Smonk

1 THE TRIAL

IT WAS THE EVE OF THE EVE OF HIS DEATH BY MURDER AND THERE was harmonica music on the air when E. O. Smonk rode the disputed mule over the railroad tracks and up the hill to the hotel where his trial would be. It was October the first of that year. It had been dry and dusty for six weeks and five days. The crops were dead. It was Saturday. Ten after three o’clock in the afternoon according to the shadows of the bottles on the bottle tree.

Amid the row of long nickering horsefaces at the rail Smonk slid off the mule into the sand and spat away his cigar stub and stood glaring among the animal shoulders at his full height of five and a quarter foot. He told a filthy blond boy holding a balloon to watch the mule, which had an English saddle on its back and an embroidered blanket from Bruges Belgium underneath. In a sheath stitched to the saddle stood the polished butt of the Winchester rifle with which, not half an hour earlier, Smonk had dispatched four of an Irishman’s goats in their pen because the only thing he abhorred more than an Irish was an Irish goat. By way of brand the mule had a fresh .22 bullet hole through its left ear, same as Smonk’s cows and pigs and hound dog did, even his cat.

That mule gits away, he told the boy, I’ll brand ye balloon.

He struck a match with his thumbnail and lit another cigar. He noted there were no men on the porches, downstair or up, and slid the rifle from its sock and snicked the safety off. He backhanded dust from a mare’s flank to get her the hell out of his way (they say he wouldn’t walk behind a horse) and clumped up the steps into the balcony’s shade and limped across the hotel porch, the planks groaning under his boots. The boy watched him: his immense dwarf shape, shoulders of a grizzly bear, that bushel basket of a head low and cocked, as if he was trying to determine the sex of something. His hands were wide as shovels and his fingers so long he could palm a man’s skull but his lower half was smaller, thin horseshoe legs and little feet in their brand-new calf opera boots the color of chocolate, loose denim britches tucked in the tops. He wore a clean pressed white shirt and ruffled collar, suspenders, a black string tie with a pair of dice on the end and a tan duck coat. He was uncovered as usual—hats made his head sweat—and he wore the blue-lensed eyeglasses prescribed for sufferers of syphilis, which accounted him in its numbers. On a lanyard around his neck hung a whiskey gourd stoppered with a syrup cork.

He coughed.

Along with the Winchester he carried an ivory-handled walking cane with a sword concealed in the shaft and a derringer in the handle. He had four or five revolvers in various places within his clothing and cartridges clicking in his coat pockets and a knife in his boot. There were several bullet scars in his right shoulder and one in each forearm and another in his left foot. There were a dozen buckshot pocks peppered over the hairy knoll of his back and the trail of a knife scored across his belly. His left eye was gone a few years now, replaced by a white glass ball two sizes small. He had a goiter under his beard. He had gout, he had the clap, blood-sugar, neuralgia and ague. Malaria. The silk handkerchief balled in his pants pocket was blooded from the advanced consumption the doctor had just informed him he had.

You’ll die from it, the doctor had said.

When? asked Smonk.

One of these days.

At the hotel door, he paused to collect his wind and glanced down behind him. Except for the boy slouching against a post with his balloon, an aired-up sheep stomach, there were no children to be seen, a more childless place you’d never find. Throughout town the whorish old biddies were pulling in shutters and closing doors, others hurrying across the street shadowed beneath their parasols, but every one of them peeping back over their shoulders to catch a gander at Smonk.

He pretended to tip a hat.

Then he noticed them—the two slickers standing across the road beside a buckboard wagon covered in a tarp. They were setting up the tripod legs of their camera and wore dandy-looking suits and shiny derbies.

Smonk, who could read lips, saw one say, There he is.

Inside the hotel the bailiff, who’d been blowing the harmonica, put it away and straightened his posture when he saw who it was coming and cleared his throat and announced it was no guns allowed in a courtroom.

This ain’t a courtroom, Smonk said.

It is today by God, said the bailiff.

Smonk glanced out behind him as if he might leave, the hell with the farce of justice once and for all. But instead he handed the rifle over, barrels first, and as he laid one heavy revolver and then another on the whiskey keg the bailiff had for a desk, he looked down at the gaunt barefaced Scot in his overalls and bicycle cap pulled low, sitting on a wooden crate, the sideboard behind him jumbled with firearms deposited by those already inside.

Smonk studied the bailiff. I seen ye before.

Maybe ye did, the man said. Maybe I used to work as ye agent till ye sacked me from service and my wife run off after ye and cast me in such doldrums me and my boy Willie come up losing ever thing we had—land, house, barn, corn crib, still, crick. Ever blessed thing. Open up ye coat and show me inside there.

Smonk did. You lucky I didn’t kill ye.

The bailiff pointed the rifle. That ’n too.

The one-eye licked his long red tongue over his lips and put his cigar in his teeth and unworked from his waistband a forty-one caliber Colt Navy pistol and laid it on the wood between them.

Keep these instruments safe, fellow. Maybe I’ll tip ye a penny for looking after em good.

I wouldn’t accept no tip penny from you, Mister Smonk, if it was the last penny minted in this land.

Smonk had coughed. Do what.

I said if it was to happen a copper blight over this whole county and a penny was selling for a dollar and a half and I hadn’t eat a bite of food in a month and my boy was starving, I wouldn’t take no penny from you. Not even if ye paid me a whole nother penny to take it.

But Smonk had turned away.

Angry harmonica notes preceded him as he twisted his shoulders to fit the door and stepped into the hot, smoky diningroom, cigar ash dusted down his tie like beard dander. The eating tables had been shoved against the walls and stacked surface to surface, the legs of the ones on top in the air like dead livestock. Justice of the Peace Elmer Tate and the lawyer and the banker and two or three farmers and the liveryman and that doctor from before checking his watch and Hobbs the undertaker, all deacons, looked at him. The talking had hushed, the men quiet as chairs. The nine ball flashing its number across the billiard table in the corner didn’t make its hole and ticked off the seven and stopped dead on the felt.

Smonk leaned against the wall, it gave a little. He coughed into his handkerchief and dabbed his lips and stuffed the cloth into his pocket, the conversation and game of billiards picking back up.

For a moment nothing happened except the quip of a mockingbird from outside and Smonk unstoppering his gourd. Then the door opened at the opposite end of the room and into the light walked the circuit judge, a Democrat, Mason and former army officer equally renowned for his drinking and his muttonchops. He acknowledged no other man as he excused his way through them and stepped onto the wooden dais erected for this occasion and seated himself behind the table set up for him, a glass of water there and a notepad, quill and ink bottle. He wore a black suit and hat like a preacher and for a gavel used the butt end of a new Smith & Wesson Schofield .45.

Order now, order, he called, removing his hat. Be seated, gentlemen. He screwed his monocle in.

Ever body set down, called the bailiff. And git ye got-dern cover off.

The men snatched off their hats and scuffed into chairs. In the rear of the room, Smonk kept standing. He ashed his cigar. For once he wished he wore a hat so he could leave it on. A sombrero, say.

Let’s see. The judge cleared his throat. First on the docket here is the people of Old Texas Alabama versus Eugene Oregon Smonk.

Not first, the defendant growled. The whole docket. Today I’m yer whole fucking docket.

Anger charged the diningroom: the state flag in the corner seemed to quiver though the air between the men was as still as the inside of a rock. From somewhere out beyond the dusty desiccated sugarcane came the high parched yap of a mad-dog.

Afternoon, gentlemen. Smonk grinned. Judge.

He pulled his shoulders off the wall and hung his cane on his arm and puffed his cigar and stopped up his gourd. But he’d only made two steps toward his table when he paused and raised his head.

Something was different.

Somehow, the red-headed farmer glaring at him was not the same farmer Smonk had beaten with a coiled whip. The town clerk was not the same town clerk he had slapped down in the street, whose face he’d ground in the mud and money purse taken. Somehow that one there wasn’t the banker he’d swindled out of seventy-five acres of bottomland including a creek. That one was not the liveryman whose daughter he’d won at rook and taken in the feed room in the back. Hobbs the undertaker was another undertaker entirely and Tate yonder wasn’t the same spineless justice of the peace Smonk had been blackmailing near a year. They were all other faces, all other men.

He didn’t know them. He didn’t know them.

The bailiff wasn’t a bailiff now but another man altogether. They were scuffling to their feet in a mob as the judge banged his pistol so hard the ink bottle jumped off.

Order! he called. God damn it, I said order!

But there was no order left.

Instead there were fire pokers and riding crops. An ash shovel. There were bricks and unlooped belts and letter openers and knots of kindling. An iron pump handle. A broken window’s flashing knives. One soaked noose, cue sticks, table legs with nails crooked as fangs, the picks and pikes of splintered chairs.

The men advanced on Smonk with leery sidesteps. He ducked the hurled eight ball which smashed a window. He dropped his cigar to the floor and didn’t bother to toe it out and it lay smoking between his boots. He took off his glasses and folded them away into his breast pocket, in no hurry despite the men closing in behind their weapons, so close the ones in front could see his red teeth.

Get him, said somebody in the corner.

But Smonk raised the prongs of his fingers and his assailants froze. He leaned back, haled a long tug of air and held it, as if he might say some truth they needed to hear.

They waited for him to speak.

Instead he coughed, blood smattering those faces closest. And in the same moment each fellow in the room tall enough to see witnessed Eugene Oregon Smonk’s eye uncork from his head into the air.

For an instant it glinted in a ray of light through the window, then McKissick the bailiff caught it like a marble.

He opened his palm and grinned.

When he looked up Smonk had a derringer in one hand and sword in the other and he was backing toward the sideboard where all those lined-up rifles and pistols lay gleaming.

Well have at it, he yelled, you hongry bitches.

Meanwhile, the sun had shied behind a cloud. The horses along the rail outside were bland and peaceful, many with their eyes shut. Even the flies had landed. Across the street, the two photographers stood on either side of their wagon cracking their knuckles and glancing up the deserted street and down it.

The blond boy had tied his balloon in the raw hole in the mule’s ear and was climbing into the saddle. He wiggled his behind. The stirrups, adjusted for Smonk, hung too far down so he didn’t use them, even as the mule backed up on its own and faced east.

When the first shot came from inside, the photographers let fall their tripod and leapt into the wagon and flung away a green tarp to reveal a 1908 Model Hiram Maxim water-cooled machine gun bolted to its metal jackstand. One man checked the lock while the other twirled vises and tightened the petcock valve.

I heard he killed his own momma, he said.

For starters, said the other.

The blond boy slapped the mule across its withers and gigged it with his bare heels. Let’s git to that orphanage, he said, saluting the machine gunners as they waited, one slowly returning the salute. The mule began to walk, and then trot, the bailiff’s son not looking back despite the storm of gunfire, the balloon bobbing above them like a thought the mule was having, empty of history.