Ghost Town: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  No sign of his horse now either, nothing but another spectral dust devil coming and going where he saw him last. Although in such utter solitude he cannot figure where such a thought might come from, he thinks his horse may have been stolen, or might have allowed itself to be. But then he spies the perverse creature again, back by the saloon, near the buckboard, nosing once more the empty trough. Must have circled back when he wasn’t looking. He calls to him and the horse looks up at him with a stricken expression, then turns away again. He walks back toward him, boots hurting him now, but the wind gusts briefly, curtaining the street with flying dust, and when it settles the horse is gone again. In its stead, in the sunbaked distance, four or five horsemen come riding in at a slow canter, dust popping in tiny explosions under their horses’ hoofs, giving them the impression of approaching on smutched clouds. They pull up at the saloon in dead silence, dismount into their own shadows, hitch their animals to the rail there, and, the tread of their boots on the wooden sidewalk unheard as if they trod on goose feathers, disappear through the swinging doors. Though he knows full well that no good can come of it, he follows them on in.

  In the saloon, men are clapping shoulders, shooting craps, drinking, laughing, brawling. Heard through the foggy racket: the soft slap of dealt cards, the poytt! thupp! of missed spittoons, the rickety-click of roulette and fortune wheels. Hit me, says a mustachioed fat man in a straw boater and raps his tabled cards with a balled-up fist. Beer is drawn. An ear is torn off. A bony bald man in a white shirt, yellow suspenders, and black string tie bangs out a melody on the grand piano, against which a buxom rouged-up lady with wild orange curls leans, singing a song about a good girl who went bad. She is dressed, like someone else he’s seen today, all in black, except for the crimson ruffles on her blouse, a ruby pin worn in her pierced cheek like a beauty mark, and a brass key, shiny as gold, dangling between her powdered breasts on a black ribbon. The fat man in the boater takes a punch and careens backwards toward the piano player, who keeps his left hand going while raising his right elbow to deliver a hammer blow that sends the fat man caroming headfirst into the wall and nearly through it. THIS IS A SQUARE HOUSE says a sign over his head. The other cardplayers pick the fat man’s pockets and divvy up his winnings.

  I’m gonna kill thet fuckin humpback, someone breathes in his ear.

  Who—?

  Yer throw, podnuh.

  There’s a shot, and somewhere a horse whinnies as though in sudden terror.

  Shitfire, parson! And I mean thet sincerely!

  Shet yer gob’n git yer money down, yu ole dildock!

  Awright, smack yu double, jughaid. So dole away!

  Yu gonna roll them damn bones, son, or eat em? he’s asked. A small circle of angry men glare up at him over their wild face hair, their pocked noses aglow under the kerosene lamp.

  All he wants is a beer, anything wet, but the leather cup his hand has closed around holds only a pair of ivory dice. Across the barroom, the singer is dolefully lamenting the unlucky gambler who bet and lost, one by one, all his body parts. He rattles the cup of dice. She’s hurtin tonight, he hears someone say behind him. Probly makes her peculiar hot, muses another. Yu reckon?

  Whoa boy, a squint-eyed stringy-haired oldtimer in a gambler’s knee-length black broadcloth coat cautions: Whut’s yer stake here? Having none other, he tosses his hat down, gives the cup another shake, throws a natural, and wins all their hats. There’s some grumbling. The oldtimer, scowling suspiciously, spins the dice on their corners while fingering an ebony-handled derringer tucked in his vest pocket.

  He hooks his thumb in his belt, within reach of his own pistol. Just in case. Any a them hats wuth a beer? he asks, and they all snort at that and throw them at him in disgust.

  A row is brewing meanwhile over behind the piano by the slowly spinning wheel of fortune. It’s the man with the ear ripped off. I’m tired a yu blowin off at the mouth so, he barks, blood cascading down the side of his head like a waterfall down a cliff face, and the baggy-eyed halfbreed he’s addressing sends a thick smear toward a spittoon and says: They’s a lotta truth in thet. Thet’s yer lookout, mister, says the man with the ear gone, and pulls a sawed-off pistol out of his pants and shoves it up the halfbreed’s broad brown nose. Before he can pull the trigger, though, the bald piano player, in the long perilous beat between chorus and verse (the lady is into a love song now about some legendary hero who was suddenly expired by an itinerant gunman and was “gone off to his reward, bless his big pointy boots”), rises up and head-butts him. The one-eared man’s head splits with a pop as a clay bowl might and his brains ooze out like spilled oatmeal when he hits the floor, by which time the next verse has commenced and the piano player’s back on his stool again. No one pays much attention to any of this.

  Come back, cowboy, and do us like yu done before, moans the chanteuse, but more to the smoke-smudged ceiling, stretched out on the broad piano as she is now with the men of the saloon lining up and taking their turns on her. Through the jostle and the saloon’s pearly light he can see she’s wearing black petticoats and, flagged to one bobbing ankle, black drawers.

  Seems like widow weeds is in fashion here, he remarks to the barkeep in a friendly manner, forcing a smile onto his parched lips.

  The barkeep grunts. Here, they always is. He’s a tall skinny man with stiff greasy hair reaching to his shoulders, making it look like an ugly insect is standing there, its belly resting on the top of his head. So whut kin I do yu fer, stranger?

  Whuskey. Double. Not what he wants at all. What he craves is a few gallons of water. But he figures some things you can get in here and some you probably can’t.

  The tall ugly barkeep glares down at him, both hands braced on the bar edge, jerks his head inquiringly, making his locks walk about. Ah. He offers him the black flat-crowned hat full of holes he’s just won off the oldtimer, best of the lot for all the damage to it, but the barkeep shakes it off. A truly formidable thirst has him by the throat and he’s ready to barter away anything he’s got, down to his weapons and his horse, assuming the horse is still in the neighborhood. Then he remembers the card from the claims office and he slaps it down on the bar.

  There’s a sudden hush. The barkeep backs away a step, hands fallen to his sides. The lady on the piano is sitting up, black skirts around her waist, and the men are stealthily pulling their breeches back on. The piano player sits stonily with his hands in his lap, staring at him, as do the faro, craps, and monte players, all hands poised. At the back, the tall fortune wheel creaks and ticks in its slow ceaseless rounds.

  Who is thet kid? he hears someone whisper, though no lips move.

  Some gunslinger most like.

  Y’reckon?

  Lookit thet injun scalp hangin from his belt!

  But he’s jest a brat. And he aint got but one pistol.

  Thet we kin see.

  Rifle, too. A blade…

  The buggy-haired barkeep, who seems to have shrunk half a foot, sets a double shotglass on the bar and, his hand trembling, smiling a nervous gold-toothed smile, pours it full to overflowing. Before he can pick it up, though, the glass is batted away. It’s the one-eared man with the oozing brains, back on his feet again. Whar’d yu git thet card, stranger? he asks, breaking the deathly silence, weaving unsteadily back and forth beneath the overhanging gas lamp. Whar’d yu git thet black one-eared jack? Everybody’s watching them. It wasn’t his intention to draw notice to himself, but it seems hard not to in here. Gimme it, kid. Gimme thet card.

  He shrugs. Hell, I dont give a keer. Here, yu kin have the damn thing.

  Goddammit! bellows the man, rage flushing his face, both sides of the split. Out comes a dirk, the blade agleam in the yellow lamplight. I said I want thet black jack!

  And I said yu kin have it.

  Yu gonna gimme thet fuckin card, boy, or I gotta kill yu fer it?

  Awright, he says, seeing how it is and bracing himself. The man lunges at him with the dirk, exposed brains wobbling li
ke gray custard: he deflects the thrust and it slices clean through his tattered vest from sleeve hole to bottom hem. He whips his own bowie knife out and, as the one-eared man plunges forward again, buries the blade deep in his belly. The man staggers back, staring down in amazement and confusion at the staghorn handle protruding from his stomach, which slowly sucks it up until it vanishes entirely. Even the pierced shirt seems to mend itself behind the handle as it sinks inside. The man looks up at him around the cleft in his skull, grins crookedly, opens his mouth as though to taunt him, and blood bubbles out. His eyes roll up and he topples over on his back. Blood continues to trickle from his mouth. Then his lips part and the knife handle slowly emerges like a stiff tongue. The men in the saloon gather round to watch it come squeezing out, bending close as though trying to decipher a message in the rivulets of blood coursing through the staghorn grooves. Offered up to him is how it seems, a kind of gift, or challenge, which he accepts, taking hold of it and midwifing it out from the man’s lips. Not easy. Like drawing out a knife buried deep in wood, as if the man were sucking on it or biting down. A fountain of blood follows upon the blade’s withdrawal, making those crowded around gasp and fall back. He wipes the blood off on the dead man’s flannel shirt, tucks it back in his belt, and turns again to the barkeep, who hands him a shiny brass key strung on a black velvet ribbon. He nods up the stairs. No thanks, he says, and hands the key back. Jest gimme a goddam drink. But the barkeep is gone, the bar as well, and the key he is poking forward is sliding into a door lock.

  Awaiting him on a brocade-laid table inside the room is a tall mug of cold beer and a plate of eggs and beans on fried cornbread. He has such an extravagant need, these things, consumed afoot, go down like air, but they ease somewhat, if not his wants, at least his apprehensions—where such feasts appear, more may follow—and he feels his saddle-hammered spine loosen like an unstrung fiddle bow. The room is filled with heavy carved furniture, not from this place, the high-headboarded bed heaped with quilts and fancy coverlets, satiny paper hiding the rough walls, lace curtains aflutter in the open windows like hovering butterflies. Butterflies! He rubs his bristly sunburnt jaw. Damn. Hasn’t reflected upon those peculiar creatures since he entered upon the desert. Which has been a bit like getting sick. For an interminable long time.

  Behind a hand-painted dressing screen is a wooden tub full of sudsy hot water, meant, must be, for him. As all else here, that bed in time, with its inviting headboard like a saloon’s false front. He unknots the braided scalp from his gunbelt, sets it, belt, gun, and knife on the table, against which his rifle already leans, then sits down on the plush seat of a high-backed chair to work his boots off, breathing through his mouth against the prodigious reek. In front of an oak-framed mirror there, he stands to peel away the rest, his shredded vest and old gray shirt, chaps and denims, and the foul blighted rags that were once a suit of underwear, seeing in the glass beneath the shadowing hat the scrawny ulcerated thing he is, scabbed and scarred, in general a most unwholesome sight, but one he shares with the pale dark-haired widow woman he has seen before, standing now behind him in the reflection and gazing with quiet awe and pity upon his stark condition.

  He turns to face her but there is no one there. The room is empty as before. As, somehow, he had surmised.

  He unties the red rag, sweat-blackened, from around his neck and, dressed only in his wide-brimmed hat, steps into the tub, his feet, so recently liberated, reveling in the emollient power of the steaming water, seasoned with bath salts whose aroma bespeaks a distant land, one where flowers grow, or grew. What brought those butterflies peculiarly to mind, may be. He stands there for a moment, letting his feet swell out, soaking up this newfound bliss, then squats to accustom his beat-up backside and privates to the heat, finally sinks in whole up to his chin, his eyelids dropping like iron shutters over his eyes, forcing their hard gaze inward toward the softer sensations that, like sudden family, embrace him all about.

  The fragrant water is not completely still but, stirred perhaps by his own entry, seems to eddy around him as if he were being bathed in a rippling brook fed by hot springs, one that cleanses itself even as it cleanses him. He feels buoyed up, stroked by the fingering currents, fondled soapily from head to foot as if he were in the hands of some water nymph or an Indian princess, one who touches him in all the tenderest places, turning pain to sweet delight, skilled as such creatures of nature are in the art of healing with water, or so he’s heard. He tries to open his eyes, can’t, so surrenders to these silky caresses and takes them for what they seem to be and quite likely are, all the killings he’s done and seen soon washed away by them, and just as soon forgotten, or nearly so. Rolling in the water to open all his crevices to its tender attentions, or hers (as he thinks of them), he feels the water well up into volumes like liquid thighs, rolling as he rolls, and with spongy patches in between and wet lips that kiss and tickle, stripping his mind and spirit pure as his body is, and as is hers, bare breasts soft as foam brushing him gently as the water streams about. No such things in this watery world as widow weeds, no weeds at all, for she, like he, like all beings in this happy valley with its genial clime, goes always naked, stark staring, as someone’s said, wearing nothing daylong but the shells and beads braided into her black hair. Here, where he is now, everything is in unison with love and nature, and all that is true, fitting, and natural in a passion is proper and legitimate. As she teaches him in her silent and voluptuous acquiescence.

  How did he come to such a place? Perhaps he lost his way, or was sent by the army, or was chased by lawmen, or went in purposeful search of some secret treasure or his own self-knowledge, or perhaps he was captured and dragged to this alien land, stripped, bound, spread-eagled on the desert floor to be tortured and killed, only to be rescued at the last moment by the great chief’s only daughter, straddling his condemned body with her innocent one, staying her father’s hand with her tender plea as she knelt over him, dressed merely in her tinkling shells and beads, a rare sight unseen by him just so before, and one that, in spite of the extremity of his circumstances, arouses in him a most profound agitation, the evidence of it rearing up before their astounded eyes like a hostile totem erected on the arid plain—which in turn arouses in the men of the tribe a contrary emotion and, in a rage shared by all of them, a young brave, one of her brothers, or a suitor, or both, staggers forward with a tomahawk to chop down the hateful thing. To save it from destruction, or simply to hide it from view, the beautiful pagan princess impales herself upon it, screaming with the sudden pain, her coppery back arching, blood dribbling in a hot stream down over his groin. Like a baptism, he thinks, a blessing, a sweet salvation, his pinned body gratefully discharging its own boiling fluids like a surging revelation into her moist interior. No choice now. He’s set free, yet unfree: one of them.

  Life with the tribe, which follows as a river follows its bed, is, though always harmonious in this idyllic wilderness, not always painless. To initiate him into their exemplary ways, his new brothers play face-kicking, fire-throwing, and dodge-the-arrow games with him, rub him with skunk oil and hang him upside down in the sun without water and food for a week, cage him with rattlers, pierce his scrotum with sharpened hawk quills, chop off one of his fingers, and send him out to wrestle buck naked with a seven-foot black bear. They display their own scars and mutilations to show he isn’t being picked on, it’s all just for fun, part of their guileless way of life. While educating him in the art of scalping, they provide him with a wild coyote to practice on, failing to inform him that it is usually judicious—a lesson he learns almost immediately while losing a second finger—to kill the scalp’s owner before trying to slip a knife in under its hairline, the consequences of his ignorance providing further entertainment for his stony-faced but attentive pagan brothers.

  Everything here gives delight or else fuck it, that’s the essence of their religion, as best he can understand it. The white baby, for example, adopted survivor of some massacre or othe
r, perhaps the same one in which he himself was captured—if—is a favorite tribal toy until its colicky crying disturbs the sleep of his Indian maiden’s chieftain father, whereupon he is called upon to swing the squalling thing by its feet against a tree and bash its little brains out, which is one of the easier tasks they ask him to perform. Compared, say, to the hard work of skinning buffaloes, then curing their heavy hides, stitching them into tipi covers, robes, and winding sheets for the dead, turning the bones into knives and arrowheads, hoes and dice, the fat into soaps and the tongues into hairbrushes, the paunches into water buckets, the sinew into bowstrings and tipi thread, and the scooped-out scrotums into hand rattles. All this, with typical patience and forbearance, the tribe teaches him how to do. Likewise how to slit throats, impersonate animal spirits, break mustangs bareass, wipe snot on dogs, woo his love on a magical flute with songs borrowed from the rutting bull elk, eat nits out of his own armpits.

  The young Indian lass meanwhile loves him openly, freely, with a love as pure and as wholesomely naive as this land of her birth is free of the evils of the civilized world from which he’s come, as evidenced by his telltale pallor and embarrassing ignorance of wigwam etiquette. She feeds him and bathes him and dresses the wounds inflicted upon him by his brothers and ornaments his naked body with horned caps and silver pendants on rawhide thongs and bear-claw necklaces and welcomes him generously into all her orifices. She cures his bellyache with skunk cabbage and wild mint, sucks out his earwax, tells his fortune. She looks into his hands and his eyes and the entrails of a dead badger and prophesies that, after many moons have passed, his old life will beckon him once more and he will abandon her and his newfound brothers and sisters and so cause her to die of a broken heart, if worse does not befall her. He does not believe this, and tells her so while beating his chest in the manner that he’s been taught, yet somehow, he knows that it is true.