Smonk

11 THE TOWN

THE BAILIFF, MCKISSICK, RAISED HIS ELBOW TO WARD OFF THE blacksmith’s next blow and heard his wrist snap. He called out his own name and said that they had Smonk on the run, he was theirs for the taking, but Gates seemed intent on murder. He raised the stock again and brought it down and McKissick’s world darkened at its edges and the room began to peel away and he was sinking in a warm, pleasant sea.

Gates stood panting. The rifle slick with blood. His face red with it. He staggered back against the log walls, his hands shaking. He couldn’t get his breath, he thought he might vomit. McKissick lay still in his own blood. Dead? Gates watched a gorgeous blue knot unwhorl from the bailiff’s temple as if his brains were about to rupture. Alive yet, or how might a knot rise? The blacksmith clenched his fists to still his hands and stepped past the dead whore and searched among the wreckage of the cabin until he found a huge butcher knife stuck in a wall and fell across his former partner. McKissick was naked and wearing his, Gates’s, shoes. He touched the blade to the bailiff’s chest where he imagined the heart to be and raised his other hand, palm flat. He closed his eyes.

He opened them.

McKissick had him by the balls. Gates forgot the knife and tried to twist away but the bailiff only squeezed harder. Somehow McKissick had gained the knife and swiped Gates across the chest and the gush of blood was such that the bailiff nearly choked on it before he could scrabble away and watch the man twitch and gurgle.

He tried to pull himself up and overturned a table. He couldn’t focus his eyes. He sat against the wall, trying to catch his breath. The room seemed bright. Then it seemed very bright.

Meanwhile, from the hill at the edge of the east woods, Ike gazed at the irregular houses and buildings and oak trees of Old Texas. He’d done this slow circuit dozens of times before, the town globed in his spyglass as he scanned the angles and doors of each building and outbuilding. A ladder that wasn’t there yesterday. The alterations of firewood piles and how long it took a splotch of birdshit to fade from a windowsill. There were ten widows in the town, ages he’d calculated from forty to eighty-five, and half a dozen young women and girls. He knew who lived where. Who’d had which husband.

Ike squatted and studied the ruin of the hotel. Looked like nothing saved, a total loss. He smiled grimly—Smonk always had been thorough—and focused the telescope when he saw a widow go in the livery barn’s side door and, a moment later, the girl he’d seen go in three hours ago come out.

Shift change. What were they guarding?

Near dusk, from beside a tall oak in the southeast, he spied a wildcat crawling on its belly toward the well. It raised to its hind legs to drink but at the sight of the water it convulsed and ran down into the town snapping its teeth. A widow hurried out and shot it with a snake charmer four-ten. She returned a moment later carrying a pitchfork with which she speared the cat and lugged it out of his sight. Ike moved for a better vantage and found himself watching the smoldering pile of dead animals they always kept burning. The widow tending it, in her early forties, used her stick to help the other dislodge the wildcat from her tines. When the first left, Ike watched the second douse the new arrival in kerosene and strike a match and drop it on the animal which burst into flame. The dog and cat faces in his spyglass frozen in waxen agony.

Later, as night fell, he saw a lone boy crouching in from the west, ducking through the cane. Good stealth on him. Centered in Ike’s spyglass, the boy became William R. McKissick Junior, the mule thief. Ike pursed his lips. How come he hadn’t took off like a boy with sense would of? What in the hell would keep a body here?

He swung his attention back to the livery barn and wondered what or who they were watching in shifts. Could be something simple as a stock animal in labor, of course, but nothing about Old Texas and its citizenry seemed simple.

He was about to creep back around to his camp when something made him freeze. He flattened himself against the ground as two old ladies and the six dazed-looking children they led passed within fifty feet of him.

Come on sugar, the ladies were saying. Come on, sweetie.

When they were gone Ike lowered his eyes. Still at it, he thought. All these years.

On the other side of the town, as he lay waiting to sneak in and find the whore, William R. McKissick Junior saw the children, too. Captured.

Dern, he thought. Now Hell Mary would be mad. He might not get his handjobs. Double-dern. He wished he hadn’t traded her the Mississippi Gambler knife. If he had it to do over, he wouldn’t trade.

Yes he would. He wished he had it to do over so he could see her titties and cooter again. That stripe of hair between her legs. Her hand on his devil’s tool as his own was now.

He got a nut and relaxed.

Naw. He oughtn’t to of traded his only knife. Especially one give to him by Mister E. O. Smonk. William R. McKissick Junior thought if he saw Mister E. O. Smonk again he would cut his thoat with that knife. He thought that if Mister E. O. Smonk hadn’t come and made Momma squeal so hard maybe she wouldn’t of kept running off. Killing a man like Mister E. O. Smonk wouldn’t be easy, though. The boy knew this. Such a man had survived dozens of attempts on his life. Man who’d shot his way out of fights up and down the map, yesterday killing a whole town’s worth of men including his, William R. McKissick Junior’s, daddy. A fellow like that wouldn’t go quiet.

But William R. McKissick Junior had picked up a thing or two about murder in all the long years of his life. Number One: Whenever you’re fixing to kill somebody using a knife, get behind them. His daddy had taught him that. Five years ago in the country of Texas America Mister E. O. Smonk had sent Daddy after that sheriff over in Throckmorton County. The sheriff had written a letter, against Smonk, to the newspaper, accusing Smonk of all manner of activities up to and including murder, by his own hand and by order. William R. McKissick Junior’s daddy had to take the boy along on the trip to assassinate the sheriff because his momma had run off again.

His daddy said it would be a good plan, though, that nobody would ever suspect a man would carry his own son with him to kill a sheriff. And if he—William R. McKissick Junior’s daddy—got killed before he finished the job, the boy was to get home by himself. Daddy said if he couldn’t find the way he didn’t deserve to get there. The boy remembered how him and his daddy took the train together and Daddy kept slipping nips from his flask. Then they loitered in the sheriff’s town for an afternoon. Jest getting the lay, his daddy said. They used fake names (the boy was Cole Younger James) and sat for an hour on the porch of a general mercantile, drinking Co-Colas and watching the jail down the way. They had oyster crackers and tobacco. Hard candy. His daddy bought him another Co-Cola and the boy drank it in one gulp and belched so hard his eyes watered and the old men who were lined up on the bench laughed. They bought him another Co-Cola and they were all burping and laughing and the old men started giving him pennies and ruffing his hair and up till his first handjob it’d been the best time of his life, that hour.

Then his daddy saw the sheriff had got back in town and they excused their selves and went behind a building. Him, his daddy said. That’s the man we’re gone assassinate.

Assassinate.

That night they’d waited in the dark alley beside the jail. A stray dog tagged along with them—this back when dogs were everywhere. Get away, the boy’s daddy kept saying, but the dog just wagged its tail and panted.

The sheriff walked by, right on schedule. He heard the dog panting and raised his kerosene lantern and looked in the alley.

The town clock bells starting bonging.

Is it something going on back in here? the sheriff called. Is that you, Roscoe?

Hello, his daddy yelled to the sheriff. We back here. I think we got us a mad-dog, he called. It’s acting all crazy. But I’m a stranger to this town and don’t want to shoot a dog that may belong to a citizen of this very nice town. I’d like to meet the sheriff of this very nice town and congratulate him on such a pleasant place. I’ll certainly direct some business this way. If that’s what the good citizens want.

A mad-dog, say? Toting the lantern, the sheriff had bumbled back to his own death in the dark where the boy’s daddy hid behind a pole. As soon as the sheriff walked past him, his daddy appeared behind him in the yellow lanternlight and clamped his arm around the sheriff’s throat and drove his knife so far through his back that the tip came out in the sheriff’s belly and split the shirt. The lantern fell and burst. A fire started. The sheriff staggered to his knees, jerking Daddy off his feet behind him, and the boy watched as the two men struggled on the ground in the firelight. William R. McKissick Junior had begun to vomit, then, from all the Co-Cola. Ain’t you shamed, his daddy said once he stood up. He flung blood off his fingers. See if I brang you one more got-dern time.

That had been in Butler Alabama. But this was Old Texas Alabama. His daddy was dead. Killed by Mister E. O. Smonk. Same man that stole his momma. Now, William R. McKissick Junior, hidden on the edge of the town, holding his devil’s tool in his left hand, laid his head on the ground asleep, an ash of grass rattling under his nose.

Meantime, having doubled back and hidden in the trees near the three-way crossing, it was a snickering Ambrose who’d shot Onan off his horse. He would’ve shot Walton next, in the head, and then Loon, in the gut maybe, but his Winchester jammed. He’d spent the next two hours trying to fix it but gave up in the end and decided it would be good enough fun to let the fools sit there terrified, pointer-fingers buried in their pockets.

Leaving his rifle stuck in the ground, Ambrose unraveled the ascot which he’d always hated and stuffed it in his back pocket like a handkerchief. He fumbled through his pants pockets and ditched the clanking paraphernalia he’d argued against toting. A sextant? A goddamn jew’s harp? He boinged it into the shrubs and turned his hat backward which was how his father had worn hats. He rolled his sleeves up and unbuttoned his top buttons so his chest showed, its tiny black springs of hair, and retraced his steps to where his mount waited, eating poison ivy. Fool animal, he said and climbed on and donned his boots and egged the horse to a trot over the parched land, leaving Walton and Loon still on their horses, in the sun, waiting for doom. Ambrose began to whistle.

Meanwhile night with its endless lines had etched the county black, and from the west two figures conjoined in shadow negotiated the rails of the fence at the edge of the field and hobbled together across the dust toward the dark back windows of Old Texas. There were no dogs to bark the alarm, and though the ladies had posted armed guards at the well and next to the blacksmith’s place, with still another guard walking the street, they’d left exposed the rears of the stores. In broad-brimmed sombreros, Smonk and Ike disappeared between buildings and a few moments later the Negro returned and crossed back toward the cane.

At the Tate house, Smonk used a pair of nippers to pick the lock. He leaned against the doorjamb in the parlor. He held his walking cane in his right hand and a gourd in the other. The old lady Mrs. Tate snored, slumped in a rocking chair next to her husband dead on the sideboard. Odor of rot swirling in Smonk’s nostrils. Something else too. His stomach growled. She’d lain her head beside the dead man in the nest her arms made, shoulders rising with each breath she haled and falling when she let it go. Smonk wiped his lips with the back of his hand and came clicking in his bones toward her and bent at the waist and nosed himself to within an inch of her mouth. She was tiny as a child but her face was a thousand years old. Hair so thin it looked like dandelion puffs. Her veil lay on the floor next to her foot, fallen there or thrown he didn’t know.

Ike had returned in his soundless way with a pair of scatterguns, barrels sawn down the way Smonk liked them. He had Smonk’s lucky detonator and several coils of wire. His pockets full of TNT. He set it all down and indicated upstairs with his chin and Smonk watched him start to tote things up.

Without a look over his shoulder, the one-eye left Mrs. Tate to her slumber and ascended the stairs toting the detonator, resting halfway to the top and again on the landing. There was a door by his ear and he inclined his head and listened. He set the detonator box down and twisted the knob and the thing on the bed leaned its head toward him and snapped its gums. Smonk was about to go in when Ike came to the door behind him, the satchel cradled in his arms.

Eugene, he said. You ought not go in there.

Naw, Smonk said. He stepped in the room and closed the door on the old colored man and clicked its lock and crossed the floor. Moonlight enough he could see the ruined body, the contorted face. The eyes that he covered with his hand as he sank his knife in the invalid’s chest.

Meanwhile, the field in which the two remaining Christian Deputies displayed stooped posture upon their horses had seemed its brightest as the sun died over the treetops; dusk had lingered, then, but at last night had commenced its slow overland bleed, shadowing the trees and shrouding the deputies in its cloak. Loon remained convicted that pointing meant instant death, though the proof had vanished as Onan’s horse had tottered off several hours earlier, dragging the dead masturbator with it and leaving a swipe the width of his shoulders on the parched ground.

Now? Walton said. May we go?

Loon glanced around. It is perty dark.

Indeed. Surely yon “sniper,” if he even exists, cannot see us now, the leader said.

Yeah, Loon said out of the side of his mouth, but he might be a dang Smonk or something.

A skunk? Are they nocturnal? I suppose they are.

No, a Smonk. Loon barely moved his lips.

Is this a local “tall tale”? Walton wanted his logbook, to make a cultural entry, but was afraid to retrieve it from his thigh-pocket. His goggles hung loosely around his neck.

Well, Loon confided, some niggers thinks he’s the booger-man, I reckon. Say he goes about killing innocent white folk by tearing they dang thoats out. The ones that lives catches the ray bees and dies going mad.

Wait. Could this “Smonk” be akin to the hirsute gentleman we encountered earlier?

Do what?

The hairy gentleman in the back of the wagon? Was he a “Smonk”?

Might of been, hell. If that warn’t the booger-man the booger-man missed a good chance.

Walton gazed into the night, toward their attacker’s last known coordinates, as Loon told more gory Smonk anecdotes, and as the leader listened, he became increasingly nervous. Smonk burning down churches, eating children, laying with animals, peeing on young girls, biting people’s noses off.

Loon was saying, It was one time, he caught a fellow in the woods—

Enough! Walton said. I’m going.

Go on, Loon said out of the side of his mouth. I ain’t going nowhere. And don’t ye pint at me, neither, ye dang shit-kicker, and do me like ye done that other fellow.

You mean Deputy Onan? Don’t you know anybody’s names?

Yeah I know they names.

What’s mine?

Yer what?

Name, Loon. What? Is? My? Name?

Hang on. Who the hell’s “Loon”?

Why, you are.

Since when?

Since quite early in the adventure.

Dang a bunch of loons. My name is Oswald Heidebrecht.

Whatever. I’m still going.

Jest don’t kill me like ye did that other knucklehead. Omar, was it?

I told you. Onan. And that was coincidence.

Oh? Loon held up his fist and slowly unfurled his “pointer” finger in Walton’s direction.

Fine, fine, the leader said, tugging his ascot. You’ve made your point.

They stared at one another, surprised at the pun.

Loon began to giggle.

Walton, despite his best efforts, joined him.

Their laughter rang out, an alien noise in this diorama of drought.

Stop, Walton said. Shhhhh. If he thinks we’re laughing at him, he may open fire again.

The mood sombered, and soon the sky had pushed a red moon out of the eastern trees.

I’m going, Walton said.

Watch ye ass, said Loon.

Watch “ye” own, the leader responded. He tapped Donny’s flanks with his heels and the horse sprang into a trot, eager to quit this part of the state’s geography. Walton held his breath and bounced along in the dark with his eyes closed, trusting Donny’s finely shod hooves. Here he was, alone in the South—truly alone—for the first time, fully expecting to be shot at any moment, prickles of fear hiving his skin and “butterflies” flittering in his abdomen.

Yet he was strangely happy.

In the Tate house, Ike climbed the stairs to Smonk’s room and dribbled piss in the slop jar and stood over Eugene watching as the one-eye labored for air and tossed and flinched in pain. Each breath one closer to his merciful last. Ike folded his arms. What a specimen Eugene had been long ago, down in Mexico. Out in the west past the Rocky Mountains. Ike remembered showing him the Grand Canyon. The Mississippi River. How to hold a largemouth bass by its jaw. He remembered Eugene’s fight with a boy a couple of years older than he was. Ike and Smonk had been fishing in a deep-woods Texas pond that wore moss like a beard when a white boy of seventeen or so had crashed out of the bushes. He had several dead squirrels hanging on his belt and brandished his paltry twenty-gauge shotgun to rob them. Smonk had looked at Ike with eyes that were nearly white. No, Ike had said but Smonk was already on the boy who never fired a shot, and when Ike snatched E.O. off—careful of those teeth—he saw the bites on the screaming boy’s neck. Instead of letting the boy suffer the horror of the ray bees, Ike dragged him into the pond and held him under. With Smonk skipping rocks across the water, Ike waited and watched and turned away only when bubbles stopped blooping in the moss. Then Ike had gathered their things, wondering (not for the first time) how Eugene could watch death’s red flower bloom and throw another rock, eat another apple, go back to sleep.

Now the colored man took up his shotgun from the corner. Jest sleep on, he thought and closed the door behind him and turned the key in its lock and descended the stairs, stepping around boards that might creak, not looking at the dead man in the parlor or his widow drooling on the sideboard.

He went out into the alley and down the back of the doctor’s and let himself in through a window. In the office he struck a match and read the labels of the brown medicine bottles and selected this one and that. He moved through the house and peered into the main room where the doctor lay dead, his widow standing at the window staring out. She sensed him and turned. He caught her before she could scream and clamped a cloth rag over her mouth, her husband’s own chloroform fainting her instantly.

Outside he crept building to building wiring dynamite. He’d just finished and stood to stretch his back when he spied another lady in black walking along the livery barn wall with a bucket. She set it down and reached back in her hair and shadowed her face with a veil. Then she and her pail slipped in the livery door and a moment later the same door opened and another lady came out covering a yawn. She threw back her veil to the air.

Ike crept along the livery’s shadowed east wall. The barn had spaces between boards and it was through such a space that he saw the girl in the cell. Lanternlight yellowing the hay. The lady he’d seen go in was guarding her. The bucket was her stool.

He twisted his head to better see.

It was her.

O God here she was. He’d never seen her before, but he knew it was her. He turned his shoulders to the wall and leaned against it, sinking to his backside where he sat for a long minute. He looked up at the sky. He didn’t believe it. What you gone do next? he asked the stars. What ain’t you gone do?

He hurried back through the alley to the house and inside, past Mrs. Tate in her restless sleep, up the stairs into the room. Eugene hadn’t stirred. His belly rose and fell and the air seemed fouler from his dying. Ike set the medicine bottles along the table and selected one and another and mixed them and poured them into Eugene’s whiskey gourd. He sat in a chair in the corner thinking. Then stood and squeaked opened the chifforobe and gazed at the colors. A moment later, his arms full of clothes, Ike left the room.

When the key clicked in the lock Smonk opened his eyes. He rocked back and forth on the bed, gathering momentum, then rolled onto the floor. Ike was gone. He stood sucking air into the bloody scraps of his lungs. He reached for his glasses and gourd and unstoppered it and drank deeply.

Little morphine kick, he said, raising the licker. Brother Isaac, I thank ye.

He drank again and hung the gourd around his neck and took one of the bottles and stripped the sheet from the bed. He hefted his lucky detonator and grabbed the coil of wire. Downstairs Ike was gone, and Mrs. Tate had barely moved, just the hitch of her shoulders as she snored. She wore black, which made her tinier.

He set his wares down quietly and undid the gourd and drank again. He found the snake of wire Ike had left and twisted it to the wire he’d brought and hitched it up to the detonator. He disappeared down the hall and returned holding a broom and, behind the old woman, flapped out the bedsheet and within a moment had employed a trick he’d learned from Kansas City teamsters where you fasten your victim to his chair with a sheet, tightening the sheet by a broom handle affixed to the back. With nothing showing but her neck and head, he twisted the handle and stood behind her where she couldn’t see him and held her until she stopped convulsing.

I got some questions for ye, he said, blowing hot sulfur breath in her ear.

He thumbstruck a match and lit a candle on the sideboard by Justice Tate’s head.

The old lady wriggled in her cocoon and he tightened it a turn. She was trying to shake her head but his hand had her face. Behind her, he looked down her length, points of her feet at the bottom.

You won’t get away, he said. Especially if I have to strangulate ye. But if ye swar to be a good ole girl, I’ll let ye loose at the mouth. All right?

Rage in her roiling eyes and the electric rod of her body, but he held her as long as she could flex and presently she went limp and he loosened the broom.

Okay. There. He lifted his palm from her mouth and moved around into the candlelight. Red bars the shape of his fingers and thumb on her cheeks.

Who—her voice a jar of wet sand opened—Who are you?

He leaned his head closer and removed the hat and glasses, his good eye twinkling in the candlelight.

When she saw who it was her body spasmed anew.

What’s the matter? he asked, muffling her screams. Ain’t ye glad to see me?

Christian Deputy Loon, meanwhile, heard a horse fast approaching and, careful not to point, tried to flag down its rider who seemed to be naked, burnt to a crisp, caked in dusty blood and carrying a giant rifle. But the stranger passed in the moonlight, racing toward Old Texas. Deputy Loon sighed. He took off his right boot and scratched between his toes. He put the boot back on. He sat for what seemed an hour of time and eventually lay forward on his horse’s neck and entwined his fingers in its mane and closed his eyes and slept and dreamed of a town burning and a horde of women fleeing the flames and overtaking him on the horse, dragging him down, tearing him into pieces. Boy was he glad it was only a dream.