long mournful howls, which seem to enter into the winds and become part of them and spread over the dimly glowing landscape as though to blanket it with the foggy ache of their unrealized desires.

Slowly the howls fade into the distance, carried away by the departing winds, and in the dense silence that follows, the stringy-haired mestizo puts his ear to the tracks and raises his hand and whispers: It’s comin!

Hastily, they stamp out the fire and don their masks and mount their horses: they can hear it now, wailing dolefully in the distance, as though returning their own howls, and heading this way. He steps the black mare into the middle of the track bed to block the train’s passage and also to nail the skittery rails in place, and the others gather around him, pistols and rifles out, waiting for whatever happens next. The roar augments, the steam whistle bawls, they can hear the rhythmic clatter of the steel wheels drawing ever nearer, but as yet no sign of the train itself.

We should oughter be seein its light, someone says, and suddenly everything goes silent.

Whut—? Whar’d it go?

Sshh!

They stand there in the dead of night, huddled together on their horses atop the short stretch of rails they’ve secured, scanning the pale empty horizon, nothing to be heard but their own breathing and the occasional stamp of a hoof, someone sucking nervously on a loose tooth. And then, as suddenly as the silence fell, the train is thundering up on them, its whistle shrieking, its headlight swinging above them like a diabolical pendulum, fire belching from its stack, sparks flying from the pounding wheels. Horses rear, riders tumble, some scream and run, but he and the mare stand fast and the train vanishes again. Silence and darkness fall, even deeper than before.

While the other men, mumbling curses, brush themselves off and crawl back onto their horses, the bandit queen sidles up to him on her golden palomino and says: Whuddayu reckon?

Dunno. Must be hidin from us. Tryin to.

It aint got past?

No. It’s out thar. Sumwhars. Slowly his eyes, temporarily blinded by the locomotive’s headlamp, adjust to the darkness, and he searches the bleak scene for any irregularity which might conceal so great a thing. Mostly just dark clumps of sage, scrub, out-croppings of pale rocks.

Whut about thet ole abandoned silver mine?

Silver mine?

Over thar. In thet little cleft this side a thet far butte. See the black hole? It’s deep and it’s got rails down it coulda used.

He nods. Aint nuthin else t’choose from. He turns to the old graybeard. Yu stay here, oletimer, and mind them tracks dont sneak off sumwhars. The resta yu men come with me.

It’s a fair gallop across the vast flat desert to the silver mine, but they cover it in due time, or rather in no time at all, for it seems he’s still contemplating the distance they have to travel when they are pulling up at the mouth of the mine on sweaty frothing horses to ponder their next move.

It’s down thar awright, whispers one of the men. I kin hear it wheezin.

So, uh, whuddawe gonna do, kid? It’s the trigger-happy humpback, now wearing the wire-rimmed specs on his bulbous nose, the two black disks pupilled each by a reflected star.

Pears we got no choice. The train’s gone down thet hole. Ifn we wanta rob it, we gotta go down thar too.

Unh-hunh. Well. Yu’re probly right. His gnarled hand digs deep into his beard, scratching at the roots. He looks around at the others. Sumbody should likely oughter go down thar.

The men of the gang, half-circling around, stare at him sullenly in the darkness. There is a lengthy silence, broken only by the train engine letting off a bit of steam deep in the earth. Awright, he says finally. But shares accordin. There’s some grumbling, but Belle says: Shore. Heck. Thet’s fair.

As he steps the mare toward the mine shaft, however, she rears and balks, forcing him to dismount (better to go in on foot anyway, he reasons, allows for a better chance of ducking out of its way should it come cannonballing up out of there), then plants her body lengthways in front of the black mouth of the tunnel, blocking his way down. She snorts pleadingly, rubbing her nose against his buckskin shirt, forcing him back. He steadies himself, one arm over her withers, and whispers into her lowered ear, twitching in front of his nose as if trying to flick flies off it: It’s awright. Aint nuthin down thar but a ole gully jumper gone off its rails. And anyhow, shoot. Yu know. I aint got no choice.

Once, long ago — he remembers this now as he pushes past the distressed mare and steps into the ink-black mine shaft, blindly feeling his way and as though possessed by some unspoken obligement he does not even recognize — he won a woman in a game of stud poker, one of the sort Belle was singing about earlier. She was, as they said about such women, a nymph of the prairie who had killed a lot of men by charming them to death, so there was a price on her head and bounty hunters were after her. In fact he was himself a bounty hunter at that time, so what in effect he had won was a hundred dollars. His problem was hauling her up to the next fort and cashing her in before rival bounty hunters got to her, so instead of killing her straight off and having to drag her dead weight around, he figured that it was better to keep her on the hoof until he could safely collect. He figured wrong. Should have known better, he was not ignorant of her reputation, but he was young then, and reckless (as if he’d grown any wiser: look where he is now), and untutored in the witching ways of professional prairie nymphs. It was said that she cast her necromantic spells through some ancient member-rubbing metaphysic, so as precaution he strapped a holster betwixt his legs and pulled on an extra pair of pants backwards, then gagged her and tied her hands behind her back. Of course that meant he had to feed and clean her, which tasks led him to the discovery that there were other sorcerous parts of her, and not least her eyes, which never ceased to fix their gaze upon him, a savage gaze, for she was of mixed breed, yet a gaze of such seeming purity and natural goodness that eventually it was all that he could see and he was in her power and she was unbound and practicing her murderous skills upon him. The days that followed blurred into a ceaseless present and, as he felt his life essence draining out of him, he lost all sense of time. And place: even the landscape seemed to change, acquiring a roseate glow, which glow in the end was all that he could see, the intensity of his pleasure, which was also pain, dissolving the world’s salients, dips, and bends into a single throbbing rubescent surface that encircled him much as does now this tunnel down which he gropes, itself now also red and pulsing, though that pounding pulse may only be his own, as it no doubt was then, and the redness an illusion cast upon his eyes by the absolute blackness of the mine. Or are now and then the true illusions and is he still in fact ensorcelled, this powerless sinking into the bowels of the earth the nymph’s wry theatrical farewell? Perhaps, and yet he seems to recall a sequel, in which, somehow, through force of youthful will, he escaped her dark enchantment and, though almost too weak to stand, subdued and bound her up once more and blindfolded her as well and sought out in the town wherein he soon found himself a preacher who might break the spell. Well, said the preacher, looking her over with his tired yellow eyes, we could tote her down to the river’n try baptizin her. Yu reckon, revrend? Seems a mite tame. The way I baptize em, son, said the preacher with a thin black smile, it either takes or we bury em. So he left her with him and went to the saloon across the way to recover some of his natural vitality. There some men joined him and affably offered to let him buy them a drink and asked him about the light-o’-love he’d towed in, trussed up like a mountain cat set for a skinning, and he freely told them about her, as they were unarmed and lacked ambition beyond the whiskey remaining in the bottle. So yu turned her over t’thet thar ranter whut runs the gospel-mill crost the street? I done so. He figgered he could unwitch her with a theologie river-duckin. Well, pard, I think yu jest lost yerself a hunderd bucks. Thet feller might be a aymen-snortin pulpit banger on Sundays but rest a the time they aint a more robustious hard-shelled bounty hunter in the Terrortory. He sat there taking in these ungratifying tidings, feeling his juices starting to churn once more but unable as yet to set his limbs in adequate motion. Tell me then, he said. Whut day’s t’day? Dunno, but it aint Sunday lest thet gospel shark sez it is. So, though putting one leg in front of the other still required considerable effort, he took his rifle and went looking for the preacher and found him naked and sucked down to skin and bone and floating face-down in the river. Never saw the prairie nymph again but he’s never been certain that he is shut of her, for she left him full of doubts about the world he walks and about himself and what is real and what is of her conjuring.

The train coughs suddenly, quite nearby, startling him, and he presses back against the glowing tunnel wall, but only silence follows. As, cautiously, he edges forward again, it occurs to him (the red walls remind him so: yes, they are no illusion) that his fears of its roaring out and running him down have been for naught, for of course the train has ducked down here cowcatcher first and cannot turn around, that red glow being provided by its caboose lantern. Which, as he rounds a falling bend, he sees, rocking faintly to and fro from the heaving tremors of the trapped engine down at the other end. It cowers there, nose buried in the narrowing tunnel like a whipped puppy trying to hide in a boot.

Well well, he says. Whut deepot’s this?

The train lets off an explosive burst of steam and sets its whistle shrieking, its bells clanging, but it’s all empty bravado.

He waits for it to cool down and then he says: They aint no way outa here, y’know, cept backin out tailfirst through the hole yu come in. It’s all uphill, yu caint git up no speed, and they’s a passel a bodaciously wicked desperadoes up thar jest itchin t’take yu apart rivet by rivet when yu come crawlin out. So I reckon the best thing fer yu t’do is give up yer goods right here and go peaceful.

There’s another whistle howl and blast of steam and a rattling of the couplings, the caboose lantern bouncing wildly on its hook at the parlor end and sending shadows leaping about the hellish tunnel, but the train knows well it’s beat. A final rackety spasm shudders its length, and then the cars slump forward in defeat, knocking dolefully up against one another, and the caboose lantern ceases to sway and hangs limply in dimmed despond.

I’ll see to it they dont hurt yu none, he says, and the train, in abject surrender, sighs grandly and commences to spill out its contents. When it has wholly emptied itself, he leads it, its steel drivers and wheels groaning self-pityingly, back up out of the mine shaft. He feels he has been down here for weeks, but it has probably not been so long, though he does emerge into midday sunlight, there to find his gang still mounted and waiting for him as he left them, the black mare foremost, greeting him at the entranceway with an eager whinny and a nuzzle of his chest. Yu kin let the train go, boys, he announces. We aint got no more use of it. It’s dumped all its freight down below. Go hep yerself!

Yippee! the men shout, and leap out of their saddles, and, as soon as the train, chugging gloomily, has backed out of the way, they go charging off into the mine, firing their pistols and racing one another for first pick among the goods. He can hear their clattering bootsteps echoing up out of the pitch-black tunnel, the occasional ricocheting shot, their curses as they bounce off the walls and each other and tumble down the shaft. Still sitting on her horse above him — in the sun, her golden palomino has a soiled and scurfy aspect, more the color of day-old cowpatties — the bandit queen takes her mask off and says: I got some news fer yu, kid.

Before she can deliver it, though, they are interrupted by a terrific explosion in the depths of the mine and the tunnel mouth spews forth a macabre and filthy rain. He turns in rage and fires his rifle futilely at the escaping train, showing now only its red-tipped caboose, wagging tauntingly in the sun-bleached distance. He leaps astride his mare, prepared to give chase, but Belle restrains him.

Whoa, cowboy, she says, grabbing the reins. Let it go. We didnt need thet gang no more anyhow. They’ve ketched the real hoss thief. Yu been pardoned. Yu’re a free man. He rests back in the saddle, taking in this unexpected news. Free. The sound of it soughs through him like a freshening wind. He stretches, and the land seems to stretch out around him. In the distance, above where the judas train disappeared, a lonely hawk wheels like a summons. It’s time, it spells out upon the slate-blue sky in graceful loops and swirls, to leave this town behind. Even as a badman on the loose he has been held captive by it, but no longer. He strips off his mask and squints off toward the spreading horizon, looking for something out there on the rim to aim at before it all recedes out of sight. Yu kin go back t’bein sheriff agin, darlin. Me’n yu, we kin clean up thet disreptile town.

I dont much cotton to the sheriffin line, mam. Reckon I’ll be hittin the trail. The chanteuse, for that’s what she is once more, looks sorrowed by the news but not surprised; it’s who he is, after all. So who’d they say done it?

Well yu wont hardly believe it. It’s the schoolmarm. She come ridin inta town on it, bold as brass.

Whut? But I give her thet hoss.

Dont matter none how she come by it. She wuz settin it and thet wuz fault enuf. They clapped her sanctimonious fanny smack in the calaboose, no questions ast nor answered, thet’s all she wrote. They’re hangin her tomorra at high noon and good riddance.

The hawk has left the sky, that slate wiped blank. The horizon has shrunk toward him some, but whether to urge or thwart his departure is not clear, and the wind has died, if it was ever blowing. His mare snorts impatiently, paws the ground. He strokes her neck. Did yu say thet sheriff’s job wuz open?

I thought yu wuz boltin off inta the sunset.

Dont seem t’be thet time a day. Anyhow, I reckon I caint go jest yet.

Now yu’re talkin, sweetie. I knowed yu couldnt leave me. C’mon! I still got thet silk’n velvet gown with all them buttons and almost nuthin spilt on it. Lets git goin!

Y’know, what gits me, says the chanteuse, gazing down upon the town, laid out below in parallel lines as though to lend conviction that it is somewhere, is how sad it is, settin thar like a speck in the middle a nuthin. And how grand.

Peculiar, more like, he says. They have arrived at a bluff overlooking the town, a prominence he had not noticed before. Dont see nobody movin down thar.

Thet’s jest cuzza us bein up so high.

We aint so high I caint read the saloon sign nor see the curtain hangin in yer winder.

And aint it a purty sight! She reaches over and clasps his buck-skinned thigh. He can also see the gallows, which, like the rest of the town, is presently unoccupied, a relief to him because he was afraid a day might have passed in their coming here and he might be too late. Unless it’s already the day after. Caint wait t’git back inta my own satin sheets. She sighs, giving his leg an eager squeeze. It aint in my maidenly nature t’be livin rough.

Belle, he says, they’s sumthin I gotta talk t’yu about.

Only one thing though, darlin: I aint sharin my bed with thet damned hoss.

Well thet’s jest it. Yu wont hafta do.

Course not. But lookie thar!

Down below, the streets are now full of diminutive figures running about in an aimless frenzy like a colony of ants whose nest has been poked. They scramble in and out of buildings, dash across streets, fall off rooftops and out of windows, whirl, roll, and tumble, and though it all happens in a heavy midday silence, he realizes that they must be shooting at each other. Yes, he can see flashes now, puffs of smoke. And then the sound does reach them: a series of stuttery little pops like strings of firecrackers going off.

I’d say thet’s a town desprit fer a sheriff, the chanteuse remarks. I jest hope they aint shot the parson.

The dead are dragged away or carried off by buzzards and the figures vanish, though the pops continue for a time before also dying away. Then the buildings shift about like wagers on a faro table, the bank moving over to where the saloon was, the saloon replacing the church now sliding into the center next to the stables, the claims office and the jailhouse changing places either side of the general store, and so on, until the entire town layout has been reset. The streets are empty and silence reigns as before. He feels he has just witnessed something vital but he does not know what it is, nor can he fix his mind wholly upon it, so assailed is it by dire apprehensions about a certain person and the danger she is in. Dont fret about no parson, Belle, he says. I aint stayin. They’s sumthin I gotta attend to. And then I’ll be movin on.

Suddenly the figures reappear in the streets below, scampering, rolling, and falling about as before, scribbling their miserable fates on the town’s dusty tablet, and a moment later the stutter of pops resumes, tattooing the desert air. He is not certain how he will manage what he has to do, but the simplest and boldest thing would be just to ride down there, pick her up, put her on his horse, and ride away, and he supposes it’s what he’ll do, or try to do. If she’ll allow him. There’s a fierce principled streak in her that can get in the way of amiable intentions. He envisions the struggle, and his lips twitch involuntarily into a half smile. Whut’s she got that I aint got twice of? asks the chanteuse flatly, her voice hardening.

He presses his lips together, feeling like someone’s just peeked at his hand in a poker showdown. It aint thet. The little figures below withdraw and the streets are cleared and the buildings slide about once more as though trying to solve some puzzle. It’s jest she aint no hoss thief, and I caint let her die fer thet.

Hmmph, says Belle in the silence that returns. Her tasseled sombrero has been tipped back onto her shoulders and her orange hair is blazing in the sun like her whole head’s on fire. Thet harpy is homely as a fencepost and friendly as a dead cat and she aint even bowlaigged enuf t’set a hoss proper. Ifn it wuz me they wuz hangin, yu’da been long gone, wouldnt yu, handsome?

She’s differnt, Belle. He remembers her as he first saw her, framed in the schoolhouse window, her dark hair coiled into a tight bun, so very pale and beautiful and staring out at him as if to instruct him by gaze alone on the ways of the universe and the means for quelling the spirits of evil in the human heart. She’s kindly and reefined and pure as a angel. She caint think a wicked thought.

Damn her eyes. She’s a prissy bitch with a cob stuck purely up her reefined angel ass. I caint stand the proud uppish way she talks, struttin her book larnin. Whut’s sumbody like her doin out here anyhow? The chanteuse pauses to collect her breath, which is coming in short furious gasps. There is a look on her face that reminds him of his mustang just before he shot him. Well jest dont yu fergit, cowboy. Yu made a promise.

He sighs. This is not turning out as he’d imagined it. He’d even thought that Belle might help him. Aint no witnesses t’thet promise, Belle.

No? How many folks yu reckon is down thar?

They are dashing about through the streets again in their hats and batwing chaps, shooting at each other, diving for cover, appearing on the tops of things only to fall off them, the buzzards as usual hovering shaggily above like bald black-jacketed croupiers, surveying the action, waiting to gather in the winnings. The thin puppety-pop code of distant gunfire rises as the agitation diminishes and the streets empty out, and then it dies, too. I dunno, he says, as the little buildings rearrange themselves around the gallows again. A goodly number, I spose. They dont stand still long enuf t’count.

Well however many, sweetiepie, thet’s how many witnesses I got.

The streets of the town below are empty and silent as before and hotly burnished by the noonday sun. Into them on a coal-black horse now rides a lone figure all outfitted in black with silver spurs and six-shooters and a gold ring in one ear. It is he. A man on a mission. The chanteuse has left him in anger and disgust, or seems to have done, nothing he could do about that, and here he is. From under the broad brim of his slouch hat he warily watches, feeling watched, the windows and rooftops, the corners of things. Expecting trouble. The mare seems edgy too, rolling her head fretfully, biting at the bit. Well, she’s an outlaw horse, has likely never set hoof in this town before except on illegal business; she probably has good reason for unease.

In the center of town across from the saloon, a potbellied mestizo with a missing ear and a tall squint-eyed man with droopy handlebars and a bald head tattooed with hair are testing the trapdoor of the gallows, using a noosed goat, not by the appearance of it for the first time. Yo, sheriff! the man with the tattooed hair calls out, dragging the goat into position. Howzit hangin?

He nods at them and watches the limp goggle-eyed goat drop, then walks the mare cautiously over to the jailhouse. So he’s the sheriff again. Yes, he’s wearing his silver badge once more, the one with the hole in it. That explains the sharp tug in the breast he’s felt since turning his back on the inviting horizon and riding back to town again. Shines out on his black shirt in a way it never did before.

There’s a poster outside the jailhouse door announcing the high noon hanging on the morrow, with a portrait of the schoolmarm staring sternly out at all who would dare stare back. He is shaken by the intensity of her gaze, and the pure gentle innocence of it, and the rectitude, and he knows he is lost to it.

He hitches the mare to the rail there, and though she is skittish and backs away, her eyes rolling, tugging at her tether, he needs her for what he must next do. He unhooks his rifle from the saddle horn. I’ll jest be a minnit and then we’ll hightail it outa here, he says softly, stroking her sweaty neck to calm her, and he enters the jailhouse ready for whatever happens.

But the jailhouse is empty, nobody in there except an old codger with an eyepatch, slumped in the wooden swivel chair, wearing a deputy’s badge on his raggedy red undershirt. There is a thick gully of scar running through his gray beard, down which a trickle of tobacco juice dribbles, and his lone eye is red with drink. Hlo, sheriff, he drawls, trying to stand. Glad yu’re back. Yu’re jest in time t’hang thet rapscallious hoss thief yerself. He chortles, then falls back into the swivel chair, takes a swig from a whiskey bottle, belches, offers it out. Yer health, sheriff!

Whar is she? he says.

The prizner? They tuck her over t’the saloon t’shuck her weeds offn her’n scrub her down afore her hangin.

The saloon?

Yup, well they got soap’n water over thar and plentya hep in spiffyin her up. The boys wuz plannin t’rub her down good with goose grease’n skunk oil after, polish her up right properlike. He’s already at the door and there’s a pounding in his temples that’s worse than snakebite. Hey, hole up, sheriff! Ain’t thet a outlaw hoss out thar?

Mebbe. I’ll check into it. Yu stay here’n keep yer workin eye on thet whuskey bottle.

I aim to.

The mare is wild-eyed and frothing, rearing against her hitching rope, so he lets her go. Stay outa sight, he whispers to her as he unties her. This wont take long. I’ll whistle yu when we’re set t’bust out. The horse hesitates, pawing the ground, whinnying softly, but he slaps her haunches affectionately, and, glancing back over her shoulder at him, she slips away into the shadows behind the jailhouse.

The object of his quest is not in the saloon either. It’s quiet in there, four men playing cards, a couple more at the bar, a puddle of water in the middle of the floor where a bucket of soapy water stands, a lacy black thing ripped up and hung over its lip. The men at the bar are laughing and pointing at the bucket or else at the wet long-handled grooming brush beside it. Thet goddam humpback! one of them says, hooting.

Hlo, sheriff, grins the bartender, a dark sleepy-eyed man of mixed breed with half a nose. Welcum back. Whut’s yer pizen?

An argument breaks out at the card table, the air fills with the slither of steel flashing free of leather, shots ring out, and a tall skinny man with spidery hair loses most of his jaw and all else besides, slamming against the wall with the impact before sliding in a bloody heap to the floor. Looks like they’s a chair open fer yu, sheriff, says the thin little bespectacled man who shot him, tucking his smoking derringer back inside his black broadcloth coat. Set yer butt down and study the devil’s prayerbook a spell.

I aint a sportin man. Whut’s happened t’the prizner?

Yu mean thet dastardly hoss thief? Haw. Caint say. He aims a brown slather of juice at a brass spittoon, and it crashes there, making the spittoon rattle on its round bottom like a gambling top. She might could be over t’doc’s fer a purjin so’s t’git her cleaned up inside as smart as out, though after her warshin in here, I misdoubt she needs it.

The others snort and hoot at this. Naw, I think doc musta awready seed her, declares the barkeep, a toothpick stabbed into a gap between his tobacco-stained teeth. He was in here shortly sniffin his finger.

Probly then, laughs another, they tuck her up t’the schoolhouse fer a paddlin.

Whut’s thet got t’do with bein a hoss thief?

Nuthin. It’s jest fer fun. Give the jade summa her own back. And they all whoop again and slap the bar and table.

He pushes out through the swinging doors, his blood pounding in his ears and eyes. Can’t recollect where the doctor lives, if he ever knew, so he heads for the schoolhouse. On his way over, he hears a banging noise coming from a workshop back of the feed store. It’s a lanky hairy-faced carpenter knocking out a pine coffin. Howdy, sheriff, he says, lifting the coffin up on its foot. Jest gittin ready t’eut the lid. Inside, on the bottom, there is a crude line drawing of a stretched-out human figure, no doubt done by tracing around a person lying there. One of the faces from the hanging posters has been cut out and pasted in the outline of the head, and nails have been driven in where the nipples would be. The arms go only to the elbows (probably her hands were folded between the nails), but the legs are there in all their forked entirety. I reckon it should oughter fit her perfect. Whuddayu think?

I think yu should oughter burn it.

The schoolhouse is not where he remembered it either. Instead, he comes on a general dry goods and hardware store in that proximate neighborhood and he stops in to ask if she’s been seen about.

Sheriff! Whar yu been? cries the merchant, a round bandy-legged fellow with a black toupee and his nose pushed into his red face. They’s been a reglar plague a hell-raisin bandits pilin through here since yu been gone! Jest lookit whut they done t’my store! Shot up my winders, killt my staff, stole summa my finest goods, ‘n splattered blood’n hossshit on all the rest! Yu gotta do sumthin about this! Whut’s a sheriff fer ifn honest folk caint git pertection!

Thet’s a question I aint got a clear answer to, he says, staring coldly into the fat merchant’s beady eyes. Right now I’m tryin t’locate a missin prizner.

Whut, yu mean thet ornery no-account barebutt picaroon? She aint missin. Yer boys wuz by here a time ago with her, plain cleaned me outa hosswhips’n ax handles; she wuz in fer a grand time. I think they wuz makin fer the stables. Yu know. Scene a the crime. He turns to leave, but the merchant has a grip on his elbow and a salacious grin on his round red face. I gotta tell yu, sheriff, I seen sumthin when they brung her by I aint never seed before. He glances over his shoulder with one eye, the other winking, and leans toward him, his cold fermented breath ripe with the stink of rot and mildew. She wuz — huh! yu know, he snickers softly in his ear. She wuz cryin!

He tears free from the merchant’s greasy grip and strides out the door onto the wooden porch, his spurs ringing in the midday hush. He pauses there to stare out upon the dusty town. No sign of them. They could be anywhere. There’s a dim shadowy movement over in the blacksmith’s shed, but that’s probably his horse pacing about. He should just go back to the jailhouse and wait for them. But then the white church steeple beckons him. She gave him a Bible once, he recalls. They’ll have to take her there sooner or later if she wants to go, and she surely will. There’s probably a law about it.

He is met inside the church doors by the parson, or a parson, standing in a black frock coat behind a wooden table with a Bible on it, a pair of ivory dice (REPENT, says a tented card beside them, AFORE YU CRAP OUT!), a pistol, and a collection plate. Howdo, sheriff, he says, touching the brim of his stovepipe hat. He’s a tall ugly gold-toothed man with wild greasy hair snaking about under the hat and a drunkard’s lumpy nose, on the end of which a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles is perched like two pans of a gold-dust balance. Welcum t’the house a the awmighty. Yu’re jest in time fer evenin prayers!

I aint here fer prayin. I’m lookin fer a missin prizner.

Y’mean thet jezebel hoss thief? She gone missin? A leather flap behind the parson blocks his view, but he can hear the churchgoers carrying on inside, hooting and hollering in the pietistical way. Well she’s probly in thar, ever other sinner is.

Thanks, revrend, he says, and heads on in, but the parson grabs him by the elbow. The pistol is cocked and pointed at his ear. Whoa thar, brother. I caint let yu go in without payin.

I tole yu, I aint here fer the preachin, I’m on sheriffin bizness.

Dont matter. Yu gotta put sumthin in the collection plate or I caint let yu by.

I aint got no money, he says firmly, staring down the gun barrel. And I’m goin in thar.

Dont hafta be money, says the parson, keeping the pistol pointed at his head but letting go of his elbow to tug at his reversed collar so as to give his Adam’s apple more room to bob. Them sporty boots’ll do.

No. Gonna need them boots. If he just walked on in, would the preacher shoot him in the back? He might.

Well how about thet thar beaded black-haired scalp then?

He hesitates. He doesn’t know why he wears it. For good luck, maybe. Like a rabbit’s paw. But he’s not superstitious. And it doesn’t even smell all that good. Awright, he says, and he cuts it off his gunbelt with his bowie knife and tosses it in the collection plate, where it twists and writhes for a moment before curling up like a dead beetle.

Now I’ll roll yu fer them boots, ifn yu’re of a mind fer it, grins the parson goldenly, picking up the dice and rattling them about in his grimy knob-knuckled hand, but he pushes on past him under the flap into the little one-room church, the preacher calling out behind him: I’m sorely beseechin the good Lawd thet yu localize thet snotnose gallows bird, sheriff! Dont wanta lose her at the last minnit and set all hell t’grievin!

Veiled gas lamps hang from blackened beams in the plank-walled room, the air hazy with smoke and smelling of stale unwashed bodies and the nauseous vapors of the rotgut whiskey — drunk, undrunk, and regurgitated — being served like communion from boards set on pew backs. Hanging in the thick smoke like audible baubles are the ritual sounds of ringing spittoons, dice raining upon craps tables, the clink of money, soft slap of cards, the ratcheting and ping of fortune wheels and slot machines, the click click click of the roulette ball, and, amid the zealous cries of the high rollers, oaths are being sworn and glasses smashed and pistols fired off with a kind of emotional abandon. Are yu all down, gentamin? someone hollers, and another cries out: Gawd-awmighty, smack me easy! Somewhere in the church, behind all the smoke and noise, he can hear the saloon chanteuse singing about a magical hero with a three-foot johnnie, now hung and gone to glory, her voice half smothered by the thick atmosphere. Sweat-stained hats hang in parade on hooks along the walls under doctrinal pronouncements regarding spitting and fair dealing, rows of decapitated animal heads, dusty silvered mirrors which reflect nothing, and religious paintings of dead bandits and unclothed ladies in worshipful positions, but the only sign anywhere of the one he’s looking for is one of the posters announcing tomorrow’s hanging nailed up over a faro table, the portrait obscenely altered. BUCK THE TIGER! it says, and a crude drawing shows where and how to do so.

He turns a corner (there is a corner, the room is getting complicated) and comes upon a craps table with strange little misshapen dice, more like real knucklebones, which they probably are. Set down, sheriff, and shake an elbow, says the scrubby skew-jawed fellow in dun-colored rags and bandanna headband who is working the table, a swarthy and disreputable wretch who is vaguely familiar. His broken arm is in a rawhide sling, its hand fingerless, and there’s a fresh red weal across his rough cheeks, the sort of cut made by a horsewhip. Here, he can no longer hear the chanteuse; instead, at the back by the big wheel of fortune, there is a choral rhythmic rise and fall of drunken whoops, so it’s likely she’s back there somewhere. Not someone he cares to see just now. Go ahaid’n roll em, sheriff, says the wampus-jawed scrub, wagging the stump at the end of his broken arm. Them sad tats is mine. Wuz.

Aint got no stake. But dont I know yu from sumwhars? With his good hand, the wretch flashes a bent and rusty deputy’s badge, hidden away in his filthy rags. Whut? Yu my deppity?

Useter be. But I lost my poke’n then some in thet wicked brace over by the big wheel. I hafta work fer this clip crib now.

Whar’s the prizner then?

Well we lost her too.

Lost her—?

T’thet hardass double-dealin shark over thar, the dodrabbid burglar whut operates this skin store. He’s the one whut give me this extry elbow and my own bones t’flop when I opened my big mouth after ketchin him with a holdout up his sleeve. He sees him now, enthroned behind a blackjack table under a glowing gas lamp, over by the wheel of fortune, an immense bald and beardless man in a white suit and ruffled shirt with blue string tie and golden studs, wearing blue-tinted spectacles smack up against his eyes. He sits as still and pale as stone, nothing moving except his little fat fingers, deftly flicking out the cards. The rhythmic whooping is coming from there and may be in response to the cards being dealt. The motherless asshole tuck us fer all we had, sheriff. Got the prizner in the bargain.

Yu done wrong. She warnt a stake.

I know it.

Whut’s he done with her?

Well. His ex-deputy hesitates. It aint nice. He glances uneasily over his shoulder. Best go on over thar’n see fer yerself.

There’s an icy chill on his heart and a burning rage at the same time and he feels like he might go crazy with the sudden antipodal violence of his feelings, but he bites down hard and collects himself and sets his hat square over his brow and drops his hands flat to his sides and straightens up his back and lowers his head and, with measured strides, makes his way over toward the glowing fat man at the blackjack table. The room seems to have spread out somewhat or to be spreading out as he proceeds, and there are new turns and corners he must bear around, sudden congestions of loud drunken gamblers he must thread his way through, and sometimes the blackjack dealer seems further away than when he first set out, but he presses on, learning to follow not his eyes but his ears (those whoops and hollers), and so is drawn in time into the crowd of men around the blackjack table. What is provoking their rhythmic hoots, he sees when he gets there, is the sight of the schoolmarm stretched out upon the slowly spinning wheel of fortune, her black skirts falling past her knees each time she’s upside down. He tries not to watch this but is himself somewhat mesmerized by the rhythmic rising and falling, revealing and concealing, of the schoolmarm’s dazzling white knees, the spell broken only when he realizes that she is gazing directly at him as she rotates with a look compounded of fury, humiliation, and anguished appeal. It is a gaze most riveting when she is upside down and the whoops are loudest, her eyes then darkly underscored by eyebrows as if bagged with grief, her nose with its flared nostrils fiercely horning her brow between them, the exposed knees above not unlike a bitter thought, and a reproach.

He steps forward, not knowing what he will do, but before he can reach the table, a tall bald man with tattooed hair pushes everyone aside and, tossing down a buckskin purse, seats himself before it. Dole me some paint thar, yu chiselin jackleg! he bellows with drunken bravado, twirling the waxed ends of his handlebar mustache. He’s seen him before, testing out the gallows, except that since then he’s acquired a wooden leg. His partner, the one-eared mestizo, now wearing a bear claw in his nose and an erect feather in a headband, hovers nearby with his pants gaped open under his overhanging belly. I’m aimin t’win summa thet gyratin pussy fer my bud’n me, and I dont wanta ketch yu spikin, stackin, trimmin, rimplin, nickin, nor ginnyin up in no manner them books, dont wanta see no shiners, cold decks, coolers, nor holdouts, nor witness no great miracles a extry cards or a excess a greased bullets. Yu hear? So now rumble the flats, yu ole grifter, and cut me a kiss.

The dealer, holding the deck of cards in his soft smooth bejeweled hands as a sage might clasp a prayerbook, has sat listening to all this bluster with serene indifference, his hairless head settled upon his layered folds of chin like a creamy mound of milk curd, eyes hidden behind the sky-blue spectacles, which seem almost pasted to them. The tinted spectacles, he knows, are for reading the backs of doped cards, the polished rings for mirroring the deal, a pricking poker ring no doubt among them, and the man’s sleeves and linen vest are bulked and squared by the mechanical holdout devices concealed within. When, so minimally one can almost not see the movement, he shuffles, cuts, and deals, he seems to use at least three different decks, crosscutting a pair of them, and the deal is from the bottom of the only deck in view at any one time, or at least not from the top.

The squint-eyed man with the tattooed hair rises up and kicks his chair back with his wooden leg. I jest come unanimously to the conclusion yu been cheatin, he shouts, as the dealer calmly slides the man’s leather purse into his heap of winnings, then takes up the deck to reshuffle it, so smoothly that the deck seems like a small restless creature trapped between his soft pale hands. Behind him, the schoolmarm, bound to the fortune wheel, grimly turns and turns, though now, with the bald man on his feet, or foot, the rhythmic whooping dies away.

Easy, podnuh, whispers the one-eared mestizo, his hand inside his pants. He spits over his shoulder, away from the dealer. He’s awmighty fast, thet sharper. Dont try him. It aint judicious.

Shet up, yu yellabellied cyclops,’n gimme room! the bald man roars. He stands there before the bespectacled dealer, legs apart and leaning on his pegleg, shoulders tensed, elbows out, hands hovering an inch from his gunbutts. I’m callin yer bluff, yu flim-flammin cartload a hossshit!

A hole opens up explosively in the bald man’s chest like a post has been driven through it, kicking him back into the crowd, the dealer having calmly drawn, fired, and reholstered without even interrupting his steady two-handed shuffle of the cards. He sets the deck down and spreads his plump palms to either side as though to say: Any other sucker here care to try his luck?

He makes certain his sheriffs badge is in plain view, tugs at the brim of his hat, hitches his gunbelt, and steps into the well-lit space just abruptly vacated by the peglegged man with the tattooed hair. He picks up the fallen chair, watching the dealer closely, and sets it down in front of the blackjack table but remains standing. I’m askin yu t’return me back my prizner, he says quietly. He has a hunch about the dealer now, something he grows more convinced of the longer he stands there studying him. She warnt a legal bet. Yu knowed thet. I may hafta close this entaprize down.

His weedy ex-deputy with the busted arm leans close to the dealer, who seems, though his thick lips do not move, to whisper something in his crumpled ear. He sez he dont spect thet’ll happen, says the ex-deputy out the side of his mouth. Behind the mountainous fat man, the revolving schoolmarm’s white knees rise into view like a pair of expressionless stocking-capped puppets, then fall into curtained obscurity, over and over, but he steels himself to pay them no heed, and to ignore as well her burning gaze, for now he must think purely on one thing and one thing only. He sez ifn yu want back thet renegade hoss thief, yu should oughter set yerself down’n play him a hand fer her.

Caint. Aint got no poke. Yes, he’s sure of it now. It’s why he sits so still. Listening. To everything. His ears thumbing the least sound the way his pink-tipped sandpapered fingers caress the cards. Behind those blue spectacles, the man is blind.

Well whut about yer boots? suggests the ex-deputy. Or yer weepons? He shakes his head. The ex-deputy whispers something in the fat man’s ear, then tips his own ear close to attend to the reply. Well awright, he sez. Yer life then, he sez. Yer’n fer her’n.

Hunh. Shore, he shrugs, and sits down on the edge of the chair to get his voice into the right position. Aint wuth a plug nickel nohow. A flicker of amusement seems to cross the fat man’s face, the reawakened cards fluttering between his hands like a caged titmouse, or a feeding hummingbird. He removes his spurs so they will not betray him, and then, leaving his voice behind, rises silently from the chair to slip around behind the dealer. Reglar five-card stud, his voice says. Face up. Dont want nuthin hid. The dealer offers the deck toward the chair. No cut, mister. Jest dole em out. The room has fallen deadly silent as he circles round, nothing to be heard but the creaking and ticking of the wheel of fortune, all murmurs stilled, which may be perplexing the fat man, though he gives no sign of it. With barely a visible movement, he deals the empty chair a jack and himself a king. I reckon yu’re tryin t’tell me sumthin, his voice says from the chair, keeping up the patter to cover his movements. Something an old deerhunter once taught him as a way of confusing his prey. It was a simple trick and so natural that, once he learned it, he was amazed he had not always known how to do it. But a pair a these here young blades’ll beat a sucked-out ole bulldog any day, his voice adds cockily when a second jack falls, a second king of course immediately following on. Uh-oh, says his voice. Damn my luck. Pears I’ll require a third one a them dandies jest t’stay in this shootout. Which he gets, it in turn topped by a third king. He is behind the dealer now, gazing down upon his bubbly mound of glowing pate. Well would yu lookit thet, says his voice, as the fourth jack is turned up. I reckon now, barrin miracles, the prizner’s mine. Stealthily, as the fourth king falls, he unsheathes his bowie knife. The dealer’s head twitches slightly as though he might have heard something out of order and were cocking his ear toward it, so his voice says from the chair: Aint thet sumthin! Four jacks! Four kings! But we aint done yet, podnuh. Yu owe me another card. Yu aint doled out but four. The fat man hesitates, tipping slightly toward the voice, then, somewhat impatiently, flicks out a black queen, which falls like a provocation between the two hands of armed men. Well ifn thet dont beat all, his voice exclaims. How’d thet fifth jack git in thar? The dealer starts, seems about to reach for his gun or the card, but stays his hand and, after the briefest hesitation, flips over a fifth king. Haw, says the voice. Nuthin but a mizzerbul deuce. Gotcha, ole man! And as the gun comes out and blasts the chair away, he buries the blade deep in the dealer’s throat, slicing from side to side through the thick piled-up flesh like stirring up a bucket of lard.

The man does not fall over but continues to sit there in his rotundity as before, his head slumping forward slightly as though in disappointment, his blue spectacles skidding down his nose away from the puckery dimples where eyes once were. His gun hand twitches off another shot, shattering an overhead lamp and sending everyone diving for cover, then turns up its palm and lets the pistol slip away like a discard. A white fatty ooze leaks from the slit throat, slowly turning pink. He wipes his blade on the shoulders of the man’s white linen suit, triggering a mechanical holdout mechanism that sends a few aces flying out his sleeves, and then he carefully resheathes it, eyeing the others all the while as they pick themselves up and study this new circumstance. He’s not sure how they will take it or just who this dealer was to them, so to distract them from any troublous thoughts they may be having, he says: Looks like them winnins is up fer grabs, gentamin.

That sets off the usual crazed melee, and while they are going at it he arrests the wheel of fortune to free the schoolmarm. When he releases her wrists, he half expects her to slap his face again, but instead she faints and collapses over his shoulder, her hands loosely whacking him behind, so that he has to unbind her hips and ankles with the full weight of her upon him. It is getting ugly in the churchroom, guns and knives are out and fists and bottles are flying, so he quickly sidles out of there, toting her beam-high over his shoulder like a saddlebag, the room conveniently shrinking toward the exit to hasten his passage. At the door, before darting out into the night, he glances back over his free shoulder at the mayhem within (this is his town and for all he knows the only people he has ever had and he is about to leave them now forever) and sees through the haze the dead dealer, still slumped there under the glowing lamp like an ancient melancholic ruin, his hairless blue-bespectacled head slowly sinking away into his oozing throat.

He strides, under a tapestry of faintly pulsing stars, through the desolate town, whistling softly for his horse, one hand gripping a lax tender thigh, the other clasped behind her skirted knees. He assumes the church will not long contain the turmoil within, but his hopes of getting out of here quickly are fading. He headed first for the blacksmith’s shed where last he spied the black mare, but the shed was not where he remembered it to be; finding the jailhouse with the gallows out front instead, he made next for the stables but wound up again at the jail. She was getting heavy, so he thought to hide her in her schoolhouse until he could locate the mare or some other horse or pair of horses, but he has come once more to the gallows and the jailhouse, or they have come to him. He stands there by the hanging place in the hushed darkness, whistling softly, frustration welling up in his breast (where is that damned horse?), trying to get his bearings, his cheek pressed against a flexuous hip, his arms hugging her legs as if they were the one sure thing he might still hold on to. Tacked up on the scaffold is one of the posters announcing the schoolmarm’s high-noon hanging on the morrow, though in the dim starlight her portrait’s fierce severity seems to have mellowed, as though surrendering to whatever fate awaits her. He is determined she will not hang — if asked why he has come here, he would now say this was why — and it is as if the portrait recognizes that and so looks out upon him more with hope than outrage; but just how he is to accomplish her rescue is not yet clear to him, which may account for the gentle perplexity he also seems to read upon the portrait’s face, its gaze beseeching, its lips slightly parted as though to ask a question, or receive a kiss. Of farewell? He feels a pricking in the corners of his eyes and water forms there, which he supposes must be tears. He must not fail her. He turns his head away from that dread instrument with its noosed rope hanging high against the night, and this loner, this aloof and restless gunslinger, footloose, free, beholden to no one and no thing, presses his lips reverently against the softness there upon his shoulder, gazing past the sweet black hillock of her haunch at the field of throbbing stars in the moonless sky beyond and thinking: I am wholly lost and am not who I thought I was.

He is about to set off on another search for horse or cover when he hears the church letting out behind him and the men pouring clamorously into the street. There’s no time; they seem to be approaching rapidly from all directions, hollering out their rapturous oaths and maledictions and firing off their weapons. He jogs heavily across the street, feeling pursued now, the schoolmarm’s head bouncing against his back (the beseeching gaze, parted lips: he’s not thinking upon these now, though he knows he surely will again), and ducks into the jailhouse, but, encumbered by the burden of her, he cannot throw the bolt before the men of the town come pounding in and push him back.

Yo, sheriff! Lookit whut yu got thar!

Haw! Aint she a gratifyin sight!

Done hit the jackpot, the sheriff did!

They light the lamps and circle about him, filling up the room, raucously admiring the woman slung over his shoulder, reaching out to try to palpate her lifeless parts or poke at them with their greasy gunbarrels. He fends them off as best he can, backing toward the cell door, considering his choices. Probably he has none.

We wuz afeerd we wuz gonna miss out our neck-stretchin party!

Yu done good, sheriff! Yu done right by the lawr!

Now whynt yu go treat yerself to a easeful potation, podnuh, and rest up fer the big day, says a toothless pop-eyed hunchback tented in a voluminous white linen jacket with a deputy’s badge pinned upside down to its stained lapel. We’ll take keera the prizner fer yu.

No, he says. In former times he would have simply shot his way out of here, tried to; can’t do that now. Yu’ll leave her be. She aint gonna hang.

Whut—?

I’m lettin her go.

Yu caint do thet, sheriff! Yu aint got the right!

We built thet new gallows jest fer her!

Hadta use up the whole back halfa the feed store fer the wood!

Caint hep thet. She aint the one. I stole thet hoss.

Yu whut—?

The men fall back momentarily, their jovial mien turned dark, while under his hand the schoolmarm’s thigh twitches and stiffens as though tweaked awake by his stark confession. Put me down, she demands icily from behind his back, and all the softness seems to go out of her. Immediately, please.

Tarnation, someone mutters, and fires a gob into the cell behind him for exclamatory punctuation. Looks like we’ll hafta change the pitcher on all them fuckin posters.

He drops to his knees to set her feet on the floor, watched closely by the surly men crowding round once more, and she straightens up above him, touching his shoulder briefly to brace herself, a touch, though merely expedient, for which he is grateful. He continues to kneel there for a moment, as if petitioning for mercy, which is perhaps what he’s doing, but without another word she turns on her stolid black heels and, hands clasped at her waist, struts away toward the door, the men removing their hats and backing off to let her pass. It is not his wont to break a silence, but faced with the dreadful and endless one to which he is now condemned (which he will confront, when she is gone, with the quiet stoicism that is his nature and by which he’s known, and has known himself), he cannot help himself: Yu aint never even thanked me, he calls out.

She turns back at the open door, framed by the velvety black night behind her. There is not much of affection in her gaze, but he is encouraged even by the lack of undue choler. Not ain’t, she replies, quietly but firmly. You have never thanked me.

No? He is somewhat bewildered but full aware he owes her much, and he stands up and takes his hat off as the others have done. Sorry, mam. But you aint thanked me neither.

She sighs and shakes her head. For what have I to thank you?

Well. Yu know. Fer whut I jest done. Fer savin yer life.

I did not steal that horse. You did what you had to do.

No. He finds it difficult to meet her hard steady gaze, which he believes now to be the color of cast iron, so stares instead at the dark dimplelike beauty mark on her cheek. Thet warnt the reason I done it.

That was not the reason that you did it.

No, mam.

So what was that reason, pray tell?

I … I caint say it.

Cannot say it.

No, mam. Jest caint.

She sighs, and though she glowers still, there is more of tenderness in that sigh than there has been in her before.

Y’know whut? I think the sheriff’s got a soft spot fer the marm!

Y’reckon?

She pauses there by the door, watching him for a moment in all her straight-backed rectitude, and then that stern righteousness melts away and, haltingly, she comes back into the room, her black skirts whispering, and stands mildly before him in the lamplight, tipping her head to catch his wayward glance, as if beseeching him to look at her, and, with an awful weakness spreading through him, he does.

Well but does the marm have a soft spot fer the sheriff?

Haw! Ifn she does, I reckon I know whar yu kin find it!

Shet yer trap now! I think he’s gonna kiss her!

Whut? I caint believe it!

Nor can he. His eyes are full of this new sight — her softened brow, the searching gaze, her moist parted lips — brand new, even unimaginable until this moment, and yet somehow so familiar he feels he’s seen this face turned to him thus yieldingly all his natural-born life, and he leans toward it, his eyes closing, as if finding at last what had long been lost.

Thar he goes!

Now we’ll hafta hang him shore!

The warmth of her breath has just fallen damply upon his parched lips when there is a sudden violent explosion that shakes the whole jailhouse — instinctively he pushes her aside, spins round, and draws: it is the black mare, wild-eyed and swelled up to twice her size, who’s come crashing in on them, taking out door, frame, and a portion of the wall, shattering all the windows with the impact, and sending the men scrambling and tumbling now to get out of the way of her rampageous hoofs.

Hey! Look out! It’s thet outlaw mare! they cry. She’s gone loco!

The schoolmarm has fallen to the floor behind him in the open cell door and is clinging to his legs. He tries whistling to the mare to calm her but it seems only to enrage her all the more. Up she rises against the ceiling, frothing at the mouth and nostrils flared, and down she comes, crushing all in her path and sending glass and dust and woodchips flying.

Look out!

Halp! I caint see! I think I ketched a splinter in my eye!

She’s mashed my laig!

The white-jacketed bent-backed deputy grabs a lasso off a wall peg and with a grunt flings it over the crazed horse’s neck, but she rears up and with a single blow stoves his head in with her hoof, spraying them all with blood and brains and leaving nothing on the deputy’s busted neck but his toothless lower jaw, hanging there like a melon rind.

Do sumthin, sheriff! Git aholt on thet devil hoss afore she’s killt us all!

Shoot the goddam animule! Whuddayu waitin fer?

He is face-to-face now with the foaming red-eyed beast, his back to the empty cell, roped to that place by the schoolmarm’s entwining arms. Both his pistols are pointed at the mare’s rolling eyeballs, but, for all that she has spoilt his singular moment with the marm, he cannot bring himself to pull the triggers, for he has never had a horse like this one and he does not want with rash haste to lose her. Particularly not now when he might most need her. She snorts and whinnies, shakes her black mane fearsomely, pounds the floor with her hoof, then seems to pump it toward his legs, behind which the schoolmarm is cowering still, peeking out between them. Then up she goes again, her forelegs churning, hind legs stepping forward, her neigh more like a terrifying shriek, and she comes crashing down (the schoolmarm screams), smashing, over and over, at the bars of the cell on either side of him.

It’s the marm she’s after!

Give her over, sheriff! Dont rile thet savage critter up no worse’n it is!

Now hole up thar, damn yu! he yells at the maddened mare. Yu back off! Yu wanta stomp sumbody, yu pestiferous jughaided scrag, yu stomp me! The horse blows through her nostrils and bangs the floor, and arches her head back so far toward her tail all he can see is her black throat, and lets out a whinny more like a quivering howl. Then she drops her head down between her knees and peers at him beseechingly from under her forelock, scuffing at the floor planks with one hoof. Awright, thet’s better. Now git outa here, he says. She swings her head from side to side, her lips curled away from her teeth, her damp gaze now more aggrieved than defiant. Git! He lowers one of the pistols and fires a shot that nicks the dead toe of her hoof. She raises it from the floor, bends her head toward it, sets it down again, and, after a mournful pause, turns to plod slowly, nose down, from the room. Someone fires a shot, she staggers slightly, pauses, then continues on her deliberate way. The rest of the men, emboldened, grab up their weapons and start shooting wildly at her as she lumbers past, following her on out the hole in the wall where the door used to be, shouting curses and blasting away.

He helps the schoolmarm to her feet, feeling tender toward her as before, all the more so as her high-collared bodice has come unbuttoned and there is a sweet powdery smell emerging from the glimpsed whiteness within that unhinges his articulations in a way the mare’s assault or any other could never do. Her own hand, however, is like a stiffened claw and is instantly withdrawn, the sentimental mood clearly no longer upon her. Why didn’t you shoot that wicked beast? she cries. In the street, he can hear the men doing just that, the explosive rattle of their barrage like a fireworks display, and for the second time in so short a while, a wetness mists his vision. She was trying to kill me!

I dunno, he sighs. I figgered ifn I could calm her down we could mebbe ride her outa here.

What? Leave this town? I could never do that, you fool! Anyway, she adds, glaring with seething fury at the dampness that has crept upon his cheeks, thet aint why.

He says nothing and she slaps him. So hard she knocks his hat off and her own dark bun is tipped askew. Outside, it sounds like the whole town is being torn apart, and inside his breast it feels that way too, for he has beheld the strands of orange curls peeking out beneath the unsettled bun.

And then the uproar suddenly subsides and the men come piling back into the jailhouse, heated up and blustery with the excitement of their kill, a turbid blur before his eyes of hats and hair and noses.

Whoa, sheriff! Yu shoulda witnessed the way thet crazy mare tuck out yer gallows!

Turned the whole bizness inta nuthin but a passel a toothpicks!

Whoopee! Never seed the like!

Obstructin justice, she wuz!

And more holes in her by then than a cribbage board!

She never even tried t’run. It wuz like she wuz plumb heart-sick’n jest hankerin t’cash in!

But it warnt easy! Thought we’d never bring the ole nag down!

Pumped everthin I had inta the colicky critter!

Criminently! She wuz some goldurn hoss!

Course, now we gotta build thet dodrabbid thing all over agin so’s we kin string up this onfortunate buckaroo.

Aw hell, we’ll never git it done in time, thet damned mare has seed to thet. I say we jest fergit it’n go git drunk instead.

Now yu’re talkin, hombre. I wouldnt keer t’put down mebbe jest a jug or two.

Shore, they all agree. Let him go. He aint hardly done nuthin wrong.

No, boys, says the saloon chanteuse, taking the dark bun off to shake her ginger locks loose, one ruby-tipped breast now bouncing free from her undone bodice, yu caint do thet. The scrofulous varmint is broke the lawr and he’s gotta pay fer it.

Aw, Belle, he aint but only a killer, hoss thief, cattle rustler, trainrobber, ‘n card cheat, whutsa harm in thet?

The sumbitch jilted me, she says bitterly. Hangin’s too good fer him.

The men glance wearily at one another, their shoulders sagging. Shit. Yu shore, Belle?

I’m shore.

Awright. Better go rustle up some hammers’n nails, I reckon.

Thet wood out thar’s all kicked t’smithers. We’ll hafta rip down the stables’n start over.

Sorry, sheriff, says a baggy-eyed oldtimer with a scar running across his bulbous nose from ear to ear like a clothesline for his beard, and now wearing the deputy’s badge. Aint nuthin we kin do. He strips him of his sheriff’s star and weapons. Better git yer pore fucked butt inta thet cell thar, whut’s left of it, and behave yerself whilst we git on with whut we hafta do.

Whutsamatter with him anyhow, deppity? someone asks and they all turn toward him. He’s watching her fasten the ruby pin into place in her pierced cheek. And reflecting on how he was never really cut out for the civilized life and how considering for a moment that he might be was a weakness and a flaw in him, a fatal one as it turns out. The jasper looks like a mule jest kicked him in the cods.

It’s Belle. Seein her fitted out like thet.

And now that horizon that was always out there for him is there no longer, and the vast horizon of his inner eye has also withered away.

I’m gonna miss yu, darlin. The chanteuse smiles, tucking her breast in but leaving the schoolmarm’s bodice unbuttoned. Aint ever day someone like yu comes driftin through.

It is not every day, he corrects her, and goes into the cell to flop down on the bare springs of the cot there.

No, haw! She laughs, they all laugh. Shore as hell aint!

He remembers that when the men went out to rebuild the gallows he looked up through his cell window from where he was lying on the cot springs and saw the stars gathered up and set spinning in the sky like celestial dust devils, and he thought: There’s a serious storm brewing. For a time then there was a silence so dense it made his ears ache, and he recalled one hot day back when he was out on the desert alone under the blistering sun and just such a silence descended and in the middle of it a great band of Indian warriors came galloping past, riding bareback and without reins, heads high and staring rigidly ahead as though drawn by something out on the horizon that he could not see, their horses’ hoofs raising a torment of dust but making not a sound. As they flew past, he saw that their lips were all sewn shut with rawhide thongs and their chests and foreheads were tattooed with mysterious pictographs and the teeth and tiny bones of animals were embedded in their flesh, and he understood that they were galloping into oblivion and carrying the secrets of the universe with them, and that although those secrets were not very interesting, they were the only secrets there were, and he would not be privy to them. In their wake came a raging river, snapping wrathfully at their heels and swallowing up their tracks, and then, as the warriors vanished and the common sounds of the desert returned, the river shrank to a rivulet from which he and his horse drank and they were sick for a time.

And so he was thinking about this when the new silence fell as he was lying there on his jail-cell cot on the last night of his life, and if there’d been any sounds of sawing and hammering to be heard before, they were stifled now by this thick clotted silence and then erased by the sudden all-encompassing roar of the cyclonic wind that followed on, sucking the roof off the jailhouse and picking up the old wooden desk and swivel chair and hurling them at his cell bars, exploding them to splinters that flew at him like darts and arrows, and he curled up with his arms over his head, giving them only his butt to strike at, it being well tanned to leather from his life in the saddle and more or less immune from punishment. The wind brought with it great slashing torrents of burning rain that bit and chewed at him then, with its driving force more ravenous than a pack of wolves, and when the rain had passed the distressed stars fell out of the sky in a shower of meteors that shook the ground and rattled the cot springs, pitching him, stunned, to the floor. And then the dust and earth and busted stones sent flying by the meteors and stirred up by the bellowing wind came rolling over him as though the desert itself had taken animate shape and had risen up against him, and it buffeted him and blinded him and entered him through all his orifices, stopping up his mouth and nose so he could not breathe, and buried him there where he lay. But he is a man schooled to the harsh and whimsical ways of the desert, so patiently he waited out the turbulence (the worst was over, the marm had left him, and she was not even the marm), meditating the while upon the ironies of his extremity — that he was holding his breath and struggling to survive so that he might live another hour to be hanged — and when it had passed he dug his way out and spat out the earth that filled his mouth and unclogged his nose with his fingers and commenced to breathe again as before.

The storm has left behind a noonday sun, shining down upon him now through the roofless jailhouse ruins. His twisted cell door is agape, and his old gunbelt and wooden-butted six-shooter is hanging on a coat hook on one of the walls left standing by the storm. There seems no reason not to do so, so he goes over and buckles it on, and as he does this he remembers that before the men went out (or maybe after) he was visited by a one-eyed photographer, which he took to be an unfavorable sign, or more than one. He was a cadaverous plug-hatted man with a Chinaman’s beard, and he was a voluble enthusiast of his trade. He insisted on showing him his sheaf of photographs of hanged men, giving him a poke in his lower regions with his rifle barrel and jerking on his earring when he showed no immediate interest and closed his eyes. It was his studied opinion, the man said, spreading out his samples and compelling his attention, that a photograph of one hanged man has a more melancholical aspect about it than do those of groups, though men strung up in multitudes of a dozen or more not only provide peculiar challenges and opportunities for the enterprising photographist, being less of a stereotype, as might be said, but they also have a way of opening up the foreground to pictorial scrutiny and drawing attention to those who have not yet been hanged. Put another way, one man suspended solo has a single sad tune to play, while a couple of dozen make a whole band of bemingled and crisscross medleys. They say two’s company, the one-eyed man went on to say, tobacco juice dribbling down his stringy goatee and dripping onto his photos, adding to their sepia tonalities as he rubbed it in with a long bony finger, but it aint. Lookit these two renegade injuns hangin here: yu aint never seed nuthin lonelier-lookin than thet! One varmint pendin’s like astin a worrisome question. Two’s like mockin each other in their silly neck-broke dangle and they aint neither of em got nuthin t’say. I sometimes like t’lookit my pitchers a two men hangin jest fer a hoot. Three’s most folks’ fayvrit, it’s a kinder mystery, like yu know whut two of em’re doin up thar, but whut about the third? Like as not it’s a mistake, like he wuz jest stumblin along’n fell inta the noose. Ifn hangin a person ever is a mistake, thet is. My own fayvrit number, though, is four. Thet’s about the most cloud-kickers yu kin string up in concert and see the whole pattern of em, whilst takin in each one of em at the same time, so’s yu git sumthin combined of all the others. Mostly, though, it’s on accounta my special regard fer gallows arkytetcher. Jest lookit these here pitchers, how differnt they all are, they’s so many novel’n wondrous ways’n shapes a hangin four men all at wunst, and danglin four of em together has a way a bringin out the grain in the wood and drawin yer eye t’the empty space neath their ascended boots. Which a course is the whole reason them estimable things git built.

Rifle now cocked and ready, he peers cautiously out the gaping hole where the street door used to be and sees that no boots will be ascended today, his or any other’s. The debris of the gallows, wrecked by the black mare, has been mostly blown away by the storm, nothing left in the wide dusty street but a few scattered splinters like frail bleached reminders of some previous resolve. Now what there is of intent can be measured only by the ominous absence of any evidence of it, for nothing moves. Not even the lace curtain in the window above the saloon sign. The weathered wooden buildings, utterly forsaken under the baking sun, look fatigued and shrunk into themselves, a grim dead silence sunk into everything the way drink can sodden a man. But that they are waiting for him out there some place, or places, of course he has no doubt. The moment for it has come.

Across the way the bank doors are hanging loose off their hinges as usual, and though it’s about a hundred yards across a wide-open space, masonry’s a better shield than timber, and he figures if he could make it over there he might have more of a chance, or at least last a little longer. He exposes himself briefly on the jailhouse porch, then ducks back inside. Nothing happens, so he checks his six-shooter (a single shot’s been fired; he reloads it), tugs his broad-brimmed hat down over his brow as though felt might fend off lead, cleans his ears out, and gets ready to run. There’s a kind of presence out there, like a filled-up space inside the empty space that’s seen, created by the portentous hour and walled by nothing but its own taut necessity, and when he enters into it, there’ll be no way out until it isn’t there anymore, or he isn’t.

A piece of the jailhouse wall behind him suddenly topples inward, breaking the solemn hush: he whirls to fire, but there’s no one there, and then, even as he watches, another piece of wall folds over like a starched collar and, after a creaking moment, slides wearily to the floor with a splintering crash. Yes, all right. Time to go.

He hunkers down, counts to three, and then charges off on a zigzagging run into the street, heart and legs pumping, expecting the whole world any moment to explode around him and bring a sudden searing end to things. This doesn’t happen, not yet, but crossing that space seems to take him years, his boots pounding and pounding the dusty arena where the gallows once stood, his hands sometimes slapping it as well as he ducks and bobs, the distance between him and the bank seeming to lengthen even as he scrambles toward it, and he feels as if caught up in one of those endless tribal hunting dances, he the designated buffalo-headed prey — or the mock prey, maybe it’s all the same — his churning legs benumbed and leaden now and his cumbersome head weighing upon his neck and bobbing on its own for lack of strength to do otherwise. He’s not going to make it across, it’s too far. He can no longer rise from his staggering crouch, it’s all duck and no bob, his wind is going, his hat’s already gone, shot away maybe, if they are shooting at him, can’t be sure, what with the blood roaring in his ears, his sight bleared by sweat and desperation.

But then, just as his knees are giving way, he stumbles upon an old buckboard with a broken wheel, which he hadn’t noticed out here before but which has somehow made itself available to him, and he rolls under it and from there pitches himself over a hitching rail and flattens out behind a foot-high wooden porch, gasping for breath, his gun aimed at the buildings across the street. He wipes the sweat from his eyes with his shirtsleeve and scans the rooftops, the dark places, the edges of things. Nothing. Same as before. A deathly stillness. Only thing exceptional out there is his black slouch hat, lying in the sun like an objectless shadow, foreboding as dynamite with a lit fuse. He glances up at the dust-encrusted window above him: GOLD! it says in peeling gold lettering. CLAIMS OFFICE. It’s an old frame building, not as sturdy as the bank, but it’s where he is and the door is agape, its hinges sprung, so he lurches forward and ducks inside.

He sweeps the interior with his six-shooter, his back pressed to the front wall, but the place is empty, thickly coated with layers of ancient grime, disturbed only by his own boot and hand prints in from the door. He slumps back against the wall, his lungs heaving, surveying his refuge. A flimsy and desolate one-room structure with a collapsing ceiling and a plenitude of uncovered windows all around, already pocked with stray bullet holes; he could hardly be in a worse place. On the counter there is a sign, TAKE ONE, but the box in front of it is empty, the cards that were in it scattered and dulled with dust where they lie, as if to say this seam’s long since played out. One of the cards is on the floor by his boot, face-down. Probably ought to leave it there. There was an educated man he knew once, a gambler who had made millions on the river and who then had drifted west for richer and easier pickings and had made more millions, until he lost not his luck but his ability to control his luck, and what he told him one night over the last beer he can remember drinking was: If you have lost the feel of the cards, son, and have to draw blind, don’t draw. But he does, knowing what card it will be even before he picks it up, a card he’s been dealt before. There are some coordinates inked on its face with numbers and symbols he does not understand, but where they cross at the slender black waist a word is written: SALOON.

He pockets the two-faced card after wiping the dust off on his pants, thinking about solitude and how he longs for it always, but cannot and even would not have it, and turns to stare out the front window, past the backwards GOLD (the gold paint is an oily black on the inside) toward the old town saloon across the way with its hanging sign, its swinging doors like folded wings, its still white curtain. It’s a kind of challenge, a dare, and one meant for him and him alone, he feels, even if the card’s been there forever and anyone might have passed by and picked it up. It’s also no doubt a trap. Whole nest of them holed up over there probably, just biding their time with wide gap-toothed grins on their messed-up faces, knowing he’ll be coming over sure as a fly’s sucked to a turd because it’s who he is and he can do no other. Well, and what if he could, what if he told them all to go to hell and just got up and walked out of this pesthole? Wouldn’t work. Everywhere he turned the town would still be there, the saloon in front of his face like an accusal and a taunt. Taint whether, as an old prospector once put it, but how. Well. That moribund fellow also declared that the good news was that everything passes. Or somebody did.

So he settles his six-shooter back in its holster and steps with measured strides out on the porch and down into the dusty street, not hurrying, passing the buckboard carriage kneeling toward him on its broken wheel and, a bit further on, his abandoned hat, lying there in the middle of nowhere in its black crumpled loneliness (Solitude! a malodorous old trapper remarked one day with a rueful snort: Shore we love it, kid, it’s whut decoys us out here, but it aint nuthin but a pipe dream, like findin a mountain a gold or fuckin angels), but not holding back either, no longer afraid of what might be hidden in things or behind them, until he reaches the wooden sidewalk in front of the saloon. There he pauses in that blinding sunlight and he sets his legs apart and he shouts out: Awright! Here I am! C’mon out ifn yu aint too afeerd! His scratchy voice echoes hollowly, as if he were standing at the bottom of a canyon, and that is the only response there is. He can barely speak for how dried out he is, the frantic run from the jailhouse having sucked all his liquids out, so he decides he has said all he’s going to say. He proceeds onto the wooden sidewalk and up to the doors, his boot heels clocking on the planks, then steps to one side to peer in the window. Nothing but a dark cobwebbed and dusty murk in there. Busted furniture strewn about, broken lamps and bottles, the old grand piano fallen face forward as if to bite the floor with its sad scatter of chipped teeth, someone’s yellow suspenders trailing from a tipped brass spittoon like spilled chicken guts.

He steps back and considers all of this, looks about him. The only sign of life is his own hat out in the middle of the empty street. He has misjudged everything. The town’s been abandoned. He’s all alone. His shoulders sag and he realizes how tired he is, a tiredness got not only from his physical exertions but also from all the hard thinking he’s been doing. Now all he need think on is finding something wet to unstick his tongue from the top of his mouth. Then worry about a horse. Not sure where to go looking for one of those beings, but if there’s anything left to drink in town it has to be near to hand. He turns to enter the saloon and the swinging doors fly open and smack him full in the face, send him tumbling backwards, head over heels, into the street. He can hardly see from the tremendous eye-watering force of the blow, but he gets off a shot at the doors even before he hits the dirt. No one there, of course. The doors rock on their hinges for a moment and then fall still. He touches his nose. Yes, broken. Not for the first time. Not a structure made for this country.

As he lies there on his back with that throbbing pain in the middle of his face, he realizes that the town is leaving him and taking the day with it. The claims office, the jailhouse ruins, and steepled church are already some distance off, their long shadows darkening the desert. The bank follows, dragging its doors. The stables and dry goods store. He touches the card in his pocket to be sure it’s still there, estimating that it represents all that he has earned from his lonely travails, all else a figment and a haunting, and it but a sign of them. The saloon is the last to go, as though overseeing the general retreat, and when it, too, is some distance away, the lace curtain in the upstairs window flutters briefly as though waving goodbye. And then it is night, and there is nothing to be seen except the black sky riddled with star holes overhead.