The Ballad of Dingus Magee

by David Markson

  So then she shot at him.

  Now this was a development considerably beyond any possibility of immediate analysis, although Rowbottom retained the presence of mind to start running again first, before pondering it. Actually he had not seen her this time at all. But when a second bullet proceeded to gouge a foot-long sliver from the planked sidewalk directly ahead of him, just as he bounded through the spillage of light from a saloon doorway, he stopped long enough to disengage the Colt from his trousers and fire once himself, if only into the affrontive blackness.

  Whereupon a blast from the shotgun slammed and clattered about him like the ultimate Wrath. Rowbottom got out of there without further contest then.

  He shed himself of the vest as he went now also, realizing that in any light at all it rendered him far too inviting a target. “Anyways I reckon I got the point of it by now,” he said. “Not jest git, but git quick.” But he held up guardedly in a stand of pines for at least ten minutes before daring even the rear alleys again. Then, making his way stealthily through some cottonwoods behind the bordello, he almost took to his heels one more time, although the furor was only Belle Nops herself evidently, and one of her uglier girls, departing hastily in a surrey.

  Then a further and even more portentous aspect of The Scheme was revealed to Brother Rowbottom. For reasons fabulously beyond his own imagining, in the ill-kept yard behind the house someone had discarded a spanking outfit of men’s clothing, lacking the trousers but with each remaining item almost miraculously a perfect fit and all of them far more expensively tailored than any he himself had ever possessed. Only the derby hat gave him pause, but not for long. “Because it ain’t fer me to go questioning His helpfulness,” Rowbottom declared. “And if’n He deems I got to approach that there new calling in style, well that’s jest Hoke Birdbugger’s poor lookout, I reckon.” So he had just stepped into the shaft of lamplight from the open upper doorway, the better to contemplate his transformation, when she hove into view again.

  Rowbottom’s pulse skipped, even as he commenced to grope hopelessly for the pistol that still reposed among his other clothes some feet away. But Providence had not yet ceased to work its wonders: not only was she no longer carrying the shotgun, but she came plodding toward him so forlornly, and in such abject spirits, that it scarcely seemed credible she had ever pursued him with violent intent at all. In fact when she finally noticed him she reacted to his presence with a gesture almost of resignation. After which she actually shrugged. “Oh, well,” she said, “so I don’t get Dean Goose, greatest bim-bam there is. So I back to you again, you dud-cartridge son-um-beetch. And I think it damn past midnight now too.”

  So again Rowbottom had not the vaguest idea what she was talking about, although he was not really listening either, already eyeing favorable directions for flight. And she had begun to stalk him too. But then, backtracking cautiously, he stumbled over the lowest of the bordello’s rear steps.

  She was at him with a leap.

  Rowbottom bolted upward, the least cluttered avenue. The door was wedged open, or perhaps hooked into place, but he had no time to close it anyway. He dove headlong beneath an enormous disheveled bed as she trundled up behind him.

  She stopped just short of his derby, where he had lost it ducking under. “All right, you son-um-beetch, where you went?” she demanded immediately. “Because I pretty damn pooped, chase you, chase that Dean Goose feller from jail before, chase him again when I see damn vest in dark out there, damn near get shot too. So I settle for short end now, be wife to Hoke Birdsill. But right damn quick I think, oh yes, hey. So you drag bumpy ass on out or I come scoot down under—which you want, you son-um-beetch?”

  So this time he understood just enough—that she had never recognized him after all, that doubtless the whole ordeal had been just that, a trial, a test of his mettle before the final glorious Calling would be proclaimed at last. So he was free to ready himself now, could prepare for the visitation. “Shucks,” he said, already sliding back out, “you want the sheriff, I reckon, Hoke Birddiddler. Well, I ain’t him, as you kin plainly see. I’m jest acting sheriff fer a brief spell, is all, so he done give me the loan of his duds to make it more official. But if’n you’ll pardon me I’ll jest mosey on along about the outlaw-catching business then, and—”

  “Hey?” The squaw scowled at him uncomprehendingly as he retrieved the derby. Then she went so far as to lift the lamp from its stand, peering at him from beneath it. “Sure ain’t Soapy-Tool Birdsill okay,” she admitted finally. “But how come is that?”

  But Rowbottom was already edging toward the door, unobtrusively, while she peered and peered. Then, glancing that way to avoid any misstep, perhaps he failed to notice it immediately—the slow, speculative narrowing of the eyes, the hesitant pursing of the lips, the profoundly visible evidence of the toils of elemental retrospection. “One-arm feller?” she said. “Ten times I hear people say it, one-arm, bald-headed preacher feller. Couple damn times I see you too, hey. But where I see you before? What your names, hey?”

  And then it came, incredulous and exultant at once, with all the apocalyptic resplendence of a trumpet in thunder: “Rowbottoms! Rowbottoms! Oh, my husband man, from so damn long I damn near forget whole damn thing!” Maybe she realized she had been holding the lamp, maybe Row-bottom did also. Maybe they both saw it crash into the wall as her arms shot outward, scattering fuel and flame alike, maybe they saw the bed blossom like a pyre. “Oh, my husband man!” she cried. “All these years Anna Hot Water wait, dream of first bim-bam with my husband! Who need that son-um-beetch Hoke Birdsill, who want Dean Goose, when I find my husband lover bim-bam again!”

  Rowbottom stood for a time transfixed, mesmerized. Then, when he fled, when he devolved through the door, it was with no thought of the stairs at all, but into space, heedless and unfettered, like a man touched by assurances not of this world—like one who has penetrated The Scheme Itself, who is privy to The Very Word. His feet were already moving, however, even in passage, and he was running when he hit.

  It was dawn when Belle and Hoke met the cavalry patrol. By then Belle’s rage was insupportable. The moon had reappeared perhaps thirty minutes after they had left the town itself, perhaps twenty after Hoke, chancing to look back, had noticed the fire, and had understood immediately by its very enormity what was burning also, if not how or why. He had said nothing, however, no solitary word, merely casting surreptitious glances across one silk-garbed shoulder now and then as they fled onward, while Belle’s own furious intractable glare remained fast to the trail ahead of them as if fixed there hypnotically, and through all the hours since then the road had stretched before them across the mesa like something unspooled. Frequently in the night’s fresh settled dust they had obliterated recent hoofmarks with their own, had flung their spume across the stark virginal scars of wildly skidding blackboard wheels. But Dingus himself still raced on somewhere unseen beyond them.

  So she was reining in the lathered, foaming team the instant the patrol cantered into view, pausing to sob once out of fatigue or possibly dumb rage again, but then had bounded from the surrey and was rushing to accost the troopers even before Hoke himself fully realized they were no longer moving. There were about a dozen riders, led by a captain whose braid Hoke could distinguish even at a substantial remove. Then as they came on in the lifting gray light he recognized the man, a grimed youth named Fiedler. His entire patrol was haggard and spent. The officer recognized Belle immediately in turn (very few male residents of the territory would fail to) but she allowed him no time for pleasantries. “Dingus Billy Magee!” she shouted even before he had halted. “That slimy, yellow-scrotum’d, dingleberry-picking polecat—in a buckboard, headed this way. Did you pass the—?”

  For a moment Captain Fiedler simply gazed at her, his lips puckered. Nor was it just puzzlement, mere astonishment at this disheveled and furious yet familiar apparition so frantically hailing him here in the empty mesa at dawn. It wasn’t even the sight of Hoke’s
striped pants beneath her dress. Because when he began to curse his sudden implosive anger left even Belle’s protracted blasphemy wan by comparison. “Because I’ll be damned on Judgment Day for a knave,” he explained. “Dingus Billy Magee. Surely. Because ever since we ran into the two of them yesterday I’ve been wondering who he was, where I’d seen him before. Sending us on a wild goose chase after nonexistent Apaches, when there isn’t a—”

  “What?” Belle cut in, cried in annoyance, “yesterday? No, I’m talking about today, tonight, right on this road, in a—”

  “And I’m talking about yesterday, in the afternoon,” the captain said. “When we were finally on our way into Yerkey’s Hole for a bivouac after a patrol that was already weeks too long and met two riders who told us about a Mescalero abduction raid on a pair of wagons. Wagons that don’t exist any more than the Indians do. Pounding our backsides raw over some saddle tramp’s idea of a joke, and through it all a bell kept ringing in die back of my mind—where had I seen one of them before? The one who called me Fetter-man. Surely. So now I finally remember. It was on a reward poster. The—”

  Belle snatched at the man’s pantleg where he sat. “Hang it all,” she demanded, “now what the fornicating thunder do I give a hoot about that? It’s now, tonight, that the mangy little pudding-pounder ran off with my safe and all my life’s savings and—on this blasted road I’m standing an this minute, it’s got to be this road, in a buckboard with—”

  But Hoke’s own impatience could withstand no more either. So he forgot why he had not climbed from the surrey to start with, why he had been sitting with a hand shielding his mustache. “In a dress!” he cried. “Don’t forget the—”

  He caught himself too late, wilting in mortification as the troopers turned toward him to a man in simultaneous amazement. “Why, you hairy-chested old honey,” one of them started.

  But Belle was already back at it. “Will you listen, confound it! Yes, in a dress, him too. And with a trunk, a big wardrobe trunk on the back of the—”

  “Dress?” The captain frowned then. “Trunk? Well, surely now, there was a dress. I mean there was a girl, if that’s what you mean. Why, she passed us not twenty minutes ago. As a matter of fact I thought she might be in distress at first, but she told us she was just rushing off to get married. But I don’t understand what—”

  But Belle had already spun back to the surrey. Half boarded, she paused anew. “One hundred dollars for each man!” she shouted. “Or hell’s bells, never mind that—there’s that nine thousand or more in rewards for the first one puts a bullet up his giggy. But on top of that I’ll—”

  She did not have to pursue it. Only Captain Fiedler hesitated briefly. Then he too had whirled his mount and was pounding after the others.

  Nor could the surrey keep up, of course. So half an hour later they were still steaming across the broad vast mesa itself, in full daylight now and some moments after the troopers themselves had disappeared far ahead where the road twisted northward into an abrupt high upthrust of stone hills, into a defile, when they heard the shooting, the rifles. “Git ‘im!” Belle shrieked instantly in approval, harrying the thundering mares even more hysterically, “—git him good now! Fill the miserable meat-beater so full o’ lead even the vultures’ll vomit when they chomp on him!”

  “But—” Hoke swallowed in disappointment, reading the same probability into the sounds and certain then that his own meager claim to the rewards was being irrevocably superseded (not by any means accustomed to the idea of a marriage that would render them inconsequential yet, either). But then he became moderately perplexed as well. “Because lissen,” he yelled, or tried to over the horses, “how long kin they keep plinking at him in there anyways? How much of a fight kin he—?”

  Because the firing still went on. As a matter of fact it cracked and volleyed so incessantly that if he hadn’t known better Hoke would have estimated a good many more than ten or a dozen rifles to be involved. “My gawd,” he commiserated then, “they truly must be massacrating the misfortunate critter at that, the way they’re—”

  “And I say more power to ‘em!” Belle dismissed him. “Pulverize the twerp!” she screamed enthusiastically into the wind. “String him up by his prunes and take target practice! Pop so many holes in the varmint he’ll leak until hell sprouts flowers!”

  Except it wasn’t Dingus.

  It took only an instant, less than that, as the surrey finally careened into the gorge itself amid high sheer walls, as it screeched precariously around the first unnavigable turn and into sight of the troopers at the same time, for Hoke to understand it had to be something different, something more. But then he was too busy to look, snatching at the reins where Belle had suddenly abandoned control in favor of the brake now but missing them completely as the amok vehicle pitched and lurched and twice almost overturned completely, stopping only after it had slewed about in a full circle to wedge itself against stone. Hoke was already leaping from it before that, however, as the bullets whined and ricocheted about his fluttering skirts, diving for shelter behind boulders where the troopers themselves were pinned down by the relentless fusillade from somewhere beyond. He buried his nose into the shiny blue serge of the soldier across whose sprawled backside he had landed, too startled to be shocked or terrified yet, although hardly failing to hear Belle’s own instantaneous new outburst despite all. “Indians?” she roared at Captain Fiedler. “Indians? Now great bleeding eardrums, it was you yourself jest said there ain’t a hos-tile Indian within six counties of this place, so how could—”

  “Well, you’ll pardon me if I don’t exactly call these peaceable,” the officer yelled back, scarcely in need of the irony as a new hail of bullets whistled and chinked overhead. “But at least they’ve most likely done us the favor of dispatching your outlaw friend for you, since he couldn’t have been more than fifteen or twenty minutes ahead of us coming through the—”

  “But my trunk!” Belle wailed. “My safe! Where’s—”

  And then the shooting stopped, abruptly but absolutely. Hoke himself had not previously moved, save to dissociate himself from the trooper’s bottom. But when the silence persisted he finally raised his head, finding the others near him beginning to better deploy themselves also, behind what appeared a fairly secure natural barricade, a fortuitously banked upheaval of jagged split shale. “And now what?” Belle was demanding. “What are they—?”

  “Just regrouping, I’d imagine,” Captain Fiedler speculated. “Or maybe debating an attack, since it’s pretty much a stalemate the way we’re situated at the moment.” Hoke could see the youthful officer kneeling, eyeing the terrain. Then the man turned to his sergeant, indicating something behind Hoke himself with a gesture, speaking more quietly.

  Hoke saw it also, however, comprehending. Close at hand, yet probably obscured from the vision of the Indians themselves, a narrow crevice broke upward through the shelving toward higher ground. And almost immediately the sergeant darted toward it, obviously for purposes of reconnoitering.

  “I’ve got a hunch we can outflank them,” the captain elaborated. “It might work if we’re not too badly outnumbered, which we don’t seem to be. Let’s hold fire and wait, now—”

  So they sat. Nor did the Indians renew their own fire either, except for those moments during which random troopers showed themselves fleetingly, evidently satisfied merely to hold the patrol at bay. Then for some moments only Belle’s irrecusable mutterings alone punctuated the calm:

  “That lamb-ramming, rump-rooting, scut-befouling, fist-wiving, gopher-mounting, finger-thrusting, maidenhead-barging, bird’s-nest-ransacking, shift-beshitting, two-at-a-time-tupping lecherous little pox. On top of which he wasn’t born either, he was just pissed up against a wall and hatched in the sun. I’ll—”

  But the sergeant finally reappeared, though it struck Hoke at once that something boded ill. In fact the man made his way toward them so thoughtfully, and in such evident distraction, that he almost exposed hi
mself more than once. And then when he reached the captain for a long moment he merely stared, not saying a word.

  “Well, drat it all, did you see them, man? What’s the—” And still the sergeant seemed wholly disconcerted, although at last he nodded. “I saw them. Yessir. Right clear in fact. But—”

  “And? So? Can we take them? Can we get—”

  “We could take them easy. Yessir. But the thing is, we can’t. I mean we can’t fight. Because—”

  “Can’t fight? Says what? There aren’t that many of them, are there? And if there’s a good tactical approach from—”

  “It ain’t that,” the sergeant said, although still he seemed incapable of coping with whatever it might be instead. “I mean we don’t even need tactics. But that’s the whole point.

  I mean, it’d be almost too easy, because it ain’t Injuns. I mean, I reckon they’re Injuns all right, but—”

  “Listen now, listen!” Captain Fiedler struggled to check his anger. “Sergeant, are you sick? Will you for heaven’s sake tell me what’s—”

  “It’s squaws.”

  “It’s—what?”

  “Squaws. Ain’t one single buck warrior down there; not a one. You kin hang me for a chicken-stealer if’n every single Winchester ain’t being shot by a female. And—”

  “But—but—ambushing a patrol of United States Cavalry? Squaws?”

  The sergeant shrugged. “Well, it don’t sound no more loco than it looked, I reckon. But it’s even more loco’n that. Because there’s some men down there too, all right, maybe ten or a dozen of’em, but they ain’t fighters—jest the old limp-dicked kind you see on reservations, maybe. And there’s a decent-size remuda likewise, like the whole outfit’s migrating somewheres, or was, until say no more’n ten or fifteen minutes ago. But now there’s this one tepee sort of half throwed up against a couple of trees—more like a improvised lean-to is what you’d call it—and there’s this buck-board setting near it. With that there wardrobe trunk still on it, yes’m. But what I mean, all the old men are doing, they’re loafing around like somebody told ‘em they had to wait on something for a spell, while over by the lean-to—well, there was this one squaw, real purty young wench too, jest getting herself all stripped down bare-titted and crawling inside. So it’s only the other sixteen who’s deployed out behind them boulders keeping a bead on us, and—”