Smonk

2 THE TOMBIGBEE

TWO WEEKS EARLIER, IN THE STATE OF LOUISIANA, THERE HAPPENED a scrawny fifteen year old girl burnt brown by the sun and whoring town to town unaware there were other options for a girl. Evavangeline was her name, the only one she knew. There was about ninety pounds’ worth of her, and say five feet, plain, petite and slightly buck-toothed. She had jags of red hair cut short by her own hand because it was cooler that way and she bore a large red scar on the side of her neck. More often than not she’d be mistaken for a boy and recently had been chased out of Shreveport for sodomy and romanticisms with a member of “his” own gender.

A group of well-uniformed Christian Deputies had burst in upon the hot upstairs hotel room where the two were transacting their business in the fashion of dogs, and Evavangeline had sprung from the bed as if ejaculated. She’d crashed unpaid out the window, clutching an armload of men’s clothing before her privates.

The deputies fell upon her co-fornicator and dragged him naked and hollering down rough pine steps and through the muddy street and strung him up by his wrists and administered him a whipping. He bellowed at each lick and cried for them to run fetch her—

It warn’t no her you pervert, said the Christian Deputy horsewhipping him.

I swar it was, cried the man. She were a gal! A gal I say!

They were behind the jail, a crowd gathering to watch. People pointing that the man being whipped still bore his member in the strategic position.

I sucked on her titties! the beaten man cried. The whip snapped mud off his shoulders. Wee tomboys I’ll grant ye, but teats sure as the world! I swar!

If that had been a woman, chided the tall, long-chinned head Christian Deputy, blushing aback his white stallion, then we’d have no reason to chase “her,” now, would we? Perhaps a dress violation. Or you could file a charge of robbery, if you want us to interrupt your “whooping” so you can fill out the paperwork and list each stolen garment.

I do! the recipient of the beating cried. A sock! he cried. A real old union suit! A hank of rope!

He continued to bawl out the names of garments, his flagpole ever faithful.

Is they even such a thang as a dress violation in this jurisprudence, boss? asked Ambrose, the deputies’ second-in-command, a short, stocky Negro who could read. His shirt sleeves and pants cuffs were rolled to accommodate his shorter limbs and his ascot had bunched at his chin. Look, he said and gestured at the scene around them. Dirty, diseased creatures of indiscriminate gender slogging through the mud wore rags, newspapers, sack cloths, loin cloths, croaker sacks, animal skins and corn shucks. Some were naked and hairy as apes.

Go, find out, said Walton, for that was the head Christian Deputy’s Christian name. “Seek and ye shall find. Ask and it shall be given unto you.”

Ah. Re-search, said Ambrose.

A bodice damn ye, cried the man being beaten. A red lacy garter!

You have to search for it first, before you can prefix it with “re,” haven’t you? asked Walton.

You’d thank so, said his ebony-skinned lieutenant. But what I heard now’s they demarcating it re-search. They do that once in a while. Ever few years. Change a word or come up with a new one altogether. It don’t make a shit normally—

Deputy Ambrose, warned his leader. You “cuss” again, I’ll have your badge.

A week later the gal Evavangeline stood in a boardinghouse bedroom in Mobile Alabama stark naked, frowning at her cactus of a body. Her titties barely qualified for the word. Old checker-playing geezers along the waterfront had better humps. And that goddamn scar Ned had give her! Big as a damn half-dollar piece! She spat into her palm, thinking to try and scrub it off. But she didn’t. It wouldn’t come off no matter how much she scratched at it and the truth was she liked it for a reminder of him. When it itched she thought Ned might be trying to tell her something. Or just saying hello. I’m out here somewheres.

In the mirror she thumped her nipples, which made them rise. She wondered about getting knocked up because she knew it made your titties grow. What she didn’t know was if they shrank back after you had the kid. Seemed like maybe they’d stay full as long as the kid sucked on them. The stickler was that she didn’t want a damn youngun to tote along, just some bigger titties. Maybe after she got the kid she could ditch it and find her a customer who’d suck the milk. There had to be men would go for that. Main thing she knew after all these years of being alive was that men existed with every possible appetite.

She gazed at her belly and wondered how a girl got knocked up. She was as skinny as a skeleton and no matter how much she ate she couldn’t put on no fat. But you got fat when you got knocked up. Maybe it was a pill you bought or something you shot. She bet a doctor could tell her.

The morning suffered on and she snuck down the drainpipe of the boardinghouse without paying the lady and found a window table at a dive overlooking the bay and sipped dark rum and slowly ate the cork and listened to the hurdy-gurdy and smoked hash mixed with tobacco as endless boats bobbed past and crows and seagulls dipped in the breeze. She ordered another rum. She saw a man get mugged on the wharf. She dozed for a while and woke thinking how much she loved money. She saw a shark attack a small dinghy. She visited the privy and on her return saw a pair of rats fornicating under the piano stool. The mugged man still lying where he’d fallen on the boards.

Inside, the smoke was so thick it was like sitting in a low cave. No one who entered displayed the stylings of a doctor, though what that might have been she had no clue. She hoped it would be self-telling. A black bag maybe. One of those contraptions on the head. If somebody were to get shot, she mused, a doc would likely appear.

She ordered another rum.

The place stank of fish and privy. Flies and gnats so thick the wind from their wings was nearly a comfort. Because of Evavangeline’s clothing and scrubby hair, a wispy red-eyed whore floated up and said, You wanna buy a girl a drank, handsome?

No, thank ye.

You lean the other way?

My leaning’s my own business.

The whore’s husband, the famously hot-headed owner of the dive, heard her. Whoa, Nellie, he said. Hold it right there.

He had a growth of mole the size of a man’s thumb dangling from his chin. Blackly purple with a marbling of red, veiny, sparsely haired and peeling a tad, it was hard not to stare at, jiggling as it did when he talked.

Hell Mary, she said. Do it grow?

Buster boy—The owner pointed a bottle of bourbon at her. If you (A) keep looking at my birthmark, and (B) ever talk to my wife like that again, I’ll (C) bust this here whiskey over ye head and make ye (E) pay the two bits the drank cost and (R) mop up the mess.

Is that right.

Yeah that’s right, dandy boy.

Don’t call me no dandy boy.

Why not? Dandy boy?

Cause I’m dranking. It don’t do to mess with me in such times.

That’s it. He slammed his hand on the countertop. I’m furious now.

He tugged at a revolver in his waistband but the gal jumped up with a sawed-down singleshot sixteen from under the table. Several glasses exploded behind him and he flew backward without even flapping his arms and his bowler hat landed spinning on the bar.

She flattened it with her open palm. I told ye.

You damn shore did, said his widow, pouring herself a whiskey heading for the cashbox.

Evavangeline hopped over the bar, her ears ringing. She knelt beside the man and tugged the long revolver from his waistband and checked its loads and stood up and cocked it with her thumb and closed her left eye for better aim and bit her bottom lip as was her habit when shooting and shot the growth of mole from the owner’s chin without blinking at the noise. She inhaled smoke from the barrel then grabbed the mole which was burning on one end and swaddled it in the owner’s dishrag for later study. Nobody in the place seemed to mind, not his wife, not the other patrons, not even the rats who’d dogged each other halfway across the floor, and no doctor had arisen from his chair. The hurdy-gurdy was playing “I’m a Good Ole Rebel.” Evavangeline vaulted through an open window and darted along the wharf carrying her guns, ducking ships’ moorings and upsetting a Hasidic Jew with an armload of beaver pelts.

Still thinking about doctors, she stowed away aboard the next steamboat upriver. She had no idea where she was going but she had always been a creature of strong instinct, and north felt right. She slept on deck and stayed sober, shooting dice in the afternoons with a group of niggers. It was hot. Her head especially. The niggers were full of stories of a character they called Snert or something. She barely listened it was so hot. When the boat docked and took on passengers she would ask the gentlemen embarking and disembarking if he was a doctor.

No one owned up.

Then, at the muggy river town of McIntosh, one stubby Irish dribbling piss off the side of the boat admitted to Evavangeline that yes he was indeedy the ship’s sawbones and further earned her credibility when he asked, You a gal under them duds and that dirt?

In his tiny room he lit a stick of incense and a candle which gave hardly any light. He smoked some skunkweed without offering to share and cranked his Gramophone and after a few loud pops some scratchy fiddles played slow and sad. She was naked, elbows and knees on his bunk, blindfolded by the silk cloth he said the Hypocritic Code called for. He popped his knuckles and spat on his finger and wormed it up her chute and wiggled it.

It’s a dollar, she repeated. I done told ye.

How’s that feel, aye? he asked. He inched in another finger.

How’s what feel?

He withdrew and sniffed the fingers.

What the hell can ye tell from that, doc?

Ye mineral content, for one thing, he said. Ye ’ve got a strong sulfur ardor. Odd. How bout this, aye?

There was a rustle of clothing. Behind the blindfold her eyes rolled. Here it came. He grasped her hipbones and grunted and worked a slightly bigger thing in.

This is the old Druidic way of examining patients, he explained. From the Bible or Montgomery Ward catalogue one. I’m an avid reader. We train our fleshly tools here to be especially sensitive, like a thermometer only in all modesty somewhat bigger, and for a fee of two dollars we can dispense a kind of miracle salve into the anal rectum and uuuuuh—

She’d contracted her nethers as Ned had taught her—done correctly, as effective as grabbing a man by the throat.

He was gasping, pounding her back.

Is that ye pinky? she asked, her teeth gritted.

Inside her it shriveled. She loosed her clench and let him pull it out. She got up and sat with her legs hanging off the bunk and removed the blindfold. I said it was a dollar.

You bitch. He fisted the wall and the record skipped. I know jest what yer eaten up with. What disease, I mean. You reek of it. And there ain’t no cure.

Are you really a doctor?

He laughed.

Will it land me dead?

You’ll be curious about that fer a spell, aye? He laughed more. Now get out of my room you lice-ridden heathen and jump off this boat, before I tell em what you really are.

Simmering mad, she climbed back atop the deck to seek another opinion. She determined this time to request proof of medical accomplishment. A note you got from finishing one of them doctor schools. She couldn’t read but expected she could judge it from the quality of the paper. Hell, even a tooth-puller would do. What did he mean what she really was? What was she?

She looked about the deck. Perhaps she could show the famously hot-headed dead dive-owner’s growth of mole. If someone could identify it, it would indicate medical knowledge.

She waited in the sun with the niggers from the dice game. Telling their crazy stories. She bit her fist. That Irish doctor. Fake doctor. Whatever he was. She smashed a horsefly on her neck and threw it in the water where a shellcracker was waiting to suck it under the waves. One of the niggers told her the way a girl got knocked up was by laying with a man and she disbelieved him. She dug the mole from her pocket and unspooled it from its rag. She sniffed it, she held it up by a long hair and watched it point north. She drew a knife from her boot and poked it. The black parts were softer. She touched it with her tongue.

No other man crossing the gangplank in McIntosh admitted to the medical arts, though, and presently the boat shrilled its steam whistle and sucked its paddlewheel to life and they lurched off. A couple of jokers fired pistols in the air, and as the scorched landscape wrenched itself past like a beaten army, Evavangeline realized that for the rest of her life she would wonder if she was dying.

Meanwhile, a number of whores and several sots had witnessed the murder and mutilation of the famously hot-headed owner of the dive.

The well-dressed troop of Christian Deputies who’d whipped (and then released) the gal’s sexual co-conspirator in Shreveport had tracked her to Mobile, and within two days Walton had bribed most involved and found where she’d resided during her week in the bay city: a boardinghouse on Dauphin Street. Of some repute. A blind man running for state representative had dined there once. And on a separate occasion a dysenterious matador from Atlanta had used its privy for the better part of half an hour. And then, the coup de gras, that long extemporaneous political debate on Populism between Professor Emeritus R. M. Brutus Theodore “Patch” McCorquodale IV, Ph.D., and Bud Rope. Right on these here boards, the “half-breed” proprietor-lady was known to say, tapping her walking cane. Her two halves were Caucasian and Indian, if Walton’s re-search was as accurate as he believed it to be.

Why in the world would the perverted sodomite they were pursuing choose such a high-profile locale?

With the bay tapping the sand and forever astonishing the crabs beyond the rim of their campfirelight, Walton led a discussion among his Christian Deputies where they sat in good posture after a meal of liver and kidney beans, earnestly dissecting their quarry’s character. Aside from the men being a bit gassy it was pleasant. The leader had a small chalkboard and stand on which he drew diagrams, charts, maps, and stick figures. He wrote words and underlined them. “CLASS.” Didn’t their misguided prey feel out-of-his-element there in the famous boardinghouse? Among “GOOD” (Walton wrote furiously) “PEOPLE”? Why wasn’t he sleeping in an alley, or in a seedy hotel, where “TRASH” traditionally stayed and where “SIN” took place? Did he feel safer there? Less conspicuous? Or was he trying to rise above his “STATION”? And if so, “WHY”?

What’s our station, Mister Walton? inquired a tall one-eared deputy with his shirttail out. He’d raised his hand.

Walton had written, “A-R-I-S-T-O-C-R-A-” but paused. Why do you ask? Loon, is it? And please, call me Captain.

Well, the deputy said, it lines up like this here. I prefers me a cathouse to a boardinghouse. I’d ruther sleep on the ground than in some bed. Do that make me trash?

Why certainly not, Walton said. Deputy Ambrose, tell him.

Ambrose looked puzzled. He scratched his “Afro” which had a knife handle protruding from it. He came over to Walton and on tip-toes whispered, I thank that ’n is trash, Mister Walton.

What ’d that little nigger say? Loon asked his buddy.

Nonsense. All of it! Walton dusted chalk from his gloves. By virtue of my being a “Yankee,” he announced, I hereby deem you all worthy.

He raised his hand sartorially.

There, he said. Anything else?

Farther north, the steamship shouldered up the brown ribbon of the Tombigbee, shrunk by the drought to half its width and narrower for oncoming boats and lower for stobs. On board, Evavangeline had run out of money. Long about midnight she swiped a black gourd of tequila from the galley and drank it. She let a thin dapper Irish in a dirty white chef’s hat lead her to a hidden spot on the deck behind some empty whiskey barrels with dead moss between the slats.

It’s a dollar, she said, turning to give him access.

I like hair, he whispered. Under the armpits. I like to smell armpits.

Did I say—ouch!—it was a dollar?

He had his hands down her pants, groping about, lifting her feet off the deck.

Where’s ye member? His tongue a hot leech in her ear.

My what? Where’s my dollar?

Yer big ole cock-a-doodle-do. I want to suck on it, honey.

You pervert. She spun and shoved him darker into the barrels. She hitched up her pants and patted her sleeves as if to dust herself of his deviance.

I’ll have ye ass, the chef said. He came at her growling in his throat, a pug of a man now, glint of a paring knife in the moonlight. But even drunk she dodged and his blade slit no deeper than her shirt. He switched hands like a knifefighter and jabbed at her again but she was suddenly behind him with her arm around his neck and a hawkbill blade hooked in his gut.

Aye, he said. Killed me.

She looked around but the watchman had passed out on deck like a sack of manure.

Dragging the dead pervert toward the rail, she darted her fingers through his pockets. A silver dollar and a rabbit’s foot, obviously defective. She shoved him over the side and threw the charm after and stumbled below deck toward the doctor or phony doctor’s room. She fell over a naked man passed out drunk. It felt like the tequila was sloshing in her head. The worm tunneling through her brain. It ain’t right, what he did, she told the narrow bucking hall. She stumbled over a sleeping child. When she found the doctor or fake doctor’s door she kicked it apart and fell through the splinters.

He sat up in bed, wearing a woman’s gown. Candles were burning. The Gramophone crackling.

Wait! he cried. He was wearing lipstick.

What in the world? She kicked his chamber pot aside and tugged at the revolver in her waistband. It was caught.

The man was begging, saying he was joshing her, she wasn’t really going to die.

To shut him up she snaked her head in and bit a hunk out of his neck and spat it on his sheets like an oyster. He gaped at her then began to scream. She unsnagged the gun and grabbed him by the waddle under his chin and shot him in his right eye and then steadying his head shot him in his left and then straight through the nose, his lips still forming words. Turning his chin left, right, she put one in each earhole at certain angles so that there was little left above the lower jaw, the top half of his head back-hanging like a hood of hair. His bottom row of teeth was intact, she noticed, her face red from his splatter. She tipped out the blood and prized free a gold molar with her knife and let him go and when he fell his head bled across the bunk like a can of paint overturned. She stepped back reloading. The gunpowder at such range had burned the web of skin between her thumb and forefinger. The Gramophone’s needle had been knocked ajar and she set it back and then, for a moment of her life, as smoke curled in the air, she listened to strings of Handel.

Anon. A lovely, leafy day. Sunlight and high cloudwork serrating the sky.

After breakfasting on cheese and “grits” and having a productive B.M. in the reeds, Walton clopped his eager stallion along Dauphin Street, making an entry in his logbook, majestic magnolias scenting the bay air with their hearty perfumes and massive live oaks columning the street, the humid shadows back from the road half-claiming mansions stately and proud, some burnt or in disrepair from the War lo these years hence but still displaying their once-splendor in the way only ruins can.

Behold Nature’s Holy Cathedral, Walton proclaimed, cross-stitched with Man’s finest architecture, and leavened by his will for destruction. Blessed be Thy name, Lord, that I am Thy servant proceeding on a Mission to spread Thy Gospel and dispense Thy Justice among these wretched heathens. He began to pump his fist in the air and hum “Onward Christian Soldiers.” He saluted a drunk trying to urinate on a streetlamp and in return the man brandished his middle finger or “shot him a bird” in the vernacular and cursed in French.

Walton turned a cold profile and trod on. The previous night’s fireside discussion had yielded nothing except cross words that ended with several deputies trying to “lynch” poor Ambrose. Confiscating their noose, the commander had dismissed the men for some “R & R”; he suspected that most of them had gone whoring and drinking as this morning he’d found several empty liquor bottles and more than a few feminine undergarments scattered among their soiled belongings. And even snoring they’d been scratching at their privates; which, of course, meant another infestation of “crabs.” Ah, the yoke of command weighed heavy.

Since he’d been unable to roust them from their slumber, and since the sight of the frilly, indeed diaphanous pantaloons, girdles, slips, garters, corsets, bras, et cetera, was distracting him from his mission, and because Ambrose was nowhere to be found, Walton had decided to visit the boardinghouse alone. Indeed, it might be less intimidating for his subject that way. He was brilliant, quick-witted and a charmer, Phail Walton, who prided himself on having no sexual impulse whatsoever. Nil. Nada. He used his male member to void through, and that was it. A purely functional length of hose. Voiding, he wouldn’t even touch it, would merely let it protrude and perform its task; and if it ever betrayed him and became engorged in his pants, he would pinch the purple turtle’s-head end, like Mother used to, and it would recede. When he had a night emission he would slam his fingers in the door come dawn and drink a pint of his own urine.

The twelve or so deputies (the number varied, sometimes day to day) who accompanied him on his adventures were required to believe similarly, though not as strongly as Walton did; they never had to purposefully injure themselves, for instance. He led prayer meetings at night where the men held hands around the fire. He made them find one thing each day for which to thank God. He frowned on whiskey drinking and encouraged washing and dental hygiene. He gave his testimony frequently. He urged the deputies to commit good deeds, such as taking an old woman’s elbow as she crossed a street or thwarting a bank robbery. He taught the troops hymns and patriotic songs and had them memorize the poetry of Lord Byron and that of a startling new voice, a certain Mister Whitman:

The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,

They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,

They do not think whom they souse with spray.

In general, the deputies were eager learners.

What the hell—

Language, said Walton at his chalkboard.

Heck. What the heck do it mean, “puffed and declined”?

Ah, said their leader. Excellent question! Anybody? Anybody?

Nobody.

Well, said Walton, writing, it’s a “M-E-T-A-P-H-O-R.”

The deputies nodded.

That’s what I knowed it was, said Loon.

On occasion, Walton would discover one of the men drunk, “stoned,” or rubbing himself against some whore’s bottom. Or concealing a sackful of stolen money. About this subject their commander was a forgiving sort and would simply and sadly give the backslider a dressing-down, confiscate any contraband, and dock the deputy’s pay. Cursing, however, was another matter entirely. It was not tolerated. Walton could recite a list of names dozens long of men unable to retain his status as a Christian Deputy; and in nine of ten cases it wasn’t excessive robbery, murder, arson, treason or even unusual or deviant sexual proclivities but profanity that saw these men’s careers wilt.

Walton and his deputies wore matching uniforms—duster coats, crimson shirts and khaki pants with extra thigh-pockets filled with snake-bite kits, cartridges, harmonicas, jew’s harps, spoons, flasks (medicinal only), chewing gum, telescopes, pencils, Bibles, thimbles, compasses, pocketknives, jelly beans, wire brushes, magnifying glasses and whistles, among other items. Walton supplied each man and paid a monthly wage from his mother’s dwindling bank account in Philadelphia. The deputies wore across their eyes an expensive new instrument called Dark-Lensed Goggles ($1.11 per pair). The goggles made them look like the outer-space monsters they’d been hearing about of late but cut down on headaches from the sun and theoretically gave one certain advantages in a gun battle on a bright day. The men wore identical tall black polished Creedmoor riding boots tucked crisply in their pants. They wore golden ascots. They wore stiff-brimmed hats and leather gloves with fringes. Each bore a Colt revolver on his gunbelt and a Winchester thirty-thirty strapped across his back. An imitation United States cavalry sword (half the price of the original) on his hip.

Now, in full uniform, armed and “goggled,” Walton on his mission of reconnaissance marched across the Dauphin Street boardinghouse’s famous porch with his left hand resting on his sword handle and with his right rapped thrice on the door. The homely, bonneted woman who answered refused to cooperate unless bribed, and after having been “jewed” down from her original asking price of eleven dollars to ten and four bits, the woman spat a glob of snuff juice between two fingers and stated the name, which Walton repeated to himself in a whisper and had her spell again as he penciled it in his Christian Deputy logbook. He noticed she spelled it differently this time.

Evavangeline, is what he wrote. Then he underlined it.

It’s an odd name, he observed. Perhaps an alias.

It ain’t that odd. My given name’s Yulena. Yulena Carp. What’s yern, Mister Walton?

Phail. And it’s Captain Walton. Please.

Fail? My word. They never give you much of a chance, did they?

Oh! Ha, ha! he said. No, dear woman, it’s with a “P-H,” as in the scientific way to measure acidity. Now, he said, smiling, when did you last see this Evavangeline creature?

She held up five fingers, he four, she five, he paid.

Left two days ago, the boardinghouse proprietor-lady said. Skipped out on her bill, she did. If you wanted to make good on it, I’d appreciate it.

Of course. Though I’m surprised you didn’t have her pay in advance.

I would of. That’s our usual policy. But she wanted to whore and cut me in for half, ye see. And sure enough, she whored a whole day, it was a line clear out the door, then the little tart vacated without giving me my cut.

I’m flabbergasted, Mrs. Carp, that you would allow such behavior on your premises.

What ye got in mind?

The woman parted her lips in what the head deputy took as an overture. Before he could stop himself and despite her advanced age, he had imagined her naked and suddenly his “bad job” (as Mother called it) sprang to life in his tight pants. Yulena Carp raised her eyebrows. Unable to pinch himself in her presence, he turned his back and bent forward and closed his eyes, imagined sawing off the hand of an innocent child. He felt himself calm.

Excuse me. He faced her and cleared his throat. However, I’m not so sure our quarry is a “she” after all.

Do what?

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

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

Walton tapped his goggle lense. From witness of these very eyes. He was—forgive me!—committing a perversion in the method of species caninus with the other gentleman we caught. Sodomy, good woman, sodomy! Ungodly, it was. The depth of wickedness. Fornicating like heinous canines. And before we could apprehend him, off she flew like a demon out the window. We provided the sinner we did catch with a good thrashing, but that other “ornery” S.O.B.—sorry old boy—has thus far escaped his come-uppance.

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

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

So you seen this Evavangeline’s…? The boardinghouse woman did the Indian finger-sign for “white man’s pecker” (a hand at the crotch with the pinky hanging down).

Oh, we “seen” it all right.

And now you fixing to track him?

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

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

If you covet these “britches,” all you need do is tell me and I’ll give them to you.

How come?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She ought never drink tequila.

The captain went about howling and throwing things from the ship. He rent his clothing and pulled clumps from his beard and rammed his head into the galley wall.

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

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

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

Naw, it’s a pickled nigger thumb, said the second mate, also salivating.

The captain threw them both overboard.

From the river the two thrashing officers saw Evavangeline dog-paddling toward land and tried to point her out, but the crew at the boat’s high rail was giving them the finger and mooning them and pissing on them and shooting at them. Somebody threw a pig.

Then one of the men was snatched underwater. He came up, flung back and fore spewing bile, bit in half by the largest alligator in Alabama. The crowd went Ahhhhhh. The officer bobbed for a moment, looking very surprised. He began to point at objects and call them Robert: a cypress knee, a beaver’s mound, a dragonfly rising from the water. Then he went down again. The other officer was screaming as things began to tear at him and he went under as well and nothing remained save his woolen skull cap, tossed in waves the color of blood.

In the meantime, Evavangeline kicked quietly toward shore, circumventing the feeding frenzy which had the men along the boat rail cheering and trying to throw one another in.

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

It’s a pecker! he yelled. What manner of man-eater, O Lord, have I brought upriver?