Smonk

by Tom Franklin

  Gates waved behind the boards but McKissick was back on the go, melting shadow to shadow across the open yard and blending alongside the house. He holstered his pistol and scaled one of the trellises and pried open the shutters of an upstairs window and his legs disappeared inside.

  Waiting, Gates screwed his pipe wrench all the way out and then all the way back in. He did this several times. He saw a rat creeping up on him and stomped on its head and the pest lay wiggling. Damn, he said. You a big one ain’t ye. He jingled the nails in his pocket then lined them up on the ledge of the cow’s stall and selected the rustiest and sucked it into his gums. He saw another rat and threw a clod of mule shit at it. He found a pail and shat a hot stew and told the horse, Dang, that sum-bitch stinks so bad I can’t hardly squat over it. Holding his nose, he carried the pail out the back door and urinated in the straw and, inside again, began to name all the dead citizens of Old Texas and knew he was leaving somebody out.

  He’d arrived in the town two years prior, had been on the run from the law for bigamy and arson and trying to sell a wagonload of stolen exotic snakes. A posse had chased him out of Jackson Alabama and he’d fled south through the woods, exhausting the horse he’d stolen and splashing on foot into a swamp. From there he found the river and followed it up the country, enmeshed in such a tangle of wilderness he’d of gladly submitted to a noose just to get out of the damn mosquitoes. It might of been days or weeks he was lost, eating bugs and frogs, finding a new leech on his balls ever morning. At some point he’d mistaken a creek for the river and followed it inland, half-mad from malaria and worms in his stool, his beard wild and flowing, his clothing long since shredded, skin covered in tears and gashes. It was pure chance that Lurleen had been out looking for berries. She’d carried him on her back to Old Texas and called the doctor who ministered to him for weeks and by the time he was sitting up in bed he was somehow engaged to be married. He reckoned it didn’t matter he had two wives already and took the plunge a third time.

  It ought to of been a dream, Lurleen decent enough to look at, plus her daughters—the three of them prancing about the house trying to show him their wares. Lurleen made it plain that he could lay with any one of them he wanted, said it was all in the family. Said the town needed younguns or it would dry up and die. For a number of months Gates had found himself in heaven, four women with large knockers and appetites, constantly vying for his knob. But anything could get old and within a year he dreaded each time they came to him, every night and morning, raising their skirts. He’d sneak down to his shop where he hid his whiskey and there would be Clena bent over his anvil with her bloomers down.

  Thrown in the mix, too, was Old Texas—the entire town—with its strangenesses and secrets. Where were the children? Why the shortage? Lurleen said it was because of the War. Said all the men and boys had gone off to fight and left the women alone. The other men who were there were men like Gates, fellows who’d found their way here and married a widow and were themselves as happily sexed as any men anywhere. But whenever a gal got knocked up, it was something happened to the baby. Better not to ask, Lurleen had said. It’s church business. And Gates, always one to mind his own affairs, hadn’t.

  He’d accumulated about enough of the mysteries when Smonk had started coming to town, though. Year ago. To tell the truth, he’d kind of liked Old E.O. He was ugly but he always had licker to sell, and if you didn’t get crossways of him, he wouldn’t get crossways of you. He would beat you at cards, but as long as you paid he was pleasant enough. Good licker too. Plus he was another man for the stepdaughters to moon over. And Lurleen. He remembered the night of the barn dance when she was out on the hay with Smonk. Gates was adding licker to the punch bowl when McKissick elbowed him and said, Uh oh.

  Smonk’s hand was on Lurleen’s caboose and ever body was looking to see what Gates would do. Had he had his druthers, the blacksmith would of told Smonk, Take her. Please.

  Then McKissick pushed Gates out over the hay. Everybody had seen what was going on, so poor old Gates had little choice but to start his banty-rooster strut, raising his hand for the fiddler to stop and that knucklehead on the triangle too.

  Smonk must of known Gates was coming though Gates was behind him. The one-eye twirled Lurleen out of the picture and stood with his back to the blacksmith, waiting.

  Gates glared at him. Then he said, Reckon that’s my woman, Smonk.

  She is, Smonk said, is she?

  He turned without looking at them and walked out of the barn. A strut of his own. Before he stepped outside he gave Gates’s wife a wink. She squealed. She squealed and jumped up clapping her hands and ran out after him. She never looked back.

  Poor old Gates. Standing there pulling on his thumb. No man wanted to go out after E. O. Smonk, in the dark. But Gates had no choice. Out he went.

  They found him half an hour later in the livery barn with his head bashed in. Near about dead. The men had a town meeting about it and agreed to meet again, but finally it was their wives harping on them that made them round up a mob and ride out to Smonk’s. Gates hadn’t yet awakened from being conked and might never, for all they knew. That would be murder, the ladies had pointed out. And this town needed every man it could get.

  Ten men went. All the other husbands. They flew a white flag approaching Smonk’s plantation. The one-eye was sitting on the porch drinking a tumbler of bourbon and soaking his feet in brine. They all had guns. He held his dog back on a rope and listened to them say he was going to be taken in lawfully and detained lawfully and tried lawfully.

  Smonk flicked a cigar into the yard. Then hanged lawfully?

  The law will decide that, Justice Tate said.

  You mean yer wife will.

  Enough, Hobbs the undertaker said. You can’t jest ride into a town and steal a fellow’s wife and knock em in the head, Smonk.

  Seems like you’d appreciate the business, undertaker.

  Well I don’t. Do ye see the position you’ve give us?

  Smonk looked out at them. Their guns. They’d all donned neckties. If I can disprove the charge of rape, he asked, will yall drop the charge of knocking that jackass in the head?

  The men grumbled among themselves. Fine, Justice Tate said. That could sure of been self-defense.

  Smonk finished his bourbon and tossed the glass over his shoulder where it shattered against the door. Out slunk Gates’s wife in a short slip. The men started coughing and clearing their throats. She had a brush and a dustpan. Without looking at them, she squatted down and started cleaning up the mess.

  Hey, Smonk yelled back at her. Tell these ignoble bastards nobody didn’t get nothing they didn’t want.

  She was sweeping pieces of glass in the pan. She wouldn’t look up.

  Well, demanded Justice of the Peace Tate. Speak up, Lurleen.

  He ain’t done nothing I didn’t let him, she mumbled.

  Good evening, bitches, Smonk said.

  Gates had awakened a few days after that, perhaps not as sound as he’d once been but alive, and then, a week later, Lurleen Gates had come home claiming Smonk had kidnapped her. She said she’d only gone out in the dark because she didn’t want the other ladies to hear the tongue-lashing she meant to put on old Smonk. Said she was sparing the town. Said Smonk did unmentionable things to her and made her lie. Said if the men of the town didn’t go get him and put his life on trial they were a bunch of lily-livered sad sacks.

  Now the blacksmith heard shots from Smonk’s house and hurried to the bay door with the Winchester, stopping to untie the horse and mule for a quick escape. He was glad not to be involved in the actual killing of Smonk because everybody knew killing Smonk would be dern near impossible. He hoped McKissick was up to it. Hell, he’d rather buy Smonk a drink of licker than kill him. Smonk always had good licker. Or maybe Smonk and McKissick would kill one another and Gates could take them both back and be heralded a hero in Old Texas instead of a cuckolded fool. He hunkered down with the rifle and waited. Or dern.
Maybe he wouldn’t go back at all.

  Smonk didn’t like the stars. He didn’t trust them. It felt like they were watching him from higher ground and cover of dark. In years past he’d insisted on rigging a tarp over Ike’s wagon before he could sleep. The tarp made Ike tense and closed-in, and he finally put Smonk out and told him to sleep under the wagon. This had worked and now, as if they were brothers in bunk beds, they talked each night.

  I had a dream, Smonk said tonight.

  Don’t tell ye dreams, said Ike.

  They lay listening to bugs.

  Tell me about that shark’s tooth, Smonk said.

  I fount it on the beach when I was a youngun, Ike said. On a giant pile of oyster shells. I couldn’t even close my hand around it it was so big. I showed it to my daddy and he quit drinking long enough to be amazed. He was a drunk and a fisherman. He said it was a great white’s tooth. Then he passed out.

  In the morning I took the tooth and showed it around. My little buddies. One of em had this magnifying glass I’d always wanted. It would start fires. When he saw the shark tooth he offered a trade.

  Then Daddy woke up and started looking for it. Looked ever where. He come fount me and said where the heck was it and I said traded and he went to whaling on me with a ax handle.

  Smonk ashed his cigar. He turned his jug up. He had burlap bags nailed to the sides of the wagon to keep out the starlight and his rifle lay cleaned and oiled alongside him in its sock. He didn’t use a bedroll, the ground better for his hips.

  He’d just rolled over onto his back when, beneath him, as if such a phenomenon were natural and nightly, the ground shook, almost gently, whispering the grass and rocking the stones and squeaking the wagon hinges. Leaves in nearby trees shuddered though the wind had faded with dusk and the bugs went dead and for a moment the night held its breath. Then a great clack of thunder and several after-clacks rumbled the south, behind them.

  Adios, plantation, Smonk muttered.

  Reckon ye got him? Ike asked.

  McKissick? Smonk blew a ray of smoke. Naw. That one’s slick. His only failure is he bucks his own nature. He’ll come at us tomorrow.

  You want me—

  Naw. Jest go on finish ye story.

  Well, me and my daddy never had no easy time with the other. He was a mean drunk that was drunk all the time and I couldn’t do nothing to please him. Nothing but leave. Which I done at the age of seven or eight. Went off and grew up to be a decent young church-going Negro. Didn’t mind my lot which seemed like it was gone be picking cane. Anyway I had a aunt would write me letters and give me the family news. I never answered em but they’d find me here and there. One of em turned up in Alabama where I’d married a gal and we was fixing to start us a family. That was the letter that said Daddy was finally dying of the cancer.

  Telegram, warn’t it?

  It was. I didn’t know it was such a thing. The wagon creaked as Ike shifted his weight. The bugs were at it again.

  I killed three horses and rurned another one getting up to St. Louis, Ike went on. And when I did I made a beeline to see Daddy straight away. Hadn’t laid eyes on him in twenty-two years. I remember he was in the back room at the doctor’s house. He didn’t even know me at first. Had a hole eat out of his neck. Weighted about seventy pounds. I took off my hat and said who I was and he said come closer. When I leaned in to hear, he said, I still can’t believe you traded that got-dern shark tooth.

  Smonk began to cough and coughed for a long time.

  When he finished, the bugs had gone quiet again.

  It was the river, Smonk said. That I dreamed of. It was up in the tree branches it was so high.

  Go to sleep, said Ike.

  In Smonk’s house McKissick was kicking through doors and belly-crawling down halls. Where the hell was E.O.? He’d fired dozens of times, at threatening lamps and figurines and at his own gaping reflection in windows and mirror-glasses. He’d found a room with twenty-five Model ’94 thirty-thirty rifles racked on the walls, drawers of pistols and stacks of ammunition.

  But no E.O.

  He smelled something burning and, reloading, hurried through the hall peppered with his own bullets and down the curving staircase. In a low corner of the kitchen, smoke was leaking from a small door he hadn’t yet seen, an aperture so squat it seemed designed for a child or dwarf. There was a string going under the door and he saw the string had been tight at one point, tripped no doubt by his own foot. He approached the door and tapped the planks with his pistol barrel, smoke seeping from the top of the door and through its knotholes and slits. He touched the hot wood with his knuckle and used his pistol barrel to unfasten the rawhide thong. When the door swung open a cloud of smoke belched out. He fanned his face and coughed, crying from heat, and bent to peer below the smoke, down the earthen steps, where in the hazy gloom lay piles of gunpowder bags and sticks of TNT in boxes and crates of nitroglycerine vials, some already on fire.

  Shit, he said.

  He fell backward over a chair and scrambled through the door. He crossed his forearms before his head and crashed through Smonk’s picture window and shutters and rolled over the porch with wood dander and splinters of glass in his hair. Clinging to his pistol, he slid over broken panes and off the porch and landed running as the arsenal in Smonk’s root cellar began its explosions, shaking the ground and the tops of trees and catapulting the porch columns over the weeds. The house disintegrating in all directions in blinding flame and glass and screaming nails and the iron dome rising in the air.

  McKissick landed on his side near the cobblestone road and rolled as a sink buried itself in the grass by his head. Burning furniture splintered on the ground and a mattress bounced and the dome landed upside down on the corn crib and settled in the fire like an enormous iron helmet cast down by some firegod of old. McKissick looked behind him where a cedar had burst into flames and then the next caught and the next and next like matchheads down the line.

  He rolled in the grass, barely missed by a sideboard landing in splinters and the bottles of liquor inside casting currents of blue flame in every direction. He scrabbled away batting fire from his arms and legs. He looked mutely for the horse or his partner as stars landed around him. He was deaf. The back of his neck was blistered. He smelled burning hair. When he whistled for the horse smoke came out. The mule trotted past Smonk’s well, and the bailiff saw a lovely burning shingle flapping down toward the animal’s back, where the fireworks he’d bought in Old Texas sat in a bundle on top of their supplies.

  No, he said.

  Someone tugged his shirt. He looked but no one was there. Something clipped his ear and he understood the idiot blacksmith was shooting at him and he rolled behind the sink. When he peered over the iron, Gates was nowhere in sight.

  McKissick’s hearing was returning in one ear, the right. Maybe the left. He was black as a minstrel, tatters of smoking cloth dripping from his arms. Something hard in his gullet. His hair burnt off. Blisters already forming on his neck and the bald back of his head.

  Where the hell was E.O.? He found his pistol smoking on the ground and fetched it and hit himself in the head with the heel of his hand to clear his thinking as he hurried toward the barn, his boots dissolving into tarry footprints as he ran. Metal eyelet marks burned into his skin.

  The hayloft was on fire as he stood in the bay door looking. Animals screaming in their stalls. Burning chickens batting past. It might have occurred to him to set the larger animals loose but at that moment somebody jumped him from behind and hit him in the head. He rolled and put up his hands and caught the Winchester’s forearm in one fist and barrel in the other as the blacksmith used his weight to force it toward his throat.

  Wait, fool, he grunted. It’s me. Ye partner.

  Oh. Gates hesitated, then climbed off. Sorry, he said. I thought ye was a nigger.

  Hell naw. I’m jest all burnt up.

  I wondered why ye head was smoking.

  McKissick squinted down at his side wh
ere fresh blood ran from his wound. Look here what ye done. I’m glad I only left ye a few cartridges. And gladder yet yer a terrible shot.

  Sorry for the mistake. Gates extended his hand and helped McKissick to his feet and suddenly McKissick was pounding his own chest.

  Dern, he said. He made gagging noises.

  What is it? Ye heart muscle?

  Naw. It’s Smonk’s got-dern eye. I reckon I swallered it.

  The hay was burning high, fire licking along their legs, and they walked to the edge to watch from a safe distance the barn consumed. The not entirely unpleasant odor of burning cow.

  Did ye kill him? Gates asked.

  Not that I know of.

  Did ye see him?

  Yeah. We played a hand of rook and drunk a root beer sody.

  Oh. Gates put his hands in his pockets and took them out again. Where to next, then?

  McKissick turned. Try to find the horse first. That mule too. See what we can save. Then back to town. Meet him there.

  They began to walk away from the fire, the bailiff stepping gingerly in his bare feet. What ’ll ye take for ye shoes? he asked.

  You can war em all the way home if ye agree to stop and visit that whore up the way. Git a taste.

  Fine. We ought to go back by there anyways.

  They shook on it, and Gates sat in the dirt and removed his shoes, well-worn suedes with yarn for lacing. He handed them up and watched McKissick pull them on using the side flaps.

  Another, smaller explosion boomed behind them, the fire raging through the trees and the fields of sugarcane popping as they incinerated. Gates hung his rifle in the crook of his arm and they walked. He decided that if he killed McKissick now he’d have to sop around in his innards to find the eye, which didn’t seem too pleasant, judging from the smell leaking out. Maybe let him move his bowels before murdering him. He cleared his throat.