Smonk

5 THE MOB

EVENING AT LAST IN OLD TEXAS. THE PARCHED OAKS LINING THE street. The dry throats of whippoorwills. The ladies of the town in their mourning color numbly lugging pails of water uphill from the well to fight fires arisen from cinders that combust upon landing like flies raised from hell. One elderly woman collapses in the street and, spilling her water, begins to wail. A younger woman takes up the buckets and totters back down to the bottom where buzzards hop off and where, flat under a bristle of scrub brush across the tracks, a wild cat ragged in its coat of dust waits, dying of thirst, twitching with the ray bees.

The judge, meanwhile, was hiding in the cluttered back room of the town clerk’s office stuffing a valise with confidential records in case he had to blackmail his way out of this brouhaha. The clerk, and Justice of the Peace Elmer Tate, and Hobbs the undertaker and a passel of business-owners, all killed, were to be memorialized in a ceremony the following Monday, and the judge expected to be asked by their widows to say a few words about each man. He was in a slight panic because he didn’t know any of them. He was always drunk on his stops here which had winnowed from bimonthly to once or twice a year. He usually passed sentence without remembering from one case to the next what he’d said. Most of the time he couldn’t even find the tiny office they provided him.

He looked up to see the bailiff watching him from the door. A Winchester rifle in one hand.

Oh, said the judge. He shut the bag and buckled it.

I don’t give a good got-dern what yer stealing, the bailiff said. Such cares is for the living, which I no longer count myself among. Did ye want to see me before I left?

I did, yes. Are ye shot?

Naw. The bailiff raised his shirt and revealed the purple anus of his wound. Stobbed a tad but it ain’t the first time.

You might want to get that looked at, the judge said. Or the rest of us ’ll stop counting ye among the living too.

The doc’s dead. Shot thew his thoat, among other places. And I’ve had worse than this anyway. The pain ’ll remind me of Smonk’s treachery.

I could write ye a statement to similar effect. In the meantime, go on lower ye tunic. I get the picture. He opened a pocket of his valise and removed a flask. Cheers, he said and drank and dabbed his lips with a handkerchief and took a seat on one side of a small writing table and waited for the bailiff to roll a stool across and sit opposite him, laying his cap between them.

What’s that in ye jaw? the judge asked. Hard candy?

Naw.

My ulcer’s griping. A rock of candy ’ll help sometimes. But that’s neither here ner there because my ulcer ain’t gone git no better until we do something about this Smonk dilemma. Cause now that you done shot them gun-killers instead of arresting em for questions, it’s no way to link Smonk to em. Is it.

I reckon not.

You reckon right. Legally, anyhow. He cleared his throat. Now. I’m willing to take into account that you was protecting the town and won’t file no charges of obstructing justice ner murder on ye.

Preciate it.

However. I’d like ye to listen real careful to a letter I got. He un-crinkled a piece of paper so oft-clutched in his sweaty palms it was thin as tissue. I’ll skip the personal references and things I deem beyond ye and jest read the particulars. To save time. He cleared his throat again. To the attention of Judge et cetera et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Ah. Here. “It is of Urgency that You come preside in the E. O. Smonk Trial. No Town has ever suffered more than Ours bedeviled and beset upon as We have been by this Devil or Homunculus or What Ever He claims to be He lives several Miles outside Town in a large Manson He comes to Town Saturday Nights and wrecks Havoc on our Citizens beating them with his Fist at Night when good People ought to be in Bed getting ready for their Day of Labor. In a bold Gesture We Citizens of Old Texas have brought criminal Charges against Mr. Smonk. Mr. Smonk claims He will attend the Trial only if a Judge of the State Circuit is brought to mediate the Matters. No One Man or Group of Men will go to his Land and arrest Him. He is armed with Weapons from the United States Army,” et cetera, et cetera.

The part he didn’t read further said: “Since We are on your Circuit, We find it curious that you have not visited our Village in more than one Year. What might the Governor think.”

Signed, the judge finished, Justice of the Peace and Beat Supervisor and U.S. Postmaster M. Elmer Tate. Owner of the Tate Hotel.

He folded the letter away. After that alarming news, he said, I began to use my copious influence and asked around about our Mister Smonk, and listen what I found out. Jest listen. Apparently it’s been years old E.O.’s done slipped around the law, hither and yon all over the goddamn country. Years I said. Rumors mostly. Accounts as far west as Nevada and as far south as Mexico north up to Dakota. Man that always gets what he wants. One way another. Threats of violence and actual violence. Lawyers when he can use em cheap, gunmen if he can’t. Bribes, extortion, name it. Blackmail. No crime ner coercion small ner large enough, with no loyalty ner fealty to country ner king. But impossible to nab. What do ye think of that, bailiff?

What?

That he disappears at will and is gone for a year then turns up someplace else. That nobody knows where he come from ner what he is. He was likely born out west where the law’s jest now setting its teeth. Such an abomination as Smonk is would of never been allowed to carry on so far here in the Confederacy. He paused and took a long drink and continued. The part I don’t understand is that for some reason not given in this letter, he’s chose my quadrant of the goddamn county for a base of operation in these his waning years.

The bailiff shifted in his chair.

You okay there? Please leave the room if ye need to pass gas.

I’m hunkydory. Can ye get to the point?

The goddamn point is we could of strang him up—fount him guilty, is what I’m saying—but instead this town of fools tries to lynch him unbeknownst to me and of course he escapes. Old Texas! What in the hell was yall thinking anyway? Leaving all ye guns on a sideboard? Not a single goddamn dead-eye sniper hid anywheres?

The women had guns. They was hid.

The women.

We figured he’d of smelt something if we done anything different like. Out of the ordinary.

Well, he might of at that. What I hear he’s had his share of experiences walking into and out of courthouse doors and he’s got an extry sense about him. How come nobody informed me of the plot?

The bailiff looked out a window.

Well?

Don’t nobody trust ye.

There’s a fine hidy-do, ain’t it. God almighty damn. At least with Smonk a body knows where he stands.

The bailiff worked his jaw. Best take care not to sound like ye admire the bastard too much.

Who wouldn’t admire the gall of a fellow brings a machine gun and a peck of hired killers to his own goddamn trial? Who wouldn’t admire a fellow never leaves a trail of evidence? That’s got this far in the world and galled so many folks and killed twice that number and cheated the rest, all without being blowed to itty bitty pieces or hanged by his goddamn neck or succumbing to one of the countless infirmities he seems to collect like a goddamn hobby, hell yeah I admire the son-of-a-bitch.

The judge took his monocle off and polished it with his handkerchief. His eye looked small and weak without it, a puddle drying up. Well, he said, if you’ll permit me, this next part’s why I’m a goddamn circuit judge and you only a bailiff. See, what none of yall folks know out here in the wilderness between the rivers is that I’m a man of principle like none you’ve met. When I learned of this Smonk’s existence, at great personal expense I sought him out to discern and divine his motives. With only the good of my constituents in mind and of course the interest of science and theology as well.

The meeting had occurred a week before, the judge remembered, down south in Mobile, where he’d met Smonk for supper in a dive overlooking the bay. Smonk had brought a big ball-headed nigger and a chink whore in with him and several people got up and left the room.

I don’t usually eat with niggers, the judge had said, his black coat folded over his arm. Chinks neither.

Smonk bumped the table sliding in. We don’t usually eat with judges.

They’d had shrimp, which the judge despised. Bugs were what they looked like to him. He’d enjoyed the broiled potatoes, however, and speared them with his fork and added salt and chewed slowly as Smonk gobbled his shrimp—legs and shell and back veins in his beard—and rambled about the bridges he’d blown up in the War with the Spanish. How crucial the placement of the charge. How perfect the timing need be. How you always get your pay in advance. The ball-headed nigger never said a word, just ate quietly and with perfect manners which offended the judge. They were in a corner booth overlooking the water and shaded by a shutter propped open with a pool cue. Every door in the dive had a horseshoe nailed over it with the ends up.

His shoulders to the wall, Smonk smoked one cigar after another and ate a raw onion like an apple and had fits of coughing that shook the table. Once, he spilled a cup of salt then scooped a few grains and flicked them behind him. The judge had heard Smonk never left a building by any door except the one he’d entered. That he wouldn’t touch a toadfrog. Wouldn’t begin a trip on Sunday or bring anything black aboard a boat. Wouldn’t carry a hoe, ax or shovel into a house. That he never stepped over a fishing pole or under a ladder. Never swept beneath a bed or sang before breakfast or watched the full moon through green leaves. He made a point of getting his hair wet in the first May rain shower and believed that to take the rings off your finger would bring heart trouble and that a mouse-hole gnawed in your floor had to be patched by someone other than yourself. He believed it was bad luck to take cats into a new house. He believed that whatever you dreamed while sleeping beneath a new quilt would shortly come true, and that a dream of muddy water meant death.

His hands were abnormally large, though whether that was normal for his own peculiar brand of physiology or a symptom of one of his many ailments, the judge could only postulate. Smonk’s fingertops were hairy and his breath hot and acidic, hanging in the air like burnt skunk, occasioning the judge to chew with his handkerchief over his mouth. Smonk had positioned the whore under the table to rub his feet and once in a while he looked down and said something to her.

Oh, yah, she answered. Mista Smonk weal, weal hod. Weal, weal big. From under the table her hands appeared, a foot apart.

Trained her good, didn’t I? Smonk said grinning to the nigger but the nigger didn’t grin back or otherwise commit. Nor did he lower his eyes to the judge’s satisfaction when the judge stared at him, but this seemed a prudent time to set one’s sense of propriety aside for the greater good, so instead of having the impertinent fellow hanged, the judge had let it go for that day and turned to study Smonk’s features. In profile E.O.’s nose and mouth extended farther than your normal white Christian’s, an African feature which might locate some nigger in his past. And his eye, the one of use, was narrow, like a chink’s. Hell, wondered the judge, am I even dealing with a white man at all? Smonk had parched skin the color and texture of an ancient saddle and matted red hair tied at his neck, a cascade of beard graying down his chest but red around the lips like a consumptive’s. There’s your coughing. It was impossible to say how old he was. Might be fifty, might be eighty. Could of been handsome too in his young days, but now with nicks and sores and carbuncles and liver spots, et cetera, and that purple scar the size of a goddamn dirtdobber nest going up his neck behind his ear, well hell, it looked like any day could end his journey of years.

Smonk had sensed this inspection and for a moment locked his eye—as clairvoyant and intent as a wolf’s, gazing at snow with blood on it—with the judge’s.

The judge looked away.

You want ye shrimps, fellow? Smonk asked.

Naw. The judge swallowed. I don’t eat bugs.

Don’t eat bugs.

Weal, weal, weal hod.

Little more was said. After Smonk waited for the judge to pay, they’d walked down a narrow flight of stairs and through a back alley past mounds of rotting shellfish and along the tracks to the rail station where three men were loading a buckboard wagon. Smonk shooed them away and offered the judge the sum of five hundred dollars in a cigar box for a verdict against the town of Old Texas. The judge removed his monocle and took the box and placed it under his arm. Smonk put his cigar in his teeth and rolled back a green tarp in the wagon and what the judge beheld caused him to drop the box.

Is that a goddamn Gatling gun?

Hell naw, Smonk said. I got dirt on a general up in Washington. This here is Mister Hiram Maxim’s machine gun, the newest model. Makes a army Gat look like a goddamn flintlock.

Now, one week and one massacre later, the judge sat across from the bailiff and stuffed his handkerchief in the breast pocket of his coat and wished he had a rock of hard candy. From outside he heard a lady wailing.

Mic—Bailiff, he said, taking another swig, don’t trouble to thank me for my legal or scientific pursuits regarding Smonk. He rose and shut the window. On the sill outside was a parched white splat of birdshit. A monarch butterfly flittered down and landed there, then fluttered on. Thought the shit was a goddamn flower. The judge smiled. It’s been my pleasure and duty, he said, turning, to serve my fellow citizens, even unto the risk of my own life yea soul.

I ain’t a bailiff no more. Didn’t I say that?

The judge began to search his pockets ironically. Did ye file a letter of resignation in triplicate? If not yer still in the town’s employ and I can’t in good conscience accept a resignation now. In this current crisis. In other words, you the law.

What was they? asked the bailiff.

What was what.

Smonk’s motives. Which ye set out to discern and divine.

Ah. The judge looked up and to the left and composed his thoughts. Wretched, he said. There’s his motives, crystallized into one apt term. But what I’m trying to get at here is that with the justice of the peace et cetera et cetera murdered, the time’s done arrived to circumvent the natural course of law.

You ain’t got to go far to convince me, said the bailiff. Smonk kidnapped my youngun during his escape, if ye ain’t heard. Or killed him one. If you’d of asked me first off, I’d of told ye Smonk’s days is numbered fewer than the fingers on my hand and I’d of been gone.

Excellent. But ye gone need help. Man be a fool to take on E. O. Smonk without a goddamn army, jest about. I’m gone wire the governor post haste, but in the meantime is it anybody else left? Yall got to go after him now, this instant. Fore he disappears.

Holding the table for support, the bailiff stood to his feet. You dreaming if ye think he’s gone disappear this time. If ye think this is done. You ain’t the only one studied him, Yer Honor. I had my dark associations with ole Smonk too, matters not to speak of now. But in his mind, ye see, we attacked him. Now if we don’t finish the job he’s gone come back tomorrow or the next day with something bigger than that machine gun and burn Old Texas to the ground, or worse. This ain’t over, is what I’m saying. It’s jest begun.

God damn, said the judge. He sat looking perplexed. How in the hell do ye account for him?

I don’t. They say when he come out his momma’s wound he caught his foot on something in her guts and snatched it loose. Say he weighed more than fourteen pounds. Say his eyes was open when the nigger midwife peeled back the caul and he sucked and gnawed on his momma’s tit even after she’d bled to death and started to cool and he never would of stopped eating if the midwife hadn’t prized her dern thumb in to break the seal. You know what else?

What?

They say he was born with teeth. Say the midwife died from the ray bees.

God damn, said the judge.

The bailiff put on his cap. It’s some things in the world ye jest got to take for what they is. On they own terms. He took up his rifle. It’s one other fellow wasn’t numbered among the dead, I heard. Blacksmith down the way. I reckon me and him’s the mob.

Well. If it’s anything yall need, charge the town for it.

I might need a few more guns.

Fine.

And a hoss.

Whatever. The important thing is to catch him and kill him and mail me his goddamn glass eye, which I claim for a souvenir.

The bailiff moved his jaw. I best git on.

Do that. The judge raised his flask in a farewell toast. He had no intention of wiring the governor or anybody else. This backward secluded town had designed its own doom and could burn forgotten to the ground as far as he cared. And as for the bailiff, closing the door behind him, well, the judge expected never to see the poor idiot alive again.

Cheers, he told the room.

Sucking Smonk’s eye, McKissick limped out into the heat. For a moment he leaned against a column until a spell of nausea passed, then he walked faster, hand clamped to his wound. He went to the doctor’s and the doctor’s widow gave him some bandages and lamp oil and he made a poultice. Then he limped along the road to the opposite end of town to the blacksmith shed where he found Gates, a filthy man in his sixties, hammering coffin handles on an anvil. Four covered bodies laid out on various stacks of wood. He’d been staring into his fire and had difficulty seeing who it was.

Who’s that? Will the bailiff?

I was once, said he. Who the hell are you? A blacksmith, or—he indicated the bodies—the damn undertaker?

Blacksmith. By God. My talent’s about the only thing he ain’t took from me. But since old Hobbs was shot, we all jest doing our own setting by. He nodded at the bailiff’s side. Catch one?

Naw. Jobbed me with his sword.

The smith drank from a tin cup and then resumed his hammering. Don’t touch them handles yonder. They still hot.

I’m going after him, McKissick said between hammerfalls. He took my boy. The judge is conscripted me.

Gates used a pair of tongs to turn the coffin handle which glowed orange and went back to whacking it on his anvil. Luck to ye.

McKissick limped to the corner of the shed and pulled back the sheet from a corpse and winced at the face stained in blood, much of the head mown away. Who’s these fellows?

The hammering stopped. That one was Lurleen.

Dern, the bailiff said. Sorry. He cocked his head for a different angle.

Them others is my stepdaughters. Itina there and Clena and that one cut in half yonder’s Revina. I still ain’t found her legs though them toes on the salt lick there’s probably hers. They long enough.

Dern. McKissick studied Gates’s dead wife. How come she’s wearing men’s duds?

All of em is. So they could go see inside the courtroom when Smonk got ambushed. They hadn’t ever saw such a show. We put they hair up under they hats and wrapped cloth around they knockers to flatten em. They was a family of big-bosomed girls, if ye remember.

McKissick did. The stepdaughters who’d lay with any man could muster a hard-on. Their mother who wasn’t a whole hell of a lot older than her oldest daughter but a lot prettier. It was common knowledge around town that she’d had congress with Smonk.

Look close, the smith said, sipping from his cup. You can still see where we drawed mustaches on her lip with ash. We was laughing so hard. Them younguns started cutting up. Scratching they make-believe balls and pretending to hold giant peckers and take a piss. Itina went over to Revina and humped on her. We was all drunk.

My condolences. On the whole brood.

Thank ye. Mine on ye boy.

Hold off on condoling him, if ye don’t mind.

Sorry. Didn’t go to jinx ye.

McKissick picked up a coffin handle from where it lay cooling on a block and threw it down.

Hot, ain’t it, Gates said. I told ye.

Naw. It jest don’t take me long to look at a coffin handle. He blew on his palm. How much longer ye reckon ye gone be here laying em out?

Why?

I come see might ye go with me.

After Smonk? The blacksmith studied his black hands. Their black nails. It wouldn’t be right, he said. I can’t jest up and leave the girls.

What’s worse, leaving em to set a spell here or letting go the scoundrel that killed em? Seems like you got a lot of reason to want Smonk dead. If it’s true what they say about him and—not to speak ill of the dead—ye wife here. Seems you was spared. Like me. I ain’t never thought much of God, but if this here ain’t God saying get yer selves out on a mob I don’t know what is.

The blacksmith didn’t answer. Using his tongs, he raised a glowing bar from the fire and began to beat it.

Well? said McKissick.

Naw, said the blacksmith. I can’t. I ain’t shot a gun in I don’t know when. Don’t even own one. I’m a humble worker. If ye had twenty, thirty fellows, sure, I might go. But jest two of us? No thank ye.

They got a word for not going. It’s called being a chickenshit.

That’s five words.

Don’t be counting my words, Gates. Judge says we can supply up, charged to the town. New firearms and such. Mounts.

Preciate it, naw. These handles won’t forge they selves.

Suit ye self then, chickenshit. I’m taking off terectly, if ye grow some balls.

He raised his hand farewell, shape of a coffin handle burned into the skin, and limped out past the covered bodies. In the town proper he sidestepped a dead horse and turned the corner and limped past the wagon with the machine gun, two young women guarding it.

They were making eyes at him.

In the store the owner’s widow had laid her husband’s body on the shelf where the tins of potted meat were usually displayed. She’d dressed him in his church suit and boots.

I can’t do business today, she told McKissick from behind her black veil. We closed for mourning.

Well, this re-supplying is on the judge, he said. He’s sending me out after Smonk. I’m sure he’d be happy to pay double. The judge, I mean. Or triple.

What is it ye need?

He bought her entire supply of firearms: four pistols, three rifles and two shotguns. She tried to sell him a used twenty gauge single but he glanced at it and said, Junk.

Then he bought all her ammunition. After that he carried his packages to the livery where he bought a tall paint (on the judge) and had the liveryman’s widow remove its shoes for a quieter ride. He noticed that the livery also sold fireworks, and he charged a box of Roman candles and several bundles of bottle rockets and firecrackers, too. His boy Willie if he were still alive would love such noise and fire. And if not, the bailiff would shoot them off in his son’s memory.

Then he was running back through the street, to the store, tromping up the steps, pounding on the glass.

Balloons, he told the lady, ye got any more sheep-guts?

Meanwhile, Gates the blacksmith had slipped off his apron and leather gloves and donned his hat and was walking toward the store when four women in black dresses and veils surrounded him with rifles. He raised his hands in surrender and they shoved him along at gunpoint to Mrs. Tate, widow of the justice of the peace and owner of most of the land around Old Texas and owner of the bank and the apothecary’s. And the hotel, recently destroyed.

They found her in her dark house at the edge of town, in her parlor with the drapes drawn. She sat beside her dead husband, very upright in an upholstered chair, fanning herself primly with one hand and with the other holding his fingers. He lay on a sideboard, dressed in a brown suit. Using pins, she’d arranged his hair despite his deflated head and placed a towel under his neck for the drainage and spread a plaid cloth over where his face had been. A tiny woman with tiny hands, Mrs. Tate flipped down her veil when they entered.

The widows shoved Gates forward and he snatched off his cap and tried to smooth his wiry hair.

Are you drunk? she asked. Such your habit.

Nome. This all is sobered me up.

Mrs. Tate snapped closed her fan and rose to inspect Gates, circling him, her head level with his biceps, poking at his kidneys with the fan.

Why weren’t you at the trial? she asked from behind him. Account for being alive. When so many better men have passed.

He stammered how he’d voted to lynch Smonk, how he’d planned to attend the trial and celebration after, but the gun-killers had robbed him and knocked him in the head. Did she want to feel the whop? He knelt as she pressed the needles of her fingers on the soft lump at the base of his skull, her touch lingering to a caress as he stammered the tragedy of his own family, dead and tarped, one and all, back yonder in his shop.

What he didn’t mention was that two of the three killers had visited his shed earlier that day, before the trial. Before the massacre. How the smith had not realized that these two strangers with a packhorse full of guns on the day Smonk was going on trial meant something was up was beyond him. He ought to of reported it. It wasn’t like there was a pair of strangers through here every day. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last new face he’d seen—other than Smonk’s. The killers had asked about a whore and he’d pointed them to his house, but instead of paying him the three dollars, they’d knocked him in the head with a rifle butt and took the coins from his pocket and left him for dead and he’d lain half-conscious on the floor in his own head blood for over an hour. It was just like Lurleen and her girls not to come get him after laying with the killers, traipsing off to the trial in their men’s duds. Lurleen would of done anything to see Smonk again, Gates knew—she still was in love with the one-eye. The blacksmith had just awakened on the floor and touched the throbbing lump at the top of his neck when he’d heard the machine gun going off.

I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. Tate said. Though if those women had known their places they’d be alive yet. You need the church, Portis, you always have. Now more than ever.

Yessum.

Our Scripture is very clear on a woman’s place. And the place of children.

Yessum.

A man’s too, Portis.

Yessum.

She reclaimed her seat in front of him. I believe your story. She plucked a wet cloth from a washbowl and wiped her fingertips of his filth and waved the other widows out of the room and resumed fanning herself.

But when the time comes to pay the fiddler, she continued, we’ve all got to chip in. Ante up, as a sinner like he might say. So I must ask you, Portis, to delay your mourning and commit us two jobs. First, find that judge before he tries to flee. He’s been unaccounted for since we put out the fire. And the more I’ve been considering it, the more I see he had to have been mixed up with Smonk. Else he’d be massacred too. Or at the very least knocked in the head like you or punctured like our new bailiff.

Yessum.

Second thing, she said, is that you must go with Bailiff McKissick. Make sure he kills Smonk. Help him. Come back and swear he’s dead.

Yessum.

And there’s only one way to prove that.

Yessum.

Do you know what that is, Portis?

Nome.

His eye. Bring me his eye.

Yessum. I will.

Good. Mrs. Tate gazed at her husband. She swatted a fly with her fan. She’d killed several already and formed a small pile at the justice’s shoulder and Gates watched as she used her fan to herd the fresh smudge over with the others. Then she resumed fanning. Is it true that Smonk took McKissick’s child? That boy William?

I heard it was.

Do I need to stress how your standing in our village will improve if you bring that little one back safely?

Nome.

You could be an important man in our town, Portis. Now that you’re a widower. With so little competition.

Yessum.

I think you should wash, she said. So we can see what you look like, those of us in need of a man, you now in need of a wife.

Yessum.

In search of the judge, Gates ran building to building, zigzagging through alleys, and had not been looking a quarter-hour when he spotted a pair of legs jutting from the rear window of town hall. Gates recognized the judge’s boots and seized him by the knees and wrestled him hard down into the dirt, papers from his bulging valise spilling into the sugarcane.

God damn, said the judge from the ground. He jabbed out his hand. Help me up and escort me to the gallows where I’ll see ye hanged.

They sent for ye, Gates said, pulling him into a headlock.

God damn, the judge’s muffled voice said. Let me go!

The blacksmith dragged the smaller man over the street as he flailed his arms and made a commotion of dust, still clinging to the valise. At the store across from the burnt-down hotel several women had congregated at the wagon in the alley as if the mounted gun had been scheduled to deliver a sermon or a serenade. When they saw the judge, they seized him from the smith and relieved him of his valise and raised him above their heads like a hero and he seemed to levitate down the street above them, his face the pallor of chalk.

Gates returned to his shack and sat alone at the table for the first time in ages—it was quiet without his wife’s fussing and the stepdaughters bickering at one another about whose turn it was to wash the clothes or who got to go and try to seduce McKissick. He left the table and rumbled in his dead wife’s trunk and found a shard of pierglass, a fingernail of soap, a razor, a nub of brush and a cracked washbasin which he filled with water. He studied the reflection of his face and began to scrub and shave. Twenty minutes later a ruddy white man slightly cross-eyed and with one long eyebrow looked at him from the glass, the water in the basin black as ink and full of gray whiskers.

Not half bad, he said, for a fellow of sixty-some year.

There were no weapons in his shop, but wearing his church shirt under his overalls, he crossed the dirt hefting his iron tongs and assessed them workable. He moved Clena’s legs and picked up a large pipe wrench and tested its screw. Lastly he put a fistful of nails in the bib pockets of his overalls.

I’ll be back, he said to the room. I hope.

He put on his hat and took it off when he entered the store.

We closed, said the owner’s widow. Unless it’s billed to the judge.

Then tally em up.

With her following, Gates bought a new Stetson hat, a scarf, a denim shirt with silver star snaps, three pairs of corduroy pants, long johns, two pairs of socks, a telescope and a bugle and several coiled ropes and a horsehair whip and the most costly snakebite kit on the shelf and two machetes and a compass and a Bowie knife. He bought a sleeping bag and saddle and bridle and blanket and knapsack and five pounds of salt, a bag of jerked beef, sugar, coffee, flour, cans of sardines and oysters, crackers, apples, hard candy, cigars and lard.

He bought a root beer soda and, sucking on his straw, requested a matching pair of Colt revolvers with hair-triggers if she had them and a twelve gauge shotgun with a pump action, and several boxes of shells, sixes or lower. No slugs, please.

We out of guns, she said. Bullets too. McKissick bought em all.

Ever one?

Well. I kept Abner’s birdshooter here. She drew the twenty gauge single from behind her counter.

How much?

What ’ll the judge offer?

One hundred dollars.

Sold to the judge.

In the livery stable Gates bought a silver gelding fourteen hands high without even bartering or checking its legs or eyes and a pack mule which he instructed the liveryman’s widow to lead to the store and load with his parcels, charged, including any special fees or taxes, to the judge.

You want these animals fed? the woman sobbed. She wore a sling around her arm and had a number of broken ribs. She also had two black eyes, a smashed nose and busted lips. Her dress was still torn and soiled with a hoofprint on her back. Either she was leaving it on as protest or it was her only one.

On the judge, Gates said. Was it you tried to stop Mister Smonk?

It was.

Look where it got ye.

Least I ain’t the fools going after him now.

Gates had ridden less than a mile when the horse, which was blind, stepped in a hole and projected him in his new outfit into the dust. When he rose he saw the animal had broken its leg. He raised the twenty gauge to his shoulder but it clicked. He checked was it loaded, it was, and tried again. Click.

He was using his pipe wrench to finish the horse, which was taking quite a while, when a gun fired.

Gates leapt over the animal as it convulsed one last time. He lay panting on the turf, his hands and shirt sleeves bloodied.

It was McKissick, his revolver smoking. He rode up behind Gates and reined in his mount and looked down. Who the hell are you out in these suspicious times?

The other half ye mob. Portis. Who’d ye think?

Who?

Portis Gates. The blacksmith?

Oh. McKissick put the pistol away and fanned his face with his hat. I ain’t never seen ye cleaned up’s all. Didn’t know you was so old. What the hell was you doing to that poor horse?

Putting it out of its misery. It got its leg broke and my shooter’s gone south.

Here. McKissick tossed him a thirty-thirty.

Where we going?

The bailiff nodded east. Smonk’s house first. Few more miles yonder-ways. He extended down a hand. We can ride double to save time.

And double they rode, east through fields of ruined cane, the blacksmith remarking how happy he was he hadn’t put his whole lot in sugar, considering the spate of weather they’d had. Wasn’t it something? How many weeks? Could McKissick remember the last drop of rain? Did McKissick think they could stop for some licker?

McKissick did not.

An odor had caught the wind and blew in their faces. What the hell is that? the blacksmith wanted to know and soon had his answer as they cupped their hands over their noses and McKissick tried to calm the horse, gazing down at a charred mess of burnt animal flesh beside the road, some dark satanic work of art, faces blended to other faces and eyes like strings of wax. Gates pointed out a few dog parts, a wildcat’s padded foot, a coon’s tailbone and a fox’s skull. His partner spurred the antsy horse along. The blacksmith said he reckoned the ray bees plague that had haunted Old Texas these last years was spreading all over.

McKissick said nothing.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Tate pronounced the judge guilty despite his citing precedents and quoting the law in English and Latin and calling upon various prophets and heroes of the Old Testament as well as Homer, Sophocles, George Washington, Nathan Bedford Forrest and Buffalo Bill Cody who was a close personal friend. He reminded Mrs. Tate that she was a female, not a judge, as she bade the widows bind his hands. They scissored off his outer clothes and took his shoes and shoved him in undergarments wrung with sweat off the porch and past the gunwagon down the narrow alley to where his knees gave way as he beheld the town’s rickety gallows.

Ye can’t hang me! he cried. Ye can’t!

You’re right, said Mrs. Tate behind him.

At her command four widows seized his ankles and dragged him through the dust and upended his legs and two widows above from the gallows floor lowered a noose and hauled him into the air with a pulley through the trapdoor until he was hanging upside down. A dozen or so ladies began to pelt him with rocks and hit him with sticks of firewood like a piñata while two others over at the store backed a team of oxen toward the machine gun.

The judge swore and threatened and cajoled and shat hot mud down his back and stammered and tried to bribe them. His sour undershirt fell over his face as rocks bounced off him. At the creak of the gunwagon he cried, What’s that noise I hear? Is it the sound of my own demise? Two ladies unhitched the oxen and led them to safety while several others mounted the buckboard and puzzled over the operation of the giant gun, handing its steam hose one to another with no idea of its function. Mrs. Tate was the one who discerned that the lock fit in the side slot. She stood on a peach box and used both hands to latch back the bolt and two fingers to squeeze the trigger which was easier than she’d thought.

The instant thunder brought screams from the ladies but removed the judge’s right arm at the elbow and splintered one of the gallows-posts. The judge began to shriek and wriggle as the dirt stained beneath him and the widows nodded to one another and drew broom straws to establish a fair order and took turns at the trigger disintegrating the judge as a haze of steam rose from the water jacket and they fanned it with their hands and the gun hammered like a locomotive boring through the last tunnel to hell. The widows fired and fired and fired and fired until the final cartridge hull clattered to a stop on the wagon floor and what was left of the judge resembled a steaming mass of afterbirth, blue and dripping. The silence of the world shocked them all.