Ghost Town: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  She turns back at the open door, framed by the velvety black night behind her. There is not much of affection in her gaze, but he is encouraged even by the lack of undue choler. Not ain’t, she replies, quietly but firmly. You have never thanked me.

  No? He is somewhat bewildered but full aware he owes her much, and he stands up and takes his hat off as the others have done. Sorry, mam. But you aint thanked me neither.

  She sighs and shakes her head. For what have I to thank you?

  Well. Yu know. Fer whut I jest done. Fer savin yer life.

  I did not steal that horse. You did what you had to do.

  No. He finds it difficult to meet her hard steady gaze, which he believes now to be the color of cast iron, so stares instead at the dark dimplelike beauty mark on her cheek. Thet warnt the reason I done it.

  That was not the reason that you did it.

  No, mam.

  So what was that reason, pray tell?

  I … I caint say it.

  Cannot say it.

  No, mam. Jest caint.

  She sighs, and though she glowers still, there is more of tenderness in that sigh than there has been in her before.

  Y’know whut? I think the sheriff’s got a soft spot fer the marm!

  Y’reckon?

  She pauses there by the door, watching him for a moment in all her straight-backed rectitude, and then that stern righteousness melts away and, haltingly, she comes back into the room, her black skirts whispering, and stands mildly before him in the lamplight, tipping her head to catch his wayward glance, as if beseeching him to look at her, and, with an awful weakness spreading through him, he does.

  Well but does the marm have a soft spot fer the sheriff?

  Haw! Ifn she does, I reckon I know whar yu kin find it!

  Shet yer trap now! I think he’s gonna kiss her!

  Whut? I caint believe it!

  Nor can he. His eyes are full of this new sight—her softened brow, the searching gaze, her moist parted lips—brand new, even unimaginable until this moment, and yet somehow so familiar he feels he’s seen this face turned to him thus yieldingly all his natural-born life, and he leans toward it, his eyes closing, as if finding at last what had long been lost.

  Thar he goes!

  Now we’ll hafta hang him shore!

  The warmth of her breath has just fallen damply upon his parched lips when there is a sudden violent explosion that shakes the whole jailhouse—instinctively he pushes her aside, spins round, and draws: it is the black mare, wild-eyed and swelled up to twice her size, who’s come crashing in on them, taking out door, frame, and a portion of the wall, shattering all the windows with the impact, and sending the men scrambling and tumbling now to get out of the way of her rampageous hoofs.

  Hey! Look out! It’s thet outlaw mare! they cry. She’s gone loco!

  The schoolmarm has fallen to the floor behind him in the open cell door and is clinging to his legs. He tries whistling to the mare to calm her but it seems only to enrage her all the more. Up she rises against the ceiling, frothing at the mouth and nostrils flared, and down she comes, crushing all in her path and sending glass and dust and woodchips flying.

  Look out!

  Halp! I caint see! I think I ketched a splinter in my eye!

  She’s mashed my laig!

  The white-jacketed bent-backed deputy grabs a lasso off a wall peg and with a grunt flings it over the crazed horse’s neck, but she rears up and with a single blow stoves his head in with her hoof, spraying them all with blood and brains and leaving nothing on the deputy’s busted neck but his toothless lower jaw, hanging there like a melon rind.

  Do sumthin, sheriff! Git aholt on thet devil hoss afore she’s killt us all!

  Shoot the goddam animule! Whuddayu waitin fer?

  He is face-to-face now with the foaming red-eyed beast, his back to the empty cell, roped to that place by the schoolmarm’s entwining arms. Both his pistols are pointed at the mare’s rolling eyeballs, but, for all that she has spoilt his singular moment with the marm, he cannot bring himself to pull the triggers, for he has never had a horse like this one and he does not want with rash haste to lose her. Particularly not now when he might most need her. She snorts and whinnies, shakes her black mane fearsomely, pounds the floor with her hoof, then seems to pump it toward his legs, behind which the schoolmarm is cowering still, peeking out between them. Then up she goes again, her forelegs churning, hind legs stepping forward, her neigh more like a terrifying shriek, and she comes crashing down (the schoolmarm screams), smashing, over and over, at the bars of the cell on either side of him.

  It’s the marm she’s after!

  Give her over, sheriff! Dont rile thet savage critter up no worse’n it is!

  Now hole up thar, damn yu! he yells at the maddened mare. Yu back off! Yu wanta stomp sumbody, yu pestiferous jughaided scrag, yu stomp me! The horse blows through her nostrils and bangs the floor, and arches her head back so far toward her tail all he can see is her black throat, and lets out a whinny more like a quivering howl. Then she drops her head down between her knees and peers at him beseechingly from under her forelock, scuffing at the floor planks with one hoof. Awright, thet’s better. Now git outa here, he says. She swings her head from side to side, her lips curled away from her teeth, her damp gaze now more aggrieved than defiant. Git! He lowers one of the pistols and fires a shot that nicks the dead toe of her hoof. She raises it from the floor, bends her head toward it, sets it down again, and, after a mournful pause, turns to plod slowly, nose down, from the room. Someone fires a shot, she staggers slightly, pauses, then continues on her deliberate way. The rest of the men, emboldened, grab up their weapons and start shooting wildly at her as she lumbers past, following her on out the hole in the wall where the door used to be, shouting curses and blasting away.

  He helps the schoolmarm to her feet, feeling tender toward her as before, all the more so as her high-collared bodice has come unbuttoned and there is a sweet powdery smell emerging from the glimpsed whiteness within that unhinges his articulations in a way the mare’s assault or any other could never do. Her own hand, however, is like a stiffened claw and is instantly withdrawn, the sentimental mood clearly no longer upon her. Why didn’t you shoot that wicked beast? she cries. In the street, he can hear the men doing just that, the explosive rattle of their barrage like a fireworks display, and for the second time in so short a while, a wetness mists his vision. She was trying to kill me!

  I dunno, he sighs. I figgered ifn I could calm her down we could mebbe ride her outa here.

  What? Leave this town? I could never do that, you fool! Anyway, she adds, glaring with seething fury at the dampness that has crept upon his cheeks, thet aint why.

  He says nothing and she slaps him. So hard she knocks his hat off and her own dark bun is tipped askew. Outside, it sounds like the whole town is being torn apart, and inside his breast it feels that way too, for he has beheld the strands of orange curls peeking out beneath the unsettled bun.

  And then the uproar suddenly subsides and the men come piling back into the jailhouse, heated up and blustery with the excitement of their kill, a turbid blur before his eyes of hats and hair and noses.

  Whoa, sheriff! Yu shoulda witnessed the way thet crazy mare tuck out yer gallows!

  Turned the whole bizness inta nuthin but a passel a toothpicks!

  Whoopee! Never seed the like!

  Obstructin justice, she wuz!

  And more holes in her by then than a cribbage board!

  She never even tried t’run. It wuz like she wuz plumb heart-sick’n jest hankerin t’cash in!

  But it warnt easy! Thought we’d never bring the ole nag down!

  Pumped everthin I had inta the colicky critter!

  Criminently! She wuz some goldurn hoss!

  Course, now we gotta build thet dodrabbid thing all over agin so’s we kin string up this onfortunate buckaroo.

  Aw hell, we’ll never git it done in time, thet damned mare has seed to
thet. I say we jest fergit it’n go git drunk instead.

  Now yu’re talkin, hombre. I wouldnt keer t’put down mebbe jest a jug or two.

  Shore, they all agree. Let him go. He aint hardly done nuthin wrong.

  No, boys, says the saloon chanteuse, taking the dark bun off to shake her ginger locks loose, one ruby-tipped breast now bouncing free from her undone bodice, yu caint do thet. The scrofulous varmint is broke the lawr and he’s gotta pay fer it.

  Aw, Belle, he aint but only a killer, hoss thief, cattle rustler, trainrobber, ‘n card cheat, whutsa harm in thet?

  The sumbitch jilted me, she says bitterly. Hangin’s too good fer him.

  The men glance wearily at one another, their shoulders sagging. Shit. Yu shore, Belle?

  I’m shore.

  Awright. Better go rustle up some hammers’n nails, I reckon.

  Thet wood out thar’s all kicked t’smithers. We’ll hafta rip down the stables’n start over.

  Sorry, sheriff, says a baggy-eyed oldtimer with a scar running across his bulbous nose from ear to ear like a clothesline for his beard, and now wearing the deputy’s badge. Aint nuthin we kin do. He strips him of his sheriff’s star and weapons. Better git yer pore fucked butt inta thet cell thar, whut’s left of it, and behave yerself whilst we git on with whut we hafta do.

  Whutsamatter with him anyhow, deppity? someone asks and they all turn toward him. He’s watching her fasten the ruby pin into place in her pierced cheek. And reflecting on how he was never really cut out for the civilized life and how considering for a moment that he might be was a weakness and a flaw in him, a fatal one as it turns out. The jasper looks like a mule jest kicked him in the cods.

  It’s Belle. Seein her fitted out like thet.

  And now that horizon that was always out there for him is there no longer, and the vast horizon of his inner eye has also withered away.

  I’m gonna miss yu, darlin. The chanteuse smiles, tucking her breast in but leaving the schoolmarm’s bodice unbuttoned. Aint ever day someone like yu comes driftin through.

  It is not every day, he corrects her, and goes into the cell to flop down on the bare springs of the cot there.

  No, haw! She laughs, they all laugh. Shore as hell aint!

  He remembers that when the men went out to rebuild the gallows he looked up through his cell window from where he was lying on the cot springs and saw the stars gathered up and set spinning in the sky like celestial dust devils, and he thought: There’s a serious storm brewing. For a time then there was a silence so dense it made his ears ache, and he recalled one hot day back when he was out on the desert alone under the blistering sun and just such a silence descended and in the middle of it a great band of Indian warriors came galloping past, riding bareback and without reins, heads high and staring rigidly ahead as though drawn by something out on the horizon that he could not see, their horses’ hoofs raising a torment of dust but making not a sound. As they flew past, he saw that their lips were all sewn shut with rawhide thongs and their chests and foreheads were tattooed with mysterious pictographs and the teeth and tiny bones of animals were embedded in their flesh, and he understood that they were galloping into oblivion and carrying the secrets of the universe with them, and that although those secrets were not very interesting, they were the only secrets there were, and he would not be privy to them. In their wake came a raging river, snapping wrathfully at their heels and swallowing up their tracks, and then, as the warriors vanished and the common sounds of the desert returned, the river shrank to a rivulet from which he and his horse drank and they were sick for a time.

  And so he was thinking about this when the new silence fell as he was lying there on his jail-cell cot on the last night of his life, and if there’d been any sounds of sawing and hammering to be heard before, they were stifled now by this thick clotted silence and then erased by the sudden all-encompassing roar of the cyclonic wind that followed on, sucking the roof off the jailhouse and picking up the old wooden desk and swivel chair and hurling them at his cell bars, exploding them to splinters that flew at him like darts and arrows, and he curled up with his arms over his head, giving them only his butt to strike at, it being well tanned to leather from his life in the saddle and more or less immune from punishment. The wind brought with it great slashing torrents of burning rain that bit and chewed at him then, with its driving force more ravenous than a pack of wolves, and when the rain had passed the distressed stars fell out of the sky in a shower of meteors that shook the ground and rattled the cot springs, pitching him, stunned, to the floor. And then the dust and earth and busted stones sent flying by the meteors and stirred up by the bellowing wind came rolling over him as though the desert itself had taken animate shape and had risen up against him, and it buffeted him and blinded him and entered him through all his orifices, stopping up his mouth and nose so he could not breathe, and buried him there where he lay. But he is a man schooled to the harsh and whimsical ways of the desert, so patiently he waited out the turbulence (the worst was over, the marm had left him, and she was not even the marm), meditating the while upon the ironies of his extremity—that he was holding his breath and struggling to survive so that he might live another hour to be hanged—and when it had passed he dug his way out and spat out the earth that filled his mouth and unclogged his nose with his fingers and commenced to breathe again as before.

  The storm has left behind a noonday sun, shining down upon him now through the roofless jailhouse ruins. His twisted cell door is agape, and his old gunbelt and wooden-butted six-shooter is hanging on a coat hook on one of the walls left standing by the storm. There seems no reason not to do so, so he goes over and buckles it on, and as he does this he remembers that before the men went out (or maybe after) he was visited by a one-eyed photographer, which he took to be an unfavorable sign, or more than one. He was a cadaverous plug-hatted man with a Chinaman’s beard, and he was a voluble enthusiast of his trade. He insisted on showing him his sheaf of photographs of hanged men, giving him a poke in his lower regions with his rifle barrel and jerking on his earring when he showed no immediate interest and closed his eyes. It was his studied opinion, the man said, spreading out his samples and compelling his attention, that a photograph of one hanged man has a more melancholical aspect about it than do those of groups, though men strung up in multitudes of a dozen or more not only provide peculiar challenges and opportunities for the enterprising photographist, being less of a stereotype, as might be said, but they also have a way of opening up the foreground to pictorial scrutiny and drawing attention to those who have not yet been hanged. Put another way, one man suspended solo has a single sad tune to play, while a couple of dozen make a whole band of bemingled and crisscross medleys. They say two’s company, the one-eyed man went on to say, tobacco juice dribbling down his stringy goatee and dripping onto his photos, adding to their sepia tonalities as he rubbed it in with a long bony finger, but it aint. Lookit these two renegade injuns hangin here: yu aint never seed nuthin lonelier-lookin than thet! One varmint pendin’s like astin a worrisome question. Two’s like mockin each other in their silly neck-broke dangle and they aint neither of em got nuthin t’say. I sometimes like t’lookit my pitchers a two men hangin jest fer a hoot. Three’s most folks’ fayvrit, it’s a kinder mystery, like yu know whut two of em’re doin up thar, but whut about the third? Like as not it’s a mistake, like he wuz jest stumblin along’n fell inta the noose. Ifn hangin a person ever is a mistake, thet is. My own fayvrit number, though, is four. Thet’s about the most cloud-kickers yu kin string up in concert and see the whole pattern of em, whilst takin in each one of em at the same time, so’s yu git sumthin combined of all the others. Mostly, though, it’s on accounta my special regard fer gallows arkytetcher. Jest lookit these here pitchers, how differnt they all are, they’s so many novel’n wondrous ways’n shapes a hangin four men all at wunst, and danglin four of em together has a way a bringin out the grain in the wood and drawin yer eye t’the empty space neath their as
cended boots. Which a course is the whole reason them estimable things git built.

  Rifle now cocked and ready, he peers cautiously out the gaping hole where the street door used to be and sees that no boots will be ascended today, his or any other’s. The debris of the gallows, wrecked by the black mare, has been mostly blown away by the storm, nothing left in the wide dusty street but a few scattered splinters like frail bleached reminders of some previous resolve. Now what there is of intent can be measured only by the ominous absence of any evidence of it, for nothing moves. Not even the lace curtain in the window above the saloon sign. The weathered wooden buildings, utterly forsaken under the baking sun, look fatigued and shrunk into themselves, a grim dead silence sunk into everything the way drink can sodden a man. But that they are waiting for him out there some place, or places, of course he has no doubt. The moment for it has come.

  Across the way the bank doors are hanging loose off their hinges as usual, and though it’s about a hundred yards across a wide-open space, masonry’s a better shield than timber, and he figures if he could make it over there he might have more of a chance, or at least last a little longer. He exposes himself briefly on the jailhouse porch, then ducks back inside. Nothing happens, so he checks his six-shooter (a single shot’s been fired; he reloads it), tugs his broad-brimmed hat down over his brow as though felt might fend off lead, cleans his ears out, and gets ready to run. There’s a kind of presence out there, like a filled-up space inside the empty space that’s seen, created by the portentous hour and walled by nothing but its own taut necessity, and when he enters into it, there’ll be no way out until it isn’t there anymore, or he isn’t.

  A piece of the jailhouse wall behind him suddenly topples inward, breaking the solemn hush: he whirls to fire, but there’s no one there, and then, even as he watches, another piece of wall folds over like a starched collar and, after a creaking moment, slides wearily to the floor with a splintering crash. Yes, all right. Time to go.