Smonk

3 THE BALLOON

MEANWHILE, IN OLD TEXAS, IT SEEMED THE BAILIFF’S BOY WITH THE balloon had vamoosed with the mule, and for a moment, a revolver in his left hand and sword in his right, E. O. Smonk had given the line of horses shirking at the rail his savage consideration. But he detested the preening highnesses and now could be found hobbling east along a row of storefronts, ducking bullets and favoring his gouty foot and using his sword as a cane and firing the revolver over his shoulder. Thinking Next time jest take a fucking horse.

Across the street, the mercenaries covered Smonk’s escape from their wagon, one firing the machine gun while the other readied a second lock and added water for coolant. The man at the trigger was screaming as he obliterated the hotel, shutters snapped off their hinges and posts sawed to dust and windows dissolving to silver mists and shingles flapping off and one short board twirling in the alley like a child.

The panicked horses kicked and rolled, a roan’s head gone, a rumpshot bay burying its hind hooves in a sorrel’s stomach, nails shrieking and wood splintering as the horses drew the rails away like a curtain, buckling the upstairs deck, the back of the building suddenly ablaze with fire, men spilling onto the porch dancing as if on stage, in their dying poses flinging out their arms or backflipping with their boots left upright on the floor. They cursed and cried to Jesus. They fingered their holes to dam the blood. They tried to remember how their legs worked. What their names were. They raised their palms but the bullets were true to the faces behind, a cheek gone, a lower jaw, grin of false teeth clacking to the floorboards and one shot-off finger pointing through the air still bearing its wedding band.

Fire leapfrogged over the floors, peeling up doorjambs and across the ceiling and walling the air with smoke. When the man at the trigger paused to let the other change locks, the citizens in the hotel began to clamber away from the fire by jumping through windows. They lurched from the ruined porch, some with their hats and coattails on fire, but froze when they saw a third man striding toward them in the smoke, stepping over bodies in the dirt, a German automatic rifle in one hand and a stick of dynamite fizzing in the other.

At the bottom of the hill, lumbering along panting for air, Smonk felt the concussion of the explosion before he heard it. Windows shook and shook the widows’ faces behind, faces already flinted into the masks they’d wear to the grave. Then he heard the Maxim resume its work. He tipped an imaginary hat to a widow on her steps trying to cock a rifle with both thumbs with a result of shooting herself in the foot. He was still chuckling when the undertaker’s widow appeared from a doorway holding a revolver in both hands and shot him broad in the chest. His gourd exploded but otherwise unharmed he grabbed her with his sword hand and danced her around and pulled her face to his and kissed her flush on the mouth and when he let go he’d taken her pistol and she bore his blood on her lips like paint, her back braced against the wall behind her.

He popped off the gun’s four rounds in three seconds and tossed it away and turned a second corner into an alley and shrugged out of his coat and left it crumpled in the dirt, his shoulders jerked by a fit of coughing and sneezes that mapped the oak trunk before him bright red.

He was edging down the alley when glass shattered by his head and a rifle barrel nosed out. Still coughing, he grabbed it from the widow’s fingers and looked it up and down with his good eye. Marlin repeater, full magazine judging the weight. He caught the hand swiping from the window and crushed its fingers like a sack of twigs and began to limp, again firing over his shoulder, levering with a flick of his wrist, ducking as a shot apothecary’s sign swung from its chain like a pendulum. A nail sparked by his foot and a post splintered by his cheek, but that was the closest they came to killing him as Smonk broke the empty rifle over his knee and burst into the livery barn. He saw no mule, donkey or pony and had little choice but the tall gray mare in the first stall, the only animal saddled and bridled. The livery attendant’s widow charged screeching from the dark holding a pitchfork woven with hay but he parried it with his sword and knocked her aside. He’d wiggled his good foot into the stirrup when she attacked again with a snub-nosed pistol. He snatched it away and smashed the gun into her cheek and flung himself onto the horse and told it Git.

The gray kicked boards loose in the wall behind and swung its head and tried to bite him but he punched its muzzle away and evened the reins. The woman grabbed his saddle strap as Smonk dug his heels in the horse’s flanks and they trundled her through the dust in the bay door and left her balled on the ground. A wave of cinders blistered past: Adios, Tate Hotel. Smonk fired the snub into the sky to get the horse’s attention and soon had her majesty goaded to an awkward lope. He looped the reins around his fingers and whacked her rump with his sword until the ground drummed beneath them and they hurtled across the railroad tracks and east, clinking bottles on the bottle tree, gunfire fading behind like a celebration of fireworks.

When it was safe he blew a mouthful of frothy blood and aimed the pistol and centered the last bullet through the gray’s left ear. The horse leapt a crossfence and whinnied and twisted in the air in some fit of pain or ecstasy and landed with the squat rider bouncing and low, the pair blurring, elongating, barely a hoof to earth, inspired by God or bespooked by the devil who could tell.

Meanwhile Will McKissick, the bailiff, coughed himself awake. Pushing a body off his own, he sat up plastered in gore. I’m in Hell, he thought. Things around him were moving and hot. Vaguely he heard gunshots. Screams. He fought to his knees, half aware of the dead and dying on the floor. Place shot to pieces. Air boiling. Splinters of glass stuck in the walls.

He fanned his face. Remembered being eight years old, the first time he’d used a slingshot and pebble to pick a hummingbird out of the air. Under a mimosa tree not long before his daddy got shot. He remembered knowing from that moment onward that he was a bad boy who would grow into a bad man. Then he’d pegged another hummingbird, a hatchling just out of the nest, no larger than a bumblebee.

He steadied himself against the wall and coughed and pounded his chest. But those birds were in the past now. Them and everything else. Lately, despite the long, varied and original chart of sins awaiting him in the devil’s ledger, he’d been fighting his evil inclinations and had broken his associations with the outlaw element and even settled down. An honest bailiff job. Several choices to marry. Redemption his target, no matter how long the shot. There was something round and blue in his brain. He could almost imagine it, but—

Smonk!

McKissick looked around. He wasn’t in Hell. This was only its anteroom, Old Texas Alabama, where moments ago E. O. Smonk had grinned blood and drawn a sword from the air and conjured a pistol by brazen will and squirted out his eye.

McKissick opened his fingers. There it was. His breath whistled out. White glass marble with a few nicks. Blue dot in the middle. Warm. He smelled it. He rolled it in his palm and pecked it with his thumbnail. It seemed to be looking at him. He popped it in his mouth where it clicked against his teeth.

His head snapped. Gunshots! He skipped through the dead to the window and double-took when he saw two men in a wagon reloading—was it?—a got-dern Gatling gun, the design of which he’d never seen, a steam cloud hovering around them like a halo. Water-cooled. Fancy.

Expensive.

They ain’t after no picture-graphs, he said to himself. Dern, I ought to knew it. Ye done got soft, Will, thoughts of revenge plus all these women at ye.

For he himself in his official capacity had questioned the strangers at their wagon before the trial. He himself the town bailiff had been convinced of their sincerity when they demonstrated the use of their camera, having him pose with his hair flattened by oil and a grimace on his face while they huddled together at the device under a blanket. Their intention was common practice, McKissick knew, to make a picture of a dead body, which would of been Smonk if things had gone according to plan. (Often the New York Times would pay a dollar for a picture of lynched niggers or shot-up outlaws. Those wily photographers would change the body—shave the fellow, say, or add an eyepatch—and send it back for another dollar.) As McKissick had stood getting his picture made, not one hour before, a number of the ladies had gathered to watch and he’d been buffaloed, proud to be the subject of artists.

Now something moved in the street. Justice of the Peace Tate, easily recognizable by his pompadour, was crawling through the dirt away from the murderers, blood strung from his chin.

McKissick saw a third killer by the hotel, a rifleman—probably the one who’d set the building afire—waving his arms so the men in the wagon wouldn’t shoot him. He hurried through the street, sticks of dynamite in his back pockets. When he reached the justice, he shouldered his rifle and drew and pointed a revolver at the back of the man’s head and fired. Dust puffed by his foot as a bullet missed him and the gunner turned the Maxim on its swivels and laid a hail of bullets across the windowfront of the apothecary’s. Meanwhile, Mister Tate’s hair had fallen but he kept crawling. The gunman shot once more then knelt and turned the man over and began going through his shirt.

There were more pockets of return fire now and the gunner swiveled the Maxim and dragged its anchor of bullets across the storefronts and ladies dove out of sight.

The rifleman in the street grabbed his chest and McKissick looked to the large house, second floor window, where Mrs. Tate, the justice’s wife—widow—was levering her rifle to shoot again. The man she’d killed crumpled and lay on his side. The gunner tried to turn toward her house, catty-corner the hotel, but bumped the shoulder of the man filling the coolant.

McKissick was high-stepping through the logjam of arms and legs, dodging a fiery falling roof timber and grabbing Smonk’s over & under which he’d squirreled away beneath the sideboard—he’d always admired the stout Winchester and knew it would be perfectly sighted. He hopped across the undertaker and clicked the rifle’s safety with his thumb and knelt at the window and sighted the gunner no more than a second before he shot him in the temple and then shot the other man before the first landed.

McKissick stared down at the rifle, heavy in his hands, the line of upswept gray smoke from its barrels a shade lighter than the smoke in the air. You done good, he told the over & under.

Since coming to, he’d been conscious of an ache in his left side, and now that he had a quiet moment he reached inside his shirt. When he drew out his fingers bloody pellets of the rice he’d eaten for dinner were stuck there. Smonk’s got-dern sword must of run right through him. He steadied himself against the pinewood wainscotting. Gritted his teeth.

Surrender? someone called.

Across the room through coils of smoke a revolver butt flagged with a white handkerchief raised itself above an overturned table. The judge’s eyebrows inched up and then his face. He waved.

You that goddamn bailiff, he called. Ain’t ye? I forget ye name. Mic-something.

How come ye ain’t dead? McKissick asked.

How come you ain’t?

I jest about am. Case ye ain’t noticed.

God damn, said the judge, fanning at smoke. Might we finish this discussion elsewhere?

A woman screamed from outside. McKissick ducked through the window and stood blinking on the splintered porch. The wind changed the smoke’s course and the street appeared before him. He lowered the rifle.

The dead were strewn and splashed along the porch, halves and quarters of horses and men splattered in puddles of tar in the street. A crater smoking where it looked like a bomb had gone off and arms and half-legs and other fragments here and there. The world seemed too bright. McKissick felt like somebody had boxed his ears. Women followed their own screams outside and whisking their skirts over the dirt sprang corpse to corpse calling out the names of the dead. At the corner of what used to be the hotel a woman held a severed hand by its pinky and screamed, Oliver! Over in the alley by the store McKissick saw the abandoned gun, still steaming, pointed at him. He tongued Smonk’s eye around the horseshoe of his jaw.

Inside the hotel, the judge crashed over the table and fell off his dais. God damn, he cried. My arm’s on fire!

The bailiff ignored him. He looked up the street and down. His memory was coming back. The mule…

The balloon!

Where’s my boy? he yelled, so hard his wound farted. He unstuck his hand from his side and raised it to the sky, rice on his fingers. Willie! he yelled.

Still making their noise, the widows in silhouette looked up from the murdered while behind them the hotel roof collapsed, fire and smoke bursting out the top windows and a moment later those on the ground floor, the air fogged with smoke and the yowls so baleful and plaintive it seemed Hell had breeched its levee and poured forth its river of dead.

Eugene Oregon Smonk, McKissick yelled, is done stold my got-dern boy!

Ike was waiting for Smonk at the three-way crossing, smoking his cob pipe and fanning his face with his hat. He’d shaved clean but for a bristly goatee, and under thick eyebrows white as a cottonmouth’s yawn his pupil bores were pinheads, watching. Old as he was and weary, he leaned against the railing of his farm wagon holding the mule thief’s hand high behind his head as the boy squirmed, kicked, spat and cursed. The mule was biting up sheaves of grass, the balloon still floating above. The mare shivered under Smonk so he dismounted and slapped her hard on the rump. Farewell yer highness, he said and watched her gone in a rattle of dust and grasshoppers.

Ike tossed him a jug which he caught onehanded. He thumbed off its thong and drank a long time with little care for what spilled into his whiskers.

The boy groaned.

Smonk gazed down. Almighty damn, he said and took another swig. Go on turn him loose, I.

Ike released the hand and the boy fell to the ground.

You run, Smonk said, I’ll shoot ye in the ass.

Dad gum that hurt. From beside the wagon wheel, the boy glared up at Ike.

What would ye name be? Smonk asked.

I ain’t got to tell you, the boy said. William R. McKissick Junior.

Well, Junior. I seen ye before. Ain’t I? I mean before I told ye to watch my mule which you will not be paid for, case ye was wondering.

Yessir. Our mule. You seen me fore that.

I thought I recognized ye daddy. A fucking bailiff, no less. Smonk’s knees clicked as he squatted then sat against the wheel spokes to catch his breath. He had both hips eaten up with the rheumatism, and every time he got down like this it felt like he might never rise.

Reckon ye old man’s bit by the respectable bug agin, he said. Well, I wish him luck but don’t allow none ’ll smile down on him, life he’s led.

The boy’s eyes egged when he saw Smonk’s speckled plank of a face up close, his bloody teeth and lips, the bright red string dripping into his beard, the hole an eyeball once held.

The boy pointed. Something got ye eye.

Smonk touched the hole. This? He put his fingertip in it.

The boy leaned in for a closer look. How deep can it go?

Smonk made a noise in his chest like rocks grumbling and spat under the wagon. Hear that, I? How deep do it go?

He did a trick where he pretended to put his whole trigger finger in but in truth he was just bending it back.

The boy laughed and clapped his hands.

Smonk lit a cigar. You ever seen a picture of a pirate?

Naw sir, what’s that?

A robber that uses a ship and robs other ships. Out in the high seas. They carry curved swords called cutlasses and kill whales for fun and fly a goddamn skull for a flag. Wear eyepatches too and about half the time they got these birds riding on they shoulder. I never did put the two together till it was too late. See, I’d always wanted to be a pirate, way back a hundred years ago when I was a youngun like you, reading dime novels, and in them days I reckon it might of been possible. But then I growed up as ye will if somebody don’t murder ye first and anyway one month of June not too long back I spent playing blackjack in a gutted-out church in Biloxi Mississippi. Remember, Ike? This coon-ass dealer used to wear him one of them pirate birds on his shoulder and I got to coveting that goddamn bird. It would say ante and bust, and it was the funniest thing. It never got old. Not one time. Ante. Bust! The whores loved it. If a man had owned that bird the whores would of fucked him for free.

The boy listened beatifically. The word whore had risen the devil’s tool in his britches.

Smonk didn’t notice or if he did didn’t say. It was one of them perfect nights, he talked on, smoking. I got on a hot streak and couldn’t of lost if I’d wanted to. Done won all they money and then won they pistols and a week of free whoring and a knife and a beefsteak ever day for the rest of my life and the steeple off they church. But it was near four in the morning fore finally I won the bird. And on threes! When I left that parrot was setting right cheer. He tapped his shoulder.

They was waiting for me in the alley, them coon-asses. I shot them I could and stobbed one or two and was about to kick the last one to death fore Ike pulled me off. And the whole time the bird never flew off my shoulder. When I finished it said Bust.

Overhead, Ike made a sound with his lips. A whistle of air.

I know, I know. Smonk winked and ashed his cigar. Brother Isaac here, he whispered to the boy, never did cater to that bird. Used to say don’t trust it. Say Let’s eat it ever time we got hongry. But I’d always concealed me a weakness for things of the air. I cherish a damn hoot owl. The ravens out west. Even yer common finches and spares. Bats, too. Always contained me a soft feeling towards a bat.

The boy wished he had a pet bat. It could fly and fetch things. Nothing big, just bat-size things. Ladies’ earrings. A pocketwatch. Flitter of wings and the tiny shiny objects of the world at your command.

Smonk waited till he was paying attention again.

So I come to enjoy this particular bird’s company and let him ride my shoulder ever minute of the day. I remember it could say fart and sang Clementine and it could do any birdcall it ever heard. Squirrels barking. A bobcat. Opera. It was jest a treasure. Then one night I was drunk on some vile potato splo a goddamn Irish foisted on me and without a speck of warning that cunning bird reaches over and takes out my goddamn eye with his beak, jest like that. Smonk snapped his fingers. Swallered it like a pill.

The boy slapped his own forehead. Dad gum! What ye do?

First thing I done I sobered up right quick, case he meant to go for the other one. Then I plucked him of his feathers and twisted off his little yaller legs and his beak and et him alive.

Dang, said the boy. How’d he taste? Had ye give him a name?

I had. Stan. Such was the name I give him. He jest looked like a Stan to me. And good. He tasted real good to be such a traitor. Somehow he was still tender.

Ike’s eyes shrank in their wrinkles, which was how you knew he was smiling, as he studied the horizon for pursuers, and Smonk rubbed his goiter thoughtfully. During all this excitement the mule had wandered up and was pushing its snout against his shoulder, the saddle off center from its run and sweat tracks down its gray sides. Burrs in its tail. Smonk ignored the mule for the whore it was, off with the first little shit to put ass to it, and studied the boy.

Didn’t I use to hold congress with ye momma?

Sir?

Fuck her, ye twit.

Yessir. I were six year old and a half that last time ye got some. I’m near bout twelve now and this much taller. He held his hand to his throat as a measure. But I remember it real good.

She like it when I nailed her?

Seemed to, yessir. The boy paused and peered into Smonk’s eye. Daddy says you a coldblooded killer. He says you ain’t like normal folks. Says you of the devil. You gone kill me, too, Mister Smonk?

Smonk glanced at Ike.

Well, he said. I reckon ye daddy would know plenty about the devil. But I done met my quota today, so naw, I ain’t gone kill ye. But get the hell out of here lest I change my mind.

The boy disappeared into the sugarcane.

Smonk let Ike haul him to his feet where he drank more whiskey, easing the pressure of his goiter with a series of crisp belches. He tossed the jug back and chewed his cigar.

You called it, I, he said. Trap, sure as sin. I’ll concede ye that one.

Ike puffed his pipe and his gaze swept the horizon.

Smonk followed where he looked and saw the road he’d just blistered with speed. The red dust still settling. The sugarcane had been baked by the unremitting sun and the stalks if you touched one would crumble in your hand. The sky beyond glaring white while every leaf of every tree or bush had been coated red, the far-reaching sugarcane itself crimson in the distance.

Ike said nothing. He looked behind him where a hawk dropped from the sky into the cane and rose back up, the fieldmouse in its grip still clutching sprigs of straw in its tiny fingers. The lessons the world taught were everywhere.

Mister Smonk?

The boy. Tapping his elbow.

Junior, Smonk said not looking down, if I want any more shit outta you, I’ll squeeze ye head.

I wondered might I get my balloon back’s all. You can keep that dern mule. It kicked me one time.

Smonk looked at the balloon over his shoulder, gray-blue and traced with veins and linked by a string to the mule’s ear. He looked at the boy’s dirty face, its skewed grin and missing front teeth and dimples and glittering blue eyes.

He reached in his bootleg with a grimace and withdrew a gleam of light that when turned in the air became a pearl-handled Mississippi Gambler stiletto with a groove in the blade for bloodletting.

Eugene, Ike said.

Smonk winked and flipped the knife in his palm and presented the handle. Here.

The boy snatched it away.

Now git.

But—

Smonk took his cigar out of his mouth and touched its fire to the balloon.

Dad gum, the boy said when it popped. How bout the string, then?

Running west into the dying sun, the boy knew better than to go back to Old Texas. All the men were dead there, including William R. McKissick Junior’s daddy, the bailiff. First William R. McKissick Junior’s momma taking off after Mister E. O. Smonk and now his daddy the bailiff shot dead by Mister E. O. Smonk.

The boy ran, holding the knife Mister E. O. Smonk had given him. He pretended it was a birthday present from his momma.

His daddy—before he was a bailiff and before Mister E. O. Smonk had shot him dead in Old Texas—had been a paid employee for Mister E. O. Smonk. In Oklahoma or someplace. Whenever Mister E. O. Smonk used to come to see Daddy once or twice a year, it meant him and Daddy would get drunk on Mister E. O. Smonk’s licker. Mister E. O. Smonk’s giant head would loll and he would slide gold coins over the table at Daddy bribing Daddy to let him go on have a piece of Momma. Sometimes it took a hundred dollars or more but Smonk seemed to think everything had its price. Momma would of been acting peculiar all night anyway, how she bent over pretending to look for dustballs under the table where the dustballs had been growing like a beloved crop the entirety of William R. McKissick Junior’s life. And her with no drawers on. William R. McKissick Junior used to hide under the table trying to see her nethers, taking out his devil’s tool and disobeying the Bible. Then, as coins rasped across the table, Daddy would say Ah hell, go ahead to Mister E. O. Smonk and Mister E. O. Smonk would grunt up off the chair unbuttoning his britches with coins falling out of his pockets thumping like hail on the floor and his suspenders falling down one then the other. Momma always chose that moment to pretend not to want none and make a fuss of being dragged in, getting her dress all tore, thigh-leg for all to see and her bottom too. Daddy would grab up the coins and stalk outside in a fury and start kicking the dog across the yard, or William R. McKissick Junior if he caught him under the table. From behind the sheet hung to divide the shack in half, the only thing louder than the bed creaking was Momma squealing.

And ever dern time, after Mister E. O. Smonk come out from behind the sheet, pulling on his suspenders and smelling his fingers, Momma would follow him, all slinky like. Wearing nothing but a shred of undergarment. In a good mood. Tired-looking. All smiley, a certain sweat about her.

Not noticing the menfolk at the table talking about murder, she’d scoop William R. McKissick Junior in her lap and hug and kiss him and smell behind his ear. Her cheeks flushed. Her bosom too. You could see most of em. Just not the nipple parts. William R. McKissick Junior would try to peek down her collar to see the nipple parts and he’d get him a devil’s tool in his britches and Momma would feel it on her leg and pop the imprint of her hand into his bottom and say, You stop that. You bad boy! You stop that right this second!

He ran fast, now, the devil stirring in his pants at the memory. He waved his new knife, accelerating to a gallop, more of the air than earth, whooping and wheeling his arms.

For he was going at last to the woman who took in orphans! There were no other children in Old Texas and the boy wanted somebody to play with. Rumor claimed there were no rules in the orphanage ner chores neither and that you ate whatever you wanted whenever you wanted and went to bed when you chose and you could even screw the girls if you had a mind to. William R. McKissick Junior very much wanted to screw a girl. It was all he thought about. Screwing girls. Now here was his chance for some real cooter. He ran faster than he ever had before saying Cooter, cooter, cooter, cooter, cooter. Then he ran even faster than that, his new knife slicing the air like a curse on its course. If only he had the balloon.