The Beetle Leg

on impulse, throwing off his coat, Cap Leech, in the days when he could shave a cow’s heart thin as glass and determine with one look beneath the sheets the life span of the stricken, dared to extract the secret of a dead woman; on a wintry morning, having arrived according to law too late, he attended the birth of Harry Bohn. The mother, dead but a moment; gave up the still live child in an operation which, hurried and unexpected, was more abortive than life saving and, when the doctor drew back, lapsed into her first faintly rigorous position. The son, fished none too soon from the dark hollow, swayed coldly to and fro between his fingers. Leech left his scalpel stuck midway down the unbleeding thigh, buried the wailing forceps in his shiny bag, stepped outdoors with the infant and disappeared, thereafter, through all his career, barred from the most fruitful of emergencies.

But attendance at the surrounded bedside was not his special pleasure, he was not keen to treat night after night the umbilical cord like a burnt cork. He did not care for the sight of a swelling that decreased and felt no duty to bring relief to a woman lying in a shaft of sunlight. Her only discoloration was for a purpose, and Cap Leech believed in the non-usefulness of burst organs; no good could come of it.

In the days following his clandestine operation upon the corpse, days of smooth cheeks and high collar, he teetered between the whiteness of a hall and the spotted robe tied behind the sufferer’s back. His training had begun with a set of wired bones in a dry box — he had clicked the teeth — and ended with poppy leaves smoldering in a pharmaceutical brass dish. Unguentine on the tip of his finger, reference to the tight page of a textbook, a limb swaddled in lay wrappings of bandage, the count of clear blood cells like constellations; with spectacles and shaved temples he took to searching coal bins for the wounded.

Cap Leech was no more a midwife. A family of one son and one unborn had been abandoned for earaches and faeces smuggled in milk bottles when he set out with a few sticks and powders for thirty years practice among those without chance of recovery, doomed, he felt, to submit. With him went the child whose features he had touched off by a slight grazing of the tongs.

He wandered the fields and lifted, dropped arms. At times, appearing starved and old, he answered questions and advised upon the description of a sore or at sight of a smoking specimen. He cauterized, poked, and painted those abrasions and distempers which, when healed, were forgotten or which, at their worst and sure to enlarge, brought a final shrinking to nameless lips.

The box grew brown with age. Once, in the empty frenzy of a cold night, he flung the bones across a whitened plain. But, always in time, he discovered the marble counter, the revolving fan, and jugs of pills. He crawled jerkily across the gumwood floor, stethoscope pressed upon the shell of a beetle sweeping hurriedly its wire legs. He mixed a foamy soda draught in paper cups, dust in water.

An old obstetrical wizard who now brought forth no young, losing year after year the small lock-jawed instruments of his kit, chalking black prescriptions on the leaves of a calendar, he was reduced to making the little circuits of malignant junctions, in conversation only now and then with a crafty druggist. His skills became an obsessive pastime and he looked even at the hobbling animal with a heavy eye. Warts appeared on the medicine man’s hands.

“He’s in there.”

“We’ll run him out.”

“With the Sheriff. The two of them.”

The wagon was burning brightly. Red light danced on the wheel tops, curled from beneath it and flitted up and down the steps which appeared to be driven into the serrated earth. The onlookers, Wade at the head of them, watched, spoke in gentler tones before the untied horse and leprous, flaking chimney.

“He’s got a girl with him,” one accused from behind. They stirred uncomfortably, huddled at the caving rear of the jail.

“If he has, he’ll make known of it. But none’s been brought this way as yet.”

Wade shook his head, in a whisper promised, “Better than that. He’s a man with knives. Wait and see.”

They could hear the muffled windy sound of a choked voice, the righteous tune of one who continued to talk even when closeted with the Missouri madman. “Old Sheriff ain’t going to be stabbed,” grinned Wade from side to side. More soft now came the Sheriff’s muddled sermon through drifting leaves, as something, a dream, slowly stopped his mouth.

“You, Wade, you been in there?”

“Ain’t anybody going to put Wade in that wagon, are they, Wade? Maybe he couldn’t take care of himself like the Sheriff.”

The horse sniffed the milling of the men. The head waved, hard of sight, feeling in the darkness for the hand with a rope. He was roman nosed, carried at the tip of his skull a broad sloping pad of fuzz and moleskin that had been cuffed when he refused to ford a river or rise in the morning to the traces. He was one that would stand when gimp-legged farmers came out to ask for help. The slack pockets in the nose closed in winter; in summer he snorted, the long ears lay flat. The tail switched, swept between the shaggy legs, rolled briskly into the black pear rump of an animal a fraction blooded with the mule. He turned his head away. From the desert other signs — a missing sheep, a carcass — now awakened the linings of his nerves. One foot moved, returned.

“When’s the show come on? When’s this fellow going to bring out that girl?”

“Or a two head calf.”

“Or a baby in a mason jar.”

The door opened an inch, a crack of fire, and was sloughed shut again by a helping shoulder. It opened, swung to, was pushed like a shutter from the nest of flames, and Cap Leech, careful not to smash his hands, stepping backwards, lifted the drowsy Sheriff into sight. They stood on the narrow platform of the top step from which Cap Leech, who now held the Sheriff’s faintly reeling body with one thin straight arm, had squinted at an early and voiceless dawn, scratching his face. With the other hand he picked at the lawkeeper’s hidden shirt front and the tip of a long white sheet was tossed back into the fire.

The Sheriff continued to swing his head, mumbled through misfit jaws, “The Range and Prairie Almanac never lies, the Moon don’t stand still. You bide by what I tell you.” Leech propped the Sheriff, took quick small steps to make of himself a ramrod. “If you don’t listen,” said the Sheriff, “I’ll fall.” Odors of disinfecting floor wash and spirits of ammonia drifted from the red door.

“Boys,” Wade tried to free his arms, “they’re dancing!”

Leech had heard enough about the almighty moon, pituitary of the wheat field and cow in foal; down one step he went and, catching the Sheriff around his waist, set him on the ground. He was light, round with talking gas. Cap Leech pushed back the head and folded the numb fingers in the pinched cup of the lap. He turned and for a few moments walked a circle some way apart, hands in long pockets, pausing now and then to stare for twenty miles through the darkness where rose one discolored furrow, a rib of earth that wormed for half an inch above the rest, as if it had been plowed up and left to dry, a spot on the horizon, the dam. Out there not a living creature, no wrist to count or old flank needing salve — he had lain his touch on animals also, in a stockyard razed by fire, had peeled the white fat glue from under bellies or driven his knife through an open eye to the brain — and he returned to the doped figure of the Sheriff. He rocked back and forth on his heels.

The Sheriff looked up, tenderly felt his temples, tried to speak, and stomach doubling in noiseless spasms at the same time, swayed as if someone boxed the sides of his head. “Quackery,” he said, awakening, “quackery,” and searched for the bars of the jail. His mouth was full of aspirin and the taste of steel.

Cap Leech unpocketed one slender hand, drew out the squeaking tongs carried in his trousers like a small key, and pushed the Sheriff down again to the step. He aimed and held the fat man with the ball point of the instrument, gently tapped the softened breastbone. The Sheriff wriggled at the end of it, ogled upward with drugged eyes.

“Now,” said Cap Leech, “I’ll talk.”

“Wade there will clear my head.”

“What you been doing to the Sheriff?”

As the law officer tried his legs and wobbled in the dark fernless yard behind the jail and Wade bounced after him, Cap Leech climbed to the top of the splintered steps, sat quietly and watched them. His mouth cracked a line to see the Sheriff sternly sway, nearly topple, an aged guinea hen with shattered cerebellum and aimless walk.

“What did you do with his revolver?”

Leech, the goat who sat in the hunched position of a man, shrugged, stroked the two long forks of hair at the end of his chin. He picked the back of his hand blotched with the corrosive action of cheap chemicals. He watched the Sheriff feel himself with wet fingers while the moon-faced friend, calling in a hurt voice now and then, attempted to learn what he had tampered with. It was a warm night and Cap Leech had cut again as he wished into a foreign town, a soft head. Sight of the Sheriff still on his feet gave him as much pleasure as those whom long before he had left helpless on a bed of white.

Wade and the Sheriff rolled from the shadow on stiff, rubber tires, a topheavy tin pickup truck. They swung it silently in a half circle on the edge of the light from the nearby wagon, stepped back and admired it. The Sheriff, suddenly stooped to spit forth a long dark string, motioned Wade to attend the truck and tottering, amazed at the slime, felt a bird body hot from his intestines lodge in his throat.

A bunched comforter covered the front of the truck — the frail engine, the flapping fenders, the hole of the radiator — and dragged on the ground. Wade tore it off, a matador sweep of dirty cotton. He began to crank but the narrow engine, so worn and without gaskets, still made no sound, turned over with no resistance, loosely. It was a truck that carried both man and animal, rear floorboards chopped from the toes of pigs, a truck to be seen at night with a woman’s knees down to the running boards and in winter left frozen in a field.

Cap Leech’s horse poked his overhanging nose toward the truck, sucked his tail tighter and returned to gazing at the plains. Cap Leech whistled softly through his teeth to see if it would start.

There was a cow in the back of the truck. The sheer and luminous udder swayed lightly through the slatted planks and, as Wade cranked, the red calf gently bounced, tossing the velvet ball. It was a youthful cream head of cheese, a nodding pendant, and the teats protruded only faintly, the knobs of new horns. The Sheriff walked slowly to the side of the truck, reached through and stroked it. The little hoof stamped, the immature red color, pink and brown, quivered in his hand. A smell of new milk and oil, manure, and brake drum fluid filled the yard. Between the red wagon and the truck and backed against the last adobe wall of the jail lay the fresh row of motorcycles, already entwined with corn stalks, webs of dust. Flies and sac-tailed insects moved in columns across the broken spokes. An accumulated late night buzzing came from the heap of confiscated machines, a warm and smoldering pile of metallic fodder.

“Is she gassed up, Wade?”

With weak step, still sick, the Sheriff returned from the jail weapons chest and carried under his arm the hunting shotguns. Sighing, clutching the truck door, he stacked them, blue bored canes, behind the feather and sawdust seat. He climbed in and wiped a clear spot on the windshield.

“You better come with us in the truck here,” called the Sheriff.

“I’ll follow,” answered Cap Leech, “you can’t drive faster than the wagon.”

Wade brought the cannisters of shotgun shells, sank behind the wheel. And Cap Leech flew in his wagon, pointed the horse in chase, running neither in trot nor canter after the red back light of the truck which, without splashboard and no vehicle to lust, sped toward Mistletoe.

He kept no hold on the mad horse but gripped the edge of the springing seat, spoke to the deviled ears now and then, a rootless spectator to the burning of the twenty miles. The horse, having never flattened himself along this course before, was guided by the Sheriff’s lamp; Cap Leech, having stumbled upon the rotting stones and stories of his family grave, rode willing to take one look, no more. The deodorizer of the homestead watched for the first sign of blackened wood and a narrow door cut with an air hole of a quarter moon. Ahead he saw the young cow hold her bush up uselessly for love or rain.

As if they had been lying on their stomachs in the flat sand, four muffled men jumped from the side of the road, ran hobbling and with yells to wait toward the slowing truck, climbed on, pulled up the last, and crowded the cat backed calf against the planks. The men clung to the red neck.

“Ain’t room for us and her too,” Harry Bohn boomed into the wind, “I better come up front!”

“Stay where you are,” answered the Sheriff. Seven skirted Mistletoe, raced for the lake.

In the wagon Cap Leech trailed behind the suspicious travelers, hearing their wordless clutter in the darkness. He had the power to put them all to sleep, to look at their women if he wished, to mark their children. Tie strings streaming, eyelids fluttering in the wind, he pulled from his vest pocket a roll of powdered lifesavers, began to chew.

In the truck Luke tied the whipping hat cords under his chin. Camper cowed before the patched white head of the calf and the near naked Finn hung his stiff legs over the speeding track. Chicken grit was caked on the accelerator.

In the wagon a lone occupant rode the bow of fire and with a tarnished frozen thermometer pinned to his breast brought something of clear vision and bitter pills to the fields of broken axles. A tin can fell backward and landed at his horse’s front hoofs, sprigs of straw whirled out of the air ahead to stick crookedly in his ears. They threw a dirty glove in his path.

In the truck Harry Bohn caught Camper around the ribs. For the first time that night he allowed the fisherman to stare at his humming-bird lipless mouth. “You,” he shouted, “untie that rope!”

In the wagon Cap Leech watched its body float down upon him, larger and larger. Horizontal, feet out straight, Pegasus of a branded species, he expected to catch it flattening in his lap. The calf lay on her side in the air, about to crash, pink spots spun on the red hide and a gentle whistling loomed over the wagon. She disappeared. Then Leech looked down and there on her back in the road she sprawled with milk rolled jaws, albino eyes in wrinkled pads, and a clean crack splitting the amorphous skull that struck; nothing more ugly than the placid mask — its mouth roared wide enough to eat meat — of a shocked cow twisting upwards in the moonlight.

And in the truck, “Sheriff,” Bohn knelt at the windowless hole in the back of the cab, “I’ll owe you for your cow.”

“Don’t stop,” the Sheriff kept Wade’s hand from the brake, “we’ll catch her on the trip home. If those devils don’t come upon her first.”