The girl blew him a kiss, bashfully it seemed, then roused her team, and Hoke stood watching with a knowing smile as she moved off. “Now ain’t that jest somebody’s smart idea of exactly the right girl to play a trick on, too,” he mused, “even if’n she sure is built fer better pastimes’n that. Dingus and me. And with the one of us standing right before her very eyes with a slow-rising johnny all the while!”
Yet back in Belle’s bedroom, when he still could not seem to locate his clothes, Hoke became perplexed after all. And then when he opened the opposite door, glancing into the main upper corridor, it developed that the girl had been right about that much at least, since the house itself could not have been more quiet. “Belle?” he voiced finally. “Well say, now, jest what in the—?”
So he was wandering thoughtfully back into the room, and exploring the extent of that curious injury to his face again now also, when the puzzlement suddenly became absolute. Because Belle was just arriving then herself, through the same rear door by which he had removed the trunk only moments before. She was carrying a shotgun, or so he noticed tangentially, although this had very little to do with his reaction. Neither did the sight of his clothes at last either, actually, so much as the diverting realization that they could hardly have fit her any better had they been her own. Even the derby rode with a reasonably natural jauntiness atop her tied-back hair.
“Sweetie pot!” Belle flung the shotgun carelessly onto the bed. “And you’re awake again. I’m so glad—”
Hoke stopped in his tracks. “And what say to a short snort in celebration?” she went on effusively, not really looking at him as she discarded the derby then also. “Oh, I doubt I murdered the critter, but I scared the crabs right off his smelly bottom for fair, and that’s a fact. He sure comprehends Hoke Birdsill is no titty-licker to be trifled with now, by golly!”
“He comprehends what?” Hoke kept on gawking. “Who does? Lissen, Belle, I’d sort of take it favorable if’n you’d inform me jest what all is—”
But Belle had already marched to a cabinet, selecting a whiskey bottle. Beaming from behind it she withdrew the cork with her teeth, then spat that aside. “Yep. Because I waited too durned long since my one previous marriage to let some runny-nozzled twerp of an outlaw turn me into a widow from this present one even before we got around to holding the official ceremony, I reckon. But jest how much of that cotton-picking nonsense did he think a girl would stand for anyways, busting out of jail and farting around challenging folks’ fiancees to gunfights, and smack in the middle of my busiest night of the week yet, or—”
“Busting out of—huh? Lissen, lissen, you mean he truly— and she weren’t jest—?”
“Oh, but it’s over now, ducky nuts.” Belle disregarded his confusion. She was pouring two drinks. “On top of which the whole cock-knocking town saw how brave you faced up to him, likewise. I hope your jaw don’t pain you too much, meanwhile—didn’t give you but a incidental jolt with the side of my fist, was all, especially since you were snoring up a storm from that there swoon you’d had to start with. But here, here, guzzle your booze—”
Hoke was too stupefied not to accept the glass. “Right smart fit in these duds too,” Belle continued happily. “I used your Smith and Wesson here, first couple of shots, but then when the mangy little sidewinder actually had the gumption to let fly back at me once, why I jest twiddled that ole scattergun and gave him hallelujah. And he sure lit out pronto after that, I reckon. Well, anyways, drink up, honey jewels, and as soon’s I get changed into something a shade more appropriate we’ll go fetch Brother Rowbottom. Any of the girls ain’t getting reamed can do for witnesses. But here’s to it, meanwhile, doll of mine!”
Belle threw down her drink at a gulp, smacking her lips and then wiping them on the sleeve of Hoke’s most costly frock coat. Hoke was barely watching, however, still struggling with it. “Escaped?” he repeated. “But I got the durned key right in my pocket here, I mean there, but—”
“Aw, sugar boots, now who gives a good gob of spit about how the ballbreaker ever done it? Good riddance, I say, and—”
“But—but there’s all that bounty payment, my rewards that I worked so hard to—all of nine thousand and five hun—”
“Now Hoke Birdsill, you don’t truly conceive you have to fret your cow-punching ass over any piddling little sum like that? When you’re no more than minutes away from being wedded to Belle Nops herself? Why, if I ain’t got twenty times that amount in cold cash in my safe here, if not to mention six outsize pisspots full of dust in there that ain’t even ever been properly weighed yet likewise, and—”
Belle dismissed his meager concerns with a confident, expansive gesture in the direction of a corner beyond her desk, where the safe had long reposed, although Hoke was still far too vexed to glance that way. Then he could scarcely help himself. Her shriek tore through the roof.
So Hoke himself was barely able to begin to explain then either, since almost before he started she had taken him by the shoulders and was shaking him maniacally, still screaming also. “Girl!” she cried. “Sick mother? Why there hasn’t been a bimbo in this house in ten years who ever knew if her mother was dead or still peddling it, let alone ever got a letter from one or could even read it if she—in my own wardrobe trunk? And you helped her carry it down? HELPED HER!”
Hoke was sick. But he understood the remainder of it now, of course, saw it with all the certainty of prophetic revelation. “Oh, no!” he moaned. “No. Because then who was you shooting at out there? Out in that street, at exactly the same time when her and me was standing next to that buckboard and you fired my Smith and Wesson and then the shotgun, who was—”
“Well who in thunderation do you think it was? Dingus Turdface Magee, that’s who, and anyway what’s that got to do with—”
But Hoke went on with it, torturing them both now, compounding the ordeal. “Sure,” he said. “Sure. And meantimes you got a bright frilly red dress somewheres maybe, with a bow jest under the boobies? And a red sunbonnet to match, with strings you kin pull tight so’s your hair would be covered up, and—”
“Well blast that too, you’ve seen me wearing them. They’re right in—” Belle whirled, as if to retrieve the garments from her closet. Then she stopped, finally, utterly, for the instant actually rigid with the comprehension. She stared and stared.
“And you never truly seen him neither, did you?” Hoke said. “Yair, because it were dark as a Ethiopian’s bunghole out there, weren’t it? So if’n I ought of thought to burn the confounded thing six months ago, only I dint, then tonight I should of took it offn that Turkey Doolan feller and put it into a crate and mailed it to somebody in Siberia. Because it were that vest. All you seen were that red-and-yeller vest and that makes four times now he’s done give it to somebody else to get shot at in, only this is the first of the times he his-self went and put on something else in its place. And with a pillow stuffed inside his—”
Belle hit him. Her fist materialized like the hind hoof of a mule and took him on the opposite side of the face this time, slamming him back against the wall and leaving him with his legs stiff but with his heels beginning to slide from under him at once anyway, not trying to stop himself and not really hurt either, not hurting even when he thumped noisily to the floor itself, simply beyond all ability of feeling. “Because I’m probably gonter have heart failure anyways,” he thought. “Because I doubtless am.”
So it was not until he was climbing into Belle’s surrey five minutes later that he began to curse, began to match Belle’s incessant, monotonous yet unrepetitive stream word for word with one of his own, reminded faintly of something by the very sound of it also, although he could not think what, nor did he care. And even then it wasn’t the money, not the long-despaired eight hundred dollars from his derby hat which had started it all and not the subsequent three thousand from the original rewards either, not that and not this latest, the nine thousand five hundred. Nor was it even the dress which he him
self, Hoke, was wearing now, the dress which Belle had only moments before flung into his face while changing hurriedly into one over his pants herself and scattering what remained of his own clothing through the upper rear door and into the yard at the same time, telling him, “Yes, a dress, and the damndest gaudiest silkiest one I own likewise, so maybe the next time you spend half a night being helpful to some other saggy-tooled cluck in one of them you’ll have the sense to lift his skirts and see if he’s got the right sort of equipment under there or not.” It wasn’t even that which evoked the oaths.
So it was the pillow, the false bosom. “Because I almost grabbed a quick feel on him,” Hoke realized. “I mean her. Him. Standing next to that buckboard and thinking on how all of a sudden I had three durned women to get myself hid from, which it looked like I’d already done give up trying anyways, and I almost grabbed holt of that one right then and there, jest to show myself a man’s still got some free choice left. And it wouldn’t of been the first time I were in bed with the erection-wasting skunk neither. So now I’m gonter git him. I’m gonter git him now if’n it’s the last thing I do on this earth!”
The surrey skidded and slewed, careening out of the alley and into the street, the road. “Yaaaa!” Belle’s voice roared and roared, her whip exploding over the mares. “Yaaaa!” Hoke rode with his head held low, fearing the sunbonnet might fail to disguise him adequately even in the darkness, and with a hand clasped across his mustache also, until they had thundered well beyond the town itself along the only obvious trail for the top-heavy Dingus to have taken with his prize.
As for the vest, Brother Rowbottom had put that on in all innocence.
He did not understand why it had been left in his shack, although the preacher found it folded far too carefully to suggest inadvertence; in fact it lay atop the very corner of the mattress beneath which he himself had deposited the recently acquired single-action Colt. And the revolver was what he had returned for, of course, after concluding his brief chore. Actually his inquiry had been superfluous; he knew full well that the model would pawn in any saloon for just the figure its previous owner had named.
But then he almost did not go out again after all. Instead, musing absently, he stood for a period as if expecting something, his eyes fast to nothing in particular and yet quite bright, quite alert. What the preacher hoped for was a call, a beckoning, an invocation from elsewhere than in this world. He had been anticipating one for some time now.
Because he had heard such pronouncements before, if not recently. The earliest had come at sixteen, when his family was migrating westward from Tennessee. Indians had attacked their wagon string, killing everyone except Row-bottom himself, although leaving him with his left arm so severely mutilated they obviously believed him dead, and failing to lift his scalp only because, inexplicably, he had already been completely bald for years. Rowbottom wandered in a delirium for days before stumbling into a mining camp where someone was able to complete the necessary amputation.
That was when he first heard the voice, during his convalescence. “Brother, you been chose,” was all it said, but he was confident he knew generally what was implied, if not in the particulars. His father had been a sometime preacher before him, as were several uncles. There were perhaps forty miners in the camp, and his exhortations amused them for a time. But when it occurred to him one bright morning to fire the shed in which the communal whiskey was stored, rather than any appreciation of his zeal it was only his height, and his correspondingly exceptional stride, that got him out of the territory alive.
But he was to change his mind about drink as a vice anyway, or have it changed. This happened after he made his way to Oklahoma to live with a relative, one of the preaching uncles. The man accepted Rowbottom as an acolyte of sorts, restricting him to such ministrations as driving tent pegs and hawking Bibles initially, but finally letting him try his hand in the pulpit also. He made no comment afterward, offered no criticism, or not until some weeks later when he suggested that the boy try again. “But this time you might interpolate a bit more hot pee and vinegar amid the words,” he said then. This was about three o’clock, with a camp meeting scheduled at five, and he handed the boy a jug. Rowbottom almost fell from the improvised dais half a dozen times. He made twice that many conversions.
So if it wasn’t drink, he began to wonder if his special vocation might have to do with women. There was only one in the uncle’s home town, or one of the sort he had in mind, and Rowbottom set out with a characteristic vengeance to redeem what he took to be her unwittingly strayed soul. Surprisingly, the whore proved interested in the notion herself, or so it appeared when she cooperated to the extent of letting the boy talk himself hoarse for three consecutive hours, and even supplied him with whiskey of her own when it became evident that this was what primed him. But then when he was barely able to keep his feet she locked the door and proceeded to teach him a thing or two about what he thought he had been talking about. “So I got to marry you,” he said, “as a penance. It’s the sole way to salvation, fer the both of us.”
The woman threw him out then, but he persisted, if limited to remonstrance from beneath her window now. And when even a bucket of slops over the head failed to deter him, she at last seemed to capitulate. “All right,” she told him, “since it looks like I either got to be saved from ordinary everyday sinning or else have murder on my conscience to boot. Tomorrow then. You come back tomorrow night and we’ll get fixed up.”
She had six or eight of her better clients in on it by then, one of whom happened to be the local justice of the peace, the rest ostensibly serving as witnesses. Rowbottom himself failed to discern how any of them were expected to fulfill the latter function in a room where all the lamps had been extinguished, but the woman insisted. “It’s more romantic in the dark,” she assured him, even squeezing his hand, although the ceremony did not take long anyway. But then when a lamp finally did go on the whore lay doubled up on the floor laughing and the hand he now found himself clutching belonged to a squat, dumpy, incredibly square-headed Indian girl, a Kiowa apparently and obviously as befuddled as Rowbottom himself, if also too drunk to stand.
He was in Sweetwater, Texas, a month after vaulting the whore’s window ledge, when he glanced up from a pulpit one evening to find her gazing at him blissfully from the rear of his newest congregation, unpresuming actually, and with the expression on her quadrangular face very much like wonderment at her own temerity, but at the same time waving a small, folded, and already long filthy paper that he understood from the length of the room away would be the certificate, the Oklahoma license. It was only chance that the first horse he spied belonged to a federal marshal. And even then Rowbottom was another full week’s ride removed in less than four days, but they had telegraphed ahead.
So he was on the rockpile when the voice came again. This time it said only, “Wait, now,” but he might have anticipated that. He had been given ten years.
Two years after he got out he was still waiting. But then when he happened upon Yerkey’s Hole, finally, at long last, he began to sense a certain urgency again, a renewed purpose, although he could never fully grasp it. But even the town’s name was a hint. “Yerkey’s Hole,” he asked someone. “You mean it were a famous water well?”
“It were a whore,” he was told, “name of Yerkey.” So when he started to preach at the brothel, it was in the realization that he had best keep his hand in. Because it could not be long now.
Then something horrendous happened to him. He had been in the town perhaps a week and was strolling aimlessly one evening, passing an abandoned suder’s wagon, when she loomed up from the shadows behind it. “You want bim-bam, mister?” she asked him. It was dark, and it had been exactly twelve years. But there was no mistaking that blunt, flat head, that squat form. Rowbottom almost collapsed on the spot.
But a miracle occurred. She was peering directly at him, seeming almost to study him even, yet no recognition crossed her face at all, and wh
en she persisted in hailing him it was only in regard to her original proposition, her modest semiprofessional offering. Rowbottom ran into her several more times in the next weeks, once at last deliberately approaching her wagon in daylight, but by then he was positive she had forgotten. “So that’s a sign by itself,” he decided. “Because she must of been brung here special, jest for me to understand I’m truly released of that one trivial burden now. Which doubly indicates there’s got to be a momentous new Call acomin’, and pronto.”
So he had been waiting more anxiously than ever tonight, listening with palpable concentration, after he found the vest. And then when he gave up again temporarily, he put on the vest itself only because wearing something, for a man minus one arm, had always struck him as more practical than carrying it. He thought he might sell the garment at the same time he pawned the pistol. That he tucked into his waistband.
So at first, approaching the wagon, he thought it no more than the usual solicitation, although it did strike him as curious that she carried a shotgun.
Then Rowbottom halted, still some distance away beneath a rapidly diminishing moon, remotely curious yet not hearing her too well either, and wondering what had happened to her usual wares, since what she attempted to merchandise now seemed limited to a “mean goose.” But something turned him wary also. “You run pretty damn fast,” she went on incomprehensibly, and still from quite far off, “for a feller squish out seventeen bim-bam in twenty damn hours, oh yeah. But I think I damn catch you this time, you betcha.”
Rowbottom knew a moment of debilitating uncertainty. Could he have misinterpreted the signs somehow? Was this some mysterious new revelation, a delayed recognition after all? He was backing off slowly, not yet completely panicked, when suddenly she sprang.
His stride was still extraordinary. But luck was with him also, since by the time he paused for breath, a good half the town away, not only did it appear that he had lost her but the moon was fully hidden now as well. He waited until he was certain there were no further sounds of pursuit, then ventured on toward the main street. “So maybe His scheme is jest more complicated than I knowed,” he was thinking. “Because if’n I got to move on, it were right accommodating of Him to hold off on informing me until I had that money from the pawning almost to hand.”
The Ballad of Dingus Magee Page 14
